Online Encyclopedia

CHARLES BULFINCH (1763-1844)

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Originally appearing in Volume V04, Page 772 of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.
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CHARLES BULFINCH (1763-1844)  ,
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American architect, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on the 8th of August 1763, the son of Thomas Bulfinch, a prominent and wealthy physician . He was educated at the Boston Latin school and at Harvard, where he. graduated in 1781, and after several years of travel and study in
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Europe, settled in 1787 in Boston, where he was the first to practise as a professional architect . Among his early
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Works were the old Federal Street theatre (1793), the first
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play house in New England, and the " new " State House (1798) . For more than twenty-five years he was the most active architect in Boston, and at the same time took a leading
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part in the public
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life of the city . As chairman of the board of selectmen for twenty-one years (1797-1818), an important position which made him practically chief magistrate, he exerted a strong influence in modernizing Boston; in providing for new systems of drainage and street-
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lighting, in reorganizing the police and fire departments, and in straightening and widening the streets . He was one of the promoters in 1787 of the voyage of the
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ship "
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Columbia," which under command of Captain Robert Gray (1755-1806) was the first to carry the American flag round the
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world . In 1818 Bulfinch succeeded B . H . Latrobe (1 764-1820) as architect of the
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National Capitol at Washington . He completed the unfinished wings and central portion, constructing the rotunda from plans of his own after suggestions of his predecessor, and designed the new western approach and portico . In 183o he returned to Boston, where he died on the 15th of
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April 1844 . Bulfinch's
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work was marked by sincerity, simplicity, refinement of taste and an entire freedom from affectation, and it greatly influenced American architecture in the early formative period .

His son,

Stephen Greenleaf Bulfinch (18og-1870), was a well-known Unitarian clergyman and author . See The Life and Letters of Charles Bulfinch (Boston, 1896), edited by his
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grand-daughter, and The Architects of ,the American Capitol," by James Q . Howard, in The International Review, vol.' i . (New York, 1874) .

End of Article: CHARLES BULFINCH (1763-1844)
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