Name John Hamilton | Role Architect | |
John R. Hamilton was an English architect who moved to Cincinnati, Ohio. In England Hamilton designed the Lincoln and Worcester Insane Asylums; the Birmingham, Plymouth, and Leicester Cemeteries; and churches in London and Oxford (according to an affidavit). He is believed to have come to the U.S. in approximately 1850 and to Cincinnati in approximately 1852. According to the Architectural Foundation of Cincinnati's Biographical Dictionary of Cincinnati Architects: "relatively little is known about Hamilton's American career, but he seems to have been a fine designer, willing to explore new technology, and with a significant influence through his pupils on later 19th-century Cincinnati-area architecture."
He is listed on his own in 1853-1855, with Rankin, 1856–1857, and with James W. McLaughlin in 1857-1858. Prominent Cincinnati architect Samuel Hannaford, born in England and brought to the Cincinnati area as a child, got his start in Hamilton's office in 1857.
Hamilton won a silver medal at the Ohio Mechanics’ Institute for his ‘Paintings, Lithographic, Architectural, and other Drawings.’ He may have been in New York City at 36 Wall Street by 1859 (or 1858, according to Haverstock), and was "made a Fellow of the fledgling American Institute of Architects in 1860." According to Haverstock, page 369, "he served during the Civil War as special artist for Harper’s Weekly, traveling as far south as Port Hudson, Louisiana," and was in Richmond, Virginia, from about 1864 to 1866. Hamilton was an early member of the Literary Club of Cincinnati (1857).
In 1854 Hamilton won a design competition for the Henry Clay Monument in the Lexington, Kentucky Cemetery, a Gothic dome "constructed entirely and innovatively of cast-iron", but it was not built and a "more conventional (if provincial) column, raised on an Egyptoid mausoleum base, supported a statue of Clay."
The Horticultural Review and Botanical Magazine (published in Cincinnati by H.W. Derby [a Hamilton & Rankin client] and edited by John Aston Warder and James W. Ward) published Hamilton’s Charles Anderson House (later Broadwell House) at SEC Fifth and Pike streets in downtown Cincinnati, and ran a series of signed articles on architecture by Hamilton. The article about "rural architecture" are "perhaps" the earliest known architectural writings by a Cincinnati-based architect, announced by the publication's editor in the first issue of the volume, IV, 1 (1/1854), 47.