William Carter Bain (January 8, 1839- July 8, 1920) was a prolific and adaptable contractor who epitomized the energetic entrepreneurship of the post-Civil War well into the 20th century. Bain began as a small-town artisan, served in the Confederate army, and became a regional builder and manufacturer. Adapting successfully to changing times during a...

Alexander Jackson Davis (1803-1892), a leading American architect of the antebellum period, had an important series of commissions in North Carolina that were significant both in the development of the state and Davis's national practice. The monumental North Carolina State Capitol (1833-1840) was designed by the firm of Town and Davis, but his subsequent...

Charles Barton Keen (1868-1931), a prolific designer of suburban residences and country estates primarily on Philadelphia's Main Line for more than thirty-five years, added a second locus of activity—North Carolina—when he became a favorite architect of wealthy tobacco and textile families starting around 1912. In several of his projects in North Carolina he was...

Frank Pierce Milburn (December 12, 1868-September 21, 1926), an energetic New South architect, designed more than forty-five major buildings in North Carolina. He also established the first truly regional practice in the South. Milburn worked throughout the southern states and in Kentucky, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia. Historian Lawrence Wodehouse estimated that...

The prolific firm of Milburn, Heister, and Company consisted of founder Frank Pierce Milburn, Michael Heister, and Milburn's son Thomas Yancey Milburn. It was established in 1909, when architect Frank Pierce Milburn formed a partnership with Michael Heister, a young designer who had headed Milburn's drafting department since 1903. The partnership became one of...

Joseph Emory Sirrine (December 9, 1872-1947) was a Greenville, South Carolina, industrial architect and engineer who in 1921 established J. E. Sirrine and Company, a large firm of national reputation. He and his firm worked extensively in North Carolina, planning and building textile mills and other facilities during the state's dramatic early 20th century...

Hobart Brown Upjohn (1876-1949) was a New York architect who gave North Carolina an extraordinary number of church and educational buildings, nearly 50 in all, and over 40 during the 1920s alone. He was an eclectic architect. This is to say he worked in a variety of historic styles, and sometimes in a mixture...

Oliver Duke Wheeler (May 21, 1864-October 27, 1942), was an architect who with his sequence of partners and associates--Luke Hayden, Louis E. Schwend, James M. McMichael, Neil Runge, D. Anderson Dickey, and others--had a long career in North Carolina and one of the state's most prolific practices of the day. Headquartered in Charlotte from...

Lorenzo Simmons Winslow (August 20, 1892 - June 20, 1976), practiced architecture in High Point and Greensboro, North Carolina, in the years between the World Wars before moving to Washington DC, where he became architect to the White House. Winslow was born in Mansfield, Massachusetts to George and Andree Hathaway. After graduating from the Mansfield...