Milburn, Frank Pierce (1868-1926)

Southern Railway Station [Asheville]

Biography

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 he designed at least 250 major structures and numerous domestic buildings. In North Carolina, his work included thirteen courthouses, six railroad stations, thirteen buildings at the University of North Carolina, and at least fifteen large commercial buildings. Working at first on his own, and beginning in 1909 with the firm of Milburn, Heister, and Company, he advanced his career through a combination of aggressive self-promotion, specialization in public and commercial buildings, and innovative business practices. Throughout his career, both alone and as Milburn, Heister and Company, Milburn published several well-illustrated promotional booklets, which contain images of his works. Several of these are listed in the bibliography. In many ways, he set a new standard for architectural practice in the South.

Milburn was born in Bowling Green, Kentucky, the son of Rebecca Anne (Sutphin) and Thomas T. Milburn. He studied at Arkansas Industrial University in Fayetteville, Arkansas (1882-1883) and began working in the building trades at the age of seventeen. His formative training came from his father, a builder who had designed and erected courthouses in three Kentucky counties during the 1870s. The younger Milburn learned about architecture, as he would later recall, in a time and place where no distinctions between "architects" and "builders" existed. He was, as he put it, "a practical architect"--trained through firsthand experience rather than academic study.

Milburn's career unfolded in three distinct phases. The first spanned the 1890s. In these years, he established himself as a rising star and moved frequently to take on important commissions. After working alongside his father on the design and construction of courthouses for Clay and Powell counties, Kentucky, he established an independent practice in Kenova, West Virginia, about 1890. For the next several years, he concentrated almost exclusively on courthouses, a building type that would become one of his specialties. Commissions for courthouses in Kentucky and West Virginia helped him begin building a reputation as an architect of public buildings.

As winner of the design competition for a new courthouse in Forsyth County, North Carolina, Milburn took an important step along this path. He moved to Winston in 1893 to supervise construction of this structure, a flamboyantly styled Romanesque Revival building with a bold tower, an offset entrance, and rock-faced stonework. It was his largest commission to date and brought him considerable attention. It also helped him secure other commissions in the Carolina Piedmont. Here, a boom in textile mill construction had created a strong building market, and Milburn was one of many architects who rushed to take advantage of the opportunities it presented.

As work on the Forsyth County Courthouse wrapped up, Milburn started on a new project for the Mecklenburg County Courthouse (ca. 1897) in the fast-growing Piedmont industrial and business city of Charlotte. Then, about 1900, he received the contract to complete the South Carolina Statehouse. That building had been started in the 1850s but remained unfinished a half century later, a victim of the state's limited finances after the Civil War. By adding a dome and porticos, Milburn gave it the full range of features typical of statehouses across the nation. The project became mired in controversy soon after it began, however. The legislative commission overseeing the project found evidence of fraud and other wrongdoings, and the state of South Carolina sued Milburn and the contractor for damages. The case ended in a mistrial, and Milburn escaped with his reputation intact. While this episode played out, he continued to pursue other commissions. Now supported by a small design staff, he carried out commercial projects in several sites in the Carolinas. In Charlotte, for example, he designed the Piedmont Fire Insurance Building, the Stonewall Hotel, and the Charlotte Sanatorium (all ca. 1903). Despite Milburn's numerous projects in the Queen City, few have survived the city's subsequent growth and rebuilding.

In the years around 1900, Milburn's practice entered a transitional phase. It began with commissions for the Southern Railway and ultimately led him to relocate his practice to Washington, D.C. In these years, Milburn added railroad stations to his specialties and acquired the skills and experience needed to compete in a larger market. Although he continued to design commercial and public buildings in the Southeast, he set his sights on working in a major city where he could earn greater financial and professional rewards.

Milburn began work for the Southern in the late 1890s, when he designed a series of railroad stations for the company in cities across the Southeast. The success of these projects led the company to appoint him its official architect in 1902. Milburn's affiliation with the Southern, then the largest rail system in the Southeast, bolstered his already formidable reputation and brought him considerable publicity. He ultimately designed eight union depots (shared by two or more railroads) and eleven independent stations for the company. Most were flamboyant Spanish Revival buildings with soaring towers, lavish ornamentation, and sumptuous waiting rooms. In North Carolina, Milburn designed union stations in Winston (1904), Asheville (ca. 1905), and Durham (1904-05) and independent stations in Charlotte (ca. 1907) and Salisbury (1908); of these, only the handsome, towered Salisbury Passenger Depot still stands. His work for the Southern required extensive travel, which made it possible for him to design public and commercial buildings as far west as Mississippi and Louisiana. It also led to commissions for other railroad buildings. In North Carolina, for example, he designed two stations for the Raleigh and Pamlico Sound Railroad, one in Wilson, the other in Greenville (both ca. 1902).

Milburn's work with the Southern Railway capped a remarkable first decade for the young and enterprising architect. By about 1900, he was reputed to have the largest architectural practice below the Mason-Dixon Line, a fact that spoke volumes about his skill as a designer and talent for selling his services. That he achieved this distinction so early in his career made it all the more impressive. Not only had he proven his ability to design large public and commercial buildings, but he was the first architect to work throughout the South. Whereas some of his contemporaries worked on a sub-regional basis--Charlotte architect C. C. Hook, for example, designed buildings across North Carolina--Milburn's practice covered six southeastern states--Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia--and also reached into Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, and Louisiana. Among architects working in the region, the geographic scope and volume of his work were unprecedented.

Milburn effectively introduced a new model for architectural practice to the South. At the outset of the 20^th century, the region remained overwhelmingly rural; only large cities could support the services of professional architects. Fragmentation and economic volatility characterized its building market. These conditions made it difficult for many architects to sustain a practice, and some found it impossible to earn a living. Milburn's solution was to specialize in certain types of buildings--courthouses, railroad stations, and, after about 1905, steel-frame office towers. This strategy was not part of a preconceived plan but instead grew out of his initial focus on courthouses and developed as opportunities arose. It did not preclude him from taking on other commissions; he also designed houses, warehouses, schools, and hotels. Nonetheless, it set him apart from virtually all of his contemporaries, who tended to serve clients in a localized area (at most on a one- or two-state basis), designed a wide variety of buildings (often taking whatever commissions were available), and saw their fortunes rise and fall with the local economy. The trend toward specialization gained strength as other architects began concentrating on specific building types such as schools, textile mills, and office towers, but at the dawn of the 20^th century, Milburn stood virtually alone.

Milburn had to travel constantly to cover such a broad territory, but this too opened up opportunities, for it helped him exploit the limited demand for architectural services in the small towns of the South. Use of a streamlined design process also increased his efficiency. Milburn made extensive use of standardized plans, which limited the time he spent at the drafting table. In the early 1890s, for example, he developed a courthouse design with corner towers, curvilinear gables, and Romanesque accents that could be adapted for budgets between $15,000 and $21,000. At least seven examples were built: four in Kentucky, one in Virginia, and two in West Virginia. He later developed a conservative Neoclassical design with columnar porticoes, dentil cornices, and a cupola. Examples were built with minor variations in at least fifteen counties.

The third phase of Milburn's career took shape toward the end of the first decade of the 20^th century. From 1902 to 1906, Milburn split his time between the corporate headquarters of the Southern Railway in Washington, D.C., and Columbia, where he continued to maintain an office. In 1906, he left the Southern Railway and relocated his office to Washington in order to capitalize on the growing demand for public and commercial buildings. As his workload increased, he formed a partnership with Michael Heister, a young designer who had headed Milburn's drafting department since 1903. In January 1909 the pair announced that their reorganized firm would be called Milburn, Heister, and Company. In the years that followed, the firm became one of the most successful in Washington, producing designs for more than fifteen tall office buildings, most of them in the Beaux Arts idiom, and a host of public, institutional, and commercial buildings.

Even as their practice in Washington thrived, Milburn and Heister continued to take on projects in Virginia, West Virginia, and especially North Carolina. When North Carolina passed a state law authorizing licensing of architects in 1915, Michael Heister and F. P. Milburn were quick to register, becoming licensed architects #2 and #3, respectively, in the state in June, 1915.Their major commissions of the period in the Old North State included steel-frame office towers with classical styling such as the Independence Building (Realty Building) in Charlotte (1908-1909), the First National Bank Building (1913-1915) in Durham, and the Wachovia Bank and Trust Company Building (1911, 1917-1918) in Winston-Salem. At the University of North Carolina, Milburn and then Milburn and Heister designed thirteen buildings in the eclectic and classical styles of the day, including the Alumni Building (1898-1901), the President's House (1907), and the Battle-Vance-Pettigrew Dormitory (1912). Courthouses also remained a specialty, and the firm planned buildings for at least eight North Carolina counties. The largest of these was the towering Buncombe County Courthouse in Asheville, a classical design selected by the county commissioners over an Art Deco design proposed by Douglas D. Ellington as a partner to his City Building (see Douglas D. Ellington).

Stylistically, eclecticism characterized Milburn's early career. His designs typically blended Romanesque and Italianate influences, and he garnered a well-deserved reputation for producing bold, forceful compositions. His railroad station designs won particular acclaim. Many featured his distinctive interpretation of the Spanish Revival style. In the first decades of the twentieth century, in part because of Heister's influence, he began to adopt the vocabulary of Beaux Arts classicism, which resulted in a more coherent and forceful approach to design. This shift became even more pronounced after Heister became a full partner in 1909 and resulted in some of the firm's finest work. In the 1910s and 1920s, Milburn and Heister excelled at producing buildings that displayed the restrained, conservative styling that by then had become the favored idiom for public, institutional, and commercial buildings.

About 1920, Milburn and Heister established a branch office in Durham. This allowed them to compete for small commissions in eastern North Carolina that would have otherwise gone to local architects. Milburn entrusted management of the office to his son, Thomas Yancey Milburn (born 1889 [World War I draft registration card] or 1891 [Social Security death record] and died 1977), a 1914 graduate of the University of North Carolina who had subsequently studied architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. Thomas Milburn served in World War I, married Mary J. O'Brien of Durham in 1920, and lived for a time in Washington. He oversaw the design of such buildings as the Durham Auditorium (Carolina Theatre) (1926) and a new high school (1930) in Durham, and the Professional Building in Raleigh (1925).

Frank P. Milburn resigned as president of Milburn, Heister and Company in 1925. He died in Asheville, North Carolina, on September 21, 1926, at the age of 56. Michael Heister and Thomas Yancey Milburn continued their practice until 1934, when they disbanded the firm in the depths of the Great Depression. Heister died at the age of 77 on March 20, 1948, in Washington. Thomas Yancey Milburn worked for the Works Progress Administration and as an engineer with a construction company before taking up architecture again after World War II. He moved permanently to Durham in about 1950 or 1952 and joined Durham's Committee of 110, a group that helped secure the Research Triangle Park for Durham County. He retired in 1962 and died in 1977.

Author: Daniel J. Vivian. Contributor: Claudia R. Brown.

Published 2009

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