Boney, Leslie N., Sr. (1880-1964)

Biography

Leslie Norwood Boney, Sr. (October 29, 1880-September 18, 1964), was a highly prolific Wilmington architect whose practice covered a wide range of building types but concentrated on educational facilities including some 1,000 educational buildings and additions. Although much of his work was in eastern North Carolina, his designs appeared in 51 of the state's 100 counties.

Leslie Boney was born in Wallace, North Carolina, one of six surviving children of William Joseph Boney (December 27, 1839-September 13, 1911) and Lou Ellen Alford Boney (August 12, 1841-July 11, 1924) of Robeson County. William Joseph Boney was a well-known Duplin County merchant, farmer, and surveyor. Leslie worked on his father's farm until he was eighteen years old. He gained his primary and secondary education from Samuel Wilson Clements, a private schoolmaster employed by local families, who was Boney's only teacher until he entered the North Carolina College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts (present NCSU) in Raleigh in 1899.

Boney enrolled in the textile school, probably at the suggestion of his uncle, Gabriel James Boney, a Wilmington merchant and miller who saw a bright future in this emerging industry. During his junior year, Boney visited a textile mill for the first time, and after determining that the noise, confinement, and dust would not suit him, he decided against a textile career. He enjoyed drawing, and his talent, probably inherited from or at least encouraged by his surveyor father, was recognized by the college faculty. At that time, as noted in Architects and Builders in North Carolina: A History of the Practice of Building, the college did not have a degree program in architecture; the only architectural training courses offered were those in engineering and mechanical drawing. (An architectural engineering program was added in 1920.) Boney took all the architecturally related courses he could and in 1903 received a bachelor's degree in textile engineering, as did architect James M. Kennedy.

After completing his college work, Boney worked in several different settings before establishing his architectural practice in Wilmington. Upon graduation, he was offered a position with Cone Mills but decided instead to work in a Greensboro architect's office (thus far unidentified). He soon moved to Wilmington where from 1904 to 1906 he was an architectural draftsman for Charles McMillen, who had moved to the city a few years earlier and was a leading figure in the city's profession. Boney particularly credited McMillen with giving him a sound knowledge of construction.

Family tradition holds that in 1906 Boney returned to Wallace where he worked as assistant cashier of the Bank of Wallace and its successor, the Consolidated Bank of Duplin, until 1909. During these banking years he is said to have designed several bank buildings in southeastern North Carolina including the Bank of Wallace and others in Burgaw, Jacksonville, and Rose Hill. He may also have designed a brick school in Wallace. Boney is also said to have practiced architecture in Goldsboro planning several buildings including the Borden Building and the North Goldsboro Fire Station, as well as additions to the Temple Oheb Sholom Synagogue, and the Odd Fellows Home. From 1919 to 1920, Boney worked with architect William J. Wilkins of Florence, South Carolina. In an especially prominent project during his association with Wilkins, he supervised construction of the New Hanover County High School (1920-1922), an imposing and up-to-date facility that symbolized the city's investment in education. (Boney also planned three major additions to the high school over the following decades.) In 1922 Boney worked as a draftsman with Wilmington architect James F. Gause. During his time with Gause he planned the Cape Fear Country Club in Wilmington and at least seven elementary and high schools from the coast to the mountains. Among these were New Bern's Riverside Elementary School and Ghent School Elementary School , which were credited as being the first "fire resistant" elementary schools in eastern North Carolina. These projects were underway when Gause died in June 1922, and Boney saw to their completion.

By 1924 Boney opened his own architectural office in Wilmington and he practiced continuously under the name of "Leslie N. Boney, Architect," until his own death in 1964. His three sons, Leslie N., Jr., William J., and Charles H. joined him as partners as each graduated from NCSU. Their firm was described as the only architectural partnership in the nation at that time consisting of a father and three architect sons. (Note: The Boney family practice after the death of the founder of the firm will be the subject of another biographical entry in the future.)

From early in his career, Boney was motivated to study and devote his talents to school design, which proved to be a wise choice in the early to mid-20^th century era of widespread school construction and consolidation. Lenoir County, which was among the first counties in the state to inaugurate consolidated high schools in the 1910s, built several large and small schools during the Progressive Era, employing Boney to design a good number of them. These included the Moss Hill High School (ca. 1917), the first and one of the largest of Lenoir County's consolidated high schools, and Kinston's Grainger High School (1926), which was among the region's premier urban public schools of its day.

As his son Leslie, Jr., recalled, Leslie, Sr.'s major contribution was as a "school architect who could take an owner's needs and his budgets and quickly deliver a new school within the funds available. He was especially interested in the statewide effort to improve schools and became a leader in the development of consolidated schools to replace the previous era's many one-room schools." Boney was noted as an accomplished draftsman, "whose speed and accuracy enabled him to accomplish a great deal of design work. Sometimes he, like other architects, would illustrate a point by drawing on whatever was handy for his pencil, be it a 1x6 plank on the job or a paper napkin on the train." Boney's school designs were "always simple. His schools of the 1920s and 1930s were usually of red brick with bearing exterior walls, white trim, and classical porticoes. A favorite ornament, a row of three diamonds or lozenges, is an identifying characteristic of his schools. The interior framing was of wood, and the typical plan included smoke towers and vestibules on the ends of the corridors. When he employed built-up roofs, he typically used a steep slope to the rear which eliminated ponding and reduced leak potential. The drawn plans were straightforward and readily understood by the builders. The student and the public readily comprehended his buildings, find the entrance, and proceed through the spaces in a logical manner."

Many of Boney's solidly built, classically detailed brick schools, once centerpieces of their communities, have been razed within the last few decades as new standards for school planning have been adopted; a few have been maintained and renovated as schools, while others have been put into new uses. The attached building list includes only a sampling of the firm's educational output; more examples are shown in the Leslie N. Boney Collection (Special Collections Research Center, North Carolina State University Libraries).

In addition to the firm's many public schools, Boney also planned large college buildings. Described as the state's largest college dorm of its day, his 820-bed Bragaw Dormitory (1955) at his alma mater, NCSU, modeled an 8-student suite plan that became a popular form for student housing. (After his death, his firm was commissioned in 1965 to plan an 808-student NCSU dorm to be named for Boney, but it was not built.) One of his last projects, aptly, was the new campus for Wilmington College Campus (1963) planned as a series of courts on a suburban site outside Wilmington; the school is now the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. Here Boney used his favorite, formal Neoclassical Revival style of red brick buildings in Flemish bond brickwork, sloping slate roofs, and columns featuring the Tower of the Winds order which he had long admired.

Beyond the specialty in schools, during his forty years of practice in Wilmington, Boney's firm planned buildings of many different types in Wilmington and across the state. His residential work included several substantial residences in Wilmington and other towns, as well as beach cottages as Wrightsville Beach near Wilmington. A prominent local project shortly after he established his own firm was the New Hanover County Courthouse Annex (1924-1925), in which he was associated with consulting architect Herbert C. Chivers of New York; the stone-faced, Beaux-Arts classical design features a full-height portico with columns in the order of the Tower of the Winds, an order long favored in Wilmington (see John Norris and James F. Post) and which Boney employed frequently. A pioneer in large-scale housing, in 1939 Boney designed New Brooklyn Homes (Taylor Homes) in Wilmington as one of the state's first public housing projects. Boney was both architect and part owner of Wilmington's Oleander Court Apartments (1941), a garden type apartment complex of 92 units, which featured classical styling, spacious rooms, and generous site planning.

Boney's church designs included the Wallace Presbyterian Church (1909) planned during his banking years there; and Trinity Methodist Church (1920-1921) in Wilmington, probably designed during his association with Wilkins. For St. Andrew's on the Sound, an Episcopal church serving residents of the nearby old soundside resort communities, he employed a cheery Spanish Revival style. When the sanctuary of Wilmington's long-established congregation of St. Luke's A. M. E. Church burned in 1944, Boney provided a design for their new building, which was completed promptly despite wartime limitations on building materials. The firm's Little Chapel on the Boardwalk (1951) at Wrightsville Beach, for which Leslie's son Charles was lead designer, was hailed as the first "contemporary" church in the state east of Raleigh, won state and regional AIA design awards, and was featured in Progressive Architecture.

At a time when health facilities were expanding statewide, Boney like other architects designed numerous hospitals and medical facilities. In 1938 he designed the Columbus County Hospital, and in 1960, an addition. Probably in response to the 1946 Hill-Burton Act which offered Federal funds to build and improve hospitals, in 1948 he designed a facility to add more beds and a surgical unit for Wilmington's James Walker Memorial Hospital. He followed this with the Pender Memorial Hospital and the Duplin General Hospital in 1950 and 1960, respectively. Before and during World War II, Boney was involved in the 1940 land acquisition survey and schools for Camp LeJeune Marine Base and in military construction including the William C. Lee Field House at Fort Bragg.

Long active in church, community and professional life, Boney was a ruling elder, deacon, and Sunday school teacher at the First Presbyterian Church in Wilmington. He was active in the growing preservation movement in Wilmington, and his own residence, the antebellum Wessell-Hathaway House (see James F. Post) was rehabilitated under his direction in 1940, with the architectural office in the basement. In the early 1950s, Boney's diplomacy and creativity helped spare the Kenan Fountain at 5th and Market Streets in Wilmington from obscurity. Traffic had increased and state transportation officials wanted to remove the fountain from the intersection in order to widen the traffic lanes. They proposed to reinstall the fountain in Greenfield Park. Boney countered with a proposal to remove the lowest ring of pools, allowing the rest of the fountain to remain intact in the intersection. His proposal was accepted and the landmark was preserved in situ.

Leslie N. Boney married Mary Lily Hussey of Wallace on June 6, 1917. The couple resided in Wallace and he commuted weekly to Wilmington until they moved to the port city in 1922. Leslie and Mary Lily Boney had five children: Mary Lily; Leslie, Jr.; William Joseph, Charles Hussey, and Sue Alford. The family resided at 412 Central Boulevard, 425 S. 3rd Street, 221 S. 5th Street, and 120 S. 5th Street. The Leslie N. Boney House at 425 S. 3rd Street, built in 1925, is a Georgian Revival brick residence of Boney's own design, which originally featured Tower of the Winds columns. The firm Boney established continued after his death and was known for several years as Boney Architects, operated by his three sons and three grandsons, Paul Davis Boney, Charles H. Boney, Jr., and Christopher Boney. In 2005 the firm became LS3P.

The building list represents only a fraction of Boney's extensive work and is intended to show his best-known buildings and a representative selection of types and locales for which status and location can be identified. A more complete listing of his work appears in the finding guide for the Leslie N. Boney Architectural Papers at the Special Collection Research Center at North Carolina State University Libraries, a collection that includes papers of both Leslie N. Boney, Sr., and Leslie N. Boney, Jr. This biographical entry was drafted by Leslie N. Boney, Jr. (1920-2003), and the building list was assembled by Charles H. Boney, Sr. and Janet K. Seapker. Additional information on notable Boney projects is welcomed.

Author: Leslie N. Boney, Jr. Contributing authors: Charles H. Boney, Sr. and Janet K. Seapker. Editor: Catherine W. Bishir.

Published 2012

Building List

Leslie N. Boney, Sr.'s Work Locations

Bibliography