Joseph Keen (1812-May 1, 1875) was an English-born brickmason who came to Wilmington, North Carolina, along with other immigrant artisans during the city’s antebellum building boom. In 1848 he and partner Maxwell Huston advertised as agents for a marble manufactory “at the north,” who could take orders for tombstones. (This was a frequent sideline for masonry contractors in Wilmington, which lacked local stone.) Keen was listed in the United States census of 1860 as a mason in Wilmington with his wife Emma and their children. In 1851 he advertised as a “Contractor and Builder, of the late firm of Keen and Huston,” able to take construction contracts and to supply lime, plaster, plaster hair, and fire brick. Keen’s principal known project, probably one among many, was the iron-fronted, brick Scott and Baldwin Store (1854), for which he did the brickwork “with his usual fidelity and skill,” while James F. Post drew the plans and did the carpentry. In 1855, Joseph Keen and carpenter George W. Rose won the bid to build the City Hall-Thalian Hall (1854-1858), the city’s principal civic edifice, from designs by New York theater architect John M. Trimble. But when the sponsors changed the plans to make the building larger, Keen and Rose “declined” to take the job. The contract went to John C. Wood and Robert B. Wood (see Wood Brothers) for the masonry, Rose for carpentry, and James F. Post as supervising architect. Keen continued in the trade and by 1860 owned $3,500 in personal and real property. He doubtless accomplished many other projects, as yet unidentified, in Wilmington. In 1874, “though afflicted,” he was “still prepared to carry on my old business,” with his son Joseph Jr. He died the next year and was buried in Oakdale Cemetery.

• William Reaves Collection, New Hanover County Public Library, Wilmington, North Carolina.
• Isabel M. Williams, “Thalian Hall,” unpublished manuscript, copy in State Historic Preservation Office, Raleigh, North Carolina (1977, 2003).
• Tony P. Wrenn, Wilmington, North Carolina: An Architectural and Historical Portrait (1984).