HASKELL, Samuel Stevens (1871-1913), an important and highly talented architect active in Montreal where he was in partnership with Jean O. Marchand (see list of works under Marchand & Haskell). Born in Haverhill, Mass., he moved to St. Paul, Minn. with his parents and obtained his early education there. In 1887, he received his early training in architecture when he joined the office of Gilbert & Taylor, which was then under the direction of the leading architect Cass Gilbert. After assisting there for one year, he moved to Boston to attend Massachusetts Inst. of Technology in 1890-91, and after graduation he joined the New York office of Carrere & Hastings, remaining there until the spring of 1894. With the advice and encouragement of his mentor Cass Gilbert, he was accepted as a foreign student at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris where his classmates included John M. Lyle, and, more importantly, a young architectural student from Montreal named Jean O. Marchand, with whom he was to later form a partnership. Haskell remained in Paris until February 1899, then returned to New York to serve as the office manager in the newly established branch office of Cass Gilbert. There, he helped Gilbert prepare the winning competition entries for the U.S. Customs House, the Essex County Court House in Newark, N.J., and the Union Club in New York, and he mastered his own interpretation of the Beaux-Arts style.
At the invitation of J.O. Marchand in Montreal, Haskell resigned from Gilbert’s office on 1 January 1903 and moved to Canada, establishing a formal partnership with Marchand.
In collaboration with Marchand, he played a leading role in the design and construction of important institutional, commercial, industrial and ecclesiastical works in Montreal, Winnipeg, Quebec City, Edmonton and elsewhere. Their firm was remarkably prolific and successful, and seemed destined for even greater achievements were it not for the untimely death of Haskell, at the age of 41 years. He died in Montreal on 20 May 1913 after a short illness (obit. and port. Montreal Star, 21 May 1913, 10; obit. and list of works Gazette [Montreal], 21 May 1913, 9; inf. from the Province of Quebec Assoc. of Architects, letter from Haskell dated 8 Sept. 1907; biog. E.A. Delaire, Les architectes eleves de L‘Ecole des Beaux-Arts 1793-1907, 289).