ELLIOT, John Harlock (1864-c. 1930), a partner in the important Toronto architectural firm of Knox & Elliot. Born in Toronto, Ont., he was the son of John W. Elliot, one of the city’s leading dentists. Both his parents were Americans who came to live in Toronto in 1858. John H. was educated at Upper Canada College in 1875-78, but he left for the United States c. 1884 and found a position as a draftsman in the office of Burnham & Root, a leading architectural firm in Chicago. It was there that he met a young Scottish architect, Wilm Knox, who had emigrated to the United States in 1886, and both opened an office under their own name in Elliot’s home town of Toronto in 1888 (see list of works under Knox & Elliot). The partnership flourished, and more than thirty works by the firm have been recorded, many in a distinctive Romanesque Revival style. Their major breakthrough came in 1889 when they won the competition for the Confederation Life in Toronto (1890-91; still standing 2019), completed in collaboration with local associate E. Beaumont Jarvis.
Both partners moved back to Chicago in 1892 and spent a year as associates with Henry Ives Cobb, assisting him with major pavilions at the World’s Columbian Exposition (1893). At the conclusion of that work, Elliot moved to Minneapolis, and Knox returned to Cleveland, and Elliot soon followed, where both continued in a successful partnership until the death of Knox in October 1915. Elliot then worked under his own name in Cleveland until after 1930 (biog. The Book of Clevelanders, 1914, 156; inf. Stephen A. Otto, Toronto). A photographic portrait of John H. Elliot was published in James L. Mercer & Edward K. Rife, Representative Men of Ohio 1900-1903, 1903, 68.