Clark, Henry Paston

CLARK, Henry Paston (1853 -1927), lived and worked in Boston, Mass. for the duration of his career. Together with his partner John L. Briggs, he opened a branch office in Saint John, New Brunswick after the Great Fire there in June 1877. They designed a sophisticated double dwelling house for Carson Flood, King Street East, SAINT JOHN, N.B. (American Architect and Building News [Boston], iii, 15 June 1878, 209, illus.). This refined work, with its distinctive projecting wooden bay windows set in a brick facade, remains intact today, and is one of the few unaltered residential prototypes devised for the city immediately after the Great Fire there in June, 1877. Clark also designed a substantial brick residence for Mr. Lockhart, Wentworth Street, SAINT JOHN, N.B. (Daily News [Saint John] 8 Dec. 1877, 3).

Clark was born in Boston, Mass on 29 July 1853 and attended courses in architecture at the Massachusetts Inst. of Technology, then moved to Paris, France where he was a student at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. After returning to the United States, he was briefly associated with Henry Vaughan (1846-1917), a leading Boston architect who executed several significant institutional and ecclesiastical works in the Boston area. Clark would later become best-known for his Shingle-style and Colonial Revival works throughout New England. A biography of Clark, together with illustrations of his works in the nearby state of Maine, was published in 2004 (Kevin Murphy, Colonial Revival Maine, 2004, 120-35, illus.). Clark died at Kennebunkport, Maine on 6 September 1927 (obituary Boston Evening Transcript, 6 September 1927, Section Two, p. 15; inf. Henry F. Scannell, Reference Div., Boston Public Library).