Clarence Wesley Wigington

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Highland Park Water Tower

Clarence Wesley Wigington (born April 21, 1883 in Lawrence (Kansas) , † July 7, 1967 in Kansas City (Missouri) ) was an American architect . He was the first registered African American architect in Minnesota and the first black municipal architect in that state.

Life and Buildings

Clarence Wesley Wigington was the son of Wesley Wigington and Jennie Marie Roberts. The father was from Texas, the mother, a teacher, from Missouri. Clarence Wesley Wigington was the fourth boy in the family and had eleven siblings. The family moved to Omaha in early childhood . In 1912 he finished high school there . His artistic talents had already been honored in 1898: he had won three first prizes at the Trans Mississippi World's Fair in St. Louis . From 1900 to 1904 he attended evening classes with Alfred Juergens and J. Laurie Wallace . Until 1908 he worked for the architect Thomas R. Kimball . Then he opened his own architecture office in Omaha. In the same year he married Viola Lessie Williams and caused a sensation with a house that he had designed for Isaac Bailey . Also that year he got his first opportunity to design a commercial object, a potato chip factory . A little later, he won first prize in a national architecture competition with his design for a two-family house. It took four years before the building was actually built.

In 1909 Wigington moved to Sheridan , Wyoming . However, there was a lack of orders there, so Wigington decided to work as a manager for the factory he had designed. This was short-lived. A newspaper advertisement for a competition to build the National Religious Training School in Durham , North Carolina , turned things around: Wigington was allowed to build an administration building and two dormitories. In 1910 the family moved back to Omaha. The first daughter, Muriel Elizabeth, was born in 1911, followed by the second daughter in 1912, who was named Sarah Mildred. In the following years, Wigington received a relatively large number of orders, including the construction of a new church with 1,200 seats for the Zion Baptist Church after Omaha was struck by a tornado .

In 1914, Wigington moved to St. Paul from Omaha with his wife Viola and their two children . He prevailed in June 1915 against seven competitors for the office of Senior Architectural Draftsman in St. Paul City's Architect's Office. He then held this office for about 35 years.

Several buildings in Wigington are now on the National Register of Historic Places , such as the Harriet Island Pavilion, 75 Water Street, and the Highland Park Tower, 1570 Highland Parkway. A total of more than 60 buildings and construction projects in and around St. Paul can be traced back to Wigington.

After he retired, Wigington moved to Los Angeles . There he made friends with Paul Williams . The two architects reactivated the National Chapter of the National Technical Association (NTA) in 1950. The National Technis Association, in which African-American architects, engineers, etc. had come together, was founded in Chicago in 1926 . In 1963 the Wigington couple moved to Kansas City to spend their old age with one of their daughters. Wigington died there in 1967 at the age of 84.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ David Vassar Taylor, Paul Clifford Larson: Cap Wigington: An Architectural Legacy in Ice and Stone . Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2001, ISBN 978-0-87351-415-6 , pp. 4 ff.
  2. ^ David Vassar Taylor, Paul Clifford Larson: Cap Wigington: An Architectural Legacy in Ice and Stone . Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2001, ISBN 978-0-87351-415-6 , p. 4.
  3. ^ Dreck Spurlock Wilson: African American Architects: A Biographical Dictionary, 1865-1945 . Routledge, March 1, 2004, ISBN 978-1-135-95629-5 , pp. 612 ff.
  4. ^ National Register of Historic Places: African American Historic Places . John Wiley & Sons, October 1, 1994, ISBN 978-0-471-14345-1 , p. 291.
  5. ^ Alton Hornsby Jr .: Black America: A State-by-State Historical Encyclopedia [2 volumes]: A State-by-State Historical Encyclopedia . ABC-CLIO, 23 August 2011, ISBN 978-1-57356-976-7 , p. 422.
  6. ↑ David Taylor, Wigington, Clarence Wesley (1883-1967) at www.blackpast.org
personal data
SURNAME Wigington, Clarence Wesley
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American architect
DATE OF BIRTH April 21, 1883
PLACE OF BIRTH Lawrence (Kansas)
DATE OF DEATH July 7, 1967
Place of death Kansas City (Missouri)