Solomon Willard: The Enigmatic Man Behind the Monument
Solomon Willard is a key figure in Quincy’s history: architect and superintendent of the Bunker Hill Monument, father of Quincy’s granite industry, benefactor of the West Quincy community. He is also an essential figure in several stories about 19th century Boston and America. So when researchers on any of these stories come to Quincy Historical Society, they inevitably ask, “Can you show us a picture of Solomon Willard?” And they are always surprised when we reply, “No. There isn’t one.”
Willard the man remains an enigma. He lived to a ripe old age, but never had a family of his own. He was described as kindly and friendly, but he seems not to have formed any close relationships. He never sat for a portrait or photograph. He went out of his way to avoid both fame and fortune.
Willard and his work can seem a series of technical achievements by a remote figure. But Willard is worth another look. A main source of information is Memoir of Solomon Willard , an 1865 biography by William Wheildon, who was the author of several popular books on the American Revolution. Wheildon provides enough detail about the man to tease out a picture of his personality and of the quite complicated story of his dedication to the Bunker Hill Monument.
Image courtesy of the Parker Collection, Thomas Crane Library.
Willard’s life and work embody many of the cultural qualities of New England in the early years of the Republic. He was ingenious, committed to self-improvement, and filled with a practical intellectual curiosity. Born in 1783 in Petersham, Massachusetts, he attended the town’s common school, then set out on a lifetime of work. He came to Boston when he was 21. Over the next twenty years, he worked first as a carpenter and joiner, then as a carver of wooden monumental figures, then as a maker of architectural models, and finally as an architect. He made this progress not only by being smart and working hard, but because he continued to study, both reading on his own and taking courses designed for “mechanics.”
The word “mechanic” in the early 1800s had a much wider application than it does now and basically referred to skilled non-agricultural workers. Mechanics and their status were both the result of and contributors to the era’s opportunity and egalitarianism. And those qualities of opportunity and equality are important parts of Willard’s story.
Willard and his architect colleagues Alexander Parris, Isaiah Rogers, and Ammi Young all had limited formal education and learned on the job. When they achieved success, they evidently did not see themselves as all that different from what they had been. Moreover, they all learned from and cooperated with one another. Willard got his experience working with stone when he assisted Parris on St. Paul’s Church on Tremont Street. Young similarly started as an assistant to Parris. Rogers began as an assistant to Willard and later they would trade plans as equals. There were some instances of professional pique, but for the most part they seem to have gotten along.
Designed by Alexander Parris.
Patriotism and democratic impulse also inform Willard’s long involvement, from 1825 to 1841, with the Bunker Hill Monument. Here, though, motives start to get complicated. The Monument began as a project of the leading citizens of Boston. They were motivated by patriotism, but also by anxiety: they feared patriotism would disappear as the last veterans of the Revolution died off. The Monument would be an impressive teaching tool. It would also memorialize the Revolution and Boston by being far and away the biggest thing ever built to that time in America. Unfortunately, the project was never adequately funded, and it also encountered all the difficulties related to project by committee. From the start there were delays. Eventually, there were delays that lasted for years.
Willard handled all this with resoluteness sometimes verging into stubbornness. He saw building the monument as a patriotic duty. He put up with numerous personal slights and only once submitted his resignation, which—probably as he intended—prompted the Monument Association to reconcile with him. But also he had a vision of what the monument should look like and, certainly by the time he selected Quincy as the source for the granite, he had a vision of how to get it built. He was determined these were how things would be. He employed a variety of strategies that were both consistent with his idealistic purpose and cannily practical. When the Association proposed economizing by having the final granite blocks cut and shaped by prisoners at Charlestown Prison, Willard provided detailed calculations to show this would be more expensive than to continue to have the work done at the Quincy quarry site. But he also rejected the proposal on democratic grounds: “For executing the work I have thought it best policy to hire good men, to pay them fair wages and to see that their labor is well directed. . . .The work which we are engaged in is a work of patriotism, where all should be on equal terms.”
In the end, Willard managed to get the Monument built in the form he intended and in the way he intended. Along the way, he took on other important, profitable projects, including the Dedham Court House and the pillars for the New York Merchants Exchange. The Monument, however, had a special hold on him. Wheildon suggests that the commitment to the monument came with a cost, that the long delays and uncertainties “had an effect upon his whole after life, affecting his spirits and ambition, changing his plans, purposes, and hopes.”
Built shortly before he died in 1861.
With the monument completed, why did Willard stay in Quincy for the remainder of his life? He claimed that he had settled here for purely business reasons and never intended to stay. Inertia might be the reason. Wheildon’s comment above hints at disappointment. But events contradict these ideas. Willard in his later years remained involved with West Quincy life. He laid out potential roadways, donated the land and helped construct the local school, was a partner in establishing the Hall Place Cemetery. He died in West Quincy on February 27, 1861, having suffered a heart attack or stroke earlier that day.
Perhaps Willard felt an affection for West Quincy that had to do with one additional motivation for the Bunker Hill Monument. At some point, Quincy granite became part of the vision. Wheildon says that Willard wanted to show “what really could be done with that comparatively new building material, the ‘gray Quincy granite,’ in massive structures.” Willard, after the Monument was completed, said that one of its benefits was “in improving the style of building and the taste in architecture, by the introduction of a building material not before in use; and showing it can be worked into any moulded or ornamental form required for the exterior of the best structures.”
Wheildon says that by 1850 there were 30 to 40 blocks of granite architecture in downtown Boston. Much of that is gone, but enough remains. Here in Quincy, Willard’s Old City Hall, built with Quincy granite by Quincy’s artisans as a place for representative government, remains, as was said when it opened in 1844, “an honor to Quincy’s mechanics.”
This article originally appeared in the 2019 edition of The Quincy Sun supplement, Historic Quincy. The supplement’s 2020 edition will be published in July.