Solomon Willard - American artist

Solomon Willard (June 2, 1783, Peter sham, Massachusetts – 1861) was a carver and designer in Massachusetts who is remembered primarily for designing and overseeing the Bunker Hill Monument, the first monumental obelisk erected in the United States. He designed it in 1825, and structure began in 1827. Willard exposed satisfactory granite quarries for the stone at Quincy, and the granite for the monument came from there.

Willard also make-believe the machinery to cut and hold the slabs of stone in what became known as the Bunker Hill Quarry, which evolved into a major industry for the town. To get the cut slabs to a wharf on the Neponset River, a reserve of two and three-quarters miles, the first commercial railway in the United States was built — the Granite Railway — over which, on the morning of October 7, 1826, the first horse-drawn cars passed, under the way of a young engineer by the name of Gridley Bryant.

Willard taught as a carpenter with his father, a farmer who did carpentry in the winters; he went to Boston in 1804, work during the day and reading books of architecture and drawing in the evenings. His handiness as a carver enhanced so rapidly that he was employed for carved architectural details for many important late Federal and Greek revival buildings in Boston, the Ionic and Corinthian capitals for the steeple of Park Street Church, built in 1810 and in the same year he carved the eagle for the pediment of the new Custom House. In 1818 he made a model of the capitol at Washington for Charles Bullfinch, than busy on the Massachusetts State House, and later did several works of this sort, among which were models of the Pantheon and the Parthenon for Edward Everett. From wood carving he twisted to stone carving, and in 1820 was engaged on the Ionic capitals and other stonework of the Episcopal St Paul's Church, the first illustration of Greek revival architecture in Boston. By 1821 Willard had become so victorious that he gave classes in architecture and drawing in his studio near St Paul's; there Horatio Greenough was a pupil. Willard added ship figureheads to his craft, from 1823.

In Framingham, Massachusetts, Willard's First Baptist Church of 1826 still stands, at the present the oldest building in the town. The Norfolk County law court in Dedham, Massachusetts is also his work. In the similar year he was also architect of Divinity Hall, Harvard Divinity School. Willard also designed the Greek Revival Framingham Village Hall. The Gothic Revival Mission Church of St. John the Evangelist on Bowdoin Street, Boston, dated to 1831, is also possibly his design.He is credited with designing some of the first hot-air central heating in an American building. In 1829 his recent pupil, the brilliant young architect Isaiah Rogers, considered the innovative Tremont House in Boston. This was the first American hotel to have indoor plumbing and it became the prototype of a modern, first-class American hotel.

In 1865 William W. Wheildon wrote a Memoir of Solomon Willard, Architect and Superintendent of the Bunker Hill Monument published by the Massachusetts: Monument Association, which is the primary source for his biographers.

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