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Vol. 26:3 ISSN 0160-8460 September 1998
Documenting the Career of Architect Robert Mills
Robert Mills (1781-1855), an early American-born architect who explored the possibilities of reviving several historical styles of architecture on this continent, was unique among his peers in having trained with James Hoban, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin H. Latrobe. His first independent works were built in South Carolina while he was still working as draftsman and clerk in Latrobe's Washington office. From 1808 to 1815, he was in practice in Philadelphia, designing and helping to engineer structures there and in Richmond, Virginia. From 1815 to 1820, he was in Baltimore, where he built that city's monument to George Washington. He served on the South Carolina Board of Public Works intermittently between 1820 and 1830, during which period he worked on road, river, and canal development, as well as the Fireproof Records Building in Charleston.
In 1830 Mills returned to Washington, where he received a number of commissions through his ties with the Jackson administration. He was appointed architect of the Patent Office and the Treasury Building in July 1836, and subsequently styled himself Architect of Public Buildings, also designing the Post Office. He is perhaps best known for his design of the capital's Washington Monument, on which work proceeded slowly because of a lack of funds. The monument had reached a height of 152 feet when Mills died in 1855; only in 1878 did Congress appropriate money to complete the structure, which was finished in 1884.
The Papers of Robert Mills project was established at the Smithsonian Institutions's National Museum of American History in 1984, following a conference at the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum on "Robert Mills: The Years of Growth," organized by Robert L. Alexander, Professor of Art History, University of Iowa. Douglas E. Evelyn of the National Museum of American History served as project director, while Professor Alexander held the position of senior editor. John M. Bryan, then Associate Professor of Art History at the University of South Carolina, and Pamela J. Scott, then Visiting Lecturer at Cornell University, joined the project as associate editors, with Ms. Scott also serving as editor of the microfilm edition.
The project's principal objective was to make the widely scattered papers of Robert Mills accessible to scholars through the publication of a definitive microfilm edition. Early advice came from Charles Montgomery Harris, editor of the Papers of William Thornton, and from Mary A. Giunta of the NHPRC staff. The Commission provided initial funding for the project, while the National Museum of American History provided office space and administrative support. Ms. Scott was the project's only full-time professional employee, and was responsible for the guide to the edition, which was published in 1990. The editorial process was supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. In a concurrent project, the National Endowment for the Arts provided a grant for the professional treatment and conservation of many of Mills' drawings.
Sketch of Washington National Monument, by Robert Mills. From National Archives Record Group 42.
The editors defined the papers of Robert Mills to include correspondence to and from Mills, as well as documents produced by him, including his published books, pamphlets, articles in newspapers and journals, drawings, manuscript books, journals, and diaries. In addition, they endeavored to include known documents mentioning Mills that were produced during his lifetime. The latter included correspondence as well as miscellaneous private and public accounts of Mills and his work.
Government printed documents were the single most important source for study of Mills' career as Federal architect. They include a wide range of related documents about the design and erection of the Treasury, Patent Office, and Post Office buildings and other structures. These documents were made a separate series in the microfilm edition; those that mention Mills were included, while those that mention his buildings but not the architect were not.
Photograph of the Washington Monument by Earl McDonald, NARA.
The editors included photographs, both historical and contemporary, for reference purposes, particularly regarding details of Mills' architecture. However, the photographs were not intended to document all existing architecture or all aspects of existing buildings. They also did not include photographs of buildings when they lacked the textual records to support attributions to Mills, whether made on stylistic grounds or based upon assumptions about his contemporaneous employment. The editors included known newspaper citations wherever possible, but did not undertake an exhaustive search of newspapers.
This edition of the Robert Mills papers consists of 15 rolls of microfilm, and is comprised of five series of records. Large-scale numbers were used so that readers can quickly identify individual documents. The series are (1) general correspondence (0001 through the 3000s), (2) Mills' unpublished works (4000s), (3) Mills' published works (5000s), (4) drawings and photographs (6000s), and government printed documents (7000s). With the exception of the drawings and photographs, which are arranged alphabetically by state and city, the arrangement is chronological within each series. Each document is identified by a four-digit number, occasionally followed by a letter ranging from A to K. A slash separates the four-digit number from page numbers within the document.
For the most part, the microfilm edition reproduces electrostatic copies of the original documents. However, in hundreds of instances, transcriptions are provided of documents which manifest poor penmanship, or of which the electrostatic copy is of poor quality. Transcriptions replicate the manuscript as exactly as machinery would allow, with some characteristics that could not be produced with machinery, such as cross hatching, entered manually. Interventions in the original text by the editors always appear within brackets.
To permit maximum use of the documents regardless of what aspect of Mills' career is of interest, indexing was by people, place, and subject. Family correspondence was generally indexed by author and recipient, except when a business relationship was discerned. Subseries were established for every aspect of Mills' professional life. Individuals who interacted with Mills were identified when possible. The names of buildings were used, except when reference to the type of building would cause ambiguity; in such cases, the building was identified by location.
(This article was prepared with the kind assistance of architectural historian Pamela Scott.)
