Title: Leroy S. Buffington Papers [finding aid]
Dates: 1865-1927
Size: 2140 items
Buffington was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1847 and received all of his formal education there. His first employment was with the architectural firm of Hannaford and Anderson, whom he left in 1871 to move with his wife of two years to St. Paul. He entered partnership with Abraham Radcliffe, an established architect, which lasted until 1874 when he moved to Minneapolis and opened an office that he continued to maintain until 1931. He had no partners. In 1880, he was appointed the official architect of the St. Paul, Minneapolis & Manitoba Railway Company, and by 1885 he had one of the largest practices in the Twin Cities. Near the end of his life, he credited himself with designing $20 million' worth of structures throughout the United States. He applied for and received a patent in 1887 for the steel skeleton method of construction for high-rise buildings, the basis upon which all modern skyscrapers are built. However, his claim was challenged in a court suit which he eventually lost. Buffington died in Minneapolis in 1931.
Harvey Ellis was born in Rochester, New York, in 1852. Little is known of his childhood or education up to 1870, when he appeared in the city directory as a surveyor. He attended West Point (1871-2), was dishonorably dismissed after a year, and made a trip to Europe to view the great architecture. Returning to New York in 1873, Ellis first set out to study art with Edwin White at the National Academy of Design (1875-6), but became an architectural draftsman with Arthur Gilman instead. He moved on to Albany, and is rumored to have worked in the office of H.H. Richardson. Ellis returned to Rochester in 1879 and entered architectural practice with his brother Charles. He left the city in 1884 or 1885 and eventually arrived in St. Paul. Between 1885 and 1889, he worked for several firms in both St. Paul and Minneapolis, his longest tenure being with Leroy Buffington. He left the area about 1890 and was employed as a draftsman with Eckel & Mann in St. Joseph and St. Louis, Missouri until 1894. Ellis returned to Rochester, NY that year and rejoined his brother's firm and continued in it until 1903. In that year, Gustav Stickley invited Ellis to join the staff of Craftsman magazine, for which Ellis executed a number of articles and illustrations between July 1903 and his death in January 1904.
The collection contains drawings for hundreds of buildings of all types including working drawings, renderings, sketches, specifications, photographs, pamphlets, and a scrapbook of clippings from architecture magazines of the 1860s and 1870s. Buildings represented by drawings include the West Hotel (Minneapolis) (1884); Pillsbury A. Mill (Minneapolis) (1880); the Cathedral of St. John the Divine (New York) (project, 1888); and Pillsbury, Nicholson, and Burton Halls (University of Minnesota, Minneapolis) (1888, 1890, 1895 respectively). More than 100 of the renderings in the collection can be attributed to Harvey Ellis.
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