#52 Ancestors 2020 Week 29 Newsworthy: Woodruff Marbury Somervell, Architect Extraordinaire

My cousin, Woodruff Marbury Somervell may not have been as famous or quite as flamboyant as his contemporary, Frank Lloyd Wright, (although he did have a Hupmobile and I think that counts toward flamboyance) but he did leave his mark on American architecture. He has been described as "the supreme talent of Vancouver." Somervell was the architect that provided a booming Seattle with architectural symbols of its new civic institutions.

Woodruff Marbury Somervell started life as Woodruff Marbury McCafferty, born in Washington DC in 1872 to Augustus McCafferty (about whom I have previously written) and Mary Eliza "Lalla" Somervell. He legally changed his name to Somervell in 1904.  One of his biographers claimed that this had to do with an inheritance from his paternal grandfather.  Now, I happen to know that his paternal grandfather, John Howe Somervell, husband of Sarah Jane Scrivener, died without a penny to his name.  So I doubt that inheritance was the reason.  But in any case, he did change his name as did his younger brother, Bruce.

Marbury McCafferty grew up in Tompkinsville NY where his father worked for the Lighthouse Department. He attended the Staten Island Academy and Latin School before studying architecture at Cornell, graduating in 1892.  After he won the American Architect Travelling Scholarship, he enrolled at the School of Fine Arts in Florence, Italy and studied at various ateliers in Paris in 1893.

When he returned to the States, he worked for James Renwick in New York and had a hand in putting the finishing details on the construction of St. Patrick's Cathedral.  From 1901 to 1904, he worked for Heins and LaFarge who sent him to Seattle in 1904 to supervise the construction of St. James Cathedral.  It was a life-changing move. He liked Seattle and decided to stay.  He opened his own architectural firm and spent the next two decades designing and building in Seattle, Vancouver and Los Angeles. (I think this move may have been the impetus for the name change.)

One of Somervell's (as he was known thence forward) first big commissions was the building of free libraries in Seattle, funded by a generous donation from steel tycoon and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie.  Somervell and his partner built a half dozen of these. The Tudor-Revival style Queen Anne Branch built in 1914 was typical of his work, featuring reading rooms, a children's story room and an auditorium in the basement.  Both the Queen Anne Branch and the University Branch (1910) are listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

Seattle Library University Branch 1910

Here is a description of another of his libraries:

Douglass-Truth Library, Seattle The original library is an unlikely cross between Italianate architecture and Frank Lloyd Wright that works thanks to the design's balanced composition, stately proportions and glazed terra cotta ornament. Designed by W. Marbury Somervell and Harlan Thomas, Douglass-Truth has a broad hip roof covered with Spanish tile, light-colored brick and tall windows ganged together to underscore the library's Prairie Style horizontal composition. A fecund mix of fruit, cherubs and open books adorns a terra cotta frieze at the cornice line and surrounds the main entry. 

Yesler Branch (Now Douglass-Truth)

Somervell went on to design banks, hospitals, schools, and office buildings throughout Seattle and Vancouver, where he had opened an office in 1910. He even worked with his partner Harlan Thomas to design the iconic Corner Market at the entrance to Pike's Place in Seattle.

One of his more spectacular designs was the Manufactures Building for the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exhibition in Seattle in 1908.

He designed many residences, one for his in-laws, Ellwood Hughes and Emma Jane De Hart, in the exclusive Highlands suburb of Seattle, his own summer residence outside Los Angeles, and a Mediterranean-style villa called Taynayan for Louis Dreyfus in Santa Barbara.

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Taynayan 1924

Marbury Somervell married Helen Mary Hughes at St. Mark's Church in Seattle in 1907.  They had one daughter, Jane DeHart Somervell, in 1908.

Marbury enlisted in 1917 and served under General Pershing in the American Expeditionary Force in France and later in Italy with the Engineering Corps during WWI. He stayed in France after the war to help with the restoration of damaged monuments.

When he returned to the States, he and his family moved to Los Angeles.  His work seemingly kept him busy driving the highways of the West Coast in his Hupmobile Century 125, as the story below indicates.

In addition to his skill in architecture, Marbury was also a talented artist and some of his landscapes were exhibited at the Paris Salon in the 1920's.

Marbury and Helen Somervell were divorced about 1930 and he married Hortense Koepfli and retired to Europe.  He died in Cannes, France in 1939.   As these examples from his work amply illustrate, he was a man of varied talents, able to design in a wide range of architectural styles from Victorian to Mediterranean to Italianate to Prairie.