Clifton Hall
Clifton A. Hall is deep in thought. He leans forward in his chair, studying the drawing stretched out across his desk --- a blueprint for a building known simply as “the Springfield House”. Every room is neatly labeled in brown ink; changes or additions are penciled in. A meticulous list of expenses follows on the next page: the final cost of the house (including labor) totals $6,428.36. Each sheet of paper bears a small watermark in the bottom right corner:
Clifton A. Hall
Architect
Market Square
Providence, RI
The year was 1856, and business was booming for 31-year-old Clifton Alexander Hall. Ever since he had moved to Providence from Boston six years earlier, he’d been practicing his trade successfully. Although it had been hard making a name for himself in Providence, away from his father’s well-known architecture firm, C.G. Hall & Son, he was pleased with his decision. Already he could see his hard work beginning to pay off. After graduation from the Fowles Monitorial School in Boston, he had worked for his father, Charles Griffith Hall, and brother, John R. Hall, learning the trade. When their firm had been commissioned to design the What Cheer building at 15 Market Square in Providence, they had sent Clifton to supervise the construction. He did, and took a liking to the small but growing city while he was there. After the building (the first and most commanding of the Renaissance business plaza in the downtown area) was completed, Hall decided to make a home and a career for himself nearby.
Now, with his business firmly established, married just a year and settling into his new house at 325 Broad Street with his new bride, Clifton Alexander Hall was on his way to becoming a success in his own right.
The Providence of the 1860s that Clifton Hall would come to know and love was a former town that had outgrown itself. A reporter for the Providence Journal wrote in 1867, “Too large for a village and too isolated to boast of metropolitan advantages, Providence is in that state of betweenity which is always embarrassing and often not a little ludicrous.” Even the fabulous wealth of the city’s most prominent families could not disguise the fact that Providence was still at its heart an industrial base, not a center for urban civilization. Before Providence could be considered a bona fide city, little sister to such belles as Boston, New York and Philadelphia, it had to develop an urban identity through civic architecture and the whole range of the requisite cultural institutions: a public library, an art gallery, a museum of natural history, perhaps even a music conservatory.
This push towards urban renewal delighted skilled tradesmen such as Hall, as it provided a steady demand for their services. As city authorities commissioned building after building, employing streams of architects, bricklayers, carpenters, painters, ironsmiths and surveyors, Providence gained libraries, museums, water systems, public parks, hotels and even a new City Hall.
While still working for his father’s firm, Clifton A. Hall supervised the construction of the Providence Institution for Savings in 1854 before turning his attention to his own pursuits. In 1856, he entered into a brief partnership with another Providence architect, Alpheus Morse, and together, Morse & Hall designed the Merchant’s National Bank on Westminster Street, completed in 1857. By then the partnership had dissolved, but the two former partners remained on friendly terms and designed another building together, Trinity Methodist Church in 1872.
Hall also designed the Curry & Richards building in 1868 and the Providence Gas Company Plant at the corner of Hospital and Curry Streets in 1872. In 1884 he entered into another partnership, this time with Charles Makepeace to form Hall & Makepeace, but this was again short-lived, and lasted only until 1886.
Throughout his career, Hall lived in four different houses on Broad Street. Each successive move took him closer and closer to the corner of Broad Street and Elmwood Avenue, the site of his final home --- Grace Church Cemetery. His marriage to Harriet T. Prentice of Hartford, Connecticut produced a son, Charles Franklin and two daughters, Emily Tyler and Harriet Clifton, between 1855 and 1859. In 1857 the family moved from 325 Broad St. to 461 Broad Street. Ten years later, the Halls moved three houses down to 469 Broad Street. Both houses faced the cemetery on the other side of the street.
Over his years in Providence, Hall gained access to the inner circles of the Rhode Island Freemasons, the oldest secret order fraternity in the country. After a mere five years of his residence in the city, the Providence Royal Arch Chapter of Masons offered him membership within their circle. The next year, he was elected to the Providence Council of Royal and Select Masters, and in 1859 St. Johns Commandery knighted him, making him a member of the Calvary Commandery, Knights Templar.
On July 7, 1857, an informal meeting was held in Hall’s office, 10 Franklin House in Market Square, to discuss the formation of a new Masonic Lodge in Providence. Hall was elected secretary of the meeting, and took notes dutifully- “Resolved, that it is expedient to form a new lodge of masons in the city of Providence.” One of 28 charter members, he was appointed Marshal for the new lodge by his fellow masons. Brother Hall (as he was called) took on his leadership role in the fledgling What Cheer Lodge No. 21 with a sense of pride and responsibility.
Hall’s involvement in the community didn’t end with secret societies, however. He also pledged himself faithfully to the Rhode Island First Light Infantry for many years, and served as a member of the Rhode Island House of Representatives from 1880-1882.
Between 1857 and 1859 and again between 1868 and 1881, Hall served as an active member of the
Providence Public School Committee. As the only architect on the school committee, he designed at least four schools: Thurbers Avenue Primary and Intermediate School (1871), Point Street Grammar School (1873), Square Street Grammar School (1875) and Oxford Street Grammar School (1877). In annual reports and meetings, Hall pushed for a system of public education that would encompass all areas of knowledge, including drawing and sketching. As a respected member of the Standing Committee of Drawing and Penmanship, Hall’s 1873 report on the usefulness of drawing for all students helped pave the way for the introduction of art classes in Providence public schools. And, while his ideas were changing the face of education in committee meetings, Hall himself was changing things in the classroom, as the first teacher of architectural drawing at the Polytechnic Evening School from 1872 to 1878.
In 1880 Hall joined the Providence Art Club as a “non-artist” member, even though his drawings and sketches clearly indicate his artistic talent. He chose instead to serve as a member of the Exhibition Committee, making sure other artists had ample chances to display their own work.
On March 22, 1877, the Rhode Island General Assembly passed “An Act to Incorporate the Rhode Island School of Design,” thus founding the now 125-year-old world-renowned institution. Hall was appointed by the Assembly as a member of the RISD corporation (other corporation members included C. A. L. Richards, William B. Weeden, Francis W. Goddard, Charles D. Owen, Helen A. Metcalf, Sarah E. Doyle, Mary H. Drake and Claudius B. Farnsworth), which was formed “for the purpose of aiding in the cultivation of the arts of design…” Hall served RISD for the next 16 years in various capacities. A trustee of the Centennial Fund (which served as a foundation of the School), Hall held the office of Director from 1877 to 1893, and served on the Board of Management (1877-1881), the Constitution Committee (1877), the Nominating Committee (1884-1885) and the Headmaster Committee (1886).
While other men jumped from profession to profession, Clifton A. Hall remained true to his first love --- architecture. While he did produce a series of intricately detailed drawings of Providence school buildings in a bound volume, he never published anything formally on the subject. He instead trusted in the buildings that he designed and the students that he taught to carry on his architectural legacy.
Among Hall’s many structural achievements are the Fales House and the Greene House, both in Central Falls, Rhode Island. Hall remodeled the Fales House in 1867 for David Fales, a wealthy manufacturer of cotton machinery, and designed the Greene House in 1868 for Benjamin Greene, an even wealthier manufacturer of thread. These high profile commissions by two of the state’s most prominent factory owners and businessmen only added to his reputation as a skilled and able architect, and Hall accepted the honor bestowed on him with pleasure. Designated by the Rhode Island Historical Preservation Commission as classic Rhode Island images, both buildings are elegant Second Empire compositions, with tall mansard roofs, bay windows and ornamental entryways. Even today, they are still admired as some of Central Fall’s most important residences.
Later in his career, Hall advertised his specialty as “designing and laying out mills and mill buildings, fine dwellings and school buildings.” His work was highly sought after by manufacturing corporations, and many of the mills in Rhode Island bear his architectural mark: the Atlantic, Delaine and Riverside Mills and the National India Rubber Works. Hall also designed many residences, churches and public buildings. His work, though mostly confined to Rhode Island, extended to New York and Pennsylvania and some parts of the South and Canada.
In 1909, Hall retired from his work as an architect to attend to his ailing health. He moved from his then home at 371 Broad Street to a spacious residence at 380 Benefit Street, where he would spend the remaining three years of his life.
By June 1910, Hall’s condition had worsened to the point where he was under doctor’s orders not to leave the house. The fatigue, chills and joint pain that he had been experiencing over the past few years were only increasing, and he began to have an inkling of something in his body gone terribly wrong. His existing symptoms showed no sign of vanishing, and new ones appeared to contend with every day (mild fevers, blood in the urine, pale skin, increased heart rate). After close examination for several days, his physician and neighbor John B. Ferguson pronounced the verdict. Two fatal diseases were fighting to claim Hall’s life: Infective Endocarditis and Chronic Nephritis. His diagnosis: Hall was slowly dying from a strain of bacteria that had entered his bloodstream and contaminated his heart. And, every day, his kidneys, plagued by inflammation, were losing their ability to filter body wastes from his blood.
Hall took the news well, considering the fact that no one enjoys being reminded of his own mortality. After all, he had lived a long and prosperous life; he had achieved great things, both professional as an architect and socially as a Mason. His daughters would look after him in his last days, caring for him as he had once cared for them until he died and was buried next to his late wife and son Charles in Grace Church Cemetery. He had only to wait for the inevitable. Inflammation of the heart’s inner chambers and chronic renal failure were fatal in those days, especially in advanced cases such as his.
Hall’s illnesses kept him confined to his home, a medical house arrest of sorts. Then, on Thursday, January 9, 1913, the 87-year-old Hall suffered a jarring fall. Making his way around the house, his feet slipped out from underneath him and he crashed into a heap onto the floor. His already feeble body was unable to recover from the bruises and broken bones he sustained during the fall, and three days later, on January 12, 1913, Clifton A. Hall closed his eyes and breathed his last. Just eight days shy of his 88th birthday, surrounded by his daughter Emily and other loved ones, Hall died as one of Rhode Island’s oldest architects and masons, elevated to the kind of prominence and success in Providence society that he had dreamed of as a young man coming here from Boston so many years ago.