Who was the first American architect?

[ Originally published on: Saturday, January 16, 2010 ]

GREENFIELD -- Who was America's first architect?

A new PBS documentary that airs Monday night claims it's Benjamin Latrobe, a British-born architect best known for designing the U.S. Capitol and White House porticos in Washington, D.C.

But Timothy C. Neumann, executive director of the Pocomtuck Valley Memorial Association in Deerfield, believes America's real first architect was Asher Benjamin, a Greenfield man who designed many local buildings after the Revolution -- including two large houses that are now the Greenfield Public Library on Main Street and the McCarthy Funeral Home on Bank Row.

The documentary was produced by WETA television in Washington, D.C., and it airs on PBS stations at 10 p.m. Monday.

Asher Benjamin (1773-1845) was born in Connecticut, but lived in Greenfield as a young adult. While here, Benjamin built those two iconic houses and wrote the first of his seven architectural books, ''The Country Builder's Assistant,'' in 1797.

The Coleman-Hollister House on Bank Row was built in 1796. William Coleman, a lawyer and publisher of Greenfield's newspaper, The Impartial Intelligencer, commissioned Benjamin to build it. The library building was built for a prominent lawyer and judge, Jonathan Leavitt, in 1797.

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