Architect and artist Harvey Ellis was born in Rochester, New York, on October 17, 1852. After attending West Point for a brief time in 1871 he is thought to have studied architecture and painting in New York. In 1877 he helped found the Rochester Art Club and during the next few years gained local acclaim as an artist. Between 1879 and 1885 he and his brother maintained a successful architectural practice in Rochester, H. and C. S. Ellis, that was known for small commercial buildings and Queen Anne houses.
In 1886 he worked in St. Paul, first for Charles Mould and then for J. Walter Stevens, for whom he designed the West Publishing Company and Goodsel Observatory at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. In 1887 he joined the Minneapolis office of Leroy Sunderland Buffington as chief draftsman. The Samuel C. Gale house, F. B. Hart house, and Pillsbury Hall at the University of Minnesota exemplify his Richardsonian Romanesque designs for Buffington during 1887 and 1888.
In 1889 he moved to St. Joseph, Missouri, and the office of Eckel and Mann, where he designed several Chateauesque buildings: the J. W. McAlister house, the A. J. B. Moss house and, most importantly, the St. Louis City Hall. Between 1891 and 1893 he was in the St. Louis office of George Mann, where he did the Chateauesque Insane Asylum for the Sisters of St. Vincent de Paul and a number of Beaux-Arts projects that were never built.
He returned to Rochester in 1893. Although he resumed an architectural practice then known as Charles S. Ellis and Harvey Ellis, Architects, painting superseded architecture as his main interest at this time. In 1897 he was one of the founders of the Rochester Arts and Crafts Society, the first such organization in the country, and for the rest of his life was immersed in the American Arts and Crafts movement. He relocated to Syracuse, New York, in mid-1903 to work for Gustav Stickley, de facto leader of the movement, and his work soon appeared in Stickley’s Craftsman magazine. His time with Stickley was brief for on January 2, 1904, he died in Syracuse of heart disease.
This sketch was written by Ellis biographer Eileen Michels, November 2009.
From the guide to the Harvey Ellis drawings and related papers, undated and 1869-1898, 1939, 1965., (Minnesota Historical Society)
