ARCHITECT: WILLIAM JAY

SCARBROUGH NOW THE THE SEA SHIPS MUSEUM HOUSE OF

SAVANNAH'S ARCHITECT

By the late 1820s, Savannah had gained notice as a place of architectural distinction. It was, according to a visitor in 1828, “the showy town of Savannah.” Four years later, another visitor described a number of charming private residences as “truly little palaces.”

These impressions of Savannah endure. For many tourists, the reason to come to this place is to see the remarkable display of architecture. But, what few visitors realize is that the initial effort to make this city beautiful can be credited to one person, a young English architect named William Jay.

In December 1817, Jay stepped off a ship from Liverpool and walked up the bluff into Savannah. He was 25, just at the beginning of his career. Shortly after he arrived, he wrote an article for a local newspaper to announce his professional credentials and offer his services to the citizens of the town. He was, he said, not “a mechanical builder,” but “an architect” who had been trained in the “science” and the “art” of architecture.

In this article, Jay observed that the existing buildings in Savannah were deficient in several aspects. There was, he said, a lack of understanding of the “true principles” of fine architecture, resulting in a display of “unconnected parts,” and ornament applied in “tawdry profusion.” But he was ready to remedy this regrettable situation by “the union of taste and knowledge.” It was his desire to make Savannah beautiful.

In the course of little more than four years, Jay completed an astonishing number of projects. His goal, as he reported to a London art journal in 1819, was to raise “public buildings” in Savannah – these would show the importance of the town in commerce and culture. These structures included a theater, a custom house, a bank, a school for indigent children, and perhaps a hotel.

He also raised several grand homes, four of which were distinguished for their plans and finishes: the Richardson House (the Owens-Thomas House, property of the Telfair Museum of Art), the Scarbrough House (the Ships of the Sea Maritime Museum), the Telfair House (the Telfair Museum of Art) and the Bulloch House (later the Bulloch-Habersham House, lost to “progress” when it was demolished in 1916).

The style of these structures is now known as Regency – Jay took his training in London at the time of the reign of the Prince Regent. In its day, the style was called “Grecian,” based on the rediscovery of ancient Greek monuments by English scholars and artists in the mid-18th century. The goal of the Grecian style was to achieve a refined classicism for a new age.

Jay’s version of this style is characterized by elegance and ingenuity. In 1944 the architectural historian Talbot Hamlin described Jay’s work in Savannah as the result of “almost perfect taste.” But this perfection came at a cost. Jay worked best when the budget was not constrained. The materials he used were of the finest quality and imported from England. From London, he secured marble mantelpieces from the workshop of a master sculptor, along with Coade stone (baked ceramic) balusters and column capitals, and superior formulations of paints and stuccos. Unique cast iron balconies, railings and fencing likely came from the foundries of Liverpool.

By early 1820, Jay’s costs, and a withering national economy, took a toll on his prospects. In January of that year, a great fire decimated the business district of Savannah. Jay advanced a proposal to rebuild the area with fireproof construction, methods he knew well from his London training. But that plan failed for want of funds.

Looking for new opportunities, in December 1819 Jay was appointed to an unsalaried position as architect to the S.C. Board of Public Works, providing stock designs for country courthouses and jails. He opened an office in Charleston in 1820, proposing a design for “a series of Buildings” at City Square (now Washington Square).

That plan was unsuccessful, but he did gain the contract for the S.C. Academy of Fine Arts. He won commissions for a few residences in Charleston, but his success was limited by the affection Charlestonians had for the 18th-century Georgian style and established house plans (the single house and the double house). And perhaps the citizens of Charleston were put off by Jay’s need for exceedingly generous budgets.

In early 1822, Jay may have been seeking work in Washington City (Washington, D.C.), but his manner of establishing contact with President James Monroe, whom he had met in Savannah in May 1819, was impolitic. Bidden or unbidden, Jay had sent Monroe plans for a country house that the president was building at Oak Hill in Virginia. In May 1822, Jay sent Monroe a bill for those drawings. Monroe was surprised – and he was not amused.

By late 1822, Jay was back in Bath, planning to return to the United States. But he did not return. Perhaps because in Bath his mother had fallen ill. Perhaps because in Charleston Jay had collided with R ob ert Mills, the self-appointed “first American architect” – Mills had trained in the Philadelphia office of Benjamin Latrobe and studied the “art” of architecture by reading books in the library of President Thomas Jefferson. Jay may have realized that he could not win in the increasingly noisy campaign to foster an authentic American style of architecture, a difficult contest for a young E n glish architect trained in the high style of the Re gency.

In E n gland, Jay made his way to Cheltenham, the newly fashionable spa destination not far from Bath. A building frenzy was in progress, and he accomplished a number of projects, most of them terraces or row houses built on speculation, always marked by his gift for inventive design and fine detail. But the national economy collapsed in 1825, and by 1828 Jay was forced into bankruptcy, a grave circumstance under British law. The matter was resolved after three years of difficult negotiations, but Jay would struggle to advance future projects on credit.

In 1836, he g ained an appointment as assistant civil architect and inspector of works, a civil service position, on the island of Mauritius in the Indi an O ce an. This was an important colonial holding, which the British had snatched from the French in 1810 to secure the safe transport of goods from I ndi a.

With a wife, two small children and a baby, Jay arrived in May 1836. I mmediately he came into a fierce load of work and a salary much too small to support his family. Then, just three months later, his eldest son “Little Willy” died, at only 6 years old, the victim of a tropical disease. Eight months later, in A pr il 1837, Jay died of an unnamed fever. H e w as buried beside his son in the Western Cemetery just outside the capitol city of Port Louis.

Jay has long been something of an enigma in architectural history. Just who was this gifted young E n glish architect? Where and how was he trained? And, most curious of all, why did he venture to Savannah?

When he arrived here in late 1817, he was one of only a very few trained architects in the United States, and the only one in the South. H is preparation for work had come in London in a long apprenticeship in the office of an architect/surveyor, and by participating in programs of the

Royal Academy. Further, he had grown up in Bath, a planned urban center with distinctive buildings, known then, as now, as the most beautiful city in England.

From his training in London, Jay understood architecture to be a fine art, based on “the pure Greek style,” but made new by the exercise of creativity – to copy was an abomination. The goal was to design modern structures of harmonious proportions and refined ornament.

And, why did Jay come to Savannah? As it happens, from his childhood Jay had heard stories of the founding of Georgia. Jay was the first son and namesake of perhaps the most famous preacher of the day in England. The Rev. William Jay was the son of a stone mason in Tisbury, Wiltshire. At the age of 13, he was apprenticed to his father. In the following year, he attended a gathering of Methodists in his village. His response to the evangelical fervor was noticed, and he was selected to train for that ministry.

Billy Jay the Boy Preacher debuted at the age of 19 before a congregation of 2,000 in Surrey Chapel, London’s largest nonconformist meeting hall. Two years later, he accepted a call to an independent chapel in Bath. He would spend the rest of his very long life as the Dissident Divine of Bath, with terms of several weeks each summer at Surrey Chapel. In London, he spoke to enormous crowds of politicians and lawyers,

These two pages: the Owens-Thomas house, designed by William Jay, is considered by architectural historians to be one of the finest examples of English Regency architecture in America. The house is now part of the Telfair Museums and is available for tours.

bankers and businessmen, writers and artists, churchmen of all ranks and denominations, and even the occasional odd royal.

Jay’s father was trained in the academy of Cornelius Winter, who had come to Georgia in 1769 as an assistant to George Whitefield, the great evangelist of the age, and the founder of the orphanage of Bethesda just outside Savannah. Winter’s task was to teach slaves to read and to prepare for the establishment of a black church. He was supported in that enterprise by the Habershams and the Boltons, whose descendants would come to be patrons of Jay’s art. Winter played an important role in the lives of the Rev. Jay, his wife, and his six children; and he spoke to them often of his fondness for Georgia.

In 1814, young William Jay opened an office in London and began the work of entering design competitions to establish his practice. Bids for an assembly hall in Liverpool and a theater in London both failed for want of influential patrons – here Jay learned hard lessons about the politics of architecture. His one success, gained through the grace of his father, was the Albion Chapel in London, a large meeting house for a congregation of Presbyterian Seceders. This group was often allied with other nonconformists to advance evangelical initiatives, including abolition and the establishment of foreign missions.

By 1816, family circumstances presented a new option for Jay. I n 1811, his eldes t sister Anne had married R ob ert Bolton, whose great-grandfather and grandfather had been followers of Whitefield, and whose father had established a prosperous cotton house in Savannah. Bolton had gone to En gland in 1808 to study for the ministry, where he sought the counsel of the R e v. Jay and won Anne’s heart.

In 1816, he w as obliged to take up the work of the Liverpool branch of the Savannah cotton house. This placed him in regular communication with friends and business associates from Savannah, including R ic hard R ic hardson, a partner in the cotton trade. That same year, R ic hardson secured from Jay plans for his own house in Savannah. N o doubt he suggested to Jay that abundant work might be found in that city.

Ric hardson was associated with at least three important projects: a theater, which Jay had recently designed for a London site; a bank, of which R ic hardson was president; and a church, the I ndep endent Presbyterian Church, for which Jay would prepare a drawing, but not secure the commission.

Jay achieved a number of successes in the course of his career. But there was no place more congenial for him as an artist than Savannah. H er e, men of considerable wealth and ambition placed their trust in Jay’s vision and talent and made it possible for him to realize what is now understood to be his finest work. Jay’s labors brought distinction to Savannah and provided models of the art of architecture that influenced the work of others in this place for many decades to follow.

Sources: Books, journals, newspaper articles and letters; images, including maps and original art; and records gathered in the libraries and archives of Bath, Cheltenham and London, England; Port Louis, Mauritius; New York, New York; Washington, D.C.; Charleston and Columbia, S.C.; Atlanta, Morrow and Savannah, Ga. These materials form the William Jay Archives of the V & J Duncan Collection, Savannah.