Robert Mills, architect
Star Profile
By John Temple Ligon
Temple@TheColumbiaStar.com

Robert Mills

Junior Achievement is inducting an architect into its South Carolina Business Hall of Fame.

The banquet is May 24 at the convention center. The inductee is South Carolina's Robert Mills, who lived from 1781 to 1855.

Mills was born in Charleston while the British occupied the city during the Revolutionary War. His father, a tailor, came to Charleston from Scotland around 1770, according to Columbia's Dr. John M. Bryan in his biography of Mills and his analysis of Mills's work, Robert Mills, America's First Architect.

After America's victory, Mills's two older brothers were sent to Scotland, and one returned with a copy of The Modern Builder's Assistant , a book that generated architectural interest in the Mills household.

Besides the offerings at the College of Charleston, Mills might have taken classes similar to those held in Charleston by James Hoban, architect of The White House.

Columbia's Ainsley Hall House, 1823-1825, by architect Robert Mills.

Hoban had to leave Charleston when Mills was just 11- years- old, but Hoban's influence stayed behind. Around 1800, when he was 19, Mills went to Washington to work under Hoban.

In his first year in Washington, Mills met Charles L'Enfant, the designer of the Washington town plan. L'Enfant was dismissed in 1792, having designed the plan but having not fully executed the plan in ink for publication.

Also in 1800, or close to it, Mills met Thomas Jefferson in Washington. Mills worked with Jefferson occasionally and used his library until Jefferson's death in 1826.

In 1802, Mills submitted design concepts for South Carolina College, later USC, based on earlier European campus plans. He had never been to Bologna, but the colonnaded porticoes, called "portici," at the University of Bologna, the world's first university, had an impact on Oxford and Cambridge where arcaded walkways connected classrooms.

Mills had seen illustrations of the arcaded academic quadrangles at Oxford and Cambridge, and the arcades came into play in his proposed design for South Carolina College.

The trustees at South Carolina College ended up drawing their own scheme, something similar to Nassau Hall at Princeton, where a good many of the trustees went to school.

Still, setbacks and all, Mills persevered to become America's first architect, a designer who studied architecture with the intent of pursuing a full- time practice, which he consummated.

Between 1820 and 1830, Mills lived and practiced architecture in South Carolina. In Columbia, his Ainsley Hall House stands on Taylor Street. His Columbia Canal, 1821- 1824, still flows, partially.

He designed courthouses for the counties of Kershaw, Horry, Williamsburg, Chesterfield, Greenville, Spartanburg, and Newberry, to cite an incomplete list. He designed jails, which include those for Union County and Lancaster County, still standing.

On Bull Street is Mills's Asylum, 1822- 1828, the largest building in the state at the time. And in Charleston, Mills designed what is now called the Fireproof Building on Chalmers at the corner with Meeting. It is the home of the S.C. Historical Society.

In Washington Mills gained favor with his fellow South Carolinian, President Andrew Jackson, and was appointed the nation's Architect of the Public Buildings.

His notable works include the Patent Office (now the National Portrait Gallery), the Treasury Building, the General Post Office, and the Washington Monument.

For the past 152 years since Mills's death, no South Carolina architect has achieved comparable scale of work or acclaim as Robert Mills.

(See Mills's Washington Monument, page 12.)