Personal Data

Edgar Allan Poe Newcomb was born April 23, 1846, in Boston, the son of Levi Newcomb and his wife Sarah Ann Ball.

Edgar Newcomb died on November 10, 1923, in Honolulu.

He was unmarried.

Career

Edgar A. P. Newcomb was educated at Boston public schools and the academy at Ogdensburg, New York, and began his career in 1866 with his father in the firm of L. Newcomb and Son, in Portland, Maine.  He moved with the firm to Boston in 1868 and remained with it until about 1878.  Thereafter, he was a sole practitioner, remaining in Boston until 1901, when he moved to Honolulu.

Among his works were the Lowell Station on Causeway Street in Boston (1871-1878; enlarged in 1894 by Shepley, Rutan, and Coolidge, to become Union Station, and demolished in 1927); St. John the Evangelist Episcopal Church in Hingham (1882-1883); the Pierce Memorial Library in North Scituate (1894); and (with Edward Tilton of New York) the Carpenter Memorial Library in Manchester, New Hampshire (1910).

He also designed residential buildings and is attributed by Douglass Shand-Tucci (in Built in Boston) as “establishing” in 1879 (in the home he designed that year at 9 Melville Avenue in Dorchester) a new approach to suburban residential design, developing, as an alternative to “densely massed streetscapes,” a “more spacious variant with more generous setbacks and circular drives leading under porte cocheres to large barns.”

In Hawaii, he was in partnership with Charles William Dickey in the firm of Dickey & Newcomb.  He designed both residential and public buildings.

E. A. P. Newcomb also was a composer, credit with writing numerous songs and at least one opera: Betty.

Back Bay Work