Personal Data

Edward Sears Read was born on March 2, 1890, in Cambridge, the son of Edward Read and his wife, Ruth Lindsay Sears (the daughter of Willard Thomas Sears).

He married in 1926, in Wood, West Virginia, to Virginia Louise Carr (b. 28Feb1905 in WV; d. Apr1992), daughter of Percy H. Carr and his wife, Caroline Smith. They divorced in the 1930s and she remarried in 1937 to Francis Edward Nute.

Edward Sears Read died on April 5, 1977, in Cambridge.

Career

Edward Sears Read graduated from Harvard in 1911 and subsequently received his Masters degree in architecture from Harvard. After study at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, he returned to Boston and worked as a draftsman until May of 1917, when he enlisted in the Army. He served until January of 1919. In May of 1920, he took over the architectural office and practice of his grandfather, Willard Thomas Sears.

His work included both residential and institutional buildings.  One of his earliest commissions, in 1921, was the New England Baptist Hospital Training School for Nurses (Edward H. Haskell Home for Nurses) on Mission Hill. According to his April 6, 1977, obituary in the Boston Globe, he “was an architect for residential colonial houses on Cape Cod” and also designed “many homes for the elderly for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,” renovated the front of the Boston State House, and remodeled the Mariners Home of Boston and St. Monica’s Nursing Home in Roxbury.

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