Personal Data

Francis Ward Chandler was born on September 30, 1844, in Boston, the son of Samuel Ward Chandler and his wife Eliza Fales Richmond.

Francis (Frank) Chandler married on October 12, 1882, in Boston, to Alice Daland (b. 16Jan1854 in Boston; d. 6Mar1932), the daughter of Henry Tucker Daland and his wife Helen E. Chamberlin.

Francis Chandler died on September 8, 1926, in North Haven, Maine.

Career

Francis Chandler graduated from Lancaster Academy in 1861 and attended Harvard until the outbreak of the Civil War, when he enlisted in the 53rd Massachusetts Volunteers.  After the War, he studied architecture, first as an apprentice in the firm of Ware and Van Brunt in Boston and then in Paris between 1867 and 1869.  He served as an assistant in the architecture department at MIT (1869-1870) and as a supervising officer the US Department of the Treasury in Washington DC (1871-1874).

He returned to Boston in 1874, and in 1875, he joined with Edward Clarke Cabot in the firm of Cabot and Chandler, described by Bainbridge Bunting (Houses of Boston’s Back Bay) as “the Back Bay’s most competent designers in the Queen Anne tradition.”   Walter Kilham (in Boston After Bulfinch) indicates that Cabot and Chandler built “numerous country houses in the rambling and picturesque style of the period.”

In 1888, Chandler left the firm to become head of the MIT School of Architecture, and, according to Walter Kilham, “succeeded in bringing it thoroughly up to date, besides being exceedingly popular with the students.”  He retired in 1911.

Back Bay Work