Personal Data

George Foster Shepley was born on November 7, 1860, in St. Louis, the son of John Rutledge Shepley and his wife, Mary Augusta Clapp.

He married on June 30, 1886, in Boston, to Julia H. Richardson (b. 1867-1868 in Staten Island NY), daughter of architect Henry Hobson Richardson and his wife, Julia Gorham Hayden (daughter of John Hayden).

George Shepley died on July 17, 1903, in St. Moritz, Switzerland.

Career

George Shepley graduated from MIT in 1882, after which he entered the offices of Henry Hobson Richardson, whose daughter, Julia, he married in 1886.

In June of 1886 (shortly after Richardson’s death), Shepley joined with his brother-in-law, Charles Allerton Coolidge and Charles H. Rutan to form Shepley, Rutan, and Coolidge, successors to Richardson’s firm. Both Coolidge and Rutan had worked in Richardson’s office.

Shepley died in 1903 and Rutan died in 1914. Charles Coolidge took into partnership George Shattuck, who had been with the firm for many years, and the firm became Coolidge and Shattuck.

Shepley, Rutan, and Coolidge designed numerous buildings of note, among them the Stanford University’s Quadrangle in Palo Alto (1888-1891); Bell Telephone Building in St. Louis (1889); the Chicago Public Library (1892); South Station in Boston (1892); the Ames Building (1893) in Boston; completion of Trinity Church in Boston, including refining the two west towers and adding the tripartite porch (1894-1897); Conant Hall at Harvard (1894); the John Carter Brown library at Brown University (1904); the Harvard Medical School (1906); and Langdell Hall at Harvard Law School (1907).

Back Bay Work