Personal Data

George Russell Shaw was born on October 28, 1848, in Parkman,  Maine,  the son of Samuel Parkman Shaw and his wife Hannah Buck (daughter of Joshua Buck).

He married on August 31, 1874, in Paris, to Emily Mott (b. 1848-1849 in PA),  daughter of Thomas Mott and his wife, Mariana (LNU).

George Shaw died on January 15, 1937, in Concord, Massachusetts.

Career

George Shaw graduated from Harvard, receiving his Bachelor’s degree in 1869 and his Master’s degree in 1872.  After studying at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, he returned to Boston and, in December 1874, joined with his brother, Robert Gould Shaw, in the firm of Shaw and Shaw.  His brother retired from the firm in about 1882.  George Shaw subsequently joined in partnership with Henry Sargent Hunnewell  in the firm of Shaw and Hunnewell.  Henry Hunnewell was the brother of Robert Gould Shaw’s wife, Isabella.

Shaw and Hunnewell dissolved in 1902, when both partners retired from practice.  George Shaw was an avid amateur botanist and devoted his retirement to the subject. In 1909, he authored “The Pines of Mexico” as publication no. 1 of the Arnold Arboretum, with plates which he had drawn himself.

Shaw and Shaw’s practice appears to have been primarily residential, whereas Shaw and Hunnewell undertook a number of commissions to design commercial and public buildings.

In the early 1880s, Shaw and Hunnewell designed the Wellesley Town Hall and Library, which Douglass Shand-Tucci (in Built in Boston) calls “vividly picturesque.”

Other work by Shaw and Hunnewell included the Watertown Free Library (1884), the Free Hospital for Women in Brookline (1894-1895), the Boston Medical Library at 8 Fenway (1899-1900), and the Jefferson Physical Laboratory (1884) and Pierce Hall (1900) at Harvard.

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