Personal Data

John Henry Chapman was born in 1847-1852 in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Timothy P. Chapman and his wife, Rachel Hartwell.

He married on July 6, 1876, in Concord, to Lucy Fay Barrett (b. 1849-1850 in Concord), daughter of Jonathan F. Barrett and his wife, Lydia A. Loring.

John Chapman died on October 26, 1895, in Fredericksburg, Virginia.

Career

John Chapman graduated from Yale’s Sheffield Scientific School in 1876.  In about 1883, he became an architect in Boston, and in March of 1891 he went into partnership with Horace Southworth Frazer (a graduate of Sheffield Scientific School in 1883).  Chapman’s health failed in 1893 and he died in 1895, but the name of the firm remained Chapman and Frazer until Frazer’s death in 1931.

In his Houses of Boston’s Back Bay, Bainbridge Bunting describes Chapman and Frazer as “the Back Bay’s leading advocates of the late Medieval and earl Renaissance styles of England.”

Back Bay Work