Personal Data

William York Peters was born March 12, 1858, in Boston, the son of Edward Dyer Peters and his wife Jane Almira Gould (daughter of William R. Gould).

He married on April 25, 1893, to Amey Dexter Sharpe (b. 4Jul1864 in Providence RI; d. 26Oct1951), daughter of Lucian Sharpe and his wife Louisa Dexter.

William Peters died on April 7, 1938.

Career

An architect, he graduated Harvard from Harvard in 1881, apprenticed with the firm of Sturgis and Brigham for two years, and then studied at the Atelier Guadet at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

He returned to Boston in September of 1888 and opened his own office.  In January of 1898, he joined with Arthur Wallace Rice in the firm of Peters and Rice.  He retired in January of 1904, and Rice continued to practice under the firm name of Peters and Rice until 1907, when he joined J. Harleston Parker and Douglas H. Thomas, Jr., forming the firm of Parker, Thomas, and Rice.

In 1900, the firm produced what Bainbridge Bunting (in Houses of Boston’s Back Bay) calls “two of the finest” examples of High Georgian designs at 97 Bay State Road and 145-147-149 Bay State Road.  Bunting notes that “the corner house of the block, the old Weld mansion at number 149, is almost palatial in scale.”

Back Bay Work