Henry Bacon (November 28, 1866 – February 17, 1924), an American Beaux-Arts architect, is best remembered for his severe Greek Doric Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. (built 1915–1922), which was his final project.
Henry Bacon was born in Watseka, Illinois . Bacon studied briefly at the University of Illinois, Urbana (1884), but left to begin his architectural career as a draftsman, eventually serving in the office of McKim, Mead & White (New York City), a widely known architectural firm in its time. Bacon’s works of that period were in the late Greek Revival and Beaux-Arts modes associated with the firm’s creations. His more important works include the Danforth Memorial Library, Paterson, N.J. (1908); the train station in Naugatuck. While at McKim, Mead & White (MMW), Bacon won, in 1889, the Rotch Traveling Scholarship for architectural students, which gave him two years of study and travel in Europe, learning and drawing details of Roman and Greek architecture as far afield as Turkey, where he met his future wife, Laura Florence Calvert, daughter of a British Consul. He traveled with another fellowship student, Albert Kahn who would become a leading industrial architect. Returning to the U.S. he spent a few more years with his mentor, Charles McKim, working on projects like the Rhode Island State House in Providence, Rhode Island, and serving as McKim's personal representative in Chicago during the World's Fair in Chicago, where MMW was at work designing certain buildings for the World's Fair.
In 1897, Bacon left the office of (MMW) to found, with a younger MMW architect James Brite, a new partnership Brite and Bacon Architects, where Brite was in charge of financial, administrative, and contracting aspects of the partnership, while Henry Bacon was in charge of the architectural design and construction. The partnership immediately won the competition for the Jersey City Public Library, the Hall of History for the American University at Washington, DC, and thereafter built a good number of public buildings and a small number of private residences. The partnership was selected to build two private residences in 1897, the "La Fetra Mansion" in Summit, New Jersey, and a three-story Georgian mansion "Laurel Hill" in Columbia, NC. The "La Fetra Mansion" was designed and built by Henry Bacon, and published in the September 1901 issue of The Architecture, the pre-eminent architectural professional journal of its time. The LeFetra Mansion fully exhibits Bacon's Greek and Roman architectural predilections. His simple, austere, elegant lines, and his skill in dimensions and proportions gave rise to a feeling of presence of divininy, peaceful tranquility, and a sense of divine protection. While the La Fetra Mansion in Summit, NJ bears Bacon's signature style, the Georgian Mansion "Laurel Hill" was most probably designed by Brite.