Pierre Pharoux

Étienne-Pierre Pharoux (1759? – Sept. 21, 1795) was a French architect, a trained-engineer, and a shareholder and agent of La Compagnie de New York (the New York Company), a Paris-based land enterprise that in the 1790s launched a speculative endeavor to settle more than two hundred thousand acres of land in a northwestern region of New York State, named Castorland. His experience in America is known through a few executed works, a journal and a series of visionary architectural and town planning designs that document Pharoux’s response to the urban landscape and the natural environment he encountered.

History

In summer 1794, Étienne-Pierre Pharoux started a survey to acquire proper knowledge of Castorland, today Lewis and Jefferson Counties. [Fig. 1] His journal of the voyage, written in French and compiled for the most part with his compatriot, Simon Desjardins, became an important testimony of post-revolution American history and culture. Often mentioned as the mentor of notorious engineer Marc Isambard Brunel (1769-1849), Pharoux left his own significant mark on American architecture by responding to the urban landscape and to natural environment he encountered with a series of visionary designs and ambitious plans. His architectural vocabulary featuring a neoclassical style ingrained in French Enlightenment, secured him prominent clients such as U.S. Senator from New York Philip Schuyler—father-in-law of Alexander Hamilton—and the Livingston family.

Little is known about Pharoux's life before boarding for New York in 1793. In the years immediately after the French Revolution (1789), he was a member of the Bataillon de Volontaires Bonne-Nouvelle (1791) and one of the sixteen “électeurs” of the Bonne-Nouvelle section of the Electoral Assemblies in the 2nd arrondissement of Paris (1790-1792). Both Pharoux and Desjardins, the other commissioner of La Compagnie in charge of Castorland, were marked as "expert bourgeois" –trained surveyors– in an architect listing of the time. The record further documents their address, respectively Rue de Cléry n.15 and Rue du Porte-Foin n.15. It appears as Pharoux had begun to work as surveyor in 1789, while Desjardins is listed as practicing since 1782. However, Pharoux is noted as "architecte à Paris" in notary records starting in April 1785.

As he reported in his journal, Pharoux and Desjardins arrived in New York City from France on a late summer night in September 1793. After a few days, they managed to meet with their American associates and, presented with fewer details about the purchased land than expected, they departed promptly for the first of several inland expeditions in the northwestern frontiers of New York State. They were joined by Marc Isambard Brunel who they had met on the ship from France. Most of Desjardins’ cargo, which included nearly two thousand volumes, furniture, plant seeds, and several cases of wine, was seized, and then recovered with the exception of a few bottles of wine that remained with the custom clerks.

The documentation of their journey includes descriptions of them traveling the shores of the Black River, the Hudson and Mohawk rivers, where they met with other land speculators, settlers, and members of the Native American tribes such as the Iroquois, the Mississauga, and the Oneida. The journal also narrates their trips to New York and Philadelphia, where they visited the home of John Bartram on the Schuylkill River (view text), and includes notes on their meetings with Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. While visiting Philadelphia, Pharoux expressed his distaste of the uniformity of the architecture there. He suggested greater diversity in the cityscape, an approach which would emerge in his own architectural plans.(view text) [Fig. 2]

The original journal in French was re-discovered decades later by historian Franklin Benjamin Hough (1822-1885), and remains in the collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Hough first described his findings in the History of Lewis County in 1883, and meant to publish his English translation soon after, but his work was left incomplete. In 1985, historian Edith Pilcher finally published Pharoux and Desjardin’s account for the first time, based on Hough’s translations.

Compiled two years earlier than the renown journals by Benjamin Henry Latrobe about American architecture and landscape, Castorland Journal is more than an historic record of the two Frenchmen’s voyage across the North East. From a linguistic point of view, translator John Gallucci—who re-published the manuscript in 2010 with a new translation directly from the French original—has described how increasingly, as time passed, both English and French words were used to chronicle the surroundings, revealing the "process of acculturation" of its authors "between two linguistic and cultural worlds." Words such as “surveyor, fieldbook, fence, acre, Yankee” were eventually added along with neologisms such as “fencer” to indicate “to fence in.”

What emerged from their accounts was that, contrary to their expectations, Pharoux and Desjardins encountered a number of significant hardship and obstacles as they surveyed the northern territories. When they first travelled to Albany, they could not move further via land as "there being no road opened for more than thirty miles." The area was in the proximity of Fort Oswego and it was "held by the English at the mouth of the Onnondago," they wrote, and then added “as we were French, it was to be feared that they would not let us through and might even take us prisoner." Despite improvements in the navigation and canals as a consequence of the works led by The Western Inland Lock Navigation Company, traveling in the region remained difficult at least through 1803. Nonetheless, the landscape provided some solace and relief to the two commissioners (view text) who found themselves in contemplation of astonishing vistas throughout their voyage (view text). In addition, once their garden was finally established at Castorland [Fig. 3] they were able to put to use the two hundred plant seeds Desjardin had brought over from France and shared with the Baron Von Steuben with whom they had soon become friends, for his property was somewhat close to Castorland. (view text)

—Valeria Federici

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Texts

• Simon Desjardin and Pierre Pharoux commenting on the landscape in the proximity of Schenectady, NY [in Gallucci, 2010: 12]

3 October 1793 ". . .At about a mile, we encountered the first rapid. . . When we had crossed this obstacle by using poles. . . we found ourselves on a plane higher than the rest of the waters to the left, right, and behind us; this gave us a view as novel as it was picturesque." back up to History

• Simon Desjardin and Pierre Pharoux commenting on the surroundings of the Mohawk River [in Philip Lord Jr., 2003]

"Finally you land at the foot of the fall, at the mouth of the projected canal. This spot presents a scene at once grand, wild, and romantic, and it might well nourish melancholy thoughts of ruin, chaos, and desolation." back up to History

• Pierre Pharoux describing Philadelphia [in Gallucci, 2010: 67-69]

28 November 1793 ". . .the city of Philadelphia is the one city in the universe where a foreigner has the most reasons for getting lost, since all the streets look alike."

2 December 1793. "A Sojourn in Philadelphia appeared to us as sad, as the city is uniform. . . The view of the Delaware is obstructed by dingy and obscure houses whose foundations are laid in the mud of the harbor, so at to shut out of view both the river and the shipping. There is not a public square. The building where Congress meets is a pile of bricks, as is the library, over the door of which the fine statue of Franklin has set into a recess, like a saint, with the result that the sculpture’s beauty cannot be enjoyed."

• Simon Desjardin and Pierre Pahroux describing the property of Mr. Bartram at Schuylkill [in Gallucci, 2010: 161; 162]

Saturday, 6 December 1794 We went to see M. Le Rebours, one of our fellow passengers. He had retired to the home of Mr. Bartram, the botanist. . . The farm is about five miles from Philadelphia, on the Schuylkill. We crossed over the bridges made of logs which he described and which are very dangerous, there not being a year in which several accidents do not occur. The countryside on the other shore is uneven. The land, as it is all along the North River, is also very uneven and composed of rock, sand and clay, which proximity to manures, the products of a large city, can alone fertilize. We could see some houses rather attractively located, the view of the Schuykill offering some charming views. We found, not without difficulty, the house of Mr. Bartram, and our friend Le Rebours in a dressing gown, a pair of large spectacles on his nose, his entire appearance that of the true scientist. We complimented him on this, as well as on his very attractively located retreat. The garden and the green house have nothing that is not very ordinary and would not be talked of in Europe; but it is a lot for this country. Judging from M. de Crèvecoeur’s narrative, it appears that the son has not augmented greatly his father’s acquisitions. We walked about, visited the botanical garden, the farm, the dyke for drying the marsh and protecting the meadow at the shore of the river from the tide. We dined without being treated to the sounds of the Aeolian harp: it no longer existed and there was no recollection of it even. We also had some very good pork, with cabbage and some excellent apples, which they call Newton pippin, and the seeds of which we kept. back up to History