Pierre Pharoux
Étienne-Pierre Pharoux (1759? – Sept. 21, 1795)[1] 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),[2] 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.[3]
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).[4] 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.[5] 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.[6] 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.[7]
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.[8] 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]
—Valeria Federici
Texts
- Pierre Pharoux describing Philadelphia [in Gallucci, 2010: 67-69][9]
- 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][10]
- 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
Notes
- ↑ The date of birth of Pierre Pharoux is unknown. However, archival records from 1790 reports “Pharoux, Etienne-Pierre, architect,” as 31 years old. Source: Assemblée électorale de Paris, 18 novembre 1790 - 12 août, 1792 : publiées d'après les originaux des archives nationales, avec des notes historiques et biographiques, https://archive.org/stream/assemblelect01charuoft/assemblelect01charuoft_djvu.txt
- ↑ When he joined Pharoux and Desjardins, Brunel was a young engineer. Later, he “was celebrated for his tunnels and dockyards” and the construction of the Thames Tunnel. Roger G. Kennedy, Orders from France: the Americans and the French in a revolutionary world, 1780-1820, (New York: Knopf, Distributed by Random House, 1989): 47-48, view on Zotero.
- ↑ Douglas G. Bucher, W. Richard Wheeler, Mary Raddant Tomlan, A Neat plain modern stile: Philip Hooker and his contemporaries, 1796-1836, Fred L. Emerson Gallery-Albany Institute of History of Art, (Clinton, N.Y.: Trustees of Hamilton College; Amherst, Mass.: Distributed by University of Massachusetts Press, 1993): 15, view on Zotero.
- ↑ Source: Assemblée électorale de Paris, 18 novembre 1790 - 12 août, 1792 : publiées d'après les originaux des archives nationales, avec des notes historiques et biographiques, https://archive.org/stream/assemblelect01charuoft/assemblelect01charuoft_djvu.txt
- ↑ “PHAROUX Etienne-Pierre. Expert bourgeois, 1789-1792, Rue de Cléry n. 15 (1790) [. . . ] DESJARDINS, Expert bourgeois, 1782-1792, Rue du Porte-Foin n.15 (1803)”, in Werner Szambien, "Les architectes parisiens à l'époque révolutionnaire", in Revue de l'Art, (1989: 83): 36-50, view on Zotero.
- ↑ Précis analytique des travaux, by the Académie des sciences, belles-lettres et arts de Rouen (France: Printed by Alfred Péron, 1849), 72, view on Zotero; and Edith Pilcher, Castorland: French refugees in the western Adirondacks, 1793-1814, (Harrison, N.Y.: Harbor Hill Books, 1985): 36, view on Zotero.
- ↑ Simon Desjardins, Pierre Pharoux, John A. Gallucci, Castorland Journal: an account of the exploration and settlement of northern New York State by French émigrés in the years 1793 to 1797, (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2010): 7, view on Zotero. See also, Edith Pilcher, Castorland: French refugees in the western Adirondacks, 1793-1814, (Harrison, N.Y.: Harbor Hill Books, 1985): 102, view on Zotero.
- ↑ Castorland Journal (2010): 24, 56, 106, view on Zotero.
- ↑ Castorland Journal (2010): 67-69, view on Zotero.
- ↑ Castorland Journal (2010): 161, 162, view on Zotero.
