Alexander D. Hamilton
*Alexander D. Hamilton was born on this date in 1870. He was a Black architect.
Alexander Daniel Hamilton was born in Eufaula, Alabama, and was the son of Alexander Hamilton Sr. and Martha Ann Coker, both from North Carolina. The couple also had four other sons before Martha Hamilton's death. His father served in the Union Army during the American Civil War. While in Alabama, the senior Hamilton served for two years in the state legislature and was elected to the Eufaula city council.
In 1877, the Hamiltons moved to Atlanta, where the senior Hamilton married Katie Grant and became a building contractor. In 1894, the family moved into a house he built on Hilliard Street in the Sweet Auburn district of Atlanta.
In 1890, he started Hamilton and Son's building business. The elder Hamilton lived there until his death on May 26, 1911. Other residences for which Hamilton served as a contractor likely also exist in the neighborhood. The younger Hamilton attended Atlanta University (later Clark Atlanta University) for three years before joining his father's contracting firm in 1890. Two years later, he married Nellie Marie Cook, and the couple had seven children: Alexander D. Jr., Eunice Evelyn, Theron Bertram, Henry Cooke, Marion Murphy, Nellie Marie, and Joseph Thomas.
In 1916, five years after his father's death, the younger Hamilton was the builder for Hentz, Reid, and Adler at the Butler Street YMCA, known as the "Black City Hall of Atlanta," due to its association with Black leadership over the years. Among its early members, Martin Luther King Jr. is the only non-white YMCA in America allowed to operate independently. The building's modified Georgian/Federal style reflects the interest of Hamilton's collaborator, Atlanta architect Neel Reid, in borrowed colonial forms, but it also demonstrates his abilities to execute them.
As an architect, he was associated with two projects before and after World War I. Robert Hall at Morehouse College (1916) and Leete Hall, part of Gammon Theological Institute, became George Washington Carver High School in 1946. Alexander Hamilton died in 1944.
Atlanta Urban Designs Commission, Atlantas Lasting landmarks, printed 1987
