Isaiah Rogers

Isaiah Rogers (August 17, 1800 – April 13, 1869) was an American architect from Massachusetts who eventually moved his practice south, where he was based in Louisville, Kentucky, and Cincinnati, Ohio. He completed numerous designs for hotels, courthouses and other major buildings in Boston, Massachusetts, and New York City, before that relocation. He was appointed in 1863 as the Supervising Architect of the United States, serving into 1865; the position was then attached to the Department of the Treasury. He also practiced in Mobile, Alabama after the American Civil War. Background Rogers was born in Marshfield, Massachusetts to Isaac Rogers, a farmer and shipwright, and his wife Hannah Ford. In 1823 he married Emily Wesley Tobey of Portland, Maine. The couple had eight children, four of whom survived infancy. Two of his sons followed him into the profession of architecture. Rogers was a student of Solomon Willard. He became one of the country's foremost hotel architects and was renowned for Boston's Tremont House (the first hotel with indoor plumbing), the Astor House in New York City, and the Exchange Hotel in Richmond, Virginia. He designed the Burnett House in Cincinnati, then the largest and most elegant hotel in the Midwest. He also designed New York's Astor Opera House (1847).