| format this article to print DAWSON, ALONZO N. (1854-1923). Alonzo N. Dawson, architect, was born in Hartford, Connecticut, on January 18, 1854. He married Carrie Rickard in 1878 in Paris, Texas, and they had two children. Dawson, who lived in Fort Worth and later in Houston, had a twenty-five-year career that covered the end of the Romanesque Revival period and the beginnings of new architectural styles such as the Neoclassical. He produced a number of significant churches and public buildings in which he demonstrated his competence with Romanesque Revival stonework and displayed a skillful eclecticism by including design elements from such other styles as Gothic and Norman. Early in his career Dawson designed two buildings in Johnson County, the Cleburne Public School (1883) and the Johnson County Jail (1884). The two-story masonry jail was built on a T plan to house iron and steel cell blocks constructed elsewhere. From 1885 to 1900 Dawson lived and practiced in Fort Worth. He entered a brief partnership in 1885 with Marshall R. Sanguinet, qv a prominent Fort Worth architect, and helped plan Ann Waggoner Hall at Polytechnic College of the Methodist Episcopal Church (now Texas Wesleyan College), Fort Worth. Waggoner Hall, a three-story Queen Anne-style structure, housed all functions of the college except the men's dormitories. Later, working as supervising architect, Dawson directed construction of the First Baptist Church, Fort Worth (1887-89), a Gothic Revival structure designed by Illinois architects Bullard and Bullard. The Fort Worth church included rusticated limestone walls, rounded towers, and Gothic windows, features that Dawson incorporated later in churches in Beaumont and Houston. | |
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