Alexander Parris

Alexander Parris (born November 24, 1780, Hebron, District of Maine, Massachusetts, U.S.—died June 16, 1852, Pembroke, Massachusetts) was an American architect, a principal exponent of the Greek Revival style in early 19th-century Massachusetts.

Parris was apprenticed to a carpenter as a boy and subsequently studied design in Portland, Maine. His houses in that city include the Hunnewell-Shepley House (1805) and the Preble house (1807–08). In the War of 1812 Parris commanded a company of engineers and after the war moved to Boston.

An early Boston project was the David Sears House (1816) on Beacon Street, now the Somerset Club. He was also responsible for numerous other private homes in Boston. One of Parris’s best-known designs is his St. Paul’s Church (1819), which, with its graceful Ionic portico fronting a Greek-temple-type structure, marked the beginning of the Greek Revival style in America.

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Architecture: The Built World

During the second half of the 20th century, the renovation of Boston’s Faneuil Hall district brought attention to Parris’s Quincy Market (1825), which was reopened as a farmers’ market. The structure is notable for its monumentally simplified geometric forms and its system of post-and-lintel supports built of granite.

Among Parris’s works outside Boston is the Unitarian Church at Quincy, called the Stone Temple (1828), a severe and impressive building that shelters the burial vaults of Presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams.