Samuel Sloan

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Samuel Sloan was a leading Philadelphia-based architect and writer of architecture books in the mid-19th century.

Born in Chester County, PA, Sloan trained as a carpenter and came to Philadelphia in the mid-1830s. He is said to have worked with John Haviland on Eastern State Penitentiary and with Isaac Holden on the former Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane. In 1851, Sloan won a commission for the Delaware County, PA, courthouse and jail and designed Andrew Eastwick’s villa near the site of Bartram's Garden in Philadelphia.

Sloan became a prolific author on architecture most notably for The Model Architect as well as City and Suburban Architecture and Sloan's Constructive Architecture (1859). In 1861, he wrote Sloan's Homestead Architecture and American Houses, and A Variety of Designs for Rural Buildings. Sloan also reached thousands of potential customers through the pages of Godey's Lady's Book which began publishing his designs in 1852.

Economic downturns in the late 1850’s as well as the American Civil War put a halt to his professional success and Sloan briefly left Philadelphia for New York in 1867. Important examples of his later work are found outside Pennsylvania, notably in Morganton, North Carolina’s Western State Asylum for the Insane. He enjoyed some later success in North Carolina, opening an office in Raleigh where he died in 1884.