ABSTRACT
The Rev. William Howard Furness and his son, the Shakespearean scholar Horace Howard Furness, are recorded in our own Plutarch, the Dictionary of American Biography. Frank Furness, a pugnacious misanthrope in the City of Brotherly Love, redbearded, bulldog-faced, scowling, dressed in the loudest tweeds, swearing like a trooper—Furness is the only noted American architect who won the Congressional Medal of Honor—has been resurrected as the Victorian ancestor of the present “Philadelphia School.” While Richardson was “the force that shifted the direction of American architecture away from the picturesque,” the work of Furness “remained firmly within the bounds of the picturesque”—which may be one of the reasons for his oblivion and rediscovery. O’Gorman does an especially fine job on Furness’s family and class background. The Furness with their New England antecedents were one of the most intellectually distinguished families in Philadelphia’s upper class. Furness also did much work for the Reading and the Baltimore & Ohio Railroads.
