Frederick A. Tompson (1857-1919)

Frederick A. Tompson (1857-1919), had apprenticed in the office of Portland Maine architect Francis H. Fassett beginning in 1876 and formed a partnership with Fassett in 1885. He established his own firm in 1891. Although he designed his own home on Carroll Street in Portland in the Shingle style, much of his work was, like the Children's Hospital, in the Colonial Revival style. The Mary Brown "Old Women's Home" on Capisic Street is another example of Tompson's use of the Colonial Revival Style for an institutional building. In that building, Tompson freely combined elements of the Georgian, Greek Revival, and Neo-Classical Styles to express a Colonial Revival sensibility. He used a similar combination of stylistic elements (blown up to a massive scale) with a Spanish Colonial Revival red tile roof added, for the George C. West mansion (1911) on the Western Promenade, still Portland's largest private residence a century after it was built. His Masonic Temple Building (1911), next to City Hall on Congress Street, is one of the city's most impressive non-governmental Beaux Arts style buildings. Although remembered primarily for his late work in the Colonial Revival and Beaux Arts/Neo-Classical Styles, in his long career he did fine work in many different styles, including the Queen Anne style (Walker Memorial Library, Westbrook), turn-of-the-century Commercial style (The Y.M.C.A. Building, Congress Square, Portland), and the Gothic Revival (Wilde Memorial Chapel, Evergreen Cemetery, Portland).