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Elise Mercur

From Demorest’s Family Magazine, Vol. 32 No 8, June 1896, p 454.

☛The name Elise is written “Elsie” so often in newspapers and other sources that we will not bother to note the misspelling when it occurs.

Elise Mercur, later Elise Mercur Wagner, was born in 1864 up in Towanda in northeastern Pennsylvania. Her family was prominent and intellectual: her uncle was Chief Justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, her father was in politics and business, and her mother was a poet. Her father had in fact been a millionaire until the Great Depression of the 1870s, which wiped out his millions, but left enough for his children to have a good education.

Elise went to boarding school in Rye, New York, northeast of New York City, as we know from an item in her hometown paper, the Towanda Daily Review, on June 20, 1881: “Miss Elise Mercur, who has been attending school at Rye, New York, came home Saturday, and will spend the summer vacation with her parents in this place.” By a random accident, we know one little fact about how she spent her summer vacation that year, because her name appears as one of the young people who submitted solutions to the puzzles printed in St. Nicholas magazine.

After boarding school, she was educated in France and Germany, as well as at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia.

In 1890 she went to work as a draughtsman in the office of architect Thomas Boyd of Pittsburgh, and within a year she was his construction foreman—an unheard-of position for a woman, but contractors soon learned that they had better take her seriously. (See the picture above.) We must give the well-established Boyd credit for his faith in her, which seems to have been amply justified.

Her big break came in 1894, when the upcoming Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta invited female architects to submit designs for a Woman’s Building for the exposition. Out of thirteen entries, Mercur’s design was the unanimous choice, and it made her an instant celebrity.

From The Inland Architect and News Record, February, 1895.

These renderings were printed in a big architectural magazine, picked up from another big architectural magazine. They were also front-page news in Atlanta, and of course in Pittsburgh. The Inland Architect and News Record accompanied them with this brief introduction to the architect:

Miss Elise Mercur, architect, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Of thirteen designs submitted, hers was considered of the highest merit and was accepted. As a preparation for her professional life Miss Mercur studied four years at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts and subsequently continued her artistic studies in Germany. The lady has been a resident of Pittsburgh for four years and has been engaged upon practical architectural work in the office of Architect Thomas Boyd, whose foreman she now is. Miss Mercur assisted in the preparation of the plans for the new city Poor Buildings at Marshalsea and superintended their erection.

The dome of the building became literally a textbook example. Mercur’s working drawings were adapted for the chapter on domes in Building Construction and Superintendence by Frank E. Kidder, a standard reference that was reprinted in edition after edition for decades.

With her newfound celebrity, it was not long before Mercur was getting some big jobs around Pittsburgh and the surrounding area. In 1895 she supervised a new building at Beaver College. By 1896, she had opened her own office—briefly in partnership with someone named Thomas.

One of Mercur’s earliest independent projects was a small church on the Hill: St. Paul’s Protestant Episcopal Church, on Center (now Centre) Avenue at Watt Street. This is significant in her career not because it was one of her largest projects, but because it still exists. It is one of only two standing buildings by Mercur that we have so far identified.

The Pittsburg Press reported on the dedication of the church, making sure to note its celebrity architect:

The new church is built of Cleveland stone, is gothic in style, and cost $10,000. The plans were prepared by Miss Elsie Mercur, Pittsburg’s well known woman architect. The furniture is of quartered oak, the altar especially being of a very beautiful and tasteful design, pronounced by the bishop the finest in the city. (“St. Paul’s P. E. Church,” Pittsburg Press, March 3, 1897, p. 2.)

As a female architect, Mercur was a novelty, and she was happy to use that novelty value for publicity. But she insisted on being treated as equal to any male architect. A profile headed “Pittsburg’s Woman Architect” in the New York World, January 9, 1898, gives her the chance to state her own principles:

A young woman who draws plans for large buildings, oversees the work of builders and gets as much money for her efforts as a man is Miss Elise Mercur of Pittsburg.… Miss Mercur has offices in the Times building, Pittsburg, and employs three draughtsmen. She said: “I seemed to take naturally to the business. With my brothers I was educated abroad. After my father had lost a fortune and died I decided I would not be a burden on my brothers, and struck out for myself. I have all the work I can do. For doing men’s work I always insist upon getting men’s prices. I never accept an assignment for less than 5 per cent. I never have any trouble. Contractors who have worked under me know that I won’t stand any ‘monkeying’ and do not try to fool me with poor material, careless work, &c. While I am willing to do what is right, I generally make them live up to the specifications, and any work done improperly has to be gone over again. Women, you know, are harder to please than men, and this is the reason, I think, I find contractors exerting themselves to please me. They know I will not pass their work unless it is done properly.”

From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, reprinted from the New York World.

So far old Pa Pitt knows of only two standing buildings in the Pittsburgh area by Mercur, but there are probably others.

St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Hill District, 1896

Dr. William H. Mercur House, Shadyside/Squirrel Hill, 1900