John Hazlehurst Bonneval Latrobe

John Hazelhurst Boneval Latrobe (1803–91), was a noted civic leader, lawyer, author, historian, artist, inventor, intellectual, and social activist in Maryland.

Born May 4, 1803, Latrobe was one of the founders of the society. His life and accomplishments deserve far more notice than they receive in the only known biography of him, written by John Semmes and published in 1917.

Biographies of Latrobe's father, architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe (1764-1820), and the elder Latrobe's journals supply details of the son's early years.

"John is a very extraordinary fellow, soul and body," the father wrote in June 1817 to his son, Henry, who died three months later.

As a teen-ager, John Latrobe assisted his famous father with the drawings for the U.S. Capitol, for which the senior Latrobe was principal architect. On the basis of his skills in drawing and shooting, the young John was appointed to West Point, where his professor of mathematics was Andrew Ellicott, a son of Ellicott Mills' co-founder Joseph Ellicott.

When yellow fever cut his father's life short in 1820, John, then 17, left West Point and studied law, a profession in which he would be capable of supporting his mother, Mary Elizabeth, brother Benjamin Henry Jr. (born 1806) and sister Juliana (born 1804.)

An older stepsister, Lydia, the child of Benjamin Latrobe's first marriage, was by that time the wife of Nicholas Roosevelt.

When the B&O Railroad was chartered in 1827, John Latrobe became its counsel and remained with the company for the rest of his life. His service with the B&O opened the door for his brother, Benjamin, to later become chief engineer and designer of the Thomas Viaduct.

As a teen-ager, John Latrobe heard Francis Scott Key speak about the plans of the American Colonization Society to release black people from slavery and establish them in freedom and self-sufficiency in Africa.

Latrobe became active in the colonization movement and eventually was president of the American Colonization Society, succeeding such luminaries as James Madison, Charles Carroll of Carrollton and Henry Clay.

Latrobe's architectural and engineering successes include the design of porticoes for the Catholic Basilica, which stands on Cathedral Street in Baltimore and for which his father was architect. John Latrobe also designed the gateways to Druid Hill Park.

The Latrobe coal stove, patented in 1846, was a forerunner to central heating and a staple in hundreds of thousands of homes. As an accomplished "technologist," Latrobe gave encouragement to Samuel F. B. Morse, who was experimenting with the telegraph along the B&O line.

Source:

http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2000-12-26/news/0012260168_1_henry...