African-American Architects: Plympton Ross Berry

As part of my Virginia Database of African American Architects class, we are supposed to write short wiki articles on 3 African-American architects. My 3 architects were Plympton Ross Berry, Wallace Augustus Rayfield, and William Sidney Pittman. This was a great learning experience for me, because I love history, and it helped open my eyes to the history of the people who blazed a trail for me to become what I am today. It's like a connect the dots of African-American history, especially with Pittman and Rayfield, for reasons that you will read later. I would have to say my favorite of the architects I researched is Berry, just for all he accomplished in his life, and all through his own merit as well as for his philanthropy, which I don't really get into in the article. 

Source: Ohio Memory

Plympton Ross Berry (1834 - May 12, 1917) in Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania, and was born a free man of color. His family moved to Lawrence County Pennsylvania when Plympton Berry was six, and the family were the first African Americans to live in the New Castle area. 

It is not known whether or not Plympton, known to all as “Ross”, had any formal schooling. We only know that he was trained at an early age to become a bricklayer and by the age of sixteen was a master brick and stonemason. Also at the age of sixteen, he constructed the Lawrence County Courthouse, which he completed in 2 years. Berry did a lot of work for the cities and counties in that area, making an opera house and a city jail for Youngstown city. Berry also had the distinction of designing and constructing Youngstown, Pennsylvania’s first mansion, as well as its reconstruction when it burned down a few years later. 

Berry soon had his own construction company, and he employed several white workers in a time when a black man supervising whites was rare. In addition, when local members of the U.S. Colored Troops returned from the Civil War, Berry offered them training and jobs with his construction company. Berry also owned his own brickyard, where he made his own bricks which were said to be unique in color. There are now 65 structures attirbuted to Plympton Ross Berry as either the brick mason, architect, or builder. He continued working until the age of 82.