JCH: The one that I think about most is Ethel Bailey Furman, an African American architect who designed more than 200 buildings in Richmond, Virginia. She’s acknowledged as both the first woman architect in Virginia and the first Black woman architect in the U.S. She is largely unknown and certainly underrepresented in local, regional, state, and national archives. Most of her residential buildings are gone, the victim of urban renewal that demolished hundreds of Black neighborhoods across the country.
MCP: When did she practice?
JCH: In the early 20th century.
MCP: So more or less the same timeline as Julia Morgan? Or a little bit after?
JCH: Furman is about 20 years younger than Morgan. Ethel was born in 1893 and died in 1976. Her dad was a builder. That’s how she got into architecture. She went to the Negro Contractors Conference in Hampton Institute in 1928, and she was the only woman in the entire group. I found her at the International Women in Architecture archive at Virginia Tech.
MCP: Had you heard about her before, or was this a eureka moment where you said, “Who’s this?”
JCH: I had never heard of her! When I was a young historian, I worked at the Historic American Building Survey, and I had never heard of her. This is largely because most of her buildings are gone, and she probably wasn’t documented as thoroughly as the white male architects.
MCP: Was she published in any traditional sense?
JCH: I believe she was, but probably in local newspapers.
MCP: Black newspapers.
JCH: Exactly.
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