Horace Trumbauer (1869-1938) was a Philadelphia architect. He was born in Philadelphia and apprenticed with George and William Hewitt before opening his own architectural firm in the early 1890s. Trumbauer quickly developed a specialty in designing large estates and town houses for America’s elite, with many commissions for Philadelphia’s Main Line communities, as well as in New York City, Washington, DC, and Newport, Rhode Island. He also designed the Philadelphia Museum of Art (in collaboration with the firm of Zantzinger, Borie & Medary), the Free Library of Philadelphia, the Widener Library at Harvard University, railroad stations, hotels, hospitals, and other commercial buildings. After designing homes for James B. Duke, Trumbauer was commissioned to design new buildings for Duke University’s Trinity College campus. He and his assistant, Julian Abele, were the designers of the university’s new west campus, including the chapel.

Trumbauer was awarded an honorary master’s degree by Harvard University in 1915. He won first prize at the Third Pan American Congress of Architects in 1927. Because Trumbauer closely followed historical designs, some of his contemporaries judged him as not being particularly creative; thus, he was not elected to the American Institute of Architects until 1931. Around 1903, Trumbauer married Sara Thompson Williams Smith, the daughter of Edward Hicks Williams and the widow of C. Comly Smith. They had no children, although Mrs. Trumbauer had a daughter, Helena, from her first marriage. She died in 1935, and he passed away on September 18, 1938 in Philadelphia.

Trumbauer’s first chief designer was Frank Seeburger. Julian Abele and William O. Frank succeeded Seeburger after he set up his own office in 1908. They kept the firm going after Trumbauer’s death, continuing to use his name for the business, but signing their own names to their designs. The Trumbauer firm remained in business until 1968; Duke University continued to be a client.

Julian Francis Abele was born in Philadelphia in 1881, the son of Charles and Mary Jones Abele. He attended the Institute for Colored Youth (now Cheyney University) and Brown Preparatory School. In 1902, he became the first Black American to graduate from the architecture school of the University of Pennsylvania. He also took classes in architectural design at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Trumbauer early recognized his abilities and paid for him to attend Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, though apparently Abele was not a regular student since there is no record of his matriculation; however, some individuals regularly sat in on classes without formally enrolling. Abele was the primary architect of Duke University’s west Gothic style campus, including the chapel, and was chief architect on many other projects. Abele liked to say of the firm’s drawings: “the lines are Trumbauer’s, but the shadows are mine.” He was elected to the American Institute of Architects in 1942 and died in 1950.

This collection was assembled by Eleanor Weller Reade and Alfred S. Branam. Branam was born in Philadelphia in 1944 and received a degree in journalism from the University of Pennsylvania. He also earned a degree in architectural history from the University of Newcastle in England. Branam worked for NBC as a news writer and also wrote about architecture. He collected many of the notes and photographs in this collection as research for a book on Trumbauer's firm. He died in 1991, before the book was completed.

Eleanor Weller Reade, a noted horticulturist, was a research consultant for American Splendor: The Residential Architecture of Horace Trumbauer, by Michael C. Kathrens, published by Acanthus Press in 2002.