Biographical Sketch

Philip Horton Smith of Salem and Wenham, Mass. was born in Salem in 1890, the son of John Josiah Foster Smith and Josephine Tillinghast (Chadwick) Smith. He was educated in the Salem schools and at Harvard College (Class of 1911). In 1911, he went to work for the architectural firm of Kilham and Hopkins at 9 Park Street, Boston. He became a junior partner in the firm in 1914, and he also took on private commissions. In the fall of 1917, Smith went overseas to serve with the American Red Cross, from which he was discharged as captain in December 1919. He remained in France until January 1921 doing architectural work as a contribution to the post-war effort. Upon his return to the United States in 1921, Smith formed, with his partner Edgar T. P. Walker (d. 1965), the architectural firm of Smith and Walker, located in the Little Building, Boston. The practice included houses, churches, schools, other public buildings, and commercial buildings, mostly but not exclusively in Massachusetts. Walker was an accomplished artist and watercolorist who did many of the firm's renderings. Generally, Smith worked on the firm's North Shore projects, and Walker on the South Shore projects, though they shared the out-of-state jobs. The practice continued from 1921 to 1942, when the economic circumstances of World War II caused the firm to dissolve. In 1946, Smith formed Emery-Smith Associates with architects Willard Emery and Charles R. Wait. Emery suffered a nervous breakdown around 1950, and after that, Smith worked either with C. R. Wait Associates (in the early 1950s); Robert Hadley and James H. Ballou, architects who had been associated with Emery-Smith and C. R. Wait; or independently.

Smith married Eleanor Colby Mahoney in 1934, and the couple had one son, Philip Chadwick Foster Smith, who was born in 1939. Philip Horton Smith's own failing health in the late 1940s and 1950s led to a gradual lessening of work, and he died of heart failure in 1960.