Frederic DeLongchamps: The Mining Engineer Who Built Nevada

There is a historical marker on South Virginia Street in Reno that was placed with unusual care. Stand at it and turn slowly and you can see four buildings by the same man: the county courthouse with its copper dome, the pale green post office across the street, the red brick Riverside Hotel on the river, and the columned bank a block north that George Wingfield ran Nevada from. One architect, four corners, the whole civic face of a city. Then drive to Carson City and stand on Carson Street in front of the Capitol, and the same man is on three sides of you again: the legislative wings of the Capitol itself, the sandstone war memorial, the courthouse built as its twin, and the Moderne Supreme Court building he slid between them. Frederic DeLongchamps designed more than five hundred buildings in his life, nine of them courthouses, and he did it from an office in the town he was born in, a few hundred yards from the house his father built.

He was never supposed to be an architect at all. He was a mining engineer with bad lungs.

A Carpenter's Son on Mill Street

He was born in Reno on June 2, 1882, the second of five children of Philease DeLonchant, called Felix, a carpenter born in France who came to the Carson City area from Quebec in 1869, cut timber around Markleeville, married in Carson City, and settled in Reno in the 1880s. That is the name the boy carried for his first twenty-nine years: DeLonchant. Felix built the family a house on Mill Street in 1887, near where the National Automobile Museum stands today, and Fred lived in it for most of his life; the 1940 census still finds him there at 103 Mill, a nationally known architect sleeping in his father's house.

He graduated from Reno High School in 1900 and from the University of Nevada's School of Mines in 1904 with a degree in mining engineering, having spent his spare time drawing illustrations for the yearbook. The motto under his senior picture was "Men of few words are the best men," and everyone who knew him afterward agreed he had chosen it accurately. He went to work as an assistant mining superintendent in Inyo County, California, and lasted long enough for a doctor to tell him that if he kept going underground his lungs would kill him. So he came home and took a job as a draftsman in the United States Surveyor General's office in Reno, which is where a mining engineer learns that he can draw a building as easily as a claim.

In April 1906 San Francisco burned. He went down to help rebuild it, apprenticed in the offices that were putting the city back up, and came back to Reno a year later, in April 1907, with a trade. He and a colleague from the Surveyor's office, Ira Tesch, opened as Tesch & DeLonchant in the Sunderland Building on Virginia Street that spring. That same summer he married Elizabeth Shay of Virginia City and pitched for the Reno Victors baseball club. The firm's first job was an eight-room grammar school at Ralston and Second that the voters declined to fund; the school board paid them $250 for the plans and the building was never built. Tesch left for Denver within the year. DeLonchant stayed, and in the summer of 1909 he did two things that made him: he designed a ward building for the state mental hospital in Sparks, his first commission as a solo architect, and he won the competition to design the Washoe County Courthouse. He was twenty-seven.

The Courthouse That Swallowed a Courthouse

Washoe County already had a courthouse, a two-story brick building put up in 1871 to 1873, and the county did not want to pay to tear it down. So the young man from the Surveyor's office designed around it. On the afternoon of August 26, 1909, the county commissioners chose his plans for the "alterations and addition to the present building" over those of M. J. Curtis, who had designed the State Printing Office in Carson City and took second place and four hundred dollars, and W. J. Dolliver of San Francisco, third, with two hundred; the winner's fee was $3,600, and the appropriation was $120,000. The specifications called for cut stone from the ground to the entablature, terra cotta above it matched to the stone, and a steel dome finished in copper, which is exactly what stands there. The building wraps the old one like a shell: a limestone-faced Classical Revival block with a Corinthian portico, a ribbed copper dome and a stained-glass inner dome in the rotunda, and inside the walls, invisible, the brick courthouse of 1873 still standing. The cornerstone went in on June 15, 1910, and it carries his old name; the building opened on June 1, 1911, at a cost of a quarter of a million dollars. Later that year, learning that the family name had been spelled wrong for a generation, he changed his own to DeLongchamps. His father kept the old spelling to the end. He had passed the California architects' examination back in 1907, because Nevada had no such thing; when Nevada finally wrote one, in 1914, he sat for it too.

The courthouse became the most photographed building in Nevada for a reason that had nothing to do with architecture. When George Wingfield's legislature cut the divorce residency to three months in 1927 and then to six weeks in 1931, every one of the divorces came through DeLongchamps's rotunda; there were more than four thousand eight hundred of them in 1931 alone. The legend that the newly freed kissed the columns on the way out was staged for a photographer and ran on the cover of a national magazine in June 1937, and the columns have been kissed in earnest ever since. He added wings in 1946 and 1949, and in 1963, at eighty-one, a five-story annex in the International Style, which tells you how little he cared about being a man of one period.

Nine Courthouses and a County That Did Not Exist

After Reno the courthouses came in a line. Lyon County in Yerington in 1911 and 1912, with terra-cotta Doric columns. Clark County in Las Vegas in 1914, where he was given an ovation at the dedication and replied that he would rather let the building speak; it was torn down in 1959. Modoc County in Alturas, California, with a dome, dedicated in May 1915. Douglas County in Minden in 1916, on a lot donated by the Dangberg family, for which the architects were paid seven hundred dollars; Gardnerville, which had lost the county seat fight, was placated with a high school that is very nearly the courthouse's twin and is the Carson Valley Museum today. He built the Minden Inn, the wool warehouse, the creamery and the Farmers Bank for the Dangbergs while he was at it, so that the whole center of Minden is one architect's work.

Then came the best story in Nevada county politics. On July 20, 1918, the Humboldt County courthouse in Winnemucca burned. The county voted a $150,000 bond for a new one and hired DeLongchamps. The town of Lovelock, at the far end of the county, asked for $75,000 of the bond to build a courthouse of its own and was refused. So Lovelock went to the Legislature, and on March 18, 1919, the Legislature carved Pershing County out of Humboldt's southern half, the last county ever created in Nevada. Both counties then hired the same architect. Humboldt got a Beaux-Arts courthouse in buff brick and cream terra cotta with a marble double stair, opened on New Year's Day 1921. Pershing got something nobody else in the state has: a hexagonal building with a circular courtroom under a shallow dome, dedicated in June 1921 for $99,138.68. He finished the run in 1928 with the Alpine County courthouse in Markleeville, built of the local rhyolite in the Romanesque style, in the hills where his father had cut timber.

The State's Only Architect: Carson Street

Carson City is where you can see him think in groups. In 1913 the Legislature voted $60,000 to add legislative wings to the 1871 Capitol, and he designed them in the same sandstone from the same quarry, so that most visitors never notice the building is forty years older in the middle than at the ends; they were ready for the 1915 session. In April 1919 the Legislature appropriated half a million dollars for state buildings and created an office that had never existed and never would again: State Architect. State Engineer James Scrugham appointed him on April 10. Governor Emmet Boyle abolished the office in 1921. Scrugham became governor and brought it back in 1923. It was abolished for good in 1926. In between, DeLongchamps built the state industrial school at Elko, a hospital building at Sparks, and the pair of buildings that anchor Carson Street a block from the Capitol.

The Heroes Memorial Building was designed in 1920 as Nevada's memorial to its dead of the First World War: coursed sandstone, a pedimented portico on four columns, and nearly fourteen thousand square feet of state offices behind it, finished in 1922. Then he did something only a man of few words would think of. He offered Ormsby County the same drawings. The Ormsby County Courthouse went up beside the memorial as its twin, a matched pair of Neo-Classical sandstone blocks with a gap left between them. Fifteen years later, with federal relief money, he filled the gap with the Supreme Court and State Library building, 1935 to 1937, and he did not match the twins. He clad it in terra cotta with fluted pilasters, a Greek-fret cornice and chevrons and sunbursts in the spandrels, the same Moderne vocabulary as his Reno post office, so that the three buildings read left to right as 1920, 1937, 1920. The Supreme Court moved out in 1991 and the county dissolved in 1969; all three are the Attorney General's now, and the 1909 granite horse fountain was moved to stand in front of the middle one. A block north at 320 North Carson is his Nevada Bell telephone building of 1930. All of it is a short walk from our door.

Wingfield's Architect

George Wingfield owned the banks, the mines, the politicians and, for a while, the state, and he built exactly one bank in his life. DeLongchamps designed it: the Reno National Bank at Second and Virginia, 1915, a Classical Revival temple in terra cotta with an Ionic portico, and upstairs a windowless private office that the town called the cave, from which Wingfield ran Nevada for seventeen years. In 1926 and 1927 Wingfield had him build the Riverside Hotel on the site of the old Riverside by the Virginia Street bridge: six stories of red brick trimmed in cream terra cotta, Gothic Revival in the details, the tallest building in Nevada until the El Cortez passed it in 1931. The same session that the Riverside opened, Wingfield's legislature cut the divorce residency in half, and the Riverside filled with women waiting out their three months, and after 1931 their six weeks. Clare Boothe, not yet Luce, checked in during a blizzard on February 6, 1929. Two of Wingfield's protégés ran a stock swindle out of the hotel that put them in federal prison. Wingfield's banks closed in October 1932 and he went bankrupt in 1935; the hotel outlived him and is artists' lofts today.

The post office was the government's answer to the Riverside. Plans were approved in May 1932, ground was broken that November, and the Masons laid the cornerstone on May 13, 1933; the building opened in March 1934 at a contract price of $363,660. It is the best Art Deco building in the state, clad in pale green terra cotta with aluminum doors and grilles, black marble and terrazzo inside, and a fourth floor on the drawings that was never built. A postcard of the 1940s claimed that enough alimony passed through its lobby to retire the war debt. It was sold in 2012 and its skylight restored; the basement is a bar.

Men of Few Words

He rose at two or three in the morning, walked downtown, ate breakfast at the Palace Club or the Golden, and was at his desk before anyone else in Reno was awake. When work was slow he wrote poetry and essays. He never stopped being a mining engineer: during the Depression his draftsmen complained that their paychecks were late because the firm's money had gone into his claims, old miners came to him for grubstakes, and from 1947 to 1950 he was an officer of a Comstock mining company while his office was designing schools. He was a charter member of the American Institute of Architects in 1912 and the first president of its Reno chapter in 1949, and the only Nevada architect of his generation to use terra cotta on the scale of a city.

Elizabeth died in 1924. In 1926 he married Rosemary Galsgie, the widow of a Reno physician, at the stone honeymoon cottage he had built at 4 Elm Court in 1919, and raised her son Galen, who later married the poet Joanne de Longchamps. From 1916 he had the business sense of George O'Brien beside him, a formal partner from 1939, who ran the office while DeLongchamps controlled every drawing that left it. In the 1930s he built Mackay Science Hall for the university and the stone Thunderbird Lodge at Lake Tahoe for George Whittell. He and O'Brien retired together in 1965. The university named him a Distinguished Nevadan in 1966. Rosemary died in June 1967. He died in a Reno rest home on February 11, 1969, at eighty-six, and was buried at Masonic Memorial Gardens.

His drawings, some five hundred and fifty projects in two hundred and fifty rolled tubes, were bought by the university in 1978 and flattened one by one under a preservation grant five years later. A handful are still withheld from the public because the buildings they describe are courthouses and prisons, which is its own kind of tribute.

At a Glance: Frederic J. DeLongchamps, 1882–1969

• Born Reno, June 2, 1882, as Frederic DeLonchant, son of a French-born carpenter who came from Quebec in 1869; changed the spelling to DeLongchamps in 1911. Reno High 1900; B.S. in mining engineering, University of Nevada, 1904. Left mining on a doctor's warning about his lungs.
• Draftsman, U.S. Surveyor General's office; apprenticed in San Francisco during the 1906 rebuilding; opened his own office in Reno in April 1907.
• Won the Washoe County Courthouse competition on August 26, 1909, at 27 (fee $3,600; appropriation $120,000; final cost $250,000); cornerstone June 15, 1910; opened June 1, 1911; the 1873 brick courthouse still stands inside it.
• Nine courthouses: Washoe (1911), Lyon (1912), Clark (1914, demolished 1959), Modoc CA (1915), Douglas (1916), Humboldt (1921), Pershing (1921), Ormsby (1922), Alpine CA (1928).
• Nevada's only State Architect, appointed April 10, 1919; the office was abolished in 1921, revived in 1923, abolished in 1926.
• Carson City: Capitol legislative wings (1913–15); Heroes Memorial Building (1920–22); Ormsby County Courthouse (1920–22, its twin); Supreme Court and State Library (1935–37); Nevada Bell Building, 320 N. Carson (1930).
• Reno: Reno National Bank (1915), N-C-O Railway depot (1910), Riverside Hotel (1927), Mackay Science Hall (1930), Reno Main Post Office (1934), Washoe County Courthouse annex (1963).
• Partner George L. F. O'Brien from 1939; retired 1965; Distinguished Nevadan 1966; died Reno, February 11, 1969; buried Masonic Memorial Gardens. More than 500 buildings; drawings for about 550 projects at the University of Nevada, Reno.
• Nevada Historical Marker No. 245 on South Virginia Street, Reno, sited to see four of his buildings at once.

Frequently Asked Questions

Did DeLongchamps design the Governor's Mansion?

No. The Governor's Mansion in Carson City is by George Ferris, 1909. DeLongchamps's Carson City work is the Capitol wings, the Heroes Memorial, the Ormsby County Courthouse, the Supreme Court and Library building, and the Nevada Bell building. He also did not design the Mapes Hotel, the Reno Arch, or the Carson City post office of 1891, all of which get attributed to him.

Did he study in Paris?

No. His only degree was in mining engineering, from the University of Nevada in 1904. He learned architecture as a government draftsman and in San Francisco offices after the 1906 earthquake, and he taught himself the Beaux-Arts principles his public buildings follow.

How many of his buildings survive?

Most of the major ones. Every courthouse except Clark County's still stands and is in use; the Carson City group, the Reno courthouse, the post office, the Riverside and the Reno National Bank are all on the National Register. The losses are the Las Vegas courthouse, the Nevada State Building in Reno, the Humboldt Hotel in Winnemucca, and a share of the roughly 185 houses he designed.

What is the best place to see his work in Carson City?

Carson Street at the Capitol. The Heroes Memorial and the Ormsby County Courthouse are the matched sandstone pair, the terra-cotta Supreme Court building sits between them, and the Capitol's legislative wings are a block away. They are all open as state offices.

Conclusion

Nevada has had louder men. It has never had one who left more of himself standing. A mining engineer who could not go underground spent sixty years putting stone and terra cotta on top of the ground instead, in every county seat that would hire him, and the result is that a Nevadan who has never heard his name has been married, divorced, sentenced, licensed, mailed a letter and sworn into office inside his buildings. He said he preferred to let them speak. They are still talking.

We are always drawn to the places where Nevada's history is still out there to be touched. To bring a piece of that era home, explore our curated collection at The Eclection.

Resources & Further Reading

For deeper study, these are reliable, non-commercial starting points. The newspaper accounts drawn on here are the Nevada State Journal of August 27, 1909 (the courthouse competition) and of February 12, 1969 (his obituary, which gives his father's origins, his licensing, his burial and his age at death), and the Carson City Daily Appeal of February 1 and April 20, 1921 (his visits as State Architect).

• "Architecture of Frederick J. DeLongchamps," National Register thematic nomination (1986) — the foundational survey of his career and buildings.
• "Nevada's Historic Architect," Nevada Magazine, July/August 1994 — the best short life, by the state's former historic preservation officer.
• Frederic J. DeLongchamps Architecture Records, University of Nevada, Reno Special Collections — the drawings, some 550 projects.
• National Park Service: Carson City Public Buildings — the Heroes Memorial, Ormsby County Courthouse and Supreme Court building.
• Nevada Historical Marker No. 245: Frederic Joseph DeLongchamps.
• Historic Reno Preservation Society, FootPrints, Spring 2015 — his first years in practice, from the Reno papers of 1907 to 1909.

Hero image: Washoe County Courthouse, Reno, Nevada, designed by Frederic DeLongchamps, 1909–11. Photograph by Visitor7, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.