Lent, Franklin Townsend

Person

Lent, Franklin Townsend

1855-1919

Frank T. Lent was born in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. on 3 March 1855 and entered the military academy there at a young age. He later graduated from Rutgers University in New Jersey and began an apprenticeship with the leading New York firm of Potter & Roberston. After 1880 he practiced his profession in Colorado, in New York City (in 1890 and again in 1896-97), in Lowell, Mass. in 1894, and in Boston after 1897. One of his major projects from this period was an elaborate Colonial style summer mansion located in York Cliffs, Maine, part of a seaside estate of 13 mansions, eight of which still stand and are now listed on United States National Register of Historic Places (26 July 1984). This residence, for an unidentified client, may be the mansion now called "Boulder Cottage" (c. 1894), or the mansion called "Pinehurst Cottage", (c. 1895). From 1900 Lent appears to have taken up permanent year-round residency in Gananoque, Ont. where he served a large number of American and Canadian clients who spent their summers in the nearby resort area of the Thousand Islands. By 1910 he had left Ontario and had moved to Leominster, Massachusetts where he continued to practise.

As an author, he published three pattern books of plans including Sensible Suburban Residences (1894), Sound Sense in Suburban Architecture (1895), and Summer Homes and Camps (1899). Many of these designs were likely used as the basis for summer house projects in the Thousand Islands on both sides of the Canadian-American border, particularly in the summer town of Thousand Island Park on Wellesley Island, N.Y. Lent died in Sterling, Mass. on 3 December 1919.

Final

Full

• English

Biographical sketch from the Biographical Dictionary of Architects in Canada at http://dictionaryofarchitectsincanada.org/node/631 (accessed 2025-02-06).