Emily H. Butterfield: Architect, Artist, and Author
Emily Butterfield (1894 – 1958), the first female architect licensed in Michigan, designed multiple buildings; showed her art in two states; and wrote two books.
She earned her Bachelor of Architecture degree from Syracuse University in 1907. While a student, Butterfield worked for an architecture firm in Syracuse. She was also a founding member of the sorority Alpha Gamma Delta in 1904.
After graduating, Butterfield returned to the Detroit area where her father Wells D. Butterfield had an architecture firm. In 1907, she earned her architecture license. Butterfield worked independently until around 1914 when she joined her father’s firm. Around 1917, they established the firm Butterfield and Butterfield together.
Butterfield supported suffrage, as she made sure to note in her 1913 entry in the Women’s Who’s Who, and belonged to several women’s organizations. In 1912, she was a founder and first president of one of the first professional women’s club in the US, the Detroit Business Woman’s Club. That year Butterfield was also Secretary of the College Women’s Auxiliaries, a member of Detroit College Club, and a member of the Methodist Church and its Woman’s Home Missionary Society.
During the course of her career, Butterfield and Butterfield designed 26 churches, many of them Methodist. The firm also designed schools, commercial buildings, and homes. Its residential work included multiple homes in the Oaklands subdivision an hour from Detroit. One of the homes is pictured here.
Butterfield maintained her association with the Apha Gamma Delta sorority. In the 1920s when it established a camp for underprivileged children in Jackson, Michigan, Butterfield designed the camp, supervised its construction, and then managed it for four years.
An image from Butterfield’s 1907 yearbook.
From a young age, Butterfield drew. She joined her father and his friends on a sketching trip to Europe and the western United States when she was a teenager. Her School of Architecture yearbook included a number of her drawngs. As an adult, she exhibited her drawings and watercolors at galleries in Detroit, Ann Arbor, and Toledo.
Butterfield’s sketch of King’s College Chapel in Cambridge, UK was one of 180 illustrations she used in her book.
Butterfield also wrote about architecture for popular magazines and in books. During her travels, Butterfield had developed an interest in heraldry which led to her first book, College Fraternity Heraldry, published in 1931. In 1933, her book The Young People’s Story of Architecture was published. It included 180 drawings by her own hand, some of them created on her travels.
Butterfield’s author’s note introducing the book for young people began, “Though most boys and girls are interested in buildings and their construction, they do not often have explained to them the principles that differentiate architecture from engineering or the influences that tend to create impulses and styles in building. It is the purpose of this book, therefore, to show how native materials, climate, and ways of worshiping, working and thinking all contribute to the growth of a community's architecture; and to make clear also the basic laws of architectural design and effect.”
During World War II, Butterfield lived on sparsely developed Neebish Island in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula where she served as its postmaster. She likely also pursued her interests of painting in nature and birding. Her retirement there was temporary, however; by 1950, Butterfield was back in her hometown of Algonac, Michigan, working 50 hours a week as an architect, according to the US Census. She died eight years later at age 73.
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Sources:
John William Leonard, Ed., Woman’s Who’s Who of America, 1913 – 1914 (New York: The American Commonwealth Company): 152
Sarah Allaback, The First American Women Architects (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press), 2008.
Emily Helen Butterfield, AIA, The Young People’s Story of Architecture (New York: Dodd Mead & Company), 1933.
AIA Historical Directory, “Emily H. Butterfied.”
“Business Women to Mark Week,” Detroit Evening Times, October 10, 1943: 2.
“Extra,” The Detroit Times, July 01, 1912: 5.
Yearbook, School of Architecture, Syracuse University, 1907.
Michigan Hall of Fame, “Emily Butterfield.”