These contributions are now thoroughly documented and placed before the world in an altogether lovely effort, “The Architectural Legacy of Wallace A. Rayfield: Pioneer Black Architect of Birmingham, Alabama” (Alabama, $32.95) by Allen R. Durough. This highly illustrated volume not only sketches Rayfield’s life but highlights his education and achievements, convincingly placing him among the first rank of early 20th-century Southern architects.
The rediscovery of Rayfield took place in the fall of 1993, when Durough was working to tear down an old barn on his property in Bessemer. Before turning a bulldozer loose on the dilapidated structure, Durough let an acquaintance of his salvage whatever old lumber and tin he wanted. While clambering around inside, carefully stepping over rotten floorboards, the pair stumbled on a stack of metal boxes. “As I reached the boxes, I discovered they contained metal printing plates,” Durough recalls. ”When I examined them, I saw beautiful drawings of churches, schools, and other buildings.”
Business advertisements announced the hoard as the work of W. A. Rayfield & Co. Architects. A subsequent telephone call to surprised and delighted staff at the Birmingham Historical Society — “they literally screamed with excitement” — revealed the rarity and importance of Durough’s find. For there in those abandoned metal boxes was nothing less than the life and career of one very talented individual, all neatly organized and packed away.
Rayfield was born in Macon, Ga., in 1872 and died in Birmingham almost 70 years later. He was the son of a railroad porter and, enjoying the advantages of the woefully small Southern black middle class, was schooled at Howard University and the Pratt Polytechnic Institute in Brooklyn, N.Y. At the latter institution he was “required to pass examinations in freehand drawing from ornament, simple casts, and objects; arithmetic, including fractions, percentages, proportion, square root, and mensuration; and in English grammar and composition.” He later met Booker T. Washington, who offered him a teaching post at Tuskegee Institute, and after a short stint there, Rayfield moved to Birmingham and hung out his shingle. There followed a long and successful career, but Rayfield’s business was badly battered by the Depression, and he suffered a stroke and died in February of 1941.
Durough presents a nice sampler of Rayfield’s work, from residential to religious to commercial to educational. Also included are some pages from his Southern Bungalow Book, a compendium of elevations, plans and pictures that demonstrates how he marketed himself. “Going to Build A Home?” asks a cutline under an attractive rendering of a two-story home hugging a hilltop. “Send us a rough outline of any idea you may have for your home,” the ad continues, “and we will make you complete sketches Free with each order.”
As anyone who appreciates the built environment of the early 20th-century South well knows, urban and small-town black churches are among the most distinguished structures out there, and they were Rayfield’s bread and butter. He built dozens of them, featuring brick and stone construction with Neoclassical or Gothic touches in their columned porticoes and arched windows. Raised block foundations, belfries of varying height, arched windows, crenellated parapets and heavy domes are among just a few of his trademark stylistic elements. Many of these buildings still stand, little altered from their construction decades ago.
The volume concludes with a list of Rayfield’s known projects (over 400) and selected pages from his Industrial Drawing Book, illustrating his methods of teaching architectural drawing. Taken in toto, “The Architectural Legacy of Wallace A. Rayfield” is a fascinating and rare compendium that scholars, preservationists and the interested lay public will surely savor.