William G. Preston dating history

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William G. (Gibbons) Preston (September 29, 1842 – March 26, 1910) was an American architect who practiced during the last third of the nineteenth century and in the first decade of the twentieth. Educated at Harvard University and the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris., he was active in Boston, New York, Rhode Island, Ohio, New Brunswick and Savannah Georgia where he was brought by George Johnson Baldwin to design the Chatham County courthouse. Preston stayed in Savannah for several years during which time designed the original Desoto Hotel (1890, demolished 1965), the Savannah Volunteer Guards Armory and 20 other distinguished public buildings and private homes. He began his professional career working for his father, the builder and architect Jonathan Preston (1801–1888), upon his return to the United States from the École in 1861, and was the sole practitioner in the office from the time his father retired c. 1875 until he took John Kahlmeyer as a partner in about 1885. The drawings of the Preston firm, now owned by the Boston Public Library, make up "...one of the most complete sets of architectural graphics preserved from the nineteenth century." Many of his buildings were pictured as prints in American Architect and Building News. He is credited with the introduction of the bungalow to the United States through a house loosely of the type that he designed in Monument Beach, Massachusetts in 1879. Preston was an early historic preservationist. He was influential in the successful 1896 effort to prevent the Massachusetts state legislature from demolishing Boston’s historic State House, which had been designed by the noted architect Charles Bulfinch and built in 1798. Bulfinch was also an architect of the Capitol building in Washington, D.C.