McKissack & McKissack

McKissack & McKissack is an American architecture and engineering firm based for many years in Nashville, Tennessee, and now based in New York City and Washington, D.C. Founded in 1905, it was the first African-American-owned architectural firm in the United States and is the oldest minority-owned architecture and engineering firm in the country.

The firm was founded by brothers Moses McKissack III (May 8, 1879 – December 12, 1952) and Calvin Lunsford McKissack (February 23, 1890 – March 2, 1968), natives of Pulaski, Tennessee. Their father and grandfather were trained builders. Moses McKissack entered the architecture trade by working as an apprentice to a builder in Pulaski who hired him in 1890 to assist with architectural designs, drawings and construction work. His formal education was obtained at the Pulaski Colored High School. Calvin McKissack was educated at Barrows School in Springfield, Massachusetts, and Fisk University in Nashville, which he attended from 1905 to 1909. Both brothers obtained architectural degrees through a correspondence course.

Between 1895 and 1905, Moses McKissack built houses in Decatur, Alabama, and Mount Pleasant and Columbia, Tennessee. In 1905, he received a commission to build a new house for the dean of architecture and engineering at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. He opened his first architectural office in Nashville and quickly picked up additional jobs designing and building other homes in the West End. The firm's first major project was design of the Carnegie Library on the Fisk University campus. This is a two-story Classic Revival building constructed from brick with a stone columned porch, featuring an interior light well; its cornerstone was laid in 1908 by William Howard Taft, then the U.S. Secretary of War. Major projects designed by Moses McKissack during the 1910s included the main campus building for the Turner Normal and Industrial School for Negroes in Shelbyville, Tennessee and dormitories for Roger Williams University in Nashville and Lane College in Jackson, Tennessee. By 1920, Moses McKissack had acquired design clients throughout Nashville. Between 1918 and 1922 he designed more than one dozen residences in Nashville and Belle Meade, largely in the Colonial Revival style.

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