Hogg, John Bowles (sold)

John Bowles Hogg (September 4, 1826 - March 26, 1888), also known as John Bowles Howard, was a civil engineer and architect active in Savannah, Georgia in the mid-late 19th century. Hogg was born in Beauford, South Carolina, where his father served as a Baptist deacon. He studied under architect Thomas Ustick Walter (1804 - 1887) and in 1848 designed his first prominent building, Trinity Methodist Church in Savannah's Telfair Square. He was elected City Surveyor in 1855 and held the role for much of the rest of his life. On the eve of the U.S. Civil War, Hogg was established as perhaps the leading civil engineer in Savannah, had married Georgia R. Lothropp (1830 - 1896), and had at least five children (several more would follow, though not all would survive into adulthood). According the Slave Schedule of the 1860 federal census, Hogg also owned five slaves, suggesting a degree of affluence. Hogg almost certainly fought in the U.S. Civil War (virtually all adult males in Savannah joined or were drafted into Confederate forces). A John B. Hogg appears in records as fighting with the Georgia cavalry before being captured and then pensioned in 1864, but this may indicate a different John B. Hogg from Georgia. In any event, after the war Hogg continued his work as City Surveyor and also designed a new sanctuary of the First Bryan Baptist Church, a curious choice for a former slave owner. This congregation had been founded by freed slave Andrew Bryan in 1788 and was one of the earliest Black Baptist churches in America (the wartime minister of this church, Garrison Frazier, had a fateful meeting with Gen. Sherman soon after the city's capture, in which the latter set aside 'forty acres and a mule' for settling Freedmen on the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia). Hogg designed the congregation's new church (built in 1873) on a pro bono basis. For reasons that are unclear, Hogg changed his last name to Howard in 1879, when he was 54 years old.