Alfred B. (Bult) Mullett (1834-90) became the official architect for the federal government. Born in England, he immigrated with his family to Glendale about 1844. A.B.’s father Augustine A. Mullett owned an 80-acre farm east of the Crawford & Clark subdivision. A. B. Mullett was schooled in Cincinnati at the Farmers’ College in College Hill and apprenticed with the renowned architect Isaiah Rogers in the mid-1850s. Mullett was working for Rogers while the latter was supervising the construction of the Ohio State House in Columbus and the Longview Insane Asylum in Carthage. Mullet’s 1862 business card lists several of Rogers’ clients as references, including prominent Cincinnati individuals and businesses such as the Allens, who resided in Glendale. Mullett’s first known private work is believed to have been the charming board-and-batten Gothic Revival Swedenborgian Church of the New Jerusalem (1861).

In 1863, after service in the Union Army, Mullett followed Isaiah Rogers to Washington, DC. Rogers, then Engineer-in-Charge of the Bureau of Construction of the Treasury Department, later became Supervising Architect of the Treasury. Mullett succeeded Rogers in that job, from 1866-74. During his eight years as Supervising Architect, he oversaw the design and construction of over forty federal buildings across America, including the elaborate State, War and Navy Department Building (now the Eisenhower Executive Office Building) next to the White House, designated a National Historic Landmark (NHL) in 1971. Many of Mullett’s government projects tended toward the dignified Neo-classical mode preferred by Rogers, but he is better known for exuberant Second Empire piles, such as the massive Cincinnati Post Office & Court House, which was replaced by the current building at Government Square under the New Deal. To give you an idea of the scope of his buildings, here are a few more.

• The City Hall Post Office and Custom House in New York (1869-1880)

• Tthe US Custom House and Post Office (1873-1884) in St. Louis

• Tthe Knoxville Custom House (1874)

• The Pioneer Courthouse in Portland, Oregon (1869), which became an NHL in 1977

• The Old US Mint in San Francisco (1874), which became an NHL in 1961.