Thomas Walter III

Thomas Ustick Walter III (born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; died c. 1930s in Virginia) was an architect practicing in Birmingham from the late 1890s to the 1910s.

Walter was the grandson of the eminent architect Thomas Ustick Walter (1804–1887), designer of the U. S. capitol dome and second president of the American Institute of Architects.

Walter came to Birmingham in the late 1890s and undertook his first major commission, for St Vincent's Hospital, almost immediately. He collaborated with landscape architect Samuel Parsons on the design for Glen Iris and was the architect of Robert Jemison, Sr's residence there.

About 1905 Walter designed a home for himself on Cliff Road in Jemison's Mountain Terrace subdivision. He agreed to trade that home with Hill Ferguson in 1908, moving to her former home at 1213 21st Street South.

By then Walter had largely given up architectural design in favor of real estate development. He acted as sales agent for Mountain Terrace as an employee of the Jemison Companies. He and appraiser Jerome Tucker derived the "Tucker-Walter Rule" used to determine the depth of residential lots on Birmingham's hillsides. Walter is also credited with establishing the limits of downtown Birmingham as the area between 13th and 26th Streets and between 8th Avenue North and 8th Avenue South.

Short on money, Walter borrowed a sum from fellow architect D. O. Whilldin, secured by his grandfather's drawings of the U. S. Capitol dome. When Walter was unable to repay the loan, Whilldin accepted the drawings, later donating them to the Birmingham Museum of Art.

Notable projects

• St Vincent's Hospital (1898)
• William Hassinger residence, Highland Avenue (1898)
• Robert Jemison, Sr residence, Glen Iris (1901)
• Lee Bradley residence, Idlewild Circle (1902)
• T. U. Walter residence, Mountain Terrace (1905)

References

• "T. U. Walter" in the Hill Ferguson Papers, quoted in Browne, Catherine Greene (1992) The History of Forest Park. Birmingham: Cather Publishing Company

• Fazio, Michael W. (2010) Landscape of Transformations: Architecture and Birmingham, Alabama. Knoxville, Tennessee: University of Tennessee Press ISBN 9781572336872