New Brunswick, New Jersey

Scottish-born Alexander Merchant was born in 1872 to a father who worked as a purser on the National Line sailing between Liverpool and New York City. The family settled in Queens before the boy’s school years which lasted until he was 16 and he began an apprenticeship in shop of architect D.D. Williamson in New Brunswick. When he obtained his license ten years later he set up his practice across the Raritan River in Highland Park where he became the most influential designer in town in the first decades of the 1900s. He was the architect for hundreds of public and commercial buildings in central New Jersey and his interpretation of an early Colonial town hall was executed in 1927.