Frederick Clarke Withers was born in
Shepton Mallet, Somersetshire. He had a brother,
Robert Jewell Withers, who also became an architect. He studied architecture in England for eight years under
Thomas Henry Wyatt. He came to the
United States in February 1852 at the invitation of the prominent American horticulturist and burgeoning architect
Andrew Jackson Downing. Withers and Downing later became family, as they married sisters: Emily Augusta and Caroline Elizabeth DeWindt, respectively. The sisters were great-grandchildren of President
John Adams, and grandnieces of
John Quincy Adams. Downing drowned a few months after Withers joined his office on July 28, 1852, attempting to save his mother-in-law in the explosion of the steamboat
Henry Clay.
Calvert Vaux, Downing's partner, then took Withers in as an assistant and later partner by 1854. Vaux included a design for a bookcase credited to Withers among those in his
Villas and Cottages (1857), which records both designs of the firms Downing & Vaux and Vaux & Withers. A year prior to publication, Vaux dissolved the practice and left for New York City. Withers began plans for his first independent commissions, a series of country houses for clients in adjacent
Balmville. His library for the Frederick Deming House, "Morningside" (1859–60) was deemed architecturally significant by the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in the late 1970s and removed for display. One of Withers's most radical and linear villas of these years was "Tioronda" (1859–60), built for
Joseph Howland and his wife
Eliza Newton Woolsey in present-day
Beacon, New York. Set within a landscape by
Henry Winthrop Sargent, Tioronda marked Withers's maturity as an architect and picturesque designer trained in Downing's vision. At the outset of the
American Civil War, Withers volunteered and received a commission as a
lieutenant in the
1st New York Volunteer Engineer Regiment. This experience added invaluable engineering experience to his architectural expertise. After 1863, he moved his practice to
New York City from Newburgh. As an independent architect in New York working largely in the
Gothic Revival mode, Withers wrote about architecture and designed in the highly colored
Ruskinian Gothic manner. His first commission in 1859 for a
High Victorian Gothic building, the
Reformed Church of Beacon (1860) was likely secured through the congregation's associations with
John Peter DeWindt, his father-in-law. Others in this style, such as the nearby Tioronda School (1865), were recognized by the
National Academy of Design in 1866. When A. J. Bicknell published Withers's
Church Architecture (1873), featuring the school, the architect's reputation was secured. Among his prestigious commissions in New York was the
William Backhouse Astor, Sr. Memorial Altar and Reredos (1876–77) at
Trinity Church. Withers's only
cast-iron building stands at 448 Broome Street, Manhattan, but many of his urban designs went unrealized. By the 1880s he had separated from Vaux and worked in partnership with Walter Dickson (1835–1903), originally from
Albany, New York. A number of Withers's works are listed on the
National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) and further honored as
National Historic Landmarks. ==Jefferson Market Courthouse==