Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on December 19, 1806, he was the youngest son of Benjamin Henry Latrobe who six years previously had married his second wife, Mary Elizabeth Hazlehurst (1771-1841) of Philadelphia. Three years earlier, President Thomas Jefferson hired his father as Surveyor of Public Buildings in the new national capitol, Washington, D.C. His father would become best known as the second Architect of the Capitol, because he redesigned the re-built United States Capitol after the British Army burned Washington in August 1814 during the War of 1812. The senior Latrobe also supervised construction of the first Roman Catholic cathedral built in the United States, the old Baltimore Cathedral (later named the Basilica of the Assumption of Mary), 1806-1821, as well as construction of the Chesapeake &amp; Delaware Canal. He and his eldest son Henry Sellon Boneval Latrobe (1792-1817) would die of yellow fever while working in New Orleans, Louisiana. His elder full brother John Hazlehurst Boneval Latrobe became a lawyer, painter and inventor of the "Baltimore heater" (an improvement upon the Franklin stove).