page_title: Robert Seyfarth
section_title: Chicago Manual Training School
hierarchical_section_title: Robert Seyfarth / Education and career / Chicago Manual Training School
caption_attribution_description: English: World's Columbian Exposition under construction as viewd from the IC tracks at 61st St. - Woman's Building, Agricultural Building
context_page_description: Robert Seyfarth was an American architect based in Chicago, Illinois. He spent the formative years of his professional career working for the noted Prairie School architect George Washington Maher. A member of the influential Chicago Architectural Club, Seyfarth was a product of the Chicago School of Architecture.
context_section_description: Seyfarth began his architectural education at the Chicago Manual Training School, which was founded by the Commercial Club (after 1907 The Commercial Club of Chicago)  out of a concern for the quality of the education of skilled labor in the Chicago region. The school had opened its doors on January 4, 1884 with four teachers and seventy-four pupils and the support of the sixty members of the club who had "pledged themselves to found a manual training school, and guaranteed for its construction, equipment and support [with] the sum of one hundred thousand dollars". The club, which was founded in 1877, was a group of the city's most influential leaders that included Marshall Field, George Pullman, Edson Keith, Cyrus McCormick and George Armour. The club's successor, The Commercial Club of Chicago would later sponsor Daniel Burnham and Edward H. Bennett's Plan of Chicago (1909), which is widely regarded as one of the most important public planning documents ever created. 
  Chicago Manual Training School was a private secondary school and was designed to graduate its students three years from the time they entered. The student body, which was all male, was required to spend an hour each day in the drafting room and two hours a day in the shop, in addition to the time spent in classrooms studying the conventional high school curriculum. In 1891 the tuition averaged $100.00 per year "to those able to pay it". In 1903 the institution became part of the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, operating out of CMTS (later Belfield) Hall.
  
  Although it was to take him in a totally different direction, Chicago Manual Training School, with its focus on the industrial arts, was a logical choice for the secondary education of the oldest son of a hardware dealer, especially in an age when primogeniture was considered important. Besides his classes in drawing Seyfarth studied mathematics, English, French, Latin, history, physics, chemistry, foundry and forgework, machine shopwork, woodwork, political economy and civil government. He attended classes and graduated in 1895 with the son of Dankmar Adler, the son and the nephew of Henry Demarest Lloyd and with Henry Horner (1878-1940) who was the governor of Illinois from 1933 until the time of his death.
  
  Despite the fact that it was 17 miles away, Seyfarth enjoyed the advantage of the school's convenient location. The railway depot that marked the beginning of his trip was a two-block walk from his home at Grove Street and Western Avenue, with the end of the ride being at the Illinois Central's Twelfth Street Station, which was located directly across the street from the school. The ride would have taken him directly over the Midway Plaisance of the World's Columbian Exposition, where he would have a clear view to the west of the great Ferris Wheel and to the east of the Beaux Arts majesty of the main body of the Fair.  It is difficult to imagine that to a boy from small-town America in the early 1890s this would not have created an impression and provided him with enormous inspiration, as it did the architectural world at large for the next forty years. In her book A Poet's Life - Seventy Years in a Changing World, the writer, founder of the magazine Poetry and social critic Harriet Monroe succinctly noted forty-five years after the closing of the Fair that "... like all great achievements of beauty, it has become an incalculably inspiring force which lasted into the next 'age'."
caption: The World's Columbian Exposition under construction as seen looking east from the Illinois Central tracks at 61st St.[20] The tracks would be elevated by the time the Fair opened in 1893.[21]
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