Michael Wills
Design for a Schoolmaster’s House, Drogheda, Co. Louth
1728
92/24.1-3
Michael Wills worked as a draughtsman and personal assistant in the office of Thomas Burgh and between 1719 and 1737 oversaw the building of Burgh’s design for Steevens’s Hospital, Dublin. In the late 1740s he designed a new Bishop’s Palace at Elphin, Co. Roscommon. His personal accounts from 1753 to 1759, held in the IAA, show that he owned a considerable amount of property in Dublin, from which he received substantial rents. His accounts also reveal he had strong religious convictions which were practically expressed in works of philanthropy. Perhaps it was this bent which had led him early in his career to produce this design for the Erasmus Smith Grammar School in Drogheda.
In 1657 Smith established a trust to use the income from the 46,000 acres of land he had acquired in the Cromwellian settlement of Ireland to ensure that ‘children inhabiting upon any part of his lands in Ireland should be brought up in the fear of God and good literature and to speak the English tongue’. Granted a Royal Charter in 1669, the Erasmus Smith Trust opened grammar schools in Tipperary, Galway, Ennis, and Drogheda. The master’s house at Drogheda was built c. 1730, though the design was changed from that shown here. Unusually, the architectural drawing is accompanied by a ‘Bill of scantling’ listing the dimensions, though not the quantity, of each of the timber elements required to construct the building.
