Date: July 20, 1982

On this day, architect O'Neil Ford died in San Antonio. Ford was born near Sherman in 1905. Though he had only two years of college and subsequently took a correspondence course in architecture, his lack of university training became part of his mystique. Ford was deeply impressed by the simplicity and beauty of the German vernacular architecture he saw in Central Texas, and the experience decisively influenced his later work. He became a protégé of David R. Williams, whose Dallas office he entered in 1926, and moved to San Antonio, where he worked on the restoration of La Villita, around 1940. In 1949, his firm received the commission to design a new campus for Trinity University, along with Bartlett Cocke. Ford also did a number of projects for Texas Instruments and the University of Texas at San Antonio.