While at McKim, Mead & White, Bacon won, in 1889, the Rotch Traveling Scholarship for architectural students. This gave him two years of study and travel in Europe, which he spent learning and drawing details of Roman and Greek architecture. In Turkey, he met his future wife, Laura Florence Calvert, daughter of a British consul. He traveled with another fellowship student, Albert Kahn from Detroit, Michigan, who also went on to become a leading industrial architect.
In 1897, Bacon left with James Brite, a younger architect from the firm, to found the partnership of Brite and Bacon Architects. Brite was in charge of financial, administrative, and contracting aspects of the partnership, while Bacon was in charge of the architectural design and construction. The partnership immediately won the competition for the Jersey City, New Jersey's public library and the Hall of History (now Hurst Hall) for American University in Washington, D.C. They built a number of public buildings and a small number of private residences, which most notably included La Fetra Mansion in Summit, New Jersey.
The partnership was selected in 1897 to build three private residences: La Fetra Mansion; Laurel Hill, a three-story Georgian mansion in Columbia, North Carolina; and Donald McRae House in Wilmington, North Carolina. The La Fetra Mansion was designed and built by Bacon, and his design was published in the September 1901 issue of Architecture, the preeminent architectural professional journal of its time. The LeFetra Mansion fully exhibits Bacon's preference for Beaux-Arts Neo-Greek and Roman architectural styles. His simple and elegant lines, and his skill in dimensions and proportions, were described as expressing a stately elegance, peaceful tranquility, and sense of divine protection.
Lincoln Memorial
In 1897, following the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, Bacon was also approached by a group, which had organized to raise public and private funds to build a monument in Washington, D.C., to memorialize President Abraham Lincoln. Bacon began his conceptual, artistic, and architectural design for the Lincoln Memorial that year. He continued in the effort, although the funding to build the project was not secured until years later. The Brite and Bacon Partnership dissolved in 1902, partly resulting from Brite's disagreement over Bacon's passion and the unpaid time he spent on the memorial design.
In 1913, Bacon was elected into the National Academy of Design as an associate member, and he became a full member in 1917.
Bacon was very active as a designer of monuments and settings for public sculpture. He designed the Court of the Four Seasons for the 1915 Panama Pacific Exposition in San Francisco, and the World War I Memorial at Yale University. He collaborated with sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens on the Sen. Mark Hanna Monument in Cleveland, Ohio, and with Daniel Chester French on several monuments, notably the Lincoln Memorial's pensive colossal Lincoln. Olin Memorial Library, one of Bacon's buildings at Wesleyan University, houses many of Bacon's documents and blueprints of the Lincoln Memorial.
Bacon rarely found time to design private residences. There are three known residential projects that are clearly his work. The first is the La Fetra Mansion in Summit, New Jersey, designed and built by the firm of Brite & Bacon from 1897 to 1900. Bacon skillfully integrated into a residential setting many of his signature Greek Revival and Roman Renaissance elements and proportions. The resulting elegance was astoundingly masterful. The La Fetra Mansion was commissioned by industrialist Harold A. La Fetra of the Royal Baking Powder Company, which later merged with RJR Nabisco. The second is Donald McRae House in Wilmington, North Carolina, built for his close friend Donald McRae.
The third Bacon-designed private residence is Chesterwood House, which he designed for his friend, the noted sculptor Daniel Chester French, as his summer home and studio at Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Its exterior bears similarity to the La Fetra Mansion.
During World War II, a U.S. NavyLiberty Ship, the SS Henry Bacon, was named for Bacon. It was commissioned on November 11, 1942.<ref>SS Henry Bacon successfully conducted a heroic rescue mission under heavy German Luftwaffe fire, rescuing all 19 Norwegian refugees, including children and women before the ship was finally sunk on February 23, 1945, under tremendously heaving bombing of Luftwaffe.
Captain Carini of SS Henry Bacon was posthumously awarded the Krigskorset med Sverd, also known as the Norwegian War Cross with Sword, which is Norway's highest military award for gallantry, and Carini is one of only two Americans and 126 foreigners to have received the award.</ref> In 1964, sculptor Joseph Kiselewski<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> created the Henry Bacon Medal for Memorial Architecture, cast in bronze by the Medallic Arts Company in honor of Bacon.
Thomas, Christopher, the Lincoln Memorial and its Architect
Thomas, Christopher, The Lincoln Memorial and American Life, 2002
The Olin Library, Wesleyan University
Kvaran, Einar Einarsson, America's Monuments, unpublished manuscript
Richman, Michael, Daniel Chester French: An American Sculptor, The Preservation Press, Washington D.C., 1976
Richman, Michael, Daniel Chester French and Henry Bacon, 1980
Tolles, Bryant and Carolyn, New Hampshire Architecture: An Illustrated Guide, New Hampshire Historical Society, Hanover, New Hampshire, 1979
Wilkinson, Burke, and David Finn, photographs, Uncommon Clay: The Life and Works of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, San Diego 1985
Wilson, Richard Guy, The AIA Gold Medal, McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York, 1984
