Agnes Addison Gilchrist

Gilchrist was born in Philadelphia,^[1] the daughter of William Henry Fitzgerald Addison and Eleanor Corkhill Adams Addison. Her father was a medical school professor and her mother was a poet.^[2][3] She graduated from Wellesley College in 1930. She earned a master's degree in medieval history at the University of Pennsylvania in 1933, and completed doctoral studies in modern history in 1938, with a dissertation titled Romanticism and the Gothic Revival. She also studied at the Sorbonne in 1935, at the Courtauld Institute of Art in 1936, and at Harvard University in 1940.^[4]

Gilchrist taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Randolph-Macon Woman's College, and New York University. In 1940, she was a founding member of the Society of Architectural Historians. She served on the society's board of directors and advisory board, and was president of the society in 1954.^[4][5][6] "People live in houses and pass in and out of buildings every day but they never see the buildings, even if they look at them," she told an interviewer in 1959.^[7]

From 1951 to 1958 she served on the board of directors of the Municipal Art Society of New York City.^[5] She became the first architectural historian hired by the National Park Service in 1957, to edit the Historic American Buildings Newsletter. she did research on New York's colonial architecture in the Netherlands from 1959 to 1960.^[4]

In 1962, Gilchrist became a researcher for the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission. She was founder and president of the Mount Vernon Landmarks and Historical Society in 1964. She also served at least three terms on the Mount Vernon Board of Architectural Review in the 1960s.^[8] She was a researcher at the National Portrait Gallery from 1966 until she retired in 1967.^[4]