state legislature. (The family also claims a connection to Alexander Hamilton, the first U.S. secretary of the treasury and coauthor of the Federalist Papers.)

In 1908 Alexander Hamilton and Son built the Linton Hopkins House in Ansley Park. The house, a shingle-clad residence with a Dutch gambrel roof, provides evidence that the builders were acquainted with the traditional historic forms popular among Atlanta clients. In 1916, five years after his father's death, the younger Hamilton was the builder for Hentz, Reid, and Adler at the Butler Street YMCA, a facility that would soon be known as the "Black City Hall of Atlanta" due to its association with African American leadership over the years. It counts among its early members Martin Luther King Jr. and is the only minority YMCAin America allowed to operate independently. The building's modified Georgian/Federal style reflects the interest of Hamilton's collaborator, Atlanta architect Neel Reid, in borrowed colonial forms, but it also demonstrates Hamilton's abilities to execute them.

In 1923 Hamilton was called on as builder to help reconstruct the Big Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, after a fire extensively damaged the building. Construction on the church, for which the original architect is unknown, began in 1891 and had just been completed by architect John A. Lankford in 1922, the year before the fire. Hamilton and Lankford, who was married to the granddaughter of well-known African Methodist Episcopal (AME) minister Henry McNeal Turner, worked together on the reconstruction, which was completed in 1924. By this time Hamilton had an established reputation, working with