Dictionary of Irish Architects 1720 - 1940

Engineer, of Cork City.   According to O'Dwyer, James Wherland was ‘a civil engineer who worked inter alia for the Cork Wide Streets Commissioners’.(1)   In 1828 he was one of the persons appointed by the Cork Grand Jury to carry out a new valuation of Cork properties and in 1837 he was one of the two parish constables for the parish of Holy Trinity, Cork.(2)  

Wherland married Louisa Crowe and appears to have been the father of James Richard Wherland (1815-1889),who received the MD degree from Glasgow University in 1838 and practised as a doctor in Cork, of Frederic Wherland (1829-1910), who emigrated to the United States and became a farmer in Minnesota(3), and of Louisa Crowe Wherland, who married a son of the civil engineer William Stokes (1793-1864) in 1845.

Wherland died tragically on the 21 January 1845 by shooting himself in the head while in the South-District Lying-in Hospital at Cork, where his son James Richard was a surgeon at the time. According to a report in the Cork Examiner the following day, Wherland was of an 'exciteable temper' and it appeared that he had been greatly upset by aspersions which had been cast on his character by the Board of Guardians, Cork Union, for whom he had acted as Revisor, and this is what ultimaltely led him to take his own life.

Address: Warren's Place, Cork.

See WORKS.



References



(1) Frederick O'Dwyer, The Architecture of Deane and Woodward (Cork University Press, 1997), 41;   in a footnote O'Dwyer adds that a map by Wherland of the South Terrace area, dated 1834, is in the Cork Archives Institute, A/55/1.
(2) House of Commons Papers 13, Pt. 1, 28,52.
(3) Frederic Wherland married a daughter of Sir Thomas Deane's brother, James Roche Deane, in 1854 (information from Katherine Keane, Feb 2014).
Information about Wherland's death kindly supplied by Teresa Stokes, by email (3 April 2020).


1 work entries listed in chronological order for WHERLAND, JAMES


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Building: CO. CORK, CORK, WATERLOO BUILDINGS
Date: 1837
Nature: Described as 'now being erected under the superintendence of Mr Wherland' at the time of Queen Victoria's proclamation in Cork in 1837.
Refs: Information from Roger Herlihy, Cork, Jan 2011.