Michael Wills worked as a draughtsman and personal assistant in the office of the Surveyor General Thomas Burgh and between 1719 and 1737 oversaw the building of Burgh’s design for Steevens’s Hospital, Dublin. In the late 1740s he designed a new Bishop’s Palace at Elphin, Co. Roscommon. His personal accounts from 1753 to 1759, held in the IAA, show that he owned a considerable amount of property in Dublin, from which he received substantial rents. His accounts also reveal he had strong religious convictions which were practically expressed in works of philanthropy. Perhaps it was this bent which had led him early in his career to produce designs for the Erasmus Smith Grammar School in Drogheda.
In 1657 Smith established a trust to use the income from the 46,000 acres of land he had acquired in the Cromwellian settlement of Ireland to ensure that ‘children inhabiting upon any part of his lands in Ireland should be brought up in the fear of God and good literature and to speak the English tongue’. Granted a Royal Charter in 1669, the Erasmus Smith Trust opened grammar schools in Tipperary, Galway, Ennis, and Drogheda.
Wills’s ‘Master’s House’ at Drogheda, a three storey edifice with vaulted basement and distinctive high-pitched roof, was to stand at the southern end of a site fronting Laurence Street. Behind this was a large garden while the school, school yard, stable yard and stables were grouped towards the back or northern end of the site. The provision of five seats in the external toilets suggests that the house was to accommodate residential pupils as well as their master.
The master’s house was built c. 1730, though the design was changed from that shown here. It was demolished in 1989.
