In 1750, his grandfather John Provest emigrated to the colony of Delaware, where he had three sons, including Alexander (d. 1840), the father of this article's subject.
[1] Alexander and Charles Provest did the stonework for the 1838 Newkirk Viaduct, the Schuylkill River bridge that carried the first railroad from Philadelphia to points south.
Later, Alexander Provest moved to Washington, D.C., where he and William H. Winter formed a company, Provest, Winter, and Co.[2] In 1849,[3] the company bid successfully to do the marble work for the east wing of the U.S. Patent Office, the 1836 building that today contains the National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
In 1856, the New York Daily Herald reported that he was one of a small group of Washington, D.C., residents with a net worth of $500,000 to $1 million[9] ($33,910,000 today[6]).
[10][11] A New York Times article describes "a local Washington entrepreneur, Alexander Provest, whose army of craftsmen was sawing, carving, polishing and setting the stone when it arrived.