General Archives - Keiran Murphy

People walking around Frank Lloyd Wright's Johnson Wax Administration Building in Racine, Wisconsin. Photo by Keiran Murphy

The telephone game of tour guiding

Posted on 01/18/2025 | by admin

Reading Time: 4 minutes

A photo I took of staff from Taliesin Preservation on a “class trip” to the Johnson Wax World Headquarters.

The “telephone game of tour guiding” is what I came up with after hearing some whoppers from tour guides at Taliesin.

btw: I’m writing only about staff I’ve come across, not who’s giving tours there now.

I gave an example of one telephone game at the bottom of my post, “Well, the guide told me“

which, well yes: involves a guide recently giving tours. Go and read the article; you’ll see it’s necessary.

Although I’ve got to say

The guides at Taliesin were pretty damned good. But they’re human. After all, for years I told the

FALSE

story that murderer Julian Carlton killed people while they all fled out of the same door during the fire/melee in 1914.

Read my post “Julian didn’t seal the entrances” to find out why I say that now.

But when a person’s learning a tour, they hear things from the instructors, other guides, then people on their earliest tours who may know more than they do.

Things filter in, and get repeated, and guides remember incorrectly, then tell something on a tour, which is heard by another guide, who says it on their tour (and maybe changes a word or two), ad infinitum. . .

I tried to correct things through my weekly “Hey Keiran!” articles

But I couldn’t be sure.

Like, here was one that drove me nuts:

One of the guides kept tying something that Wright wrote to the 1914 fire, when he was plainly talking about Taliesin’s 1925 fire.

In fact, here’s what the guy wrote about that fire’s aftermath:

The living half of Taliesin—gone—again.

Plate glass windows lay, crystal pools in ashes in hot stone pavements.
Smoldering or crumbled in ashes, priceless blossoms-of-the-soul—we call them works of Art—lay broken, or had vanished utterly….

Frank Lloyd Wright. An Autobiography (Longmans, Green and Company, London, New York, Toronto, 1932), 259.

However, she kept saying that the “soul” of “Blossoms of the soul” were the victims from 1914.

And not art. As in “we call them works of Art”. As in the actual words the man wrote.

So, I just kept bringing up Wright’s “blossoms of the soul” quote in my

articles, hoping she would read them and change her story.

I kept hoping that maybe she’d give in when she did too many tours at the end of the season.

Sometimes you change things when you get loopy like that.

But, no. It was like the problems I had convincing one guide that Wright actually had the blue shag carpet in his bedroom. That tour guide, John, refused to believe me even when I showed him color photos. He was convinced it was the work of Wright’s wife, Olgivanna.

Still, we did try to control what people said on tours through training. When I was there, guides started giving their tours after 4-full days of training, then everything from announcing the tour, how to get folks on the shuttle, how to talk while the bus is taking you there—and remember that YOUR right is THEIR left—give a full tour to you and staff, until their first public tour.

But as for other tours,

guides trained by taking tours from other guides. And they found out other things by reading my weekly Hey Keirans, or by talking to other guides.

So, sometimes unusual things got stuck in the mix.

Like,

one time a man called me (as the historian) on the phone. He was giving a speech the next day, and was checking to see if the story he’d heard from his Taliesin tour guide was true so he could use it.

The story?

That as Solomon Guggenheim was driving to Taliesin, Wright took that conch shell on a table in Taliesin’s Garden Room and was inspired to design the Guggenheim Museum.

The shell’s on the far left in my photo below:

In my Hey Keiran column the next week, I repeated what the man had asked me about and said that this was a conflation of another commission that Wright received: that little building that we know as FALLINGWATER.¹

You know? One of the most famous things about Wright aside from the fact that he killed his second wife?²

I think my annoyance was really well displayed because, like, 2 years later a guide apologized to me for getting that wrong.

I never did

figure out how, exactly, this got into the ether.

I wonder what current guides find of interest today.

Although, there’s a few other things that came into Taliesin that I went into detail in my post, “Well, the guide told me”.

And hopefully,

nothing will be as bad as that one guide I took a tour with at another Wrightsite.

She

let me check my list…

Told us that Wright patented the color, “Cherokee Red”
Invented the trundle bed.
Had architect Philip Johnson as an apprentice.
That his second wife paid for the reconstruction of Taliesin after its 1925 fire.
That a cat, described by someone on the tour as black and white, was a bobcat. I discovered later that bobcats are tan or brown.

So the cat they saw was probably a cat owned by someone in the Taliesin Fellowship.

And other things –

THAT I COULD REMEMBER.

I’m sure I forgot some things because I took the tour at, well, Taliesin West, in July of 2007.

which I said here going to in the summer isn’t worth the price you save on plane tickets. Don’t get me wrong: the building’s great. But the heat in Arizona in July makes you want to run under the shade cast by Saguaro cacti.

although that guide might have also said that Wright invented the file cabinet.

I can say one thing, though—

that guide saying Wright patented the color Cherokee Red pretty much takes the cake.

First published January 18, 2025.
I took the photo at the top of this post in 2016.

Note:

1. The “Fallingwater story” was first told by Edgar Tafel in his book, Apprentice to Genius. I wrote about the book here.

2. NO: he didn’t kill Mamah and they weren’t married. I know you know that, but I want to make sure I’m not in charge of another set of rumors.

A drawing of the main floor of Taliesin, 1936-39. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York), Number 2501.048.

The Chronologies—my detailed history of Taliesin

Posted on 12/17/2024 | by admin

Reading Time: 6 minutes

The drawing above shows the main floor of Taliesin where Wright lived, 1936-39. This is one of my favorite Taliesin drawings. Why? Because it actually shows the space pretty much as it existed at that time.

In this case, I’m talking about Taliesin the building, not Taliesin the estate.

I mean: the UNESCO site, not the 600-acre National Historic Landmark¹

I wanted to write about that after putting up the link to a post on my LinkedIn page.

While doing that I re-read that I told you all I should “write about” my Taliesin Chronologies some time.

This was great, because

since I don’t answer “Hey Keiran” questions from Taliesin tour guides anymore,

I was looking for something new to write.

The compact version of the Chronology project is in my post, “How I Became the Historian for Taliesin“.

The longer version

involves

as I recall,

some tears and some hyperventilation.

Over 21 years ago, Taliesin Preservation (then doing Taliesin’s restoration²) was gearing up for the Save America’s Treasures project that put in comprehensive drainage at the residence in 2003-04

(that’s when we found the window).

So, in the summer of 2003 I was asked to start writing detailed histories of each space in Wright’s living quarters.

You see it in most of the photo below:

Black and white photograph from Taliesin's Hill Crown to its Living Quarters. April 1953 — Taken by Richard Braun or his brother.
Property: Taliesin Preservation, Inc.

I concluded it was best for me to tackle Taliesin one room at a time.

Because I did not intend to write a detailed explanation of what we knew about the entire floor where Wright lived after he started his home,

And then

after 56 pages or so,

write

So, in the next year….

Repeat, repeat, repeat until you got to the year 1959…

My analysis began at the southern part of this floor, with the intention of writing a history of each room to the north.

I chose this path because there were generally fewer post-1925 changes made to this wing as you go north (towards Taliesin’s living room).

I researched and wrote the complete history

Or at least I hope I did

of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Bedroom and bedroom area over about 6 weeks.

I mean,

As I’ve written before, the man often didn’t write what he was doing at his house in any detail.

Or sometimes he wrote some things that we don’t necessarily find out to be true.

Like, he wrote in his autobiography that after Taliesin’s 1925 fire,

I made forty sheets of pencil studies for the building of Taliesin III.³

An Autobiography in Frank Lloyd Wright Collected Writings: 1930-32, volume 2. Edited by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, introduction by Kenneth Frampton (Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., New York City, 1992), 303.

40 sheets? Where the hell are the 40 sheets, Frank?

There are some drawings, like the one below I originally referred to as the “crazy-making drawing”:

That hell-spawn of a drawing you see is number 2501.003 at The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York). Click on the drawing to see a more humane version of it online.

However, I have never come across what appears to be 40 preparation drawings.

Still, I had to start and, fortunately, the office had black and white photographs of some of the drawings, too, which were easier on my eyes. And I could magnify them without the computer scan dissolving into only pixels.

Since my first room was where Frank Lloyd Wright’s Bedroom is today (what he used as of 1936)⁴ and looked at the entire space from 1911 onward (even before a room existed).

I’ll put an early drawing of Taliesin III below. First I’ll show the whole floor he drew in 1925, then a detail of his bedroom:

Main floor of Taliesin c. 1925. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives, number 2501.001.

A detail from drawing 2501.001, in color:

The room exists in the photo below under the shed roof beneath the arrow:

George Cronin took this photograph 1929-33 while on top of Taliesin’s Hill Crown. Looking (plan) northeast.

In 1935, he built a fireplace for this room

in this photo online.

Then he took over the space a year later, and added a terrace as he made this into his personal bedroom. The photo you see in this link from the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation has him sitting on the terrace with his daughters and members of the Taliesin Fellowship.

When Wright no longer lived in Wisconsin in the winter, he extended his bedroom onto the terrace in 1950, like you see below:

Photograph taken in 1957. William Blair Scott Jr Collection, OA+D Archives.

As a result of my work,

my “first go” at the detailed history of one room was over 100 pages long.

So you can see why I can walk through the rooms in my head in the past.

5 or 6 months later,

I was on the third room

(out of 10 rooms on that floor).

Then

the Executive Director⁵ came and asked me to complete the write up of the history of all of the rooms in this wing of the building

over the wing’s three floors, and totaling 20 rooms

in 10 weeks.

While listening to her, I was probably nodding. When she said I had to finish all of this in 10 weeks, I probably took on an expression of,

well,

“terror” might best explain it.

Truth is,

that led me to, an hour or two later, putting my forehead on the desk and crying.

10 WEEKS!…

I went home early.

So, that night,

I decided to throw out anything about the rest of the rooms that took place before c. 1950 and combine a few spaces.

And I did it!

In early April,

in other words, 10 weeks later,

I presented the Executive Director with 12 documents that had a total (as I recall) of 821 pages.

At least 821 is the number I remember putting in size 56+ font on my computer desktop for a couple of days after completing the work.

Then a month or two later Carol directed me to write Chronologies for the rest of Taliesin (over 100 rooms).

First published December 17, 2024.
The drawing at the top of this post, Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives Number 2501.048, is available here at JSTOR.

Notes:

1. wtf, Keiran: the estate is 800 acres. So much for this “Taliesin Historian” crap!

The NHL is for the 600 acres that Wright had and was owned by the Foundation when it received NHL status. In the 1990s, the Foundation bought the neighboring 200 acres, originally owned by Wright’s Uncle Thomas. This creates a land buffer.

2. In early 2020, the site owner, the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, completed what it had been doing for several years: moving all of its preservation and restoration staff from Taliesin Preservation back under its management. The two organizations still work together, but care of the NHL is again under the Foundation.

3. Note to those who are convinced that Frank Lloyd Wright didn’t refer to his home as Taliesin II or Taliesin III until Henry-Russell Hitchcock wrote In the Nature of Materials in 1942: Wright referred to his rebuilt home as Taliesin III in his autobiography first published in 1932. I know ‘coz that quote above is from my own paperback copy of it, published in 1933. Sorry – it’s just an ongoing argument in my head. Carry on.

4. Some people might think it’s weird that the Wrights eventually had two bedrooms, but I know people who also made that choice, because they sleep better.

5. I referred to Carol here when I wrote about “The Album”.

Taliesin Hill Tower in the Milton Nicholls Collection at the National Library of Australia. nla.pic-vn3603884-s835-v

Hill Tower at Taliesin

Posted on 11/25/2024 | by admin

Reading Time: 5 minutes

An unknown woman stands in the Hill Garden of Taliesin with the Hill Tower behind her. Either Marion Mahoney Griffen or husband Walter Burley Griffin took the photo, 1920-24. The Griffins met while working in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Oak Park studio. I can’t tell if the woman is Marion, who would have been in her late 40s/early ’50s.

Today’s post is about another idea I got from a reader—what is the purpose of the tallest part of the building?

We call that the Hill Tower and, in total, it’s 4 stories.

On tour in the 1990s, we interpreted the Hill Tower as a stake that was pounded into the ground. That came from architectural historian Neil Levine. He wrote this in his book, The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright:

The tower indicates the deepest penetration of the house into the hill and can thus be read as an eccentric vertical axis staking the building to the site as the house unwinds in a spiraling, counterclockwise direction around the hill and out to the entrance.

Neil Levine. The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright (Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1996), 84.

Aside from being

one of the most distinctive features at Taliesin, it’s also one of its oldest.

We know because draftsman Taylor Woolley took a photo of it in 1911.

But it’s also frustratingly absent from the drawing record. Only its ground floor appears in Taliesin floor plans, like in this drawing, published in 1913. Other than that, there are no drawn sections and you see it in one or two elevations, like this:

Details from the drawing 1403.013. Like I wrote in my last post, just because the drawing has “1403”, that doesn’t mean it was executed for Taliesin II. There are details you can see in the larger drawing that show Wright was executing a Taliesin I drawing.

The Hill Tower functioned as a Belvedere

to provide a commanding view

and

a dovecote.

You can see the nest holes for pigeons in many old photos, like the one at the top of this post, and the one below:

I put this photo, c. 1919-1920, into my “Anna to Her Son” post.

The Hill Tower housed dorm rooms for three apprentices right after the Taliesin Fellowship started in 1932. The larger dovecote was removed by 1937, and the room was expanded. That lead to its current appearance:

Looking at the Hill Tower at Taliesin on September 29, 2012. Photo by QuartierLatin1968. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

The smaller dovecote is still there, around the plaster wall. You can see it in this photo taken in 2018.

In 1932,

as Edgar Tafel related it, while he and other early apprentices settled into their rooms, several set up house “above the dining rooms”.¹

That is, the old dining room I wrote about before.

Also, Fellowship member John “Jack” Howe mentioned the tower in an “At Taliesin” article:

AT TALIESIN, May 13, 1936

…. One may see how the old carriage house, stables, and granary were converted into apprentices’ rooms, new farm buildings and garages being added beyond; how the old water tower was enlarged and converted into a beautiful trio of apprentices’ rooms; how the dining rooms have been enlarged, the gardens extended and the driveway changed from above the buildings on the hill…. Such is the natural growth of Taliesin (shining brow).

Randolph C. Henning, ed. and with commentary. At Taliesin: Newspaper Columns by Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship, 1934-1937 (Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale and Edwardsville, Illinois, 1991), 192-3.

But he was wrong when he called it a “water tower”. It never held water.

I wrote its history from c. 1950 to the early 2000s when I worked at Taliesin Preservation and

it was always my hope

to get back to write its full history. But that always got put on the backburner.

HEY, anyone from the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation and/or Harboe Architects: you’ve got my contact info.

The lowest part of the Hill Tower is on the main level of the Taliesin complex. This space appears in the drawing apprentices did for In the Nature of Materials, by Henry-Russell Hitchcock.

The room is labeled “Milk Room/Tower above”:

In the Nature of Materials, 1887-1941: The Buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright (New York, Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1942), by Henry-Russell Hitchcock, figure 175.
Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives drawing number 1104.013.

The footprint of the “garage” was one story above. I mentioned the garage in the photo I showed from 1911 in my post, “This Stuff is Fun for Me“.

“Milk Room” refers to the room in which the milk was stored; not the room in which the cows where milked.

More on the milk room:

Longtime Fellowship member, Cornelia Brierly, said that they placed milk pails in a trough in the room. It was fed continuously with water pumped up to the hill west of Taliesin from the hydraulic ram at Taliesin’s dam below. This—plus the placement of the “Milk Room” with thick, stone, walls, and lack of windows—kept the milk sufficiently cool.

At the top of the Hill Tower, 3 apprentices lived in the rooms for years.

Until

one apprentice went to visit his family.

According to Joe Fabris (in the Fellowship for decades), while the apprentice—Richard Erickson—was visiting his family in 1949 or ’50, Wright decided to change the room, which was above the Hill kitchen. In order to provide more ventilation, Wright removed the floor of Richard Erickson’s room.²

Joe told Indira that,

“There was a door up there from the Tower landing which came into this room. So when Richard came back he opened his door and all he saw was a big hole!”³

Originally Published November 25, 2024
The photograph at the top of this post is available here in the National Library of Australia, Milton Nicholls collection.

Notes

Edgar Tafel. Apprentice to Genius: Years with Frank Lloyd Wright (McGraw-Hill, Inc., New York, 1979), p. 37.
“Joe” told this to Indira Berndtson, the (retired) administrator of historic studies, collections and exhibitions for the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation in an interview on August 10, 1990.
Page 20 of the interview transcription. Joe’s appeared in this blog before. I put a photograph of him helping Wright onto his horse in my blog post, “Taliesin Kitties“.

Photograph by Keiran Murphy, September 1, 2003.

The Abandoned Stairway at Taliesin

Posted on 11/01/2024 | by admin

Reading Time: 6 minutes

I was working on my Taliesin Book¹ and thought up another change at Taliesin I should write about.

So today I’m going to write about what you see in the photo at the top of this post.

The photo shows

a stairway that used to take you from Taliesin’s Guest Wing (the first floor) up to its main floor, where the Wrights lived. If you popped through the black rectangle in the photo, you’d be in Taliesin’s Entry Foyer (below), about where the black outline is on the floor.²

Finding that stairway was always a wild moment for people. To start with, you’d be on the first floor (which most tour guides aren’t casually allowed into), and be poking around the rooms (by invitation of course).

On the side of the hallway opposite the rooms, about halfway down, you’d see wooden doors covering up an alcove. If you opened them you’d see a couple of steps on one side, and a door-frame with no door. Beyond that, you’d see a stairway that leads nowhere.

This stairway is really old. It might go back to 1911. But if not, part of it definitely goes back to Taliesin II.

In 1911:

to get to these stairs, you’d walk outside to where the kitchen is, and take a right near the current “front door”.

See this post on how to get to the front door in early Taliesin.

I put a drawing from Wright’s archives below and drew a blue line on the drawing to show you how you’d walk there Taliesin’s Porte-Cochere:

The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York), #1104.003.

So, if you walked into Taliesin at that time, you could go through that door, take a step or two, and there was a descending stairway to your right. That was the only way to Taliesin’s first floor for years.

There aren’t any floor plans for Taliesin’s first floor, but you can see the steps in a section drawing I added below:

The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York). This is a detail from drawing #1403.013. “1403” refers to Taliesin 2 (1914-1925), but this is Taliesin 1 (1911-14). In the right-hand side of the drawing, you can see plaster in the terrace above the stone foundation. That’s a T1 trait. Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, the late curator of Wright’s archives, didn’t know this and thought for other reasons that this was T2. He had to know a lot about thousands of Frank Lloyd Wright drawings; while I only have to know what’s on the Taliesin estate.

After the first and second fires at Taliesin, Wright kept the steps in the same place. Following Taliesin’s 1925 fire, Wright expanded the descending stairway by about 4 inches.

You could tell that by looking at the stone:

Seven steps on this stairway (from the top down) are red, showing where the fire touched.³ Then there’s a break line on the left, and these yellow steps are undamaged.

The last time

the stairway appeared in that spot in a drawing was the January 1938 edition of Architectural Forum magazine. Here it is, below:

Taliesin’s living room is on the left and Frank Lloyd Wright’s bedroom is on the right (“Master”). Apprentices executed the drawing in the fall of 1937.

If you click

on the link for the Architectural Forum magazine ABOVE, it takes you to the copy of that magazine issue at ARCHIVE.ORG.

when you get there, the floor plan of Taliesin starts after page 4.

It’s kind of dark, but still: it ROCKS.

BACK TO

what I was talking about:

You don’t see those steps today because Wright changed them

starting in 1939.

Here’s what Taliesin Fellow Curtis Besinger wrote about it in his book, Working With Mr. Wright:

Toward the end of the summer [of 1942] Mr. Wright completed a change in the way one entered the guest wing below the house, a change which he had begun in the fall of 1939 when he had had the inside stair closed….

He had a stair built that was outside but under the cover of the roof connecting the house to the studio. This change in the entrance to the guest wing seemed to be in anticipation of the fact that the Fellowship, reduced in numbers, would all be living at Taliesin during the coming winter.

Curtis Besinger. Working with Mr. Wright: What It Was Like (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England, 1995), 139.

Luckily, his 1939 change appears in a drawing in the book, In the Nature of Materials, 1887-1941: The Buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright, by Henry-Russell Hitchcock:

Apprentices in the Taliesin Fellowship also executed this drawing not currently in Wright’s archives. This drawing is in the book, In the Nature of Materials, figure 271.

But those steps are no longer there, either.

Besinger explained the move in the same passage as above:

Of course this entrance was changed again several years later. It was made into an entrance that was more gracious, less steep, and better lighted.

Besinger, Working with Mr. Wright, 139.

They’re under the roof you see in the 1955 photo by Maynard Parker:

You can see this view if you take a 2-hour Taliesin House tour, or the 4-hour Estate tour.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen

a photo from when the steps were in front of the Taliesin kitchen

(the “Little Kitchen”).

But, like many things at Taliesin, while Wright changed stuff, evidence of it was usually left behind.

We found this out during Taliesin’s Save America’s Treasures project in 2003-04. The contracted masons were taking the stone out of Taliesin’s Breezeway and it was like, lookey here!

Before:

Looking in Taliesin’s Breezeway at the door to the “Little Kitchen”.

And after:

The Breezeway again. You can see to the edge of what’s been removed, where the top of the steps were revealed.

I’ve written about the SAT’s project before. With the found window, and the found floor—and other things—I should write that down sometime.⁴

Last thing:

those steps under the main floor are one of those things by Wright that you will only (mostly) be able to experience in your mind.

Because

they are now inaccessible.

The climate control work that the Preservation Crew has done included finding spaces where they could add chases for machinery to adequately heat and cool the building.

In fact, when staff and I went down to the Guest Wing in 2018 to see their work, I asked the Director of Preservation at Taliesin if we could still see them.

He opened the door to the alcove and, on one edge, you could see maybe 4 inches [10.16 cm].

STILL:

I showed a drawing with the steps in my posts about the night that future architect Gertrude Kerbis spent at Taliesin; and when I identified an old photo of the “Blue Room”.

First published November 1, 2024
I took this photo the first day I was taking photographs related to Taliesin’s SAT’s project.

Notes:

It’s a continual project that I hope to finish one day.
It was right next to where we found that floor in 2003 during Taliesin’s Save America’s Treasures project. I wrote about that in 2022.
Read my “I Looked at Stone” post to find out why they’re red.
I’ll put it into a book entitled, “That’s Not a Crack, That’s a Change: Adventures in Preserving Taliesin”.

Photo is sepia of cabin with hipped roof surrounded by trees in late fall. Property: https://digitalcollections.hclib.org/digital/collection/MplsPhotos/id/12037/

Frank Lloyd Wright Violated the Mann Act

Posted on 10/17/2024 | by admin

Reading Time: 5 minutes

No, not the first time he violated it.

I wrote about that before when introducing you to the second Mrs. Wright.

In this post I’ll write about the second (and last) time.

As I wrote once before, information about the Mann Act is something you learn when working at Taliesin.

In particular, the Mann Act is related to what happened to Frank Lloyd Wright on October 21, 1926, at the cottage in the photo at the top of this post.

It started,

as things do with Wright,

in a story that got really complicated.

Let’s go back

to Wright’s second wife, Miriam Noel. She left him by early May 1924, then almost 6 months later, he met his future wife, Olgivanna. Their new relationship was practically tried by fire—Taliesin’s second fire 5 months after they met. Olgivanna had their daughter, Iovanna, in December while she was chased out of the hospital after giving birth. And, in the next year, Wright was having financial problems while struggling to find clients. What’s more, Miriam was still refusing to settle their divorce.

This was quite a problem for everyone.

Especially, where Wright lived.

Spring Green was dealing with the “Chicago boys”: those reporters from that city’s newspapers. They were around, writing about Wright’s problems with Miriam. She had shown up at Taliesin in early June 1926 trying to get in while the Chicago Boys took photos.

Taliesin was legally her home, after all.

So William Purdy, editor of Spring Green’s newspaper, The Weekly Home News, wrote about this sorry business in the June 10th edition.

Also, Purdy allowed Wright to publish an apology to the people of the village. Here it is in part:

Architect Makes Statement to Public

FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT THANKS HOME PEOPLE.

To the Countryside:

Taliesin seems to be a storm center for conflicting human interests and emotions. Three times I have built it up from its ashes;¹ each time stronger and more beautiful than before tragedy destroyed it. The cooperation of the countryside was mine in all this and I have appreciated it more than I can tell. But I have never thanked my neighbors and townspeople directly for their friendship and forbearance. I want to do so now, particularly in consideration of their “hands off” attitude in this last attack—this attempt, made in hatred and a spirit of revenge, to destroy any usefulness I have and make what I have struggled to establish here useless to me or anyone….

Then, the last paragraph includes my favorite part:

Enough of that. What I want to say to you was that I like you people…. You all seem home-like to me. I’ve been about all over the globe and come back here with that feeling of coming “home” we all seek somewhere, and too often seek in vain…. I want to stay here with you, working until I die. I want to mind my own business and not be subject to public question if I can manage it. At the present times it looks as though I yet had some distance to go—and I might die before I got there. I must be patient and I hope those of you who don’t believe in me very much, perhaps, will be patient too—along with those who are closer to me and know better what I have had to contend with and what I would do if I could. I think the countryside deserves the best of me and if you who make it what it is give me the benefit of the doubt in all this for a year or two, I believe I will come through right side up and you may yet take pride in Taliesin as I have always hoped and believed you would do.

With affection, such as I am

Your—FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT.

If you didn’t see it above, check out the photo I put together below:

Photograph of Frank Lloyd Wright by Edward Steichen, Bequest of Edward Steichen. Located in the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution — Photograph of Frank Lloyd Wright in the National Portrait Gallery. © Condé Nast. NPG.82.92

Honestly, I wanted to show this because it looks like a motivational poster that’s taken a bad turn.

Despite what he wrote to his neighbors in 1926, things for Wright would not get better in “a year or two.”

In fact,

they were going to get worse that fall.

At the end of August, one of Wright’s attorneys (Levi Bancroft) advised Wright to spend a while away from Taliesin. Bancroft and others were trying to settle things with Miriam and the Bank of Wisconsin.

So, Wright and his coterie —Olgivanna, her daughter, Svetlana, and Iovanna—eventually went to the cottage you see at the top of this post. It was on Lake Minnetonka in Minnesota, where they all lived for about a month.

But unfortunately,

as biographer Meryle Secrest wrote,

Wright could not have known that by driving Olgivanna across the Wisconsin-Minnesota state line, instead of having her get out and walk (presumably to demonstrate she was not a “victim”) he had given the bureau new evidence under the White Slave Traffic Act [a.k.a., the Mann Act].

Meryle Secrest. Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography (Alfred A. Knopf, New York City, 1992), 327-328.

And, on October 21, 1926

there were at the cottage when they were apprehended and brought to the county jail for the night. They released everyone but Wright the next day. Then, he stayed for the weekend until they could all see the judge.

Although Svetlana’s father, Vladimir Hinzenberg, dropped the charges once he saw that she was no longer in trouble, the event caused a permanent rift between Hinzenberg and her. In fact, her son Brandoch Peters² later told the LaCrosse Tribune that this was why she always signed her name, “Svetlana Wright Peters”.³

A good thing about this is that the tide began to turn against the second Mrs. Wright. Around that time her lawyer, Arthur Cloud, said, “I wanted to be a lawyer… and Mrs. Wright [i.e., Miriam] wanted me to be an avenging angel.”⁴

One last thing about the cottage in Minnesota:

Its photo shows it with a hipped roof and apparently windows all the way in the back. When I first saw that photo over a year ago, I instantly remembered Graycliff, a home in Derby, New York. Wright designed it that year, 1926, for Isabelle Martin, wife of longtime client, Darwin Martin.

My photo of Graycliff is below:

I don’t know if there’s any connection, but I was really struck by the resemblance to this home against a lake.

Posted October 17, 2024.
The photo at the top of this post is here from the Digital Collections of the Hennepin County Public Library.

Notes

He says “three times I have built it from its ashes”, but Taliesin was only destroyed twice by fire: in 1925, but also 1914. I think Wright might have meant that the first construction was atop his former home/life in Oak Park.
Brandoch is seen talking about his grandfather in this video, Brandoch Peters Remembers, Part 1. Part 2 is here.
Susan Smith for Lee Newspapers. “Grandson of Wright offers his memories”, La Crosse Tribune, December 14, 2003.
Meryle Secrest. Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography, 331.

Distant view of Taliesin in 1921-22. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York), Photograph by Clarence Fuermann of Henry Fuermann and Sons.

The Musical-Note Retaining Wall at Taliesin

Posted on 10/01/2024 | by admin

Reading Time: 4 minutes

We hear he liked music,

if you didn’t know that, just trust me

but what is this thing about a Musical Note?

I’m talking about a retaining wall outside of Taliesin and I’m going to write about it today.

It’s called that because

It looks like two musical quarter notes touching end-to-end.¹ You can see it in the historic photo at the top of this post, just left of center.

And you can see it in the modern-day photo below:

Used with permission.

The wall seems to have shown up after 1912, based on other photographs at the Wisconsin Historical Society. For instance, this really old photo of Taliesin doesn’t show this wall at all:

Looking northwest (plan direction) at Taliesin’s living quarters, 1911-12. Given the configuration of the building, it looks like this was taken during Taliesin’s first winter.

Then there’s one taken in 1912 by Clarence Fuermann of Henry Fuermann and Sons; and if you look closely at it, something has been built in the area, but not the retaining wall.

But we know he was doing something around there in 1913.

We know that because on June 19 of that year, The Weekly Home News² stated that:

Work has started at Frank Lloyd Wright’s summer home. B.F. Davies³ has a crew of men laying water mains, which will supply all the buildings with water and also irrigate the gardens, vineyards and flower beds.

All of these things help to get water to the gardens, which Wright wrote in his autobiography that each court at Taliesin:

… had its fountain and the winding stream below had a great dam. A thick stone wall was thrown across it, to make a pond at the very foot of the hill, and raise the water in the Valley to within sight from Taliesin. The water below the falls thus made, was sent, by hydraulic ram, up to a big stone reservoir built into the higher hill, just behind and above the hilltop garden, to come down again into the fountains and go on down to the vegetable gardens on the slopes below the house.
An Autobiography, by Frank Lloyd Wright. In Frank Lloyd Wright Collected Writings: 1930-32, volume 2. Edited by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, introduction by Kenneth Frampton (Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., New York City, 1992), 226.

This is the second time I posted this quote. The first time was about whether or not Taliesin had outhouses. You don’t know?! Well check it out.
Of course I’ve thought about that. I think I’ve mentioned on here that sometimes I walk through Taliesin in the past to relax myself before sleeping.

Still, we can only confirm that Wright built the “notes” (the circular parts at either end of the wall) during the Taliesin II era. One of those Taliesin II images is at the top of this post.

And,

those “notes” maybe may have been functioning cisterns.

After all, that part of the hill faces mostly south, which means that it gets a consistent amount of sunlight, so it’s a place Wright, in the earliest years was trying to get vegetables grown while trying to make a go of it out here in the country.

A good Taliesin II photo of planting grids on the southern part of the hill, is below. I’ve pointed out one of the “notes” on the retaining wall:

Looking (plan) northwest at Taliesin’s Living Quarters, 1915-21. This photo is printed in the book, Frank Lloyd Wright Collected Writings, volume 2, p. 145.

But I have no idea what he could have been growing in those grids.

btw: anyone who knows me knows I have a black thumb.

Anyway,

So, if they were cisterns, Wright stopped using them. Probably, once he expanded his land holdings, he could grow vegetables in all the other spaces as he bought more surrounding land. Yet, while he eventually had no reason to use the stone structure, he still kept it. Like what you can see in the Taliesin 3 aerial photo, below:

Photo published in Frank Lloyd Wright: Complete Works, volume 2, 1917-1942, by Pfeiffer, Bruce Brooks (Taschen, 2009), p. 145.

When I first started giving tours, we walked up to the house and took a rest at that retaining wall to catch our breaths. While they sat on the wall, I’d invite my guests to look at the view while I started telling Taliesin’s story.

nowadays, folks on the Taliesin Estate tour still walk past there before going up to have their break.

In fact,

I remember plenty of days in my earliest years in which I repeated the myth about Taliesin’s 1914 fire that the murderer “sealed all of the entrances to the House“.

Information about this retaining wall probably isn’t common knowledge at Taliesin. But a lot of people can see it on tours, so there’s a bit of info for you.

First published on October 1, 2024.
The photograph at the top of this page was taken by Clarence Fuermann of Henry Fuermann and Sons. I talked about the Fuermann photos in my post about the Flower in the Crannied Wall statue.

Notes:

1. p.s.: I don’t think Wright ever referred to it that way, but that’s what we all call/ed it in Taliesin tours.

2. Spring Green’s newspaper.

3. I think I might have found B.F. Davies in the census. Wright wrote to a “Ben Davies” several times in the late 1920s.

Photograph of Keiran with a tour group on Taliesin's Hill Crown. Keiran has white pants on.

Doing too many Taliesin tours

Posted on 09/15/2024 | by admin

Reading Time: 5 minutes

My post today isn’t going to be about taking too many Taliesin tours, but about giving too many of them. That’s because, you see, we’re coming into late September and I realized that the Taliesin tour guides right now may start to feel like what I wrote years ago

in my unpublished memoir, “What Time Does the 1:30 Tour Leave?”

I started giving tours in 1994 while I was in school.¹But after this, I worked full-time in the tour program during the 1995-2002 seasons.

During that time, Taliesin Preservation mostly had:

The 1-hour Hillside Studio and Theater tour,²
The 2-hour, 2-mile Walking Tour,
The House tour,

Now called the “In-Depth” House Tour. Here’s a link to a description from 2021.

And the Estate tour

a.k.a, the 4-hour tour.

Due to the lack of heat inside Taliesin, we gave interior tours at that time only from May-October.

Therefore, we were always happy when the tour season started, because

We got to

see the buildings again! That really was like seeing old friends.

And then the season really got rolling and veteran guides mostly gave House and Estate tours.

This heavy rotation of veteran guides giving tours that went into the House would go

probably STILL DO

from late June through our peak season (ending on Labor Day).

Then the kids went back to college and the tour numbers dropped

(spiking in October for “leaf season”).

This heavy House tour rotation

from June through the beginning of September could start to do funny things to the mind.

In fact,

I usually succumbed to what I call:

“tour guide’s disease”.

That is: on tour, I’d say whatever was in my head.

I’m not talking about giving my shopping list or commenting about a sweater any of my guests was wearing

I mean that,

The genius of the man and the beauty of the spaces faded

And instead, I found myself musing out loud about the bunny rabbit that had shown up on the tour; or,

a small change in the stone that I’d never noticed,
an answer to a question someone had asked me earlier that day,
and talking about Sherpa, who was a Taliesin Kitty for years.

Then in one particular year, the tour scheduler

No, not you, Bob

basically xeroxed the tour schedules.

That is,

she gave us each the same tour schedule week after week.

In fact, one of the Taliesin tour guides gave only House tours through July and August. In other words, all this guide gave was: two, two-hour House tours, five days a week, for eight solid weeks.

I saw the effect this schedule had on her by the end of that summer.

Because

as I was also on this “xeroxed” schedule, I gave House tours two days a week; one Estate tour; and for the other two days I was a Taliesin House Steward.

Our collective experience was like walking up to a mirror and saying your name over and over until it becomes an inexpressible concept.

Sometimes, this guide would be talking about something while looking in a completely different direction. Because OF COURSE she knew exactly where that table, piano, Japanese screen, or bed was in each of the rooms.

Also,

sometimes she walked past me while I held the door open for her and visitors to walk into Taliesin’s Guest Bedroom:

and she’d whisper “God, get me off this tour” to me as she walked over the threshold.

Now, my suggestion for guides (and myself) in this case

giving the same tour over and over

is to “vary your tours”: find some aspect about Wright, or his ideas or buildings to explore.

which is why what I talked about on tours was sometimes completely different in September than what it had been in May.

However, that summer was special, too.

Because of the weather.

It was warm.

Not dangerously hot most of the time, but through the bulk of the summer, the weather seemed a consistent 85F [29C] or so.

Sometimes it was warmer, and sometimes it was cooler, but the rest of the time, it was 85F.

And dry.

So, every day was hot.

Cloudless.

Hot.

Cloudless.

Hot, perhaps a little humid, cloudless.

all the while we were surrounded by dying crops and brown grass.

This repetition made us all a little loopy.

And for me? I was giving so many House/Estate tours and listening to so many House/Estate tour guides in such heat that my internal censor had begun to malfunction.

I do remember

when this problem hit home.

I was giving a House tour and was on the stone hearth in front of the Living Room fireplace (like you see in the photo from 1955, below):

Color photograph taken of bench and fireplace in Taliesin living room, 1955. — Courtesy of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
Call Number: photCL MLP 1266

A fireplace, inglenook and flagstone floor seen in my post, “1940s Change in Taliesin’s Living Room“

I had either just received a question regarding the furniture in the room,

or had just come to that subject in my tour narrative.

Do you know that at Taliesin, there is said to be only one piece of furniture from the interior that survived the 1914 fire? It’s a bench that is, today, behind the dining table in the room and you can see it in the photo below:

The bench is one of two on either side of the table in the photograph above.

While I was speaking, I voiced the thought I’d previously had about that bench:

“that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. If a guy is chasing you through a burning building with an ax, are you going to think, ‘Oh, yeah, got to save this bench over here.’”?

I was speaking these words and

a voice in my head off to the side was asking me:

“Keiran. Dear. What the f**k are you saying?”

While my lapse in judgement caused me to rethink my phrasing, several days after my comment, the heat broke in two of the most ferocious thunderstorms I had ever personally witnessed. Two large cloud bursts each lasting an hour and a half brought 7 inches of rain.

In addition, the manager finally scheduled all of us for more Hillside and Walking tours.

So that broke the spell.

Published September 15, 2024
Someone from Taliesin Preservation took the photograph at the top of this post. It shows me with a group while I was giving a tour. I’m standing in the middle in white pants. You can also see this image in my post, “Tour Guides and Trust“.

Note:

1. you can read about the guy I was writing my Master’s thesis on at that time, here.

2. formerly called the “Hillside Home School Tour”, but we changed the name by the mid-1990s after some people got very angry when they found out they weren’t going to the Taliesin residence.

Flower in the Crannied Wall at Taliesin

Posted on 09/05/2024 | by admin

Reading Time: 5 minutes

I posted today because I want to talk about the “Flower in the Crannied Wall” statue at Taliesin.

She was originally designed for Frank Lloyd Wright’s Susan Lawrence Dana residence in Springfield, IL (1902-04).

Sculptor Richard Bock make her in terra cotta for Wright and she was placed inside, near the front door of the Dana house, like you see in the photo below:

There she is looking really tiny.
I got this screengrab from their site.

Bock later told architectural historian Donald Hoffmann that Wright told him what he envisioned for the sculpture. Bock worked until he “eventually felt very sure” he got a statue that Wright had imagined.

In the sculpture, Bock created a nude woman “issuing from a structure of crystals” that are based on the abstraction of Wright’s motif for the Dana House: the sumac tree.¹You can see this in the tower in the pic below:

I took this photo from page 72 of the book of essays about Taliesin edited by Narciso Menocal: Taliesin 1911-1914, Wright Studies, Volume One.

“Flower in the Crannied Wall” is the name of a poem by Alfred Tennyson that’s on her back. Someone is contemplating a flower they’ve taken out of a wall and using it as a way to understand God, nature, and man.

I put a link to the poem, here.

When Bock showed the architect this sculpture, Wright

“beamed and said,

‘You have done it, Dicky; you have done it. This is going to make you famous!”²

Wright had a plaster cast made of the original, then brought her out to Taliesin really early. In fact, you can see her at Taliesin even before they put steps up to the Tea Circle:

She later showed up in some postcards, like the one below:

Published with permission from Patrick Mahoney. This photo is on p. 41 of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin: Illustrated by Vintage Postcards, by Randolph C. Henning.

“Flower” stayed there until at least 1921, when a photographer from Henry Fuermann and Sons took Taliesin photos for an article about Wright in a magazine.

Photo from my copy of the book, The Life-Work of the American Architect Frank Lloyd Wright (1965; Santpoort, Holland: C. A. Mees, 1925).

I don’t know why, but Wright apparently moved her from the Tea Circle by the time of Taliesin’s second fire.

So, where did she go?

From photos it looks like he kept her, at least sometimes, near Taliesin’s entry gates on County Road C (the same gates seen on tours today going up to the house).

Wright also sent the photographer from Fuermann and Sons down there to photograph her in the late 1920s. I put one of those photos from one of my books, below:

This photo comes from Frank Lloyd Wright: Selected Houses, v. 2, Taliesin, p. 46.³

However, if you want to see a better version of it, check out the Journal of the Organic Architecture + Design Archives with Fuermann Photographs from 2018.

Plus,

Wright put her a couple of times on the dam at Taliesin’s pond.

Yes, there WILL be a pond and waterfall at Taliesin again.
I’ve been told that the work was done and approved and they’re just waiting for the written permission from the Wisconsin DNR.

Here’s a photo from the early 1920s when she was on Taliesin’s dam:

Luckily, she survived.

coz, man!, the guy could be brutal with his artifacts.

When I started giving tours she was down by Taliesin’s Root Cellar. Fellowship member, Wes Peters, told the Administrator of Historic Studies for the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation that she had arms when he became an apprentice in ’32. He thought that “Flower” ended up by the Root Cellar by the 1950s. At some point she also lost her arms and the top of her tower.

I took a photo of her at that spot in 1994, below:

When she was there, we often stopped on the House tour, talked about the statue and sometimes told people our nickname for her: “Crannie de Milo”.

And,

yes,

I might have subjected more than a few people to my complete recital of “Flower in the Crannied Wall”.

It’s not a really long poem, but… still.

in my defense it took me a while to shed my overt remnants of Graduate School.

…. At least I stopped bringing in Narciso Menocal’s interpretation of the statue after the first season… or two.

Also in the 1990s, they did a preservation assessment of her:

It says in part:

The sculpture has extensive cracks, breaks, and old repairs. The old glue is smeared with dirt, and has discolored, disturbing the visual integrity of the surface…. The head is sagging forward and could fall.

The plaster … is cracking on the brow and arms….

A photograph of where “Flower” used to stand was taken in 2018 on a tour by a photographer named Stilhefler. The photo is posted on Wikimedia Commons and gives you a good view, including the walkway to the Root Cellar beyond the stone archway:

“Flower” was restored and returned in 2014. And for the first time in its existence, that original plaster cast was placed inside to protect her from the elements. She now stands in Taliesin’s Drafting Studio on the box near the vault.

What the hell, Keiran – are you trying to make me crazy?! I was at Taliesin this summer and SHE’S OUTSIDE BY THE TEA CIRCLE!!

JUST SO YOU KNOW: When you go to Taliesin today, what you’re seeing outside is a concrete copy of her.

If they’d listened to me, I’d probably want her back near the Root Cellar. But I think she’d get kind of janky down there.

Originally published September 5, 2024.
In 2021, I took the photo of her in Taliesin’s Drafting Studio at the top of this post.

Notes:

1. “Taliesin, the Gilmore House, and the Flower in the Crannied Wall,” by Narcisco G. Menocal. In Taliesin 1911-1914, Wright Studies, Volume One, ed. Narciso Menocal (Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale and Edwardsville, Illinois, 1992), 70.

2. From Hoffmann’s dissertation, “Chicago Sculptor Richard W. Bock: Social and Artistic Demands at the Turn of the Twentieth Century”, 208. This is quoted in “Taliesin, the Gilmore House, and the Flower in the Crannied Wall,” by Menocal in “Wright Studies, Volume One”, 74.

3. Text by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, edited and photographed by Yukio Futagawa (A.D.A. Edita, Tokyo, 1990).

The wedding anniversary of Frank Lloyd Wright and Olgivanna

Posted on 08/24/2024 | by admin

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Frank Lloyd Wright standing with daughters Svetlana and Iovanna, while his wife, Olgivanna, looks at the photographer. Wright’s sister, Maginel, sits behind them with the dog. Judging from Iovanna’s age, I think this was taken in the summer of 1930-32. The group is seated at Taliesin’s Tea Circle steps. I can’t find an early photo of just the Wrights, so I thought I’d put one in here with mostly their nuclear family.

Being in the Wright world means that you know a smorgasbord of things, along with certain dates:

April 9
- the day Wright died
April 10
- the day he bought the land where Taliesin is
April 20
- the day of the second fire at Taliesin (newly in his relationship with Olgivanna)
April 26
- the day of the Hillside fire
June 8
- Wright’s birthday
August 15
- the day of the first fire at Taliesin

and

August 25.

This was the day in 1928 that Frank Lloyd Wright and Olgivanna Lazovich Milanoff got married (here’s the link to the wedding announcement).

So, today

I’m going to include quotes from Olgivanna or Frank Lloyd Wright about their wedding, or each other.

Here is Olgivanna’s writing in The Life of Olgivanna Lloyd Wright: From Crna Cora to Taliesin; from Black Mountain to Shining Brow.

This was the book compiled and edited by Maxine Fawcett-Yeske, Ph.D. and Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, D.H.L

Wedding

At last we awoke on the sunny morning of the long-awaited day of our wedding…. The ceremony was held on the lovely patio under a blue sunny sky. Frank was dressed in white… and I had a purple afternoon gown sprinkled with a gold pattern and a wreath of lavender flowers around my head. When the minister asked the question, “in sickness and in health?”

Frank answered very quietly, “Yes, I have and I will.”

…. then a memorable telegram came from Darwin D. Martin, “Taliesin open for your return.” The joy that went through us lifted us up…. It was Taliesin we saw, the hills, the meadows, the cows chewing benignly in the sun. We embraced each other; the children bounced around us. A cycle of our life was closing, and we were about to enter another… – re-establishing our life at Taliesin, after years of wandering.

The Life of Olgivanna Lloyd Wright (ORO Editions, 2017), 101, 102.

And here’s

some of the nice things that Wright wrote about Olgivanna in the 1943 edition of his autobiography.

The version of the 1943 autobiography that you can get via Amazon is through a small bookseller because I think it hasn’t been printed in awhile. But if you want to see it RIGHT NOW, you can read it online at Archive.org, the Internet Archive.

Wright and Olgivanna met in late November 1924 by chance at a ballet matinee,¹ and spoke during and afterward:

… I must have met her—somewhere? But no, no one like her—that I could remember–…. She spoke in a low musical voice…. [p. 510] No longer quite so strange, the emissary of Fate, mercy on my soul, from the other side of the known world, bowed her head to my invitation to tea at the nearby Congress. She accepted with perfect ease without artificial hesitation.

I was in love with her.

It was all as simple as that….

Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography, new and revised ed. (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1943), 509.

And he writes heart-catchingly

a few pages later:

Just to be with her uplifts my heart and strengthens my spirit when the going gets hard or when the going is good.

…. I found that the girl who was qualified by years of hard, patient trying to understand, inspired by ideas similar to my own, was qualified to be an imaginative vivid inspiration and a real mate.

Whatever she undertook, she never shirked.

And strangely enough—or is it so strange—she, whose parents were Montenegrin dignitaries, had pictures of her Montenegrin forebears that looked just like my Welsh forebears….

She is brave and has the heart of a lioness.

No, I think we mated as planned behind the stars—just right. I don’t even wish I were younger because we both seem to add up to just about the right age for us, and I admire maturity much more than youth.

Frank Lloyd Wright, 512, 513.

Posted August 24, 2024.
The photo at the top of this page was on the cover of the book, Frank Lloyd Wright Remembered, ed. Patrick J. Meehan. The photo is from the Frank Lloyd Wright Trust.

Notes:

1. Yes, I know that if you get “the Fellowship book” (The Fellowship: The Untold Story of Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship, by Friedland & Zellman), you read how Olgivanna met Wright as part of a plan by Gurdjieffians (followers of George Gurdjieff) in the U.S. But while

YES

the book has over a hundred pages of Endnotes, I concluded after my first read that you’ve got to read every note to check on what they’re writing.

Because,

while they’re almost obsessed with proving that Olgivanna was pushed in front of Wright so fans of Gurdjieff in the U.S. could recreate his philosophical community, the easy conclusions they come up with in the text don’t always match the Endnotes. Did Olgivanna meet Wright at the ballet in 1924 because Jerome Blum (a friend who Wright wrote about in his autobiography) arranged for the meeting? Well, Endnote 95 on page 618 (of the 1st edition of The Fellowship book) says, “There is no evidence of any relationship among Olgivanna, Jerome Blum, and Waldo Frank, other than through Gurdjieff connections.” And that’s just one of the places where the book’s text is different from an Endnote.

Statements after the murders at Taliesin in 1914

Posted on 08/13/2024 | by admin

Reading Time: 6 minutes

August 15, this coming Thursday, marks 110 years since 7 people were inexplicably murdered at Frank Lloyd Wright’s home, Taliesin, by his servant, Julian Carlton.

I’ve written about it a couple of times¹ and had not planned on writing anything today.

But I’ve gathered a lot of information over the years and,

in the spirit of “preservation by distribution“,

I decided to put up a post with the statements by the survivors, or related parties, that appeared in the newspapers.

I think this is kosher, since I’m publishing news that was written 110 years ago.

Just so you know, sometimes the stories spell Julian’s last name as “Carleton” and I decided to keep those misspellings without correcting them; writing “[sic]” after each misspelling gets distracting. Additionally, one story refers to Wright’s partner, Mamah Borthwick, as “Mrs. Borthwick”.

Herbert Fritz’s narrative of what happened

He was one of Wright’s draftsmen. He survived by jumping out of a window when he noticed the fire, but before Carlton could attack. As a result of his relative lack of injuries (he broke his arm), Fritz gave the most complete description of what happened.

This first appeared in the The Chicago Daily Tribune on August 16, 1914:

Story of Survivor.

“I was eating in the small dining room off the kitchen with the other men,” said Fritz. “The room, I should say, was about 12 x 12 feet in size. There were two doors, one leading to the kitchen and the other opening into the court. We had just been served by Carleton and he had left the room when we noticed something flowing under the screen door from the court. We thought it was nothing but soap suds spilled outside.

“The liquid ran under my chair and I noticed the odor of gasoline. Just as I was about to remark the fact a streak of flame shot under my chair, and it looked like the whole side of the room was on fire. All of us jumped up, and I first noticed that my clothing was on fire. The window was nearer to me than the other door and so I jumped through it, intending to run down the hill to the creek and roll in it.

“It may be that the other door was locked. I don’t know. I didn’t think to try it. My first thought was to save myself. The window was only about a half a foot from the floor and three feet wide and it was the quickest way out.

Arm Broken by Fall.

“I plunged through and landed on the rocks outside. My arm was broken by the fall and the flames had eaten through my clothing and were burning me. I rolled over and over down the hill toward the creek, but stopped about half way. The fire on my clothes was out by that time and I scrambled to my feet and was about

Cont’d, p. 6 column 1

to start back up the hill when I saw Carleton come running around the house with the hatchet in his hand and strike Brodelle, who had followed me through the window.

“Then I saw Carleton run back around the house, and I followed in time to see him striking at the others as they came through the door into the court. He evidently had expected us to come out that way first and was waiting there, but ran around to the side in which the window was located when he saw me and Brodelle jump out.

“I didn’t see which way Carlton went. My arm was paining me, and I was suffering terribly from the burns, and I supposed I must have lost consciousness for a few moments. I remember staggering around the corner of the house and seeing Carleton striking at the other men as they came through the door, and when I looked again the negro was gone.”

Statement by William Weston in The Detroit Tribune on August 16:

Weston was Wright’s carpenter. He followed Fritz and another victim, Emil Brodelle, out of the window. Carlton gave him a glancing blow, so he survived. However, Carlton did murder Weston’s 13-year-old son Ernest. Ernest and two others (David Lindblom and Thomas Brunker) were attacked exiting through the door on the opposite side of the room:

“As each one put his head out,” said Weston, “the negro struck, killing or stunning his victim. I was the last. The ax struck me in the neck and knocked me down and I guess he thought he had me, because he ran back to the window and I got up and ran. When I looked back, the negro had disappeared.[“]

Unfortunately, that’s it. Although he was probably not able to talk since his son died later on the 15^th.

Gertrude Carlton quoted in the Escanaba Daily Press on August 18:

Authorities found Gertrude Carlton, Julian Carlton’s wife, innocent of any involvement in the crime. Two weeks later, she was allowed to leave. She took a train to Chicago and was never heard from again.

“I don’t know why Julian did it,” she said. “He must have been crazy. I think he was. He had just served dinner, and I saw him cleaning a white rug in a pan of gasoline out in the courtway. He had his pipe in his mouth, and I saw him light a match.

“The next thing I knew the kitchen was in flames, and I saw Julian running toward the barn with a hatchet in his hand. I ran downstairs to the cellar and climbed from a window.”

The woman was arrested while walking on the road to town. She said her husband had been moody and “acting queer” of late.

“I woke up several times at night and found him sitting up,” she declared. “I would ask him what was the matter and he would say that workmen around the place were trying to ‘do’ him. That was why he made me tell Mrs. Borthwick we would leave Saturday because it was lonely for me in the country.”

Wright was in Chicago,

finishing up his Midway Gardens commission when he found out about the fire. Here’s the Chicago Tribune again on Aug. 16:

Tells of Crime.

Mr. Wright was notified of the tragedy at his office in the Orchestra building by long distance telephone.

Mr. Wright almost collapsed when the news first reached him. He got the tragic long distance telephone message while at Midway Gardens, the new south side amusement park, which he designed.

“This is Frank Roth at Madison,” came a voice over the wire. “Be prepared for a shock. Your wife—that is, Mrs. Cheney—the two children, and one of your draftsmen have been killed by Carleton.

“Carleton set fire to the bungalow and got away. He must have gone crazy. A posse is chasing him. You’d better get to Spring Green right away.”

Roth, from whom the message came, is a friend of the architect.

Subsequently Wright received a telegram from Spring Lake signed with the initials of Mrs. Cheney—of Mamah Borthwick, or as she now calls herself

“Come as fast as possible; serious trouble,” was her message.

“Frank Roth” is an unknown person and no one has found the telegram. “Spring Lake” is wrong. It should be Spring Green.

Here’s the Chicago Tribune on Wright’s statements before he came back to Wisconsin on the train with his son, John:

Unable to Talk Coherently.

The architect was so distraught he could not tell a coherent story to the detectives.

“The Carletons, Julian and his wife, were the best servants I have ever seen,” he said. “The wife cooked and Julian was a general handyman. They were Cuban negroes, and Julian especially seemed to have an intelligence above the average and a good education for one of his class.

“They had not been engaged permanently and were to have quit our employ today. Julian was to have started for Chicago on the 7:45 train this morning. The train would have reached the city shortly after 1 o’clock, and he was to have visited my office to get his wages.

“Three days ago, when I last saw him, he seemed perfectly normal. He must have lost his mind—and yet I cannot believe that the news is true. The fact that the telegram was signed M.B.B. was received after the alleged murders buoys my hopes.”

Paul Hendrickson did some good work to show that Julian Carlton was not from Cuba or Barbados, which was repeated in other newspaper stories at that time. In his book, Plagued by Fire, Hendrickson makes the case that Carlton was from Alabama.

First published August 13, 2024.
A.S. Rockwell took the photograph at the top of this post on the day of, or the day after, the fire. The photograph in on Wikimedia Commons and is in the public domain. See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Taliesin_After_Fire.jpg for information about the origin of the photograph.

Note:

1. if only to tell you that Carlton didn’t serve his victims soup!