Stone Entry Gates on Highway 23

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Photo taken in 1955 by Maynard Parker for House Beautiful magazine. It wasn’t published at that time, but you can find it on p. 4-5 in the book At Taliesin; and in the book Working with Mr. Wright, p. 8-9.

Are not the original entry gates to Taliesin.

That’s what I’m going to explain in my post today.

You can see the gates I’m talking about without being on a Taliesin tour. They’re just off the road, and Wright’s estate mostly surrounds you. In the photo at the top of this post, the gates are under the clump of fir trees by Highway 23.

I took the photo below that shows the stone gates today:

One of my close-ups is in the slideshow you see on my homepage. I took this and other photos while: trying to come to terms with losing my job; and my husband was gently persuading me to develop the domain name keiranmurphy.com that he’d reserved for me.

I gave a presentation a couple of weeks ago and was reminded that many people think that those stone gates are “the original entry” to Taliesin.

No, they aren’t.

Let’s get it out of the way and confirm that the original entrance gates to Taliesin are by Taliesin’s waterfall.¹

In 1911, Wright’s draftsman, Taylor Woolley, took the picture of those original gates on County Road C surrounded by its stonemasons:

This photo is published in Building Taliesin: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Home of Love and Loss by Ron McCrea (Wisconsin Historical Society Press, Madison, Wisconsin), 2012, p. 102 (fig. 96). It’s now out of print, but you can get it from other sites online.

So, why do people think the gates on Highway 23—about half a mile away from Taliesin—are “the original”?

Long story:

You’re not surprised, are you?

In the 1980s,

the Taliesin Fellowship was in charge of giving tours at both Taliesins. Wright’s widow, Olgivanna, decided to employ guides in Wisconsin instead of just using architectural apprentices.

The tours usually only went to Hillside, the hub of the architecture firm, Taliesin Associated Architects founded upon Wright’s death.  

They didn’t have regular Taliesin House tours because Olgivanna lived in Taliesin’s Living Quarters, while the rest of the Fellowship lived elsewhere in the building.

So, with brand new guides,

Fellowship members relied on each other

to gather the information needed for a tour, while apprentices also taught new guides.

Everyone went with what they knew, and apparently the story that rose to the top was that those Highway 23 gates were “the original”.

That’s what I learned in 1994 when I started in tours.

Tours then (like today), started by leaving the Frank Lloyd Wright Visitor Center on a shuttle bus and driving down the highway.

Since we drove to Hillside for tours around a dozen times a day, we all learned to point out things on the right as we drove by, including the stone entry gates.

as a result, I’ll probably be able to confidently reach my left arm out while saying, “And, to your right…” to the end of my days

Although I don’t think I’ll be able to do this while walking backwards anymore.

I didn’t question

the history of the stone gates until the winter I worked in the Preservation Office.

When I wrote “My Dam History“ and discovered Raymond Trowbridge’s photographs.

And saw the gates weren’t in a plan with Taliesin published in 1913 in Western Architect magazine:

You can see this in “The Story of Taliesin: Wright’s First Natural House,” by Neil Levine in Taliesin 1911-1914, Wright Studies, v. 1.²

Plus,

The office also had Plat maps. One from 1915 showed that Wright’s brother-in-law, Andrew Porter, owned the land where the gates are now:

Someone in the office used a green highlighter on the properties owned by Wright or his relatives. Frank Lloyd Wright’s land is on the edge of the number 3 in “30”.

You can see Porter’s land under Wright’s. If the stone gates were there in 1915, would be roughly to the right of the “R” in Porter.

So the gates weren’t there in 1915.

Or after Wright bought the land (c. 1920), because he was busy with the Imperial Hotel in Japan.

And after this, he was working in California.

Then there was Taliesin’s 1925 fire, and all the problems with his second wife.

Because of all of that and more, by the late 1920s he was pretty poor.

Hey! I made a rhyme!

And in May 1928, the Bank of Wisconsin foreclosed on Taliesin.

Still,

that’s gonna help us get closer to understanding the gates. 

In July 1928

Wright buys Taliesin back with the newly created “Frank Lloyd Wright, Inc.”

A lot of people banded together and bought shares in Wright’s future, thinking that it would all be ok.
while I wrote last year that “Wright Was Not a Shyster“, still… none of them knew the Great Depression was coming up.

Wright moves back home and writes to stalwart (not always by his choosing) Darwin Martin: longtime friend, client, and benefactor.

In the letter

Wright wrote that the highway was newly re-done and he was planning on building a road to it.³

Unfortunately,

the b—–d didn’t write “I’m calling one of my stonemasons to build some nice gates on the highway.”

But I think we’ve got proof he was building a road in 1928 because of a letter in early November to the Capital City Culver Co.⁴ He ordered several long, wide pipes. It seems logical that they could be used when constructing a road over the creek that runs through his property.

The creek that fills the pond, and creates the waterfall which, again, as of May 27 2025 is back at Taliesin!

So, with the road constructed in 1928-29, the stone gates were built.

This seems likely given a photograph of the gates taken by a photographer named Gilman Lane, from Chicago:

This photograph by Gilman Lane is courtesy of the Oak Park Public Library Special Collections, Oak Park, Illinois.

We don’t have an exact date, but it was taken 1930-33, based on Lane’s other work. And the young pine trees behind the gates show, I think, that they were newly constructed.

And you can see “Taliesin” carved onto the stone. That was done by Wright-apprentice Abrom “Abe” Dombar. Abe was in the Fellowship from 1932-35.

 

 

First published June 5, 2025.
The photo at the top of this post can be found on this webpage: https://hdl.huntington.org/digital/collection/p15150coll5/id/10262

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Notes

1. AS OF THE LAST WEEK OF MAY 2025, THE POND- AND WATERFALL ARE BACK AT TALIESIN!
2. Publishing info: editor, Narciso Menocal (Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale and Edwardsville, Illinois, 1992).
3. This is MICROFICHE ID #L003C04, which is in the collection of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York).
4. This is MICROFICHE ID #C003D03, written November 1, 1928 from the Capital City Culvert Co. regarding for several culverts they were sending to Wright. Also in the collection of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives.