The photo above shows Taliesin after the murders and fire there on August 15, 1914.
August for me in my small town in Wisconsin often includes remembering Taliesin’s 1914 fire.
Therefore, on this blog, you’ve seen my posts explaining the fire, and Mamah (and one with some snark). Plus, last year I posted statements that survivors Herbert Fritz and William Weston and Carlton’s wife, Gertrude, made to reporters.
Then, this past April I thought about the emotional impact on those close to victims, or who went through it.
So, that’s what I’ll write in this post:
Emil Brodelle
The Weekly Home News in Spring Green said he was 30 years old.
On Aug. 18, 1914, the Escanaba Daily Press in Michigan noted that Clarence Bootscher prepared to take Brodelle’s body back to his parents’ home in Milwaukee. Bootscher’s sister (also of Milwaukee; they didn’t give her name) was set to marry Brodelle. Clarence Bootscher told the Escanaba Press that,
My sister is prostrated…. It was all we could do to prevent her from coming up here. Emil was the most promising draftsman in Mr. Wright’s employ.
John and Martha Cheney
Their father, Edwin, took their remains back to his family in Oak Park, IL.
But, before he left, a reporter at the Milwaukee Leader asked Cheney if he was planning to go to Mamah Borthwick’s funeral.
Cheney said, “That’s Wright’s affair…. I have two children who were murdered here.“
In 2008, I saw Nancy Horan as she came out to Taliesin for a special tour[pdf] with us surrounding Loving Frank.
I created the tour and had a nice time with her.
Around that time, she said that someone told her that Edwin Cheney, who later worked in St. Louis, MO, kept an urn on his desk. Nancy thought the urn contained John and Martha’s ashes.
Nancy also said Edwin and his second wife Elsie Millor (they married in 1912) adopted two children after 1914.
[The Wikipedia page on Edwin says they adopted three children; perhaps Mamah’s niece, Jessie (who lived with them almost from birth), was one of the three].
Brunker and Lindblom:
I couldn’t find a lot of info on Thomas Brunker or David Lindblom.
Although the Weekly Home News of Spring Green wrote about the murders in their August 20 edition and I trust them the most because they were (are) the local paper. Brunker was the hostler (he dealt with the horses); and Lindblom was Taliesin’s gardener.
In addition, I learned in the Aug. 19 issue of the Evening Times-Republican (of Marshalltown, IA) that Lindblom was 55 and Brunker was 60. The Evening Times-Republican also informed me that Brunker (from Ridgeway) had 10 children who had lost their mother 4 years before.
Thomas Brunker was buried near the Catholic church in his town.
The “Home News” added in their August 20 edition that:
The funeral of David Lindblom was held Tuesday afternoon (the 18th) and internment was made in the cemetery at Unity Chapel…. Lindblom was born in Sweden and had no relatives in the United States except one sister, residing in Chicago, who could not be located.
I haven’t found Lindblom’s grave at Unity Chapel’s cemetery.
Ernest Weston:
The family buried Ernest in the Spring Green cemetery. His father, William, didn’t go to the funeral because he stayed at home convalescing from his injuries.
William Weston:
He may have been suffering psychologically, because the Home News reported almost a year later that he unexpectedly left Spring Green, and turned up in Minnesota. He returned to his family, but the newspaper reported 5 months after that (Nov. 11, 1915), that he had just come home from the Dakotas where he had been working. Perhaps these moves from Spring Green were related to William Weston needing to forget the violence he witnessed and the loss of his son.
However, if Weston left for that reason, it seemed to have worked because the Home News didn’t report any other disappearances by him.
Herbert Fritz:
While writing her biography on Wright, Meryle Secrest talked to Herb Fritz, Jr. about Wright, Taliesin, and the 1914 fire. Fritz said,
My father never talked about what he saw happening. I think he had emotional problems, but he would just stand and stare off into space.1
Gertrude Carlton:
She escaped Taliesin at the beginning of her husband’s rampage and the police picked her up as she walked to Spring Green.
The Iowa county police in Dodgeville held her to determine what connection she had to the murders. They concluded she had nothing to do with them and let her go. So, on August 29, she left Dodgeville on the train.2 From there, she disappeared.
Wright:
He responded in a few ways. First, he refused to see his family:
A horrible loneliness began to clutch me, but I longed for no one I ever loved or that I had ever known…. My children—I had welcomed them always—but I did not want them now. They had been so faithfully kind in my extremity. I shall never forget.
But strange faces were best and I walked among them.3
Then, he writes further about his life with her: “I could see forward but I could not see backward.“3
Additionally, he wrote that he did not “turn back” or stop “to mourn”, but tucked memories with Mamah away for “years to come”. And that it was as if Mamah hadn’t “really lived at all.”
Therefore,
Wright appears to have suffered from “Complicated grieving”, which can occur following violent death.4
For this reason, complicated grieving can also explain his decision to embark on a romantic relationship with Miriam Noel soon after meeting her in late 1914.
Moreover, when he worked on the Imperial Hotel, Wright,
… wanted to get away from the United States. I still imagined one might “get away” from himself. In spite of all my reasoning power and returning balance I was continually expecting some terrible blow to strike. 5
Wright’s son, John:
was with his father when he found about the fire and rode the train with him to Spring Green.
One chapter in his book, My Father, Frank Lloyd Wright,6 is “REFLECTION”. There he wrote his thoughts on his father and Mamah’s relationship, and how he changed after her murder:
Something in him died with her, a something lovable and gentle that I knew and loved in my father. As I reflect now I am convinced that the love that united them was deep, sincere and holy in spite of its illegality—I am convinced that the woman for whom he left home was of noble character.
John’s observations go deeper and I think they need to be included here:
Through the years they lived their life together Dad was free to express his love and attention to his children. After the tragedy it was not so. Up to that time he lived life fully. After that time he seemed to have no protection domestically whatsoever, reveling in an intoxication of freedom he could never know. He was wide open for anything that might come his way, restless, frustrated. He seemed to be making an effort to live in the varying and shifting scenes of his domestic life, but a self-forcing, so to speak—trying always to make it what he would like to have it through showmanship and penmanship. Only architecturally was he able to hold his own.7
Published August 4, 2025.
A.S. Rockwell took the photograph at the top of this post on the day of, or the day after, the fire. The photograph is 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.
Notes:
1. Meryl Secrest. Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1992), 400.
2. Ron McCrea, Building Taliesin: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Home of Love and Loss (Wisconsin Historical Society Press, Madison, Wisconsin, 2012), 196.
3. Frank Lloyd Wright. An Autobiography (Longmans, Green and Company, London, New York, Toronto, 1932), 191.
4. The violence can be actual, criminal violence, or through accident or suicide. Complicated grief in those bereaved by violent death: the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder on complicated grief, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3384450/ The information about complicated grief is part of the research I undertook while exploring the nightmare for loved ones that must have occurred after the murders.
5. An Autobiography, 194.
6. John Lloyd Wright. My Father, Frank Lloyd Wright (originally published as My Father Who is on Earth, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1946; Dover Publications, Inc., New York; 1992). I’ve quoted from John’s book in my post about Taliesin’s first fire, and in “How Did Frank Lloyd Wright Feel About Christmas?“
7. My Father, Frank Lloyd Wright, 85.
