Tag: John Cheney

Taliesin August 1914 after first fire

The tendrils of Taliesin’s 1914 fire

Posted on | by keiran
Reading Time: 5 minutes

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.

Also, you can read my essay, “We lived–Richly” (about Mamah’s grave), from the April 2025 issue of Madison magazine.

And if you live near Prairie du Sac, I’m giving my “Myths of the 1914 Fire” lecture on August 21 at the Ruth Culver Community Library.

Taliesin August 1914 after first fire

Julian didn’t seal the entrances

Posted on | by keiran
Reading Time: 6 minutes

Albert Rockwell took this photograph on August 15, 1914. It shows Taliesin’s burned living quarters.

WARNING: My post includes descriptions of the extreme violence that took place during Taliesin’s 1914 fire. Additionally, contemporary news reports often refer to murderer Julian Carlton as “the negro”. I’ve removed that term for Carlton when the sentences are still comprehensible, but did keep it in areas.

In this post I am dissecting what I think is the biggest myth surrounding the August 15, 1914 fire and murders at Taliesin: that the murderer sealed all of the entrances and killed everyone as they ran out of Taliesin’s one unlocked door.

Read my post on the fire for the basics and information on those killed.

And I wrote a note near the bottom of this post (1) that lists the newspapers that repeated the myth in 1914. However, I want to address the “he sealed the doors to the house” myth first.

This myth derives from something that survivor William Weston said. Here’s Weston, in the Detroit Tribune on August 16:

“As each one put his head out,” said Weston, “the Negro struck, killing or stunning his victim. I was the last…” [ellipses included]

“The ax struck me in the neck and knocked me down, but left me conscious. I got up and ran, the Negro after me. Then I fell, and he hit me again. I guess he thought he had me, because he ran back to the window and I got up and ran. When I looked back he had disappeared.“

People gravitated to this statement:

“As each one put out his head…,” Carlton “struck, killing or stunning his victim. I was the last.”

However,

the other survivor, Herbert Fritz, gave a description that day which contradicts the myth. I copied his statement on what happened. The Chicago Daily Tribune first printed this on August 16:

“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.”

Showing where everyone sat that day:

I determined everyone’s location due to work by other Wright biographers, and the article in the August 20, 1914 edition of the Weekly Home News (the newspaper of Spring Green). The Home News had the best article on the fire and murders.

I wrote the room in which each person sat on the drawing from 1914, below. The words, “living room”, “porch” and “men’s dining room” appear on the actual drawing:

Taliesin floor plan after the 1914 fire.
The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York), 1104.010

One person (Herbert Fritz) escaped through the south window without being touched. On the other hand, Julian Carlton attacked two men (Brodelle and Wm. Weston) who exited on that same side (the arrow with “Men’s Dining Room” is pointing at the room’s south wall). Carlton also attacked three that came out of the door on the north side of the room (Thomas Brunker, David Lindblom, and Ernest Weston). The details about the attacks on those three are not known.

Looking at what happened and what Fritz and Weston said, it appears that Weston witnessed:

        1. Fritz jumping out of the window,
        2. Emil Brodelle next jumped through the same window, where Carlton struck him, then
        3. Weston jumped. Carlton almost fatally struck Weston, who must have also been on fire.

Regardless,

people interpreted Weston’s quote, that “[a]s each one put out his head,” as “everyone attacked that day came through one door with Carlton waiting on the other side.”

The Chicago Daily Tribune printed Herbert Fritz’s statements that, “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.” However, most other newspapers put the myth (the interpretation of Weston’s statements) into print. And newspapers often printed that Carlton locked all of the doors except for one.

Then, adding to the gruesomeness,

is the fiction that everyone at Taliesin stuck their heads out of Taliesin’s windows. In fact, the Chicago Daily Tribune states on August 16 that Carlton, “dashed at Weston and chopped at his head as the carpenter thrust it out the door.”

On that same day, the Decatur Daily Review wrote that Borthwick: “was the first to put her head through the window to escape the intense heat.” And that Carlton “struck her down with one blow, crushing her skull.”

Yet, no one saw Carlton attacking her, or her children.

The October 4, 1914 issue of the Washington Post has this:

Mamah Borthwick made a dash through the window. As she went out a hatched[sic] crashed into her head. Her innocent little son jumped after his mother. He, too, was killed by the hatchet. Then the daughter jumped. She was stricken down. One by one the guests jumped out, not knowing what had happened to the others. Each one was struck down. When the murderer was finished six lay dead and three wounded seriously.

The particularly violent and horrific narrative that the murderer stood outside of the one unlocked door is consistent in the contemporary news stories. And this, while even Nancy Horan wrote in Loving Frank that three of the victims—Mamah Borthwick and her children, John and Martha Cheney—sat in the terrace off Taliesin’s living room.

You can see where people sat in the drawing I put above.

This narrative stays because it’s so grisly.

In addition, in 1914, it was conveniently racist: of course, a fiendish Black man killed all those people. But, even more so, he did it with superhuman (animal?) speed and cruelty.

This detail, then, has been written in biographies and historical books. I didn’t start to get closer to this until I thought I really needed to read the primary sources.

That was when I realized people writing in 1914 were wrong about things at the time. Of course they were! On August 15 and 16, 1914, they were there, taking notes while trying to make sense of a pile of burning rubble that had once been a house. One that most had never seen before.

First published August 12, 2022.

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.

Notes:

1 Newspapers where the myth was first printed:
The Chicago Daily Tribune, Aug. 16; the Decatur Daily Review, Aug. 16; the Detroit Tribune, Aug. 16; the Daily Clintonian, Aug. 17; the Des Moines Daily Review, Aug. 18; the Richland Democrat, Aug. 19; the Waterloo Evening Courier, Aug. 19; the Winchester Journal, Aug. 19 and the Camden Record on Aug.. 20 (both of which reprinted the Clintonian news report); and, repeated from the Judson News story is the Wanatah Mirror and the Westville Indicator of Aug. 20, the Monon News and most of the story in the Roann Clarion on Aug. 21; Spring Green’s newspaper, the Weekly Home News on Aug. 20 (which otherwise is probably the best reporting of the 1914 fire and murders); and the Washington Post on October 4.