What is the oldest part of Taliesin, part 3
Photo looking (plan) southwest at the fireplace area in the Taliesin drafting studio. I took this photo in 2005.
About 2 weeks ago I looked over my old blog entries while prepping for my overview(opens in new tab) on the entries I’ve posted over the years about the 1914 fire and murders at Taliesin,
And realized
that my 2 entries about its oldest parts
here:
https://keiranmurphy.com/what-is-the-oldest-part-of-taliesin-part-i/(opens in new tab)
and here:
https://keiranmurphy.com/what-is-the-oldest-part-of-taliesin-part-ii/(opens in new tab)
were incomplete.
So, I’ll add something new (or, old… you know what I mean) on this page today.
One feature from 1911 you can see today
is in Taliesin’s studio.
If you take a tour(opens in new tab), the stone mantel at its fireplace in his former studio is the same as what was there when he first built the home and studio.
To give you a sense, look at the 1911-12 photo of men in front of the fireplace taken by Wright’s draftsman Taylor Woolley(opens in new tab):
Taliesin workmen for in front of the fireplace in the studio. This is one of the photos put into “The Album(opens in new tab)” that was auctioned on Ebay(opens in new tab) in 2005. The deck you see above the mens’ heads matches the deck in the black and white photo below near the bottom of this page.
Although if you read the novel Loving Frank(opens in new tab), Nancy Horan imagined the “character” of Mamah taking a photograph of the men – not in the studio – but at the fireplace in Taliesin’s living room.
Here’s the excerpt of that scene:
One evening Mamah set up Frank’s camera in the living room and had the men pose….
When she peered through the camera, she regretted what the shutter couldn’t capture: the accents of Ireland and Norway and backwoods Wisconsin. The sweet, high longing of the flute. The scent of tobacco on the man, and sweat muffled under layers of wool…. Mamah knew then what she wanted to give Frank for Christmas. The men’s portrait would be one of a whole series of photographs for a photo album that would tell the story of Taliesin.
Loving Frank, by Nancy Horan (Ballantine Books, New York, 2007), 233-34.
Two things:
Given that I
EVEN I
was initially wrong on where the men sat, I don’t blame her.1
But I changed my mind after studying the config(opens in new tab)2 of the horizontal shelf above the men’s heads you see going into the stone. That didn’t show up in the photographs of the living room at that time that I knew.
Today’s living room fireplace also doesn’t match what was there in 1911, but I thought I might have a chance to find the config if I went to Wright’s old studio. So, I drove to Taliesin like I often did to study the stone(opens in new tab). One of those photos is below:
Looking (plan) south at the fireplace mantel. I took this in March, which explains the light blue line you see under the stone lintel(opens in new tab): they put rigid foam-core insulation there to slow down the warm air in the room escaping through the chimney.
Then in 2010,
reporter Ron McCrea was working on Building Taliesin: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Home of Love and Loss(opens in new tab). Ron started the book after discovering negatives of Taylor Woolley’s photographs at the Utah Historical Society. We met and he showed me the printouts, then later sent(opens in new tab) me electronic versions of them.
One of Woolley’s photographs I hadn’t seen before shows the config near the fireplace mantel, on its far left-hand side:
(opens in new tab)
(opens in new tab)
Looking plan west from Taliesin’s studio into the workroom (that room’s now known as the Front Office). The edge of the studio fireplace is on the extreme left. I also posted this in my post, “Don’t Touch That Stone(opens in new tab)“.
This is ID #695921 from the Taylor Woolley Photograph Collection at the Department of Cultural and Community Engagement in Utah. Published in Building Taliesin, p. 69.
This reminds me of how Ron, when he showed me the images, thought I was curiously nonplussed upon seeing them. I said something like, “Oh, yeah: I’ve seen these images before from the University of Utah.”
If you read the “The Album” post you’ll see I touched on this: that no one seemed to be listening to me when I tried to tell them these images matched those at the University of Utah. I finally convinced Ron when I sent a long email with text in bold and ALL CAPS explaining that and where I’d seen these prior to the Ebay auction. Then he got on writing the rest of the book.
Building Taliesin‘s out of print but check my link for it above to see where else you can find it. I wrote the captions for all of Woolley’s photos.
First posted August 27, 2026.
I took the photo at the top of this post over 21 years ago. DAYUM(opens in new tab).
Notes
1. Plus, I appreciated that she evidently went to the Wisconsin Historical Society for a special viewing of the images they had after they were shipped to the society. She seemed to care more about Taliesin than William Drennan(opens in new tab), author of Death in a Prairie House. I read the manuscript of his book (see SOUP(opens in new tab))) and saw the man didn’t know what Taliesin looked like during Taliesin I (he coulda just asked). Nancy and I had several conversations on the building (long after her book was published), and she knew Taliesin surprisingly well.
2. My shorthand for “configuration” up there reminds me of something my oldest sister(opens in new tab) asked me once: did I have words at my job that don’t make sense to other people. Although I think “config” can kind of be understood but maybe not by a general audience. One time a Taliesin House Steward(opens in new tab) told me that folks on my tour didn’t understand when I called the men who restore/preserve Taliesin “the Pres Crew”. I tried to remember to say “Preservation Crew” from then on.
