Catching Up on All Things Wright

© Mark Hertzberg (2023)

It seems like more than a month since I last posted, but, a month it is, almost to the day. Today is catch-up day, with a variety of things for you.

First (and most important?!) are my latest photos of our dear friend Minerva Montooth. I had the pleasure of chatting with her June 30 when I was taking another Road Scholar group – my 14th since 2017 – to Taliesin, at the end of their week-long Wright adventure in Illinois and Wisconsin (I am with them for the three days in Wisconsin). I will post a link to this particular Road Scholar trip at the end of this article.

Minerva and her friend and assistant Renee

Minerva turned the tables on me with her phone camera:

Next, I am a few months late to the party, but I just finished an important book about the Jacobs houses in Madison and Middleton. It is published by OA+D:

https://store.oadarchives.org/product/frank-lloyd-wright-s-jacobs-houses-experiments-in-modern-living-pre-order

The book was edited by Neil Levine, and starts with an essay by him. Neil’s late wife was Susan Jacobs Lockhart who grew up in the two houses. Hers is one of  six essays in the book (the others are by her sister Elizabeth and brother William, and by Michael Desmond) There are profiles of Herbert and Katherine Jacobs; first-person accounts of growing up in the houses; and compelling perspectives on the history and architectural significance of the two houses. There is also a rich collection of historic photos and of Wright’s drawings. I was particularly taken with the photos of the Madison house under construction, and shortly after, when it stood almost alone in the neighborhood.

Thirdly, Michael Schreiber of This American House, sent me a link to a “Reconsideration of William Cary (sic) Wright,” Wright’s father, by Hope Rogers, William Carey Wright’s great-granddaughter. The architect’s father has been given short-shrift in many accounts, wrongly portrayed as a thoughtless man who abandoned his family. One other recent setting straight of the record was Paul Hendrickson’s 2019 book Plagued by Fire. Here is a link to her telling of his story:

https://thisamericanhouse.com/the-architects-father-a-reconsideration-of-william-cary-wright-the-father-of-frank-lloyd-wright/

And, finally, mentioning Paul Hendrickson is also a way to segue into my last offering for this article. He recently attended a conference at the Embassy Suites by Hilton Rosemont hotel near Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. We were going to meet at the hotel and he emailed me that he was anxious to show me a variety of homages to Wright in the hotel. They are like fish out of water, with no apparent context. After all, the hotel was near the airport, not in Oak Park in River Forest where acknowledging Wright would have been a logical. Regrettably, the manager of the hotel has not had the courtesy to return a number of calls over several weeks, calls in which I had hoped to learn the genesis of the Wright decorations. So, here with no explanation, are some photos from the lobby and one of the ballrooms:

Road Scholar Illinois /  Wisconsin: Architectural Masterworks of Frank Lloyd Wright:

https://www.roadscholar.org/find-an-adventure/22976/Architectural-Masterworks-of-Frank-Lloyd-Wright

What’s next? “Only the Shadow knows,” as was said on the long-ago radio program. I rarely know in advance what and when the next posting will be. Stay tuned, and in the meantime, scroll down for previous articles.

Wright Books + 1 + 1

© Mark Hertzberg (2023)

Sometimes the night does things to you. I woke up at 4:30 this morning reconsidering my last post in terms of what I wrote about Elizabeth Wright Heller’s book, The Architect’s Sister – The Story of My Life (Brushy Creek Publishing Co.: Iowa City, 2019). There are arguably two ways to interpret the title, and it occurs to me that I did it wrong. I took it to mean the book would tell us about “The Architect,” which it does not do in much detail. It does tell us in vivid detail about Frank Lloyd Wright’s star crossed father, William Carey Wright. And that is important in the canon of Wright.

William Carey Wright was both a musician – which is certainly something that led to Frank’s love of music – and a minister. Sadly he could not hold a pulpit long, and the family was itinerant. His first wife (Heller’s mother) died and his second marriage, to Anna, was a nightmare. I did not give enough weight to Heller’s description of Anna’s abuse of her. The divorce petition filed by William Carey Wright is chilling. The divorce left young Frank with his domineering mother.

We are as familiar with Frank and his flaws as we are with his architecture. We do not escape our childhoods. How much did Anna shape Frank’s personality? How much did she poison her son against his father?

While most of Heller’s book is about her life other than growing up, and she did not know Frank well, after rethinking my essay, I now recommend you read it to get a better understanding of Frank’s lesser known parent, the father we have been led to forget about.

Frank was drawn to Cecil Corwin when Frank moved to Chicago. They had a very close relationship. Corwin’s father, Eli, was also a preacher. He was pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Racine, Wisconsin from 1880 – 1888. Frank’s first commission in Racine was his unrealized 1901 commission to remodel Herbert and Flora Miles’ house. The commission had first gone to Corwin two years earlier. We do not know how Wright and Thomas P. Hardy met (the Hardy House, 1904/05 was Wright’s first realized commission in Racine), but it is entirely possible that it came about through the Corwin – Racine / Corwin – Wright connection. Two architects, two fathers who were preachers.

So, make it Wright Books  +1 + 1.

The Racine Heritage Museum will be mounting a long-term exhibit curated by Tim Samuelson that reprises his 2020 “Wright Before the Lloyd” exhibit in Elmhurst, Illinois. The emphasis on the Racine exhibit will be on Corwin and Wright. The museum is located just two blocks from the Henry Mitchell House (1894) which, though in Corwin’s name, is likely a collaboration between Corwin and Wright. Details will be announced.

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Wright Books: + 1

© Mark Hertzberg (2023)

How many books about Frank Lloyd Wright are enough, or too many?

When I ordered a copy of Jonathan Adams’s new book, Frank Lloyd Wright – The Architecture of Defiance (The University of Wales Press: Cardiff, 2023), I thought of something the late Sam Johnson, then Chairman Emeritus of SC Johnson, said to me when I showed him my “Wright in Racine” photo presentation and told him my idea for a book about Wright’s built and unbuilt work in Racine. Sam’s father, H.F. Johnson Jr. had commissioned Wright to design the SC Johnson buildings and Wingspread, among others, and Sam grew up in Wingspread. My heart sank when he said, “The world does not need another book about Frank Lloyd Wright.” Then he added, “But it does need a book about his work in Racine.”

I do not feel the need to read, much less own, every single book about Wright. So, does the World of Wright need yet another book about him? I would posit that it does need this one. Adams’s book is one of five Wright books I know of being published this year. It is the third in a series of books commissioned in 2016 by the Royal Society of Architects in Wales, exploring the architecture of Wales. It shines a bright light on Wright’s Welsh roots, and the family he grew from.

Much of the Wright history in the book is familiar to those of us in America who have had dozens of books about Wright at our disposal. We are not the primary audience for this book. Forget about the familiar people you correspond with in America about Wright and see at Wright conferences, because Defiance was commissioned and published in Wales, 5500 miles east of Taliesin. Taliesin is, of course, a Welsh word, an homage to Wright’s maternal ancestry in Wales. Wright also gave  Welsh names to the Bradley House (Glenlloyd) in Kankakee, Illinois, and to the Fred B. Jones estate (Penwern) on Delavan Lake, Wisconsin. The latter is particularly important to me; we will get to that shortly.

Many people can recite their Wright knowledge backwards, forward, and inside out, but how much do they know about what may have made Wright what he was? What do we know other than the old saws about his character flaws? We know that Wright’s mother, Anna (nee Hannah) came from Wales as a child with her parents, Mallie and Richard Lloyd Jones. Adams takes us in great detail through their arduous eight month journey from their Welsh homestead to Ixonia, Wisconsin. Their voyage and her pioneer life in Wisconsin molded her, and shaped who she would be as Wright’s mother.

Last year Mary Rogers sent me a copy of her great-grandmother Elizabeth Wright Heller’s book The Architect’s Sister – The Story of My Life (Brushy Creek Publishing Co.: Iowa City, 2019). Heller’s father was William Carey Wright, making her Frank Lloyd Wright’s half-sister. Heller writes about how her step-mother Anna Wright physically and emotionally abused her. She lived it, but Adams has a different take. Georgia Lloyd Jones Snoke, Wright’s first cousin, twice removed, offers this perspective, “The way Jonathan explored that portion of Anna’s life made Anna more, not less, human. To have achieved a prestigious teaching degree (at immense emotional and intellectual expense) and to have given it up for a mismatched marriage would have caused a brilliant and ambitious woman more than a little angst. Just how she took it out on her step children is—at best— questionable.” Heller’s recollections were written decades after they happened and long after Anna died. Is the truth with the person who lived it, recalling it years later, or not?

Snoke and I began corresponding with Adams two years ago because he was including Penwern in his book. I had relied on speculation from Wright scholar Jack Holzhueter in my book about Penwern that Wright had persuaded his American client Jones to name his estate after Pen-y-Wern, the Wright ancestral home in Wales (Frank Lloyd Wright’s Penwern: A Summer Estate – Wisconsin Historical Society Press: Madison, 2019). Snoke had kindly given me photos for the book that her husband, Kenneth Snoke, had taken of what they thought was Pen-y-Wern during one of the trips to Wales.

Adams contributes several important facts to our understanding of the Wisconsin Penwern. First, he documents a trip that Anna Wright and her daughter Maginel made to the ancestral home in 1900, concurrent with the design of Penwern. While there is no piece of paper that ties together the names Pen-y-Wern and Penwern, their visit adds significant weight to Holzhueter’s speculation about the origin of Penwern’s name. Second, he found documentation that there had been marshes near Delavan Lake. While I had written that “Penwern” can mean “at the head of the alder tree” and there were alder trees near the lake, Adams writes that, more accurately, the word means “above the marsh.”

And, finally, he documented that the Pen-y-Wern that the Snokes visited 20 years ago is not the one that Richard Lloyd and Mallie Jones emigrated from. He sent us a photo of the actual cottage, long since demolished. The photograph, taken from Chester Lloyd Jones’s 1938 book, Youngest Son, shows marshland below the cottage.

Mallie Jones, Courtesy of Georgia Lloyd Jones Snoke

The book jumps around chronologically, which perplexes me, but I did not let that become an obstacle to my reading. While the book is thoroughly and impressively researched and footnoted, I wish to set the record straight on two small points regarding Penwern. Adams names the steward of the estate as Frederick Jones. His name was Fred B. Jones, not Frederick. And, Adams speculates that Ward W. Willits (of Wright’s Willits House in Highland Park, Illinois) was an early visitor to Penwern. Willits and Jones worked together and I have placed Willits on Delavan Lake in 1895 and speculated that he suggested that Jones build his summer “cottage” there five years later, but his name was never mentioned in the extensive newspaper records of visitors to Penwern.

There are two ways to think of the title of Heller’s book. It is literally true. But it can be thought of as misleading, because there is scant reference to Wright himself. She was, literally, his half-sister, but while she writes about her apparently single visit to Taliesin, and about her father, and Wright’s and the family’s itinerant life while he was alive, the book is more her interesting life story than about Frank Lloyd Wright.

I am an avid bicyclist. Bicyclists often joke that if “X” is the number of bicycles one owns, “X + 1” is the ideal number of bicycles to own. Jonathan Adams’s book is worth a “+1” in the canon of Wright literature.

Scroll up for an updated reconsidered post about Heller’s book

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