- Tonight, it's my honor
to be able to introduce Mark Hertzberg.
Mark was here last May, so if you were able to attend,
you're familiar with his awesome photography.
If not, you're in for a treat tonight.
He is the author and photographer
of three books about Frank Lloyd Wright's
work in Racine, and he has a new book coming out
in the spring of 2019, that is focusing on a topic that
we're here to learn about tonight, Penwern,
and Fred Jones, the man who commissioned
Frank Lloyd Wright to design and build
this summer place on Lake Delavan.
And that book is being published
by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press,
I have to put a plug in for them.
And again, it will be published in the spring of 2019.
The book is based on four years
of extensive primary source research
in Illinois, New York, and Wisconsin,
including visits to Jones's hometown
of Pittsfield, Illinois.
Besides being an author, Mark chronicled daily life
in Racine for the Journal Times for 33 years.
First as a staff photographer,
and then as Director of Photography.
He took an early retirement from the newspaper in 2012.
He's a native of New York City,
he graduated from Lake Forest College
with a BA in International Relations.
He serves as secretary and newsletter editor
for Frank Lloyd Wright Wisconsin,
and he's an avid, year-round bicyclist.
He and his wife, Cindy, enjoy traveling
and spending time with their two sons and two grandchildren.
And without further ado, I'll turn the podium
and microphone over to Mark,
so that he can share his rich collection
of historic and contemporary photos of Penwern with us.
Welcome.
(applause)
- Thank you, Bridget,
and thank you everyone for coming this evening.
A lot of people who are familiar with
Frank Lloyd Wright's work,
have focused only on his year-round
urban and suburban homes.
Not much attention has been paid to the work that he did
summer cottages, lakefront properties and so on.
He designed about 50 lakefront properties,
summer cottages, boathouses, and so on.
Most of them were the earlier part of the 20th century.
And about half of those were realized.
Delavan Lake is a particularly rich gathering
of Frank Lloyd Wright commissions.
There were five homes that were built
for Chicago business men between 1900 and 1905.
There was a Yacht Club that was built,
and several unrealized commissions.
Where you see number six on the map
is where Penwern, the Fred Jones estate, was built.
Fred Jones was an interesting man.
He was born in Pittsfield, Illinois,
which is an hour and a half west of Springfield.
And after high school, he left and went to Chicago,
and he took a job for six dollars a week.
That's $143 a week today,
with the Adams and and Westlake Company.
It was a very large manufacturing concern.
They made cameras and bicycles,
two things I care about,
kitchenware, brass beds, but their bread and butter,
their most important products
was hardware for steamship companies,
and for railroads, and streetcar companies.
So they did the headlamps, the door handles,
the coat racks, and things like that.
If you're driving into Chicago,
and if you come in on the Kennedy,
you exit on Ohio Street,
as you get to the bottom of the ramp,
look across Orleans Street, and you'll see the remnants
of the large manufacturing complex.
So Jones started at six dollars a week
at age 19 as a stock clerk.
Became what they called a commercial traveler,
a traveling salesman.
By age 40, when he commissioned Penwern,
he was the managing director of the company.
He then became secretary,
he retired as vice-president of the company
at age 50 in 1908.
Two years later, his stock in today's dollars
was worth 10 million dollars.
Jones was a bachelor,
but he was apparently a very friendly person.
It took, as Bridget mentioned,
this was a four-and-a-half-year research project,
and it was about three years before I saw
the first adjectives that described Jones.
Other than that, we just had the nouns,
the dry facts of his life.
Eric O'Malley, who some of you may be familiar
with his old Prairie Mod website,
it's now Wright Society,
found an article in an 1888 St. Paul, Minnesota newspaper,
and there was a column about the commercial travelers,
the traveling salesmen.
And fortunately for us, they decided to do
an extensive write up about Mr. Jones,
and they had a sketch of him, he's in his 30s.
I'm gonna read a little bit of it.
"One of the heavyweights of the profession is Fred B. Jones,
"representing the Adams and Westlake Company of Chicago.
"He tips the beam at 215 pounds,
"and he appears to increase in upward dupois each year."
Incidentally, in terms of research,
I have his death certificate and his passport application.
We know how tall he was.
I tried to find an autopsy report
to find out his weight,
and this was the only indication we found.
There's no autopsy report for 1933 anymore.
So this is St. Paul, Minnesota.
He's a traveling salesman, evidently, living in a hotel.
"For the past 13 years, he's been on the road
"for the firm which he represents.
"His specialty being lighting materials
"and trimmings for car interiors,
"and his jolly face is like a sunbeam in any assemblage.
"Fred was born in the Sucker State--"
that's what Illinois used to be called--
"31 years ago, and after leaving school at the age of 18,
"he started out as a commercial traveler,
"and has proven himself a very successful one.
"He makes his headquarters in this city,
"and his territory embraces the great railroad centers,
"such as Omaha, Denver, Kansas City,
"St. Louis, and Milwaukee,
"and among railroad magnates, he's a universal favorite."
And the next paragraph is very important,
because it's thought that Jones' built Penwern
in large part, to entertain his friends.
To have a summer place to entertain his friends.
"In addition to his business qualifications,
"he's a good storyteller,
"and many an evening that would otherwise prove
"tedious and dry is whiled away listening to
"his inexhaustible fund of anecdotes."
There are only about three or four pictures of Jones
that we've been able to find.
This is the only one of him known to exist at Penwern,
the summer cottage that he commissioned.
And this is probably taken in the mid 20s
when he was about 65 years old.
Jones never married. He was a world traveler.
He started traveling before he was 40 years old.
We found albums, there's the one in the upper left,
the trip to the Orient in 1899.
And my wife's incredible sleuthing job
found the upper right, the pictures below,
Fred B. Jones around the world cruise,
the SS Resolute in 1924.
Most of the photographs in these four albums
were probably taken by a shipboard photographer.
They're the equivalent of postcards.
And presumably a shipboard photographer
would take the pictures, process them onboard
and you would buy them from him.
We have two pictures of Jones.
The one on the left, he's in a wheelchair,
and somebody at the Walworth County Historical Society
found in the microfilm a notice in 1924,
when he was on the around the world trip,
that he broke his leg in Egypt.
And we have the picture next to that,
you see the man in the white pith helmet?
Just to the right of center?
And that's Mr. Jones, and if you go up the second row
from the top, the woman in the dark dress
is Dora Mortimer.
Dora Mortimer is the mystery woman in Fred Jones life.
Somebody in the audience asked what can you tell us about Fred Jones?
Jones was a bachelor, never married.
His brother had gone to Yale, Jones didn't go to school,
beyond high school education.
His brother first married Sara or Sally Bunn.
The Bunn family was said
to be the wealthiest family in Illinois at the time.
She died, he became the assistant Postmaster General
of the United States, to President Grover Cleveland.
When he remarried in 1912,
he made the newspapers across the country.
He married Ulysses Grant's the Fourth's daughter.
Fred, by contrast, they were close but Fred never married.
Now we can't discern exactly
what the nature of his relationship was
with Dora Mortimer.
We know from the 1900 census in Chicago that she was single.
We know from the 1910 census in Chicago
that she was a widow.
We know from a passport application in the 20s
that she was married to Henry Ruben Mortimer.
We can find no record of the marriage,
no record of his death, but there's a microfilm note.
One of the things that was invaluable in research
were the social notes of the two Delavan newspapers.
And they often mention who visited who,
on the lake during the summer.
That extensive social notes
between Memorial Day and Labor Day.
And we know in 1904
that Mr. and Mrs. H.R. Mortimer visited Penwern.
One notice in one newspaper
said that Mrs. Mortimer was Jones's cousin. That's not true.
She's been referred to as a housekeeper.
We don't know if that's true.
Somebody who was in her 80s recalled to Jack Holzhueter
that Mrs. Mortimer took care of the big house on the estate.
She may have been somewhat of a housekeeper.
We know that they traveled together to the Orient.
We know they went around the world together.
We know they were on the same ship,
can't find cabin records.
I don't know if they were in the same cabin.
His last home in Chicago, the late 20s till he died in 1933,
was the Parkway Hotel in Chicago.
He had a suite of rooms at the north end of the 7th floor.
It included a small apartment for his cook.
Mrs. Mortimer had a small apartment at the south end.
So we don't know.
She worked for him, social companion,
did they have a romantic relationship?
The other possibility that some people have suggested
is that he may have been gay.
That she was cover for a gay lifestyle.
And most of the people who visited Penwern were male.
So we have this picture of the two of them
during this trip around the world,
and in 1933 when Jones died,
he left very generous gifts to many charities,
to relatives and so on.
Also, to some former employees.
And in the will he said,
I know that I'm leaving some relatives out.
That's being done intentionally.
We know for example, one cousin was left out
because he was an adulterer.
So Fred Jones took care of the man's wife and the children,
but not the cousin.
And five cousins sued and they said in their lawsuit
they said that Mrs. Mortimer had exerted undue influence
on Fred Jones, feeble-minded and so,
but those are assertions that somebody is going to make in a lawsuit.
And part of the bone of contention
is that Fred Jones left her $100,000 trust fund
and the diamond ring I wear.
So he died, 1933.
He also left her the contents of his apartment
and at Penwern, except for his library.
He and his brother who predeceased him by two years,
had 5,000 books and they left 'em
to the library in Fred's hometown,
and they gave Pittsfield $25,000 to build an annex
for the book collection.
So some of the questions that were important
to try to find out were why Jones built on Delavan Lake,
and how did he and Frank Lloyd Wright meet?
There is a complete dearth of correspondence
between Frank Lloyd Wright and his early clients.
There's a very rich collection from the later clients,
but there's nothing, virtually nothing,
from the early 20th century, the early clients.
I don't think that they were lost
in the fire at Taliesin in 1914,
as some people have suggested,
because most of the drawings survived.
And Eric O'Malley suggests
that until Eugene Masselink came along,
Frank Lloyd Wright did not have an effective secretary.
Maybe he thought there was no reason
to keep all the correspondence.
Why did Jones build on Delavan Lake?
Imagine what life is like in the middle of Chicago
in a terribly hot summer.
And 1900 was a brutal summer according the newspaper files.
People were dying in the streets and so on.
So there's no air conditioning, there are no electric fans.
People are cooking with coal,
so you've got coal dust even on a hot summer day.
Horses are a primary means of transportation.
Horses leave gifts in the street,
which become a little more troublesome in the hot weather.
Horses die in the street.
I mean, there are just a lot of unpleasant aspects,
and if you've got the means, which Jones had by then,
you're gonna look for a summer place.
And Delavan Lake was a very popular resort.
The 1809s, there were art classes,
through the art institute in Delavan,
and there were several large resort hotels on Delavan Lake.
So how did he and Wright meet?
There's a list of names I've presented there.
Henry H. Wallis is one of the most important.
Wallis was in the hardware business,
and for a while he worked for a company,
Delavan Lake was part of his territory.
And among other things, he sold knives that fishermen used.
At some point, Wallis opened his own hardware store,
on Lake Street in downtown Chicago.
And he opened a real estate sales business near there,
selling land on the lake.
He sold at least a hundred lots
on the south shore of Delavan Lake.
So if you bought property on Delavan Lake,
chances are you bought it from Henry Wallis.
The woman who interviewed, talked to Wallis's widow
before she died in 1950, and Mrs. Wallis told her
that Wright was fond of Henry Wallis
and whenever Henry sold a piece of property,
Wright would give him a little memento.
We have no idea what that was.
So Wallis grew up in Oak Park, Illinois.
Went to Oak Park high school and one of his classmates
was Thomas H. Gale, which doesn't by itself mean anything.
But when Wallis got married around 1895,
he had only 25 guests at his wedding.
So presumably he was very close
to the people he invited to his wedding.
One of the guests was Thomas H. Gale.
The early part of Wright's career,
when he was working for Adler and Sullivan,
he wasn't supposed to have private commissions.
But he designed what are called the bootleg homes.
They were put in the name of Cecil Corwin, his good friend.
He hid the commissions from Louis Sullivan, for a while.
And Thomas H. Gale was one of Wright's first clients, 1892.
George Furbeck was another one.
Furbeck and Gale were also members of a club in Oak Park
that Wallis belonged to.
So you have these little connections
that may have led Henry Wallis to Frank Lloyd Wright.
Orlando Giannini designed,
painted some murals for Frank Lloyd Wright
at Wright's home and studio in Oak Park.
Giannini was a foreman in the shop at Adams and Westlake,
Jones's company, for a few years.
We however, don't have anything that ever puts Giannini
in the executive suite at Adams and Westlake.
Somebody wrote in a scholarly piece a few years ago
that Giannini introduced Ward Willits,
who we'll get to in a moment, to Frank Lloyd Wright,
but there's no documentation of that.
And the last piece of the puzzle is Ward Willits,
and Ward Willits was one step above Fred Jones
on the executive ladder at Adams and Westlake.
So when Jones is Secretary of the company,
Ward Willits is the Vice President.
When Jones is Vice President before he retires,
Ward Willits is the President.
And incidentally, around 1902, Willits commissions
his own Frank Lloyd Wright home,
a very well-known home on Sheridan Road in Highland Park.
Ward Willits vacationed on Delavan Lake in June of 1895.
And there are two letters we have copies of
that he sent to his mother.
We have these courtesy of Willit's grandson, Peter Burnside.
If any of you are baseball fans,
Burnside was a major league pitcher.
Pitched for the New York Giants,
Baltimore Orioles, Detroit Tigers.
He told me that he gave up more home runs
to Roger Maris the record setting year,
than any left-handed pitcher.
So one of the letters Willits writes back to his mother
and says I'm having a phenomenal time.
I'm gonna stay here, I was gonna go elsewhere
for the rest of the vacation.
I've got hemorrhoids, I'm sunburned,
but the fishing is terrific and I'm staying here.
So it's entirely possible
that when Jones said to Willits and other people
I want to build a summer home, that Willits suggested
that he look at Delavan Lake.
This is Henry Wallis
and this is a land sales brochure
that Wallis put together in 1895.
There was an earlier version
which I haven't been able to get hold of,
and you can see the one in the upper right.
H.H. Wallis sales, all in the uppercase,
Delavan Lake Property.
And it's a lovely little brochure
and he sold over a hundred lots on the lake.
Wallis had a cottage on the lake,
before he met Frank Lloyd Wright,
and he called the area Wallisia.
And this is a sign that Wright designed for him,
for that area.
And it is thought that Frank Lloyd Wright
designed what is called the Wallis Gate House.
That's the structure on the right.
Which is at the entry to that property.
Again, the cottage that Wallis had
is pre-Frank Lloyd Wright.
There is no documentation that Wright designed it,
but people do think he did.
There's a plaque that declares that,
we don't know where that comes from, it says 1897.
Brian Spencer, an architect who's researched
a lot of the lake history, thinks it's 1893.
The reason for that, Wallis's mother and family were German
and there were German language newspapers from 1893
found a couple of decades ago, in the walls as insulation.
So that brings us to 1893.
And the Wallis gate house looks
a lot like Wright's Nathan Moore house,
which you see in the two pictures on the left.
The Nathan Moore house, this is the second incarnation.
Originally built in 1895,
largely damaged in a fire 1923 and rebuilt.
So there are similarities there.
These are some historic pictures of the Wallis gate house
and the fence to the left of the door,
the board battened fence,
is similar to one at Wright's home and studio in Oak Park.
And here there's another version
with lovely chicken-wire fencing.
[laughter]
Wright did design a boathouse for Wallis
at the non-Wright cottage, again this is the property
that had the Wallis gate house in front of it.
The boat house, designed in 1897,
and it was demolished sometime prior to 1939.
In 1900, Wright designed a home for Wallis,
and Wallis sold it almost immediately,
to the GoodSmith brothers,
and the capital S in GoodSmith is not a typo.
That's how the name is spelled.
One of the things I was trying to do,
researching the book, was primary research,
not accept what's been written.
One of the things that's been written
is that Wallis sold the house to the GoodSmith brothers
because he was despondent over the death
of their only child, their daughter.
Sold the house in 1900,
their daughter died in the late 1920s
so there's no correlation between those.
The porch that you see facing the lake
is a later addition to the house.
It's a bit of a nautical theme, you see on the left side,
what looks a bit like the prow of a ship.
This is a clubhouse proposal that Wright designed
at Wallis's behest in 1902, so Wallis was quite a patron
of Frank Lloyd Wright, and in 1902 there's a yacht club
that Wallis asked for.
He and Fred Jones were members
of the Delavan Lake Yacht Club.
The yacht club was demolished in 1916.
The yacht club had merged with the new golf club
and they built a new clubhouse,
non-Frank Lloyd Wright, across the road.
Jones was Wright's second client on the lake.
And the estate was built between 1900 and 1903.
The property was originally about eight acres.
It's now about five acres.
The drawings for the house and boathouse
are dated, I'm sorry, October 1900.
The gate lodge and the stable are from 1903.
The drawing stable was built in 1904.
There were two non-Wright additions, which you'll see,
put on the house by Jones.
They were removed in 1994,
and as we look at this map,
the bottom of the map shows the road, South Shore Drive.
And that's the east side of the property.
So the first building, number one,
is the gate lodge.
That's the only part of the estate
that you could see from the road.
Number two is the stable.
Number three is the main house.
Number four is the boat house.
There are questions about the origin of the name Penwern
and it's been written and repeated a number of times
that Penwern is Gaelic for Great House.
I googled a Gaelic-English dictionary.
Penwern didn't come up.
I called up the Irish consulate,
they said it's not a Gaelic word.
Jack Holzhueter, who many people
at the Wisconsin Historical Society know, a great scholar.
[unintelligible] said it's Welsh or Cornish.
I talked to the Welsh, the National Library of Wales.
They said it's indeed a Welsh word
and it can mean at the head of the alder tree.
But Jack went one step further.
He put me in touch with Georgia Snoke,
who lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma,
who's Wright's first cousin, twice removed. [laughter]
Bridget can tell you, Jack is an incredible resource.
Wright was very fond of his mother.
His maternal grandmother grew up
in this cottage called Penwern, in Wales.
The family had emigrated from Wales.
And so, Jack suggested that Wright possibly
gets his American client Jones,
to honor his mother's, Jones family,
with the name of his estate.
It has been written that Fred Jones was related to Wright,
because of the Jones name.
There's no truth to that, whatsoever.
But this is likely where the name came from.
There are 17 surviving drawings of Penwern,
and we're very fortunate to have these.
The reason why some may not exist,
the north and south sides of the house are missing.
Again, I don't think they were lost in the fire,
and Wright himself wrote
about having thrown out some drawings.
Not necessarily of Penwern, he's talking about Unity Temple,
but that he regretted throwing out some drawings.
And it's also possible that when he moved from Oak Park
to Taliesin, 1911, 1912,
that some drawings got lost in the transition.
So here we have a view of the east side of the house.
If you look all the way to the left in the drawing,
you see an open porch.
That was taken down when Jones put on one of the additions,
and you'll see the additions later.
Sue and John Major became the stewards of Penwern.
I don't like the word owners, in 1994.
And one of the first things they did
was to take the additions down.
And they replicated on a slightly larger footprint,
that open porch.
They did have it enclosed, as a year-round room,
first for their children, now it's a family room.
What you see slightly to the right of middle
in the photograph, is a tower.
And Jones entertained many, many people
many, many times at Penwern.
And there's a card playing room in that tower.
Wright called the tower the Pavilion.
And men only, men didn't have to leave the card game
when the call of nature came,
there was a urinal built into the wall
that drained to just outside.
The urinal is now in storage in the stable.
This is the west side of the house,
the lake is to our left.
All the way to the right again,
you can see what was the open porch
and is now an enclosed family room.
The additions that Jones put on the house
were on the east side, so that's the side you saw
coming in from the road that's to your right.
And, I'm sorry the south side,
and here on the west side which is facing us,
and in the middle you see the dining room.
and the addition, the windows in the middle,
there are four across, two below it.
Those windows were covered up by the addition.
Just extraordinary that Jones did that.
This is the lake side of the house.
It's arguably the front of the house.
That's called the front porch.
You see the Pavilion, card playing room, to your left.
The drawing below is extraordinary.
I've got a good friend in Racine, Robert Hartmann.
He's an architectural designer,
and Bob helped me with research.
He figured out some extraordinary things about Penwern
and we didn't have drawings of the north, this side,
and south sides of the house.
Bob took it upon himself to make drawings
in the style of those drawings of Frank Lloyd Wright,
of what Wright's drawings would have looked like.
So at the bottom is Bob's extraordinary
two-month old drawing of the lake side,
the north side of Penwern.
And this is the south side,
Bob's extraordinary drawing of that.
So this is the view when you come in from the road,
when you come down the driveway.
The arched porte-cochere, the covered walkway above it,
that goes to the card playing room in the tower.
Wright often reprised design elements.
So you notice the arched porte-cochere
is a prominent feature of the house.
In the bottom right is Wright's first proposal
to Henry Wallis, for what became the Wallis-GoodSmith house
and you see an arched porte-cochere there.
It was not executed there.
That drawing is dated September, 1900.
It's a month earlier than the only dated drawing
for the Penwern main house.
Above that, the sunset picture is Penwern.
To the left, bottom left, is one of the Gerts cottages
in Whitehall, Michigan, about an hour from Grand Rapids,
little summer cottage and you have the same idea
in the archway over the little brook, below the porch.
And that's a couple of years after Penwern, excuse me.
Back to the Wallis- GoodSmith house,
the house is built, except for the open porch
which is added later, in the upper right.
In Wright's drawing, the upper left.
Bob Hartmann wasn't satisfied
just looking at the drawing and taking it at face value.
He noticed something that nobody else had noticed.
And he noticed the faint outline of a covered walkway
over the porte-cochere and of a tower.
And so the drawing on the bottom,
is Bob having enhanced that drawing and filled in the lines.
So we don't know whether Frank Lloyd Wright, excuse me,
A- proposed or thought of proposing the tower,
the covered walkway and so on to Henry Wallis,
or as Wright is known to have done at least one other time,
whether he's using as scratch paper,
one of the Wallis drawings,
and sketching out ideas for Jones.
So either or, we don't know.
This is the floor plan of the main house,
and you'll notice the three curved porches,
top and bottom, of the side porches east and west side
and all the way to the right, is that front porch.
There are curved walls, but they seem to have been built
with straight walls.
Bob, we were talking about this for years and years,
Bob is the one who noticed on the drawing,
very faint straight lines.
See those?
And Bob theorizes that either Wright figured out
or somebody said to him, you can't build this easily
with the curved walls, it's just not gonna work.
And so Wright then draws those straight lines on the porches
and that's how they were built.
And again, hats off to Bob.
It's one of the things he figured out.
John O'Shea, who was steward of Penwern from 1989 to 1994,
rebuilt the front porch, the big porch to the right
with the curved wall and Sue and John Major
have the side porches rebuilt three years ago.
And you'll notice one of the lovely things,
one of the design elements that ties together
parts of the estate are the curved lines.
The three curved porches, the curved porte-cochere,
and look on the right, this dramatic 28-foot-long arch,
spanning the front porch.
The house, incidentally,
was originally stained dark green or dark brown.
All the lake cottages on Delavan Lake
were apparently that color,
suggestive of the rustic setting that they had.
This is the view, we're getting to another curved element,
something Bob Hartmann figured out again.
We're at the gate lodge, again the only part of the estate
that you see from the road.
And I've wondered, the gate lodge is not built till 1903.
The house is built in 1901.
Jones moves into it in June 1901.
Try to imagine, I don't know what the approach
to the estate was, without the gate lodge,
and the house is so far down in the distance.
You're arriving horse drawn carriage or something like that,
but it's hard to imagine without the gate lodge.
And the little structure that you see,
with the boulder walls in the upper pictures,
is the water tower adjacent to the gate lodge.
And Bob noticed on one of the drawings,
you look to the right of the drawing, lo and behold,
there's a curved wall there.
But only half that wall exists now,
as you can see in the two photos on top.
So Bob mentioned this to Sue and John Major,
Sue and John Major had an excavation done last fall.
They have found the foundation of the missing part of the wall.
The wall is gonna be rebuilt.
They're just absolutely
extraordinary stewards of the property.
This is a boulder bridge, little bit of an arch
on the bottom, that leads to the main house.
There are very broad eaves.
The house is not prairie style,
in terms of a quick look at it.
As you know, the urban and suburban homes of his,
of the era, but there are prairie style elements.
He uses casement windows.
They're much better for ventilation.
As opposed to double hung windows,
which he called guillotines.
And it's got broad eaves.
One of the other things you're going to see,
in some of the photographs,
is a slope in the ridge-line of the roof.
This is a Japanese touch,
and it's in three of the four buildings at Penwern.
He also did that in the Bradley and Hickox houses,
1900 in Kankakee, Illinois.
I love this window, the upper picture.
And this is a view on the inside.
It's at the head of the back stairway.
And think back to what lighting is like
in 1900, so my thought is,
this helps illuminate the hallway
as people come up the back stairs and go to the bedrooms.
You come into Penwern, through an extraordinarily wide door.
And, not necessarily because Jones was a stout man,
the Bradley house has a very wide front door also.
Both are arguably on the side of the house,
Bradley and Penwern, they're under the porte-cochere,
you come in under the porte-cochere.
And you may be familiar, people refer
to compression and release or the path of discovery,
as Wright brings you into his buildings.
And this is the path of discovery
in the main house at Penwern.
We've just come in the front door.
He doesn't wall you off from the rooms.
You can look into the living room on the right,
and to the center and left center,
you're looking into the dining room.
To the right, right around the corner, is the billiard room.
There are no walls separating any of this.
Patrick Mahoney, an architect, Wright scholar in Buffalo,
instrumental in helping restore Graycliff,
Darwin Martin's summer cottage there,
observes that most homes have two public rooms.
Dining room and a living room.
Penwern had three public rooms, dining room,
living room and the billiard room.
Jones was a member of the Chicago Athletic Association.
I think it's 16 South Michigan.
Now it's a phenomenal boutique hotel,
and I urge you to go in there,
if not just for Steak n' Shake on the ground floor.
But go upstairs and the original billiards room is there
and the lounge, and you imagine these captains of industry.
This is not an ethnically diverse or gender diverse crowd,
but these captains of industry,
with their after dinner drinks,
clouds of smoke, male banter.
Try to imagine these men in their social club.
And Jones lived there for a while,
he was head of the billiards committee,
he was on the board of directors.
So we're back inside, we're in the living room now,
and you can look into the billiard room off to the right.
The black and white pictures you're going to see
in the corners are period pictures.
We don't know of the exact date,
but from Jones's time there.
The only furnishings that we know that Wright designed,
are a liquor cabinet in the billiard room,
and the dining room hutch in the gate lodge
in the main cottage itself.
You see in the center, right behind that sailboat,
there's a landing for the stairs.
We'll talk about that shortly.
That to me is a special space.
And, if you see to the billiard room,
and above that is an open balcony.
You keep going to the left, that takes you to the Pavilion,
to the card playing room.
This is an open balcony that overlooks the living room
and the billiard room,
and takes you to the bedrooms of the house.
This is looking into the living room again,
wonderful fireplace, Roman brick fireplace.
And this is the landing on the staircase.
Wright could have, presumably,
designed a conventional staircase in a couple of sections.
But he's got several landings here, that to me,
in my mind, have a purpose.
You come down in the morning,
you're going to stop at this landing
if somebody's in the living room,
one of your weekend guests, you're gonna talk to them.
Maybe pause to look out at the lake.
And if you're going up to bed before some of the other guests,
you may stop, say goodnight to them, and so on.
And it's a place to pause and reflect.
This is the dining room.
To the left, if you look along the wall, past the fireplace,
you see the enormous front door.
And past the dining room table is the billiard room.
And you see that dining room hutch I mentioned to you,
There is a quote on the upper wall,
at the end of the dining room.
That's not from Frank Lloyd Wright.
Sue Major had it put there.
She was very fond of her late father,
and it was a favorite expression of his.
Looking the other way with the dining room.
So imagine, the addition that Jones put on in 1909,
that's covering those dining room windows.
It's unfathomable.
And if you look all the way to the left,
we see into the family room.
That's where that open porch had been.
This is the billiard room, another fireplace.
This is Jones master bedroom.
There was only one bathroom upstairs,
for five bedrooms originally.
Soon John Major remodeled,
so each room has its own bathroom.
The only upstairs fireplace until the additions were built,
was in this, the master bedroom.
This was the only sheet of drawings that exist,
Frank Lloyd Wright drawings, for the boathouse.
It's also dated October, 1900.
In September, 1978, the boathouse was burned
in an arson fire.
It lay in ruins until 2005.
This is what was left from '78,
after it was cleaned up, to 2005.
Sue and John Major had it rebuilt,
from that single sheet of drawings.
The architect for the project was
Brian A. Spencer, who we met earlier.
I told you he had done research to Wallis' gatehouse and so on.
The town of Delavan did not want the boat house rebuilt.
They didn't want any more boat houses on the lake.
And Brian Spencer called in every chip he had,
as he phrased it to me, and I have a copy
of the notebook he put together, with testimonials
from architects, Cesar Pelli, Wright luminaries,
people literally from all over the world,
telling the town of Delavan
you must allow this to be rebuilt.
And I'm surprised that the town of Delavan
didn't say forget it guys,
you're not gonna tell us what to do.
But fortunately they relented,
and we have the boat house again.
And what are we seeing here?
What did Wright have in his drawing?
An arch.
Echoes the arch over the porch, the arched porte-cochere.
So that's the boat house today.
One of the stipulations with modern code,
they couldn't keep a boat inside the boat house.
There has to be a pier, so they've got kayaks and canoes in there
on the lower floor.
The upper floor of it is used for entertaining,
dances and so on.
A few views of the boat house.
Do you see the raised ridge-line in the roof?
Let me go back a second.
Wright's drawing, the one in the upper left,
and if you look really closely,
if you're right up next to it, Wright whimsically,
we think it's Wright, drew a flag on the left flagpole.
It has a little Jolly Roger on it.
[laughter]
Grant Carpenter Manson, who was an early chronicler
of Wright's work, Frank Lloyd Wright: The Golden Years
is his book, and he calls this a touch of Jaedo.
Jaedo was an ancient term for Japan or Tokyo.
So the Japanese influence in this building.
This is shot under the archway
of the main porch, the front porch.
The windows at Penwern, most of the windows,
are diamond shaped pane, right?
They're not the decorative leaded glass.
He had done them for Bradley and Hickox
a littler earlier than this the same year.
But these are thought to be commercially available patterns.
Now we're looking from the boat house up to the main house.
We come to the gate lodge again, the only part of the estate
that you see from the road.
In Frank Lloyd Wright's drawing of the gatehouse,
above that water tower to the right,
there are four bedrooms in the gatehouse.
The main house was not heated at the time.
And so, if Jones came up during winter,
he stayed in the gate lodge, it was heated year-round,
because the caretaker lived there year-round.
And there were fireplaces in two of the four bedrooms there.
These are early postcard views of the gatehouse.
The bottom one, if you look at the bottom left
of the water tower, and we'll meet it later in more depth,
there's a greenhouse that Frank Lloyd Wright
had put on the plan.
That greenhouse was taken down in the mid 70s,
replaced by a carport.
Sue and John Major are gonna have
the greenhouse rebuilt this fall.
This is inside the gate lodge.
Again, you've got an open floor plan, if you will.
We're looking from the living room into the dining room.
This is the dining room, I mentioned the dining room hutch
that Wright designed that's on the left.
Bedroom views, upstairs in the gate lodge.
The stable, there are two sets of drawings of the stable.
And the one above, which is not the drawing
that was used in construction,
is in a much simpler print or hand.
We don't know who delineated any of the drawings.
We spent months trying to get that figured out,
but that's impossible.
And the drawing on the bottom is what was built,
and the writing on that drawing
is more like an architect's drawing,
what we're familiar with.
You notice there's a weather vane on top
of the drawing on the bottom.
And there is a weather vane with Jones's initials.
It's been in the living room for years.
Bob Hartmann pointed out that's probably
the one from the stable.
Sue and John Major are having a replica of it made.
It'll be back on top of the stable.
See the weather vane to the right?
This is the stable as rebuilt.
It was in quite distressed shape
when Sue and John bought Penwern.
Side views of the stable.
The part, this is the south side of it,
the view as you come from the road.
And the section to the left was lost.
John Major owned the Wallis-GoodSmith house in 1989
when he bought Penwern when it came on the market.
So he sold Wallis-GoodSmith, and he admits
that he bought Penwern with the intent
of flipping it right away.
He owned it until 1994 when Sue and John bought it,
but the day he closed on the property,
he sold off strips on the east and west side.
That's when it went from eight to five acres.
And part of what was lost, in addition
to some of the breathing room on either side of the estate,
were the paddocks, the back part of the stable.
So that's the paddock on the section
with the windows you see all the way to your left.
Old picture of the stable, and if you blow it up,
you can see the weather vane.
Modern picture of the stable.
And we come to altered and lost Penwern.
So this is the dining room side of Penwern.
The west side and you see on the left,
that addition that covered the dining room windows.
They were done in 1909 and 1910.
It's been written in one book that they were done in the 20s.
The newspaper, microfilm, tells us '09 and 1910.
Certainly there's no involvement by Frank Lloyd Wright.
It's been written that Jones did this
either for his mother or for his grandmother.
That's not true, because all three women
predeceased the design of Penwern.
And this is nine and 10 years after Penwern was designed.
The upper picture, you can see
what replaced that former open porch.
This is a picture probably from the mid 20's.
You see the straight porch wall, on the main porch,
the front porch.
The one that now has the round wall.
Up above, that's the master bedroom,
the awning to the right, center right.
Those awnings are gone.
What looks like gangsters.
[laughter]
We have a wonderful photo album from Betty Schacht,
whose grandparents were the caretakers of Penwern
in the early 30s.
It's a wonderful collection of photographs,
unfortunately none of them show Mr. Jones in them.
But the upper picture, we have a good view
of the greenhouse that was on Frank Lloyd Wright's plans.
It was a greenhouse that was demolished in the early 70s,
replaced with a carport.
And Jones loved growing roses.
He had another greenhouse built at some point
on the west side of the gate lodge,
and that's the greenhouse that you see on the right
in the bottom photograph.
This shows you the back of the gate lodge,
with that carport instead of the greenhouse.
Wright designed gates for either side of the property,
the east and west sides toward the lake.
This is Burr Robbins, who was the second steward of Penwern.
He and his wife Peg bought the estate in '38 or '39
and all the way to the left,
you can vaguely see this metal gate.
And it's been described, it's a wondrous thing that turned.
It was to keep the dogs on the property,
and it would swing shut after you went out.
But those gates were lost,
certainly by the time John O'Shea sold the lots
on either side.
The bottom picture, there's a microfilm article
that mentions that Wright designed a trellis
at some point for the property.
We don't know if this is the trellis that Wright designed or not.
The large water tower is not by Wright, it's 1917
and it was for fire protection.
It's been written in a book that's very popular
that the water tower that's at the gate lodge was demolished.
That's not true, it's still standing there.
This is the water tower that's gone
and this was gone when the side lots were sold off.
This is-- Well, I guess we'll call it butchery of sorts,
which somebody did to the front of the boathouse at one point.
The arch is gone.
So this is pre-fire.
This is floor plan of the stable,
and in the middle it makes reference to the old barn,
but we have found no evidence of an old barn.
So we don't know whether it was built
around something or not.
But this is the size of the stable to the right.
You see that courtyard that led into the stable
and the paddocks for the horses are all the way to the left
and that's what was lost when the property was divided.
So Peg and Burr Robbins were stewards from '39 to 1980.
Their son Ross Robbins became the steward in '85.
He sold it to John O'Shea 1989,
and Peg and Burr Robbins renamed the property Robbinswood
instead of Penwern.
Burr was a major figure
in the outdoor advertising business in Chicago.
He also enjoyed farming and he had a farm near,
if any of you have been to Delavan,
you remember the old Millie's Pancake House?
Which it's not there anymore, but near there,
he had what they called Robbinswood farms.
This is Ross Robbins and his sister, Terry Cantie,
reading Sunday newspapers, August 1941
and they're in the billiard room.
And Ross told me that they didn't
have a billiard table in there.
Billiard was not part of the family life,
obviously it was important to Jones not to them.
And this was their breakfast nook
and this was the family room for them.
The headlines in the Sunday Tribune are the war in Europe.
This was a few months before Pearl Harbor.
John O'Shea became the steward, '89 to 1994
and I mentioned he rebuilt the front porch,
you see that work in progress.
And Sue and John Major became the stewards.
They're shown here with their children last summer.
And the gentleman on the right is Bill Orkild.
Sue and John were living near Barrington Hills, Illinois,
when they bought Penwern and Bill Orkild
had a little repair business, handyman business.
And he put fliers in people's mailboxes.
If you need a window screen repaired
or something like that, call me.
And he got a call one day from the Majors' assistant.
Mr. And Mrs. Major one day bought a home in Wisconsin.
Would you take a look at something, please?
And Bill basically has not left since 1994.
This is Bill last summer with Bob Hartmann.
Bob is on the left, he's the gentleman who has made
these great archeological discoveries about Penwern,
and made those two drawings I showed you.
And one of the first things that Sue and John Major did,
was to take the additions off.
And John told me they endured a lot of abuse.
They'd go to the grocery store, people would yell at them,
because you're ruining a Frank Lloyd Wright house.
And people didn't know that the additions
were not by Frank Lloyd Wright.
They had only known the house with the additions,
so they assumed it was part of the original design.
This is the carport being taken down.
Also at the gate lodge, the open porch had been enclosed
by a subsequent owner, so that's open again.
Just a lot of work had to be done.
This is restoration of the stable.
It's been an incredible project.
And this is rebuilding the boathouse
and Bill Orkild has said that it was just
incredibly challenging in the dead of winter to do this.
But some of the work had to be done during the winter.
Peg and Burr Robbins painted the dining room white.
That included Wright's wonderful dining room hutch.
And you can see the bottom right,
Bill Orkild has stripped it down and restored it
to what it was originally.
These are photographs as he's rebuilding the side porches.
He's taking off the straight walls
and putting in the curved walls
that Wright had originally intended on those drawings.
Wright's drawing for the billiard room,
shows what's called a safe room.
And it's been incorrectly written
that it was a place that Jones wanted
to hide liquor during Prohibition.
Doesn't make sense.
The safe room, Prohibition comes 18 years
after the house is designed,
and the feds aren't gonna care
who's got liquor in their homes.
Jack Holzhueter points out it's a place for a safe.
For gentlemen to keep money and jewelry and so on,
when he's got weekend guests.
When he's up there for the summer.
And you see the cross lines.
There's a zinc floor in that room,
and to the right it says "Billiard Room"
and it says "Case to Roll in Place"
and there are wheels on the bottom of the liquor cabinet.
And the liquor cabinet slides out.
Jones, in 1930 or '31 had the safe room
converted into a powder room, a little bathroom.
So this picture was taken about three years ago,
when the Majors were converting it back into a safe room.
So Jones had put a door off to the left,
going into the billiard room.
And off to the right, we're looking past the liquor cabinet
into the billiard room.
You could see the case, the liquor case, is pulled out.
You could see into the powder room
and the upper picture you see the door in the powder room,
and the picture below what it looks like now,
there's now an angle nook, and the only entrance
is the door behind the liquor cabinet.
This is a view from that open balcony into billiard room.
One of the common threads for all of the people
who have been stewards of Penwern, is entertaining.
Jones loved to entertain.
The notes from the lake, the early days,
the two weekly newspapers in Delavan,
they're filled with the names of people visiting Penwern.
Sue and John have a party Fourth of July weekend every year.
That's where these photos are from.
And this is a picture of Burr Robbins.
He's the man in the white suit. He raised German Shepherds.
That's one of his shepherds next to him.
Entertaining his male friends in the advertising business,
other related business men.
The white dining room, the dining room hutch and so on.
No women at the table.
Burr and Peg Robbins in the living room.
They put large mirrors up,
that covered the living room windows.
John O'Shea, he said, told me that his happiest memory
of Penwern was the party, the wedding reception that he had
and the reception was on the deck
of the ruins of the boat house
and his worst memory is the Aloha party he had
at the end of his stewardship.
He'd gotten divorced and he decided to sell Penwern
to Sue and John, and this is the Aloha party.
And you see that addition,
that's on the west side of the house.
The other Wright homes on Delavan Lake.
I told you that there were five homes in all.
You already met the Wallis-GoodSmith house.
We've met Penwern, the Jones house.
1902, the Spencer house to the left.
The only one diminutive enough
to be considered a cottage in our vernacular,
although they were all called summer cottages.
It's got a boat shape prow, front porch
and the Ross house next to it.
The Ross house was the first one,
and Mrs. Spencer was the Ross's daughter.
So they're living next door to each other on the lake.
But the Ross house has been considerably changed.
The changes came in the 1920s.
The house was originally stained dark brown or dark green
and you can see in the drawing from the Wright archive,
that there was an open porch in just a single story,
to the left of the main part of the house.
In the 1920s that porch was enclosed,
a second story was put on top of it.
And you can see also that a second story was added
on the south side of the house, all the way to the right.
So the interior of the house is much as Wright designed,
but the exterior has been altered quite a bit.
The Spencer cottage, the lake side is what you see
in the upper photograph.
It was built without a bathroom.
There was a bathroom in an adjoining building.
That burned down in the 1980s,
and the Muellers, who are stewards of the Spencer house,
had an addition put on the backside.
That's the lower photo. It's got a master bedroom.
It's got a bathroom in it, and it's prow shaped,
to mimic the porch at the front of the house.
The Arthur P. Johnson house, 1905,
is the last of the Wright commissions on Delavan lake,
in terms of the five homes.
This is the view from the lake side.
Again, it's been largely altered.
It was not board and batten, it was tongue and groove.
It's now EIFS, it's a stucco like material.
There were open porches
in what looks like the middle floor here.
Those have been enclosed now,
but a third floor, a basement level,
was put under the house.
It's guest rooms and a recreation room.
This is the view from the lake side.
There were other Wright projects
that have been written about on the lake.
There was thought of a hotel,
they wrote in a newspaper in 1913
that Wright was gonna design a hotel.
There's never another mention of that.
These projects have vanished in thin air.
And I leave you with the view at sunset
from the front porch at Penwern.
And a thank you.
Many people, a project like this doesn't just happen.
A lot of people were very generous with their time,
with their knowledge, archives they have and so on.
So I think you very much for coming this evening.
[applauding]