by Steve Lehto
The murders at Taliesin make the home in Spring Green, Wisconsin, the most architecturally significant murder house in America. Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and built in 1911, Taliesin—pronounced tally-ESS-in—was his summer home. It was a refuge for him, as he had recently left his wife and taken up with Borthwick. The two would escape to the Wisconsin countryside to evade the gossip that had escalated to the point of newspaper editorials condemning the couple for their immoral ways. The Taliesin property also housed Wright’s office and working quarters and required a staff and ground crew to operate and maintain.
Frank Lloyd Wright is unquestionably America’s most famous architect. Wright was born in 1867 and by the 1890s was working as an architect in Chicago. He did not have a degree in architecture and he probably did not even graduate from high school. Wright simply began working for an architect in Chicago and learned by doing. He started out as a draftsman and then apprenticed as an architect. Soon he was designing buildings and homes for the clients of his employer, as well as creating “bootleg” designs as side jobs without his firm’s endorsement. In the early 1890s he started his own firm, and by 1900 his fame was growing as more and more homes were built using his designs.
Wright began exploring some innovative ideas. For example, Wright believed that an architect should consider the place where a building was being constructed and seek harmony between the two. Some of his most iconic work involved structures melded into the landscape, epitomized by his “Fallingwater” home, built atop a waterfall in 1937. The house was constructed on top of the waterfall, with the river flowing under the house before plunging over the edge. Fallingwater was praised by Time magazine and eventually became recognized as one of the greatest and most admired works by an American architect. Long before he became famous for being America’s architect, however, he was known for the gossip his private life generated.
It was 1909 when his life took a scandalous turn. Although already married for two decades, he became romantically involved with the wife of a client, Martha “Mamah” Borthwick. She filed for divorce from her husband so she could be with Wright. Wright’s wife, however, refused to grant him a divorce. The Wrights’ situation was a little trickier: They had six children. Her refusal did not stifle his romance. Even though he was still married, Wright openly traveled to Europe with Mamah. For the time, this was considered quite controversial, and upon their return they discovered that the town gossip had reached a fever pitch. Wright decided it would be best if they moved someplace they could have some privacy. He had spent his childhood summers in Spring Green, Wisconsin, at the home of his mother’s father, in a valley that had connections to his family going back quite some time. This side of his family traced its roots back to Wales. When Wright decided to build a home in Spring Green, he chose a hill to place the home upon, and decided to locate the house on the “brow” of the hill, not the center of the hilltop. The placement of the home made it much more architecturally interesting, and to some observers the house looked like it was a natural part of the landscape. Wright chose to name it Taliesin, after a Welsh poet whose name translated as “Shining Brow,” a nod to the home’s placement on the brow of the hill.
The building was huge, and he relocated his offices and staff to the new location from Oak Park. Within two years, he was living in Spring Green with Borthwick and conducting his business there. Mamah had quickly obtained her divorce, but Wright was still having problems exiting his marriage. His wife, Catherine, would not consent to a divorce until 1922. Still, Wright and Borthwick settled into the spectacular home and began their new life together. The interior of the home was more than twenty thousand square feet; counting the courtyards and terraces, it encompassed thirty-seven thousand square feet. Wright oversaw construction of more buildings at the site and also purchased surrounding land whenever it became available. Eventually, the property would include a total of five buildings designed by Wright, scattered over six hundred acres.
The Taliesin complex required quite a bit of maintenance and upkeep, so Wright hired a staff of groundskeepers and servants. Among those he hired were Julian and Gertrude Carlton, a couple from Barbados, who came to work at Taliesin in the summer of 1914. Julian was thirty years old and worked as a butler and handyman at the house, and Gertrude cooked. Some visitors to Taliesin said that Julian displayed a bit of a temper. It is hard to say what brought it about, but according to one account, one of Wright’s guests had caused Julian to explode by calling him a “black son of a bitch.” In August, the Carltons gave Wright their two weeks’ notice that they were going to quit. It was probably for the best, and some suggested that Mamah may have told the Carltons it was time for them to leave. Wright went back to Chicago for a quick business trip. It was then that Julian Carlton committed the murders.
Julian Carlton never explained why he had done what he did. His wife also claimed to have no idea why her husband had snapped. Julian tried killing himself by drinking poison shortly after he was arrested but survived. He then went on a hunger strike in jail and, after seven weeks, managed to starve himself to death.
Wright buried Mamah on the property and rebuilt Taliesin, which he renamed Taliesin II. The home would burn again, in 1925, when it was struck by lightning. Wright was home on this occasion but was unable to stop the fire from reducing the living quarters to ashes. Although he was able to rebuild Taliesin II, he lost a large collection of Asian artifacts he had acquired during time he had spent in Japan overseeing the construction of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. When the home was rebuilt after the fire, he added another digit to the Roman numerals, making it Taliesin III.
Wright built a second home in Arizona that he called Taliesin West. When its construction was completed in 1937, Taliesin West became Wright’s winter home and Taliesin III remained his summer home.
Wright’s Wisconsin home became the focus of pilgrimages by many architects and other luminaries who sought to pay homage to Wright, who had become world renowned for his designs. Many of the visitors became lifelong friends. Buckminster Fuller, Philip Johnson, August Perret, G. I. Gurdjieff, Charles Laughton, Carl Sandburg, and Ayn Rand were among those who stayed there. Rand visited after she had written The Fountainhead, her novel about an architect who battles conformity. Many readers thought the book was based on Wright, although she denied it.
Wright died in 1959. In 1940, he had created the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, and it became the owner and caretaker of his properties after his death. In 1973, Taliesin was designated a National Historic Landmark, and efforts are being made to maintain and preserve it.
Today, Taliesin is open to the public. Tours of the grounds are available but the property is privately owned, so visitors need to find out in advance the schedule and availability of tours. Many tours sell out during the summer. The grounds now also contain a bookstore and café. Taliesin is located about an hour west of Madison, Wisconsin. Those interested in learning more about the site and visitor information can visit taliesinpreservation.org.
Not far from Taliesin, the state of Wisconsin erected a historical marker that bears this inscription.
Frank Lloyd Wright, Wisconsin-born, world-renowned architect, lived and worked in Wyoming Valley, 6 miles southwest of here, at Taliesin, his home and school for apprentices. In the practice of “organic” or natural architecture, he sought to blend structure with site, to create harmonious surroundings for the occupants, to bring the outdoors indoors, and to use materials naturally.
Among Wright’s many innovations were the pre-fabricated house, gravity heat, indirect lighting, concrete block as an effective building material, and revolutionary engineering concepts such as the earthquake-proof structure. Shortly before his death in 1959 at the age of 90, he designed a mile-high office building.
Colorful non-conformist, believer in beauty, and champion of democracy, he scorned all criticism. “Early in life,” he said, “I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose the former an
d have never seen reason to change.”
Taliesin is a remarkably beautiful place and the home is fascinating. The caretakers of it now are quick to point out how insignificant the murders were in the grand scheme of things. True, they were horrific and altered Wright’s life immeasurably. But they had nothing to do with the home itself and amount to little more than a footnote in its history.
*Taliesin Preservation, Inc., taliesinpreservation.org
Where Only Death Can Remove a Curse
THE “HEX HOUSE”
1928
1709 Rehmeyer’s Hollow Road
Stewartstown, Pennsylvania 17363
On the evening of November 27, 1928, three men called at the home of Nelson Rehmeyer. Rehmeyer’s farmhouse was fairly isolated, in a hollow near Stewartstown, Pennsylvania. The men, named Blymire, Curry, and Hess, knew Rehmeyer well and the purpose of their visit was straightforward. They had come to undo a hex they believed Rehmeyer had placed on them. It was a simple matter: All they needed was for Rehmeyer to give them a lock of his hair and his spell book. After all, Rehmeyer was a renowned witch.
Rehmeyer lived alone and was a huge man. And he knew very well what these men were up to. He was not going to give up his spell book or a lock of his hair without a fight. The three men barged into the home to take the things forcefully. Rehmeyer put up a fight. None of the men were armed and the four clashed viciously inside the farmhouse. Rehmeyer fought off his attackers with ferocity. The intruders realized they might have gotten themselves into a situation from which they could not easily extract themselves. One of the men smashed a chair over Rehmeyer’s head and knocked him out. The intruders then cut off a lock of his hair and began ransacking the house, looking for Rehmeyer’s spell book. They could not find it.
They realized that Rehmeyer was dead. Unsure of what to do next, the men poured kerosene on Rehmeyer’s body, lit it on fire, and fled. Rehmeyer’s body refused to burn; the fire extinguished itself. The three men ran off into the darkness of the hollow, hoping their actions had removed the hex. While much of this story might sound odd today, none of it seemed unusual to the members of the community, most of whom believed in witchcraft.
In the 1920s, conventional wisdom in parts of Pennsylvania held that most everyday problems could be solved with spells and potions. For example, rats and mice could be ordered to leave one’s harvest alone by repeating the following phrase as the first three sheaves of the harvest were placed in the barn:
Rats and mice, these three sheaves I give to you,
in order that you may not destroy any of my wheat.
That incantation would assure that the rodents would not eat any of the grain beyond those first three sheaves. This admonition was one of many written by a man named John George Hohman in his bestselling book on hexes, which would play a large role in one of the spookiest murders in American history.
Murder in America is not all that unusual; what was remarkable in the Rehmeyer’s Hollow case was that the perpetrators and the victim all believed in a form of rural magic, as described in a popular book at the time called PowWows; or, Long Lost Friend. In this context, the word powwow does not bear the typical connotation attributed to it by most people, that is, to gather, to talk, to interact. Here, powwow means “to heal.” It very well could be that the term was borrowed from the Native American concept of a healer. The book was published in 1820 by Hohman, a German printer who had settled near Reading, Pennsylvania, and collected folk remedies, cures, and hexes from the locals. He added in a few spells he had brought with him from Germany and he had a bestseller on his hands. The first edition of the book was printed in German, but soon English translations were being carried in shirt pockets and sitting on nightstands across Pennsylvania Dutch country.
The little book included all manner of spells and incantations, everything from how to ensure your own safe journey to cures for toothaches and epilepsy. Along with the medicinal remedies it included spells that—if cast properly—would purportedly cause a thief to be frozen in his tracks or allow a person to win a lawsuit through the use of a spell. Not all the spells had good intentions. The book described spells that could be cast to cause bad luck to befall one’s enemies. In the decades following the publication of Long Lost Friend, the book became a respected text among many Pennsylvania Dutch.
The term Pennsylvania Dutch often confuses outsiders. The name—as with many words in their dialect—was altered from the original German. The term was originally the Pennsylvania Deutsch, a word meaning “German.” The group descended from Mennonites who emigrated from Germany to rural Pennsylvania beginning in the late 1600s. The most well-known members of the Pennsylvania Dutch are the Amish, a religious community that has maintained its traditional dress and lifestyle over hundreds of years. Today, many know them from reality television shows that contrast their simple horse-and-buggy lives with the lifestyles of their modern neighbors.
In 1928, Nelson Rehmeyer lived in a simple two-story clapboard-sided house he built on the side of a hill in Rehmeyer’s Hollow, a chunk of land in York County, Pennsylvania, that his family had owned and worked for several generations. Nelson constructed his home next to the log cabin his grandparents occupied. Nelson had a wife, Alice Cora Shaffer, and two daughters, but at the time of his murder he lived alone. Neighbors sometimes referred to the man as a hermit, although his estranged wife and children lived just a mile away.
By all accounts Rehmeyer, a reclusive local farmer, was also a powerful “powwow doctor”—a practitioner of the Pennsylvania Dutch form of healing that some called witchcraft. In the community, anyone considered skilled in powwow medicine was considered a witch, regardless of their gender. And for Rehmeyer, the most important guide for him in his doctoring would be his copy of Long Lost Friend, whose contents he had mastered. And while he may have spent a lot of time working spells and potions to heal the sick, some people suspected he used his abilities to cast spells on his enemies.
A former worker on Rehmeyer’s farm, John H. Blymire, was also a practitioner of powwow and had been known to effect cures for others until, he said, one day his power simply vanished. He believed his spells were being counteracted by another powwow practitioner’s spells, a witch more powerful than himself. He had his suspicions but he was not certain who had hexed him. After he lost his healing powers, he also began to feel sickly and so he did what any self-respecting witch would do: He sought advice from another witch. Not certain of who had hexed him, Blymire could not trust a local witch. He went and found one a little ways away from Rehmeyer’s Hollow and described his predicament. The witch told him that his problems were indeed caused by a hex and that she knew how to reveal the identity of the hexmeister. She told Blymire to place a dollar bill in his left hand and stare at it while she worked some magic on it. Blymire later testified that he saw Washington’s portrait replaced by an image of Rehmeyer. When Blymire told the witch what he had seen, she told him there was only one way to remove the hex: He needed to get his hands on Rehmeyer’s spell book and burn it. He then had to get a lock of Rehmeyer’s hair and bury it. That, and only that, would remove the hex placed on him by Rehmeyer.
Blymire felt he had no choice. He needed to take the necessary steps to rid himself of the spell. He brought along a friend—a fourteen-year-old named John Curry who also believed he had been cursed by Rehmeyer—and went to pay a visit to Rehmeyer. The two pretended to simply be stopping by for a friendly visit. Not knowing that his two callers might intend to harm him, Rehmeyer invited them in and Blymire and Curry even spent the night at Rehmeyer’s house when it got too late for them to head home in the darkness. They did not take any action that night, however, because they noticed one problem. Rehmeyer was huge and the men didn’t think they could tackle him without help. Still, they remained convinced Rehmeyer was the one who had hexed them.
The next day, Blymire and Curry recruited a third man to help them named Wilbert G. Hess. Amazingly, Hess also blamed Rehmeyer for a recen
t streak of bad luck and ill health. In this place and time, many people blamed bad luck and ill health on hexes. On the evening of November 27, 1928, the day after Blymire and Curry had spent the night in Rehmeyer’s home, the three went to Rehmeyer’s house. They were convinced they could counter all of Rehmeyer’s hexing by taking his copy of Long Lost Friend and getting a lock of his hair. It was this evening that the men attacked Rehmeyer, ransacked his house, and attempted to burn his body.
The men had not originally intended to kill Rehmeyer as far as anyone knew, but the confrontation had spun out of control so quickly that it was probably impossible for it to end in any way without someone dying. The ferocious and deadly struggle made a mess of the house. Furniture was displaced and broken, and blood was splattered everywhere. As Rehmeyer lay dying, the men ransacked his house, looking for Rehmeyer’s spell book. They also found a small amount of money in the house, which they took. The attackers then put his lifeless body on a mattress and doused it in kerosene, which they ignited before fleeing the scene. They hoped that the ensuing fire would burn the house down and make it look like Rehmeyer had simply died in a house fire.
Legend has it that the murder was committed at exactly one minute past midnight, but such precision seems unlikely in light of the mayhem that preceded the death. Perhaps the most mysterious aspect of the murder was how Rehmeyer’s body did not burn. The fire extinguished itself and the house did not catch fire. Many locals knew that Long Lost Friend closed with the admonition: Whoever carries this book with him, is safe from all his enemies, visible or invisible; and whoever has this book with him cannot die … nor burn up in any fire. Even in death, Rehmeyer’s magic was powerful. He didn’t have a copy of the book on him, but he was so familiar with it that it protected him anyway. Rehmeyer’s body was found the next day by a neighbor who was passing by and wondered why the Rehmeyer place was so quiet. When he approached the back door of the house, the neighbor spotted Rehmeyer’s charred body lying on the floor.