by Ron McCrea
Fig. 173. David Lindblom, 38, was a gardener. He died after suffering for three days from “burns on body and head and blow on skull.” Wright paid for the burial expenses of the young Dane and laid him in the Unity Chapel family cemetery.
Fig. 174. Thomas Brunker, the oldest victim, almost 66, was a laborer from nearby Ridgeway. He died three days after suffering “a fracture of skull caused by a hatchet in hands of a negro” and severe leg burns. He left 10 children.
“This is perhaps the most complete collection of its kind in the United States. There will be models of Japanese temples, rare antique brocades of various periods, samples of antique Chinese pottery, ancient Korean pottery, and various other articles. Mr. Wright has made three [sic] trips to the Orient to procure these articles and the duty on the last consignment was $3,000.”18
On September 7, a week after the county fair, Wright hosted the annual picnic of Sauk County’s rural mail carriers on the Taliesin grounds. “We are told that this was one of the most successful and enjoyable meetings the assembly has held,” the Home News said.
JENSEN STANDS UP
The nursery that had sent Wright all the fruit trees and bushes in 1911 still had not been paid. Ellwanger & Barry sent a letter to Jens Jensen on August 19 asking him to intervene. They picked the wrong time and the wrong Dane.
Fig. 175. Julian Carlton’s death certificate gives his age as 31 and his place of birth as “Alabama?” He said he was from Barbados. The cause of death on October 7, 1914, was “Starvation—suicide following attempt at suicide by hydrochloric acid.” Iowa County Sheriff John T. Williams attested to the information.
Fig. 176. The Dodgeville Chronicle published the only known photo of Julian Carlton on October 9, 1914, after his death October 7.
“I presume you are aware of the fate that met his home a week ago,” Jensen replied. “I am surprised that you would send your letter at this time. I don’t know of anything more brutal that has happened in the history of America than what happened to Mr. Wright’s family Sunday [sic] a week ago, and I would have pity for my worst enemy if he had suffered what Frank Lloyd Wright has had to suffer… .
“I shall be glad to take this matter up with him, but you must pardon me when I say that I cannot do it now as he has my sincere sympathy in his great sorrow and economic loss.”19
WASMUTH PORTFOLIOS DESTROYED
Wright’s Japanese prints except for those in the house were spared because he kept them in a vault in the studio wing of Taliesin. Others were stored at his Chicago office in Orchestra Hall.
But 500 sets of the two-volume English edition of the Wasmuth Portfolio, which he had hoped to sell, were nearly all destroyed by fire and water. He had stored them in the basement of Taliesin’s residential wing.
The books “went up in smoke when Taliesin burned,” Wright said later. “Some thirty copies only were saved. The pile in the basement smoldered and smoked for three days after the house had burned to the ground.”
Fig. 177. Ellen Key wrote the words “Nu Mördad”—“now murdered”— in Swedish on the first page of Mamah Borthwick’s last letter to her, dated July 20, 1914. Below it she drew a cross. The signature, which reverses Borthwick’s middle and last names, also is in Key’s handwriting.
HILLSIDE HOME SCHOOL SUCCUMBS
Hillside Home School announced that it would open for its 28th year of classes on September 23, but for the first time Nell and Jennie Lloyd Jones, the founders, would not be at the helm.
The new principal was Henry T. Mortensen, a teacher at the Francis W. Parker School in Chicago. “The change in leadership means no change in fundamental educational principle,” the Home News reported.
But it was no good. The horror at Taliesin was the “fatal blow,” the “calamity,” that Jenkin Lloyd Jones mistakenly thought Frank and Mamah living at Taliesin would be. Hillside Home School shut down the following year.
Wright would later buy it, convert it to a school of architecture, and place the names of Ellen and Jane Lloyd Jones on the cornerstone.
SIGHTSEERS AND SOUVENIRS
An event like the Taliesin mass murder, accompanied by the destruction of a landmark building, would dominate news cycles for weeks today. But there were no news cycles in 1914. People lived harder, less vicarious lives. Community newspapers were not encouraged to dwell on morbid events. The story, which had received national headlines, dropped from sight locally almost immediately.
The burned-out site at “the bungalow” quickly became a curiosity. “Messrs. Williams, Roy Thomas, John Berryman and Misses Nora Berryman and Ward of dodgeville were guests at the A.D. Richardson home Sunday,” said a social note in the Home News. “They also took a trip to the bungalow.”
Hathaway’s dry-goods store in Spring Green advertised “Fair parade and Wright postcards.”20 The postcards, taken by freelance amateurs and local studio photographers as souvenirs, showed the ghastly scene, the murder weapon, and crowds of onlookers viewing the ruin.21
“I don’t know of anything more brutal that has happened in the history of America than what happened to Mr. Wright’s family … I would have pity for my worst enemy if he had suffered what Frank Lloyd Wright has had to suffer.”
—Jens Jensen, August 24, 1914
THE TREATMENT OF JULIAN CARLTON
Gertrude Carlton, Julian’s wife of two years, was held briefly and then put on a train to Chicago. She had $7 in her pocket and was not heard from again. Julian Carlton arrived at the Iowa County Jail in Dodgeville in bad condition. The acid he had swallowed had burned his esophagus and it was hard for him to take nourishment. Even today it would be a challenge for physicians to save a person so injured. One also might assume that a black man accused of multiple killings would receive harsh treatment in a rural jail.
Fig. 178. Frank Lloyd Wright told Ellen Key in December 1914 that he would deal with the loss of Mamah Borthwick “as the heart of her would have me, and put the soul of her into the forms that take shape under my hands.” He wrote the note on his special red-square stationery.
But Julian Carlton received both medical attention and due process from the medical and legal systems of Iowa County. In some ways he was treated like a celebrity.
He was tended to by at least three physicians, including Dr. William Pearce, the head of the county medical society, but he was not hospitalized. His meals were prepared by the wife of Sheriff John T. Williams, whose family lived in the Cornish-style jail attached to the courthouse.
The night after Carlton was arrested he became violently ill in his cell. After being examined by a physician, who pronounced his condition grave, he was arraigned the next day in the hallway. He was charged with the murder of Brodelle—the one killing directly witnessed—and a not-guilty plea was entered.
At his arraignment in court on August 27, testimony was taken and more charges were added, including the slaying of Mamah Borthwick and the others; arson; and the assaults upon William Weston and Herbert Fritz “with a dangerous weapon, to-wit: a hatchet.” Carlton was ordered to appear at the next sitting of the Circuit Court. That would not be until October 1, more than a month away. In the meantime he languished, while curiosity-seeking crowds pressed to get a glimpse of him. Sheriff Williams put an immediate stop to it on August 17, banning anyone from the jail who did not have business.
Ernest Wittwer was four when his father took him to the Dodgeville jail to catch a glimpse of the notorious killer. “He held me up so I could see him through the window,” he told an interviewer 84 years later. “I had never seen a black man before. I never felt the same about black people after that.”22
Judge George Clementson, the circuit-riding jurist from Lancaster, who was known to avoid contact with lawyers even at lunch, eating only with his court reporter Edward Morse, emerged as a man of unusual character. On the morning of October 1 he ordered Carlton examined by two physicians to assess his condition. They said he could appear, but he was carried in on a stretcher and seemed semiconscious. T
he observers in the jury box were a who’s who of local eminences, including both the current and former Iowa County representatives in the State Assembly.
Clementson read the charge against Carlton, then said, “Yesterday I was informed that the defendant had no attorney and had no means to employ one. I appointed Mr. E.C. Fiedler as his attorney in the case.”23 Ernest Fiedler, of Mineral Point, argued that Carlton could not survive a full trial and “it would look better and be creditable to our American court procedure if a short postponement were to be had.” He did not have to add: “and nature were allowed to take its course.”
William Drennan documents that Judge Clementson had orchestrated this out-come that morning, after he visited Carlton in his cell at the prisoner’s request—a highly unusual move. “I was informed that the defendant wanted to speak with me,” Clementson said in a statement read into the record. “He did not say anything to me while others were present, but when all had withdrawn, he then talked with me.”
The judge continued: “When he thoroughly understood what I was saying to him and I put the question to him whether his plea would be guilty or not guilty and explained how he might be benefited by a certain plea in the case in his now physical condition, he told me that he would plead ‘not guilty.’ So let that plea be entered.”24
Clementson must have explained to Carlton that if he pleaded guilty, he would be sent directly to the state’s maximum security prison at Waupun, and die there. The alternative was to plead not guilty, remain in the Iowa County Jail, and die in the care of the sheriff’s family. As a practical matter it was compassionate counsel. The acid was Carlton’s punishment and he had administered it to himself. The jail was his hospice. But the judge had taken matters into his own hands. Carlton was not offered an insanity defense, which was available at the time.
He died in his cell six days later. The cause of death was listed as starvation. He weighed only 90 pounds and had lingered for 47 days. His remains were shipped without embalming to the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where they were dissected, examined, burned in a cadaver incinerator, and deposited somewhere on the campus grounds.
Fig. 179. Mamah Borthwick had this portrait taken as a gift to Wright for his 47th birthday, June 8, 1914. She turned 45 on June 19. Wright sent it to Ellen Key in December, and it was found at Strand in 2012. On the back of the photo Key has written in Swedish: “Mamah B. Borthwick (one of my American translators) in Aug. 1914 killed by her negro cook, who was mentally ill (and killed 5 others in the home at the same time).” Photo courtesy of Hedda Jansson, Strand
FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT, SURVIVOR
In the days after the killings and fire, Wright retreated to the draftsmen’s parlor and bunkroom in the studio wing. “The following week there was no one on the hill at night but myself and the watchman who sat on the steps to the court with a gun across his knees,” he wrote.
“Those nights in the little back room were black, filled with strange, unreasoning terrors. No moon seemed to shine. No stars in the sky. No frog-song from the pond below. Strange, unnatural silence, the smoke still rising from certain portions of the ruin… . The gaping hole left by fire in the beautiful hillside was no less empty, charred and ugly in my own life.”
Strangest of all, there was no Mamah.
“Strange! Instead of feeling that she whose life had joined mine there at Taliesin was a spirit near, that too was utterly gone… . Totally—Mamah was gone… . Gone into this blackness of oblivion for several years to come was all sense of her whom I had loved as having really lived at all.”
“We lived—richly. She was taken—suddenly … just as we were beginning to feel that the bitter struggle was giving way to the quiet assurance of peace and the place we coveted together.”
—Frank Lloyd Wright to Ellen Key, December 8, 1914
Wright’s prodigious instinct for self-preservation had kicked in. He literally could not allow himself to think of her. “I could see forward but I could not see backward,” he said. “until many years after, to turn my thought backward to what had transpired in the life Mamah and I lived together at Taliesin was like trying to see into a dark room in which terror lurked, strange shadows moved, and I would be well to turn away.”25
Wright’s sister Maginel returned from the East. She could see that her brother had been numbed by the trauma, and had “set about directing the restoration of the burned house as automatically as a machine. But then the numbness wore off and the pain came.” He developed boils, insomnia, and temporary blindness. He lost weight.
Their therapy was to ride together on horseback. “He wanted to ride, and so we rode by the hour,” his sister said, “farther than we would have ridden in a happier time: over Pleasant Ridge, to Blue Mound, and on and on. He would stop the horses on a hill and stare down into the Valley, with its cloud shadows. Then he would talk.”26
After recovering enough to do his duties—to attend funerals, arrange for the county fair art show, and publish an open letter “To My Neighbors” in the weekly Home News—Wright left for Chicago. He kept a small apartment at 25 Cedar Street, in Old Town, and now moved there.
Fig. 180. Frank Lloyd Wright in an early reflective portrait.
He refused all company, including his mother’s. He needed to get away from family, get away from the Valley, get away from the curious. He needed to be invisible. “Strange faces were best, and I walked among them,” he said.
He had a basic decision to make—an existential decision. On December 8, he revealed what it was in a letter to Mamah’s former life coach, Ellen Key, in Sweden. He told her that, faced with the choice between action and surrender to despair, he had decided to live “as the heart of her would have me” and “put the soul of her into the forms that take shape under my hands.” Her life would live in his architecture.
“Your kind words of Mamah are like balm to my heart,” Wright replied to Key’s letter of condolence.
“There is nothing to say. The lightning struck us—why, no one can say. All that remains is to keep it from sinking me so deep that my usefulness will be gone. Or, rather, to take it as the heart of her would have me and put the soul of her into the forms that take shape under my hands.
“We lived—richly. She was taken—suddenly—without warning or pain to her, I am sure, just as we were beginning to feel that the bitter struggle was giving way to the quiet assurance of peace and the place we coveted together.
“I hope that I can see you some time and we can talk of her. You have been a strength and comfort to us both and we have blessed you often.
“With love and regard
“faithfully yours,
“Frank Lloyd Wright”27
NOTES
1. ”Wright Case Agitation,” Dodgeville Chronicle, January 5, 1912. The story is unbylined but it was customary for editors of country weeklies to write the main stories.
2. Jens Jensen to Ellwanger & Barry, April 27, 1912. Ellwanger & Barry archive, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, University of Rochester Library.
3. Jerry Minnich e-mail to author, October 4, 2010.
4. Andrea Reithmayr e-mail to author, May 18, 2011, Rush Rhees Library, University of Rochester.
5. Jerry Minnich e-mail to author, March 22, 2011.
6. Charles E. Aguar and Berdeana Aguar, Wrightscapes: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Landscape Designs (New York: Mcgraw-Hill, 2001), 326, n. 286.
7. Ibid., 157.
8. David H. Engel, Japanese Gardens for Today (Tuttle, 1959), quoted in Aguar and Aguar, Wrightscapes, 160.
9. Robert C. Twombly, Frank Lloyd Wright: His Life and His Architecture (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1979), 389.
10. Maginel Wright (enright) Barney, The Valley of the God-Almighty Joneses (Spring Green, WI: Unity Chapel Publications, 1986), 145.
11. Edna Meudt, “A Summer Day That Changed the World,” in The Rose Jar: The Autobiography of Edna Meudt (Madison: North Country Press, 1990), 174–178. All the quoted and descriptive m
aterial is from this documentary poem. Kristin Kritz changed her first name to Edna after being baptized as an adult, and her last name to Meudt after being married. She is called Kristin here throughout because Edna Meudt tells the story through the young girl who was Kristin.
12. Sources for this narrative include “Awful Crime in Wisconsin Cottage,” Chicago Sunday Tribune, August 16, 1914; “Negro Murderer of Seven,” Spring Green Weekly Home News, August 20, 1914; Ron McCrea, “The Murders at Taliesin,” Capital Times, August 15, 1998 (N.B.: the name Carlton is misspelled Carleton in my account); William Drennan, Death in a Prairie House: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Murders (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007); Meryle Secrest, Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), 216–222; and Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography, in Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, ed., Frank Lloyd Wright: Collected Writings, (New York: Rizzoli, 1992), vol. 2, 239–240.
13. Secrest, Frank Lloyd Wright, 220.
14. Ibid., 222.
15. Journal of Dr. Marcus Bossard, Marcus Bossard collection of papers, Wisconsin Historical Society. Bossard, after whom the Spring Green library originally was named, published a memoir of his years as a small-town doctor. There is no word in it about the Taliesin mass murder.
16. Reprinted in Frances Nemtin, Web of Life (Spring Green, WI: Self-published, 2001), 34.
17. ”Hillside Notes,” Home News, August 27, 1914.
18. ”Wright Collection at Fair,” Spring Green Home News, August 27, 1914. Zona gale was also curious. “I have seen nowhere reference to the Japanese prints of Mr. Wright’s,” she wrote to Jane Porter after the fire. “I want so much to know if they were saved, since a part of the studio is safe.” Jane Porter scrapbook, Frank Lloyd Foundation Archives, courtesy of Keiran Murphy.