The weather in Chicago this past weekend was legendary–moderately windy and bright blue skies most of the day. There is just something about the screech of metal-against-metal as the L-trains round their tight curves that tells me I’m home. If I thought it even remotely possible to find work in Chicago, it would be hard to stay in North Dakota.

For reading matter on the bus and in the hotel room, I brought along The Complete Architecture of Adler & Sullivan, long awaited product of the Richard Nickel Committee. Sullivan officianados/fans/freaks will recall that Richard Nickel undertook a documentation project as a student of photography at IIT, a project that literally ended his life in 1972 while recording the destruction of A&S’s Chicago Stock Exchange. Friends of Nickel collected his negatives and research material and have been completing his project for publication. Frankly I didn’t think I’d live to see it.

I mention Nickel for several reasons. First, if you’re looking for “stocking stuffers” this holiday season, find a big sock. The Complete Architecture weighs in at about twelve pounds. Much more important for me has been the insight the book has afforded.

Let’s face it: I was virtually ignorant of Louis Sullivan’s full career. There are so many projects from the Adler & Sullivan practice that I had known only by name–projects that stood during the 1950s while my head was still deeply up my teenage ass–that I now must face the task of virtual re-education. It has been the houses that are so astounding; Victorian, Frank-Furness-like piles that impress with such surprise. Nickel was somehow able to inspect during their last moments the interiors of these single-family homes for many of Dankmar Adler’s Jewish friends. The photos are a revelation. Reproduced in rich duo-tone, their sepia sadness only hightens the loss of so many structures from the city’s architectural heritage. I was either born too late or came to architectural awareness not soon enough.

For the Agincourt Project, this new book and its coincidence with a trip home have confirmed some of my decisions for the Agincourt Public Library, but they have also challenged many others. I welcome the chance to reflect and reconsider.

Reverend J. K. Karcher’s spiritual odyssey spanned the breadth of Christian belief–from popish orthodoxy to liberal latitude. So it shouldn’t surprise us that he spent three distinct periods in the Episcopal church, a pivotal place on that spectrum. Investigating his life, however, did open a window into the rise of Unitarian-Universalism during the 19th century. Except for the Transcendentalists, I hadn’t known much about them.

Unitarians and Universalists were two separate denominations through the 19th century, not joining forces until 1961. But it was the Unitarians who were more active in westward expansion. Recall that Frank Lloyd Wright was a Unitarian and architect for one of its most significant buildings.

There were Unitarians in both Fargo-Moorhead and Sioux Falls in the 1880s, groups so liberal that even free-thinkers were welcome at their gatherings. Really. I’m not kidding. Their 1892 Fargo church enjoyed an odyssey of its own: when they disbanded, the building became a mortuary and was later used by the Reformed LDS church, until it was eventually purchased by a reconstituted U-U congregation. Full circle in roughly a hundred years! I was anxious to imagine liberal belief–even UNbelief–in Agincourt, and, especially, to imagine what sort of building might satisfy their architectural needs.

Sleuthing the web one day for railroad-related structures, I ran across a complete set of working drawings for a water tower. The design was approved for the Chicago & Northwestern and was subsequently adopted for the Milwaukee Road, so I thought it was fair game for a trackside site on the south edge of town. And then a stroke of genius or perversion; you decide. These standardized structures arrived at their site on a flatcar, pieces numbered and ready for construction. Why couldn’t a bureaucratic snafu have accidentally ordered TWO water tower kits? The second redundant tower might languish for years on a siding and eventually be offered to a non-profit group as a charitable contribution; after all, who needs a second water tower. Voila! Agincourt’s freethinkers–its heretics, apostates, blasphemers and worse–would have a place to be unreligious! And it would be as unchurch-like as possible.

My challenge is simple: adapt this kit of parts to accommodate the intellectual home of Agincourt’s freethinkers.

Possibly the most interesting character I’ve encountered in the study of Episcopalians in Dakota Territory (and, of course, the churches they built) is John Keble Karcher. Born in Pennsylvania about 1835, his idiosyncratic life defies easy explanation.

Karcher was born in southeastern Pennsylvania, an area heavy with the Reformation. A name like Karcher (or Kaercher or Kärcher, other spellings I’ve found) suggests that his family were Lutheran or some other species in the German Reformed tradition. As a young man he attended Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, intent possibly on a career in the law, until the clerical life suggested itself. Scant records hint at ordination in the Lutheran denomination, but that didn’t last very long.

At Philadelphia he had shifted allegiance and become a Unitarian minister and, like any recent convert, was soon zealously organizing a second Philadelphia congregation of “Liberal” Christians. Having some skill as a public speaker, he went to Montreal (of all places) to raise money for this new endeavor, but it came to naught. Always on the move, Karcher and family relocated to Nantucket Island and took charge of the Unitarians there. This also didn’t last very long.

Without entangling you in a complicated timeline of geographic and denominational change, Karcher’s spiritual odyssey took him from eastern Pennsylvania to Quebec, Rhode Island, western Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Dakota Territory and finally back home to Philly. At the same time, he shifted his religious affiliation from Lutheran to Unitarian to Episcopal to Roman Catholic to Episcopal to Roman Catholic and back for a third time to the Episcopal church, where he remained until his death about 1915 (I think; my notes aren’t here in front of me). In Dakota Territory alone, he arrived and left as an Episcopal priest, but spent a few of those months back in the arms of Rome. Jason and the Argonauts had nothing on Karcher. I’d give anything for a long conversation with Mrs Karcher and the kids.

The bottom line here is that Dakota was a way station for many journeys of the mind and the flesh. John Keble Karcher may have been an extreme example, but his story is not isolated.

I’m surprised he didn’t make a pit stop in Iowa.

NB [27SEP2020]: As a foot note, I’ll be listing here Karcher’s parish connections, which are several and not always well dated:

• 1870-1871 — Emmanuel, Allegheny City, PA
• 1872 — St Paul’s, Wellsboro, PA
• 1875 — Pittston, PA
• 1876 — Atlantic City, NJ
• 1877 — Portage, WI
• 1878-1879-(1880) — Rochester, MN
• 1880 — St James, Pittston, PA
• 1881 — Appleton, MN
• 1882 — Evansville, IN
• 1883 — Grand Forks, DT
• 1884-1885 — Larimore, DT
• 1888-1889 -1890-1891-1892 — Grand Forks, DT/ND
• 1893 — Philadelphia, PA (npa)
• 1896 — Greenbush, NY
• 1896 — MS (sep)
• 1898 — Carlinville, IL (+chesterfield, IL)
• 1901 — Died at Chicago, IL 1901

NB [19NOV 2022] Here are some land holding of Rev Karcher in the Grand Forks vicinity and their dates of purchase:

KARCHER ANNA CHRISTINA    05   152 N  055 W  032     160   272002  PA  7306 10/20/1884
KARCHER JOHN KEBLE        05   151 N  055 W  005      80   272002  PA  6763 10/20/1884
KARCHER JOHN KEBLE        05   151 N  055 W  005   40.36   272002  PA  6763 10/20/1884
KARCHER JOHN KEBLE        05   151 N  055 W  005   40.33   272002  PA  6763 10/20/1884

12DEC2022: The comment below comes from a current Lutheran clergyperson, though I can't say how he found this blog entry nor why he felt the need to add a comment. Ancestry.com and findagrave.com do, indeed, offer considerable information that helps us document Rev. Karcher's  movements. The latter adds this, which we had already known: "Civil War Union Army Chaplain. He was commissioned as Chaplain, Field and Staff, 114th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry on September 1, 1862.

"In March 1863 he was placed under arrest for being absent without leave, having returned to the regiment's encampment at Camp Pitcher, Virginia eight days after his official leave had expired. He was court-martialed, and plead guilty to the charge. He was sentenced to be dismissed from the service with loss of all pay and allowances, but he was allowed to resign his commission instead, which he did on April 3, 1863." [source: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/127056235/john-keble-karcher]

God Giveth the Increase, Robert and Wynona Wilkins’ denominational history of North Dakota, was published in 1959. It’s typical of many similar studies of the Episcopal church on the Great Plains; volumes of comparable size and perspective were written for South Dakota and Kansas about the same time. Fascinated by the split fieldstone churches that I had seen at places like Casselton, Buffalo, and Lisbon, the Wilkinses’ study was a first step toward understanding the newly-formed missionary diocese of northern Dakota and its powerful corporate image.

Now, here’s the rub. Mid-century academic historians like UND’s Robert Wilkins understood the power of ideas and of the people who acted upon them. They were much less comfortable with material culture (a speculation I’ve expressed here earlier) and God Giveth the Increase makes the point: statistical data are given a human face–specific bishops, clergy and laity–and buildings are used to demonstrate the denomination’s physical presence; prominent doctors, lawyers and bankers are invoked, but the name of an architect never appears in print. Do you think I’m being overly sensitive?

St. Stephen’s Episopcal Church, Casselton, ND (1885-1887) by George Hancock, architect. These HABS drawings were prepared by students of NDSU Professor Steve Martens’ seminar in historic preservation.

Early in my own naive investigation of Dakota’s early church architecture, I had the audacity to contact Professor Wilkins, whose response was distant; today you might call it patronizing. I’ll get over it. I do, however, want to acknowledge the window he opened for me into patterns of parish operation and governance. In Dakota, the diocese depended on the labors of yeoman clergy, Episcopal priests as virtual circuit riders in a place without infrastructure. Bishops were often absent in New York or Chicago, trolling for cash, which left many decisions to parish leaders.

I have worked with this Dakota material long enough to draw some cautious parallels with rural Iowa a decade or two earlier. And my imagined history of Saint Joseph-the-Carpenter grows from thirty years of this background research.

Two years ago Howard Tabor took a walk. It was the early evening of Election Day and he’d become stressed by too many talking heads repeating themselves without end. So Howard and his dog Digger strolled over to claim three pints of green tomato chutney from Aunt Phyllis.

On the way home, he was seized by the beauty of Agincourt’s Episcopal church, St. Joseph-the-Carpenter. Gerry Leiden and the choir were rehearsing the Christmas “Festival of Lessons and Carols” and their harmonies wafted through open doors across a smokey autumn landscape. Howard and Digger slipped into a back pew and gave themselves over to reverie. Oddly, his column on Saturday dealt with architecture; not a word about election results. I wonder where he’ll be tomorrow night.

I knew Agincourt would have an Episcopal church. The Power of their Glory, a book about the disproportional role of Episcopalians in America’s political and economic life, joked that “Episcopal isn’t a denomination; it’s an income tax bracket.” The humor has some basis in fact. But what to name the parish? “High Church” or Anglo-Catholic Episcopalians have been on my radar for thirty-plus years I’ve investigated North Dakota’s fieldstone churches from the 1880s. So I toyed with St. Mary-the-Virgin or Transfiguration, or English saints like Aidan, Swithin or Chad. Then it occurred to me that Papists give plenty of air time to Joseph, the foster father, while Anglicans practically ignore him. Why not St. Joseph-the-Carpenter?

It was an interesting but (I thought) unusual choice–until a quick google check proved there’s already a church bearing that dedication in the Bay Area. Still, the association with a foster parent, a man who worked with his hands, offered direction for my design: this was likely to be a building of the 1870s and I was anxious to work in a “Carpenter Gothic”/”Gothic Revival” vocabulary.

St. Joe’s evolved as a three-stage design: 1) an 1878 original, perhaps by popular East Coast architect Henry Dudley; 2) an 1898 expansion by Des Moines architects Proudfoot & Bird (yes, they’re real); and 3) a chapel added in 1915 to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt. That last phase would also be an opportunity to involve Anson Tennant just before sailing on the Lusitania.

Buildings are rarely complete at their outset. Why should this one be different?

Part 2

What is it about books? I buy them in good faith, intrigued by a title or its cover art; then it sinks by the bedside to the bottom of a growing heap of even newer purchases. Somewhere in there a borrowed book totally disappears, has to be replaced, and then magically surfaces two days after you “returned” the new one.

Some books lie in plain sight–unread–for months, even years, until you accidentally pick one up and read straight through in the next four hours. Others can inspire us from Day One. The problem at our house is the sheer number of books compounded by the absence of a librarian; finding anything is such an archaeological dig that it’s often easier to buy a second copy. That’s what happened with Little Lives by John Howland Spyker (pseudonym of the late Richard Elman [1934-1997]). I bought mine in 1978 and now have at least three copies seeded around the house.

In the spirit of Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology, Spyker delineates a desperate county in upstate New York through brief biographical sketches of its citizenry. Colorful characters all; denizens instantly recognized; some of them the product of pitiful genetic material. When Agincourt began to develop, I had long consigned Spyker’s Little Lives to the background soundtrack of my life. It has surfaced once again, however, a valuable reference and counterpoint for the sketches written by my friend Howard Tabor.

The hardback of 1978 and paperback the following year are its only published forms. It’s especially sad to see many ex-library copies being offered on abebooks.com; copies displaced by newer, more exciting titles–in someone’s estimation. If a copy has been deleted from your library’s shelves in the benighted interest of contemporaneity, I thought you might enjoy a glimpse at Spyker’s style.

Cack The Sissy

Born in a pesthole, sired by a lout and a jade, and treated most cruelly by both throughout his childhood, Cack the Sissy grew up in our midst to wear his nickname of opprobrium like a war decoration.

He never went to schools, and could neither read nor write.

He was ill-housed, and ill-fed, and sometimes was forced to wear women’s clothes to keep his frail body warm.

He was known to relieve himself in the church pews, and he pestered some of the little boys.

Great sport was made of Cack by others; he was called “jack-o’-lantern face” and “moon boy,” “twit” and “girly.”

Once he was taken in by a farmer on the Vaughn Road to do chores, but the man lost patience with his squeamishness, and filthy traits.

He finally found work at the Hercules plant, but fell (or was pushed) into a vat of fulminate and disolved almost to the bone.

Or how about Bonar Thomas?

He was a Welshman. He raised sheep. He lived alone. The schoolboys called him Boner.

I know very little else about the man except he had a brother with an unpronounceable name near Amsterdam, and he was trampled by an ox once in the Romaree Corral.

Some of us will leave behind little more than this.

There is some disturbing rhetoric in higher education today that we may regret in the long run. Much of it boils down to the simple (but not necessarily simplistic) distinction between education and training.

Even The Nation, ordinarily a welcome source of progressive ideas, has brought me up short in a recent article by Thomas Geoghegan, “Ten Things Dems Could Do to Win.” Number 8 on Geoghegan’s list suggests a College Bill of Rights for those who elect to pursue higher education. One of his proposals for “Truth in Advertising” would make our institutions accountable for their product. I’m concerned that the emphasis, however, will swing disproportionately toward training and away from education: the former regulates the bowel habits of young children; the latter equips young adults to face the unanticipated challenge of complex issues without easy or even obvious solutions.

The upper echelon of education is populated with administrators who do “the big think”; whose academese and status equip them to tell all of us–regardless of discipline–how to do our jobs in the trenches. Being lectured by them can be galling.

Books come along that change lives, often unexpectedly. Finite and Infinite Games by James P. Carse has been that kind of experience for me, especially Chapter 17 as it cuts through the argle-bargle of education-speak, discussing our preparation for the surprises that life delivers without end:

To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated.

Education discovers an increasing richness in the past, because it sees what is unfinished there. Training regards the past as finished and the future as to be finished. Education leads toward a continuing self-discovery; training leads toward a final self-definition. 

Training repeats a completed past in the future. Education continues an unfinished past into the future.

Our department has succeeded because, consciously or otherwise, we have embraced Carse’s understanding of education versus training.

Agincourt has had at least two institutions for advanced education during the last 150 years–the private Bishop Kemper Academy and the the public Northwest Iowa Normal School–not to mention K-12 public and parochial schools. I wonder how these ideas have manifest themselves.

While I’m on the subject of Dr Bob, the therapist who helps me expect the unexpected, I’m guessing that Agincourt has had at least one oracle (not to be confused with the business software company who appropriated the word, hoping, perhaps, that their product might be consulted in the same spirit). Most ancient world cultures and some contemporary ones have relied upon interpreters of wisdom, divine and otherwise, consulted when reason fails or conflicting opinions arise. And, while many oracles relied upon babbling incoherency or chemically altered states of consciousness, Glenn Beck is not a contemporary manifestation of oracular power. It’s like squares and rectangles: all squares are rectangles; not all rectangles are squares. Glenn Beck is merely a crackpot whose insights are mistaken for wisdom, which, contrarily, does not mean that he cannot speak wisely on occasion. The odds are just against it.

Agincourt will have had its oracular types, though they and those who listened to them may not have known it. Wisdom often works that way. So whether it was a bartender, owner of a general store, nurse, doctor or vagabond, I feel the need to invent one. My guess is that they were neither teacher nor clergy, folks whose community roles often put them in oracular posture.

I am a part of all that I have met–for better or for worse; and vice versa. Consequently, Agincourt is populated with many people I have known and a handful that I’d like to meet before lying down for the dirt nap.

Edith and Franz Wasserman had a son named Karl, who studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and, like his near contemporary Anson Tennant, came back to home base for the majority of his life. A significant death facilitated Karl’s return and appointment to teach art at the Normal School. One result of that event will be the series of Stations of the Cross in the 2011 exhibit.

Another, as yet unexplored, design opportunity will come from Edith Wasserman’s younger brother Herr Dr Reinhold Kölb, psychologist who had more sense than god gave a rutabaga and got the hell out of Vienna in the 1920s (when the gittin was good). Kölb had become a friend of Jacob Levy Moreno, inventor of psychodrama, and decided a visit to sister and brother-in-law in America might allow him to bring that new therapy to the so-called New World. The result was the establishment of “Walden,” his appropriately named private hospital at the east end of Thoreau Avenue.

It’s relatively easy for me to shift into Progressive or Arts & Craft design mode; those periods of design are comfortable, familiar. Nineteen-twenties European Modernism, however, is a vocabulary I recognize but don’t yet fully understand: it’s not yet a part of my arsenal. So, among many other diversions and distractions, “Walden” is on my plate. What do you think about some inspiration from Mies van der Rohe?

All rights reserved byJagerJanssen Architects BNA

Frank and Edith Wasserman came to Agincourt just before 1900 with Otto Koehmstedt and bought out an earlier hardware store that had been badly mismanaged. Within three years Koehmstedt, Wasserman & Co. had become the dominant regional supply house for all things practical; from tools, nails, screws, hinges, and knobs to plumbing apparatus and small internal combustion engines, if they didn’t have it, they’d find someone who did. By 1910 Koehmstedt, the senior partner, was ready to retire. So the Wassermans bought out his interest in the business and were ready to replace the jumble of buildings they occupied at the corner of Broad and James.

It’s a longer tale than can be told here; suffice to say architecture in 1900 was in transition. At that point Agincourt didn’t have a resident architect. There’d been several men who called themselves “Practical Architect” during the last quarter of the 19th century, but that usually meant a more pragmatic approach to building–someone who’d begun his career as a carpenter/builder and picked up the rudiments of fashion along the way. So Frank Wasserman (actually, he and Edith had come from Austria, so his given name was Franz Josef, after the Emperor) went to Sioux City for professional services, eventually settling on Joachim& Perlmutter.

I gather J&P (or Hans und Franz, as they were known) didn’t give the best service. Within two years, the Wassermans found themselves in need of remodelling–embarrassing when you consider how new their building was. Luckily for our story, Anson Tennant had just returned from architectural studies in Chicago, ready to become Agincourt’s newest professional.

Since Tennant’s father did a goodly amount of business with Wasserman, it may have been Jim Tennant who leveraged Anson’s first commission: a remodeling of the front suite of offices to become the Wassermans’ apartment. In lieu of fees, Anson negotiated a sweet deal that gave him a five year lease on the space that he adapted as a studio/apartment.

The plan in magenta is Tennant’s studio; in yellow the two-story apartment he designed for the Wassermans.

I thought you might like to see the place Anson lived and worked for four years, until that fateful sailing on the RMS Lusitania.