Lake Life (1.something or other)
Archers (that’s what people from Agincourt call themselves) have been summering at Sturm & Drang since the 1880s. A spur line of the NITC served the community between about 1911 and WWII, with a single stop at the Station-Store where passengers transferred to the motor launch that served an arc of resorts going halfway clockwise around Lake Drang. Depicting “lake life” has been aided by postcard offerings of examples from cabins to hotels, most of them dating before 1929 and, therefore, of a more rustic character. With good fortune, I found two postcard views that qualify for inclusion. I’m certain each of them has a story to tell.
Enriqueta Tennant Rylands [1843–1908]
In the land of Six Degrees of Separation (with or without Kevin Bacon), I’ve experienced more than a fair share of connections that seem too close for coïcidence. Witness the (synthetic) family of Anson Curtiss Tennant, entirely concocted and major players in the Agincourt narrative.
photo copyright John Rylands University Library
The young architect required a family, so I provided one, three generations back and two ahead. To simplify the “work”, I made the founder of the family a bastard, there being at least three “Tennant” families in Burke’s Landed Gentry as sperm donors. Flash forward several years: Mr J. Johnson and I were walking down Deansgate, the main thoroughfare in Manchester, UK. I stopped short, making Jeremiah wonder what could be wrong, and I pointed to the John Rylands Library two blocks ahead. I was a little foggy on its date but knew precisely that the architect had been Basil Champneys, a name that doesn’t roll lightly off the tongue or the memory. We invested a couple hours wandering it wondrous interior where the main reading room is presided over by larger-than-life white marble sculptures of the library’s founders John and Enriquetta Rylands. Then flash forward to a simple search for additional information on the library and its founders at the end of the 19th century.
Much to my surprise, shock and amazement, Mrs Rylands was the former Enriqueta Augustina Tennant [1843-1908], born in Havana, Cuba, to an English father and Cuban mother. You can find quite a bit of biography about her but two things are important for me: #1) her maiden name was Tennant, for krysakes, and #2) “Enriqueta Rylands is one of the most influencer [sic] philanthropists in the history of the United Kingdom,” according to a documentary I found. [They must have used google.translate.]
It’s going to take a while to weave this good woman into the tale but I’m compelled to do it.
David G. Fode (1968-2022)
It is with extreme sadness that I report the death in Waukesha, Wisconsin of David G. Fode, a contributor to the Agincourt Project, though he may not have understood that. For a deeply personal reminiscence of Fode’s life, see this blog written by a close friend.
The community of Agincourt was made real through its stories and its stuff, words (too many of them) and objects, material culture (of which there will never be enough). David — whom I never met but communicated through email — operated a stained glass studio in Waukesha. I discovered him through the most random searching on the web and found a craftsman with both wit and skill. I had found an illustration during my undergraduate years at the University of Oklahoma in an early issue of The International Studio, an art journal with a long run of holdings in the library at OU. I’ve been able to find very little biographical material about the artist but that image stayed with me for literally decades, until I found myself designing Agincourt’s kindergarten, circa 1910, and needed some ornament to be in keeping with the general Arts & Crafts feeling I was trying to establish. Lloyd’s illustration of a Punch & Judy show, no matter how sexist it might be in our own culture, was a mainstay for children during the Victorian and Edwardian years.
What Lloyd intended for her charming, albeit politically incorrect image, I have no notion. But it looked to me like the beginning sketch for a stained glass window — one that would require one hell of a lot of staining, there being perhaps a thousand infinitesimal shards of color in its design. I contacted David Fode, included a copy of Lloyd’s design, and asked if he could interpret it at 24-30 inches in diameter. That window is here — in our dining room but still unframed — as an artifact in The Agincourt Project.
The world of stained glass craft has lost a remarkable and phenomenally creative person with David Fode’s passing. Whenever and wherever any subsequent Agincourt exhibit may occur, the “Punch & Judy” window will be a prominent feature and a testimony of David’s work.
I genuinely feel the afterlife will be more beautiful through his presence.
David G. Fode
1968-2022
1,198
That’s the official number of souls who went down with the R.M.S. Lusitania on 7th May 1915. But I continue to wonder whether that number ought to be adjusted by one, the one who went down but came back; the one who escaped being recorded, whose name appears on neither list, of those who perished or those who lived to wonder why they hadn’t.
That number comes to mind this morning as I rummage for a couple coins from what I’m reluctant to call a collection. Somewhere hereabouts are two coins struck by Martin Coles Harmon while he was “King” of Lundy, during 1925-1929 when its status was as a “micronation”. The 1,100-acre island lies off the coast of Devon in the Bristol Channel. Harmon had his own coinage struck in 1929 — the puffin and half puffin — which got him in deep difficulties with the British government and resulted in some jail time. Whether the notoriety was just compensation you’ll have to ask Mr Harmon, but that’s another story for another day. During this quest (as is often the case at our house), I ran across something else misplaced among the detritus: a piece of medalic [spellcheck doesn’t like it with either one “L” or two] art or what coin collectors are wont to call exonumia [spellcheck doesn’t like this either].
When the RMS Lusitania (the ancient Roman name for their province which is now Portugal) sank, the Germans took considerable pride, more than sufficient to strike a commemorative medal, a piece of both medalic art and propaganda. That medal — I’ve not seen one for sale or auction until curiosity overcame me today — was recast in 1916 by Selfridge’s to benefit St Dunstan’s Blinded Soldiers and Sailors Hostel; 250K were cast, which makes it considerably less than rare, but the point is made: there was no honor in this bald-faced act of savagery.
Our copy of the British restrike retains is commemorative box and single-sheet brochure. But it also contains a handwritten letter from F. Luerson of #83, Amhurst Rd, Hackney E8. Google.earth will take me there in a few moments. The note is addressed to “My Dear Ruby” and dated Christmas, though the year is missing, torn or worn from top and bottom of the single foolscap sheet. It’s just like me to wonder about the writer: Who were the Luersons? And would the period of their residence provide a clue to which Christmas it was that seemed appropriate to remind a friend of such a disaster. Seems an odd gift, given that Ruby might well have known someone who might have known someone whose name was on the list. The list which might have included Anson Curtiss Tennant, if only he’d been real.
Tomorrow, maybe, the story of the puffin and half-puffin and the aforementioned Mr Harmon. And WTH that could have to do with a fictional town in Iowa.
PS [a few minutes later]: Mr Frederick Luerson (son of Frederick Luerson and Anne Fenner) had two sisters and did himself serve in the British military. The Luerson home may have become lost in street renumbering, The current premises are either: 1) Yori Sushi, 2) Supreme Boutique, a unisex salon, or 3) Noodle Express, none of which are likely to be anywhere near my Bucket List.
Sedona sink hole — a short story
No one recalled when the ground had begun to fall away, to drop suddenly without warning, leaving houses wavering on the gaping maw — why do maws gape? — like twins on a teeter-totter so finely balanced that their in- and exhalations had to be coördinated lest one of them triumphantly silhouette the other against the sky, the Ektachrome® blue desert sky, a color unknown to any but those born into the long-gone age of film-based photography, which would have done the scene crisp pictorial justice, the aforementioned not-quite-azure against the rusty-tawny soluble substrate the houses foolishly depended upon for support. Anyway.
Anson Tennant
CHAP ##: DESIGNING DESIGN: A CONVERSATION WITH MYSELF
No work of architecture stands alone. It comes from a designer’s cumulative experience — historian J. Ritchie Garrison calls it “memory in motion” — and takes form through collaboration with clients and builders (and, dare I say it? bankers, and code enforcement officials). When asked about his best design, Frank Lloyd Wright replied, in that spirit, “The next one, of course”, a design that will, in turn, influence the one following and the next. It also has potential to affect the work of others in both positive and negative ways. Very likely, both. At the same time. The consequence itself becomes consequential.
Those complex relationships exist on a broad spectrum of awareness, a large measure of it subliminal; the result of what designers call intuition. But “the happy accident” is neither accidental nor incidental. And, so, I have to fit young Anson Tennant’s design of Agincourt’s new public library somewhere into this highly organic process.
Carnegie libraries constitute a major event in American cultural history: During the “wholesale” period of his giving, the Pittsburgh industrialist underwrote more than 1,800 public and academic libraries and effectively created an icon. One hundred and eight were built in Iowa alone. And their stimulus encouraged other communities to follow suit through local benefaction or outright public support. But whatever the source, Carnegie’s efforts had established a virtual template for small public library design. Indeed, popular opinion holds that Carnegie provided the plans themselves and that “all Carnegie libraries look alike”. Well, yes, there was bound to be a family resemblance. But there was considerable variation on the basic theme and a measure of downright innovation. Sites and local taste varied, as did the abilities of local architectural talent. And such a prominent public “statement” could only enhance a young architect’s career.
Strict chronology doesn’t quite apply here. I’m not Anson Tennant (no matter how much I might enjoy inhabiting his world for a little while), so the backstory is really mine. And my experience as an historian of architecture predisposes me to certain defaults — Louis Sullivan, for instance, the founder of this feast. Young Tennant would have been a Sullivan enthusiast at age twenty-five but so was I, a Chicago native exposed to Louie’s work for a dozen years by that time in my life. A project like this depends on either 1) this kind of familiarity before the fact, or 2) a necessarily intense exploration to compensate for ignorance. So, the evolving APL design has been interrupted now and then with a need to tell Anson’s backstory, not mine, and allow it to shape the narrative.
Young Tennant’s exposure to Sullivan could have come through professional periodicals. But many Iowa communities looked toward Chicago generally as a cultural mecca. Sullivan’s five Iowa commissions — three banks, a church, and small department store — were a tempting but unlikely factor. Sullivan himself, as I’ve noted more than once, designed no public library facility during the Carnegie Era. But he did produce designs for buildings of similar scale and complexity: small-banks, substantial single-family homes, the aforementioned church in Cedar Rapids. Those were helpful for shaping the library’s space and its sequencing, what Beaux Arts architects like Sullivan would have called enfilade.
One of the most useful tools during the project has been another cultural phenomenon at the turn of the century but one likely to fall below our radar: the common penny postcard, popular during the years 1880-1920. They could be bought for a penny and mailed for the same. The U.S. Postal Service delivered twice daily and also on Sundays — who says we’re not a secular state? — and folks used “postals” as a common means of communication even within small towns, until the telephone was more widespread. And also because the postcard coincided with the Carnegie era, those new symbols of civic pride were featured in rotating racks at the drug store cashier. I began this project just about the time the on-line auction site that dare not speak its name entered the picture. And as its search engine has become more sophisticated, the number of postcards has compounded geometrically. At the time of writing, nearly six million are offered for bids and a respectable number of them will be library buildings of the 1890-1920 era. One of those cards played a major role in shaping the APL.
Conventional wisdom (which is neither) tells us those Carnegie libraries were built from stock plans provided by Carnegie himself. Not so. Indeed, he commissioned a survey in 1909 to assess how wisely his benefaction was being invested and was shocked to find many communities had wrongly assumed his intent was immortality! Pompous porticoes sporting Carnegie’s name in an august two-foot Roman font. So the thrifty Scot produced a tri-fold pamphlet titled “Hints on Library Bilding”. And, no, that’s not a misprint; Andrew was also a proponent of simplified phonetic spelling which he calculated would save millions of trees and tank cars of ink. So Anson’s initial notion for his design, one which would separate him from his fellow competitors, was a hybrid scheme incorporating both civic and commercial space: why shouldn’t the building generate income to supplement the library’s operating budget?
One day my casual search of postcards at auction produced something I had never seen: a late 19th century public library occupying all of its site — something Carnegie libraries rarely did — with two twenty-five-foot commercial storefronts on the major street frontage and the library entrance halfway down the length of the building, a lobby providing access to the second floor library itself [the first floor for Europeans], pre-Carnegie pragmatism. Anson’s building had already taken this form on faith, so I was temporarily vindicated.
An inquiry to the Keokuk Public Library (an Iowa town on the Mississippi River) confirmed this building had served the community’s needs from 1883 into the 1960s. And an interesting footnote: the reference librarian said her mother would not allow the child to go unattended, because the ground-floor space at the rear of the building had at one time housed prostitutes — another American notion of taxing sin to underwrite virtue.
Sullivan’s late house for Henry Babson was an obvious point of departure for Anson Tennant. It was published in the Architectural Record magazine for October 1911, about the time the APL competition would have been in discussion. And the scale of the Babson house was ideal. Unlike Frank Lloyd Wright’s houses of the time — the so-called Prairie School period of flowing space and blurred lines between inside and out — Sullivan’s spaces were discrete, cellular, and formally sequential. Sullivan thought in terms of rooms and buildings as collections of them, axially organized like an ancient Roman bath: frigidarium — tepidarium — calidarium. Tennant adapted Sullivan’s pulsing enfilade (spatial progression) to the needs of the small American public library.
No work of architecture stands alone. It results from a designer’s cumulative experience — what historian J. Ritchie Garrison calls “memory in motion” — and takes form through collaboration with client, builders, and (dare I say it?) bankers, and code enforcement officials. When asked about his best design, Frank Lloyd Wright replied, in that spirit, “The next one, of course.” A design that will, in turn, influence the next and the next. It also has potential to affect the work of others in both positive and negative ways. Very likely, both. Simultaneously. The consequence becomes consequential.
Those complex relationships exist on a broad spectrum of awareness, a large measure of it subliminal; the result of what designers call intuition. But “the happy accident” is neither accident nor incidental. And, so, I have to accept young Anson Tennant’s design of Agincourt’s new public library developing somewhere in this highly organic process.
Strict chronology doesn’t quite apply in this case. I’m not Anson Tennant (no matter how much I might enjoy that for a little while), so the backstory here is mine. And my experience as an historian of architecture predisposes me to certain defaults — Louis Sullivan, for instance, the founder of this feast. Young Tennant would have been a Sullivan enthusiast at age twenty-five but so was I, a Chicago native exposed to Louis’s work for a dozen years. A project like this depends either 1) on this kind of familiarity before the fact, or 2) a necessary intense exploration to compensate for my ignorance. So, the evolving APL design has been interrupted now and then with a need for Anson’s backstory, not mine.
Carnegie libraries constitute a major event in American cultural history: During the “wholesale” period of his giving, the Pittsburgh industrialist underwrote construction of more than 1,800 public and academic libraries. One hundred and eight were built in Iowa alone. And their stimulus encouraged other communities to follow suit through local benefaction or outright public support. But whatever the source, Carnegie’s efforts had created a virtual template for small public library design. Indeed, popular opinion holds that Carnegie provided the plans themselves and that “all Carnegie libraries look alike”. Well, yes, there was bound to be a family resemblance. But there was considerable variation on the basic theme and a measure of downright innovation. Sites and local taste varied, as did the capabilities of local architectural talent. And such a prominent public “statement” could enhance any career.
Young Tennant’s exposure to Sullivan could have come through professional periodicals. But many Iowa communities also looked toward Chicago generally as a cultural mecca. Sullivan’s five Iowa commissions — three banks, a church, and small department store — were a tempting but unlikely factor. Sullivan himself, as I’ve noted more than once, designed no public library facility during the Carnegie Era. But he did produce designs for buildings of similar scale: small-banks, substantial single-family homes, the aforementioned church in Cedar Rapids. Those were helpful for shaping space and its sequencing, what Beaux Arts architects like Sullivan would have called enfilade.
Artifactually Speaking
We invested the morning in salvage: books from the Little House that needed to be removed before the building can be moved in preparation for a new foundation. Downsizing for whatever remains of my life is a pain in the dupa. Among the many things that will also have to find safe harbor — rather than simply becoming an item in the biggest garage sale this neighborhood has ever seen — is the stained glass window and custom-made door from the Agincourt Project meant to invoke young Anson Tennant’s architectural office, opened in 1912 and put in mothballs when he was thought to have gone down with the Lusitania. It came up in my FB memories and a friend was kind enough to ask for a fuller story.
Yes, I readily admit this blog is anything but user friendly; difficult to negotiate and impossible to detect any sort of organization whatsoever. And my feeble attempts at providing that have not succeeded, generally. So what follows here is twofold: 1) an attempt to bring together one of the project’s most important stories (Anson Tennant) and 2) a consideration of what will become of all the artifacts that have accumulated in the course of the last sixteen years — and they are considerable.
In simplified terms, Anson Tennant was the architect for the new Agincourt Public Library, built in 1915. But his “backstory” required all the preparation he’d have required to reach that position as a young untried designer but favored as a “native son”. This entailed a sequence of events which built toward that end:
- spending summers with his maternal grandfather Corwin Curtis on the farm outside Mason City and learning the rudiments of carpentry from him;
- designing and crafting a dollhouse for his little sister for Christmas 1905;
- graduating from high school and, soon after, being entrusted by his parents Jim and Martha with expansion of the family home;
- heading off to Chicago to “study” architecture at the School of the Art Institute and, with advice from a family friend;
- returning home in 1912 and receiving his first commission: remodeling of the Wasserman Block and receiving studio-office space in trade for his professional services;
- and, finally, imagining how a young architect would present himself to an audience of friends and neighbors.
That office required a public face, a business card of sorts, abbreviating his design point of view. Which evolved into a stained glass window with his name and, far more important, the motto of the Arts & Crafts movements, “Als Ik Kan” or “to the best of my ability”. And that, in turn, depended on the considerable abilities of Mr Dan Salyards.
♦So, what is to become of this wondrous artifact?
♦Here are some links to several parts of the story…not necessarily in consecutive order. Sorry about that:
♦Chicago architect J. Lyman Silsbee plays w part in the origin of the Agincourt Public Library.
♦Anson’s first commission in Agincourt was a remodelling of the Wasserman Block, where he eventually set up an office-studio. The office itself began to take shape. And its Arts & Crafts character took on significance.
♦The stained glass window was crafted by Dan Salyards.
♦There’s a bunch of stuff on Tennant family genealogy.
♦And, then, among many other miscellaneous things, there’s the whole matter of the Tennant Manufacturing Co. and all those damned wood blocks.
It really has got needlessly complicated, hasn’t it.
Donald Maxwell [1877–1936]
[From the Community Collection, a public trust in Agincourt, Iowa]
MAXWELL, Donald [1877–1936]
“Pook’s Hill, Little Dartmouth”
ca1920
lithograph / 6.8 inches by 10.9 inches / edition unknown
A charming early 20th Century chromolithograph, showing a view across Pook’s Hill, Little Dartmouth adds to the apt but unjust observation — in our estimation — that the Community Collection consists largely of “landscapes and livestock.” Artist Donald Maxwell may be better known for his considerable body of work as an illustrator:
“Maxwell trained in London at the Clapham School of Art, the Slade School of Fine Art, and the Royal College of Art. He was soon writing and illustrating extensively for The Yachting Monthly and other magazines. In about 1909, he became a regular correspondent for the Daily Graphic and the illustrated weekly The Graphic and continued so until the latter closed in 1932. In later life he wrote weekly illustrated articles for the Church Times.
“Most of Maxwell’s thirty or more self-illustrated books were about voyages in (Europe, Mesopotamia, Palestine, and India) and later about the sights of Southern England. He also illustrated books by many other authors, including Hilaire Belloc and also Rudyard Kipling, to whom his mother was related.
“Interest in Maxwell’s work as an artist has continued. Several of his topographical paintings were bought by the Southern Railway and displayed as prints in railway carriages. These have since become collectors’ items. A lithograph of a water colour by Maxwell showing Shap Fell in Cumbria, printed for the London, Midland and Scottish Railway, sold at auction for £517 in 1999, and a marine oil painting for £5520 in 1998. A folio of unframed drawings by Maxwell fetched £840 at auction in 2005.” [from Wikipedia, no less]
We are fortunate to have this delicate piece.
Ross Foster [active 1980s]
[From the Community Collection, a public trust in Agincourt, Iowa]
FOSTER, Ross [active 1980s]
“Punch & Judy”
oil on board / 10.6 inches by 10.6 inches / signed
ca1980s
“Merry-go-Round”
oil on board / 7.25 inches by 8.5 inches / signed
ca 1980s
Though the subject reeks of contemporary political incorrectness, “Punch & Judy” are represented in the collection three times. This impressionist interpretation probably dates from the 1980s. British artist Ross Foster has been drawn to beach, carnival and other scenes such as this. In spirit, it pairs nicely with Jeffrey Boys’ similar subject. The second “merry-go-round” painting is also typical of the artist’s tendency toward impressionist treatments of recreation in the U.K.
obliti abhorrentes (1.1)
maxime innocens
“The town that time forgot and geography misplaced” has been Agincourt’s subtitle, almost since the beginning. So much so that it seemed the proper motto to grace the city’s official documents: its seal incorporates what google.translate claims is proper Latin and the official flag remains a work in progress. It follows — as naturally as anything does in this context — that Agincourt would have an entry in the WPA guide to Iowa.
Published in 1938, Iowa, A Guide to the Hawkeye State explores the state region by region in somewhat organized “tours” — as if anyone had enough spare cash to afford gasoline! — generally from east to west, from the Mississippi to the Missouri. The book has been available in reprint forever, though I suspect you’d have to find it in the O.P. market these days. I checked and found an original 1938 copy for $106 on biblio.com! Shocking because I seem to have acquired two copes myself. And I didn’t pay anything like that.
Some years ago, I wrote a similar “entry” for Agincourt in Hilton & Due’s The Electric Interurban Railways in America, another standard reference which would have been remiss to overlook our fair city. Agincourt’s summation in either would have been formulaic and (I thought) easy to simulate. Messrs. H&D proved easier than the WPA format. Then I had a perverse moment of inspiration: suppose it had been put in the hands of Douglas Adams: “Mostly Harmless” pretty much sums it up.