» Wright exhibit:
“Frank Lloyd Wright: A Wisconsin Original” opens Thursday to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the architect’s birth.
Two years before Frank Lloyd Wright died, the good people of Spring Green asked their famous neighbor to be the grand marshal of a parade celebrating their community’s centennial.
Dressed formally in a white suit with top hat and cape, Wright sat in the passenger seat of a beautiful surrey with his wife, Olgivanna, as two horses pulled them through the streets of Spring Green on a sunny July day.
He could have ridden in a fancy car. But Wright loved horses and kept his horsedrawn vehicles long after the internal combustion engine made carriages and wagons mostly obsolete.
That surrey with a fringe top is on display along with a Wright-owned 1890 roof-seat omnibus at the Wesley W. Jung Carriage Museum, which opens its “Frank Lloyd Wright: A Wisconsin Original” exhibit Thursday to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the architect’s birth in Richland Center.
“This is the first time people will see it and connect it to Frank Lloyd Wright,” said Bridgitt Zielke, manager of marketing, public programs and events at Wade House and the nearby Jung Carriage Museum.
The exhibit features a rare album of photos showing Taliesin before a 1914 fire destroyed much of the complex — among the only known pictures of the original Taliesin before it was set ablaze by an arsonist who killed seven people — including Wright’s mistress, Mamah Cheney, and her two children — with an ax as they fled the burning building in 1914.
The exhibit also features a workshop for children to play with architectural toys and Legos and read books in a stagecoach-inspired reading nook.
The Jung Carriage Museum is part of a statewide effort to celebrate the life of Wright, which includes a 200mile Frank Lloyd Wright Trail showcasing his designs in his home state.
The omnibus, which Jung estimated was built in 1890, was used to ferry people visiting Taliesin from the Spring Green train station. It became part of the Jung collection in the 1950s and was restored in 1967.
For the new Wright display, conservators only had to touch up some of the paint in the front, otherwise it’s in great shape, said Jim Willaert, curator of interpretation and collections.
Wright knew Jung because of their interest in horsedrawn vehicles, and he sent several of his carriages to Jung for restoration. Vicki Nelson Bodoh, former president of the Carriage Association of America, has researched Wright’s horsedrawn vehicles and found records that Jung had several Wright carriages. But within a few years of Wright’s death in 1959, all but one — the omnibus — were no longer in Jung’s carriage inventory.
“How Wesley Jung acquired (the omnibus) we don’t really know,” Nelson Bodoh said in a phone interview from her St. Croix Falls home. “I think I can be accurate in surmising that it was taken as payment for a bill that wasn’t paid. Frank Lloyd Wright was notorious for not paying bills.”
A friend of Nelson Bodoh heard a rumor that there were old carriages at Taliesin, Wright’s summer home and architecture school. After getting permission to go on the property in October 2000, they discovered several horse-drawn vehicles, including a cutter, gig, wagonette, governess cart and sailor wagon. Most were in terrible shape, all but forgotten in a barn and garage at Taliesin.
Wright’s love of speed
Nelson Bodoh found a May 22, 1932, Milwaukee Journal article describing Wright’s love of speed: “Standing up in the carriage with hair and coattails flying, he grabbed the reins in one hand, the whip in the other, and the race was on. He got (to the Spring Green train station) just in time to board his train, breathless, ticketless, but there.”
Wright frequently used horse-powered carts and carriages to take his apprentices and their families for picnics. When he was asked to be the Spring Green centennial parade marshal, Wright contacted Jung to borrow one of his carriages which had been recently restored in the spirit of the surrey from the popular musical “Oklahoma.”
A photo of Wright and his wife in the surrey appeared in Look magazine and is included in the new museum exhibit.
A schedule of free lectures at the carriage museum about Wright’s life includes a talk by Nelson Bodoh about the architect’s carriages at 7 p.m. Aug. 10.
The carriage collection was donated in 1963 to the state and displayed at Wade House, an 1850 stagecoach inn built halfway between Sheboygan and Fond du Lac. The bulk of the collection was given by Jung, whose German immigrant grandfather opened a carriage and wagon manufacturing shop in Sheboygan in 1855. The 38,000square-foot museum opened in 2013.