Sometimes, a loss is loss

Options few on burned-out Fay Jones-designed house

It can hardly be a surprise that the people running the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art don’t want its Bentonville campus to become the historic house subdivision of Northwest Arkansas.

The latest news from the saga of the burned- out, Fay Jones- designed former Fayetteville home of law school professor-turned-president

Bill Clinton is that the Bentonville museum doesn’t see the benefit of restoring the structure nearly 40 miles away from where it was built in 1957.

Sure, the museum’s grounds are home to a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed structure, the Bachman-Wilson House, that was originally built in New Jersey in 1956. No offense meant to the memory of E. Fay Jones, who was a great and inspired architect from Fayetteville, but Frank Lloyd Wright is considered on many lists as the greatest architect of all time. Even recognizing Jones’ incredible talent, the house at issue is, at this point, largely a pile of rubble. So what the architect designed and built is gone. And the home’s relevance in the history of President Clinton is deeply rooted in its location near Fayetteville, not at a museum in a neck of our woods more renowned for Mr. Sam than for President Bill.

It is unfortunate that a recent blaze so seriously damaged the home in which Clinton lived from 1973 to 1975, the year he married a young Yale Law School alum and fellow University of Arkansas law professor named Hillary. They moved to a different house nearer the college that today is the Clinton House Museum owned by the Fayetteville Advertising and Promotion Commission.

The reality is the now-burned house on Huntsville Road isn’t so historic because Bill Clinton got his mail there for a couple of years. It’s an interesting story, but its real significance comes more from its legendary designer than from its status as a Clinton hangout.

The history went up in flames. A rebuilt home would essentially be a replica.

Thank goodness Fayetteville still has 27 homes designed by Fay Jones, the man who made us all marvel with his Thorncrown Chapel in Eureka Springs and who was among the most successful of apprentices who studied under Wright.

Perhaps little can be done to recover the damaged house on Huntsville Road, but those other 27 should now be guarded and protected even more for the treasured examples of architecture they are.