Cranbrook to host lecture series on historic landscapes

The Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research plans to examine the histories of three of Cranbrook’s cultural landscapes in the 2021 installment of the annual Bauder Lecture Series.

The lectures, “Unsettling Landscapes at Cranbrook,” bring historians and experts to explore the history of the original Booth Estate in Bloomfield Hills, the 1915 Japanese Garden on the Cranbrook grounds, and the 1950 Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Smith House, which is now part of Cranbrook’s collection.

The first lecture, “The Cranbrook Estate and the History of the Region’s Indigenous Communities,” on April 11, will focus on the history of Cranbrook Estate and the history of the area’s indigenous communities. George Gough Booth and Ellen Scripps Booth bought a “run-down farm” in 1904 that became the foundation of the Cranbrook Educational Community.

That farm was on land ceded by the Odawa (Ottawa), Ojibwe (Chippewa), Wendat (Wyandot) and Potawatomi Nations in the 1807 Treaty of Detroit. The lecture explores the history of the indigenous communities around Oakland County and examines how the Cranbrook property and surrounding region were used prior to the arrival of settlers from Europe. The lecturers include John P. Bowes, professor of history at Eastern Kentucky University, and Eric Hemenway, the director of archives/records for the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians in Harbor Springs.

The second lecture, “The Cranbrook Japanese Garden and the Japanese Experience in World War II and its Aftermath,” April 18, focuses on the history of the 1915 Japanese Garden on the original Booth Estate. One of Cranbrook’s oldest cultural landscapes, it will serve as a starting point for the story of Japanese-Americans during and after the war.

Bonnie Clark will tell the largely unknown story of the Japanese gardens of Amache, the U.S. government internment camp in Colorado, where gardeners cultivated community in confinement.

Mika Kennedy will relate how Cranbrook’s leaders distanced themselves from Japan during World War II, renaming the Japanese Garden the “Oriental Garden.” Yet they also re-embraced the Japanese community after the war, offering Brookside School as the site for the first Japanese School of Detroit with Saturday morning math and Japanese lan

guage classes.

The third lecture, “The Frank Lloyd Wright Smith House and Segregation in Metropolitan Detroit,” on April 25, will focus on housing segregation in Detroit, using as an example the Smith House in Lone Pine Estates, which was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and is now part of Cranbrook.

When Cranbrook took ownership of the Smith House in 2017, it acquired more than a completely intact 1950 Usonian house and its surrounding landscape — Cranbrook became signatory to a problematic deed.

In the deeds to Lone Pine Road Estates, there is a note that the property within the subdivision may not be owned or rented by anyone not of the “pure, unmixed white, Caucasian, Gentile race.” The Smiths were born into Orthodox Jewish families in Detroit and were able to purchase the land in the 1940s only because of their non-Jewish-sounding surname.

Usonian was a word Wright used to describe some 60 smaller homes he designed for middle-income Americans as part of his vision for the United States of America having a “New World” character, free of established architectural conventions.

Wright designed three Usonian homes included in a 1950s planned community now referred to as The Usonia Historic District in Pleasantville, New York.

Thomas Sugrue, a historian who has written extensively about Detroit, will examine how federal, state and local governments systematically imposed residential segregation around Detroit and elsewhere. Gregory Fioritto, a lawyer with Zelmanski, Danner & Fioritto, will discuss Michigan law on restrictive covenants.