The Other China Connection—Dwight Heald Perkins and Nanjing
Dwight H. Perkins. The Forest Preserve District of Cook County (Chicago, 1921), 87.
If Walter Burley Griffin had no real connection with China, the same was not true for Marion Mahony Griffin. As students and fans of the Griffins will know, Dwight Heald Perkins, a well-known Chicago architect, was Marion’s cousin. But Walter had a direct connection of his own to Perkins: Walter worked in Perkins’s Chicago office immediately after finishing his degree at Illinois, so he was quite familiar with Perkins and his operations. Consequently, even though Dwight Perkins never designed a building in Grinnell, he was closely connected to the Griffins. And, by virtue of receiving the commission to design the first buildings of China’s Nanjing University at about the same time that Ricker House arose on north Broad Street in Grinnell, Perkins inevitably joined the Griffins in a grand venture of international design.
Dwight Perkins, however, never went to China, nor was he responsible for most of the designs applied to the new university; those tasks fell to his partner, William Kinne Fellows, who spent five months in China in 1914, deciding basic questions of design as well as the best materials locally available. Fellows’s contribution to the Nanjing project, therefore, was enormous. But it was Dwight Perkins who handled all the business of the commission, particularly by his assiduous attentions to Nettie Fowler McCormick, one of the principal benefactors of Nanjing University.
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Cady & Gregory, University of Nanking Plan (Feb. 1912). University of Nanking Magazine 4, no. 1 (Feb. 1913), cover overleaf.
About the same time that the Rickers moved into their new home in Grinnell, spring 1912, it looked as though the commission for designing the campus of Nanjing University might go to a New York firm. An early plan of the proposed campus, dated February, 1912 and published in the University magazine, bears the name of Cady and Gregory, a well-established New York architectural firm that J. Cleveland Cady headed. By this time Cady, sometimes called the “Presbyterian architect” for his numerous commissions for the Presbyterian church, was 75 years of age and nearing the end of his career. Whether his age affected the commission is unknown, but already in March 1912 another New York firm had entered the picture: Ludlow and Peabody. William Orr Ludlow (1870-1954) was born in New York and in 1892 received an engineering degree from Stevens Institute of Technology. After an earlier partnership dissolved, in 1909 Ludlow partnered with Charles S. Peabody (1880-1935) who had graduated from Harvard in 1903, and in 1908 from Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. The firm, which lasted into the 1930s, was responsible for several hundred designs, including many New York City churches and several skyscrapers. But its beginnings depended upon two college campus designs: Sheldon Jackson College (now dissolved) in Sitka, Alaska (1910-11); and George Peabody College (now part of Vanderbilt University) (1911-14).
Nettie Fowler McCormick, 1919. Stella Virginia Roderick, Nettie Fowler McCormick (Rindge, 1956), before 163.
As with Cady, Ludlow’s Presbyterian background (his father was a Presbyterian minister) and his work for the Presbyterian Sheldon Jackson School attracted the interest of the university board. In an April 15, 1912 letter to L. H. Severance, Ralph Diffendorfer, then secretary to the Nanjing University Board, reported that he had been in contact with Ludlow. “I have asked him,” he wrote, “to talk with his partner about the possibility of their willingness to undertake the entire work involved in laying out this property and the various buildings.” Ludlow and Peabody, he continued, “are both Christian men and I have asked them to make this work a contribution to the cause of mission.”
Using Ludlow and Peabody made sense, given their recent experience with college planning and their Presbyterian connections. And, in a March, 1912 letter, Ludlow expressed a willingness to take on the Nanjing project, and offered to exempt from charge his own and his partner’s time, if not all design costs. But in a reply to Ludlow, dated June 4, 1912, Diffendorfer noted that Mrs. Cyrus McCormick had recently pledged $25,000 for a dormitory in Nanjing, and was eager to use her own architect. Ludlow’s response acknowledged the donor’s right to name the architect of the building she gave, but did doubt whether “it would be good policy for the Board to have him [Mrs. McCormick’s unnamed architect] also make the layout plan.” Ludlow thought the Board would be better served by a New York architect, easily reached from the Board’s New York headquarters. Diffendorfer’s late June reply stipulated that the matter would remain open, awaiting developments. In fact, however, Nettie Fowler McCormick seems to have seized the initiative. As the first of the big donors to the project, Mrs. McCormick seems to have earned the right to nominate the architect, and she wanted a Chicago—not a New York—architect.
John Elias Williams. W. Reginald Wheeler, John E. Williams of Nanking (NY, 1937).
In his 1937 biography of John E. Williams, vice-president of the University and fund-raiser-in-chief, W. Reginald Wheeler quotes from a Williams letter dated March 15, 1912 that reported on his most recent visits: “I saw Madame McCormick this afternoon. She gives twenty-five thousand for a dormitory of the College group. She was deeply interested in the whole scheme and in our plans.” The archive of the United Board of Christian Higher Education in Asia includes a brief letter of the same date, addressed to Williams, and signed “N. F. McCormick,” that confirms the gift, the first to underwrite the initial group of buildings of the University. Later, Mrs. McCormick, who was a much more generous philanthropist than her deceased husband had ever been and who gave substantial amounts to numerous overseas projects, was incensed at mistaken press reports that credited her with giving Nanjing a quarter-million dollars. The New York Times, for example, reported on December 22, 1913 that Mrs. McCormick “was to finance a large portion of the construction of a group of new buildings for the Shantung Christian University at Tsinan…and another group of buildings for the University of Nanking.” As she wrote in a January 15, 1914 letter, “I have made no such gift… I have promised one building to Nanking [a dormitory], and one to Shantung, not expensive buildings. This is all. I have no part in the other buildings” (although she did later contribute $10,000 toward the $30,000 Language School Building at Nanjing).
As Stella Virginia Roderick observed in her biography, Nettie McCormick had a deep interest in and appreciation of architecture (one of the reasons, perhaps, that her grandson Gordon himself became an architect): for instance, long before she became involved with the Nanjing project, she dealt with Louis Sullivan who designed a building she gave to Tusculum College and who also did some early work at Walnut Grove, her husband’s former home in Virginia. Mrs. McCormick’s archive is full of architects’ renderings for numerous projects she helped fund, so her insistence on using her own architects for the Nanjing project is no surprise, nor was it a surprise that Perkins, Fellows and Hamilton, who executed several buildings for her, including her Lake Forest home, received her confidence.
Correspondence surrounding the Nanjing University project confirms that Dwight Perkins won the commission through careful cultivation of Mrs. McCormick. Even before Fellows joined the firm, Dwight Perkins was exchanging correspondence with Mrs. McCormick, but in the period immediately leading up to the Nanjing commission, Perkins was particularly assiduous in his attentions. In the Nettie Fowler McCormick correspondence archived at the Wisconsin Historical Society is a letter from Perkins dated April 10, 1911 in which the architect noted Mrs. McCormick’s gift to Chicago’s Fourth Presbyterian Church and its new buildings. “Naturally,” Perkins continued, “we are interested in regard to the architectural commission, and write to ask what our chance is in this matter.” Another exchange of notes concerned Mrs. McCormick’s health; expressing thanks for his concern, Mrs. McCormick invited Perkins and his wife to accompany her to church, and then to join her at home for supper—which they did. Perkins shared architectural plans (for New Trier High School, for instance) with Mrs. McCormick, and she, in turn, tried to bring him into her circle of reading, at one point loaning him her copy of the Hibbert Journal, evidently as part of a discussion the two had had about war.
As the Nanjing project developed, Perkins made sure to touch base often with Mrs. McCormick. The McCormick archives contain early drawings of the dormitory she was donating (Front Elevation, May 27, 1912) as well as several attempts at laying out a new overall plan for the university (Group Plan, University of Nanking, May 27, 1912; Alternative Group Plan, May 27, 1912). Later deliveries included updated elevations (preliminary prints for the first and second floors of the dormitory, January 11, 1913; front and rear elevations of the dormitory, January 11, 1913; detailed drawings of doors and windows, January 11, 1913; and a cross-section of the north elevation (January 11, 1913). In addition, Perkins sent along a revised group plan (Long Scheme, University of Nanking, April 1, 1914; General Block Plan, University of Nanking, December 30, 1914; and a Topographical Map of North End of Campus, May 14, 1914. In brief, Mrs. McCormick received regular and detailed reports on the entire project. Her money as well as her experience with architects empowered her to propose to the university board that an architect be sent to China, as a May 9, 1913 letter from Dwight Perkins confirms: “During one of our conferences,” he wrote to Mrs. McCormick, “you suggested that some one of our firm should go to China and make a study of conditions to gather this information and to enable us to become more thoroughly equipped for this piece of work…The more we think of it, the more we are convinced that this would be a wise thing to do.” That mission fell to William Fellows.
William Kinne Fellows (1870-1948) was born in Winona, Minnesota, and grew up just blocks away from Seth Temple, who designed Grinnell’s Fellows House (no relation that I could establish). Also like Temple, Fellows attended Columbia University, graduating with an architecture degree in 1894, and, again like Temple, won a traveling fellowship to Europe in 1896. After his return to the U.S., Fellows entered private practice, partnering with George C. Nimmons in Chicago; the firm survived until 1911, specializing in large commercial buildings for clients like Sears, Roebuck and Co. Apparently it was Hamilton who recruited Fellows to the Perkins firm in 1911, where Fellows was responsible for numerous institutional designs, especially schools, for which the firm became well-known. When the partnership dissolved in 1925, Fellows continued to work on his own, although apparently without great intensity, since he had become very wealthy through some stock he owned. Fellows died in Chicago in 1948, his estate donating $560,000 to Columbia University to endow (in his name) traveling scholarships for young architects—like the fellowship that Fellows himself had won in 1896 (see New York Times, February 22, 1953).
By all accounts, Fellows was a gifted architect, but apparently he was also something of a loose cannon within the office; according to the recollections of Dwight Perkins’s son, Lawrence Bradford Perkins (1907-97), Fellows quarreled with his former partner, George Nimmons, because Fellows was uninterested in paying—or even maintaining—accurate bills. Fellows was “handsome, urbane, very talented, and bone lazy,” as Lawrence put it, but he was very skilled and deeply influenced by European trends—”Gothic ornament…dripped off his fingers,” the younger Perkins reported, with the result that later projects of the firm lost the prairie impulse that Dwight Perkins had first developed (and so brilliantly conveyed in the several structures at Chicago’s Lincoln Park and Carl Schurz High School).
Campus Plan of University of Nanking. Educational Buildings by Perkins, Fellows and Hamilton (Chicago, 1925), 144.
Nanking University, Main Quadrangle (ca. 1920). Photo courtesy China Christian Colleges and Universities Image Database (http://divdl.library.yale.edu/ydlchina), Yale Divinity Library.
After Perkins devoted several months to negotiation with the university board over the cost of sending Fellows to China, William Fellows left Chicago for China in late December, 1913. The March, 1914 issue of the University of Nanking Magazine enthusiastically welcomed Mr. and Mrs. Fellows and plans for the university he brought along. The differences between the early plans that Mrs. McCormick received in 1912 and 1913 and those subsequently developed make clear that Fellows’s visit to Nanking had a tremendous influence on the final design. The original group plan shared many basic ideas with the 1912 scheme of Cady and Gregory, with dormitories flanking the chapel and science building in one grand courtyard that headed a long axial orientation. But after having seen the site, Fellows opted for a much more interesting solution whose basic outlines may still be seen in today’s university campus, despite all the subsequent growth of the university.
Following a detailed topographic study of the site, Fellows proposed in his 1914 report to university trustees to isolate “the main college group on a system of terraces at the north end of the property…these form a series of ascending courts from a public road at the bottom… This places the Chapel and Library on the first terrace, about five feet above the road; the two Science buildings on a second terrace, about ten feet above the road; and the Administration building on a third terrace, about fifteen feet above the road…This arrangement gives the dominant position to the University group at the north end of the plan.”
Large, city-wall brick used in University of Nanking building foundations. Photo 2011.
A second emphasis of Fellows’s report fell on building materials. Fellows noted that, although China had plenty of building materials (with the exception of wood), “there is no building material easily available…in Nanking.” Having observed local brick production, Fellows found Nanking bricks “at best…soft, and deficient in bearing strength.” Building in brick requires mortar, but Fellows reported that “there is no local sand available,” nor, it seems, was any “suitable building stone…found in the immediate vicinity.” Nevertheless, he was able to recommend a series of solutions for building materials, and provide specific costs, the better to estimate how well donors’ funds matched actual building costs. University Trustees by resolution of April 27, 1914 endorsed Mr. Fellows’s report, and provided a list of preferences for building materials. For the walls, the trustees thought “Specially burned brick with marble trimmings” their least favorite solution, but it was, in fact, the ultimate choice. For foundations, the trustees hoped for concrete or local sandstone, city-wall brick as a third option—again, the alternative won the day. Something similar happened with roofing choices, the trustees expressing a preference for green or yellow glazed tile, but willing to accept concrete or slate. Despite these variations, there can be no doubt that, because Fellows had investigated all these options on-site, the architects and University trustees were on much firmer ground about their plans than they could possibly have been in the absence of Fellows’s sojourn in Nanking.
Henry Murphy, Foreign Languages Building, Nanjing Normal University (former Ginling College). 2011 photo.
The last part of Fellows’s report dwelt on style, bemoaning the failures of foreign efforts in China. “The foreign style has so far developed nothing worthy of imitation,” he asserted; “Foreign architecture as introduced into China through the Treaty ports from Hong Kong and the south has not one feature to redeem its stupidity. Transplanted Gothic, no matter how well it may be executed, looks out of place.” Fellows, from whose fingers Gothic designs fairly dripped (according to Lawrence Perkins), thought “it would be a worthy work to adapt the Chinese to their modern and changed conditions and still retain for them the beauty and individuality of their native art.” Writing about the Architecture of Christian campuses in China, Jeffrey W. Cody pointed out that the “Beaux-Arts method helped architects lay out their buildings within a spatial system that made coherent sense to them…[and showed a] predilection for symmetry and the creation of courtyard configurations…” Henry Murphy‘s plans for Ginling College may represent this finding best, but Bill Fellows’s plans for Nanking University certainly harmonize well with Cody’s analysis. The courtyard cluster, the use of transitions (via paths at Nanking), an axial orientation to the cluster, and relatively tall structures to anchor vistas—all these may be found in plans developed by Fellows for Nanking university.
Ambrose Swasey (1846-1937), donor of Swasey Science Building, University of Nanking.
Swasey Science Building, University of Nanking. Photo courtesy China Christian Colleges and Universities Image Database (http://divdl.library.yale.edu/ydlchina), Yale Divinity Library.
McCormick Dormitories, University of Nanking. Photo courtesy China Christian Colleges and Universities Image Database (http://divdl.library.yale.edu/ydlchina), Yale Divinity Library.
Other alterations followed, most a function of the availability of materials. One significant change was to abandon the idea of one large dormitory, and to use Mrs. McCormick’s gift instead to build two smaller buildings, the beginning of a residential courtyard. But once the dormitories went up, other structures soon followed. Thanks to the generosity of Cleveland’s Ambrose Swasey (1846-1937), a new science building was completed in late 1916, allowing Swasey and friends to attend the formal dedication in Nanjing, January, 1917. The administration building was the gift of two other Cleveland philanthropists—John L. Severance (1863-1936), famous for Severance Hall, today still home to the Cleveland Orchestra, and his sister, Elisabeth Severance Prentiss (1865-1944), who gave generously to Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Museum of Art. Fellows and Severance exchanged a series of letters, the basic thrust of which was Severance’s desire to trim the costs of the building, especially by deleting the tower. Fellows, however, held firm, insisting that the tower was crucial for water supply as well as aesthetics, and in the end his view carried the day, even if it did cost the Severance siblings another $15,000 over the $25,000 they each gave. Day Chapel, as it was called in the early correspondence, was later named Sage Chapel, thanks to a $25,000 gift from the Sage legacy by the New York Women’s Board. Bailie Hall, named for the university’s long-time agricultural specialist, Joseph Bailie (1860-1935), closely matched the Swasey Science Building on the opposite side of the courtyard, but was not completed until 1925, bringing the main courtyard near to completion on the eve of political turmoil that took the life of John Williams and did so much to interrupt the successful growth of the university.
John L. Severance (1863-1936), donor (with his sister, Paula Prentiss) of Severance Hall, University of Nanking.
Elisabeth Severance Prentiss (1865-1944), donor to Severance Administration Building, University of Nanking.
Severance Hall (Administration Building), University of Nanking. Photo courtesy China Christian Colleges and Universities Image Database (http://divdl.library.yale.edu/ydlchina), Yale Divinity Library.
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Sage Chapel, University of Nanking. Photo courtesy China Christian Colleges and Universities Image Database (http://divdl.library.yale.edu/ydlchina), Yale Divinity Library.
Writing in the April, 1916 issue of Western Architect, Robert Craik McLean noted that “three early members of the [Chicago Architectural] club are now engaged upon the most notable works performed by ‘foreign’ architects in the history of the modern world.” And who were these architects? Walter Burley Griffin, by then deep in the struggle over what would become Canberra, was first on the list. The second architect whom McLean saw taking his Chicago experience abroad was Frank Lloyd Wright, then at work on the commission that became the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. The third Chicagoan whose art had crossed American borders and whom McLean grouped with Griffin and Wright was William K. Fellows, partner with Dwight Perkins and chief architect of the Nanjing project.
Perkins Eastman, Samuel Pollard Building, Johns Hopkins-Nanjing University Center for Chinese and American Studies. 2011 photo.
Commemorative Plaque in lobby of Auditorium Building (Former Sage Chapel), Nanjing University. Photo 2011.
Of course, McLean was writing nearly a century ago. But more recent developments have once again brought Perkins, Grinnell, and Nanjing back into contact. In 1987, Grinnell College signed the first of a series of agreements—recently renewed on the 25th anniversary—that linked the Iowa college to today’s Nanjing University, and has resulted in many tens of faculty from each school visiting the other, and has placed some fifty Grinnell College graduates in Nanjing, teaching at the university-affiliated high school. An even more intimate revival of old connections appeared in Nanjing where in 2001-2002 the University undertook a costly and very careful restoration of the former Sage Chapel under the direction of Zhao Chen and Leng Tian. Visitors to the newly-refurbished auditorium can see in the lobby a plaque that recognizes Perkins, Fellows and Hamilton. Finally, in 2006, Perkins Eastman, one of whose principals is Bradford Perkins, grandson of Dwight Perkins, designed a new building for the Johns Hopkins-Nanjing University Center for Chinese and American Studies, thereby reviving the architectural legacy of Perkins, Fellows and Hamilton on the Nanjing University campus.
The China Connection—Walter Burley Griffin and Shanghai
When Walter Burley Griffin won the design competition for a proposed Australian capital, he collected a great deal of publicity that helped vault him into the front ranks of the world’s architects. The New York Times, for example, on June 2, 1912 printed a full-page story along with reproductions of several renderings from the plan and a photo of Griffin, a man who, after all, was still a young, little-known architect. The publicity was certainly welcome, and the first step to new commissions, so Griffin did what he could to seize the opportunity. Newspaper reporters unfamiliar with Griffin, as most were, found it natural to ask Griffin about his plans, about himself, and, finally, what else he had done that prepared him for the Australian project. Consequently, when the Times article went on to observe that Griffin’s “only other experience in planning a city was when he drew the plans for the rebuilding of Shanghai, China,” we can be confident that it was Griffin himself who supplied this background. Similarly, the July 4, 1912 Engineering News also reported on Griffin’s success, and, whether borrowed from the Times or derived again directly from Griffin, noted that Griffin had “also prepared a design for a new city at Shanghai, China, a few years ago, when it was proposed to establish a modern city on a new site, and to abandon the old city… The delegate from the Chinese government to the St. Louis Exhibition [1904] had plans prepared by Mr. Griffin, but owing to the death of the delegate on his return to China nothing was done toward carrying them out.” The implication of these words was that the young, relatively unknown Walter Burley Griffin was already an experienced urban planner whose artistic sights had long since eclipsed the provincial boundaries of the American heartland.
Now more than a century later, the Shanghai plans to which the 1912 reports refer remain undiscovered, despite numerous efforts to locate them. The absence makes one wonder: In making these claims about Shanghai, was the young architect simply padding his too-thin resume, the better to justify his receiving the Australian prize over many better-known and more accomplished architects? Or did Griffin actually design a new Shanghai, and in so doing already in 1904 begin his decades-long involvement with the architecture of Asia and Australia?
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When the St. Louis World’s Fair (sometimes known as the Louisiana Purchase Exposition) opened on April 30, 1904, Griffin was just 27 years of age and five years out of the University of Illinois; at that time he was still working for Frank Lloyd Wright, was still a novice and unknown beyond the confines of greater Chicago. True, Griffin had accumulated a few commissions of his own on the side, including the 1903 Emery House in Elmhurst, Illinois. But these were all modest accomplishments, and unlikely to earn him the sort of commission implied by the Shanghai project.
![Wong Kai-Kah (ca, 1880). From Incidents and other dents in the four years course of the class of 1883 [Yale College] with reunion notes [compiled by] Henry C.M. Thomson. June 1921, New Britain, Connecticut. Opp. p. 24. Manuscripts & Archives, Yale University](https://kaiser355.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/1780850.jpg)
Wong Kai-Kah (ca, 1880). From Incidents and other dents in the four years course of the class of 1883 [Yale College] with reunion notes [compiled by] Henry C.M. Thomson. June 1921, New Britain, Connecticut. Opp. p. 24. Manuscripts & Archives, Yale University
![Wong Kai-Kah (ca. 1904). From Incidents and other dents in the four years course of the class of 1883 [Yale College] with reunion notes [compiled by] Henry C.M. Thomson. June 1921, New Britain, Connecticut, opposite p. 24. Manuscripts & Archives, Yale University.](https://kaiser355.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/1780851.jpg)
Wong Kai-Kah (ca. 1904). From Incidents and other dents in the four years course of the class of 1883 [Yale College] with reunion notes [compiled by] Henry C.M. Thomson. June 1921, New Britain, Connecticut, opposite p. 24. Manuscripts & Archives, Yale University.
Greater Shanghai, 1912. Madrolle’s Guide Books. Northern China, the Valley of the Blue River, Korea (Paris, 1912), p. 283.
But, even if one grants all that, there is no evidence that Wong had the authority to solicit a redesign of Shanghai—minutes of the Shanghai Municipal Council (Gong bu ju dong shi hui hui yi lu [Shanghai, 2001]) from the years around 1904, for example, do not reference Wong at all, much less report a Council directive to solicit a redesign of the city from an American architect. Nor, so far as anyone has yet discovered, did any of the Qing reformers around Wong evidence any interest in a thorough-going redesign of Shanghai. Furthermore, even if Wong had such a vision for the future and had received a mandate to secure a new design for Shanghai, why would he entrust such a monumental project to someone like Griffin who was at that point practically unknown and had given little evidence of accomplishment? It is easier to believe that Wong, given his long association with Yale, might have entrusted his project (if he had such a project) to a Yale graduate or to a better-known Yale College architect, such as J. Cleaveland Cady, who contributed numerous buildings to the Yale campus. What could have recommended Griffin to Wong?
Further undermining Griffin’s claim about Shanghai is the fact that the 1912 newspaper articles that celebrated his victory in the Australian competition and were informed by Griffin himself only vaguely allege the abandonment of the Shanghai plans and (incorrectly) report that Wong had died on his return to China. In fact, Wong returned home safely, and only after being posted to Japan in 1905—after still another visit to the US—did he perish, so that, if he carried plans from Griffin from 1904 or early 1905, he certainly had opportunity to deliver them in China before setting out once again for the US and then later for Japan. Griffin’s uncertain hold on the details collides with the obvious importance for Griffin that such a project would have had.
Finally, scholars of Griffin’s work have been unable to discover any trace of the plans themselves or even any records that reference these plans (aside from the 1912 newspaper reports). Griffin materials housed at the National Archives of Australia and the National Library of Australia, for example, where the bulk of the Griffin archive resides, contain no Shanghai drawings. Understandably, therefore, scholarly opinion is inclined to disbelieve Griffin’s claim. John W. Reps, for example, author of Canberra 1912: Plans and Planners of the Australian Capital Competition (Melbourne, 1993) and a scholar of urban planning, in a private message to me expressed doubt that any such plan was ever drawn up.
However, as Kerrie MacPherson pointed out to me, it is possible that Wong lost the Griffin drawings before he ever left the U.S. After the December, 1904 close of the St. Louis World’s Fair, Wong spent several months in Los Angeles as the guest of Tom Leung, at whose house in March, 1905 U.S. immigration officials staged a raid, apparently persuaded that Wong had overstayed his visa. In his public statements about the restrictions imposed upon Chinese as a result of the Chinese Exclusion Act, Wong had certainly agitated U.S. officials, and their unhappiness with the well-spoken Wong may well have precipitated the raid. In fact, however, Wong had done nothing wrong, so that the raid only further inflamed Chinese opinion. It is possible, however, that during the raid U.S. officials seized Wong’s possessions, including, perhaps, Griffin’s ideas for Shanghai, in which case the Griffin drawings might have been discarded as irrelevant, or the papers might still be buried somewhere in the National Archives.
Consequently, someone may yet discover deep in the bowels of the National Archives evidence of Griffin’s 1904 ideas for Shanghai. But at this point, scholarly skepticism over whether Griffin ever prepared plans for Shanghai seems well-justified. Given Griffin’s status in 1904, it seems unthinkable that, if Griffin really did develop “detailed plans” for such an important project, he did not keep a set of the drawings—or even a record of having dispatched such drawings—for himself.
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Until new evidence emerges, therefore, it seems safe to conclude that, although early in his career Walter Burley Griffin may have nourished dreams of designing a new city for Shanghai, when submitting his proposals for the 1912 Australian competition Griffin could rely only upon the rather more limited, more recent designs he had prepared for several small American communities: Idalia, Florida; Rock Crest/Rock Glen, Iowa; and the aborted Janney Addition Re-subdivision in Grinnell.
The Twins Go to School
Cooper School, 6th and Elm Streets, Grinnell, IA (1899). Matlack Family papers, Grinnell College Libraries, Department of Special Collections, Grinnell, Iowa. Ms01.46
Parker School (1896). Photo courtesy Drake Community Library, Grinnell, Iowa.
Grinnell school records confirm that Elizabeth and Edward Ricker began kindergarten at Cooper School fall semester, 1919. There they studied and played beside children from the eastern and northeastern part of town, keeping most of their kindergarten friends in their class for more than three years. Beginning third grade at Cooper, the twins soon found themselves promoted ahead of their classmates, and then, almost as suddenly, at the beginning of spring semester transferred to Parker, a grade school that mostly taught children from the western and northwestern sections of town. When they entered sixth grade, they moved to yet another school, Center, a middle school or junior high that served the whole town. Nevertheless, because Davis School, the third elementary in town, was large enough to offer Sixth and Seventh Grades, most of the students whom Elizabeth and Edward encountered in sixth grade at Center were the same north Grinnell students with whom they had studied earlier at Cooper and Parker.
Davis Elementary School (1917; photo ca. 1924). Courtesy Drake Community Library, Grinnell, Iowa. My thanks to Dorrie Lalonde for locating the photo.
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Cooper School, Kindergarten, Fall, 1919: Geographic Dispersion of Homes of Students in Ricker Twins’ Class (rural students excluded).
Parker School, Grade 4B, Spring 1923: Geographic Dispersion of Homes of Students in Ricker Twins’ Class (rural students excluded).
Davis School, Kindergarten, Fall, 1919: Geographic Dispersion of Homes of Students (rural students excluded)
The 1920 Grinnell directory lists all the district’s schools and teachers. As in many other places, Grinnell’s elementary schools were intended as “neighborhood schools.” Parker (602 Sixth) and Cooper (1307 Sixth)were both built in the 1890s along Sixth Avenue, each drawing students from its respective side of town, north of the railroad tracks. Both buildings hewed to the Victorian ideal—a two-story structure with a raised first floor and large, high-ceilinged rooms, although Parker boasted a tower reminiscent of the many Queen Anne-style homes then visible in Grinnell. Each school was staffed by six teachers, one of whom was also principal; each teacher, including the principal, was responsible for a grade level, kindergarten through fifth. Davis School, built in 1917 at 818 Hamilton, was considerably newer than the other two elementaries and showed it; although faced with brick like its cousins on Sixth Avenue, Davis was built as a large rectangle ribboned with huge windows that ran all around the first and second floors, making Davis classrooms much lighter than the often dark teaching spaces of Parker and Cooper. Davis was also considerably larger, staffed by a full-time principal and eight teachers who taught kindergarten through seventh grade. Located south of First Avenue, between Main and Broad, and replacing the former South School, Davis mainly drew students from south of the east-west railroad. A fourth school, Center (1871), stood at 911 Park, adjacent to the High School (1902) and east of the Congregational stone church. Later pulled down to make room for the Junior High, Center, too, was small, and had a staff of six teachers; the 1920 directory reports that Center offered only sixth grade, other teachers being designated for “department work.” Grade books from the early 1920s, however, indicate that Center School offered sixth, seventh and even eighth grades. A couple of blocks further south than either Parker or Cooper, Center School was, if not the center of the district, at least less of a reach for students who grew up on the south side of town.
Center School (ca. 1880). Photo courtesy Drake Community Library, Grinnell, Iowa. My thanks to Dorrie Lalonde for locating the photo.
In these years Grinnell grades were divided into two distinct halves, each of which required promotion to the next level. Autumn term students normally began in level “B,” from which they would hope to be promoted to “A” spring term, and from which, in turn, they hoped to move up a grade, again usually beginning in “B” in the fall. Typically the same teacher covered both halves of the year in sequence—that is B in the autumn and A in the spring. But if a student were advanced half a grade, as the twins later were, someone had to offer the necessary grade out of the usual sequence. This meant that in practice teachers often simultaneously taught both A and B classes.
A Page from the grade book of Bernice Goodrich, Center School, 6B, spring 1925.
To judge only by the grade books, promotion in the 1920s was far from automatic at either of the two promotion points each year. Not uncommonly teachers retained a few students, promoting the rest, excepting those who moved or dropped out. For instance, of the 23 students in the twins’ kindergarten B at Cooper, fall, 1919, 17 were promoted to kindergarten A, 1 was retained, 2 moved, 1 transferred, and one student skipped to 1B. That autumn at Parker, 25 students belonged to kindergarten B, and 22 moved up to kindergarten A (although one was “on trial”); 1 moved; and 2 were retained. At Davis that fall, 27 students enrolled in kindergarten B, 19 of whom were promoted; 4 were retained; 2 were “removed” and 2 “dropped.”
Teachers kept what appear to be meticulous attendance data, noting absences, tardies, total number of days taught, and in some cases “minutes lost.” In addition, teachers recorded grades three times each semester in each of several subjects: spelling; reading; writing; arithmetic; grammar or language; geography; music; and drawing. Occasionally rhetoric or another subject joined the list. Each of these subject grades was then averaged for the semester, and from these averages the teacher then computed overall averages—all reported numerically. In a few cases semester averages appear not simply as whole numbers but with fractional additions, suggesting the teachers’ confidence in discerning even the smallest differentiation among students. Teachers normally affixed a letter grade for “deportment,” a category in which Elizabeth regularly outshone her brother. Finally, each grade book provided space for teachers to report on the year’s visitors. A few of these pages were left blank, although whether this means that no one visited or that the teacher omitted to fill in the page is unclear. Most teachers, however, carefully inscribed the names of visitors and the dates of their visits. Occasionally visitors came from one of the teacher training schools, but usually the visitors were parents who came to school at various points in the calendar, sometimes in clusters, but more often individually. Some classes enjoyed the visits of only a handful of parents; other visitor lists were so long that a week without a visitor was a rarity.
Visitors Register from Grade Book of Eva Grace Martin, Parker School, 4B, spring 1923. Mrs. B. J. Ricker visited May 16 (3d from bottom).
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Kindergarten Classroom, Cooper School (ca. 1920). Photo courtesy Drake Community Library, Grinnell, Iowa.
During their three-and-a-half years at Cooper School, the twins studied under five different teachers, the very first of whom was Geneva Anderson (b. 1899), who taught kindergarten at Cooper 1919-20 as her first job, replacing Elizabeth Goodman who had taught kindergarten at Cooper the preceding two years. Born to a grocer father in Albia, Monroe County, Geneva was the second of two girls, her sister Genevieve being two years older. According to the 1920 census, Geneva—then 21 years old—was still living with her parents in Albia, despite her duties in Grinnell, but the 1920 Grinnell directory reports that Anderson boarded that year with the widowed Edna Wilson and her daughter, Evelyn, at 1317 Fifth Avenue. The next year Anderson was gone from Grinnell, and by 1925 had settled in Knoxville with her husband, J. Otis Brown. Their son was already two in 1925, so the couple must have married soon after Anderson left Grinnell. The 1930 census found them in Lincoln, Missouri with two children and a servant (!), but by 1940 Geneva Anderson Brown and her two children were back in Albia; widowed by then, Brown resumed her career as a teacher in the public schools.
Fall 1920 Elizabeth and Edward returned to Cooper School for first grade, this time to study under Floy Porteous (1895-1968), who was 25 when the Ricker twins entered her classroom. Porteous was born July, 1895 in Indiana, but her family moved to Delaware County, Iowa soon thereafter. She apparently graduated from Iowa State Teachers College (now University of Northern Iowa), and, before moving to Grinnell, taught first grade at Manchester. The 1920 Grinnell directory has her living at 1119 Park Street, the home of John Evans, his wife Tillie, and their son, Harold. However, Porteous did not stay long, leaving Grinnell and settling in Hammond, Indiana, where she appears in both the 1930 and 1940 censuses as an unmarried teacher in the public schools. In July, 1941 at St. Louis, Missouri, she married Amos S. Tucker, and the couple settled in St. Elmo, Illinois, then moved to West Union, Iowa, still later to Crawfordsville, Indiana. Floy Tucker died in Monticello, Indiana in July 1968, but her body was returned to Manchester, Iowa where she is buried in Oakland Cemetery.
Ruth Paine (1913). The Grinnellian 1913 (no p.). Special thanks to Karen Groves for finding and sharing this photo with me.
Ruth Paine, 2nd grade, Cooper School, 1947. The Grinnellian 1947, p. 44. Thanks to Karen Groves for finding and sharing this photo with me.
Back at Cooper again for 2nd grade, fall, 1921, the twins met another young teacher, Ruth Paine (1895-1963). The same age as Porteous, Paine, however, was born in nearby Newton and raised in Grinnell where she remained her whole life. She attended and graduated from the Grinnell schools in which she later taught for more than 40 years, beginning in 1915 at Cooper; she retired in 1960, died just three years later, and is buried in Hazelwood Cemetery. When she taught the Ricker children, Paine was living at 523 Broad Street with her widowed mother, Bessie (who managed Western Union) and her sister Dorothy (who also became a teacher in the Grinnell schools). Active in numerous organizations, Paine was a member of First Congregational Church, P.E.O., D.A.R., the Community Hospital Auxiliary (now Grinnell Regional Medical Center Auxiliary), a charter member of the Historical Society, and board member of the Grinnell Historical Museum.
Myrtle E. Parkes, long-time Cooper School principal and the twins’ 3d grade teacher. Photo (ca. 1945) from 1948 Grinnellian.
Autumn, 1922 Elizabeth and Edward Ricker once again filed into Cooper School, this time to begin third grade; their teacher that semester was Myrtle Parkes (1878-1964), who was also principal of Cooper. Like the twins’ other teachers, Parkes was single and boarded with townsfolk. The 1920 census reported Parkes as living at 817 East Street, a roomer with Dr. and Mrs. Evan Evans, their 8-year-old daughter, Julia, and one other teacher-boarder. According to the census, Parkes was born in Iowa, but her 1964 obituary claims that she was born in Harding, Pennsylvania in 1878. When she taught 3B in the fall of 1922, then, she was 44 years old, and a veteran of the Grinnell schools, where she began to teach in 1908 at Parker; since 1911 she had taught at Cooper, originally teaching first grade. Upon retiring in 1949 at age 70, Parkes moved to Hillsboro, Illinois where a brother and a married sister lived. A Methodist and member of the Order of the Eastern Star, Parkes also belonged to the Past Matrons Club of Hillsboro, where she spent her last years.
Myrtle Parks at her 1949 retirement. Photo from 1950 Grinnellian.
Although Parkes in fact taught the twins for a shorter time (one semester) than most of their Grinnell teachers, she was probably the most influential, since it was she who advanced the twins ahead of their peers; her 1922 grade book contains the notations that indicate that Edward received “special” promotion to 3A on September 28, Elizabeth getting the same promotion four days later (October 2). In other words, the Ricker children spent less than a month in Parkes’s 3B, and then about three months in her 3A. At the beginning of the second semester in January, 1923, both children were promoted to 4B, the normal course for students who successfully completed 3A.
Skipping a half-grade was not unheard of in Grinnell schools of the time, but the explanation for the twins’ rapid promotion is not obvious. Myrtle Parkes’s grade book indicates that in 3B the twins had each accumulated a 90 average, which was quite good, but not any better than Esther Peck’s 95, Dorothy Brown’s 94, Wilber Porter’s 93, or Gladys Bader’s 91, and none of these students was pushed ahead. Did B. J. or Mabel, like some of today’s “helicopter parents,” pressure Parkes into promoting the children, thinking them too gifted to remain with their peers? There is no evidence that they did; in fact, according to the list of visitors appended to Parkes’s grade book, neither B. J. nor Mabel visited the class that fall, although in earlier years one or the other parent invariably came to school. The explanation, therefore, remains a mystery.
Florence Crawford, Iowa State Teachers College, 1916. Photo from 1916 Old Gold Yearbook, and courtesy University Archives, University of Northern Iowa.
In any case, in Cooper’s 4B Florence Crawford (1893-1965) taught the twins for only two weeks before their transfer to Parker School. When second semester 1923 opened, Crawford had just turned 30, and had taught fourth grade at Grinnell for five years. Although born in Brooklyn, Iowa, she and her parents moved to Gilman before Florence reached school-age. Accordingly, she attended all the Gilman schools, graduating from Gilman High, after which she enrolled at Iowa State Teachers College, graduating in 1916. Some years after meeting the twins, Crawford moved to Des Moines where she seems to have abandoned teaching, working as a secretary and doctor’s assistant before retiring back to Grinnell in 1955. A member of the Congregational Church, Crawford never married and died at age 72 in 1965.
After spending only a few days in Florence Crawford’s 4B at Cooper School, the twins transferred to the same grade in Parker School, a few blocks west of Cooper and just south of Sixth Avenue. Once settled in Parker 4B, Edward and Elizabeth maintained their high academic performance: Elizabeth recorded a semester average of 88, Edward, 89, both more than sufficient to gain promotion to 4A for the following autumn. The next semester the twins did even better, averaging 91 and 92, respectively, earning promotion that winter to 5B. Consequently, whatever had given rise to their skipping a half-grade and the subsequent transfer to Parker, the two Ricker children adapted quickly.
Eva Grace Mackenzie (1936). Thanks to Criss Davis for finding this photo and sharing it with me.
Part of their success may have been due to their teacher at Parker—Eva Grace Martin (1888-1967). When Martin welcomed the twins into her fourth-grade classroom in the spring of 1923, she was about 35 years old, unmarried, and an experienced teacher: she had begun teaching fourth grade at Parker in 1917. The 1920 census reports her living with her parents at their home at 915 Park Street. Her dad, John, worked thirty years for the Spaulding Company as a “provider of truck bodies,” the primary business of Spaulding at that time, so it is small surprise that Ernest and F. E. Spaulding were both pall bearers at John Martin‘s 1933 funeral. Hester Bartow Martin, Eva’s mother, died in June, 1925, and two months thereafter Eva married Rev. Joseph Mackenzie, then resident in York, Ontario. Although Martin was a member of the Grinnell Congregational Church, Mackenzie was an ordained minister for the Disciples of Christ, and that year accepted a pastorate at the First Christian Church in Massillon, Ohio. The young couple settled in Ohio, the bride bringing along her widower father. Eva Grace Mackenzie, as she had become, did not resume teaching, and lived out her life as a minister’s wife, dying at age 79 in Massillon.
Nettie Dell Bayley, long-time teacher and principal of Parker School, and the twins’ 5th grade teacher. Photo (ca. 1945) from 1948 Grinnellian.
Nettie Dell Bayley, 5th Grade, Parker School, 1946. The Grinnellian 1946, p. 82. Thanks to Karen Groves for finding and sharing this photo with me.
The twins’ next teacher also taught them for a full year, albeit also interrupted by the summer holiday. Nettie Dell Bayley (1878-1961) was principal at Parker School, and was herself born and schooled in Grinnell, where she completed the public schools and attended Grinnell College (x-1900). Like Myrtle Parkes, principal at Cooper, Bayley had taught at Grinnell for a long time, beginning no later than 1909, teaching seventh grade at Center, a position she maintained until 1917 when she moved to Parker and began teaching fifth grade. In 1920 she was living at 1023 Park Street, boarding with her widowed mother. When she entered the names of Elizabeth and Edward Ricker into her grade book, Bayley was already in her mid-forties, and she continued to teach long afterwards, retiring after fifty years of teaching in Grinnell. A member of the Methodist church, Bayley was also active in the church’s Women’s Society of Christian Service and served as local secretary for the Grinnell YWCA and later as board member and vice-president for the Grinnell Historical Museum. Her commitment to Methodism is apparent in the sizable bequests she left to the Grinnell Methodist Church and to Iowa Methodist Hospital (now Iowa Methodist Medical Center) in Des Moines after her 1961 death. She is buried in Grinnell’s Hazelwood Cemetery.
Room 4, Center School, Grinnell, Iowa (date?). Photo Courtesy Drake Community Library, Grinnell, Iowa.
The last of the twins’ Grinnell teachers was Bernice Goodrich who taught at Center, the twins’ third school since they began third grade. Goodrich was not yet 25 when second semester began in January 1925. Her father, Ira Goodrich, ran a grocery and meat shop in town for many years. In 1897 he had married Minnie Daugherty in Marengo, and in 1899 Bernice was born. The 1910 census places her at 513 Park, living with her family, but by 1920 Mr. and Mrs. Goodrich had moved to 1015 East. Bernice, who was appointed to teach in Grinnell in 1924, was only in her second year of teaching when the twins entered her classroom, and was living at 1015 East Street. She later married Wiley Burden, and moved to Beaver Dam, Kentucky where she evidently died sometime before her father’s 1955 death.
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As this quick review shows, Edward and Elizabeth Ricker passed through the Grinnell elementary grades with no apparent difficulties; whatever determined their jumping a half-grade in 1922, the twins quickly adjusted and continued to post high grades. Their teachers—all unmarried women—were a mix of beginners and experienced veterans, but they all seem to have exercised a similar vigilance in guarding the gates to promotion.
It would be fun to know what the twins thought of their school experiences, and what their teachers made of these two young people who had come to Grinnell from so far away. However, the bare-bones reports of grade books provide little with which to color in the outline provided here.
How the Rickers Knew About Walter Burley Griffin
Walter Burley Griffin. Eric Milton Nicolls Collection, National Library of Australia, vn3603884a-s246.
Louis Sullivan. Merchants National Bank, Grinnell, Iowa (1914; photo 2012).
A successful businessman and community leader, B. J. Ricker has nevertheless inscribed his name into Grinnell‘s enduring history not through these achievements, but principally through the town’s architecture: it was Benjamin Ricker who, as a director of Merchants National Bank, arranged for Louis Sullivan to build the bank’s spectacular 1914 home; and it was Ricker who, as chairman of the committee charged with commemorating the recently-deceased Dr. E. W. Clark, Sr., in 1910 commissioned Walter Burley Griffin to design the memorial fountain; finally, of course, it was Ricker who had Griffin build him his own distinctive home on north Broad Street. The memorial fountain is long gone, but the bank and Ricker house still proudly reflect the aesthetic wisdom and influence of B. J. Ricker.
But how exactly did Ricker come to know about Walter Burley Griffin and bring him to Grinnell? The usual assumption is that, because Mabel Tompkins grew up in Oak Park, where Frank Lloyd Wright and several other architects were busily re-conceptualizing American architecture, Mabel was probably responsible for recommending Griffin. However, no evidence directly connects Mabel with Wright or Griffin. Of course, Mabel did attend Oak Park High School (now Oak Park-River Forest High School), as did Griffin, so it is possible that Mabel knew Griffin and subsequently became a fan of his architecture. But Mabel was several years older than Griffin—she would have been a senior when Walter was just a tenth-grader—and it seems unlikely that the young boy would have had much contact with the older Mabel Tompkins. Moreover, although the Tompkins Oak Park family home—323 Pleasant Avenue (1028 Pleasant in today’s numbering system)—stood only a few blocks from Wright’s studio, the house itself evidently bore no evidence of the architectural revolution then underway in Oak Park. Finally, Mabel, who married B. J. Ricker in late December, 1897, left Oak Park before Griffin even graduated from the University of Illinois (1899) and several years before Griffin began to practice architecture in the Chicago area. Consequently, although it is possible that in subsequent visits to Oak Park, Mabel Tompkins Ricker became acquainted with and a partisan of Griffin, it is not obvious that she was well-positioned to recommend Griffin to her husband.
But if not through Mabel, then how did Benjamin Ricker become aware of Walter Burley Griffin? It’s a good question, and worth considering, which is what I’ve been doing recently. My research led me to an unexpected and very interesting coincidence that, it seems to me, offers a far more logical and compelling explanation for how Benjamin Ricker found Walter Burley Griffin. This story passes not through Mabel Tompkins and Oak Park High School, but through Grinnell, Iowa—through the college that Ricker attended and through the business to which Ricker devoted himself after he returned to town in 1895.
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Commencement Program, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Candidates for the Degree of Bachelor of Science…with titles of the Graduation Theses, June 3, 1890.
Elwood Allen Emery (1865-1936). Photo from “Musicians in the Public Eye,” Fine Arts Journal v. 14, no. 3 (March 1905):118.
In 1894 Iowa College (as it was then called) appointed to the music faculty a certain Elwood A. Emery as an instructor in voice. Emery had taken an undergraduate arts degree from the University of Minnesota in 1887, and had then enrolled at Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he pursued a degree in architecture. When he graduated from MIT in 1890, he moved to Chicago where for three years he worked for the well known architectural firm of Burnham and Root (in these years superintending the construction of the Columbian Exposition). Only then did he come to Iowa to accept the teaching position at Grinnell. Consequently, although at that point he turned his back on architecture and chose music as his life’s vocation, Elwood Emery brought to Grinnell an excellent knowledge of architecture and its contemporary practitioners, many of whom he would have met while working for Burnham and Root in Chicago.
More than that, Emery the musician-architect was a relative of William H. Emery, Jr., who later became the patron for Griffin’s first significant commission, the W. H. Emery house (1903) in Elmhurst, Illinois. William’s grandfather, William H. Emery (b. 1818) was the youngest brother of Elwood Emery’s grandfather, Samuel Henry (b. 1795). So the Grinnell College voice instructor and the Griffin patron in Elmhurst were second-cousins; their fathers—William Harrison Emery, Sr. (1840-1903) and Andrew J. Emery (1832-77)—were cousins. The kinship link is not terribly close, of course, but it bears emphasizing that the several branches of the family began close at hand in Fairfield, Maine (where Elwood Emery was also born) and that later these particular sections of the family reunited in greater Chicago, providing plenty of incentive to maintain relations.
William Harrison Emery, Sr. had come to Chicago from Fairfield, Maine where his father —William Jr.’s grandfather—had established a sheepskin tanning and dying business. In Chicago, William Emery, Sr. founded in his own name a company (137 Kinzie) devoted to acquiring and selling hides; according to surviving accounts, in the late nineteenth century William Emery, Sr. made a name for himself among Montana‘s native Americans whom he visited each year, collecting vast quantities of hides. His son, the Griffin patron, also founded a business connected with leather: Chicago Rawhide (1301 N. Elston) produced a wide array of leather products—mostly belts and seals used in machinery. In other words, both Emery’s—senior and junior—made their livings from hides, also an essential raw material for the gloves that Ricker was now so deeply involved in producing in Grinnell.
Chicago’s tanneries, where the senior Emery got his start, also shared business interests with the Grinnell firm of which Ricker became a co-owner. Even as late as 1905, Morrison, McIntosh & Co. (as it was then still called) concentrated much of its work on tanning hides, the industry begun in Grinnell by Frederick W. Morrison decades earlier. In other words, B. J. Ricker, who was often in Chicago for the Grinnell glove company, as the Grinnell newspapers regularly reported, had good business reasons—seeking hides and keeping up to date on developments in the tanneries—to know both the senior and junior Emery.
Advertisement in the 1905 Grinnell College Cyclone, p. 234.
Even without the business explanation, however, the connection between Ricker and the Elmhurst Emery’s may still be reasonably inferred. Ricker himself graduated from Grinnell College in 1891, and, as pointed out in an earlier post, almost immediately left for California, where he remained until 1894. By the time Elwood Emery joined the faculty at Grinnell College, however, Ricker was back in Grinnell where he bought a share of the glove company. Did Ricker perhaps make contact with Grinnell’s Emery at this point? More than likely he did.
Sarah Cushman Household, United States Census, 1900, index and images, Family Search (https://familysearch.org/pal:MM9.1.1/M9L6-88S: accessed 08 Jul 2013), E A. Emery in entry for Sarah Cushman, 1900.
While living in town, Elwood Emery boarded with Sarah Cushman, whose son, Edward, had been a Grinnell College classmate of Ricker’s (there were only 38 in the 1891 graduating class), so the two young men surely knew one another. Besides, Cushman’s mother previously had supervised all college residences for twelve years—which would include the years when Ricker was a student— so it is no stretch to think that Ricker knew both Cushman and his mother, who in 1895 was boarding Elwood Emery.
Ricker had one more reason to become acquainted with the college’s new voice instructor: while a student at Grinnell, Ricker sang in the College Glee Club (he was one of four second tenors) as well as the Glee Club Quartet. Ricker had also been a member of the Grinnell Institute Chorus, here singing first tenor. His interest in singing, along with his familiarity with the Cushman family with whom Elwood Emery was then living, surely propelled him to make the acquaintance of the musician-architect.
Once the two were introduced, even the most casual conversation between Elwood Emery and Ricker would have inquired into B. J.’s current concerns; the coincidence of business interests between Ricker and Emery’s Elmhurst relatives could not but lead immediately thereafter to mention of Elmhurst, and perhaps a suggestion of a meeting to discuss their common concerns. Indeed, although Elwood Emery’s family had lived in Minnesota for some years, after the death of Elwood’s father in 1877 and Elwood’s own move to Boston in 1887, Elwood’s mother, the former Mary Gray (b. 1839), herself moved to Elmhurst, making Elmhurst Elwood’s new “home” when visiting his mother. Confirmation of this connection emerges already in 1895 from the pages of The Unit, a college newspaper that attempted to connect on-campus events with alumni. In February, 1895, the paper reported that “Mrs. Emery of Elmhurst, Illinois, arrived [in Grinnell] Thursday morning to make an extended visit with her son, Professor [Elwood] Emery of the conservatory faculty.” Therefore, not only was Elwood Emery knowledgeable about architecture, but he was also directly connected to Elmhurst, where his Emery relatives, who operated businesses devoted to hides and tanning, were then living.
Long after Elwood Emery left Grinnell (1900, first to Boston, but ultimately settling back in Chicago to teach), Elwood’s connection to the Elmhurst patrons of Walter Burley Griffin remained strong. Elwood never married, and had no children, so when in 1936 he died under tragic circumstances (he slipped and fell to the pavement while trying to reach a streetcar) his closest relative who served as informant for the death certificate was “E. W. Emery”—Edward Wilder Emery (1906-64), the oldest son of William Harrison Emery, Jr., for whom Walter Burley Griffin had designed the 1903 Elmhurst home. Consequently, long after the Griffin commission and long after his sojourn in Benjamin Ricker’s Grinnell, Elwood Emery maintained close links with his Elmhurst kin to whom, it seems reasonable to suspect, he had introduced B.J. Ricker.
1936 Death Certificate for Elwood Allen Emery.
To put it another way, Elwood Emery, the architect/musician who had lived in Grinnell for the last five years of the nineteenth century seems a very strong candidate to have helped B. J. Ricker forge a relationship with the Elmhurst Emerys, and through them, especially after the 1903 Emery commission, connect B. J. Ricker with Walter Burley Griffin.
The Rickers Go to Church
“Old Stone Church” (1877-1951), Congregational Church of Grinnell. Photo courtesy Drake Community Library, Grinnell, Iowa.
The First Congregational Church, Grinnell, Iowa (1860?). Photo Courtesy Drake Community Library, Grinnell, Iowa.
Grinnell was still young and undeveloped when Edwin and Clara Ricker brought their family here in 1867. The town was founded by a band of congregationalists, so that when the first, crude church building arose in the 1850s, it became the worship home for the founders and those first arrivals, come to help people the new island of the righteous. And when in 1877 at the corner of Broad and Fourth they built the large, limestone structure known as the “Old Stone Church,” the Congregationalists demonstrated how deeply they dominated religious life in Grinnell. Closely connected with the college in town, the Congregational Church could boast a membership that included most of the important men and women of Grinnell and that grew steadily over the decadesl.
Gradually, however, other churches also took root in Grinnell, establishing permanent homes at prominent sites around town. Already in the 1850s, some Baptists and Methodists had organized churches, meeting in the newly-built schoolhouse or other temporary facilities. Over time, the number and variety of churches in town grew significantly, most finding a place to build their own houses of worship. The 1920 city directory identified ten: Methodist Episcopal (now United Methodist, Park and Fifth, current building erected in 1895); First Baptist (Park and Fourth, building erected in 1889, now razed); United Presbyterian (now First Presbyterian, State and Fifth, building erected in 1906, razed and replaced in 1977); Friends (625 West, 1907, later razed); German Lutheran (Elm and Seventh); Roman Catholic (327 Main, 1883, now St. Mary’s Catholic Church and relocated to Broad and Fifth); St. Paul’s Episcopal (Main and First, organized 1873, later situated at Sixth and State); Adventist (421 Broad, organized 1883); Christian Science (by 1920 meeting at the public library); and Church of Latter Day Saints (no location cited and omitted from 1920 directory).
First Baptist Church, 4th and Park, Grinnell, Iowa (1889). Photo courtesy of Drake Community Library, Grinnell, Iowa.
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Methodist Episcopal Church, Fifth and Park Streets, Grinnell, Iowa (1918). Photo courtesy Drake Community Library, Grinnell, Iowa.
When the Edward Ricker (1823-72) family moved to Grinnell from their previous home near Davenport, Iowa, the church options remained few. Given the New England roots of the Ricker ancestors, one might imagine that Edward was a Congregationalist, if only by family tradition. But there is no evidence that B. J.’s father ever joined the Grinnell Congregational Church before his 1872 death. Clara Ricker (1829-1904) herself did not join until May, 1881, the same year she took a second husband, Allen W. Dean. Rufus Ricker (1849-1936), B. J.’s oldest brother, had joined already in April, 1868, but left in 1882, later joining the Methodist church where he long exerted an important influence. Shortly before Rufus left, Ella Mabel Ricker (1861-1951), a sister to B. J., joined the Congregational Church, but she, too, withdrew in 1885. Another brother, Charles F. Ricker (1850-1932) joined at some point, but was removed from the membership in 1884, one of those deemed “long absent without taking letters” to new church homes. Two other sisters, Fannie Morrison (1854-1935) and Addie McIntosh (1857-1904), joined in the summer of 1887, and stayed the course till their deaths.
Overall, then, the Rickers had an uneven, irregular relationship with the Grinnell Congregational Church. They did not hurry to join, which is probably why B. J., the first of the Rickers’ children to be born in Grinnell, evidently was not baptized here. Only in May, 1883 did “Bennie Ricker” officially join the Congregational Church “by profession of faith.” He was one of a large group of young people—about half girls (including his sister Grace) and half boys—who joined at the same time, perhaps part of a special effort to include the youth, inducting them as a group so as to relieve some of the anxiety of individual decisions. But B. J.’s first association with the Grinnell Congregational church was brief: in 1885 B.J. and his recently blended family moved to Cedar Rapids, where B. J.’s stepfather, Allen Dean, had long lived before coming Grinnell. The church register indicates that that autumn Clara, B. J., and Grace Ricker (B. J.’s younger sister and the tenth child born to Clara and Edward) were all dismissed to “Cedar Rapids,” without specifying a church there. It seems likely that First Congregational Church, Cedar Rapids became their new church home. Now headquartered at 361 17th Street SE, First Congregational Cedar Rapids was still a young congregation in 1885, its first (wooden) building having been erected in 1880 at Second Avenue and Fifth Street SE.
Certainly the Ricker children and their mother had good reason to leave Grinnell and the Grinnell Congregational Church, but their departure came hard on the heels of a housecleaning of members. Congregationalists of that era took seriously their church commitments, and periodically embarked upon a paring of the membership rolls, eliminating those not deemed sufficiently committed. In December, 1884, for example, the church voted to strike from the rolls 40 members, and then appointed a committee of three—S. J. Buck, professor at the college; S. F. Cooper, civil war veteran and educator; and S. L. Herrick—to report to a February, 1885 congregational meeting “on the question of dropping from the membership of the church certain persons.” Having consulted “the brethren” of the “charges brought against them,” the committee found the objects of their inquiry not unaware of “their neglect of Christian ordinances” and “the duty to be faithful and persevering in the service of God.” However, the committee reported, “we are sorry to say that such is their indifference that they are not prepared to promise to return to Christian duty and …to keep their covenant vows.” Despite the rebuffs, the committee was reluctant to condemn their fellow members, preferring, the committee report continued, to regard these persons as “backslidden Christians rather than as impenitent sinners.” Declining to recommend specific actions, the committee concluded by asking to be relieved of its charge. The church accepted the report and dissolved the committee, but soon thereafter proceeded to shrink the rolls vigorously, evidently less respectful of the slackers than had been their designated committee.
So it was perhaps fortuitous that Clara Dean and her two youngest children left the Grinnell church when they did. At the time of the move, Susan Grace Ricker was only fifteen, and, as her subsequent biography confirms, over the next few years Cedar Rapids played a big part in her life. She finished school in Cedar Rapids, in 1894 married Lemuel Kratz there, and continued to reside in the city until some years after her first husband’s 1922 death. The situation was different with B. J., who was thirteen when his mother remarried and seventeen when the household moved to Cedar Rapids. With his 1887 enrollment at Grinnell College, B. J. was back in Grinnell where two of his older siblings—Fannie Morrison and Addie McIntosh—and their families lived. Both families belonged to and were active in the Congregational Church, allowing B. J. the means for an easy resumption of membership in the Grinnell church.
So far as the Grinnell records can confirm, however, B. J. Ricker did not involve himself very closely with the Grinnell Congregational church during his college days. Nothing in the membership records indicates that he rejoined, although he may well have attended church, faithfully or episodically; so close was the church’s connection with the college—college commencements and many other public events took place in the Congregational church—that one might almost expect Ricker to have appeared often at the Grinnell church. If he did, the church seems to have held little attraction for him, and shortly after graduation from the college, young Benjamin Ricker set out for California. He soon found himself in Selma, about fifteen miles south/southeast of Fresno where B. J.’s older brother, George, lived. In Selma, B. J. put down some roots; working first for a fruit-packing company and then for a lumber enterprise, B. J. also joined a church—Cumberland Presbyterian Church of Selma.
As noted in an earlier post, in the 1930s B. J. and Mabel Ricker were active members of the Bidwell Memorial Presbyterian Church of Chico, so perhaps the destination is not so surprising. But Cumberland Presbyterian was a different kind of Presbyterian church, formed in the early nineteenth century from a split within the denomination over requirements for the clergy. Founded and largely based in the South, Cumberland presbyteries gradually spread outward, often depending upon ministers who had no special training. Although conservative theologically, Cumberland churches were often more socially progressive than their cousins in the main Presbyterian denomination.
Cumberland Presbyterian Church, 1295 North Harrison, Fresno, California (founded 1910).
How B. J. found the Cumberland Presbyterian Church of Selma or what he thought of it, we do not know. According to an 1882 history of the region, at that time there were only about 200 residents in Selma and only four organized churches—one of which was Congregational. But, according to this narrative, “the people under the direction of the C[umberland] P[resbyterian] Church have built a very neat and comfortable church house, free for the use of all orthodox denominations.” Apparently Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians and Congregationalist shared the same modest facilities Nevertheless, according to the Grinnell church records, when B. J. rejoined First Congregational Church of Grinnell, he did so by letter of transfer from Selma Cumberland Presbyterian.
Returning to Grinnell in 1895 and having purchased a share of the glove business, B. J. did not immediately renew his membership at First Congregational Church. Was this a conscious decision or merely a sort of laziness over a matter of no great concern? Nothing survives to answer the question satisfactorily. What is clear is that as soon as he and Mabel married in December, 1897 and set up house in Grinnell, they quickly moved to join the Grinnell Congregational Church. Records report that B. J. and Mabel officially joined the membership in March, 1898, he by letter of transfer from Cumberland Presbyterian Church, Selma, California, and she by letter from First Congregational Church (now First United Church) of Oak Park, Illinois.
First Congregational Church, 4th and Broad, Grinnell, Iowa (1923). Photo Courtesy Drake Community Library, Grinnell, Iowa.
Despite the apparent haste to join, neither B. J. nor Mabel make much of an appearance in church records from the years after they married and moved to Grinnell. Occasionally B. J. was named to various positions, but Mabel is all but invisible. In late 1906, for instance, B. J. Ricker was one of nine—along with Iowa College president John H. T. Main, college professors Jesse Macy and L. F. Parker, C. W. H. Beyer, Judge J. P. Lyman, and Ricker’s business partner, D. S. Morrison—named “to select and recommend a pastor for the church.” At the April, 1907 meeting at which the committee reported its choice, it was B. J. Ricker who read to the congregation nine letters of recommendation for the Rev. H. Dascomb, the committee’s nominee. Clearly this committee was an important assignment that had B. J. mixing with some of the church’s and town’s most influential people, but it does not seem to have translated into still higher posts later. At the following year’s annual meeting, Ricker provided the report on Sunday School, and he was also named one of about a dozen men responsible for ushering at Sunday morning services. At another point, Ricker found himself singled out (along with two others) to advise the church on financial matters.
Certainly these were all worthy appointments, but they do not match the important positions regularly filled by B. J.’s brother-in-law and business partner, David Morrison, and Morrison’s son, Fred, each serving as trustee among numerous other visible duties. But Ricker, who had put in two years on the Grinnell city council with some very visible results, and who was made a director of Merchants National Bank in 1909 and then trustee of Grinnell College in 1910, seems to have occupied no position of authority within the church until 1924, shortly before the Rickers left town, when B. J. was elected to a three-year term as trustee. Throughout the ‘teens, the annual lists of Congregational Church officials, often including more than fifty members, made no mention of either B. J. or Mabel Ricker.
Nevertheless, after adopting Elizabeth and Edward in late 1918, the Rickers made sure that their children were promptly baptized. On June 15, 1919 the Ricker twins were part of a group of 13 children baptized that morning at the Congregational Church. Although already five years old at the time, Edward and Elizabeth experienced the rite along with infants like Mark Morrison, who was only one year old at the time. But if B. J. and Mabel were not especially active in the church, the twins cannot have been too deeply involved either.
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When the Rickers left Grinnell in 1925 and moved to Los Angeles, they did not immediately remove themselves from the rolls of the Grinnell church, nor did they rapidly join a new church. According to Grinnell records, only in April, 1927 did the Rickers request a letter of transfer to First Congregational Church, Los Angeles.
First Congregational Church, Los Angeles, California (1932), 540 S. Commonwealth Ave., Los Angeles
Today, the Los Angeles Congregational church occupies an immense, gothic revival, all-concrete building erected at 540 South Commonwealth Avenue in 1932. The massive structure is impressive and beautifully fitted out. But when B. J. and Mabel sought membership in 1927, First Congregational occupied a different, more modest building on Hope Street between Eighth and Ninth. A fairly conventional Victorian church set off by a four-story bell tower, the downtown building was not far from the Rickers’ Los Angeles homes—about five or six miles—but the decision to affiliate with the oldest and probably most-respected Congregational church in the city probably had other explanations.
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But here, too, the Rickers did not linger long. As noted in an earlier post, already in autumn, 1928 B. J., Mabel, Elizabeth and Edward Ricker were accepted into membership of Bidwell Presbyterian Church in Chico. The twins joined “by profession of faith,” presumably because they had never formally joined either the Grinnell or Los Angeles churches, but B. J. and Mabel joined by letter of transfer.
In contrast to their earlier experience, in Chico the Rickers seem to have immersed themselves in church life. B. J. was elected a trustee almost immediately upon joining, and in their last years in Chico Ricker chaired the Board of Trustees. In addition, B. J. was also active in the men’s fellowship and sang in the choir for years. Mabel, for her part, was active in the Mite Society, a missionary organization, and even took part in local presbytery matters. The twins, too, are visible in various sunday school and youth activities at Bidwell Memorial. In contrast to their Grinnell church life, then, the Chico Rickers were much more active and filled more responsible posts than they ever had in Grinnell.
Why? What can explain the apparently dramatic enthusiasm? Certainly everyone in the family had matured—B. J. was 60 in 1928—but advanced age had not been required to make B. J. Ricker a Grinnell College trustee (Ricker was 42 when appointed), bank director (at age 41), or city councilman (at age 38). Had the Rickers somehow “got religion” as they aged? Perhaps, although no testimony of their own or others survives to confirm the hypothesis. But it is clear that when the Rickers reached Berkeley, they joined First Congregational Church and participated with enthusiasm. B. J. felt the attachment so strongly that his 1950 will provided that, should Mabel predecease him, fully one-third of his estate should go to the church. Of course, Mabel did not die before B. J., so Ricker’s intended benefice was never actualized. But his expressed wish confirms the idea that, if not early in his life, then in his later years B. J. Ricker felt very strong identification with and commitment to his church.
B. J. Ricker Behind the Wheel—Automobiles Come to Grinnell, Part 2
1912 Spaulding 4-door. Image courtesy of Drake Community Library, Grinnell, Iowa.
If in fact B. J. Ricker did not own a car until 1916, he was far behind the pace setters. The first automobiles appeared on Grinnell’s streets around 1904, often wreaking havoc with the buggy teams that at the time still dominated street traffic. According to a short piece in the April 19, 1904 Grinnell Herald, the town could boast a total of nine cars of seven different makes, and by August, 1908 the newspaper could count no more than 33 automobiles, an indication of the infant market and the wide array of automobile makers. Records of the Iowa Department of State, which began to issue registrations in 1904, confirm this modest dispersion of automobile ownership: only nine Grinnell registrations in 1904 and just 13 in 1905. But the trend was accelerating, so that during 1908 25 new registrations from Grinnell entered the state records.
As the numbers of owners multiplied, the state found registration increasingly difficult, and eventually shifted responsibility to the counties in exchange for their receiving a portion of registration fees. But the transition seems to have undermined record-keeping, so it is difficult to know with certainty how many automobiles were registered in Grinnell after 1908. There can be no doubt, however, that the numbers were constantly growing. The December, 1913 Grinnell Register reported that one local vendor had sold 101 cars that year; a mid-October 1916 report on the company bragged that 127 cars had been sold since January 1. Of course, automobile fever was not unique to Grinnell. Newspaper reports indicate that state-wide 150,000 automobiles were registered in Iowa in 1915; by July 1, 1916, more than 170,000 vehicles were officially registered.
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Advertisements for Some Automobiles Sold in Ricker’s Grinnell
In Grinnell, as in much of the country, Ford automobiles came to dominate sales. A 1922 list of 178 delinquent vehicle registrations identified 47 different automobile makes. Most were represented by one or two owners; Ford, on the other hand, was the vehicle of 54 of the delinquents—which gave Ford 30% of the market (if this list of owners can be likened to the whole). Some other names still familiar to car owners appear on the list: 9 Chevrolet and 8 Buick owners also earned censure for failure to register. Other cars, some evidently quite popular, are less familiar to today’s drivers: for example, 15 Overland drivers and 12 owners of Maxwells were cited in the list. Still other automobile names either do not resonate at all with contemporary consciousness, or else summon only humorous associations. To the first group belong the Moline, Metz, Cleveland, White, and Paige, each of which was represented by a single owner. To the second group belong the Hupmobile, Dort, and Dixie Flyer, also each listed here only once.
The growth in automobile ownership was matched by an increase in dealers. When automobile sales were still in their infancy, the principal Grinnell vendor was the Grinnell Auto and Garage Company, which in 1905 advertised “Automobile Livery at Fair Prices.” Headquartered adjacent to the Colonial Theater on Main Street, Grinnell Garage accurately claimed to be “the Oldest Auto Dispensers in Central Iowa,” and initially, sold Fords, the early models of which were not inexpensive. But as Ford shifted its cost to the bottom of the price curve, Grinnell Garage adjusted its pitch: a 1908 ad promoted the “Rakish four-cylinder [Ford] Roadster” for just $750. Later the company expanded its marketing to include other makes as new automobiles entered the market.
Colonial Theater, Main Street, Grinnell. Note the building behind the theater, facing Fifth Ave.
Advertisement from Grinnell Herald, May 28, 1912.
By 1914, several local dealers vied for the attention (and money) of automobile buyers. J. N. Knight and Son, like the old Grinnell Garage, had sold carriages in Grinnell for twenty years, but added automobiles around 1910; operating their business from 613 Fifth Avenue, they sold the Hudson, Maxwell, and Marathon. John Mincer, who founded and owned Mincer Automobile Company, began with an auto garage “in the rear of his billiard hall at 827 Main,” according to a newspaper article. Originally having rented out the premises, Mincer took the business over in 1912 and began to sell the Jackson, “which any farmer with a mechanical turn of mind can keep in repairs,” advertisements alleged. The Jackson competed at the upper price point, selling for between $1385 and $2300, so Mincer offered the Detroiter ($850-$900) and Metz ($475) for more economically-minded buyers. Perry Dayton also came to the business a bit later, opening at the corner of Main and Commercial in 1912. But in the middle of the ‘teens, the most successful dealer was the Grinnell Motor Company, founded in 1912 on Fourth Avenue, but moved to 1015-1019 Main Street the following year. Their most popular vehicle was the Ford, but they also sold the White and Studebaker at higher prices; until 1915 Grinnell Motor was the exclusive agent for Spaulding in Poweshiek and Jasper counties.
Advertisement from July 20, 1916 Grinnell. Register.
Advertisement from Grinnell Register, July 13, 1916.
Other dealers were smaller, and most did not last into the 1920s as the automobile business consolidated. J. E. Alexander, for instance, sold the Glide (“Ride in a Glide Before You Decide,” ads suggested), while in 1912 O. B. Mathews represented Rambler. In 1924 H. D. Wilson was selling Studebakers from 920 Main; the “Big Six 7-passenger sedan” sold for $2685. Brownell, LaGrange and Risse opened a shop on south Main in 1912, offering both the Reo and Oakland; later they sold the Detroiter for about $1100. George and Frank Hagen opened the Hagen Brothers Garage at 801 Main, and became the lone distributor of the Hupmobile; Hawkeye Motor Sales, from whom Ricker bought his Mitchell, also sold the Oldsmobile, Reo, and Saxon. In 1916, Lamberson-Hunt (founded in Oskaloosa) took over the Spaulding garage behind the Colonial Theater; by 1920 they were located at 1026-1028 Main Street, and held the Ford franchise for Poweshiek, Mahaska, Keokuk and parts of Jasper and Marion counties. Sometime in the 1920s Rinehart Motor Company took over Ford sales. W. C. Robinson Auto Company (later Robinson & Hink) in 1908 offered “Bargains in Second Hand Machines…at prices ranging from $200-$500.” They also represented Maxwell and in 1909 sold Buicks, but their business closed well before 1920. Outside Grinnell one could find several more automobile dealers nearby: Malcom Auto Sales Company handled Buicks and the Craven Garage in Kellogg sold the Great Western, a car produced in Peru, Indiana.
In other words, over the course of ten or fifteen years, the automobile conquered Grinnell. If the 1910 city directory mentioned no automobile dealers, the 1920 directory listed sixteen retailers of new and used automobiles. In addition, the directory identified purveyors of “Automobile Accessories,” “Automobile Livery,” “Automobile Painters,” “Automobile Parts (Buick),” “Automobile Repairing,” “Automobile Supplies,” “Automobile Tire Repairers,” “Automobile Tires and Accessories,” “Automobile Tops” and “Automobile Trucks.” Among those listed in 1920, Brumfield Motor Company sold the Paige (“The Most Beautiful Car in America”) out of the Armory at 816 Fifth; J. N. Knight paid for a quarter-page ad in which to pitch a revised lineup of automobiles: Cadillac, Hudson, Essex, and Dodge. A. G. Larson also bought a quarter-page ad to advance his dealership at 1029 Fourth where one might purchase “First Class Service” for automobiles. Similarly, William Cuttell and Dess Martin opened the Cadillac Repair Shop at the rear of 925 Broad, featuring “a full line of Cadillac Oils” as well as Cadillac and Ford tires.
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Cartoon from front page of February 2, 1914 Grinnell Register.
Advertisement from front page of Grinnell Herald, August 13, 1912.
The increasing number of cars meant inevitably that larger numbers would be abandoned or wrecked, which explains A. N. Hockett‘s business at 521 Third Ave.—Grinnell Auto Wrecking House: “We Wreck the Cars—Sell the Best and Junk the Rest.” To judge by newspaper reports, Hockett’s business enjoyed a brisk trade as reports of automobile accidents became a regular feature of the local press. A common complaint was that automobiles were traveling too fast. The front page of the February 2, 1914 Grinnell Register reprinted a cartoon from the Providence Journal that lampooned “speed mania” and reckless driving. There can be little doubt that speed did appeal to the audience. The Grinnell Herald of September 1, 1905 announced in huge, bold type an “Automobile Race! At the Grinnell Fair.” Dangling a $1000 purse before 14 automobile drivers, the paper called it the “first and biggest automobile race ever held in Poweshiek County,” but it was far from the last; automobile races became a regular feature of the fair, and drew increasingly titillating headlines from sponsors. The August 13, 1912 Herald, for example, promised “Death Daring Auto Races” between two professionals along with an entire card of local races. Reporting on the results a week later, the newspaper declared that in fact “Auto Races Are Fast and Exciting.” Iowans generally agreed, explaining, perhaps, how automobile races also became part of the Iowa State Fair no later than 1916.
But how fast was fast? A May, 1912 case throws some light on the question. According to reports, the city of Grinnell filed charges against fourteen automobile drivers for “exceeding the speed limit of ten miles per hour” within the city. Among the accused were Jesse Fellows and his business partner, E. W. Clark, Jr., along with the only woman on the list, Alma Christian. Apparently the city had employed two men who used stop watches to judge the speeds of passing automobiles, a circumstance that encouraged most of the defendants to decline to plead guilty. Of most interest is that, in filing the results, the court announced the speeds at which the convicted had been traveling; most were between 15 and 20 miles per hour, but Adam Dunlap was clocked at 30 mph, Frank Wood at 25 mph, and Alma Christian at 20 mph.
Speed was not the only issue that gave rise to problems as city authorities struggled to come to grips with an entirely different mode of transportation. In October, 1916, the city issued “uniform traffic regulations,” copies of which were distributed to automobile owners. Among other advice, the new regulations required drivers to keep to the right and pass on the left; they also ruled against parking “in front of theaters” or within twenty feet of fire hydrants. “Slow down when approaching intersections,” the rules counseled, and “signal cars behind you before stopping or changing course.” Most important to Grinnell drivers was the amendment to speed limits, which drivers regularly complained were too low. The new rules established a limit of 12 mph around schools, along West Street as far as the railroad crossing, and along Fifth Avenue as far as the north-south railroad. Everywhere else in town one might speed along at 18 mph.
Automobile accidents did not stem from speed alone; newspaper reports demonstrate that the automobile collided—often literally—with both old and new technologies of travel. The earliest accidents brought automobiles face to face with traditional horse-power. One of the first cases (also among the most celebrated and the subject of prolonged litigation) arose in 1905. Gabriel Strand brought suit against Grinnell Auto Garage, alleging that one of its vehicles had so frightened his horse on the road near Newburg that the animal had bolted, thrown, and injured Strand. An initial hearing led the jury to award Strand $1500, but the judge demurred, thinking the award too high. Strand appealed and ultimately collected $2000.
But the Strand case represented only the the tip of the iceberg; newspaper articles thereafter regularly reported on unfortunate encounters between autos and horses. One picturesque story comes from May, 1916, when a horse-and-wagon was left standing on a downtown street, hitched as usual. “For some unaccountable reason,” the newspaper reported, the horse “became frightened and made a sudden plunge towards the railroad track…[then] along the sidewalk and up the paving on Third avenue.” Unfortunately for J. A. Stone, his “touring car was parked opposite his store…and three ladies…were seated in the car. The horse turned out enough to pass but the wagon crashed into the car.” The car was significantly damaged, as was the wagon, although the collision then freed the horse of the wagon, so that the animal “tore madly on down the street…in and out among innumerable cars [along Fourth]…until he reached the McMurray Dry Goods store corner” (4th and Main). Bystanders watched helplessly, fearing that the horse would crash straight through the merchant’s plate glass window, but the runaway stumbled on the curb, providing a chance for someone to grab the reins. Surprisingly, no one—not even the three ladies waiting in Stone’s car—was hurt.
The “iron horse” seems to have proved even more dangerous to Grinnell-area motorists, and newspapers regularly reported on collisions. Mid-summer 1916 Miss Grace Ettinger was driving a Ford roadster east on Hamilton Avenue when she prepared to cross the north-south railroad tracks. Later reporting that she had heard no whistle or bell, Ettinger started across the tracks, but immediately caught sight of the approaching train; in haste she tried to reverse the car, but killed the engine instead. Her passenger jumped to safety, leaving the driver to face the slow-moving freight, which “struck the car and pushed it off the crossing,” luckily without overturning the vehicle or propelling the driver out of the car. Something similar had taken place a few weeks earlier: Mrs. H. W. Spaulding was driving south (on which street the story did not say), intending to cross the Rock Island railroad. Although she knew that the No. 7 train usually passed at about that time, she seems not to have seen the train approaching as she tried to cross the tracks, moving slowly “on account of the bad crossing.” No sooner did the front wheels reach the track than she saw the train bearing down on her. “She threw on the brakes and reversed the car,” but not fast enough; the train struck the vehicle, tearing off the front wheels, lamps, and fender. Luckily, both Mrs. Spaulding and her passenger escaped harm, despite the collision.
Most automobile accidents had far less happy consequences, however. A story from September, 1916 reported on a “Terrible Accident Near Montezuma” in which two drivers “were putting on a little race.” One car hit soft dirt, skidded, and overturned, pinning the occupants beneath. The other car drove to Montezuma in search of help, and returned with enough hands to lift the auto off the injured parties. Mrs. James Bangham suffered multiple fractures of her arm, the bones protruding through the skin. Her father, D. L. Gorsuch, suffered serious back injury, and little Ida Fay Gorsuch, a passenger and daughter of the driver, “received some wicked gashes across the limbs from the glass of the wind shield,” and died within days.
Numerous accidents reported that, like the Gorsuch car, the vehicle had “turned turtle,” capturing occupants beneath, usually with fatal or very serious consequences. In 1914, for example, a Gilman man died when his car “turned turtle…burying him beneath it.” Louise Morrison was driving near Kellogg in June, 1916 when she hit a rut, and lost control of the car, which then “turned completely over backward and pinned both [Morrison and her passenger] beneath it.” Miss Morrison, the newspaper reported, was found “lying beneath the wheel with the broken windshield across her chest…[her] neck had been broken and the jugular vein severed by the broken glass.”
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Advertisement from February 26, 1912 Grinnell Register.
“Keep out of Ruts” a 1914 newspaper article advised, but doing so was not easy on the roads of early twentieth-century Iowa. With no better success, city and state authorities counseled drivers to lower their speeds. B. J. Ricker seems to have absorbed these bits of driving advice: no newspaper account reported him involved in an auto accident or cited for speeding. The rest of Grinnell, however, seems to have been captivated by automobile speed, an inclination which the newspapers were glad to indulge. Along with the frequent reportage on auto accidents, in 1912 the Grinnell Register serialized “The Flying Mercury.” The tease that appeared in the February 26 issue promised “A romance of motor racing that will thrill you like the sight of whirling cars. A modern story with a modern setting that…moves with a rapidity sufficient to satisfy any reader.” Consequently, even if B. J. Ricker drove his Mitchell slowly and carefully around Grinnell, his neighbors were purchasing ever more cars and driving them ever faster, in the process helping remake America into what a recent book has labeled Car Country.
B. J. Ricker Behind the Wheel: Automobiles Come to Grinnell, Part 1
1916 Mitchell 7-passenger automobile. Photo courtesy of Frank and Elizabeth Francis.
When Jesse and Maude Fellows had their new Broad Street home designed in 1914, they made sure to include a garage; indeed, the plans of Temple & Burrows show a double garage, a reflection of their shared enthusiasm for the automobile. By 1914, Jesse Fellows had owned at
Temple & Burrows (1914). West Elevation of Fellows House, Grinnell. Double doors in center of 1st floor indicate the two-car garage.
least two automobiles, including his Detroit rechargeable electric that he purchased in 1910 for $2500. Earlier, Fellows had owned a Buick, and when in 1916 Billy Robinson’s biplane crashed south of Grinnell, rescuers hurried to the site in Fellows’s Cadillac. It is no surprise to learn, then, that when the Grinnell automobile club formed, Jesse Fellows was elected the organization’s president. More surprising is that, in an age when women in America did not yet enjoy the franchise, Maude Fellows was also an automobile enthusiast, driving in the 1913 Fourth of July Parade of automobiles. Whether she owned her own car the records have not yet confirmed, but the Fellows House double garage indicates that Jesse and Maude owned at least two cars, and thought their care important enough to make arrangements for their shelter in the Fellows’s fine new Broad Street home.
As is well known, Walter Burley Griffin‘s Ricker House, as built on north Broad Street in 1911-12, did not at first include a garage. Griffin’s plan for Ricker House most certainly did include a garage (although not quite the one that Francis Barry Byrne brought to life in the winter of 1916-17). But at the time a garage was a far from common component of Grinnell houses. Older homes of distinction might have a coach house in which to store the family buggy and horse, but simpler homes made less provision for their conveyance. As automobiles increasingly marked the modern era, a garage came to be viewed as a necessary part of every “modern” home. For instance, an April, 1914 advertisement in the Grinnell Herald argued that a garage was necessary to “Complete the Joy of Motoring.” In addition to a work bench, good lighting and windows, a concrete floor would allow owners to “wash the automobile in all kinds of weather,” the ad straight-facedly asserted. A garage, the text concluded, is now “a year round necessity.”
Printed version of Marion Mahony Griffin’s Rendering of Ricker House. From Country Life in America 24(May 1913):39. Note the garage on far left.
Then why didn’t Ricker’s new house include a garage, especially since Griffin’s plan provided for one? Some have argued that the garage was omitted because Ricker had not yet acquired title to the land in lot 3 on which the garage would be built. However, as noted in an earlier post, already in 1909 Ricker had purchased from Gideon Merrill lots 1 and 3 (even if he hadn’t finished paying for them when he left town in 1925). So Ricker certainly could have built the garage, indeed, should have built the garage, given how involved he was in various automobile-related developments in Grinnell. When Ricker served on the Grinnell city council, for example, he played a central role—perhaps the central role—in guaranteeing paved roads for the city. Furthermore, Ricker gained special recognition for his part in developing the “River to River” highway that passed through Grinnell soon after 1910, and he was among the earliest members of the Grinnell automobile club over which Jesse Fellows presided. All this evidence implies that Ricker owned and used an automobile as early as 1909 or 1910, and therefore had need of a garage.
On the other hand, none of the early Iowa records for automobile registration mention Ricker, nor does his name appear on any of the lists of automobile purchasers that Grinnell newspapers in these years printed with increasing frequency. The first mention so far discovered of Ricker’s new automobile comes from a September, 1916 item in the Grinnell Register: “B. J. Ricker is driving a new seven passenger Mitchell purchased of the Hawkeye Motor Sales Company.” The report does not say whether the new car replaced an older one, or whether the Mitchell was added to a car that Ricker already owned. What is clear, however, is that Ricker acquired his Mitchell immediately prior to the time the new garage was added at 1510 Broad, implying that the (two-car) garage was built exactly because of Ricker’s new car (or perhaps to accommodate the acquisition of a second car).
7-passenger 1916 Mitchell Automobile. Photo courtesy of Frank and Elizabeth Francis.
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The Mitchell was a fine car, but an unusual choice; home-town boosterism might have persuaded Ricker to acquire a Spaulding, even if Spaulding was on its last legs in 1916. The Mitchell-Lewis Motor Company had its home in Racine, Wisconsin, where it established a 75-acre, 2500-employee factory and automobile test site that, at its peak, produced about 75 cars a day. Nevertheless, the number of Mitchells sold in Iowa was quite small. Why then did Ricker opt to buy this relatively rare, out-of-town vehicle?
1916 Advertisement for the Mitchell sedan. Thanks to Mary Schuchmann and Gerry Karwowski for help in locating Mitchell ads.
Although by 1916 the local press regularly printed advertisements for automobiles and despite the fact that the Grinnell Register that year even included a special section devoted to local dealers and the cars they represented, one will look there in vain for news about the Mitchell whose advertising sought out more elevated publications. Whereas the Spaulding never succeeded in establishing a presence east of the Mississippi and remained a distinctly midwestern automobile, Mitchell advertising claimed not only a national but an international presence—in Europe, South America, Canada and Mexico.
One place where Mitchell-Lewis did regularly advertise was the Literary Digest, a Funk and Wagnalls popular national weekly with intellectual pretensions. Mitchell advertisements in the 1916 Literary Digest regularly emphasized—even exaggerated—the length of the car, a silouette that the ads claimed was “the handsomest ever attained.” Indeed, the Mitchell’s promoters emphasized the exceptionalism of the car, no doubt intending it to appeal to men like B. J. Ricker—well-off business men who wanted their cars to emphasize and broadcast their success. An ad from late 1916, for example, boasted, “Now 24% Extra Luxury,”and “Deeper Finish—Finer Upholstery—31 Extras”—all of which were said to help the owner attain “the height of luxury.”
For all that, the Mitchell was not an especially expensive automobile. Advertisements from 1916 indicate that the 7-passenger touring car that Ricker purchased listed for $1360—only about half of what Jesse Fellows had spent in 1910 for his Detroit electric, and only a fraction of what a new Peerless might have cost: a 1913 Peerless ad reported that a six-passenger car would cost between $4300 and $7200. (By late 1916 the price for the Mitchell 7-passenger had risen to $1460; still later, the 7-passenger Mitchell Springfield, a hard-top sedan, listed at $1985 and the 7-passenger limousine at $2650.)
On the other hand, the Mitchell sedan was an intentionally rare commodity. Although the factory claimed to produce 75 finished vehicles each day, total 1916 production of the touring sedan, according to advertisements, was limited to 500. Perhaps the very rarity of the car appealed to B. J. Ricker, as it did to other “Big Men” to whom Mitchell-Lewis directed its advertising. Elegant of line and steeped in luxury, the Mitchell was also a car so unusual as to turn heads—and that at a price well below some of the most expensive automobiles of the day.
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Spaulding Manufacturing Company (ca. 1910). Photo Courtesy of Drake Community Library, Grinnell, Iowa.
Of course, the Grinnell-produced Spaulding was also an unusual, even rare, automobile. According to later studies, between the founding of the automobile division in 1910 and the cessation of automobile production in 1916, Spaulding produced just under 1500 cars total. Nevertheless, despite the periodic bursts of publicity that attended various stunts and long-distance races in which Spauldings did very well, the Grinnell automobile did not have the same cachet as did the Mitchell. For one thing, even though country-wide the Spaulding was rare (and evidently never made any claims to having buyers in foreign lands), in Ricker’s Grinnell the Spaulding was not at all rare, and owning one would have done little to further Ricker’s reputation.
Furthermore, in 1916 as Ricker pondered the purchase of his new automobile, despite the roughly similar price of comparable automobiles, the Spaulding company was in dire straits, and Ricker, who regularly met with H. W. Spaulding as fellow trustee of Grinnell College and who shared membership with Spaulding in the Grinnell Congregational Church and numerous civic organizations, was sure to know about the company’s problems. Indeed, Hawkeye Motor Company, from whom Ricker bought his Mitchell, was partly owned by Ernest Spaulding, one of Henry’s sons who was also deeply involved in the Spaulding business and locally represented and sold Spauldings. So Ricker was sure to have known of the problems confronting Spaulding, and the likely consequences of buying an automobile that was on the verge of extinction.
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Ricker’s purchase of a Mitchell automobile, therefore, was of a piece with the entire story of his building a beautiful, modern new house on north Broad Street. His car was modern, stylish and special, just like his house, and confirmed B. J.’s modern, special station. What Ricker could not have anticipated, however, was how his new auto might also affect his future family: when in 1919 the Chicago Tribune reported on the 1918 adoption of the Rosier twins, the celebratory article included a quotation from an ebullient, four-year-old Edward: “I like my new papa,” Edward is reported to have said to the reporter, “and if you will come out to our home I will give you a ride in our automobile!” Over time Edward no doubt came to love his new papa for many reasons, but at that moment of introduction, it surely did not hurt that B. J. Ricker drove a luxurious automobile of distinction.
Race and Ethnicity in the Rickers’ Grinnell—Part 2
Six Chinese Students in the Grinnell College Class of 1920: (L-R, top) Wen Chian Feng; Pao Shu Kuo;Liang-Chao Cha; (L-R, bottom): Chung-I Tseng; Ko-Nien Yang; Kuo-Neng Lei.
As noted in an earlier post, B. J. and Mabel Ricker did not have much occasion to encounter racial diversity in 1920s Grinnell. Although the Rickers did hire help at home—the city directory reported that Mary Elick was a “domestic” at 1510 Broad where she lived, and that James H. Daley was the Rickers’ “houseman,” although he lived at his own residence—their help was white, like that of their neighbors. Similarly, as Alice Renfrow reported, no blacks or Mexicans worked at the glove factory, despite the frequent advertisements to hire more help when the glove business was booming. But Ricker’s close association with Grinnell College—as an alumnus and, since 1910, a college trustee—did offer him some familiarity with racial diversity as it appeared on the college campus.
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Over the years, an occasional Asian student studied at Grinnell College. Perhaps the most famous Japanese student at Grinnell was Sen Katayama (1859-1933), who graduated from Grinnell in 1892 and went on to found the Japanese Communist Party and to serve the Comintern in Moscow (where he is buried). But Asian students remained exceptional at Grinnell, at least until the 1916 establishment of Grinnell in China. The class of 1913, for instance, included Jiro Imada, a student from Hiroshima, Japan, and both Aquilino Carino (Philippines) and Pyn Muangman (Siam/Thailand) were part of the class of 1923.
In the years around 1920, however, Chinese students came to constitute the largest, most recognizable minority on the college campus. Even then, however, Chinese students matriculated at irregular intervals. The class of 1916 included only one Chinese, E. Hsuehcheng Hou, who hailed from the Shandong where Grinnell in China was headquartered. Apparently there were no Chinese students who graduated in 1917 and 1918, but the class of 1919 included three Chinese men (Tsu Lien Wang [Shanghai]; Chuang Lu [Dewang, Sichuan]; Kuang Chao Lu [Wuchang]), and at least seven were part of the class of 1920. Four of this group lived off-campus: Ching Tseng (Jiangsu) lived at 1233 Park; Wen Chian Feng (Chow Hsien [?Zhaodong, Xian?]) lived at 1033 Park Street with Fan Kuong, while Pau Shu Kao (Cheushu?) and Yu Pin Kuo (Hunan) lived at 1032 West. At least three more Chinese students appear in the college yearbook but not in the 1920 census or directory: Liang-Chao Cha from Tianjin; Kuo-Neng Lei from Kai-Hsien; and Ko-Nien Yang from Changsha. None were U.S. citizens, and all had entered the U.S. within the few years prior to 1920, probably only for purposes of attending college.
The class of 1923 counted just three Chinese students (Chieh Min Chang [Chaugh, Zhili Seng], Tsung Chin Chao [Gansu], and K. C. Wu (Kuo Cheng Wu [Beijing]), who went on to receive an honorary degree from Grinnell College and become an important part of Chiang Kai-Shek‘s Kuomintang. The following year a larger contingent from China studied in Grinnell: “Eaton” Kung Chun Tsai (Fuzhou); Jen Pei Shen (Beijing); Chi Chang Ma; Kai Yun Lu (Beijing); Shao Yu Liu (Beijing); “Durham” Chen Chang (Beijing) and Te Hsu Cheng (Nanjing). Yet another Chinese, Sin Chen, had been part of the class of 1924, but after only a semester in Grinnell he left for Columbia University business school. So young Chinese men were not unusual on the streets of Grinnell in the Rickers’ last years in town; not only was there a regular presence of Chinese men on campus, but several also boarded off-campus, and inevitably therefore had contact with town residents and businesses. But except through the college population, the men and women of Grinnell had scant reason to meet anyone from Asia. The sole exception to this generalization seems to have been Kim Fong, a 54-year-old Chinese man who reported to census-takers that he had entered the U.S. in 1899 and who in 1920 was operating a laundry on Broad Street (the 1920 city directory, however, does not include Fong).
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The class of 1922 included no Chinese at all, but did include two black men: Mona Tappie Chie, an international student from Liberia, and Hosea Booker Campbell, an African American from Tallahassee, Florida. Chie had been born in a small Liberian village, and had then moved to Monrovia where he began mission school; with the intervention and help of one of his teachers there, he entered the U.S. in 1913, enrolling at Taylor University academy in 1914 and at Grinnell College in 1918. A Chemistry and Zoology major, Chie promised great things, but never graduated from Grinnell: after a lengthy illness in the spring of 1922 he died and was buried in Hazelwood cemetery. Hosea Booker Campbell, concentrating in History and Philosophy, attended Grinnell on a Julius Rosenwald scholarship. Upon graduation, he entered Harvard University, pursuing an advanced degree in history. Here he met John Hope Franklin and studied under Carter G. Woodson, a pioneer of African American history.
Hosea Booker Campbell and Mona Tappie Chie, Grinnell College Class of 1922
Gravestone for Mona Tappie Chie, Hazelwood Cemetery, Grinnell, Iowa. Photo by and courtesy of Bill Baumbach.
Overall, however, only a handful of blacks attended the college in these years. The class of 1913, for example, included J. Owen Redmon from nearby Colfax, while Alphonse Heningburg, native of Mobile, Alabama and a graduate of Tuskegee, was part of the class of 1924. Sebert Dove, native of Jamaica, was a classmate to Heningburg, and both were active in the newly-formed college Cosmopolitan Club—devoted to promoting “a friendly relationship between the foreign and the American students, and to unite them in a spirit of understanding.” Despite this noble sentiment and the efforts of the Cosmopolitan Club, Ricker and his north Grinnell friends will not often have seen African American students in town. Townsfolk were more likely to have noticed Mumpford Holland or Lee Renfrow, although these black men will have occupied only a small margin of the attention of prosperous, white Grinnell.
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None of this indicates that Grinnell was insular. Indeed, the 1920 census reveals that a good part of the town’s population was foreign-born, including some of Grinnell’s most famous and well-off citizens. For example, both Andrew McIntosh (who married B. J. Ricker’s sister, Addie) and R. G. Coutts (who built Ricker’s brick home and whose several children attended Grinnell College) were born in Scotland and adopted Grinnell after immigration. Al Lindeen and John Anderson, building contractors who lived at 808 Summer Street, were both born in Sweden; Ole Bartinan and his wife Aagot had immigrated from Norway, while Anton Rohner and his wife Maggie were Swiss, operating a bakery in town. Daniel Berman, the junk dealer who lived at 803 Pearl Street, like his wife and children, was born in Russia, but, like many others in 1920s Grinnell, the Bermans made Grinnell their home, their ethnic difference submerged beneath racial similarity.
The college also attracted to town foreign-born faculty, including some of the its most well-known professors, several of whom lived in a cluster on High Street where the young B. J. and Mabel Ricker had first lived. Edward Steiner, for example, age 53 in 1920 and Rand Professor of Applied Christianity, had entered the U.S. in 1886 from Austria and been naturalized six years later; he and his wife lived at 921 High. Another Austrian, Edward Scheve, professor of music, was one year older than Steiner, but had immigrated in 1883 and claimed to have been naturalized in 1894 (although, in fact, once World War I began, Scheve required the college’s help in 1914 to confirm his citizenship). Scheve’s wife, Lina, German by birth (but Austrian according to the census), had arrived only in 1890 and she reported having gained American citizenship in 1896; in 1920 the Scheves lived at 914 High.
Foreign-born Faculty of Grinnell College (clockwise from top left): Eugene Lebert (French); Edward Scheve (Music); Elias Blum (Voice); Edward Steiner (Rand Professor of Applied Christianity).
Eugene Lebert (42), assistant professor of French, had immigrated from Nantes, France in 1906, and at the time of the 1920 census was still an alien; his wife, Frances (36), who lived with him at 931 High Street, had accompanied him to America, and she, too, remained alien. Elias Blum (38), instructor in voice, had immigrated from Hungary in 1891 and was naturalized eleven years later; Blum’s wife, Jennie (37), claimed German birth, moving to the United States in 1910. Several college faculty who themselves were America-born had immigrant spouses. John Stoops‘s first wife, Mary (54), for example, was Canadian, moving to the U.S. in 1886 and becoming a citizen in 1901. Similarly, Elsie McClenon (35), wife of mathematics professor Raymond McClenon, was German, but received American citizenship in 1912.
These European immigrants, however, caused less notice in Ricker’s Grinnell than did people of color. All white, the foreign-born faculty, like the foreign-born McIntosh and Coutts, were imagined to share the “determination, will power, self-control, [and] self-government” implicit in their race. Domiciled around the college, often in grand homes, these immigrants were not differentiated by race, and could interact freely with the town’s business and social elite, even if their incomes did not make them rich.
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The situation was different with the Mexicans and African Americans, most of whom earned modest incomes and occupied modest homes on the town’s social fringe. Marked by the color of their skin and the inherited notions of race, these men and women interacted with white Grinnell only in very limited circumstances and from positions of financial and social disadvantage. Even men like B. J. Ricker, who were educated in a college founded by abolitionists and who as students themselves encountered fellow-students of color, seem to have inherited notions of racial difference. Could it have been an accident that Ricker’s glove factory never found it possible to hire someone like Alice Renfrow? And did Ricker, who graduated the year before Sen Katayama, and who therefore almost certainly knew him, and who, as a member of the college’s board of trustees helped oversee the enrollment of Chinese students and the foundation of Grinnell-in-China, see Asians as his racial and social equals? The Rickers’ adoption of Australian children showed them to have no bias against the foreign-born, and when in 1930 B. J. and Mabel helped their children return to Australia for a prolonged visit, they reinforced their sense of international awareness in an age when American immigration policies were becoming increasingly restrictive. But perhaps race proved a more difficult challenge, and the Rickers, like much of the rest of Grinnell of that time, implicitly accepted the advantages of being white.
Race and Ethnicity in the Rickers’ Grinnell—Part 1
According to census data, in 2010 Grinnell‘s population was about 92% white. A century earlier Grinnell was even whiter: the 1920 census counted 5362 Grinnell residents, but only about 50 were people of color. In other words, Grinnell was about 99% white. All the same, the town claimed a proud history of defending America’s blacks. In the long years of slavery in the United States, Grinnell was firmly abolitionist—the town was founded by J. B. Grinnell, a active abolitionist and friend of John Brown—and Grinnell became a well-known stop on the underground railroad, a route to freedom for escaped slaves. As early as 1863, Grinnell College admitted its first African American student, and in 1879 the college issued its first diploma to an African American.
Nevertheless, residents of Ricker’s Grinnell understood that race had meaning. Occasionally, recognition of difference assumed an apparently harmless guise, as it did in August, 1922 when the Kansas City Giants, a Negro league team, came to town to play the locals. The newspaper was at pains to acknowledge the skill of the visitors, but could not avoid awareness of difference: “the colored boys showed right from the start that they were going to be hard to beat,” the Grinnell Herald remarked, but Jimmy Grant, the sore-armed Grinnell pitcher, “made the colored lads look sick with his breaking curve ball and lots of smoke on the fast one.”
Earlier newspaper commentary on race was more assertive. The January 1st, 1907 Grinnell Herald, for example, considered the meaning of race on page one, atop the fold. According to the paper, “The Caucasian…is dominant and domineering, and possessed primarily with determination, will power, self-control, self-government, and all the attributes of the subjective self…The negro is in direct contrast by reason of a certain lack of these powers…” Whether the Grinnell editors composed this piece themselves or reprinted it without amendment from some other source as they often did with newspaper content, the arguments laid out here no doubt resonated with those dominant, domineering, self-controlled white men who operated Grinnell’s levers of power. This vision of race defended stereotypes and generated a smiling, paternalistic tolerance of difference and inequality.
In Ricker’s Grinnell, newspapers were the principal mechanism through which Ricker and the rest of Grinnell learned about the men and women of other races with whom they shared the town, and newspaper accounts regularly indulged in stereotypes. Although there were only a handful of Mexicans in Grinnell, they invariably appeared in the news as violent or drunk; Mexicans never appeared in the more prosaic accounts of “local news” that occupied so much of the Grinnell newspapers. The January 4th, 1916 issue of the Grinnell Herald, for example, reported that Jose Flores was arrested “for celebrating the New Year too enthusiastically,” and on February 24th the newspaper headlined a story on five Mexicans arrested for bootlegging. A front-page story on June 6th described a bloody, knife fight between Marcus Toros and Peter Negrete, both Mexican (as the paper observed), and a September 8th article announced the arrest of eleven Mexicans charged with breaking into freight cars to steal “numerous and succulent watermelons to satiate the cravings of Mexican appetites.”
Similar treatment attached to the few African Americans living in Grinnell. A long, front-page article from August, 1916 reported the death of Mumpford Holland, an African American former slave who was said to have been 108 years old. Described as “a negro typifying the best qualities of his race, faithfulness, industry and affection,” Holland was, the paper affirmed, known to all. And yet there was that awareness of difference—and the expectation of deference that informed perception. Characterizing the dead man, the paper said, “Always there were the same quaint, stooping walk, the same deferential greeting, the flash of white teeth from behind the gray, wooly beard…. Everybody teased him and joked with him, and he expected it and liked it,” the newspaper allowed. Perhaps the former slave had reconciled himself to the deference he had been raised to honor, but certainly none of Grinnell’s movers and shakers aspired to the same attitude. Without theatrics or violence, Ricker’s Grinnell quietly accepted racial difference and its implied inequality.
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But who were the men and women of the town who were not white? The 1920 U.S. census of Grinnell and the Grinnell city directory of that year document the presence in town of a surprisingly large number of Mexicans. Interestingly, the census and city directory saw the Mexicans as “white”—specifically labeled white in the census whereas the directory left them otherwise undescribed, just as it did the town’s whites; in the city directory only African Americans appeared with the abbreviated adjective (“col”—i.e., “colored”).
Most of the Mexican men in Grinnell worked as section hands for the Chicago, Rock Island, and Pacific Railroad. Whole families “bunked” in railroad cars on the railroad rights-of-way or along State Street, immediately adjacent to the tracks where a series of six identical, compact, one-and-a-half-story houses lined the east side of the street, parallel to the railroad tracks. Only two of these houses are still standing, but they prove that the space available was often insufficient for the people who lived there. The Espinosa family, for example, was headed by Frank Espinosa, who was 45 in 1920, and who lived at 628 State Street with his 35-year-old wife, Salome, and their five children: Frances (19);
600 block of South State Street, 1906 Sanborn Fire Insurance Map of Grinnell
Gregory (18); Adela (15); Esperancia (11); and Castilia (9). According to the census, all were aliens—a term regularly used by census workers for all immigrants who had not received U.S. citizenship—who had entered the U.S. in 1918. Quirino Flores (41), who also worked for the railroad, had immigrated already in 1896, together with his mother, Paula (70); they lived next door to Espinosa at 624 State Street. Jesu Fregoso—another railroad worker—and his wife Refugio lived at the southern end of the block at 608 State Street; Daniel Ochoa (25), also a section hand for the railroad and only recently arrived in the US, boarded with them.
Houses at 628 and 624 State Street (2013).
In this one block, then, twelve Mexicans resided. Pedro Alvarez, age 37, “bunked” on East Street with his brother, Luis (23). The Alvarez boys, both of whom worked for the railroad, were also listed as aliens, entering the U.S. in 1917. Sebastian Ortiz, 28, another railroad laborer, had immigrated only the year before the census, bringing his wife, Inocencia (25), son Victorino (9) and daughters Asencion (6) and Esperanza (4); the Ortiz family also bunked along the railroad near East Street.
Frank Duran (33), on the other hand, worked for Iowa Light, Heat and Power (ILHP), and lived at 622 East Street with his wife Cresensea (29) and son Joe (8). The census reports them all as alien, having entered the US in 1916. Antonio Torres (30) had come to the US already in 1910, and in 1920 was working as fireman for ILHP. He lived with his wife May (28) and father Eugenio (66) at 703 Summer Street. All were aliens, but Eugenio had only arrived in the U.S. in 1917. Joseph Torres (35), perhaps a relative of Antonio or Eugenio, had come to the U.S. in 1913, and he, too, now worked for ILHP. He lived at 305 Park Street with his wife Adela (28), son Chino (9) and daughter Sarah (11); all had come to America only in 1917, perhaps following Joseph once they felt his work secure.
As the addresses—all in south Grinnell—make clear, few residents of north Grinnell would have known any of these people: the freight cars on the railroad spurs or the State Street spec homes could be compared with Ricker House or Fellows House only with considerable imagination. The box cars were barely furnished, hard to heat, and, perhaps worst, were vulnerable to mischief, as a small article that appeared in the Grinnell Register in October, 1916 indicates. According to the paper, one night at Ewart, south of Grinnell, a Mexican section hand and his wife were awakened from their sleep and barely escaped the fire of the “old box car in which they were living.” The fire was no accident, and was “started from inside” the car. The article named no suspects, but implied that another Mexican was responsible: “there has been more trouble reported between two Mexican laborers at Ewart and a time or two it seemed bodily injury might result.”
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Mexicans were not alone in coloring the population of Ricker’s Grinnell. In addition to Mumpford Holland, the long-lived former slave, several other African Americans appear in the 1920 US census and the city directory. William Good, for instance, was only 16 in 1920, but was already working as a porter for Lamberson-Hunt automotive shop; he boarded at 715 Spring Street. The 1920 Grinnell directory identified E. Bruce Lucas as “col[ored],” and reported that he worked as a shoe black, and lived with his wife, Ruth, at 823 4th Avenue. The 1915 Iowa census included their then twenty-year-old daughter, Rebecca, who had been sent to a “school for the Feeble Minded,” but the 1920 records make no mention of her. Nelson Hudson (35), described as “co[ored]” in the 1920 city directory and “mu[latto] to the 1920 census, worked as a custodian at the Elks Club; he lived at 308 Main Street with his wife Ruby (20), their son Robert (3) and daughter Dorothy (10 months). Another African American was James H. Jones (39), who worked as a janitor at Grinnell College, as did his wife, Mary (41). But the couple lived at 102 Park Street, at the far southern edge of town and far from the grassy college campus.
George and Eliza Craig also were black and already elderly in 1920—75 and 73, respectively. Both had been born in the South—George was an escaped slave—and had migrated north sometime later, settling in Grinnell where they occupied a house at 513 2nd Avenue. The 1920 city directory identified George as a barber who reported to the 1915 Iowa census that he had earned $600 the previous year. The largest African American family in 1920 Grinnell was headed by Lee Augustus Renfrow (47), who, like the Craigs, had migrated from the South; Lee had been born in Texas, but in 1920 lived with his wife Eva (44) at 411 1st Avenue, Grinnell. Eva was daughter to George and Eliza Craig (mentioned above), and had come to Grinnell originally to help family. But she soon married Lee, whom the 1915 Iowa census described as a “cook” (he was chef for a time at the Monroe Hotel), an occupation that had earned him $400 the preceding year. Six children are listed in the 1920 census: Helen (15); Alice Lee (13); Rudolph (12); Evanel (11); Edith (5); and Paul (3). The family worshipped at the Congregational Church (long a bastion of abolitionism) where, Edith Renfrow later remembered, the family met College President John Nollen and many college faculty. Edith herself attended Grinnell College (Class of 1937) where, she recalls, she encountered no difficulties because of race. Beyond the college, however, things were not so fair. Many years later Edith remembered that African Americans were not welcome at Candyland, the town’s favorite ice cream emporium, and if they went to the movies, blacks had to sit in the balcony. Consequently, despite the family’s connection to the college that Ricker served as trustee, it seems doubtful that the Rickers would have had any knowledge of or contact with the Renfrow family.
Edith Renfrow Smith, Class of 1937. Photo by Mark Batrell, reprinted courtesy of Grinnell Magazine (Summer 2007).
If the railroad and the power plant explained why most Mexican families lived in Grinnell, there was no obvious magnet to draw black Americans to Grinnell. Certainly Grinnell College employed people of color, but, as Stuart Yeager pointed out, most African Americans who worked for the College occupied low-status, low-paying jobs as janitors—like James and Mary Jones—and cooks. But there were no jobs for skilled African Americans. Alice Renfrow, who grew up in Grinnell, provided a discouraging report on the prospects for African Americans in Grinnell: “We all took short hand and typing,” she said. “If we excelled, we were all supposed to be recognized as the ones to be selected, but that was not the case. There were no secretarial jobs at the college, none for me.” The situation was the same at the other main employers in town, including B. J. Ricker’s glove factory: “They didn’t have any Negroes down at the glove factory, [nor] at the canning factory,” Alice reported. “They used to hire just anybody who could just look like they could read ABC and that’s all. They would hire those people, but not us.”
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There is more to be said about race in Ricker’s Grinnell, but even this survey reveals that 1920s Grinnell was a place where people of color found themselves the victims of implicit bias. The geography of residence and the sociology of income combined to keep people of color pretty much out of sight. It is possible that white Grinnellians who attended school in south Grinnell regularly encountered Mexicans or African Americans; poverty led to more racial diversity than did financial success. But even in the most prosperous parts of Grinnell, B. J. Ricker and his friends might encounter racial diversity, as the next post will point out.
Ricker House Neighborhood—Janney Addition/Clark Re-subdivision
Map of Janney’s Addition. Grinnell Herald, 8 January 1909, p. 4
The area just north of Merrill Park also played a part in the Ricker House story. As mentioned already, when the Rickers lived on north Broad Street, they lived at the northern edge of town. In the 1920s Merrill Park came into existence, but beyond the park there was very little to the north until the 1950s. But things might have turned out differently, because already in 1909 an Ottumwa developer by the name of C. G. Janney had the idea of creating more homes in the fourteen acres immediately north of Merrill Park. Before the story had completely played out, Jesse Fellows became involved in the project and, more importantly, Walter Burley Griffin was called upon to bring his creative powers to bear upon the plan. Had Griffin’s plan been actualized, Grinnell might have become home to one of the largest articulations of prairie school architecture in the United States.
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G. C. Janney, although born in Virginia, spent much of his early life in Muncie, Indiana where he became involved in the manufacture of farm machinery. In the last years of the nineteenth century, he moved to Ottumwa, Iowa where he founded an enterprise devoted to machinery that planted and harvested corn. With a workforce of between 150 and 200 men, a foundry, blacksmith shop and assembly plant, the factory produced the “Janney Common Sense Corn Husker and Shredder,” the “Janney Common Sense Triple Geared Grinding Mill,” and
Advertisement for Janney Common Sense Corn Husker, Farm Implement News, vol. 20 (3 August 1899), p. xvii.
the “Janney Common Sense Corn Planting Machine.” To Janney’s misfortune, by 1905 the company was in the hands of a receiver, so Janney attempted to start anew, founding the Ottumwa Pad and Blanket Company to manufacture horse collar pads and blankets. Allegedly capitalized with $10,000, Ottumwa Pad and Blanket appears in the Ottumwa city directory with the same address as Janney’s home, an indication that from the first the project was not a good bet.
But during the course of 1908 Janney fell into negotiations with several Grinnell businessmen about moving the pad and blanket company—and many of the forty employees Janney claimed to employ—to Grinnell. Reporting on these discussions, the Grinnell Herald explained that Janney hoped that, by moving to Grinnell, he might escape “the labor problem at Ottumwa.” Besides, the paper continued, Janney liked “the moral and educational tone of the [Grinnell] community as a place for his family.” Perhaps he did, but Janney insisted on a further, less idealistic provision: to help finance the move to Grinnell, Janney asked Grinnell businessmen to purchase for him the fourteen acres north of Merrill Park between West and Park Streets and to guarantee the interest on this purchase for two years. The idea was for Janney to plat the land, then sell the lots to pay back the principal. Two trustees—S. J. Pooley from Grinnell and J. F. Webber from Janney’s business in Ottumwa—would hold the land in trust until the investment was repaid.
With this agreement in hand, Janney arranged for C. R. Allen, who had worked as an engineer for Janney in Ottumwa, and S. J. Buck, Grinnell College professor and Poweshiek County surveyor, to plat the newly-acquired property. The result was a rather conventional (and somewhat thoughtless) division of the fourteen acres into 57 lots, all laid out as rectangles at right angles to the north-south orientation of West and Park Streets, and the proposed continuation of Main and Broad Streets. In the western half (from West Street east to the alley between the proposed continuation of Main and Broad Streets) the lots were smaller than in the eastern half, but the plan—typical for a midwestern urban grid—showed no sensitivity to the topography of the land or the difficulties the topography represented for providing city services.
Advertisement for Janney Addition, Grinnell Herald 18 May 1909, p. 3.
At meetings around town and in interviews with the Grinnell newspaper, Janney bubbled with enthusiasm for Grinnell’s future. Advertising “Choice Building Lots in the Janney Addition,” the Ottumwa man claimed that the lots would double in value in two years. At a meeting with Grinnell businessmen in City Hall in early January, 1909, Janney provided details about the 57 lots he was marketing, and according to the newspaper some of those present immediately purchased lots: Grinnell businessmen Samuel Pooley, George McMurray, Louis Kemmerer, F. M. Card, H. W. Spaulding, R. G. Coutts, and O. K. Cole acquired the first seven lots. Soon thereafter Janney donated to Grinnell College lot 43, one of the largest and best-situated lots, atop the rise at the southeast corner of today’s Twelfth Avenue and Country Club Drive.
If any Grinnell investors were suspicious of all the lather emanating from the newcomer, they soon found themselves justified. In late 1909 Janney was indicted for having secured a bank loan under false pretenses (perhaps connected to his claims about the Ottumwa factory). Meanwhile, two Grinnell banks brought suit against Janney, aiming for a declaration of involuntary bankruptcy. Janney’s resistance proved fruitless, and in late November, 1909 Janney’s firm, the newly-renamed Grinnell Pad and Blanket, was declared bankrupt, and Janney disappeared from the project to which he had so recently devoted so much enthusiasm.
Almost from the moment that Janney appeared in Grinnell, however, Jesse Fellows and E. W. Clark, Jr. associated themselves with him and his project. Early in January 1909 a brief newspaper article observed that Clark and Fellows “have entered into an arrangement with Mr. G. C. Janney to help him dispose of the lots…,” and they gave Janney space at their lumber business where, as the occasional newspaper advertisements reported, Janney could be reached. After Janney’s disgrace,
Gravestone of Elbert W. Clark, Jr. Hazelwood Cemetery, Grinnell, Iowa. Photo courtesy of Gail Bonath (www.findagrave.com/).
Clark and Fellows took possession of the remaining lots, and, after young Clark’s death from typhoid fever in 1913, Clark’s widow, Ada, and Jesse Fellows continued to sell lots in Janney Addition through at least 1915, although the quick return on investment promised by Janney did not materialize and few houses appeared on these lots before the 1950s.
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More importantly, the Janney Addition drew the attention of Walter Burley Griffin, probably when Griffin came to Grinnell in 1910 to plan the memorial for Dr. E. W. Clark, father to Jesse Fellows’s business partner.
![Walter Burley Griffin. Clark Memorial Fountain, Grinnell, Iowa [1910]. National Library of Australia, Eric Milton Nicholls Collection, vn-3673470.](https://kaiser355.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/vn3673470a.jpg)
Walter Burley Griffin. Clark Memorial Fountain, Grinnell, Iowa [1910]. National Library of Australia, Eric Milton Nicholls Collection, vn-3673470.
It was just at this time that Clark and Fellows took over the project, and they had reason to pump up publicity for the lots, hoping to counter some of the negative feelings associated with Janney’s bankruptcy. Because the young Clark, Jesse Fellows and B. J. Ricker were all members of the same clubs in town and because Fellows and Ricker were neighbors (on High Street in the years before they both raised new houses on north Broad), Clark and Fellows were sure to have heard from Ricker about Griffin and his visit to Grinnell to plan the Clark Fountain. Of course, this visit took place before Griffin won the international competition to design a new capital for Australia and before Griffin’s practice became too busy to contemplate new clients, so naturally Griffin was interested. But more than securing new commissions for his practice, Griffin no doubt saw in the Janney Addition an opportunity to design not simply a house, but an entire community. As later demonstrated in the plans for Rock Crest/Rock Glen and for Idalia, Florida, Griffin aspired to plan whole communities that were integrated into their natural environment rather than imposed upon it. The resubdivision of Janney Addition represented exactly that sort of opportunity.
It followed, then, that Griffin would propose a plat radically different from Janney’s, contrasting his vision with what Griffin called the “purely mechanical extension of the typical layout…of the city.” As against the “brutal mutilation of the natural advantages by the typical rectangular extension,” Griffin imagined a layout that followed “the rolling disposition” of the land—an aesthetic consideration. But the reason that Clark and Fellows sought his help probably had less to do with beauty than economy, and Griffin hastened to demonstrate how his plan was not only more beautiful but also more economical. Since the original plat took no account of the different elevations of the land, Griffin wrote, it implied an expensive and difficult installation of city water and sewer services. By contrast, Griffin’s plat, which followed the contours of the property, managed to add nine more lots, increase average frontage, and simplify installation of city services, thereby making the project more attractive to investors while also producing a less rectangular and visually more pleasing distribution of lots. To illustrate the possibilities, Griffin later drew onto the plan a representation of Ricker’s own house, thereby illustrating not only the more “natural” organization of the community but also directly connecting the project to Ricker’s Broad Street house.
![Walter Burley Griffin. [Community Plan of] Mr. E. W. Clark,Jr. Resubdivision of Janney Addition [ca. 1910]. National Library of Australia, Eric Milton Nicholls Collection, vn-3662595.](https://kaiser355.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/nla-3a.jpg)
Walter Burley Griffin. [Community Plan of] Mr. E. W. Clark, Jr. Resubdivision of Janney Addition [ca. 1910-30]. National Library of Australia, Eric Milton Nicholls Collection, vn-3662595.
As pleasing as this might have been, Griffin’s plan was never adopted, although subsequent development did moderate the original plan: houses raised in the 1960s stood astride several of the original lots, and both Manor Drive (the would-be Main Street) and Country Club Drive (the extension north of Broad Street) curve to follow the natural slope of the land. Moreover, with respect to the history of north Grinnell, despite the fact that Griffin’s plan was never fully adopted, the architect’s encounter with Janney Addition investors confirms the Grinnell men’s interest in progressive architecture, and, as noted in an earlier post, may have encouraged Jesse Fellows to seek Griffin to design his home across the street from Ricker House.
Ricker House Chronicles 
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