The Taliesin Massacre: The Darkest Chapter of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Story
Ask any random American to name a famous architect, and chances are, they’ll say Frank Lloyd Wright. His iconic, Modernist Style is instantly recognizable, and while he was alive, Wright promoted himself like a kind of rock star.
But his image, along with his career, was nearly destroyed thanks to a dark chapter that he (and later, his estate) worked hard to erase.
Wright got his start as an architect in the well-to-do Chicago suburb of Oak Park. He designed several homes in his unique “Prairie” style, which emphasized the importance of family life. Wright himself was a family man, married to Catherine (“Kitty”) and father to six children.
As his Prairie style grew in popularity, so too did Wright. And with popularity came temptation. He began having affairs with the wives of his clients, though these were kept secret. Then he began having an affair with Mary Borthwick Cheney — known as “Mamah” — in 1903 while designing a home for her husband, Edwin.
Borthwick was an early feminist, a well-educated woman who could speak multiple languages. She was the first woman Wright considered his intellectual equal. When they met, she was engaged in translating a pamphlet on free love from Swedish to English.
The two would often ride around Oak Park in his car, setting the local tongues wagging. Soon enough, all doubt as to their relationship would be removed.
As the Cheney home was being completed, Borthwick and Wright would have sexual encounters in the bedroom. Unfortunately, Wright’s unique architectural style was his undoing: thanks to the open floor plans and large windows, neighbor children could climb over fences or up trees and watch them.
Once the kids told their parents what they had seen, the whole town was scandalized. Oak Park was deeply conservative — nicknamed “The City of Churches” — so no one was willing to work with Wright anymore. His commissions dried up, and all his clients dropped him. He was facing financial ruin.
So in 1909, Wright closed up his studio, left his wife and children, and met Borthwick in Europe. She, too, had left her husband and two children to elope with her lover. However, Kitty refused to grant Wright a divorce, so the two lovers couldn’t marry. Instead, they spent a year in Europe together, where Wright worked on some portfolios and building up his reputation as a genius architect to the slightly less conservative European market.
After about a year, the two returned to the US. However, Oak Park and even Chicago would have nothing to do with him. So Wright’s mother purchased some property for him near his family’s farm in rural Spring Green, Wisconsin.
There, starting in 1911, he designed and built Taliesin, a sprawling complex resembling an Italian villa, for he and Borthwick to live and work. Its design incorporated features and materials from the surrounding landscape, and is considered the first of his “organic” style of architecture.
In this pastoral isolation, Wright hoped to restart his career, away from the prying eyes of the press. But he could not stay hidden long. Soon the press found his “love cottage,” as they called it, and scandalous stories of their affair made the front page news.
For a married man to be living “in sin” with his mistress, who herself divorced her husband and abandoned her children, was horrifying to early 20th century Americans. But Wright refused to be ashamed. He claimed that “Laws and rules are made for the average.”
While this was certainly the nadir of his career, he did manage to get a commission to design Midway Gardens in Chicago. He was there working on it in August 1914. He left Borthwick and her two small children — Martha, 9, and John, 12, who were visiting for the summer — back at Taliesin.
On Saturday, Aug. 15, at midday, the Taliesin household sat down for lunch. Borthwick and her two children sat on the porch, at one end of the complex. Wright’s longtime personal aide and handyman, 30-year-old Barbados native Julian Carlton, served them lunch, as he always did.
Down a long hallway, in the formal dining room, a crew of workers — including one carpenter’s 13-year-old son — also sat down to eat, and Carlton served them as well. He told his wife, Gertrude, the family cook, to go home.
As they started eating, Carlton said he needed some gasoline to clean a carpet (in those days, gasoline was used to remove stains from rugs). One of the workers told him where to find a can of gas, and Carlton left as well.
As they ate, Carlton snuck around the building, bolting the doors shut, before grabbing the can of gas and an axe.
One of the workers said they smelled gas, and they saw the liquid flowing under the door just before it caught fire. While the workers desperately tried to escape, Carlton ran down the long hallway to the porch where Borthwick and her children were eating.
He immediately buried the axe deep in Borthwick’s forehead. Next, he began hacking at the children. Martha nearly escaped, her dress in flames, before dying on the lawn, her head crushed in. John was not so lucky.
Back at the main dining room, 19-year-old draftsman Herbert Fritz managed to break through a window and escape the inferno. He rolled down the hill to put out his flaming hair and clothes, and when he looked up, he saw the living quarters engulfed in flames, and Carlton attacking the other workers with an axe as they too tried to escape through the broken window.
Two other men managed to escape: 35-year-old master carpenter William Weston, who had built Taliesin, and 38-year-old gardener and handyman David Lindblom. The three ran to a nearby house to call for help.
Soon neighbors arrived to put out the fire, and they came upon a gruesome scene: the bodies of the Cheney children and three workers — Weston’s 13-year-old son, Ernest; draftsman Emil Brodelle, 26; and foreman Thomas Brunker, 68 — lying dead on the lawn. Mary Borthwick’s body would eventually be found inside, her skull nearly cleaved in two. Later, Lindblom would succumb to his burns and die as well, bringing the total dead to seven.
As the farmers worked to douse the roaring blaze, the Iowa County sheriff and the Polk County undersheriff, along with a Unitarian preacher who was related to Wright, formed a posse and used bloodhounds to find Carlton.
They eventually found him curled up, barely conscious, in the basement. He had swallowed acid in a failed suicide attempt.
He was nearly lynched on the spot, but the sheriff managed to get him away and drove him to the nearby jail, carloads of angry armed men in hot pursuit.
Because of the wounds sustained to his mouth and throat from the acid, Carlton couldn’t speak or eat. So police tried to ascertain his motive by questioning Gertrude and all the other workers on the estate.
Gertrude told police her husband had become increasingly paranoid in the weeks leading up to the massacre, and had started keeping an axe near the bed. Surviving workers said that there had been some disputes with Carlton recently, including a rumor that someone had called him a racial slur. Another worker said that “If anyone around there ever did him any dirt, he would send him to hell in a minute.”
There was also a rumor that Borthwick had told Carlton that he was being let go, and Gertrude confirmed that the two of them were scheduled to take a train to Chicago that evening. Considering Borthwick was his first victim, this makes the most sense as a motive.
But in the end, no motive could be confirmed. Carlton died of starvation seven weeks later, before he could stand trial.
The press was savage in their coverage of the crime, attributing Borthwick’s death to proof of an Avenging Angel, as though this were the punishment she deserved for “disregarding the bonds of marriage.”
Wright buried her in his family’s plot in the nearby Unity Chapel cemetery, which he had designed. He buried her at night, in secret, in a plain pine box under a wreath of flowers. He then sent local newspapers an open letter thanking the community for their support and defending Borthwick.
In the letter, he also vowed to rebuild Taliesin in her memory. And he did. By the end of the year, he had rebuilt the residential wing — and already fallen in love with another woman.
But the rebuilt Taliesin would not stand for long. In April 1925, faulty wires ignited yet another fire that destroyed the living quarters. Wright again rebuilt his estate, and it served as his studio, school, and home until his death in 1959.
Today it still serves as a museum to Wright. But the tragedy of 1914 is scarcely mentioned, considered a blot on his otherwise great legacy.
