A: Mary Long Rogers, ca. 1942. Photo courtesy of Janeen Gieseke.
Last year, I participated in a virtual symposium called “Chicago Women in Midcentury Design,” which highlighted the contributions of women in architecture and allied fields during the period before and after WWII. Since I was asked to focus on early women landscape architects, I primarily focused on Gertrude Deimel Kuh (1893-1977). In addition, I provided a short biography of Kuh’s friend and collaborator, Mary Long Rogers. You may remember that I also briefly mentioned Rogers in my February 2021 blog about Kuh. At that time, I didn’t realize that Mary Long Rogers was not only a talented landscape architect, but also a pioneering urban planner.
“Jane Addams Homes Proposed New Design of the Play Areas and Landscaping,” Mary Long Rogers, Landscape Architect, July 10, 1941. Burnham and Ryerson Art and Architecture Archive, Art Institute of Chicago.
After my Kuh blog came out, I heard from Joseph Wehrmeyer, a reader who has a special interest in Mary Long Rogers. Joe grew up in Metropolis, a small city in Southern Illinois where Mary lived in the mid-1930s. In fact, Joe’s grandparents purchased the home that had previously belonged to Mary’s parents.
Mary Long Roger’s parents built this mansion in Metropolis, Illinois, in 1929. From Pictorial History of Massac County, Illinois.
Mary and her mother, Katharine Bedford Wilson Long, 1907. Photo courtesy of Janeen Gieseke.
In the 1960s, when he was a boy, Joe liked to play in the attic, and there he found little houses that reminded him of the hotels from Monopoly. He was intrigued. Joe eventually found out that the houses came from a model Mary made for a project that proved to be important to her career. Joe Wehrmeyer has been gathering information on Mary Long Rogers for years, and I am grateful for his help with this blog.
Born on April 16, 1904 in St. Louis, Missouri, Mary Wilson Long was the daughter of Stephen H. and Katherine Long. Katherine’s family owned a successful firm that manufactured parlor stoves, and by 1910, Stephen was its Secretary. Sometime before 1920, the Longs moved to Metropolis, Illinois, where Mary’s father and her uncle, James Wilson, managed one of the company’s stove factories. According to a letter that her son wrote to a graduate student in 1991, Mary had aspired to pursue a career in architecture but her mother convinced her that this “just wasn’t something a Southern woman did.” So she studied Landscape Architecture at the University of Illinois instead. Excelling in her studies, she won an honorable mention in a design competition that was juried by such noteworthy professional landscape architects as O.C. Simonds.
Mary Long is in the bottom row, third from the right, in this Gamma Phi Beta Sorority photograph. From The 1926 Illio.
Mary with her son Raymond Dart Whitmore, Jr., 1938. Photo courtesy of Janeen Gieseke.
After graduating in 1926, Mary Long travelled extensively and also began receiving landscape architecture commissions. Her early work included preparing plans for improvements to Fort Massac State Park in Metropolis. In 1929, she married Raymond Dart Whitmore, an affluent textile manufacturer from Larchmont, New York. A Westchester County newspaper noted that the couple’s Paducah, Kentucky, wedding “attracted society from five states and united two families of prominence and social position.” Mary moved into “Raydamor,” the Whitmore family’s mansion, and lived with her husband, her mother-in-law, a cook, a gardener, and two other domestic servants.
After a few years of marriage, Mary gave birth to a son, Raymond Dart Whitmore, Jr. Mary must have been unhappy because around 1934 she left Raymond, Sr., took her young son, and moved into her parents’ home in Metropolis. Her mother had recently become a widow and was facing financial struggles. To help support the three of them, Mary Long Whitmore launched her landscape architecture practice from her mother’s home.
Mary Long Whitmore with Luther Carson, donor of a park and fairgrounds in Paducah, Kentucky, ca. 1937. Photo courtesy of Janeen Gieseke.
Though landscape design opportunities were somewhat limited due to the Depression, Mary was talented and clever. In 1935, she created a model to show potential clients what could be done on an average-sized residential lot. She displayed her miniature house, gardens, and play yard at garden club events, while sharing her vision with members. Around that same time, she made an even more impressive model of Paducah’s new Carson Park, which would be used for county fairs, horse shows, and horse training.
Damage done during the 1937 flood near Shawneetown, Illinois. The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library.
Mary soon learned of an opportunity that would prove quite important to her fledgling career. In the early months of 1937, Shawneetown, Illinois, located about 70 miles northeast of Metropolis, at the confluence of the Ohio and Wabash Rivers, was ravaged by a devastating flood. As water surged higher than the 60-foot-high levees, most of the town’s 1,400 residents had to be evacuated to tent cities. Flooding had been a problem in Shawneetown for over a century, and Gallatin County officials had long discussed the idea of relocating the entire town. In 1937, the Gallatin County Housing Authority (GCHA) applied for funds through President Roosevelt’s New Deal administration to move the whole town to higher ground about 3-½ miles away.
Mary Long Whitmore is shown working on her Shawneetown model in her mother’s garage, ca. 1937. Photo courtesy of Janeen Gieseke.
The CGHA held a design competition for the new Shawneetown. Mary Long Whitmore entered and competed against nationally-known architecture, engineering, and city planning firms. In addition to submitting plans and drawings, she built a 14x16-foot model of the new town. The Evansville Press reported that the model had hundreds of well-detailed houses with “windows, doors, tiny porches, chimneys.” It also showed an orderly street layout, lovely greenspaces, churches, schools, a courthouse, a city hall, and a post office, as well as factories, a railway and freight station, and a grain elevator. After the selection committee came to Metropolis to see Mary’s model they “unanimously voted to accept it.”
Aerial view of new Shawneetown following Mary Long Rogers’ plan, ca. 1945.
Newspapers across the country reported that Mary Long Whitmore had won the competition to design Shawneetown. Many of these papers marveled that a young woman “engineer” would serve as the new town’s chief planner. The federal government appointed Lincoln Rogers, an accomplished architect and US Naval Commander, as new Shawneetown’s WPA manager. (Rogers’ given name was Herbert, but he didn’t use it professionally.) The project moved ahead swiftly with land purchases beginning in February of 1938.
Mary Long Whitmore and some colleagues on Shawneetown levee. Photo courtesy of Janeen Gieseke.
Mary Long Whitmore and Lincoln Rogers fell in love. Rogers was a married man, the father of four daughters, and more than 25 years Mary’s senior. Of course, the relationship scandalized the small town. According to David Welky, author of The Thousand Year Flood, the CGHA quickly fired Rogers, “ostensibly because the relocation no longer required his services.” He and Mary divorced their spouses, married each other, and moved to Chicago with Raymond Dart Whitmore, Jr. In 1939, as Shawneetown residents moved into the new community that Mary had designed, she and Lincoln were busy working together for Chicago’s Southtown Planning Association. Lincoln served as executive director and Mary Long Rogers was the organization’s landscape architect.
“River Stay Away from My Door,” Saturday Evening Post, December 7, 1940.
“Basic Framework for Rehabilitation of Southtown,” Lincoln Rogers and Mary Long Rogers, Southtown Planning Association, ca. 1940. Burnham and Ryerson Art and Architecture Archive, Art Institute of Chicago.
Together, the couple produced important studies, reports, and plans for neighborhoods on the South Side of Chicago. By the early 1940s, however, the Southtown Planning Association could no longer afford the couple’s salaries, and their positions were eliminated. In response, the Rogerses established their own office, working on projects collaboratively and separately.
One of Mary’s most fascinating projects of this period was her “Proposed New Design of the Play Areas and Landscaping for the Jane Addams Homes.” The public housing complex had been completed in 1938 and the landscape firm of C.D. Wagstaff & Co. had installed its original plantings. But a few years later, there must have been a need for a plan for the housing complex grounds that would better serve the residents. Mary Long Rogers produced a colorful plan with playgrounds for older and younger children; lawn areas for tennis, badminton, and volleyball; parking areas, one of which was to be used for roller skating except when overflow parking was needed for community events; shuffleboard courts; flower beds; and numerous gardens. Mary also created a proposal for a Jane Addams Homes Garden Club. She envisioned that residents of each building would plant and maintain their own garden and an overarching club would sponsor lectures, trips, plant exchanges, and other events.
Close-up view of “Jane Addams Homes Proposed New Design of the Play Areas and Landscaping,” July 10, 1941. Burnham and Ryerson Art and Architecture Archive, Art Institute of Chicago.
Presentation drawing of the James and Hortense Becker House, Highland Park, Illinois, 1957. Art Institute of Chicago.
When Lincoln Rogers died in 1944, Mary was living in Winnetka, Illinois, with her mother and her son, Raymond. She continued to work in private practice to support her family. Mary Long Rogers and Gertrude Kuh became close. Both were talented women landscape architects with strong ties to Chicago’s North Shore. They were widows who were each raising a son. Around the late 1940s, Kuh had begun hiring Rogers to help with her busy practice. Kuh relied heavily on Mary’s exceptional drawing skills. In fact, Mary Long Rogers often created exquisite presentation drawings that Kuh used to illustrate concepts to potential clients. These drawings were often signed by both women.
Perspective drawing of the Mr. and Mrs. Robert Minsch House, Highland Park, Illinois, 1960. (N.B., Rogers signed the left side and Kuh the right side of this drawing.) Art Institute of Chicago.
Mary Long Rogers moved to St. Louis in the early 1950s, and later settled in Santa Barbara, California. Despite the distance, she continued to work with Gertrude Kuh while also maintaining her own practice. According to a master’s thesis by Mary Elizabeth Fitzsimons, the two women worked together over the phone, through the U.S. mail, and sometimes in person. Fitzsimons explains that during winter months the women would meet somewhere with a warm climate “such as Rogers’s guest cottage in Santa Barbara, California, or resorts in Arizona,” and in the summer they would get together in the Chicago area “where Rogers kept a temporary residence.” The two collaborated in this manner for well over a decade.
Mary continued to work in her chosen profession until the 1960s. She retired because her daughter-in-law died in childbirth and her son needed help raising his three children. In her later years, Mary Long Rogers designed her own home, participated in garden clubs and civic organizations, and was an avid painter. She died in 1978.
Mary with her son and his family 1973. This photo, taken in the house Mary designed, shows a painting of Half Dome that she created. Photo courtesy of Janeen Gieseke.
I am amazed that Mary Long Rogers’ contributions have been overlooked for such a long time, and I am honored that I could tell her story. I am very appreciative to Joe Wehrmeyer; Mary’s granddaughter Janeen Gieseke; Lisa Lee of the National Public Housing Museum, headquartered in the Jane Addams Homes; and the staff of the Burnham and Ryerson Art and Architecture Archive of the Art Institute of Chicago for helping me with this important project.