Frederick and Grace Bagley House, Hinsdale, Illinois. Photo by Marcello Rodarte.
Over the past year or so, Jean Follett, a good friend and talented architectural historian, and I have been collaborating on a fascinating project—uncovering the history of the Frederick and Grace Bagley House in Hinsdale, Illinois. Completed in 1894, the Dutch Colonial style house was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright when he first established his own firm. Last year, when the Bagley House went on the market, preservationists feared it would fall victim to the teardown trend that pervades many of Chicago’s western suburbs. The Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy, Landmarks Illinois, and local residents quickly organized a national campaign to save the building.
Bagley House, ca. 1900. Courtesy of Hinsdale Historical Society.
Jerry and Jeannette Goldstone, previous owners (left), and Safina Uberoi and Lukas Ruecker, new owners (right), in front of the Bagley House, 2021. Photo by Marcello Rodarte.
Fortunately, Safina Uberoi, an award-winning documentary filmmaker and member of the Conservancy’s board, and her husband, Lukas Ruecker, came to the rescue. The couple owns and has been restoring the Tonkens House, a significant Wright-designed residence in Ohio. Last year at the eleventh hour, they purchased the Bagley House. Uberoi and Rueckner are making restoration plans that include removing the artificial siding and rehabilitating the wood shingle cladding underneath it. They also intend to add modern conveniences to attract new owners who will appreciate the nationally significant residence. To ensure its future protection, they hired Jean and me to research and prepare landmark nominations for the building. As a result of our work, the Village of Hinsdale officially designated the Bagley House as a local landmark in June.
John Waters, Preservation Programs Manager for the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy, has been a valuable member of the project team. This year, the Conservancy’s national conference will be held in Chicago from October 19 through 22, with the theme The Progressive City: Wright and his Chicago Contemporaries. At John’s suggestion, Jean and I submitted a proposal to give a presentation on the Bagley House. Our paper was selected, and we will be speaking on Saturday, October 22, 2022. Please register if you can attend the conference in person or as a virtual participant. I’m pleased to share some of our findings in this month’s blog.
Frank Lloyd Wright, ca. 1895.
At first glance, it seems surprising that the Bagley House was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, who is known across the globe for his innovative Prairie style and Usonian houses. However, the Bagley House represents the influence of Wright’s two mentors, architects Joseph Lyman Silsbee and Louis Sullivan. The gambrel roof and Classical columns of the Bagley House make reference to picturesque Victorian residences produced by Silsbee, Wright’s first employer. The house’s open floor plan, deep horizontal front porch, and octagonal library point to Sullivan and the experimentation he encouraged over the six years Wright had worked for him. Both Silsbee and Sullivan produced domestic architecture that was clad in wooden shingles.
Frederick Bagley Residence, Frank L. Wright, architect. Annual Exhibition of the Chicago Architectural Sketch Club, 1894.
When Frank Lloyd Wright launched his independent practice in 1893, the 25-year-old was married, with two children and another on the way. With an office downtown and a studio at his Oak Park home, Wright had substantial overhead costs. The nation was in a recession and there was plenty of competition among Chicago’s many architectural firms. Fortunately, through family connections and his own social circles, Wright met Frederick and Grace Bagley, early clients who were fond of the young architect and sought to help him achieve success.
Frederick P. Bagley, ca. 1910.
Born in Detroit, Frederick Phillips Bagley (1860-1933) was the son of a prominent businessman, and the nephew of John Judson Bagley, Governor of Michigan in the 1870s. Frederick Bagley moved to Chicago in 1885 when he became engaged to Grace Hodges (1860-1944), daughter of attorney and real estate investor Leonard Hodges and his wife, Carrie Almeda Hodges. After Frederick and Grace married, they settled on the city’s fashionable Near South Side. Frederick Bagley soon became a dealer in architectural marble, first with a partner and then in his own firm, Frederick P. Bagley & Co. Specializing in Georgia marbles, Bagley’s company supplied materials to high-profile projects across the country.
Grace Hodges Bagley. Courtesy of Portraits of Suffragists, 1911. Cary Chapman Catt Papers, Bryn Mawr College Special Collections.
By the early 1890s, Frederick and Grace Bagley had three children, and despite running a busy household, both husband and wife devoted substantial time to progressive causes. They were active members of Chicago’s All Souls Church, a Unitarian congregation founded by Jenkin Lloyd Jones, Frank Lloyd Wright’s uncle. A renowned pacifist and supporter of progressive causes including women’s suffrage, Jones often worked with Jane Addams, founder of Hull House, the nation’s first settlement house.
Post Card View of Hull House, ca. 1905.
Grace Bagley also had a close and collaborative relationship with Jane Addams and Hull House. In a 1918 article in Friends’ Intelligencer, Bagley explained that years earlier she had “…drifted into Hull House, as do most Chicago women, when they begin to want to help other people, and got quite interested in the work there among the foreign population.” Deciding she wanted to become involved, she quickly realized that since her husband owned a “large Italian tenement” near W. Polk and S. Clark Streets, she wouldn’t have far to go.
Located at 186-188 Pacific Avenue, the Bagley tenement building is the pink (brick) dumbbell-shaped structure located near the top right side of this map, next to the yellow (frame) freight house. Rascher’s Atlas Vol. 2, Sheet 86, 1891, Revised to Jan 1901.
After visiting the tenement, Grace told her husband that she didn’t care for its conditions. Before long, she had convinced him to let her take full charge of the facility. In addition to collecting rents and overseeing repairs, she “looked after the welfare” of the residents “and took a keen personal interest in their affairs.” She wrote, “I didn’t take myself as arbiter of their moral destiny. I just liked them…and felt a human interest in everything they did.” Through this open-minded perspective, Bagley gained a deep understanding of her tenants. She became committed to improving the living conditions in the surrounding neighborhood and in tenement districts throughout the city.
Bagley House, ca. 1940. Photo by Gilman Lane. Courtesy of Oak Park Public Library.
Like other affluent Chicagoans of the early 1890s, the Bagleys wanted to escape the city during the summer months. They selected the bucolic suburb of Hinsdale, Illinois, to build their second home. Located ten miles west of the city, the village had good passenger train service. Wright completed the Dutch Colonial residence in 1894. Interestingly, he showcased marble elements in its design that had surely come from Bagley’s business. In addition to the house’s white marble Ionic porch columns, an interior fireplace had a red marble surround flanked by a pair of white columns like the exterior ones.
Left: Bagley House original fireplace. From Frank Lloyd Wright to 1910 by Grant Carpenter Mason. Right: Some original red marble appears to have been reused in a completely altered version of the fireplace surround. Photo by Julia Bachrach.
Around the time that the Hinsdale house was completed, Frederick Bagley commissioned Wright for two smaller projects—a communion rail and a baptismal font. Bagley likely intended to display these carved marble interior church elements as samples in his marble company’s showroom. Although the communion rail was never produced, Wright’s elegant design for the baptismal font was executed in stone.
Baptismal font designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for Frederick P. Bagley & Co., 1894. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art, Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York) 9413.0001.
Fanny Barrier Williams, 1900. Courtesy of New York Public Library.
By this time, Grace Bagley had become quite active in the Chicago Woman’s Club (CWC), an upper-class private club that had begun to focus on social reform issues, particularly those relating to women and children. In 1894, Grace and two other prominent club members created quite a stir when they nominated Fanny Barrier Williams, one of the city’s leading Black social reformers, for membership. The Chicago Tribune explained that after presenting “admirable papers before the Parliament of Religions and the Congress of Representative Women,” Mrs. Williams had become friends with Mrs. Bagley and her two CWC colleagues. Realizing that their suggestion would force the all-white club to examine its policies, the three women presented a resolution to have the CWC “condition its membership on character and intelligence, without restrictions of race or color.” After more than a year of debate on the issue, Fanny Barrier Williams was finally admitted into the club in 1895.
Excerpt from “Ready for Slum Display: Charts and Photographs of Chicago Tenements Prepared,” Chicago Tribune, December 16, 1899.
The Bagleys sold their Hinsdale house around 1898. It is unclear why they enjoyed the Wright-designed home for such a brief time. Grace’s increasing involvement with social justice causes in the city may have contributed to the decision. By this time, she was serving with Jane Addams and other leaders on a CWC reform committee that sought to change the way children were treated in the criminal court system. Juveniles who committed even minor infractions were sent to jail alongside adult offenders. Bagley and her associates believed that delinquent children deserved the opportunity for correction rather than punishment. The committee spurred a movement that led to the creation of the world’s first juvenile court system in Chicago in 1899. Grace Bagley had also become a recognized national expert on tenement housing. In addition to speaking on the subject, she and prominent reformers including Jane Addams and architect Dwight Perkins were part of a group that presented data on tenement conditions and created an exhibit of model tenement houses. The display traveled to other cities including New York.
In 1899, Grace’s younger sister, Almeda Hodges, married Stephen Foster, an attorney who later became a circuit court judge. Just as the Bagleys had, the Fosters hired Frank Lloyd Wright to design a second home for them. Located on Chicago’s outskirts in the West Pullman neighborhood, the Foster House was completed in 1900. The Bagley family likely summered with the Fosters there, as they rented out their own Chicago residence for the summer months at this time.
Wright’s Stephen and Almeda Foster House. Photo by Eric Allix Rogers.
Frederick Bagley’s marble business went into receivership in 1906. Shortly thereafter, the Bagley family moved to Boston. Grace remained committed to social reform causes throughout the remainder of her life. Soon after her death in 1944, the Massachusetts Department of Public Welfare held a memorial program in her honor. A publication for this event stated that, in over 35 years in Massachusetts, Grace Bagley had “continued and enlarged upon the fine work begun in Illinois” with accomplishments that ranged from organizing nurseries for Italian children in Boston’s North End to serving as Vice-President of the Massachusetts Civic League and Massachusetts Chair of the National American Woman Suffrage Association.
“Yuletide Cheer for Foreign Women,” Boston Globe, December 22, 1917. Note, Grace Bagley is shown at center of the three women on the right side of the photograph.
I hope I’ve enticed you to participate in the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy Conference in person or online. (Single-day attendance for the presentations is available.) And, speaking of conferences, I will also be participating in a couple of virtual Olmsted programs in October. I am presenting the first, a Newberry Library Seminar entitled Olmsted in Chicago: Iconic Greenspaces and the 1893 White City, with archaeologist Rebecca Graff, Lake Forest College professor and author of Disposing of Modernity: The Archaeology of Garbage and Consumerism During Chicago’s 1893 World’s Fair. The seminar will take place on three consecutive Thursday evenings from October 6 through 20, 2022. I will also be on an October 25, 2022 panel discussing the Past, Present, and Future of Olmsted Landscapes in Chicago. After you register, you’ll have the option of attending live or watching a recorded version later. I hope to see you at some of these events in the near future!