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Prologue The House across the River Who can set bounds to the possibilities of man? Ralph Waldo Emerson In this story, I am God. Frank Lloyd Wright Throughout the otherwise tedious spring and summer of 1911, the dusty Wisconsin town of Spring Green, in southern Sauk County, was gifted with a welcome and unexpected diversion, one that had sparked a flurry of interest, rumors, and gossip among the villagers—all 730 of them. Just down the road, across the Wisconsin River in neighboring Iowa County, a house was being built, such as none of them had ever seen. Month after month, from behind the trees that wreathed the river’s farther edge, hammers sounded and saws rasped. Ponderous horses hauled vast cartloads of local limestone, mined from an outcropping only a mile distant, up the steep hill to the building site. While its designer at first dismissed the project as a mere “cottage,” the structure was emerging as an outright mansion in the eyes of the townsfolk and area farmers . Many of them, in fact, had been put to work on the house, which was set into—not on top of—a graceful knoll overlooking the fertile river bottom land known locally as “the valley of the God-Almighty Joneses”—a reference (at once grudging and admiring) to the doughty family of Welsh pioneer farmers who had settled there and who had 3 ultimately produced, on his mother’s side, the nation’s most influential architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, then forty-four years old. It was said that the house was intended for Anna Lloyd Jones Wright, Frank’s aging mother, who had bought the land on which it would sit. The locals were being quite consciously deceived. The deception was abruptly unmasked on September 8, when the Chicago Examiner first broke the story that the house going up across the river was actually intended as a “love nest” or “love cottage” (the Examiner’s reporter coined the suggestive phrases, both of which gained wide currency) for Frank Lloyd Wright and his paramour Mamah Borthwick Cheney, the architect’s erstwhile neighbor in the posh Chicago suburb of Oak Park. Even isolated Spring Green knew about Mamah: Frank had already run off with her once before—to Europe, that time—deserting his wife Catherine and their six children. And now he meant to live in quite blatant sin with his illicit “soul mate” just outside this staid, conventional farming village. Predictably, the town was outraged. Pastors sharpened their pencils and set to work on denunciatory sermons. The newspaper editor cast about for a vocabulary sufficiently purple to express his fury. In time, there was even serious talk that the citizens of Spring Green should mobilize, take arms, and forcibly evict the errant couple from their hillside retreat. And three years later, the house—Taliesin, as it came to be called—would provide the setting for the most horrific single act of mass murder in Wisconsin history. What could Frank Lloyd Wright have been thinking? 4 Prologue:The House across the River ...

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