Lucky for us, the motel rooms at the Round Barn were full. ”We don`t have anything except country housing,” said the woman on the phone.
”What`s that?” I asked.
”Country housing,” she repeated. ”It`s separate from the hotel. I can let you have that for two nights, at $55 a night.”
My Euphemism Alarm went off. Visions flickered of a lean-to for two, outhouse attached, modified mosquito-bite plan. But it was mid-May, late in the week and we desperately wanted a weekend out of Chicago. So all right, what the heck. We took it.
And that was how we found ourselves inhabiting Frank Lloyd Wright`s uncle`s farmhouse, proprietors for the weekend of a spacious four-bedroom cottage in one of the greenest, prettiest and most interesting valleys in the Midwest, about 150 miles northwest of Chicago.
We had read about Aldebaran Farm in a couple of the travel brochures, but such is the low-key, light-under-a-bushel nature of tourism in this part of southern Wisconsin that we had no clue that the place even took guests.
The tight collection of red farm buildings on the hillside was listed simply as one of the attractions here, a side trip for people coming to steep themselves in the works and memory of Frank Lloyd Wright.
Home alone
But there we were, unpacking our bags and dashing around like 6-year-olds, in an 1860s farmhouse that was ours alone for the weekend-not a restored, cutesy-pie Victorian relic but a comfortably thrown-together place, with functional kitchen utensils and aging magazines on the shelves.
It had the feel of a borrowed cottage, clean but used, with enough of the previous occupants` lives still in evidence to make snooping a pleasure.
And that was only the first of the weekend`s serendipities, as we stumbled around a region that seemed to specialize in them. The Spring Green region may not be on many travelers` ”A” lists, but it ought to be. There are splendid back roads for cruising and cycling, an unspoiled river for canoeing, plus theater, golf and a host of eclectic tourist attractions-including two of the most unusual houses in America, one a masterpiece of modern art, the other a masterpiece of modern kitsch.
The hills here are low and close. You`d call them foothills except, this being the Midwest, they`re not at the foot of anything. Geologists call this the Driftless Zone, meaning the glaciers missed it; unlike most of Wisconsin, it wasn`t ground flat during the Ice Ages. But the Wisconsin River flows by, heading west to the Mississippi and creating a broad, rich bottom-valley that`s thick with corn, hay and dairy cows.
Welsh immigrants drifted here in the early 19th Century, drawn to the nearby lead mines and the rich farmland. The Lloyd-Jones family settled in the valley just below Spring Green, establishing itself with such a vengeance that one traveler nicknamed the area ”the valley of the God-Almighty Joneses.”
James Lloyd Jones built Aldebaran on a west-facing hillside and worked the fields there with the help of relatives, including his sister`s son, young Frank Lloyd Wright.
Wright`s chapel
As a fledgling architect in 1886, Wright helped his first boss design the little Unity Chapel in the Jones family`s graveyard just below Aldebaran; a year later he designed a schoolhouse for his two aunts, teachers Nell and Jane Jones, on a rise across the creek.
And when he fled his own family in Chicago 22 years later with the wife of a client, he came back here, building the first stage of a house he called Taliesin. Over 50 years, the intricate structure on the brow of the far hill
(the name means ”shining brow” in Welsh) became Wright`s fortress, as well as his school, studio and longest-running architectural project.
We learned all this our first evening, on a stroll from our ”country housing” down to the family graveyard, where Wright`s gravestone lies, set off by a circle of stones and an overhanging shrub. The grave is vacant, emptied in 1985 by order of his third wife, Olgivanna, who hated Wisconsin and wanted Wright`s remains moved to their winter home in Arizona. (Local officials were outraged, although many of them weren`t exactly Wright fans while he lived, and some continue to hope for an eventual return.)
The next morning we took the public tour of Wright`s studios. The place is owned by the Taliesin Fellowship, the communal school of apprentices who still spend their summers here and continue to work, more or less, according to the master`s principles.
”Organic Architecture” proclaims the inscription on a huge Wright model. ”All Forms Integral, Natural to Site, Materials, Process of Construction and Purpose.”
Breaking away
Fortunately, you don`t have to understand what that means to enjoy the unusual proportions and spaces in Wright`s low, limestone buildings here. Wright believed in ”breaking out of the box,” as he called it, and played cleverly with light, shapes and textures.
Unfortunately, the tour is limited to the school portion of Wright`s complex here. Taliesin itself, including Wright`s own living quarters and personal studio, is off-limits except by special arrangement with the directors of the fellowship.
It took me a second trip, on business, to discover that Wright`s personal space holds by far the most dramatic and beautiful parts of the complex. But there is hope; the state of Wisconsin is negotiating with the financially strapped fellowship to restore the structures in exchange for providing greater public access.
There is still plenty of Wright to see around here, however. That night we ate at the Spring Green Restaurant, which calls itself the only such facility that Wright designed. Built a couple of years after his death, it sits a mile up the road on the banks of the Wisconsin River, its earth-red roof and antennalike spire peeking mysteriously from the overhanging oaks.
Sitting on Frank`s stools
The area along the river here is subject to strict development rules, so there is nothing to obstruct the splendid views. The dining area stretches along a long, narrow space broken by low beams. The food is fairly bland, eclectic-continental, but the view from the bar-where you may linger over a drink while sitting on one of Wright`s weird stool-chairs as the sun sets downriver-is splendid.
Up the road is the open-air American Players` Theater, a 10-year-old summer company specializing in Shakespeare. In winter, the area sprouts cross- country ski trails. In fact, the makings of a great resort area are here, and we were a little surprised at how unpretentious-or at least how unpromoted-it all seemed.
That is changing. A large German development firm has bought the restaurant, the nearby golf course and ski area and lots more, and is planning a hotel and 280 time-share condos on the property. Wright-like demonstration buildings are already starting to rise off the main road, and the developers promise to retain the tasteful, low-key atmosphere of the valley.
The pitfalls of overdevelopment are not hard to imagine. In fact, they`re only about an hour away at Wisconsin Dells. There, what once was a unique geological formation in and around the river has become an interruption in a wall-to-wall landscape of waterslides and souvenir stands.
And then there`s . . .
And even closer is Wisconsin`s largest and arguably weirdest tourist attraction, a monument to obsession called (always in capitals) The House on the Rock. Once, briefly, it was a real house, and there really is a rock underneath it all, but today it is a kind of Midwestern San Simeon, hideously excessive and fascinating.
Visitors by the tens of thousands pay $15 apiece to wander through a labyrinth of carvings, collections and ”stuff”-tons of stuff, including mechanical musical-instrument ensembles that play automated classics, miniature circuses, dolls, guns, carousel parts (and a colossal, completed one), scrimshaw, pipe organs and on and on and on, for about two miles and three hours. After which you may find yourself wondering why you bothered, glad you did, or perversely, and like us, both.
But back here in Spring Green, the tourist business is for the moment relatively benign. The village itself is a typical railroad town,
distinguished only by a couple of craft shops and a bizarre bank building designed by Wright`s son-in-law. When we took off on our bicycles the next day, we easily found a 20-mile circuit of quiet country roads, broken only by farmhouses.
There were only two commercial signs; one belonged to Global Views, an exotic import shop improbably housed on a dairy farm eight miles west of Spring Green. Owners Brian Walton and his French wife, Fanou, specialize in Indian and Southeast Asian jewelry and clothing, which they promote in the summer by staging monthly Asian dance festivals. Business isn`t exactly booming, but they don`t seem to mind the isolation.
”There`s a consciousness of keeping the area preserved for its natural beauty, as well as keeping it humane,” Walton told me.
The other was for the Biglow Cheese & Butter Co., a low stone house at a crossroads, which bragged that it had been ”serving this community for over 100 years.”
And may it do so for another 100, I said to myself as we pedaled on. –
