Amazing Accomplishment(s)

A couple of years ago I promised my wife that we were going to visit a very special place during our long road trip back to Ontario from Arizona. It was to be a birthday present for her and a way for me to stall a while longer in the spring. When it was time to make the rather significant detour I had to announce the destination and when the announcement of “Bentonville, Arkansas” failed to elicit much in the way of a positive response I threw in the additional enticing facts that it was the birthplace of both Sam Walton and Walmart and added for safety that it was also near Fayetteville, “Home of the Hogs”. We are still together. My real purpose was for us to visit the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, which we both thoroughly enjoyed and, by the way, Fayetteville is a lovely university town.

By now you probably know about Crystal Bridges which is a MAJOR museum nestled in the woods among springs in a structure designed by Moshe Safdie and which is full of American art (among other things). There are deer in the woods among the tulip trees. Apart from the architecture of the museum there is also the Frank Lloyd Wright ‘Bachman-Wilson House’ which was disassembled in New Jersey and put back together in this splendid setting. Go to the website and have a look and then go - or shop online at the very nice store. I would put pictures here, but I am rather a novice at blogging as you know. Keep in mind also that some of the exhibits change. When we visited, one of them consisted of the illustrations of Samuel Kilbourne from Game Fishes of the United States. When I went up to the library (yes, it has a very nice one) a blazered gentlemen pulled a copy from the shelves and left me alone to examine it

And, by the way, much of this is the result of the vision (and of the expenditure of considerable sums) of one woman - Alice Walton. There is a great anecdote about her found in a great story about the whole project. Apparently a committee had decided that a good name for the place would be “The Benton Wood Museum” (which makes sense since it is the name of a senator and the setting is bucolic), but Ms Walton had decided upon the present name. When one of the members suggested that “Crystal Bridges” sounded a trifle “kitschy”, like the name of a “second-rate country singer” her response was “Well, I like it.” For the good story see: Rebecca Mead, “Alice’s Wonderland: A Walmart Heiress Builds a Museum in the Ozarks,” the New Yorker, June 27, 2011.

So, what was the purpose of recounting this tale which, even if better told, happened a while back? Well, apart from letting you know about the place, I wanted you to know that I just learned that a) this is not the first time a wealthy woman has established a museum in the boondocks, nor is it b) the first occasion when some enterprising person has taken apart a Wright house, transported it hundreds of miles and re-built it. Both those things happened. In 1959, Mary Marchand Woods opened the Westmoreland Museum of American Art in the woods of southwestern Pennsylvania. Nearby, one will also find a Frank Lloyd Wright house that was dismantled and moved from a Chicago suburb. In fact, there are a couple of Wright houses as well as his Fallingwater. You can even stay in one of them. For all the details you need to plan your detour see: “In Frank Lloyd Wright Country, Architecture and Apple Pie,” Stephen Heyman, the New York Times, July 27, 2016.