Content area
Full Text
Dear Family and Friends,
"For some time now, you have been telling me that I should make a record of how the Frank Lloyd Wright house known as Kentuck Knob came to be built ..."
So begins "The Story of Kentuck," the working title of an unpublished memoir by Bernardine Hagan, who, with her husband, the ice cream manufacturer I.N. Hagan, commissioned Kentuck Knob and lived there for 30 years.
Hagan, now 92, wrote it over two weeks in the summer of 1997 at Chautauqua, N.Y., where she has vacationed for 25 years. The memoir is a posthumous collaboration with her late husband, who took most of the photographs she plans to use in the book.
Last year, the University of Pittsburgh Press published Kansas City architecture critic Donald Hoffman's book, "Frank Lloyd Wright's House on Kentuck Knob," a small, scholarly history of the house and an analysis of its design.
Hagan's memoir is more personal, like a chat with old friends, and filled with stories of the Hagans' interactions and negotiations with Wright, how the Hagans made the house a home and much more.
"We started working on the [Kentuck] property before we started to build," Hagan said in the living room of her Uniontown home. "It was a fringe of trees and below that, nothing. It was a horrible-looking location."
They planted 8,800 seedling trees -- oaks, poplars, maples and pines, each about a foot tall -- from the entrance to the top of the knob.
"This had all been cornfields, and we wanted woodland," Hagan records in the memoir.
She also wanted a garden.
"The first thing I did was cover the hillside [off the dining room terrace] with daylilies to hold the soil."
Later, she planted the terrace with dwarf, creeping, flowering perennials, creating an undulating carpet of pink, lavender and blue.
Kentuck Knob was the first (and only) house the Hagans built.
"We thought you would just put it up and there wouldn't be any...