Content area
Full text
Many a visitor to Kentuck Knob has left the Frank Lloyd Wright- designed house wanting to know more about it.
Now comes architecture critic Donald Hoffmann to the rescue with a diminutive, affordable book that reveals the history of the house and puts it in the context of Wright's other work, especially the nearby house on the waterfall with which it has such close ties.
Fallingwater is about 4 miles from Kentuck Knob as the crow flies, that is, southeast across the meandering Youghiogheny over one of the river's best-known landmarks, Dimple Rock.
In the summer of 1953, Isaac Newton Hagan -- always known as I.N. - - and his wife Bernardine bought a mountain farm of about 80 acres from Donath and Anna Peles, who retained the right to live out their years in the farmhouse by the road. It wasn't the house the Hagans wanted; it was the land around Kentuck Knob, a landscape feature that took its name from a large part of eastern Fayette County called Little Kentucky by an early settler who started out for Kentucky but never made it.
Hagan, the Uniontown ice cream maker, had met Edgar Kaufmann when the latter came calling in the early 1940s and asked Hagan to bottle milk produced by a cooperative of farmers around Bear Run. The two businessmen became friends and the Hagans made several, perhaps many, visits to Fallingwater in the 1940s. Encouraged by Kaufmann, Hagan wrote to Wright immediately after returning from one trip on Aug. 9, 1953:
"With each subsequent visit," he wrote,...