NEW IPO Logo - by Charles Larry Home Search Browse About IPO Staff Links

Dana-Thomas House celebrates centennial

On December 23, 1904, Susan Lawrence celebrated the completion
of her Springfield new home with a lavish Christmas party, inviting the laborers and tradesmen who worked on the mansion to bring their families. Frank Lloyd Wright, the avant-garde designer who Lawrence hired to "remodel" the modest Italianate home of her late father, was on hand to welcome the workers. He brought along his 12-year-old son, who wrote down his impressions of the gala forty years later:

"It was really a mixed crowd, all formally dressed in owned or rented attire. One of the hod carriers brought his twelve children. Except for the formal getups, it could have been called a democratic affair. Papa was master of ceremonies. He looked liked a Three-Tail Pasha among his people. I think the party was given for him."

Last month the State of Illinois hosted its own month-long Christmas party at the Dana-Thomas House, decorating the home in grand style for the thousands of visitors who yearned for a taste of holiday magic and audacious art.

The Dana-Thomas House is the largest and best example of Wright's "Prairie Style" constructions, surviving nearly a century with most of its original furnishings intact. The art and architecture alone make it a priceless possession, though it nearly met the wrecking ball in the 1940s, selling for a mere $17,000 at a public auction. It fell fortuitously into the hands of the Thomas Publishing Company, whose CEO, Charles C. Thomas, had the insight, means, and sense of history to keep the home as a working office as well as a cultural artifact. When the state purchased the Dana-Thomas House in 1990 for a cool million, then spent $5 million to restore the home to its 1910 glory, the acquisition was perceived as a boondoggle of the Thompson Administration. Now the home is a jewel of the Historic Preservation Agency, drawing tourists, architectural historians, and Wright aficionados from around the world. But the memory of that first Christmas party, where humble hod carriers and bricklayers mingled and drank punch with the demigods of wealth and genius, comes back every December, like the melody in a forgotten music box.

ih011005-1.jpg
The Dana-Thomas House bedecked for the holidays and its centennial Christmas party.
Photo courtesy the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency.

10 | Illinois Heritage


|Home| |Search| |Back to Periodicals Available| |Table of Contents| |Back to Illinois Heritage 2005|
Illinois Periodicals Online (IPO) is a digital imaging project at the Northern Illinois University Libraries funded by the Illinois State Library