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From Hearth To Heritage
Patricia Eakins
10/01/2005
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Clifton worked alongside her
husband while he chaired the Florida Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission
on Civil Rights in the 1950s and 1960s. Their activism drew various threats from
the community, and some locals pulled their money out of the bank, Van recalls.
“My dad said his great-grandfather and grandfather never took Confederate money,
and he didn’t need it either,” he explains.
 | SPRING HOUSE, a Frank Lloyd Wright hemicycle in Tallahassee, Fla., was
commissioned by George and Clifton Lewis in the 1950s.
Photography by Sue Root Baker |
To commemorate the two legacies
that Spring House represents—the family’s politics and Wright’s design—the
Lewises founded a Florida not-for-profit corporation in 1996, the Spring House
Institute, designed to turn the house into an educational facility. The house
has since been the site of a few seminars focused on the environment, the arts
and human rights.
Susan Olsen, a former member of the board of directors of
the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy and a past director of the
Wright-designed Pope-Leighey House in Alexandria, Va., describes the Lewises as
free spirited and public spirited. But the preservation of a legacy home demands
much more than goodwill. Owners must set aside enough assets to provide funds
that will grow long into the future, and they must possess the ambassadorial
acumen to marshal a core of passionate community leaders or family members to
maintain the house.
Spring House could easily require an endowment of about
$5 million, similar to the figure required by the famous Farnsworth House (see
“From Eyesore to Icon,” page 88) in Plano, Ill., says Ron Scherubel, executive
director of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy, a Chicago-based
preservation group. Indeed, Spring House poses especially thorny maintenance
issues. It is built partly of wood, which needs special treatment to withstand
Florida’s hot and humid climate. Even now the house is in need of roofing
improvements and other repairs.
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