The Houses Lewis Bowman Left Behind: A Mount Vernon Story

Mount Vernon home designed by Lewis Bowman in 1917.
He and his family lived there until 1920. 

 

Bowman was born in 1890 in New York City. His family soon moved to a “Foursquare” on Franklin Avenue in Mount Vernon, N.Y., a fast-growing suburb.

“Foursquare”—because the clapboard house was boxy with a porch and a dormer, a rising architectural style that rejected ornate Victorianism. 

“Bowman”—because some people who live in the houses he designed more than 100 years ago have the habit of announcing: “it’s a Bowman!” as one might exclaim, “it’s a Picasso!” These homes are clustered in southern Westchester County, about 30 minutes by train from Grand Central Terminal.

Quite a few of the best-known, grandest houses that Bowman designed are located along Elm Rock Road in Bronxville, N.Y. They belong to very proud residents of a village that considers itself close to perfection, right next door to Mount Vernon. 

Yet Charles Lewis Bowman, who graduated from Cornell University in 1912 with a B.A. and an M.A. in architecture, left an equally consequential imprint in his hometown.

 

***

While studying at Cornell, Lewis Bowman (he dropped “Charles”) worked summers at the renowned architecture firm, McKim, Mead & White. The prestige did him no harm, of course, but he said it was like working in a factory.

Therefore in 1912 he returned to Mount Vernon, moved in with his parents,  and joined the Milligan Company.

House designed by Lewis Bowman for the Milligan Company, 1917.

Lewis Bowman's drawings for the house pictured above.

Andrew W. Milligan had made a fortune in metals before turning his attention to home construction in 1906. His trajectory resembled that of Andrew Carnegie and other capitalists who rode the wave of modern industry. Milligan sold many a battleship and cruiser to the U.S. Navy during its sweeping nineteenth-century rehabilitation. 

Now 50 years old, Milligan rented an office on First Street overlooking the railroad cut and joined forces with Walter King Cooley, a hometown real estate broker who had planned to become a physician but changed his mind.

“I consider the outlook bright!” Cooley proclaimed to anyone who asked about Mount Vernon’s prospects.  

Walter King Cooley
Who's Who in Westchester (1925)

Indeed, most American suburbanites looked forward to a charmed future.

Milligan and Cooley planned to build up-to-date homes on small plots in a variety of architectural styles. Alas, Milligan died unexpectedly in 1907. Cooley continued the construction business, which was quite successful. Subsequently, he reorganized the company and established Gramatan Homes, Inc.*

Lewis Bowman was just 21 when Cooley offered him the position of chief architect.  

This decision transformed the new company.

Young Lewis Bowman in his studio
(Bronxville History Center)

 

The young man proved to be extraordinarily versatile. He created dozens of Colonials, Tudors, and English cottages that went up quickly during the boom years surrounding World War I.

I believe there are far more than have been identified. Clues appear in trade journals wherein Bowman’s designs were lauded. Occasionally, he published an article and sat for an interview. One can only hope that greater access to Bowman’s plans and properties will come someday, when the City of Mount Vernon decides to run a professional Building Department.

Bowman disliked modernism, insisting that he could not imagine swapping stone, brick, slate, and other classic building materials for steel.

Yet he embraced modern conveniences: attached garages, heated garages, the best furnaces and boilers, closets with shoe shelves, sinks flanked by porcelain drain boards, and so forth.

The houses that Bowman built in Mount Vernon fall largely within a slice of the Forster Tract (see previous post), a multi-acre property assembled by developers in the 1890s.  

Bowman designed this house for an investor's daughter. It is located on Frederick Place,
 Mount Vernon, N.Y. 

In 1917, Bowman decided to build his own house on a double lot in the Forster Tract. He had married Eleanor Holwick of Canton, Ohio in 1913, and their daughter, Jean, came along just as the house reached completion. Perched on a rocky corner, it incorporated features that would distinguish his later work.

House designed by Bowman, 1920, Mount Vernon, N.Y.

One wonders when Bowman began longing to be on his own. As the twenties progressed, he surely saw the possibilities. In the meantime, an unusual adventure awaited the Gramatan Homes gentlemen. 

 

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2026/02/the-houses-lewis-bowman-left-behind.html?m=1

*The company took its name from an Indian sachem who conferred land to white settlers, the area now encompassed by Eastchester, around 1700. The story has never been documented fully.    

 

   

 

 

  

 

   

 

 

 

 

A Son & His Father

Earl Starrett Goudey, 1937

I always hoped to circle back to Earl Starrett Goudey, born in North Adams, Mass. in 1895, a man who took a circuitous path to his vocation.

Earl Goudey spent 35 years teaching biology and sex education to students at the public school in Bronxville, N.Y., a suburban village outside New York City, 29 minutes by train to Grand Central Terminal. Unruffled by controversy, he worked calmly with parents and pastors who wished to keep a lid on things.

The eldest son of Nova Scotian immigrants Henry and Mary Goudey, Earl battered his way out of his boyhood home and navigated through the thicket of church and school before launching himself into the world.

Mary Goudey died of consumption in 1906, leaving her husband with four children, the youngest just two years old. Their father, Henry James Goudey, was a minister affiliated with the Advent Christian Church. He preached in North Adams and Lynn, Mass., Hartford, and Brooklyn.

Reverend Goudey often delivered a speech, “Facts About Hell,” at the local YMCA. With his mother, sister, and brother, Henry had sailed on the schooner Gladiator from Yarmouth to Boston in 1871 and imbibed some sort of gladiatorial ferocity along the way.

Reverend Henry J. Goudey, 1935

He directed his abusive temperament at Earl, forcing the boy to memorize long passages of the Bible as punishment for scrappy behavior. At the age of thirteen, Earl ran away from the family’s wood frame home in Lynn and became a loom setter. (During the late nineteenth century New England’s textile industry had begun to shift to the South, but plenty of cotton and woolen mills remained.)

Earl finished high school at night and, trying to please his father, entered the Newton Theological Seminary in Newton, Mass. In the spring of 1917, on both the verge of graduating and the eve of the U.S. entrance to World War I, Earl headed to the Boston Navy Yard and enlisted. He joined the Navy Medical Corps as an apprentice seaman and served as a Pharmacist’s Mate First Class. 

A PHM1 is a petty officer who – under the supervision of physicians – offers care to naval personnel. In the course of his work on a hospital ship, Earl came to know David Linn Edsall, dean of the Harvard Medical School and an expert in preventive medicine and public health. They worked together on a study of the 1918 flu pandemic, and Edsall encouraged Earl to become a doctor.

First he needed a college degree, so he enrolled at Boston University where he met his first wife, Marjorie Pelton. Her father, who ran a business college, told Earl to skip medicine and go into the brave new world of sales.

Once again Earl danced for others, climbing the ranks to become a top salesman in the soap and ice cream businesses. To assuage his conscience, he also directed “boy’s work” at the Tremont Temple Baptist Church in Boston. He would always have a soft spot for wayward boys.

Imagine Earl during these years. Is he frantically trying to find a place in the confusing decade that followed World War I? Is he philosophically ticking through the professions in order to figure out which one is right for him?

When I interviewed Earl’s son Pelton in 1997, he did not know how Earl came to the attention of the superintendent who presided over the nationally-known progressive school in Bronxville. But Willard W. Beatty had a nose for great teachers, and in 1928 Earl joined the faculty.

Clipping about "Elementary Biology," the
sex education class Goudey taught in Bronxville

During the 1920s, Reverend Goudey remarried and divorced and remarried. In 1936, he hopped on a train to Miami, where he felt welcome and decided to stay a while. The Adventists gobbled up his screwball theories about astronomy and physics.

“The earth is an outstretched plain,” he explained, “founded upon the waters of the deep; the sun, moon and stars in motion above; over the whole being the firmamental vault or floor of Heaven.”     

In 1941 Henry published Earth Not A Globe, Scientifically, Geometrically, Philosophically Demonstrated, in which he summoned 75 reasons to explain why the earth is flat.

It was as if he couldn’t stop punishing Earl but realized he’d have to swap out Bible passages for scientific bunk in order to torture his son to the greatest extent possible.

Henry Goudey died in Boston in 1947.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2020/10/a-son-his-father.html?m=1

An Education in 1930s Suburbia

University of Michigan School of Education,
Ann Arbor, 1930s

This is what happened. Gordon and his wife, Helen, returned to the U.S. from Lucknow with no means to earn a living. With their children, they moved in with Gordon’s mother. He lectured here and there on international issues while working on the Socialist Norman Thomas’ 1932 presidential campaign.  

The following year, the family moved to Ann Arbor where Gordon studied for an M.A. at the University of Michigan’s School of Education. His thesis about progressive schools somehow drew the attention of the school superintendent of Bronxville, N.Y., who wrote to him in 1934, offering a teaching job at $2,000 per year.

Reflecting on the village years later, Gordon described it as a “company town.” This characterization was incorrect. A company town is controlled largely by one firm on which residents depend for employment, housing, goods, and the like.

In fact the affluent, one-square mile village was dominated by progressive Republicans who made their fortunes in banking, real estate, and retailing. They ran the school board and decided, in the early 1920s, to institute the most modern educational methods and hire the best teachers and administrators.  

Bronxville, N.Y., 1930s

Unfortunately, Gordon arrived in Bronxville just as new worries about Communism emerged nationwide. While Senator Joseph P. McCarthy would instigate the nation’s second Red Scare during the 1950s, the seeds were planted years earlier when the New Deal stirred concern about Communist subversion.

Gordon fell under suspicion almost immediately. If you were to draw up a list of activities that would provoke most parents of 1930s-era students – well, he hit every one:

-field trips to cooperative housing built by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union in The Bronx; visits to slums, organized by an interfaith group which taught young people about the living conditions of the poor; a dinner with Father Divine, a black minister who ran the Peace Mission, a non-governmental relief agency in Harlem; a play presented by the Works Progress Administration; meetings with officials of peace and justice groups; and “national dinners” hosted by Gordon and Helen, where students ate indigenous food and learned about different cultures.

While local residents grew concerned about these and other activities, the superintendent who had hired Gordon departed and was replaced by a more conservative man. In 1937, at a community rally held in the school auditorium, agitated parents yelled about radicalism in the schools and the revolutionary activities of a teacher who could only be Gordon.  

Since his contract expired in 1938, it made sense for him to move on.

We were in Bronxville living on schoolteacher's pay of $2000 [per]
year - then by helping with the football team - an increase of $200.00.
Wow! We could not afford a telephone!
(excerpt of letter from Helen to me, 2002)

About 60 years later, while living in Bronxville, I wrote a history of the school, one of the first public progressive school districts in the nation. In the course of reading newspaper accounts and interviewing retired teachers, I learned about Gordon. 

Zoom forward to 2002. Gordon still intrigued me. Perhaps there was more to write. And he and Helen were still alive! Hence the trip to Vermont.

However, I soon discovered, sitting around listening and sifting through papers in the attic of their comfortable, disorganized home, that Gordon and Helen had thoroughly documented their lives. Gordon had self-published a book about their years in India and was 88 pages into an autobiographical manuscript. Helen also brought forth an autobiography.

We spent three days together, carrying on nearly nonstop conversation about everything.

With voluminous notes, I returned to Kansas. Over the years, I tried several times to write about him and them, without success. 

But recently, I’ve thought a lot about how Gordon found his way in the world.

He believed that he took a wrong turn at Bronxville, and I had reflexively adopted his view:

-he had a bad time of it with awful people,

-he gained nothing from it,

-the interesting stuff came afterward,

-it was not worth an ounce of reflection.

Looking back, this perspective seems flawed.

Gordon dismissed teaching in Bronxville as his least important, most unpleasant experience. Now I’m inclined to think it was an essential experience.

He had returned from Lucknow in exhilaration, having put forth a bold statement about British imperialism.

But he needed to support his family – and it wouldn’t necessarily be on his terms. That was a jolt. Luckily, he could afford graduate school and found a job quickly.

The Bronxville School 

In Bronxville, Gordon and Helen soon learned that life can be brutal in a small community. Unfortunately, they formed lifelong stereotypes of wealthy suburbanites who surely returned the favor.

Yet Gordon forged ahead despite the discomfort. He formed a student Peace Club in 1935. He screened films depicting life in Asia. He visited Russia in the summer of 1937 and lectured about it that fall.  

Through various activities, Gordon affirmed his liberalism and started to develop a network of people and institutions that supported the kind of work he wanted to pursue. Although he never again worked as a teacher, he grew professionally.

There’s no question that Gordon knew excruciating details about the plight of the Indians who lived under British rule. He had witnessed the destitution of the Great War refugees. Power, politics, oppression – Gordon had a vast understanding of international issues.

But my hunch is that he possessed less insight into the suffering of Americans at the bottom of the Great Depression. He had a lot to learn.

When he visited those New York slums, his eyes must have opened as wide as those of his students.

Ultimately, four years in Bronxville were not a waste. They enabled Gordon to receive an introduction to his own nation in his own time.

"I felt the world I had come to know and the ideas churning

in it must be as remote to these youngsters as the moon."

(excerpt of Gordon's letter to me, 1995)

 
See post October 26, 2016.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/11/getting-educated-in-1930s-suburbia-part.html?m=1

“Well, world, what have you for me today?”

Cumberland Street in Marshall, Illinois, circa 1900;
boyhood home of Ignatius Donnelly Taubeneck

Leaving the farm, heading out – in search of education and the rest of the world. During the last decade of the nineteenth century, these departures accelerated among young Americans. The trend concerned President Theodore Roosevelt, who hoped to persuade young men and women to stick with the agricultural life.

In 1908, TR appointed the Country Life Commission, chaired by a brilliant Cornell University botanist with the inimitable name of Liberty Hyde Bailey. Bailey’s report contained three basic recommendations. 

First, make an exhaustive study of “the conditions that surround the business of farming and the people who live in the country.” 

Next, organize and expand agricultural extension work by colleges and universities. 

Finally, initiate a campaign to rebuild country life and spur “rural progress.” These ambitious plans launched the country life movement, which persisted with limited success through the New Deal.

Of course the children of farmers continued to get away. A large number became educators in urban areas, an essential development considering the exponential rise in public school enrollment. Many were fine teachers with interesting stories to tell.

Among them, a man named Ignatius Donnelly Taubeneck taught history and public speaking in Westchester County, N.Y., between 1930 and 1952. He had the habit of grandly opening a newspaper at the start of each class and demanding, “Well, world, what have you for me today?”

Born in 1892 in Clark County, Illinois, a region that contains the most fertile soil in the United States, Taubeneck grew up on a farm. His uncle, Herman, became national chair of the Populist Party and worked closely with a quirky Minnesota politician, Ignatius Donnelly, who made the fateful decision to endorse William Jennings Bryan for president in 1896. 

By throwing in the Populists’ lot with the Democratic Party, Donnelly ensured the demise of the People’s Party, as the Populists also were known.

Ignatius Donnelly served in the U.S. House and Minnesota legislature, as lieutenant governor, and as a state lecturer with the Minnesota Farmers Alliance. He championed the Freedmen’s Bureau after the Civil War and was a brilliant orator. He also wrote futuristic novels.

His namesake, “I.D.” Taubeneck, graduated from Illinois State Normal University in 1917, having participated in oratory, nature study, and theater clubs. For his senior essay, Taubeneck wrote about “Our Social Delinquent.”

Right after graduation, Taubeneck became a high school principal in a nearby town. He requested exemption from the draft, citing “internal strain.” 

But in 1918 he changed his mind, shipping off to France with hundreds of other young men from southern Illinois. He served as a first class private in the machine gun company, 58^th Infantry, Fourth Division. “He was on his way to the front, and within the sound of the firing when the armistice was signed,” the Illinois State alumni magazine reported.

Instead of returning home, however, Taubeneck joined the faculty of a university that the American Expeditionary Forces organized during demobilization.

This will surely sound remarkable because nothing like it could happen today.

During World War I, the YMCA led an overseas educational program through which more than 300,000 American officers and soldiers studied French language, European geography and history, and other subjects “to gain an intelligent appreciation of the achievements and ideals of our allies and the great aims for which the allies were fighting.”

After the war, the YMCA handed off the program to the Army, and a special commission oversaw the creation of a campus and curriculum at Beaune, France. Nearly 10,000 soldiers – the sole requirement was a high school degree – attended classes there between March and June, 1919. The faculty of 300 included Taubeneck.

Eventually, he went home to Illinois and taught at his alma mater until a school superintendent in the New York City suburbs hired him as a high school teacher.  

Ignatius Taubeneck, 1920

Among the many things I.D. contributed to the community was his habit of prophecy. He would predict the results of presidential elections and major national and international events. Each prediction would be sealed and placed in a safe deposit box. 

By 1942, when The New Yorker wrote him up in “Talk of the Town,” Taubeneck had aced 57 major predictions and 83 minor ones.

He never bought a house, having grown up amidst farm foreclosures. Nearly every summer, Taubeneck told a reporter, he would travel around the country with his family, “trying to find out what people think, if anything.”

That sounds just about right for today.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/01/well-world-what-have-you-for-me-today.html?m=1

Superintendent Beatty

Willard W. Beatty, 1936 Bronxville High School yearbook

Rebecca Josephine Butterfield Walcott came roaring out of the internet bedecked with nineteenth-century spiritualism and suffrage. I did not expect her. It was her grandson for whom I’d been searching for nearly two decades. He had been superintendent of schools in Bronxville, N.Y., between 1926 and 1936.

The village’s old-timers recalled the former superintendent as controversial and brilliant. “There were rumors that he was a little pink,” an elderly alumna said, sipping iced tea on her porch.

How incongruous it seems now: the staid square-mile village 30 minutes north of Grand Central Station welcoming a reformer during the 20^th century’s most conservative decade. Yet the school board composed of Republican businessmen hired him precisely to make a break with conventional schooling. They wanted their children to be well-educated and happy. 

I encountered the superintendent while researching a history of the school, looking for a few personal details about the man with a whiff of radicalism who had stepped onto the local stage 60 years earlier. So I wrote to the former superintendent’s son whose name appeared in his father’s obituary. The story was ¾ of the way through a reel of New York Times microfilm that snapped and crackled through the groaning machine. 

In the meantime, a school administrator unlocked a closet where old photos and records were stored. Several pictures showed the superintendent in meetings and posing with the faculty. A retired teacher pointed him out. He appeared modest, with a small build and glasses.  

But in 1936, the yearbook editors grandly dedicated a full page to the departing superintendent, whose “assumption here ten years ago marked the beginning of a new era in the world of education.” The accompanying photograph startlingly resembled young FDR. I couldn’t wait to hear back from his son. 

Finally a response arrived. “His mother died when he was six and shortly after his father left San Francisco,” the son wrote of his father. “He was brought up by an uncle from his mother’s side of the family who lived in the city. He had no siblings.” It sounded like a rough start. I concluded that the superintendent overcame a childhood of hardship and struggled to get to college and navigate the world. This turned out to be completely wrong.

Willard Walcott Beatty became the ward of his uncle in 1901, the year he was orphaned. A better guardian could not have been found. Journalist, novelist, social observer, and city official, closely involved in San Francisco culture, Earle Ashley Walcott would see his nephew through grammar school to Lick High School to the University of California, Berkeley, and beyond.  

Lick-Wilmerding High School yearbook, 1909

It was impossible to know this in 1995 because the internet had not yet the habit of yielding obscure documents. Just a year ago, it threw up the fact that Earle – a sickly boy – was the reason his parents left rural Illinois for Santa Barbara. Then Willard’s mother Mabel, his aunt Maude, and father William stepped out of the pages of college yearbooks. And with sufficient poking, the internet revealed that the boy’s grandmother, Rebecca Josephine Butterfield Walcott, harnessed the late nineteenth century like it was her own wild ride.

See other posts: November 11, 2015; January 12 + 16, 2016; August 3, 2016.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2015/11/superintendent-beatty.html?m=1