Glen Rowan Guide
Glen Rowan: Its History, Architecture, Landscape, and Interior
Glen Rowan—according to the late Lilace Barnes--was named both for its glen, a Scottish word for a ravine, and for its rowan trees, ash or oak such as those on the broad lawn east of the brick house. Glen Rowan was acquired by Lake Forest College from its original owners, the Barnes family, in 1968. The seven acres of land first was built on by Lilace Barnes’ grand parents. They were Scottish immigrant Simon Somerville Reid, a successful Chicago wholesale grocer, and his spouse Martha McWilliams Reid. This 1968 institutional acquisition was one of the city’s earliest historic preservation steps. After renovations ca. 1970, the 1909 Howard Van Doren Shaw-designed house became a conference center and by 1980 the College’s guest house as well as “parlor.” But for most of the first two thirds of the 20th C. this house built by the Rev. Clifford W. Barnes and his spouse Alice Reid Barnes was a handsome focus of Chicago-area reform and reformers and their visitors. One of the most notable of these occasions occurred in the mid 1960s, when Lilace Barnes hosted here an informal reception for Chicago real estate leaders with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who was working then for open housing in the city. This was one of only two known King visits to Lake County (the other being to Temple Solel, Highland Park).
The Barnes Family and Their Architect, Howard Van Doren Shaw
Glen Rowan, the home of the Rev. Dr. Clifford W. and Alice Reid (Lake Forest College Class of 1886) Barnes, was completed in 1909 to designs created by AIA Gold Medal architect Howard Van Doren Shaw. Barnes was a graduate of Yale, Class of 1888, and Shaw followed him there in the Class of 1890. Barnes, after divinity school at Yale, came to Chicago in the early 1890s with the new University of Chicago’s President William Rainey Harper, soon immersing himself in social reform and the settlement house movement, led in the city by Jane Addams. Barnes was the founding president of the Chicago Community Trust in 1915, also working early in that century for women’s rights. Native Chicagoan Shaw (1869-1926) went to Boston’s MIT architecture program before returning to Chicago, also in the early 1890s, to work in the office of the city’s first Paris-trained architect, William LeBaron Jenney. Also, traveling to Europe for study in that period he started his own firm in 1894.
Alice Reid was the daughter of Scottish-born Simon and his spouse Martha McWilliams Reid, post-Civil-War successful immigrants to Chicago from Buffalo, who soon were wealthy in the wholesale grocery business (Reid Murdoch & Co., Monarch Foods). Their 1872 wood-frame, Stick Style Lake Forest home or cottage, The Lilacs, stood northeast of Glen Rowan, until it was demolished by the College in 1971. Simon Reid died in the early 1890s and their son Arthur died in 1899, leaving Alice’s spouse Clifford the local male head of the Reid family. In 1899 Martha Reid donated the two 1900-completed gray limestone College buildings across Sheridan, the Arthur S. Reid Memorial Library (now Reid Hall) and the Lily Reid Holt Chapel, named for Alice’s earlier-deceased sibling; another sister, Grace Reid Nash, married and lived in Pasadena. Rev. Barnes was a trustee of the College until his death in 1944. He was succeeded in that institutional role by his daughter, Lilace, the institution’s first woman trustee.
Clifford by 1908 already had served a brief term in 1900-02 as president of Illinois College, Jacksonville, and had hired Shaw to build a president’s house there. Also he had just launched at Orchestra Hall in Chicago the Sunday Evening Club for young people new to the city, with Shaw on the Board of Directors. Daughter Lilace (1900-1988), who inherited her father’s reform mantle with a lifetime of service to the YWCA movement and other causes, recalled her strong-willed father arguing vehemently with Shaw about the plans for the house—a “collaboration.” At that time Shaw was reaching the major phase of his career as a residential architect for the midwestern elite, while also having just completed at the College an English-traditional dining hall, Calvin Durand Commons (1908), modeled on such a space at Trinity College, Cambridge. His favored style was indeed English traditional, reflecting the Arts & Crafts Movement, as found also at his own 1898 Ragdale, on Green Bay Road, and nearby here at 855 E. Rosemary, the first local Finley Barrell place, of ca. 1909-12. This same style characterizes much of his 1916 Market Square.
The House and Its Landscape
The English traditional styled house nevertheless manages to be unique among Shaw’s works for some of its most notable features: its juxtaposition of informal style and formal plan, its porte-cochere, and also its remarkable terrace. Glen Rowan’s informal style—massing and scale, the pressed red brick with limestone trim, the hint of crenellations over the study, the Mercer styles on the north façade and in the fireplace front in the study inglenook, and the two-story hipped gable on the west service wing—all reference the Arts & Crafts style, especially as launched in 1860 by architect Philip Webb southeast of London (Bexleyheath) for William Morris’s Red House. The house also echoes the style, scale, and materials of the two family-donated buildings, plus Blackstone Hall (1907), to which Martha Reid also contributed, across Sheridan. (The Arts & Crafts style or perspective was a reaction against the mass produced, inferior goods and also the disintegration of family life after the industrial revolution. The home was seen as the foundation for rebuilding society, based on hand-made accessories which honored the worker and built in intergenerational exchanges and life together.)
Glen Rowan’s site marks one point of a triangular treed savannah space (as with Scottish rowan oaks), with one side being the line of the College buildings across the street, with the other two sides being the ravine (glen) and the other the drive to the house. Like the Collegiate Gothic buildings to the east, Glen Rowan appears as an informal, traditional English manor. The landscape as it appears is in the smooth-mown lawn style, the “beautiful” in 18th C. English landscape theory juxtaposed with the “picturesque” or sublimely wild ravine to the south; this notable contrast was reflected in the name Glen Rowan. The identities of historic designers of the park or landscape and no-longer extant gardens are not known, though century-ago plans can be attributed to Prairie Style master O.C. Simonds. The middle distance colonnade and floral gardens are long gone, but in 1999 alumnus (class of 1972) and trustee Dennis Nyren, supervised by landscape architect P. Clifford Miller, restored the ravine edge with native species and extended the lawn west between the house and its “glen.”
The surprise on the interior is that this is a classic central-hall Beaux-Arts plan, as taught at MIT. The informal street façade outside appears to drop back south of the north entry façade and its porte-cochere (a Chapel feature, too, but apparently unique here among Shaw’s entry treatments). But the east-facing terrace with its pool actually is an exterior room on the central-hall plan, a delightful and perhaps unprecedented way of managing to impart at once both a formal and informal sense of the space.
Indeed, there is a parallel east side outdoor passage way to the terrace from just east of the main entrance on the north façade. This axial walkway continues south across the terrace to give an opening to the garden from this exterior room, for summer parties. The brick terrace railing on the east has inverted semicircular clay tiles for balusters, in the Arts & Crafts mode of English architect Edwin Lutyens (the Deanery) and others. The fountain sculpture is original, as are the square pots with classic relief friezes. By 2009 the reflecting pool with its original garden ornaments was the oldest local such water feature, repaired by never reconstructed, and still operating with its central fountain. The turf surface of part of the terrace, a common feature of Shaw terraces (Finley Barrell, nearby, for example), was restored in 2009, with the original brick paths still in tact.
The Interior
Once inside, the central hall as a space, not just an organizing feature, is a Shaw signature low-vaulted gallery, English Tudor long gallery—leading straight to the study with a view through the porch, now enclosed, to the ravine. The molded strapwork plastering of the vaulted hall ceiling ends on the south at the study, but is continued over both the east bay window and the west inglenook there.
The dining room continues the overt references to William Morris, picking up in the plaster frieze on the upper walls both the trellis and grape-vine motifs notable on the Morris’s firm’s Arts & Crafts wallpapers of the late 19th C. The window ledge is tiled, and the pilasters here continue this early English Renaissance classic element from the gallery. Pilasters and paneling of a similar type can be seen, too, in the Durand Commons on campus. Research by architect and historian Stuart Cohen for a forthcoming monograph on notable Shaw houses has turned up an image from the April 1913 Architectural Record of the 1911 Glencoe house for C.H. Hermann with a very similar dining room. Included there too, besides the relative scale, are the white-painted paneling with the frieze above, the fireplace, the sconces, and the wall to the left, with two windows and space for a serving table between. Even the round dining table and chairs for the Hermann house resemble closely those which Miss Barnes took with her to her new house to the south in 1968.
The hall, study, library, and dining room lighting fixtures (ceiling and wall sconces) are original, and have been attributed (by Arts & Crafts authority Rick Darke) to the Tiffany Studios, whom Mrs. Simon S. (Martha McWilliams) Reid commissioned for the stained glass east-end window of the Lily Reid Holt Memorial Chapel, just across Sheridan Road, less than a decade earlier.
The Glen Rowan stairway was enclosed ca. 1970 by Perkins & Will, architects for the First National Bank Building, Chicago, which leased the house from 1970 to ca. 1980. Katherine Kuh also is credited with the décor at that time. When the College took over the house from the Bank in the early 1980s, its Women’s Board, led by the late Charlotte Simmons, redecorated and furnished Glen Rowan to the present appearance.
The large portraits were not originally here, but were installed in the 1980 redecoration, from the College’s collections, mostly from Farwell Winston in 1955. Two of the older large portraits are in the gallery. In brilliant red is the mid 1860s portrait by Chicago-based Charles Hightower of Mary Eveline Smith (Mrs. Charles B.) Farwell. She re-established as co-educational in 1876 the institution’s four-year collegiate program. To the left is the more somber portrait of a gentleman with his walking stick, the Rev. Ira Weed (a 1926 gift from his daughter), a promoter of new midwestern Presbyterian churches for the denomination and who in 1856-57 played a major role, according to first president the Rev. R. W. Patterson, in founding the College and town. In the library, on the wall toward the fireplace is an 1885 full-length portrait of Mary Farwell’s daughter, also a College alumna (1890), Rose Farwell (Mrs. Hobart C.) Chatfield-Taylor, painted by English artist John Elliott, then in Chicago and working on the Potter Palmer mansion’s murals, on Lake Shore Drive.
The College as Steward of Glen Rowan, Since 1968
Over a third of a century ago Lilace Barnes deeded Glen Rowan to the College and built her smaller-scaled, modernist house in the ravine to the south, designed by architect Balfour Lanza. She continued to be active in the College community, and hosted new faculty along with old friends through the 1970s. Glen Rowan was leased by the College to the First National Bank of Chicago (now Chase), when Gaylord Freeman was chair, for their use as an executive retreat center. A sensitive adaptive re-use to this institutional purpose was funded by the bank, and carried out by Perkins & Will, the bank’s architects for its new headquarters in the city. The brass gate at the entry is the safe deposit door from the old bank. The stairway was enclosed on the main level for fire safety reasons, most notably. Chicago art and decor authority Katherine Kuh was the consultant on the interior. A decade later the bank gave up its lease and the College assumed management of Glen Rowan, as a guest house and entertaining venue on campus.
Today Glen Rowan continues to entertain notables, as it has since the Rev. Barnes’s day, when Theodore Roosevelt visited, and to host campus special events. During the 1990s there began to be annual observations of Dr. King’s birthday in Glen Rowan, community suppers following commemorative programs in the Chapel across the street.
The brick-like walkway north from the front door to the parking area was added in the 1990s, by the College’s Women’s Board, thus asserting long afterwards Shaw’s axial central hall into the otherwise informal English Landscape school grounds, with the gently looping drive under the porte-cochere. Built a century ago to entertain, Glen Rowan continues to greet cordially College and community friends and visitors, a testimony to the vision of its architect and clients as well as to that of all those good stewards who have followed them in preserving this significant landmark.
Sources and Bibliography
Barnes and Reid family papers, Special Collections, Donnelley and Lee Library, Lake
Forest College.
Coventry, Kim, Daniel Meyer, and Arthur H. Miller. Classic Country Estates of Lake
Forest, Architecture and Landscape Design, 1856-1940. W.W. Norton, 2003.
Greene, Virginia A. The Architecture of Howard Van Doren Shaw. Chicago Review
Press, 1998.
Halsey, John J. History of Lake County, Illinois. Waukegan: Bates, 1912.
Hildebrecht, Paul H. “Clifford Barnes and the Decline of Protestant Power.”
Transactions of the Illinois State Historical Society (1988), 1-13.
Miller, Arthur H. and Shirley M. Paddock. Lake Forest: Estates, People and Culture.
Arcadia, 2000.
Miller, Arthur H. and Charles A. Miller. African American History in Lake Forest: A
Walking Tour. Lake Forest College, 1997.
Schulze, Franz, Rosemary Cowler, and Arthur H. Miller. 30 Miles North: A History of
Lake Forest College, Its Town, and Its City of Chicago. Distributed by the University
of Chicago Press, 2000.
Vitrano, Steven P. An Hour of Good News: The Chicago Sunday Evening Club, A
Unique Preaching Ministry. Chicago Sunday Evening Club, 1974.
Arthur H. Miller
Archivist and Librarian
for Special Collections/LIT
Donnelley and Lee Library
Lake Forest College
555 North Sheridan Road
Lake Forest, IL 60045-2399
847-735-5068 voice, -6296 or 97 fax
amiller@lakeforest.edu
July 12, 2006; rev. October 3, 2006 and November 4, 2009