1490 Lake Road 2023 Holiday Party
1490 N. Lake Road
Origins in Outbuilding for Ioka,
Estate of D[avid] Mark Cummings and Ruth Dexter Cummings, ca. 1903-07
Architect Frederick Wainwright Perkins
Rehabilitated and expanded, 1988-91 for Barton and Joan P. Love
Architects Robert Geudtner & Associates, Lake Forest,
(with Diana Melichar, a staff architect in 1991when the house was being completed)
The Hannah/Mark eras, 1880s-1980s
Hannah
John S. Hannah, 1846-1901, likely was the owner of the west of Lake Rd. parcel on which sits today 1490 N. Lake Rd. Hannah, his wife, and three children (Elizabeth, Carrington, and Zoe, the oldest fifteen when their father died, 1901) lived summers on the site of the future Mark Cummings Ioka lakefront site, according to the Dart Supplement to Arpee’s 1960s history (299). The 1860 Cemetery plan just north was about to be implemented in the early 1880s, not without some neighborhood concern. Edward Arpee in his 1960s town history, though, reported that when asked if he objected to the cemetery when its development was beginning in the early 1880s, Hannah replied “’Not at all. They are the quietest neighbors we have ever had’” (111). The Hannahs’ Chicago home was on Dearborn Street.
Mr. Hannah’s business interests were in grain futures on the Chicago Board of Trade and with storage elevators in Chicago, nearby, and further west on the plains in Iowa, etc. He was vice president of Carrington, Hannah & Co. When he died in 1901, it was reported that “Mr. Hannah for twenty years was one of the leaders in the grain trade in Chicago” (Modern Miller, v. 27, 1901, 15). From 1896 to 1901 he was a trustee of Lake Forest University, along with Clarence Buckingham, Byron L. Smith, and other Chicago business leaders living locally, when Dr. James G.K. McClure was the institution’s president as well as Presbyterian minister. Earlier he had supported Dr. McClure in removing the 1858 Hotel from the future Triangle Park and for an 1894 anti-saloon Temperance march by Lake Forest University students in Chicago (Arpee 138 and 164-65).
D. Mark and Mary Dexter Cummings
By 1903 the property south of the cemetery on both sides of Lake Rd. was acquired by second-generation Chicago banker and entrepreneur D[avid] Mark Cummings, 1866-1932. His father was Columbus R. Cummings, a Chicago associate of Potter Palmer and later banker from the 1870s, married to Sarah Marks, Pekin, Illinois. Son David Mark (Mark) Cummings graduated from Yale’s Sheffield engineering school in 1887, and married Ruth Dexter, 1872-1959, in 1893, daughter of Chicago and New York meatpacker and merchant Charles Pitkin Dexter and Mary DeCreet Dexter. Mark Cummings was engaged in banking with partners, for a decade, and then with the passing of his father Columbus in 1897, he took over his father’s larger and multiple banking interests, including the Union National Bank that merged with the First National, Chicago, in 1902, where he became a director. He also was a director of two light rail Chicago and area operations and of the Chicago Telephone Company, merged with AT&T in 1908. His clubs by the time he updated his biography for The Book of Chicagoans, 1911, included the Chicago, Chicago Athletic, and Onwentsia (1901) clubs. For his 1911 short biography he listed golf as his principal recreational interest, by 1932 adding Old Elm and Shoreacres to his list of clubs, followed by interests hunting and fishing. By 1924, with his two stellar offspring, Edith and Dexter, the New York Times reported that the Cummings were “America’s greatest golfing family.”
The Cummings’ Ioka, 1907, architect F.W. Perkins
Between 1903 and 1907, the Cummings family developed, with architect F. W. Perkins, their main house on the bluff east of 1490 N. Lake Rd., and this outbuilding east end now at 1490, the latter an outbuilding garage and staff lodge on the second floor. The garage was developed likely after or concurrent with the arrival locally of automobiles in a critical mass in 1904.
The lakefront house’s style (demolished) was French Beaux Arts Chateauesque, designed by Chicago architect Frederick Wainwright Perkins, 1866-1928. The two and a half story summer place is described by landscape architect Ralph R. Root and shown with its west façade in Lake Forest: Art and History Edition, 1916, pp. 46-[47].The large double entry doors are framed in a large segmental arch, between two towers, the left, north one larger with its conical top reaching above the roofline and reaching above the attic roofline and the south one shorter, the abbreviated tower’s conical top beginning at the attic roof line. A dormer in the attic is above the centered entry. A large unbroken lawn is to the west. The massing with towers may suggest that it was inspired by the much larger though high profile 1895 George Vanderbilt Biltmore, near Ashville, North Carolina.
The outbuilding, a garage and staff lodge, is in a contrasting classic, Arts & Crafts, modern, and Prairie School—eclectic--style, with a low hipped roof descending on the north to the first-floor level. Four Viennese Secessionist/Prairie pilasters ending at the second-floor windows level in flower basket finials define the spaces for the three garage doors below. Above the doors are three Diocletian windows, a classic element. By the 1980s, this style would have been hard to read and out of character with the 1890s-1940s Lake Forest traditional style palette then being revived. It also would have been difficult in character for expansion further west. The historic photo is shown in the Preservation Foundation’s first Guide to the Historic Districts, 1991 and 1993, with Diana Melichar’s 1991 Norman-French half-timbered rehab and expansion by the Barton Loves.
Architect Perkins was roughly contemporary with both Howard Van Doren Shaw and Alfred H. Granger. He was born in Burlington, Wisconsin, and like them he attended Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), with its architecture program’s Beaux Arts studio run by Eugene Letang, or L’Etang, a top Ecole des Beaux-Arts graduate. Among Perkins’ other Lake Forest commissions were the 1907 George McLaughlin summer place, W. Laurel Ave. (confirmed by owner), ca. 1913 Schweppe mansion, 405 N. Mayflower; the 1915 second Finley Barrell estate, 747 E. Deerpath; the Barrell memorial, Lake Forest Cemetery (vault or gates?); and the Double/Folds residence renovation, on the southwest corner of Spruce and Elm Tree. In Chicago he designed the 1896 Drexel Blvd. house for John G. Shedd and the 1893 house for Philip D. Armour, Jr., 3700 S. Michigan Ave., along with the 1897 Lake Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, summer place for Philip D. Armour, Jr., nominally, also P.D., Sr. Perkins was at the top of his game in ca. 1907 when the Cummings house and outbuilding were designed. His papers are at the U. of Illinois-Champaign-Urbana, with a list of his commissions online, though not always clear on whether projects were built, including more Lake Forest located projects. This all warrants further investigation.
The Cummings house and grounds on the lake as late as 1956 was on a Lake Forest Garden Club walk, Mrs. Cummings having joined the club in 1928.
Dexter and Emilie Hoyt Cummings
Mark and Ruth Dexter Cummings’ two children who lived into adulthood, Dexter Cummings, 1903-1979, and his older sister, Edith Cummings Munson, 1899-1984, were amateur champion golfers. Edith became a nationally known flapper, amateur golfer, and socialite—member of the WWI era Big Four with also Ginevra King. Her 1923 women’s amateur golfing title landed her on Time magazine’s cover, the first such woman athlete. Edith married in ca. 1934 Curtis Burton Munson, Washington, D.C., and relocated. Dexter also was a great amateur golfer, the 1925 Yale University team captain, as discussed on the Yale Golf History website:
When Dexter Cummings won his second consecutive individual intercollegiate golf championship in 1924, the New York Times identified him as “a member of America’s greatest golfing family.” Dexter and his sister Edith learned to play golf from their parents at the Onwentsia Club in Lake Forest Illinois, a venerable course laid out in 1895 and site of the 1906 US Open. Both his mother and father had been club champions.
Dexter, who graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Yale in 1925 as well, went into business, including industrial-scaled farming in Illinois, and by the 1940s was in charge of the trust of his father, David Mark Cummings, as Mark had taken over from his father before him.
Lindeberg’s Cummings House, 1920
The most notable thing about Dexter’s memory among locals, though, is his prominent Lake Road 1930 residence, on a southwest portion of the Cummings early 1900s estate at Lake and Spruce, the architect Harrie T. Lindeberg and the landscape by Umberto Innocenti, who around the same period working on the larger Noble Judah estate, Green Bay and Westminster (Gary L. Hilderbrand, Making a Landscape of Continuity, The Practice of Innocenti…, 1997, 122).
The substantial though not grandly scaled residence is set off by its perfectly proportioned for the house walled entry court, with its regularly spaced trees, formerly pollarded in the French manner. The house’s symmetry, proportions, and a restrained use of voids on the front, almost story and a half only though with a tall attic, makes this a 1930 period Art Deco version of Renaissance revival. The pink brick employed with horizontal rustication at the entry to the courtyard, framing the limestone pedimented entry. This stands as an orderly Renaissance small manor house, almost pavilion. Perhaps all the viewer today knows of Innocenti’s landscape is the once pollarded trees lining the courtyard, essential to its Gallic essence.
The History Center’s recent video on the Dexter Cummings house and landscape on YouTube, by LFPF members and donors David and Pam Waud, provides a great introduction to the house. The house also provides the frontispiece/inside front cover, a photograph by Marcus Norman, for the 2022 published Architectural Lake Forest, published by the Preservation Foundation.
Dexter and Emilie Cummings appear to have retained ownership of the larger property through their lifetimes, Dexter to 1979 and Emilie to 1987.
Barton and Joan P. Loves’ French Country Manor, 1991, Designed by Robert Geudtner & Assoc.
When Barton Love at the age of ninety died in 2019 in Hobe Sound, Florida, he and Joan had been married for sixty-seven years. Raised in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood, Barton’s younger sister was the late Posy Krehbiel, 930 E. Rosemary Rd. He studied art at the Art Institute after high school, prior to service in the Korean war. Upon return, he married Joan and went into the graphic arts business, eventually with his own successful printing enterprises. Like the Cummings, he loved golf, and was a member at Knollwood and at a club in Florida.
By 1988-1991, the Cummings’ garage and staff lodge, in a dilapidated state, was redeveloped by architect Robert Geudtner and his firm for the Loves as a guest house, according to Diana Melichar his later partner, between the exquisitely high styled French Renaissance Dexter Cummings place immediately south and the Finley Barrells’ donated memorial Gothic cemetery gate, northeast. West of the early 1900s Tudor rehabbed auxiliary structure a new pre- or early-Renaissance period Norman-French half-timbered rambling manor house took shape, in the pre-classic traditional style, including the re-envisioned garage building with a total residence of just under 14,000 sq ft. This 15th or 16th century traditional style may have alluded to the Gothic/Tudor period style of the adjacent 1910s Cemetery gate. A 1918 donation by Mrs. Finley Barrell in memory of her son, John, who died in 1915.
The architect for this substantial early New Traditional style residence was the late Robert Geudtner, 1927-2020 (Chicago Tribune, Nov. 1-12, 2020), and his firm, 1963-1993, Robert Geudtner & Associates. With Diana Melichar as an associate, this firm soon became Geudtner & Melichar Architects, 1993-2006, later Melichar Architects, 2006 to the present. Robert Geudtner received his architectural training at Iowa State University, and in time formed his own firm which with his brother designed buildings for corporations, hospitals, and churches, in addition to residences. With economic changes of the 1980s, this large residence was a harbinger of changes in Lake Forest, including the revitalization of old estate properties. Architect Diana Melichar, who was on staff and the end of construction for this residence, has practiced locally since the 1991. She holds master’s degrees from Columbia U., NYC, in architecture and urban design, and in architecture from Tulane University. Her new and rehabbed traditional residential designs in Lake Forest over the last three decades include many LFPF award winners.
The Loves’ manor included a vertical tower adjacent to the new main block and entry to the west, designed by the Geudtner firm. This and a smaller tower or dovecote frame an enclosed courtyard, in the manner of one at Anderson & Ticknor’s 1929 Leavell house, Maplewood Rd. The east façade in the new courtyard is a restyled early-Renaissance version of the next-door Dexter Cummings house’s east entry facade by Harrie T. Lindeberg. Architect Geudtner’s masonry tower recalls the north tower of the Cummings’ 1904-07 Ioka house on the lake (demol., replaced), as seen in the 1916 Lake Forest: Art and History book. The tower gives the new house its unambiguous French Renaissance English Channel area traditional character, where half-timbering as in England met towers in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance south of the Channel in Normandy.
This manor house type was reprised in post-WWI Lake Forest, 1920s, by architects Lindeberg (Carr, Beidler), Clark (Swift), Russell Walcott (Boardman), and Anderson (Leavell, Starkweather/Anderson)—the last as at 791 Verda Lane and seen in Architectural Lake Forest (2022), 107 and 114. The interior great hall, with its beamed ceiling and second floor level gallery, also recalls Anderson’s Leavell house (Classic Country Estates of Lake Forest…, 2003, 280-81), a version of a Norman original. As this 2022 guide illustrates, this style from the 1910s through the historic period (to 1973) has been a major contributor to Lake Forest’s historic character. The Geudtner firm’s design from 1988 to 1991 pays homage to the local estate heritage.
The current edition of Virginia Savage McAlester’s Field Guide to American Houses (2013) would identify 1490 N. Lake Rd. as New Traditional in style, not the Tudor version (738-39), but instead the locally well-known 1910s-20s Northern French Country type. This re-envisioning of the Cummings auxiliary building by F.W. Perkins by Robert Geudtner’s firm was one of the outstanding early examples locally of New Traditionalism, a handsome homage to Lake Forest’s estate era especially from the 1910s and 1920s.
Arthur H. Miller
ahmiller169@gmail.com
December 3, 2023