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Dude ranch’s Frank Lloyd Wright credit called misplaced

By , Staff WriterUpdated
Susan and Jody Jenkins show their 1947 pilots lounge at the Flying L Guest Ranch last month. At left is the newly installed Texas historical marker crediting the building’s design to famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright. The Texas Historical Commission said it would review the factuality of that claim after it was challenged by an article in Texas Architect magazine.
Susan and Jody Jenkins show their 1947 pilots lounge at the Flying L Guest Ranch last month. At left is the newly installed Texas historical marker crediting the building’s design to famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright. The Texas Historical Commission said it would review the factuality of that claim after it was challenged by an article in Texas Architect magazine.TOM REEL /SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS

The dedication of a state historical marker at the Flying L Guest Ranch is on hold — as are plans for a Frank Lloyd Wright museum there — amid challenges to the marker’s claim that Wright designed buildings at the Bandera County retreat.

The cast-metal plaque, meanwhile, has already been delivered from a foundry and implanted at the site, a heavy problem for the Texas Historical Commission if revisions need to be made.

Ranch owners Jody and Susan Jenkins, who’d secured the marker with their own research into Wright’s alleged role in designing a pilots’ lounge and nine villas at what was once a famous fly-in dude ranch with its own airstrip, said they were shocked by an Oct. 5 article in Texas Architect magazine that called the Wright claim incorrect.

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Bearing the headline “That’s not Wright,” it credits the San Antonio firm Smith, Pitts & MacPherson with designing the pilot’s lounge built for retired Army Air Corps Col. Jack Lapham in 1947.

“It’s devastating. I’ve spent hours and hours and hours on this,” Susan Jenkins said this week. “I would like to have an expert come out here and figure it out.”

Until the issue is resolved, she’s not spending any of the $10,000 allocated for the museum project by the city of Bandera from sales tax proceeds.

“Now that it’s been brought to our attention, we will investigate,” said Robert Brinkman, the Historical Commission staffer who worked on the marker.

The magazine quoted William A. Storrer, an expert on Wright, and cited a 1947 Daily Texan article about a University of Texas exhibit on “progressive Southwestern architecture” that states, “A pilot’s lounge for the Flying L Guest Ranch at Bandera is displayed by Smith, Pitts, and MacPherson.”

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He also referenced an internet posting that quotes Harry L. Geron, a former employee of the San Antonio firm, recalling how Lapham hired it for Flying L buildings with a “quonset design,” which the lounge has. Geron died in 2008.

Public records and new accounts credited Wright with designing the villas, some years after the fact. Decades of local lore recall Lapham hiring Wright. But Storrer, a visiting professor of architecture at the University of Texas at Austin, was adamant that Wright did no work there.

“Frank-ly, there is NO FRANK Lloyd Wright buildings at the Flying L Ranch,” Storrer wrote by email Thursday after viewing photos of the lounge. He said archives of Wright’s work contain no designs for the Bandera County location.

“Why would anyone with a first grade education call that quonset hut a work by Frank Lloyd Wright? Laughable,” he said of the lounge, expressing disappointment that the state agency didn’t consult him before issuing the marker.

“How dare any historical commission make a claim for Wright without checking with the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation or ME!” Storrer wrote.

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The foundation did not return a call in September for a story about the city’s investment in the museum project.

Brinkman said the THC relies primarily on sponsors of proposed markers to research and substantiate historical claims for their projects and to come up with the $1,800 to cast those that are approved.

“If it seems to make sense and the sources look good, then we proceed,” he said. “We require documentation with reference notes, but we don’t go and check each one of those references.”

The Jenkinses expected the state agency to verify their findings, said Jody Jenkins, noting, “We were never out to deceive anybody.”

The Historical Commission occasionally posts smaller, supplemental plaques if some element of a marker’s narrative is proven incorrect, but rarely has faced a claim — as in this case — that the central premise of a marker is flat wrong, Brinkman said.

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RELATED: See a map of historical markers around Bexar County here.

He plans to ask the Jenkinses and the Bandera County Historical Commission, which co-sponsored the marker, as well as the magazine, to submit whatever additional information they have, adding, “I wish the Texas Architect magazine had called us first” before publishing its article.

Susan Jenkins expressed similar frustration.

“I think common courtesy would be to call me and say, ‘We’re questioning this. What’s your proof?’” she said.

The magazine’s editor, Aaron Seward, said it “reached out” to the Flying L and state agency but didn’t immediately hear back, “and we wanted to get this out for our members.”

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In March 1963, both the Bandera Bulletin and the San Antonio Express-News reported the Flying L was reopening and noted “its deluxe guest units, designed by the late Frank Lloyd Wright.”

The article quoted Lapham’s widow, ranch owner Lucy Jane Lapham. And a 1979 document now on the state historical commission website lists Wright as designer of the nine still-standing villas, the Jenkinses said.

Told of the controversy, Bandera Mayor John Hegemier said, “I’m caught flat-footed.”

“If it’s not right, then we need to make it so,” said Roy Dugosh, chairman of the Bandera County Historical Commission.

All his life, Bandera County Judge Richard Evans said, he has heard locals say Wright designed the villas at the ranch.

“Just because it’s told doesn’t make it correct,” he added. “They need to find out what the facts are. The facts will determine the outcome of the project.”

Rice University architectural historian Stephen Fox agrees that Wright didn’t design the ranch buildings. The magazine quoted him saying such misattributions are fairly common.

But that doesn’t make them unimportant, he said by phone last week.

“The Flying L is architecturally significant because it was designed by Smith and his collaborators,” Fox said. “Harvey P. Smith was a very distingusihed San Antonio architect who restored all the missions. He was the one who reconstructed Mission San Jose.”

RELATED: See a guide of historical markers in Bexar County here.

zeke@express-news.net

|Updated

Zeke has primarily covered the Texas Hill Country since joining the San Antonio Express-News in 1996.