I’m not a hugely sentimental person, but I am a nostalgic one (I swear, there’s a difference). As I leave Cranbrook after four years here to embark on the next phase of my career, I can’t help but think about all the different places on campus I will miss. Here are my top five:
Cranbrook House, 1925. Cranbrook Archives.
If you’ve ever visited the Cranbrook House library, you’ve probably noticed The Great Crusade, a large tapestry hanging on the south wall. Many people associate tapestries with medieval times, when they were used to keep drafty castles warm in winter. Woven wall hangings were also popular as decorations, especially as a sign of wealth since the extensive labor and pricy materials made tapestries more expensive to produce than paintings. While most of the tapestries that adorn Cranbrook House are fifteenth-century Flemish, The Great Crusade is a toddler; though it utilizes a historic technique, it was designed and produced in the early twentieth century.
Herter Looms, The Great Crusade, 1920. Cranbrook Art Museum.
George Booth’s devotion to the ideals of the Arts & Crafts Movement was evident in the early buildings of Cranbrook (Cranbrook House, the Greek Theatre, Brookside, Christ Christ Church Cranbrook). One of the hallmarks of the movement was to support living, working artists. Enter the Detroit Society of Arts & Crafts (DSAC). Founded in 1906, the DSAC provided an environment where artists, craftsmen, architects, and designers could share ideas and coordinate activities to raise the level of American craftsmanship. Out of their showroom, works by nearly every major craftsman active in Europe and America were exhibited and sold. George Booth was not only one of the founders of the DSAC, but also its first president.
Detroit Society of Arts & Crafts Watson Street Showroom. Cranbrook Archives
George Booth was also a great supporter of the DSAC and filled his home with items he purchased or commissioned. A collection of those objects is currently on display at Cranbrook House in an exhibit titled, “Crafting a Life: George Gough Booth and the Detroit Society of Arts & Crafts.
~Robbie Terman, Archivist
The Detroit connections of James E. Scripps and George G. Booth are well-documented: Scripps as founder of the Detroit News and founding member of what is today the Detroit Institute of Arts, and Booth as a founder of the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts. Less known, perhaps, is a venture near the end of Scripps’s life that helped create the Scripps Branch of the Detroit Public Library at Trumbull and Myrtle. The library was actually George Booth’s former home, renovated to accommodate library services. It stood in Scripps Park though a different library (the Frederick Douglass branch) sits there now.
Here’s the story. When George Gough Booth and Ellen Warren Scripps married in 1887, James Scripps built a house for them, designed by Mason & Rice, across the street from his own on Trumbull Ave. Fast forward to 1905. James Scripps donated 15 lots of property, on Grand River between Trumbull and Commonwealth, to the city of Detroit as a site for a park and branch library. He included $50,000 to be used for city beautification.
Booth Family Home, 605 Trumbull Avenue, 1898
The Library Commission, on which Scripps served for five years, was already thinking of putting a branch in this area (no doubt influenced by Scripps), so the city gave the Commission the land. Now things get more confusing. Upon the death of James Scripps in 1906, the estate purchased the George Booth home (located next door to Scripps’s donated property; by this time the Booths had moved to Cranbrook) and included that in the gift. So the Library Commission didn’t have to build a new branch and used the $14,000 designated for that purpose to renovate Booth’s house as a library.
Early landscape, Scripps Park, ca 1908
In fulfilling Scripps’s intent for a park, Booth hired H.J. Corfield, landscape gardener who designed the basic landscape for Booth’s Cranbrook estate. Booth wrote to Corfield “I feel quite sure that we can carry through a nice piece of work and will be able to pay the foundation for a small park of unusual attractiveness in this city.” Corfield transformed land that was “little better than a city dump … into one of the prettiest parks in the city of Detroit.”
Entrance to Scripps Park
The former Booth home was almost doubled in size and opened on July 3, 1909 as Scripps Branch Library.
There’s another interesting twist to the story. In 1898, James Scripps added an 800-ton octagonal chapter house, modeled after the one in Westminster Abbey, to his own home on Trumbull across the street from the Booth’s. It contained his book and art collection. In 1927, James’s son, William E. Scripps, made a gift of the tower to the Library, along with its collections, it was moved across the street and attached to the Scripps Branch Library!
The sad ending is that the branch closed in 1959, and was demolished in 1966. The Gothic tower was razed sometime later, after a valiant attempt to save structure, by George Booth’s youngest son, Henry Scripps Booth, failed.
~Cheri Gay, Archivist
The year was 1918, fourteen years after George and Ellen Booth purchased the property they called Cranbrook. The lay of the land was far different from the lush greenery, grading hillsides, and bountiful gardens which exist today. An estimated 150,000 trees were planted during George’s lifetime, a testament to his devotion to the Arts & Crafts ideal of surrounding one’s self with nature. Buildings during this time were scarce; in this aerial view, the only two existing Cranbrook buildings seen are Cranbrook House (top middle) and the Meeting House (middle left), which would later become Brookside Lower School. The house seen in the lower left, called Edgevale, was the home of George’s cousin, Clarence Booth.
~Robbie Terman, archivist
Intersection of Lone Pine and Cranbrook Roads, c1917. Cranbrook Archives
As a part of Cranbrook Archives architectural slide collection*, this image shows Cranbrook House’s sunken garden in full bloom in 2003. If you’re in the area, be sure to stop by the gardens this summer – with new patterns and plants, they are in full bloom and open for visitors!
The sunken garden at Cranbrook House in full bloom, 2003. Balthazar Korab, Cranbrook Archives.
My favorite thing about being an archivist is that sometimes a seemingly simply question turns into a new discovery. This happened recently when I was researching the artist of a ceramic vase located in Cranbrook House, a historic house on Cranbrook’s campus and the home of Cranbrook founders George and Ellen Booth. Finding the answer should have been a simple task: open the object file, locate artist’s name. A two-minute job.
Two-minutes turned into a two-week journey.
The mysterious vase in question, currently living at Cranbrook House.
Cranbrook Kitchen Sink 