On this day, Aug. 15, in 1914, a worker sets fire to the Wisconsin home of architect Franklin Lloyd Wright in Wisconsin and killed seven people.
Wright, America’s most famous architect, named his estate, Taliesin, after a Welsh bard. Wright was in Chicago at the time of the attack.
An estate worker, Julian Carlton, 30, locked all the exits to the home known as Taliesin and set fire to the home. He then used an ax to attack those who jumped out of the windows to escape the flames.
Killed were Wright’s lover, Mamah Borthwick Cheney, her two young children, a teenager and three workmen.
Carlton was nearly lynched, but the sheriff got him to jail before the mobs could get to him. Carlton died from starvation seven weeks later.
– Scott McCabe
