On this day, Aug. 15, in 1914, a worker set fire to the Wisconsin home of architect Frank Lloyd Wright 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 and set it on fire. He then used an ax to attack those who jumped out of the windows to escape the flames.
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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 a mob could find him. Carlton died there seven weeks later. The official cause of death was recorded as “Starvation — following attempt at suicide with hydrochloric acid poisoning.”
-Scott McCabe
