My Little Journey to East Aurora

By Kim

If you lived in America at the turn of the last century, chances are you knew of an arts and crafts community called Roycroft. Perhaps you subscribed to The Philistine, a magazine featuring Roycroft’s founder, Elbert Hubbard. A slim leather volume, A Message to Garcia may rest on your bedside table. (It sold 40 million copies and was translated into 37 languages). You may have attended one of Hubbard’s lectures and found yourself inexplicably mesmerized by a cleverly crafted commercial. You may even have taken Hubbard’s advice and made your own ‘little journey’ to East Aurora, New York.

My great-grandfather, Carl Ahrens, did just that. After attending an 1899 lecture in Toronto, Carl introduced himself to Hubbard. Hubbard, it turned out, was familiar with Carl’s paintings and expressed admiration. As the men spoke Carl learned that Hubbard was interested in starting a potter-shop. He had experience and offered his services. Soon Carl moved to East Aurora with wife, children, and cousin (and fellow painter) Eleanor Douglas in tow.

I owe my existence to Elbert Hubbard.

If Carl had not spent five miserable months locked in a battle of wills with the Sage of East Aurora, a young artist named Martha Niles would never have walked into his studio. Had my great-grandparents met in any other location, it would have proved scandalous for a thirty-eight-year-old married man to so openly befriend a seventeen-year-old girl.

Hubbard is now often regarded as the ‘original hippie.’ He believed men and women should work and play together on equal terms. The result: people fell in love. Some, like Carl and even Hubbard himself, were married to others at the time. Hubbard fathered a child out of wedlock, his wife divorced him and he married his mistress in 1904. Carl worshipped his ‘Madonna’ without seduction (according to her memoirs) until after he left his wife in 1905. (Emily refused to divorce him). It’s possible he never secured a legal divorce, but he married Madonna anyway. Twice.

Before I started writing The Oak Lovers, I knew nothing about Roycroft or, for that matter, the arts and crafts movement. I scoured eBay listings trying without success to find Carl’s pottery or any books into which Madonna had hand-painted designs. Over the next year my research garnered me the ability to easily recognize art by Jerome Connor, Alexis Fournier, Dard Hunter, Karl Kipp and W.W. Denslow. Still, I felt I was missing something vital to the quality of my work and felt compelled to see the place for myself. In September of 2006 I booked a ticket and set off on my own ‘little journey’ to East Aurora.

Boarding my plane for Buffalo, I imagined a quiet, contemplative place, with whispers of creative energy from the past. Instead I found a horticulture festival sprawled across every inch of the campus lawn. Grove Street was all but a parking lot, there was no room at The Inn (thankfully I had other arrangements), and soon I was swallowed into the swarm of tourists and vendors. I stood there, a bit peeved, wondering how in the hell I was going to get decent pictures, let alone video footage, when I realized I’d been handed a gift.

So many tourists flocked to Roycroft in 1900 that, in a moment of entrepreneurial genius, Hubbard decided to build the Roycroft Inn for them. Even without tourists, the campus bustled with over a hundred workers. Adding to the confusion, boulders littered the campus lawn and the construction of the Second Print Shop caused a constant racket. Conditions were, in other words, a fair echo of the past.

As for creative energy, I can honestly say there’s no place I’ve ever been that boasted such abundance. I wanted to write, to paint, to try my hand at the potter’s wheel, and I wanted to do these things at the same time. Oh, the things I could accomplish were I to set up an office in the Morris Room of the Inn, the very room in which Madonna once worked.

As I retraced my great-grandmother’s path up the stairs from the reception room to the Morris Room, I felt a chill against the back of my neck. Once inside the room, images and voices from the past flashed through my mind with such speed and force, I had to grip a table to keep from falling over. My tour guide, Kitty Turgeon, a former owner of the Inn and one of the founding members of the Roycrofters-at-Large Association, gave me a knowing smile. She assured me many people had such reactions to the room, some just more intensely than others. She then told me the story of how a society of mystics called the Rosicrucians (of which Hubbard was a member) believe there are energy lines called ley lines on the Earth. They say two of those lines intersect over the Morris Room, making Roycroft a place that draws creative and spiritual people like a magnet. Two recent dousing ceremonies, which Kitty witnessed, confirmed their beliefs. I wanted to be skeptical, but I was a bit too shaken for that.

As if that weren’t enough excitement, part of my reason for coming to East Aurora was to change the course of my family history. For the first time in the 101 years since Carl walked out on Emily and into Madonna’s arms, descendants of the two women would meet. I had recently found my half second cousin, Martha McGowan, who lives in Rochester. When I mentioned coming to New York, there was no question we had to get together. The fact that we were doing so ‘at the scene of the crime’ only made the adventure more fun. And yes, we do laugh that she shares a name with the woman for whom Carl left her great-grandmother. (Emily and her family, it turned out, believed her name really was Madonna!)

As often happens when traveling for research, luck was with me, people were incredibly generous, and I got to share wonderful experiences with my cousin. Within an hour of my arrival, Christine Peters of the Roycroft Campus Corporation invited me to submit an article on Carl for their yearly magazine The Fra. Don Meade gave us a private and detailed tour of the Elbert Hubbard Museum. Eleanor Douglas’ old studio, now the West End Gallery, was open, and we explored rooms that our great-grandfather knew well. The owner was also home at Carl’s former residence. When the day was over, I bid Martha goodbye and went home with my friend, Janice McDuffie of Roycroft Pottery, who was at the time the only artisan actually working on the campus.

I left East Aurora with a new sense of purpose, due in part to an acceptance that I must embrace that spiritually sensitive part of my own nature in order to clearly hear Carl’s voice. Some may call it channeling. Some may call it madness. I choose to call it ‘touched by the muse.’ That muse, I believe, is smiling somewhere in heaven, content that the fences he once ripped down have been lovingly mended by his descendants. Martha, it was an honor to work beside you.

The group photo above is from the collection of Robert Rust and Pam McClary. Carl is the tall man in shadow to the far left. Eleanor Douglas is beside him. If you can identify anyone else with certainty, please comment and let me know. I believe Jerome Connor and Lyle Hawthorne are in the photo, but I am uncertain.

If you would like to learn more about Elbert Hubbard and the Roycrofters tune into the PBS documentary Elbert Hubbard: An American Original on November 23, 2009. The preview is posted here.

To read a more detailed and informal journal of my time at Roycroft, click here.

To read my 2007 article in The Fra, click here.