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.

Need characters? Borrow from your family tree.

By Kim


I’m an accidental genealogist. I know it’s a strange hobby for a thirty-five year old, but compiling a family tree can be as much about stories and the characters who lived them as names and dates. What better raw material for a novelist?

Yes, your query would be rejected immediately if you begin with I’ve written a 150,000 word novel about my great uncle; but if that uncle happened to live a compelling life you can always wow an agent with the story first and casually mention your relationship to the protagonist later.

Still not convinced? While researching for my current work in progress, I’ve found Eleanor Douglass, a fiercely independent artist at the turn of the last century (and a minor character in my current book). Then there’s Edgar and Sarah Niles who left New York for the western frontier in the 1880s in a desperate attempt to cure Edgar’s consumption. The level of detail about pioneer life in their letters to family back home is enough to make any novelist salivate. Just last month I discovered that no one has ever written a book on one of the most famous Indian agents during the Revolutionary War. That’s three potential books right there, thanks to my second cousin, my great-great grandparents, and my 6x great grand-uncle.

I never had to search for the subject of my current work in progress. The most cherished fairy tales of my youth all featured a rather colorful character named Carl Ahrens. My grandmother, Tutu, used to entertain me with stories about Carl running away from home to live with the Indians or making a catastrophic attempt to fly off the barn roof. (My daughters cringe when I recite the flying tale, but always ask to hear it again.) As I grew older, the stories multiplied. Carl was a cowboy in pioneer Montana, befriended Calamity Jane, traveled the California coast by covered wagon, and spent an afternoon hiding in a buffalo hollow while warring bands of Indians shot arrows over his head. She never explained how he did all this while suffering from a crippling form of tuberculosis, and it seemed an unimportant detail.

Of course, all good heroes must have a heroine, and Carl found his while working in the Roycroft arts and crafts community. To keep the story interesting, or so I thought, Tutu complicated their relationship in deliciously scandalous ways. Carl, then 38, already had a wife who despised him but wouldn’t let him go. The “Madonna” he worshipped was all of 17. He was a genius with a paintbrush, but cantankerous and destitute. Irresistible as well, apparently, because Tutu occasionally slipped and called them Daddy and Momma.

Having grown up surrounded by paintings of trees that laughed, grieved, danced, and even embraced, I never questioned that my great-grandfather was both a real person and an amazing artist. However, it wasn’t until I was about seven that I began to associate the adventurer with the frail old man in the family photographs. One day my mother saw me playing with a small antique basket that has always fascinated me. She mentioned she believed it was Indian made and had likely been Carl’s. Running my fingers reverently over the basket’s intricate designs, I peered at the nearest old photos. They were candid snapshots instead of the dour portraits that were the vogue of the day. Madonna not only laughed as she sat beside Carl, but leaned into him, sometimes touching his arm or his hand. Carl gazed at her rather than at the camera, an expression of naked adoration on his face. Even then, looking at them made me smile.

We later inherited the photo of Carl I have included in this post. It was the first image I had seen of him as a young man. The resemblance between my real life hero (Dad) and my fictional one (Carl) was so striking that I could no longer doubt even the most outrageous of Tutu’s accounts.

After years of intensive research, I have proved the fairy tales true.

Now, obviously, not everyone has been blessed with such a character in their family tree, and some of you may be reading this and quaking at the idea of committing to a historical novel. I was, too. I fought the inevitable for years, going to college and graduate school and getting a “real job.” When I finally settled down to write something, I spewed out a contemporary and largely autobiographical novel I refer to as “literary vomit.” It is condemned to dwell in a box in my closet for eternity. My next attempt was better – some concepts can be recycled. The third novel was better still and will be worth resuscitating someday. As I typed the last few lines of it, however, I panicked. I minored in history. I took research classes in graduate school. I enjoyed being trapped in a room filled with nothing but old documents that no one had looked at in a century. I had written a novel with an artist protagonist. In short, I had spent the last ten years of my life preparing to write Carl’s story and had no excuses left. Gulp!

Even if you would rather run a mile barefoot on broken glass than look at eighteenth century census records, you can ask questions. Talk to parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles. Don’t listen simply for the names and dates, but wait for a character to speak to you. Look at those old family photos and study the faces. Some stories can be updated and others will remain firmly in the past. If nothing else, you can probably find some interesting character names. Think about what a conversation piece surnames such as Bottenhagan, Cuthwolf, Dunfrund and Frithogar would be. How about Godfrey Lothier III? He happens to be my 24th great-grandfather, but I’ll share.