J. OGDEN ARMOUR'S ITALIAN VILLA, "MELLODY FARMS" (1908)
Architect Arthur Huen's great villa (now Lake Forest Academy, north of Route 60 and just west of the west branch of the Skokie River) announced the arrival on the prairie of a new spirit in country places, one found in the title of Edith Wharton's 1904 book, Italian Villas & Their Gardens. This followed a less comprehensive 1894 book on the same subject by Charles Platt, who a dozen years later would design Harold and Edith McCormick's "Villa Turicum" on the lake. Confronting directly the Olmsted/English landscape tradition, these books represented a revival of formal European garden styles, centered on Italian Renaissance achievements. From this perspective gardens became extensions of houses, series of outdoor rooms for various occasions, times of day, etc. Mellody Farms, though, was vast-enough and its terrain was flatly un Italian-enough as to permit both a good evocation of Italian villa vocabulary and also some beautiful prairie vistas. The J. Ogden Armour estate, today much of it Lake Forest Academy and (new) Open Lands property, was a major departure for Chicago and Lake Forest, and one that would prove influential.
J. Ogden Armour, according to Arpee the second-richest man in the world before he lost his fortune in the depression of 1921, was a representative second-generation scion of a Chicago/Porkopolis fortune. Better than most, the Armours reflect the leverage -- described by William Cronon in his 1991 Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West -- of the railroad in funnelling the wealth of the West through Chicago and, in this case, the Union Stockyards. This mid-continental imperial capitol, Chicago, accumulated in the last third of the Nineteenth Century unprecedented wealth from Cronon's funnel, centered on a few families. These were the oil sheiks and Asian cartel leaders of a century ago: buying up art, etc. Especially after the labor strife particularly in 1886 (McCormick) and 1894 (Pullman), the focus of Chicago domestic architecture shifted to the country, to Lake Forest just north of protective Fort Sheridan. And the biggest project was Mellody Farms, in the new Italian vein. In this golden moment forces converged to create in Lake Forest and in a few other places in America (Newport, Gatsby's Long Island, the southern California Mediterranean-like coast) "charmed circles," to use a term used by Lake Forest genteel author Hobart Chatfield-Taylor. Here sprouted up villas in the grand manner of previous cultural high-water marks: Pliny's Rome and Tuscany, Renaissance Florence and Venice, Seventeenth Century France, and Eighteeenth-Century England. The Platt and Wharton books, both serialized in influential genteel-tradition periodicals, set the standard and fired the imaginations of an increasingly well-travelled American upper-class -- the sort of people encountered in Italian novels and stories by Henry James.
Mellody Farms, as Arpee says Mrs. Armour named the estate, was ambitious and on a scale with its builders' means. Arpee describes it well: a driveway of two miles, a main building 180 x 500 feet, twenty marble fireplaces, and its own railroad station where guests were met by "uniformed and cockaded grooms" to be taken to the house. The gardens, too, are pictured and described in Griswold's 1991 book, The Golden Age of American Gardens. Jens Jensen did much of the landscaping, with three reflecting pools and formal elements interspersed with his signature native prairie plants. Today, west of the main house which now is Lake Forest Academy, are the outlines and remains of the magnificent formal gardens -- still dramatic statements of the characteristic Italian unity of house and grounds.
From Armour's fall in the 1920s to the Academy's arrival in the 1940s, the property was in a latent state. Arpee reports that a group headed by Samuel Insull (whose own Italian villa to the west is now the Cuneo Museum on Milwaukee Road) bought Mellody Farms to convert it into "an Aviation Golf Club." But while this effort was in progress, the collapse of 1929 intervened. Only after the depression and the war did this estate come to house the growing Academy, following its fire near Lake Forest College in 1946. In 1985 Lake-Forest-raised novelist Ward Just returned home to address the Friends of the Lake Forest Library and recalled sitting in an upper-story bedroom-turned-Academy classroom shortly after the move. Rather than hearing instructor Arpee's lesson on mathematics, he imagined Fitzgerald characters moving through the stately rooms. Just before that, too, a PBS version of Fitzgerald's story "Under the Biltmore Clock" was filmed at Mellody Farms.
And by 1993 when I brought some French tourists to see the formal gardens west of the house -- having already stopped by the remains of the Jensen/Shaw garden for "Havenwood" on Ringwood at Mayflower -- they exclaimed "How amusing to come to America to see ruins!" Just beyond the now-fragile garden structures pictured in their prime in the Griswold book is one of the reflecting ponds and, beyond that, the sounds of the tollway. For west Lake Forest is on the busy inter-metropolitan axis between Chicago and Milwaukee, in the county Fortune labelled in a July 1993 issue the fourth fastest job-growth area in the nation (after Orlando, Las Vegas, and West Palm Beach). Driving in we had heard the sounds of saws cutting down Jensen's now magestic trees planted early in the century, but culturally a millenium ago. This royal-preserve-like forest was yielding to an economic imperative which barely can be slowed down.
Fortunately, Open Lands and generous,far-sighted property-owners have preserved the eastern end of the Mellody Farms estate, on Waukegan Road. But, overall, one of the greatest flowerings of country-place culture in history -- of which Mellody Farms was a dominant feature -- is disappearing very quickly, indeed.
Arthur Miller
November 1, 1994; corrected March 17, 1995