Walter Rogers Furness Cottage

Walter Rogers Furness Cottage (1890-1891) – also known as the "Old Infirmary" or the "Jekyll Island Infirmary" – is a Shingle Style building on Jekyll Island, in Glynn County, Georgia.

Walter Rogers Furness Cottage
Walter Rogers Furness Cottage in 2019.
Location101 Old Plantation Rd., Jekyll Island, Georgia
Coordinates31°03′24.0″N 81°25′10.6″W
Built1889-1891 (1889-1891)
ArchitectFurness, Evans & Company
Architectural styleShingle Style
Part ofJekyll Island Club Historic District
NRHP reference No.72000385[1]
Significant dates
Added to NRHPJanuary 20, 1972
Designated CPJune 2, 1978[2]
General information
Construction started1889
Completed1891
Relocated1896, 1930
Renovated1930, 2017
Technical details
Materialwood shingles

It is one of thirty-three contributing properties in the 240-acre (97.1 hectares) Jekyll Island Club Historic District.[3] The district was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1972, and designated a National Historic Landmark District in 1978.

Walter Rogers Furness

Walter Rogers Furness (1861–1914) was an American architect and real estate developer, and the eldest son of Shakespearean scholar Horace Howard Furness and Helen Kate Rogers.[4] He attended private schools in Philadelphia[5] and Harvard University.[6] Like his friend and Harvard classmate, author Owen Wister, Furness traveled to the American West for recreation, hunting and fishing.[7]

His uncle, Fairman Rogers, told him about plans to develop Jekyll Island as an exclusive winter hunting resort,[8]:61[9] and in 1886 Furness was the youngest of the fifty-three founding members of the Jekyll Island Club.[10] That same year he married Helen Key Bullitt, and they had two children—Helen Kate (married Wirt Lord Thompson) and Fairman Rogers Furness.[11]:366 He worked for Furness, Evans & Company, the architectural firm founded by his uncle, Frank Furness, and was promoted to partner in 1896.[10]

A member of the Racquet Club of Philadelphia,[12] Furness was blinded in one eye while playing rackets in 1898.[10] The injury made it difficult to draw with precision, so he gave up architecture.[lower-alpha 1] It made it impossible for him to aim a rifle, so he gave up hunting.[lower-alpha 2] He sold his shares in the Jekyll Island Club, and allowed his membership to lapse in 1901.[13] He inherited his Rogers grandparents' Philadelphia city house, at the southwest corner of Locust Street and Washington Square West, and demolished it to build a 1909 office building (designed by Furness, Evans & Company).[14] "Repeated bouts with alcoholism brought about strained relations with his family."[10] His wife died at age 47 in January 1914, and he died of Bright's disease a month later, following a heart attack.[10]

Cottage

Walter Rogers Furness was listed as the Furness, Evans & Company individual-in-charge for the Jekyll Island cottage,[11]:306 often an indication of who within the firm was a building's primary designer.[11]:86 He and James W. Fassitt,[lower-alpha 3] a partner in the firm,[11]:86 visited Jekyll Island in February 1889.[10] They seem to have brought hunting dogs with them, perhaps combining a hunting trip with selecting a building lot.[lower-alpha 4] Furness erected his cottage in the isolated southern part of the club compound, on a slightly-sloping lot amid tall trees.[16]

The twelve-room, two-and-a-half-story cottage is slightly raised on footings. "The overhanging shingled volume of the second story is carried on slender, turned porch posts,"[11]:306 creating a "J"-shaped covered porch beneath. The entrance is indicated by a Juliet balcony on the west façade, and the apsoidal south façade features a peak-ceilinged semicircular sleeping porch on the second story.[11]:344C To the east is a two-and-a-half-story section containing the dining room and kitchen, with bedrooms and servant quarters above.

The unusual apsoidal-ended cottage is reminiscent of Frank Furness's apsoidal-ended University of Pennsylvania Library (1888-1891), a building then under construction.[11]:290 Walter Rogers Furness's father served as chairman of the library's building committee, and was intimately involved in its planning and detailing.[11]:290 The library inspired the design of Frank Furness's own apsoidal-ended country house, "Idlewild" (c.1890),[17] built in the Philadelphia suburbs, just outside Media, Pennsylvania.

  • University of Pennsylvania Library (1888-1891)
  • University of Pennsylvania Library plan
  • "Idlewild" (c.1890), Media, Pennsylvania
  • South facade
  • North façade
  • East (kitchen) façade

Later owners and occupants
Jekyll Books occupied the cottage from 2001 to 2016.
West façade, following the 2017 renovation

Publisher Joseph Pulitzer purchased the cottage from Furness in 1896, and had it moved to his building lot at Riverview Drive and Stable Road.[16] He lived in the cottage through two winter "seasons" while his own twenty-six-room villa was under construction.[18] He then slightly moved the cottage—about 125 ft (38 m)[10]—and used it to house servants.[10] Hydroelectric power magnate and art patron John J. Albright purchased the Pulitzer villa in 1914, slightly moved the Furness cottage—about 70 ft (21 m)[10]—and also used it to house servants.[10]

The parents of lumber executive Frank H. Goodyear, Jr. built an Italian villa on the club compound in 1906.[19] He inherited their villa, and was himself elected to membership in 1916.[8]:64, 102 Goodyear purchased the Furness cottage from Albright in October 1929. On January 21, 1930, the cottage was moved a distance of about a quarter-mile (400 m),[10] to the northeast corner of Old Plantation and Stable Roads (its current site).[16] Goodyear had the cottage was renovated, equipped as an infirmary, and donated it to the club in memory of his mother.[10] The Josephine Goodyear Memorial Infirmary was in operation from 1930 to 1942, when the Jekyll Island Club went out of business.[16]

Georgia obtained Jekyll Island through eminent domain in 1947, and operated it as a state park for several years.[20] The Jekyll Island Authority was created in the 1950s to conserve and develop the island.[20] Various authority employees leased the Furness cottage as a residence, into the 1990s.[10]

An independent bookstore, Jekyll Books at the Old Infirmary, occupied the cottage from 2001 to 2016.[21] The booksellers claimed that the cottage was haunted by the ghost of a young girl, and posted a sign on the second floor: "STOP – Only ghosts are allowed on 3rd floor stairs."[22]

Hurricane Matthew hit Jekyll Island in October 2016, and the Furness cottage was damaged by a fallen tree.[23] Repairs and renovations to the building were completed in Summer 2017.[24] The restorers painted the cottage the same pale blue color that it had been in the 1930s and 1940s, when it served as Jekyll Island Infirmary.

The nearby Jekyll Island Museum moved its visitors center and gift shop to the cottage, while its own building underwent renovations.[25] Following nearly two years of work, the Jekyll Island Museum reopened on April 27, 2019.[26]

See also

Notes
  1. "The year 1898 is the last he is listed in the Philadelphia City Directory as a partner in the firm of Furness, Evans and Company." McCash, p. 86.[10]
  2. "I am extremely sorry to hear about the injury to your eye, and that you do not think of coming down. Am also sorry that you want to dispose of your share, but will be pleased to put it forward, should I hear of a buyer." Ernest Gilbert Grob (Jekyll Island Club superintendent) to Walter Rogers Furness, 21 January 1899, quoted in McCash, p. 86.[10]
  3. James Wilson Fassitt Jr. (1850–1892)[15] was a Philadelphia architect, and Frank Furness's brother-in-law. He worked for Furness, Evans & Company, and was promoted to partner in 1886. Fassitt died unmarried at age 42. Thomas, p. 86.
  4. June Hall McCash publishes a photograph of Walter Rogers Furness and James W. Fassitt posing with their four pointing dogs in a Savannah, Georgia portrait studio. McCash, p. 82.[10]

References
  1. "National Register Information System". National Register of Historic Places. National Park Service. July 9, 2010.
  2. "Jekyll Island". National Historic Landmark summary listing. National Park Service. Archived from the original on 2008-06-19. Retrieved 2008-06-21.
  3. Jekyll Island Historic District, from National Park Service.
  4. Walter Rogers Furness, from Find-a-Grave.
  5. John Woolf Jordan, A History of Delaware County, Pennsylvania, and Its People, Volume 2 (New York: Lewis Historical Publishing Company, 1914), pp. 669-670.
  6. Harvard University Alumni Association, Harvard Alumni Directory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1913), p. 298.
  7. Neal Lambert, "Owen Wister’s 'Hank’s Woman': The Writer and His Comment,” Western American Literature, vol. 4, no. 1 (Spring 1969), pp. 39-50.
  8. Richard Jay Hutto, The Gilded Cage: The Jekyll Island Club Members (Macon, Georgia: Indigo Custom Publishing, 2006).
  9. "Winter Newport: Notes on the History of Jekyll Island Club," Nineteenth Century, vol. 12, no. 1 (1993), pp. 24-25.
  10. McCash, June Hall (1998). The Jekyll Island Cottage Colony. University of Georgia Press. pp. 79–88. ISBN 9780820319285.
  11. George E. Thomas, Jeffrey A. Cohen and Michael J. Lewis, Frank Furness: The Complete Works, (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, revised 1996).
  12. Social Register, Philadelphia (including Wilmington), 1912 (New York City: The Social Register Association, 1911), p. 80.
  13. Tyler B. Bagwell & Tyler E. Bagwell, The Jekyll Island Club (Arcadia Publishing, 1998), p. 32.
  14. 700 Locust Street, from Philadelphia Architects and Buildings.
  15. James Wilson Fassitt, from Find-A-Grave.
  16. "The Infirmary / Furness Cottage" marker (erected by Jekyll Island Museum), via Historical Marker Database.
  17. James F. O'Gorman, The Architecture of Frank Furness, (Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1973), p. 64.
  18. Villa of J. Pulitzer, from Georgia Archives.
  19. William Barton McCash, The Jekyll Island Club: Southern Haven for America's Millionaires (University of Georgia Press, 1989), pp. 102, 183.
  20. Jekyll Island Authority, from georgia.gov.
  21. Jekyll Books at the Old Infirmary, Jekyll Island, from Facebook.
  22. Ghost sign, from Facebook.
  23. 2016 Progress Report, Jekyll Island Authority, February 2017, p. 9.
  24. 2017 Progress Report, Jekyll Island Authority, February 2018, p. 17.
  25. Deborah Bayliss, "New Jekyll museum construction to start this winter," The Brunswick News, July 17, 2017.
  26. Grand Opening: Mosaic, the Jekyll Island Museum, from Jekyll Island Authority.
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