Regeneration & Frank Lloyd Wright
“Every spirit builds itself a house; and beyond its house, a world; and beyond its world a heaven. Know then, that the world exists for you: build, therefore, your own world.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
As we rounded the crest of the dirt driveway, the tree-lined road gave way to a majestic expanse of snow dusted mountains and gently sloping pasture land. The spacious blue October skies and lack of human presence led to a deep full body breath. Giddy, we drove slowly through the wooden gates and were welcomed on either side by tall pine trees, a grand entry into a place of remarkable beauty and history. A little over 100 years ago Frank Lloyd Wright and a team of architects held a similar vision, a community for people to live close to nature. My intention to learn about regenerative community building led me here to this ranch in Darby, Montana. Below is my attempt to capture a fraction of what I’ve learned about this land between Nov. 2020 — May 2022.
History
Frank Lloyd Wright, considered one of the world’s greatest architects of all time designed 1,114 architectural works of all types in his 91 years of life — 532 of which were realized. The largest, Como Orchards “University Heights”, was designed and partially realized in 1908 here on this very bench of the rugged and wild Bitterroot Mountains. Wright was hired to design a residential community and vacation retreat for “noted savants” from Chicago to come connect with the land tending apple orchards and sharing meals in the clubhouse overlooking the rolling Sapphire Mountains to the East. All of the buildings were of board-and-batten construction, simple cottages with 2–3 bedroom designed for camping in the summer.
“The Como Orchards project was one of Wright’s earliest commissions, instrumental in shaping his architectural style and ecologically minded value system, and is remembered as the first and largest of his development projects. From the original plan 11 structures were fully built, including the lodge, a few single family homes, and multiple bungalows. Two of these historically significant structures still stand on the property today — the main house and one of the bungalows.” — Patrick O’Mahoney, Frank Lloyd Wright Society, 2021
History, here, feels fresh, recent, and repetitive. The last of the Indigenous Salish were forced onto the “Flathead” Reservation (now the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes) three hours north by military decree a little over 130 years ago, in 1891. Two hundred years ago Lewis & Clark made their way through this valley, being welcomed by the Salish with offerings of food and buffalo robes. Jesuit Priests started St. Mary’s Mission in 1841, creating the first permanent white settlement in Montana, 41 years before it became a state. The settlers and Salish lived alongside each other in relative peace for decades, trading knowledge and culture until the number of settlers became too great and willingness of settlers to co-exist with locals disappeared. From 1900–1910 the number of settlers moving into the Bitterroot Valley rose 125%. In comparison, the rise of new settlers like myself coming to the entire state of Montana between 2010–2020 is 10%. For many locals, 10% feels like a physical and cultural invasion. Imagine 125%.
When I first arrived I was surprised to hear of a proud group of “fifth generation Montanans”. Through my left coast lens, it appeared a clean and direct finger point to those responsible for returning land back to those from whom it was stolen. (Said by someone who has never owned land.) This conversation quickly morphs into a complex exploration of what makes someone indigenous to a place? Time? Buried ancestors? Blood, sweat, love, and toil? A law created in 1785? I do not pretend to know these answers but addressing them, addressing the means by which land is “owned” and passed down among mostly white people in this country, feels imperative to creating a possible alternative.
The long history of people, like myself, coming to a new place to try and buy land is as old as land ownership itself, which in the USA is The Land Ordinance Act of 1785. It laid out the process by which lands west of the Appalachian Mountains were to be surveyed and sold. In the year 2022 I find myself in the middle of another land rush, mostly people coming from California looking for land they can afford, driving up land prices, and driving out locals. It is simultaneously the best, and worst, time to try and explore cooperative land ownership.
In the tiny log cabin “Pioneer Memorial Museum” in the center of Darby, the closest town of 780 people, I found the original “pitch deck” for Como Orchards created by initial investors W.I. Moody and Frederick Nichols of Chicago back in 1906 (est.). It advertises “perfect fruit land in the perfect environment” to non-residents looking for a summer home in nature. “For only $400 an acre, with $50 down, and 10 years to pay, the investors would receive a quick return on their investment.” (Delton Ludwig, Frank Lloyd Wright Newsletter Vol. 5 №2, 1982) These men, following in the footsteps of copper king Marcus Daly, were partly responsible for the largest irrigation development project in the west, a 55 ft. dam called Lake Como delivering 700-second feet of water through 80 miles of canal to over 45,000 acres of land completed in 1910.
It is hard to grasp the enormity of a project such as this that makes this valley capable of remarkable self-reliance in a changing climate, connecting sandy loam soil to large amounts of water melting off 10,000 ft. peaks. Rights to water in Montana, I quickly learned, is full of drama and intrigue of Godfather proportion. There is a running joke about the first water dispute between ranchers in Montana ending with one using the other’s body to divert water onto his property. In my idyllic experience, each May the water begins to flow through the Tin Cup ditch winding its way through this land, bringing cold, clean water to trees, birds, and critters of all kinds, and it feels like precious gold.
The Land
The silence here is rarely broken for more than a moment; starlings twittering, black and white thrushes pecking wood, a Red-tailed Hawk and Owl screech, and maybe a random rifle shot in the distance. The most lingering and stirring sound is the rushing of wind down the canyon from the Bitterroot Mountains through the crowns of the Ponderosa Pine trees; what John Muir called “a symphony of pines.” Being alone on 200 acres of ranch land bordered by 1.2 million acres of protected wilderness, I was immediately aware of how far from the “wild” I have been.
Every morning I wake up and look out a south facing window at sloping green pastures dotted with pine trees, slow nibbling families of deer, and snow capped mountains over 65 miles away. No homes or structures, people or cars from this vantage point, only me in bed with nature as my lover. Lonely at times, yes, but the ice pick to the brain of modern life is always only an arm’s length away on the bedside table.
I walk the land every morning with my tiny furry companion, Leika. We do a giant loop from our bottom floor two-bedroom apartment (7) through the Pine lined driveway, past the old Wright house (8), the Cider Gathering House, and the original Wright Guest Cabin nestled creekside beneath a thick, elder Ponderosa Pine. (If you put your nose into her thick flaking bark, you may get a whiff of butterscotch.) We head out the main gate and toward the eastern pasture crunching pine cones and needles underfoot. Leika bursts into the open fields (5) at top speed sniffing evidence of deer, sounding like a stampede of teeny elephants. The deer have made paths all over this place. The one I walk takes me into the orchard, home to trees over 100 years old, still bearing sweet (and some bitter)MacIntosh apples each Fall.
This place, like most places, is sacred and not only for its beauty, history, and perceived value, but for its’ essence. The Roland Family has been intentional about preserving it exactly as they found it. When we walk into the backwoods (4,3,2), we follow the fire access roads built by the Forest Service. Thankfully, my itty bitty sentry, makes enough of a racket to avoid actually running into the black bear, moose, wolf, mountain lion, skunk, coyote, or red tailed fox who call these woods home. I have been fortunate enough to see the elk out in the fields from time to time, once below a radiant, valley wide rainbow.
Darby & The Bitterroot Valley
One bitter winter long ago the Salish people were struggling to find enough food for their people to eat so an elder Salish woman went into the forest to forage in the frozen forest. Overcome, she sat to rest on a rock and her tears slowly traveled down her long, gray hair melting the snow below. Suddenly, the sacred Bitterroot Flower was revealed, offering tender, nutritious roots that would feed her people through the harsh winter. They named that place the Bitterroot Valley. (Watch a short documentary about the Bitterroot Flower, here.)
“Success is not measured in corporate internal ecological balance and loss accounting, or scored against a regenerative certification scheme; it is subtly reflected in the health and vitality of the communities, ecosystems and bioregions the business operates in. Ultimately, the measure of success is the improvement of local and regional capacity to face an uncertain future creatively and be of healing influence in the nested contexts in which we operate.” — Daniel Christian Wahl
Carol Sanford and others in the regenerative movement speak to the concept of nested systems. We are always operating in a complex ecology of relationships and what we do impacts this web in ways we may, or may not, intend. You can read more about how I engaged in the Bitterroot Valley community here. Como Orchards, the ranch I am living on, is nested within the communities and ecosystems of Darby, the Bitterroot Valley, Ravalli County, Montana, and the United States, Earth.
On July 4, 1888 Ravalli County’s southernmost town officially became the town of Darby. It began as a mining and fur trading town, gradually changing to logging, agriculture, and cattle ranching. Como Orchards was originally founded to take advantage of a growing interest in establishing the valley as the apple orchard capital of the West. Frank Lloyd Wright actually took his first, and only, commissioned whack at city planning here in Darby in 1908.
In 1930, Darby had the first all woman town council in the state, and around the same time U.S. Highway 93, now a two lane highway, became Darby’s main street. The logging industry dominated the landscape for many decades, but with the intervention of environmentalists in 1970s, the timber industry has almost disappeared. Ravalli County’s economy relies largely on cattle ranching, recreation, and tourism.
What does this place want to be?
One August weekend, I co-hosted a small retreat with Professor and Author DJ Lee on Creative Placemaking. She invited her friend, Ayad Rahmani, an Iraqi-American Professor of Architecture to give a lecture on his most recent book about the spiritual love affair between Frank Lloyd Wright and Ralph Waldo Emerson. The more he spoke of the spiritual thread connecting these two American icons, the more I could it feel it revealing the thread that brought me here.
Wright’s relationship to architecture was a deeply spiritual one. He thought a “much better approach to education would be to start on the farm, tending to fields, animals and all the operations associated with cultivating, seeding and harvesting. Learning would be less the product of abstract thought and structured curricula, and more one of relevant responses to real and tangible problems..
It was on his own family farm as a child, “where he’d observe and appreciate the beauty and unity of art and science, not as two disciplines but as one, tightly woven around a web of relations, critically played out in color, proportion and balance. Flowers were just as important as machinery, helping the young student understand the order and meaning of the universe.” — Frank Lloyd Wright and Ralph Waldo Emerson: Changing the American Mind, Ayad Rahmani
The thread of regeneration, community, and design is trying to re-emerge in this place. A thread picked up again over ten years ago by Analise Roland, and now me, and all the people who continue to be touched by this place.
Supply chain and weather issues as well as the rerouting of the North Pacific Railroad led to the eventual collapse of the Como Orchards project. In the end, twelve structures were built, two of which remain. “The clubhouse was altered, whitewashed, and used to house workers and store hog feed. In 1945 the boards were taken to build a barn. Now the land office building and one three-bedroom cottage remain.” ( Lind, Carla (1996). Lost Wright: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Vanished Masterpieces. Simon & Schuster)
Wright said in his autobiography, that it was “[i]n these adventures alone-abroad in the wooded hills fetch[ing] cows… that he learned to know the woods, from the trees above to the shrubs below and the grass beneath.” But also “the millions of curious lives living hidden in the surface of the ground, among the roots, stems and mold.” It was here too that he would soon find himself “happy in such knowledge.” He was “a listening ear, a seeing eye and a sensitive touch.” The farm was his “book of books, experienced as the only true reading, the book of Creation.” — Frank Lloyd Wright and Ralph Waldo Emerson: Changing the American Mind, Ayad Rahmani
I came looking to create community and possibly a media lab, a place for artists, futurists, entrepreneurs, and land stewards to immerse themselves in regenerative culture and see what wants to emerge through them. (Like this series of blogs — start at the bottom.) I clearly stepped into an already unfolding vision. What does it want to be? How will it help regenerate this land, community, and ecosystem? Can it come to be in an extractive system without losing the thread? Thankfully my dear friend Evan Ryan, who had completed a course in regenerative real estate development with the Regenesis Institute for Regenerative Practice, emerged to help me explore these questions.
More on what emerged soon…
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