Former Mansion and Grounds of Founder of National Lumber Company in MI

John W. Blodgett Estate - Brookby House, East Grand Rapids Michigan

Date added: August 08, 2024

Do you have an update on the current status of this structure? Please tell us about it in the comments below.

The 1928 John W. Blodgett Estate is associated with John W. Blodgett, Grand Rapids financier, lumberman, and philanthropist, and his wife, Minnie Cumnock Blodgett, who was nationally known for her work in public health and welfare. The estate possesses significance in artistic and architectural terms for its early twentieth-century landscaping and for the Blodgett house which, designed by A. Stewart Walker of the New York firm of Walker and Gillette, is one of Michigan's outstanding monuments of Georgian Revival domestic architecture. The estate and house are all the more important in that they remain virtually unaltered from the time of their completion. The house still contains its original furnishings and art.

The Blodgetts, a pioneer family in western Michigan, were descended from seventeenth-century forebears who migrated from England to the eastern United States. Delos A. Blodgett, the progenitor of the local branch of the family, was born in New York State in 1825 and came to Michigan in 1848 to work as a saw mill hand in the Upper Peninsula. In 1850, at the age of twenty-five, he formed the first of several lucrative partnerships in the lumbering business. For the next thirty-five years, he expanded his timber operations along the Muskegon River in the western Lower Peninsula.

In 1885, when the lumber industry around Muskegon had reached its peak, Delos Blodgett expanded his operations to other states. He also began to engage in non-lumbering activities, such as farming, stock breeding, banking, the purchase and development of urban real estate, and the founding of several towns. Once timber had been removed from the land, he established large farms which opened up the agricultural frontier in Michigan. Among the towns which owe their existence to his foresight and energy are Hersey, Evart, and Baldwin In the northern Lower Peninsula.

It was Grand Rapids, however, with which the Blodgett name came to be most closely associated. Delos Blodgett moved to the city In 1881 and soon became Involved In extensive business Investments of various kinds. In 1885 he joined In financing the first cable cars to provide mass transit to the "hill district" on the city's east side. He was one of the incorporators of the Grand Rapids Fire Insurance Company and a stockholder in the Morning Telegram, a precursor of the Grand Rapids Herald. He was also president of the Fourth National Bank of Grand Rapids and held stock in several other banks in the city. In 1889 he built the Blodgett Building, the first furniture exhibition building in Grand Rapids.

John W. Blodgett (1860-1951), son of Delos and Jane S. Blodgett, attended Highland Military Academy in Worcester, Massachusetts, and planned to attend Harvard. At the age of eighteen, however, his father's failing health made it necessary for him to return to Michigan to take over part of the family lumber business. After taking a business course at Swenberg's Business College In Grand Rapids, he took charge of the Muskegon office; he was soon directing all the operations from timber cutting to lumber sales.

From 1883 to 1893 he served as president of the Muskegon Boom Company, said at that time to be the largest exclusive dealer in saw logs in the world. Following his father's retirement In 1900 from active participation in the lumbering business, John W. Blodgett served as chairman of the Blodgett Company, Ltd., and spent much of his time supervising operations in Mississippi, Louisiana, Oregon, and California. His stature as a national leader in his field resulted in his serving three times as president of the National Lumber Manufacturers Association.

While John W. Blodgett built upon the timber empire begun by his father, he also followed in the philanthropic tradition of his parents. Their benefactions to the city of Grand Rapids are almost too numerous to mention, but two stand out most clearly in the public mind today, the D. A. Blodgett Home for Children and Blodgett Memorial Hospital. The former Institution grew out of a small group of women organized in 1887 by Mrs. Delos A. Blodgett to care for children from broken homes. Five years later the group incorporated as "The Children's Home Society" and in 1908 Delos and John Blodgett built a new home for the wards of the Juvenile Court and children who were temporally disabled.

The other major philanthropy of the Blodgett family, Blodgett Memorial Hospital, is the oldest general hospital in the city. Its origins go back to the Ladies Benevolent Association, a group of charitable women who organized to care for the sick and needy. By the end of the nineteenth century, this modest beginning had grown Into a full-scale hospital operating under the Union Benevolent Association. John Wood Blodgett served for a time as president of the Association. In 1916 he gave the Association a new $600,000 building, which was named Blodgett Memorial Hospital in honor of his mother, Jane Wood Blodgett, who was one of the founders in 1873 of the Union Benevolent Association. In 1937 he gave an additional $225,000 to help eliminate the hospital's debt.

In 1895 John W. Blodgett married Miss Minnie Cumnock of Lowell, Massachusetts. Like her husband, she took a deep interest in community affairs and was nationally known for her work in public health and welfare. She was a leader in the National Committee for Mental Hygiene and the National Organization for Public Health Nursing. At the state level, she assisted In the drafting of a new children's code for Michigan. Her active concern with the health problems of Grand Rapids youngsters led to the founding of a Clinic for Infant Feeding, the Association for the Blind, the Grand Rapids Child Guidance Clinic, and the D. A. Blodgett Home for Children. In addition, she joined her husband in donating a site of forty acres on Lake Michigan near Agnew for Camp Blodgett, a summer fresh air camp for underprivileged children. In 1930 and 1931 she opened to the public the gardens at the family home, Brookby House, for the benefit of the camp.

In 1928 John W. Blodgett, the city's leading financier at the time, and his family moved into a new home. The house is the focal point of Brookby and is a fine example of Georgian Revival architecture unaltered since its 1928 construction. The house is also significant as an important domestic work by A. Stewart Walker of Walker and Gillette, a prominent New York architectural firm. Founded In 1906, the firm practiced for almost four decades. In the 1910s and 1920s, the Walker and Gillette firm was known for its large Georgian Revival, Colonial Revival, Elizabethan, and Italian country and suburban houses.

Site Description

The John W. Blodgett Estate ("Brookby"), developed In 1928, is an eight-acre tract located at the northwest corner of Fisk Lake and southeast of the intersection of Robinson and Plymouth roads in a wealthy section of suburban East Grand Rapids. The estate contains the Blodgett house, a broad-fronted, winged, red brick structure with rich Georgian Revival detailing, and other, subsidiary buildings set on grounds which are beautifully landscaped with formal gardens, terraces, and large, old trees. The house itself retains its original decor and furnishings.

The estate is fronted along the street line by a high, wrought-iron fence. Square, paneled, urn-crowned piers constructed of Limestone form the main, western entranceway to the estate. Directly back from the gateway, and facing west toward it behind a circular drive, is the 1928 Blodgett house.

The Blodgett house is a two-story, limestone-trimmed structure of red brick laid up in Flemish bond. The predominant detailing employed is Georgian Revival in character. A clearly Adamesque influence is seen in the quiet, almost unstated roof line of the house.

The central portions of both the front and rear facades project the depth of a window bay from the main mass of the building, the front projection being punctuated by four pilasters dividing it into three equal bays. A corbelled brick cornice with brick dentils ties the facade together horizontally at the level of the pilaster tops. Of the three bays, the central one is the most highly articulated, having in it the entrance doorway. The two slender doors topped by a transom are flanked on either side by a Corinthian pilaster and, in front of it, a column of the Corinthian order. These support a projecting broken entablature and segmental pediment. Both the entablature and pediment are finely detailed with small modillions and dentils. Within the broken entablature and pediment a molding supports a carved urn and foliated garland. The center bay is topped off with a stone-framed bullseye window flanked on either side by a carved scroll and leaf decoration.

First-floor windows throughout the house have semi-circular arched openings, with the exception of two in both the front and rear facades at either end of the building which have semi-elliptical openings. Within these are semi-circular fanlight windows and side lights. All second-floor openings are rectangular and most of them contain double-hung, 6/6 windows.

The south end of the house opens out upon a circular reflecting pool and formal gardens. A double-door opening with semi-circular fanlight above is centered In this end facade and is protected by a colonnaded porch. The slender proportions of the columns and the geometrically decorated fretwork above the capitals is characteristic of the Adamesque and Georgian Revival styles, as is the overall symmetry of this facade. The main living room of the house opens upon this porch. The north end of the building consists of a wing for servants quarters.

The rear facade opens upon a terrace, complete with stone balustrade, which commands a view over a large area of open lawn and manicured shrubbery, all of which is back dropped by trees and a stream that leads to Fisk Lake.

The interior is elaborately decorated and still retains all of its original fittings, furnishings, and woodwork. The floorplan of both floors is similar with all the rooms reached off of a long hallway that runs lengthwise through the house.

The first-floor vestibule opens upon a black-and-white, marble-floored entrance hall from which a winding staircase with black wrought-iron railings ascends to the second floor. A long hallway with an arched ceiling bisects the entrance hall and stretches from the dining room on the north side to the living room at the south end of the house. All other rooms are entered from the hallway. Other first-floor rooms are the library, directly opposite the entrance; the telephone, flower, and breakfast rooms; the coat room; and an octagonal reception room. Beyond the dining room is the north wing which contains a kitchen and pantry.

The principal first-floor rooms are the living room, dining room, library, and reception room. The living and dining rooms and library are designed in English, mid-eighteenth-century style, and have elaborately sculptural cornices, door enframements, and mantelpieces enriched with modillions, dentils, anthemions, egg-and-dart moldings, and other Classical devices. The reception room has a Chinese decorative scheme, which includes its mantelpiece and the mirror frame above it, the chandelier, and large, painted landscapes set in panels in the walls. The dining and living room walls also display oriental landscape paintings (set in panels in the wall) and tapestries. This artwork was purchased at the time of the house's construction and the house was designed to accommodate it.

The second floor contains four large bedrooms with fireplaces and tilled baths. The servants' quarters, comprising five bedrooms, are in the north wing.

To the north of the main house along Robinson Road are located four brick buildings which were built at the time the house was constructed. Directly north of the north wing is a small brick tool shed which originally had an attached greenhouse. The greenhouse has been removed and donated to Windmill Park In Holland, Michigan. Directly to the east are the one-story chauffeur's cottage and the two-story caretaker's cottage with its attached, six-car, bi-level garage. At the south end of the estate is a small gatehouse which doubles as a gardener's cottage. A tennis court which is not visible from the house is located at the southeast corner of the property along Fisk Lake.