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In The California Craftsman Style: David Owen Dryden

BY DONALD COVINGTON

David and Isabel - Married in 1902 in Monrovia, California

This is the story of one man’s rise and fall, buffeted by the turns of economic fortune during his lifetime and nourished by an architectural style that would sweep through America’s cities.

The California Craftsman style was created in part by famous architects, and popularized by carpenters and independent developers. The elements of the style were used to achieve a form of home building which approached the status of folk art. It was a builder’s art form, a style that celebrated an aesthetic based upon the logic of forming a simple, forthright structure using natural materials. And, it was nurtured by the hands-on labor of many, many common craftsmen and builders.

One of those who created Craftsman homes in Southern California and as far north as central Oregon, in the years between 1900 and 1930, was David Owen Dryden. Born in 1877 on a ranch in the redwood forest of Sonoma County, Calif., Dryden later moved with his family to a farm on the southern Oregon coast. In his youth, he apprenticed with relatives in the lumbering and building trades, on the Pacific Coast, where he acquired firsthand a knowledge of wood structure, and sensitivity to the rustic quality of vernacular architecture and natural materials.

In the mid-1890s, at the age of 18, David Dryden moved with a sister and brother-in-law to the small orchard community of Monrovia, Calif., in the San Gabriel Valley, a few miles east of Pasadena. In that small foothills community, in 1902, David met and married Isabel Rockwood. Together, David and Isabel launched a career of home building and decorating. David created structures in the typical builder’s bungalow style of the day. Isabel collaborated with him on functional planning and chose colors and other enhancements of interior elements. As gardens were considered to be integral parts of the whole plan, Isabel chose plants and supervised the placement of landscape elements.

In Los Angeles, David worked odd jobs, including that of a Tram Conuctor on the Boyle Heights Line, Before becoming a carpenter in the thriving home building industry in the community of Monrovia

In their early years in Monrovia, the Drydens purchased building sites, completed structures and moved into them for the finishing phase. While David worked on a new house, Isabel turned a recently completed one into a functioning and artfully decorated home. As their reputation for creating handsome, stylish bungalows grew, they were constantly on the move from completed home to new structure. One year they moved eight times.

David Dryden’s aesthetics gradually evolved from the ubiquitous bungalow of the early 1 900s to the more romantic “chalet” style, made popular throughout the San Gabriel Valley by the Greene brothers and their contemporaries. The Craftsman style that emerged in the first decade of the century turned the builder’s craft into an expressive art form, and often, as in Dryden’s case, made the house carpenter a folk artist.

By 1911, after a decade of developing his craft and mastering the new style, Dryden moved from Monrovia to San Diego where a building boom had begun in preparation for the 1915-16 Panama- California Exposition celebrating the opening of the Panama Canal. It was in the new suburbs of Point Loma, Mission Hills and North Park that the mature phase of Dryden’s Craftsman style developed.

Dryden’s San Diego houses affirm the harmony of shelter and earth through the combination of natural materials and structure, expressing the concepts of the Craftsman movement. Deep eaves supported by a variety of brackets and beams are capped by broad, low-pitched roof lines. The roof structure hovers above walls of redwood shingle and board siding, which occasionally rest on foundations veneered in river-worn boulders and cobbles.

The simple, direct forms of Dryden’s houses take on a dynamic character through the contrast of solids with the open structure of pergolas and port-cocheres. The picturesque effect is always present in the exteriors and is achieved by extruded elements such as stairways, window bays, inglenooks, balconies and sun porches. Shadows patterned by open structure and textured surfaces that evoke the natural character of the material add to those effects.

Interiors of the houses contain extensive wood paneling and cabinets with leaded art glass and glazed ceramic tile. Built-in buffets, china closets and bookcases in quarter-sawn oak or red gum are typical. The open plan is achieved by wide arches between major rooms or by double, sliding pocket doors and French doors. The integration of interior and exterior space is created by continuous lines of casement windows for maximum light and ventilation.

David Dryden built 60 Bungalows in the Suburbs of San Diego Between 1911 and 1919

These houses, built in the years of the Exposition in San Diego, brought status and wealth to David Dryden who progressed from the role of a carpenter to that of an independent building contractor, supervising a crew of artisans and craftsmen. By the spring of 1915, at the peak of the San Diego building boom, Dryden’s mature Craftsman style had reached its zenith.

Dryden’s clientele steadily increased during 1916-17. His work flourished and he became known as a builder of Craftsman style houses and bungalows for the affluent new middle-class professionals and retired industrialists who, eager to escape urban congestion and colder Eastern climes, were eager to live in a genteel, semirural villa — surrounde d by orchards, gardens and lawns, a short tram ride away from the merc antile and commercial establishments of the urban center.

Creative by nature, David enjoyed the role of designer and director of construction; but he was impatient with record keeping and preferred to pay receipts from pocket cash. His lack of prudence in business affairs was matched by a disdain for money in general. Dryden’s descendants recall his throwing money away, literally, over the cliffs into the surf below.

Interior of a Classic Redwood Board and Shingle Tradition of the Craftsman Style

His lack of respect for currency, however, did not extend to the luxuries that wealth could obtain. His obsession for quality in construction also extended to other material possessions. He admired fine tailoring and fast motorcars. He was a traveler as well, and spent many summers exploring the Pacific Coast by steamer and automobile, from the Mexican border to the rivers of Oregon.

And there was a gentler side, that David Dryden revealed in the poems he wrote for his grandchildren and in rhymed notes to his mother-in-law. Letters to his wife indicated a sentimental man of tender demeanor, and one with great admiration for the beauties of the natural environment. It was this more sensitive side of his nature that suffered most from the humiliating experience which followed the failure of his once robust career.

With the entrance of the United States into World War I in 1917, real estate and building businesses took a sudden nose dive. Shortages of man-power and materials made house construction a difficult and expensive venture. A national influenza epidemic also helped depress the economy. Dryden found it hard to gain enough commissions to ensure payment for the many high interest loans to which he was committed. With the need to cope with the ebbing tide of fortune that had once brought him wealth and security, Dryden apparently succumbed to questionable business practices and, eventually, to alcohol abuse.

A rash of liens and lawsuits for unpaid bills mounted against Dryden and, in the late winter of 1918-19, the Drydens left San Diego. Isabel and the children remained in the Los Angeles area while David returned to Oregon to recover emotionally and financially from the personal catastrophe which had devastated his life and career. He moved north to the Umpqua River where he worked with some success as a carpenter building houses and barns for $5.50 a day, a decent wage at the time.

By the winter of 1920-21, with new resolve and somewhat financially recovered, David and Isabel returned to San Diego where they began anew to acquire land for construction. The Craftsman style that had been popular the first two decades of the century had lost its appeal in the postwar years, however, and Dryden gradually shifted from the frame bungalow to the more modish stucco and tile “hacienda.” The Spanish Revival style, initiated by the seductive charms of’ the lath and plaster palaces of the 1915 Panama-California Exposition and reinforced by Hollywood films, spread across the new suburbs of the 1920s, not only in San Diego but throughout California.

In the summer of 1925, the Drydens moved to the San Francisco Bay area, where David gained a second small fortune continuing to build stucco bungalows in the popular Mediterranean style. Dryden’s masterpieces, however, remain the romantic Craftsman villas and bungalows that he created in the years before World War I.

It is a tribute to the quality of his craft that most of David Dryden’s houses from his early career in San Diego are well-cared for today. Many of them, having survived modernizat ion and change, grace the old suburb and neighborhoods north of Balboa Park, echoing the serene lifestyle of a distant era.

While vacationing in Northern California during the summer of 1946, David Owen Dryden died on the picturesque Pacific coast that nourished his early aesthetic awareness.

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By David Cathers

Collecting American Arts and Crafts furniture in the early 1970s was simple and straightforward. You searched and searched and searched, and when you were lucky enough to find, say, an actual piece of Gustav Stickley furniture, you’d buy it, almost no matter what. Unless you tallied up the expense of driving many thousands of miles year after year, it didn’t cost much money, because in those days almost nobody wanted that furniture. Established antiques dealers looked down their noses at such 20th-century “junk.” By about 1980, though, prices for Gustav Stickley furniture began their inexorable rise, and since the late 1980s they’ve occasionally reached stratospheric heights.

During the first years of the 1970s there was other Arts and Crafts furniture you searched for, too, mostly Roycroft, L. & J.G. Stickley, Stickley Brothers and Limbert. On the East Coast, we combed New York State for the work of Charles Rohlfs. Others hunted for the decorative designs of Frank Lloyd Wright and, on the West Coast, a handful of collectors sought Greene and Greene. Beyond those, a few large-scale makers were known then, for instance the Michigan furniture firms Lifetime and Luce, the Cincinnati-based Shop of the Crafters, New York’s Joseph P. McHugh and a smattering of others.

But beyond these re-emerging names lay a baffling terra incognita of unidentified furniture that collectors, dealers and auction houses came to label “generic mission.” While it’s unlikely that we’ll ever know exactly how much of that furniture was made, for 10 or 15 years it poured out of American factories in huge quantities: A 1908 industry survey, for instance, listed 148 manufacturers specializing in “mission furniture.” Though often it was pretty scrappy stuff, many pieces were well designed, solidly constructed and nicely finished. Clearly there had once been a number of manufacturing firms, their names long lost, that had produced this furniture with considerable care. For many modern-day Arts and Crafts enthusiasts, this vast landscape remained unknown territory until the pioneering husband-and-wife team of Michael Clark and Jill Thomas-Clark ventured into it about 1988.

Michael, a professor of speech and theater at Elmira College in Elmira, N.Y., and Jill, registrar of the Corning Museum of Glass in nearby Corning, began buying American Arts and Crafts when they married and moved to Elmira in 1984-deciding, reasonably, that they should collect something they both liked. Together they have built their collection of Arts and Crafts furniture, lighting and textiles over the last two decades, making most of their finds in small-town auctions scattered across New York State. They’ve also branched out, buying Onondaga Pottery dinnerware made in Syracuse in the early 1900s,

Belgian and American art pottery, Russel Wright dinnerware from the 1930s and ‘40s, Maxfield Parrish prints, and copper and aluminum artware hand wrought by the Avon Coppersmith. The two, with graduate degrees in the arts and art history, became eclectic and knowledgeable collectors, buying what they liked, what they wanted to research and what they could use in their 1905 Arts and Crafts-era home. They have never held on to pieces solely because they are rare or unique. As Jill says, “We have always kept the things we like to live with. We preserve and protect the furniture we collect, but we also use it.” They’e said they would rather have a roomful of Arts and Crafts furniture than “one piece of Gus.”

In their career they’ve mapped a whole territory of previously unknown or little-known New York State Arts and Crafts furniture makers-about 50 so far. These firms- whose work had been relegated to the dim reaches of the “generic mission” universe until the Clarks identified and wrote about them- have become familiar names to Arts and Crafts enthusiasts. Among them are Plail Brothers Chair Company, in Wayland; Majestic Chair Company, in Herkimer; Quaint Art Furniture Company, in Syracuse; H.C. Dexter Chair Company, in Black River; and the Stickley & Brandt Company, in Binghamton. The Clarks have profiled these and other makers in their much read “Best of the Rest” series in Style 1900 magazine. In 1999, at Hamilton College, in Clinton, N.Y., they curated “Imitation and Innovation: An Evaluation of Arts and Crafts Furniture in Central New York,” the first-ever museum exhibition of the furniture once known only as “generic mission.”

All that is not to say that they have ignored Stickley. In 2002 they published The Stickley Brothers, the sole book that charts the personal and professional interactions of Gustav, Leopold, Albert, Charles and John George. They are regulars at the Grove Park Inn conference, where they lead small-group discussions each year. In 2002, they revealed some of their trade secrets in a session on their adventures as “Arts and Crafts Sleuths,” and in 2005 they lectured on a topic close to the heart of everyone at the conference (and certainly many readers of this magazine): “From William Morris to Archie Bunker: The Evolution of the Morris Chair.”

Beyond “Generic Mission”

When they began collecting in earnest, they knew, as art historians and researchers, that they could not long be satisfied with such a vague designation as “generic mission” for the furniture turning up at country auctions. They needed to learn more about this little-explored landscape and its inhabitants.

Perhaps providentially, it was an unusually well designed and beautifully made slat-backed armchair they found at a local auction in 1988 that provided a case study, as it were, for their education.

The maker of the chair (which they snapped up for $35) was unknown. The only clue, and it was a tantalizing one, was a fragmentary oval black paper label on the underside printed with ornate gold script that was no longer legible. It wasn’t until the following year, at the 1989 Grove Park Inn Arts and Crafts Conference, that they found a dealer who had an identical chair with an intact label. It read “J.M. Young & Sons. Camden, New York.” As Michael recalls, “I remember walking into the room at the antique show and looking to my left, and our same chair was on a table. I walked/rushed to it and flipped it up and there was the J.M. Young & Sons oval label.”

J.M. Young furniture was attracting a few collectors by then because it offered a Stickley-like level of craftsmanship at less-than-Stickley prices. But little was known about it. Who was J.M. Young? When did this firm produce Arts and Crafts furniture, and how much had been made? And what had become of the company?

Though at this point they had many questions and few answers, that single, intact paper label was the catalyst for their journey of discovery into the world of “generic mission.”

Discovering J.M. Young

As the first step of their research into J.M. Young, Jill contacted the Historical Society of Camden, N.Y. She immediately experienced one of the incredible strokes of good luck that seem to come most often to dedicated and resourceful researchers: the woman she reached, one of the society’s volunteers, knew the firm well because her husband had been its last owner, and- astonishingly- she still had its surviving records in her possession. Just before the old Young factory was to be demolished in 1979, she and her husband had retrieved as many of the firm’s papers as they could find. They packed them into cardboard boxes and stored them away, hoping that someone, one day, would consider them important.

Offering to research and interpret this trove and ultimately donate it to Winterthur-the preeminent decorative arts museum and library in Winterthur, Delaware-the Clarks brought the boxes home. They had in their hands the firm’s sales journals, letters and furniture photos, as well as facts about construction techniques, woods, stains and finishes. They excitedly pulled from the boxes two small books, more precious to a researcher than gold: shop drawings containing, as they later wrote, “measurements and design changes handwritten by J.M. and [his son] George Young.”

They also retrieved other crucial details of the shop’s Arts and Crafts work, including records showing the dates when specific armchairs, rockers and tables were first made, how many of each model were sold and when they were dropped from production. (Among their discoveries was that the chair that had started it all was a #1916 armchair, made in 1927.) And, intent on gathering the kind of direct, firsthand insights that can’t be gleaned from business papers, they found and talked with the factory’s few surviving workers and befriended J.M.’s grandson, Gordon. Studying those dusty documents and arranging personal interviews gave the Clarks an intimate view of the firm’s day-to-day operations during the years-a surprisingly long span of them, as it turned out-when J.M. Young & Sons made Arts and Crafts furniture.

In 1994 they shared their discoveries with other collectors and scholars in their first book, J.M. Young Arts and Crafts Furniture, still the definitive source of information on the firm’s work. John McIntosh Young, they had learned, was a Scottish immigrant, a woodcarver who opened his furniture manufacturing business in 1872, in Camden, about 30 miles northeast of Syracuse, and began making elaborate Victorian chairs, tables and cabinets, along with more utilitarian, bread-and-butter furniture. His was a small, family-run enterprise, with J.M. and his sons busy each day in their factory alongside a workforce of some 12 to 14 men.

In 1902, the company abruptly changed direction and began producing Arts and Crafts furniture influenced by Gustav Stickley and L. & J.G. Stickley in addition to its original designs. Though it was organized like most other American furniture manufacturers of its day and had an efficient factory equipped with up-to-date machinery, it added an extra dimension of handicraft. As Jill and Michael have written, “In identifying the works … one will find the diversity of the artist craftsman at work. J.M. Young, his sons and collective of craftsmen, working in the spirit of the Arts and Crafts movement, often made design modifications on the spot to create an individualized piece.”

The Clarks’ research revealed surprising and significant facts about J.M. Young. They learned that when Leopold Stickley’s company stopped making Arts and Crafts furniture, about 1922, he at first filled orders from stock on hand, then turned to the Youngs to replicate several of his most popular models and recreate his fumed finishes. In other words, some ÒL. & J.G. Stickley furniture- was in fact made by J.M. Young. Young continued manufacturing these designs on a limited basis into the 1940s-startling evidence that in some instances “mission” furniture making continued much longer than is commonly believed.

Today, Jill and Michael are not just scholarly chroniclers of J.M. Young. They are ardent collectors who’ve filled their home with the firm’s best Arts and Crafts furniture, a unique collection their passion for research has helped to shape.

Who Made All Those Brown Oak Lamps?

The Clark home is also the showplace for another of their passions, a large collection of “mission” table lamps-about 50-that has grown out of their exploration of the mysteries of Arts and Crafts lighting. A common sight in American homes a hundred years ago and frequently seen in collections today, these lamps are mostly straight-lined, made of quartersawn oak stained brown, and have varicolored art glass shades, occasionally leaded but often not. Yet as familiar as these lamps are, their origins have long perplexed collectors. Though some were evidently shop-class projects produced by students and others the efforts of amateur woodworkers, most were clearly factory made.

But what factory? Probably there were several manufacturers, and their names are still obscure. When the Clarks came across a rare 1912 catalog, though, something clicked, and they presented their major discovery at the 2001 Grove Park Inn Conference in a lecture that asked, “Who Made All Those Brown Oak Lamps?” The answer turned out to be-yes-the W.B. Brown Company, of Bluffton, Ind., a manufacturer that touted its wares with the hearty, self-confident slogan, “A Firm with A Mission.”

As Jill and Michael discovered, the forgotten Mr. Brown created light fixtures that were “designed and constructed to blend harmoniously with the total Arts and Crafts environment.” In Style 1900 they wrote that he used “efficient design and production methods” that made his stylish lighting affordable and “easily shipped in great quantities.” Brown’s factory relied on machine power to mass-produce table lamps and ceiling lights, but the products were also marked by handcraftsmanship of its highly skilled staff: “the artistry of individual workers,” as the Clarks wrote, “remains evident in each fixture.” Like J.M. Young and the other Arts and Crafts furniture makers uncovered by their research, Brown helped popularize the movement and brought its “modern” idea of simple design to a large and appreciative middle-class market. A book on Arts and Crafts lighting, focusing on Brown and many other makers, will be the Clarks’ next project.

The Furniture in the Attic

These pioneering scholars and collectors hope in the years ahead to devote even more time to the Arts and Crafts subjects that matter to them most. “We write only what we want to write,” they told me. “It is a labor of love.” Though they live mainly with J.M. Young furniture and W.B. Brown lamps, they also have a “study collection” stored in their attic. I haven’t had a chance to explore that attic, and I’m curious: just what, exactly, is up there? And, whatever it is, who designed and made it? One day, I expect, the Clarks’ ongoing labor of love will produce more answers.

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