the polk clan: kentucky's contribution to the early development of modern architecture

Kentucky Historical Society

THE POLK CLAN: KENTUCKY'S CONTRIBUTION TO THE EARLY DEVELOPMENT OF MODERNARCHITECTUREAuthor(s): James HancockSource: The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, Vol. 67, No. 3 (July, 1969), pp. 232-236Published by: Kentucky Historical SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23376918 .

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THE POLK CLAN

KENTUCKTS CONTRIBUTION TO THE EARLY DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ARCHITECTURE

By James Hancock

O OMETIME AROUND 1886 a lone, indefatigable, dapper ^ and diminutive dynamo named Willis Jefferson Polk first hit San Francisco. Some said that his coming marked the Architectural Renaissance of San Francisco.1

San Francisco was growing from a mining camp into a

city, awakening to possibilities and opportunities not dreamt of before the discovery of gold. Polk himself said that he arrived "just about the time that architecture did."2

Experienced beyond his nineteen years, the young man from Kentucky was searching for the success his vanity craved.

The story of how he found this success and became known by such titles as: "The Man Who Rebuilt San Francisco," and

"The Father of the California Bungalow," is full of humour,

pathos, and unfulfilled dreams. Willis Polk was to say in later life that he came to San

Francisco only because he was restless. Probably more ac

curate, however, is the assumption that he did so because

things were not so easy, financially, with the folks back home.

This young man, the product of generations of Kentucky architects, certainly could never have remembered when things were easy for his family.

The Civil War had all but wiped out the Frankfort family's resources. The father, Willis Webb Polk, was also an architect, but his practice was slow after the war, partly because of an

illness contracted by him as a direct result of it.

"James Hancock is a practicing San Francisco architect and member

of both the American Institute of Architects and the Society of Architectural

Historians. 1 Henry F. Withey and Elsie Rathburn, Biographical Dictionary of

American Architects, Deceased (Los Angeles: New Age, 1956). 2 Harold Kirker, California's Architectural Frontier: Style and Tradition

in the Nineteenth Century (San Marino: Huntington, 1960), 115,

232



233 THE POLK CLAN

The elder Willis Polks first wife, the former Parthenia Frances Dye, had died in 1866 in Weston, Missouri, leaving behind their one son, William Chinn Polk, then six years old. Willis Webb Polk married again on January 1, 1867, the widow Endemial Josephine Burch, nee Drane, of Kentucky, the

daughter of Reverend J. T. Drane, a noted Baptist preacher, and the niece of Judge Drane of Frankfort.3

Willis Jefferson Polk was born to this marriage October 3, 1867, in Frankfort, Kentucky.

The Polks were descended from Robert Bruce Polk who received a grant of land in Maryland in 1687. According to

Appleton's Cyclopaedia of American Biography,4 their name was originally spelled "Pollack" when the first emigrant of the

family came over from Ireland. They were also said to be re lated to Tames Knox Polk, eleventh president of the United States.

Willis Webb Polk (the younger Willis' father) was himself born May 12, 1838, in Scott County, Kentucky, the fifth child of Daniel and Sally Ann Tanner Polk. His grandparents (young Willis' great-grandparents) were Ephraim III and Rhoda Ann Polk. After the death of his wife, Sally Ann Tanner Polk, Daniel Polk moved, with his children, in 1853, to a farm on the

Lawrenceburg Pike near Frankfort, where he built a saw and grist mill and continued to pursue his architectural career.

It was the Civil War which was primarily responsible for

changing the peaceful farm life of the Polk family. Willis Webb Polk (who was later to become young Willis' father), was a staunch Southerner who chose to follow the Stars and

Bars, enlisting in a company of the Missouri State Guard which fought with General Sterling Price at the Battle of

Lexington where Colonel Mulligan's Federals surrendered. Later he transferred to the regular Confederate service, be

coming the Second Sergeant of Company K, Third Missouri Volunteers. After the war and his second marriage, the elder Willis Polk tried to practice architecture in Lexington, Frank

fort, Louisville, and St. Louis, among other places, but was

3 William Harrison Polk, Polk Family and Kinsmen (Louisville, Ky.: Press of Bradley and Gilbert Company, 1912), 583.

4 Appleton's Cyclopaedia of American Biography (New York: D. Apple

ton and Company, 1888), V, 56,



234 BEGISTER OF THE KENTUCKY HISTORICAL SOCIETY

held back by a form of rheumatism suffered as a result of

long nights spent in wet marshes and trenches during the war.

The family moved to St. Louis about 1873 when little Willis was but six-and-a-half years old. Mrs. Polk ran a

boarding house and Mr. Polk found work as a stair builder, but things were still so tight that the parents were forced to

put their son out to work as a newsboy. As a result, he was

never able to receive any formal education whatsoever. His

knowledge was all given to him by his father who tutored him

while the family sat around the kitchen stove in the evenings. Having had both a father and a grandfather who were

architects, the boy's subsequent choice of profession seems

only natural. It was just as natural that Willis younger brother, Daniel

II, born May 25, 1869, should have been an architect also. Dan's specialty was classic work and interior design. There are some old-timers who say that he might have been the

better architect. Dan was a talented pen and ink man whose

drawings were frequently featured in architectural magazines. Dan Polk married Miss Alice Grimm, of Topton, Pennsylvania, on Christmas Day, 1897, in Brooklyn. He died in New York

City in 1909. Daniel and Alice Grimm Polk had a daughter, Endemial.

Another Endemial Polk had already been bom to Willis Webb and Endemial Josephine Polk: young Willis Jefferson's and Daniel's sister, "Endie," bom November 15, 1872. "Endie" was an excellent singer. She went abroad to study music and died in Paris shortly before her scheduled operatic debut, on

May 20, 1890, of an acute appendicitis attack. Willis Jefferson Polk's older half-brother, William Chinn

Polk remained in Weston, Missouri, as bookkeeper and cashier

of the local bank. He married, September 16, 1891, Miss

Minnie Hillix, and to them was born a daughter who died in

infancy. The one sibling (besides his half-brother) to survive Willis

Jefferson Polk was his sister Daisy, born April 23, 1874, who

became a French Countess upon her marriage to Cavalry Gen

eral Marie-Joseph Louis Robert de Buyer, whom she married

in 1917, in Vitrimont, France.



THE POLK CLAN 235

Daisy had gone to France at the close of World War I in the company of some other San Francisco society ladies to help with the rebuilding of the ruined country. She was working on reconstruction of the village of Vitrimont when, one day, her car broke down and she met her future husband as he stopped to assist her. They were married in the village church, the first

building she had restored, and she became the Countess de

Buyer-Mimeure. As Willis Polk the younger became a teen-ager, he began

to achieve some of the success for which he was to search all his life. During his short life, he had worked at every job he

oould find, at tasks including: "hat boy," "water boy" for

construction crews, "handy boy," "sticker" for a planing mill,

"cutting-ticket man," bench hand, estimator, stone mason, and

carpenter. At fourteen he was apprenticed to an architect and

a year later, at age fifteen, he obtained his first architectural

contract by winning a competition for the design of a six-room

schoolhouse at Hope, Arkansas, a suburb of Little Rock.

At nineteen he found his way to California and the rest

of his family soon followed. His father's health had improved somewhat by then, and the two sons, Willis and Daniel, to

gether with the elder Willis Polk opened a practice in San

Francisco, calling their firm Polk and Polk.

There were hard times occasionally thereafter. On the

whole, the younger Willis Polk made steady progress, however,

culminating in an alliance, after the great fire and earthquake in San Francisco of April, 1906, with the man who was then the

monarch and titan of the American architectural community, the eminent Daniel Hudson Burnham of Chicago. Daniel Burnham had great respect for young Polk who had worked for him in Chicago for four years from 1900 until 1904. He

opened a branch office in San Francisco to help with rebuilding the ruined city and put his former protege in charge. This con

nection made Polk the leading architect of the city. In 1911

the office was turned over to Polk as his own and he practiced until his death in 1924.

Among Polks accomplishments was the rebuilding of

some of San Francisco's most historic "skyscrapers" gutted

during the 1906 fire: the de Young Building, the Claus



236 REGISTER OF THE KENTUCKY HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Spreckels Building, and the Mills Building; the restoration of

Mission Dolores, which showed great erudition and infinite

patience; the design of some of the area's most palatial estates such as Harriet Pullman's "Caroland's," the Crocker estate called "Uplands," the present home of shipping heiress Lurline

Matson Roth, built originally for William B. Bourn, called

riloli, and iJeaulieu, m Cupertino; tne transformation or

tlie fire-gutted house of Bonanza silver-king James Clair

Flood into the ultraexclusive Pacific Union men's club head

quarters; he designed many new, notable "skyscrapers" for

San Francisco, Indianapolis, Spokane, Chicago, Sacramento, and other cities; he brought new beauty to previously dull

utility facilities such as railway stations, gas and electric

company substations, water works, etc., throughout Northern

California; he planned, coordinated, and executed the Panama

Pacific International Exposition held in 1915-1918 in San

Francisco; and built the world's first major urban building with

a glass curtain-wall, the Hallidie Building in San Francisco.

More than anything else he designed, this structure came to

be thought of as a most significant pioneering expression in

the development of modem architecture, so much so that for

years a picture of it has hung in a place of honor in the halls

of the Harvard School of Design. Willis Polk, the uneducated genius, in his lifetime hob

nobbed with the greats, with millionaires, cabinet ministers,

governors, university presidents, royalty, and social Hons, and yet he was well known for his great generosity to young fellow artists. His obituary in one San Francisco newspaper began: "San Francisco's master builder is dead. . .

Yet, even now, more than four decades after his death, he is still revered, talked and written about, wherever his

works stand.



the polk clan: kentucky's contribution to the early development of modern architecture

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