Mendota County Park - Taliesin Spring Green, Wisconsin 8/1 - 8/4/2021 Travel Tour

                                        From: casarollnotes.blogspot.com                                                                                                                Tim and Linda Bunyan

We stay at the sizable Mendota County Park in Middleton, Wisconsin.  It is beautifully located on Lake Mendota with resort-style amenities.  It has 30-unit electric reservable RV  sites.There is a swimming area and a launch 

for small boats and canoes.  This is our home from which we visit Taliesin, Frank Lloyd Wright's family country estate where he spent much of his childhood.

We stop for gas for our drive from Middleton to Taliesin in Spring Green, Wisconsin.

The region was formed in Jones Valley, the Wisconsin River valley in an unusually hilly landscape with carved river valleys.

The valley was originally settled by Wells immigrant Frank Lloyd Wright's maternal grandfather, Richard Lloyd Jones and his family invited Wright to work during summers as a farmhand.

Wright's aunts began a co-educational school, the Hillside Home School, and let Wright design the building in the Prairie Style.  This was Wright's first independent commission.

Wright developed a corn and fruit farm on the property 

The Hillside School was built with only local building materials.

Typical of a Prairie School design the house was low, wide and snug into the hillside.

A small wing jutts out of the broad section.

Frank Lloyd Wright-designed floor lamp.

The Prairie School period ended after 1914

He chose yellow limestone from a quarry of outcropping ledges on a nearby hill.  The local farmers helped Wright move the stone up the Taliesin hill.  

Architectural historian Neil Levine compared Taliesin to the works of art of Pablo Picasso.

In final form, the Taliesin building measured 37,000 square feet.  The property combines 

2 acres, on 600 acres of land.

The Taliesin Fellowship, a formal school, is an educational institution for architecture.

Frank Lloyd Wright's interior designs remain relevant today.

The Taliesin estate is listed in the National Register of Historic Places and Landmarks and is currently a World Heritage Site with special worldwide significance.  A special place with an entire environment where architecture and nature form a harmonious whole.

We leave the country behind to catch the great capital city

 Madison, Wisconsin.

Madison is home to a vibrant cultural scene.  Music festivals include fly-pasts by air force jets.

One of the best college towns in the country.  It ranks fifth of best livability.

The comely Wisconsin State Capitol sits on an isthmus between lakes Mendota and Monona.

The Frank Lloyd Wright influence is obvious in this downtown building

Along the State Trail a lakefront convention center designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

This is a beautiful land and many cheese-selling endeavors.  To our delight, we discovered Squeaky Cheese Curds 

as we stopped at the roadside Carr Valley Cheese

 between Taliesin and Madison, Wisconsin.

We must move on to the City of Chicago, Illinois!