2829 Sheridan Pl
Evanston, IL 60201, USA

Edward Kirk Warren House and Garage - National Register of Historic Places

Statement of Significance:

The Edward Kirk Warren House is significant as a Tudor Revival design by a nationally known architect and for its associative value with the accomplishments in manufacturing, religious work, and conservation of its original owner. The Tudor Revival style, based on medieval English types, was popular during the early twentieth century, both for imposing architect-desired suburban manor houses and for more modest examples built by developers for the burgeoning middle class. Some historians have lased the word "Jacobethan" to describe the amalgamation of late Medieval forms and Renaissance details that occurred during the reigns of Queen Elizabeth (1558-1603) and King James (1603-25). Asymmetrical plans and massing and combinations of brick, stucco, and/or stone with Hal timbering are the more common features of the style, exemplified in Evanston principally by the work of architect Ernest A. Mayo. Although stone trim is relatively common in the Tudor Revival, dressed ashlar as the principal building material is rather rare; this is bo0e out by only one other occurrence in Evanston, the Milton H. Wilson house, 1100 Forest Avenue, in the Evanston lakeshore Historic District. Because the exterior of this house designed by Beers Clay & Dutton was drastically altered in 1930 by Mayo 6^yo, who added even more Tudor trappings, but removed the entire front porch, porte-cochere, and octagonal tower and remodeled the gables and windows, the Edward Kirk Warren house is the sole intact example of a dressed ashlar Tudor Revival mansion in Evanston. It is also a masterpiece of William Carbys Zimmerman's residential work in this style. The Edward Kirk Warren house is no. 260* on the Illinoi s Historic Structures Survey of Evanston. Both the house and the garage are designated Evanston landmarks that meet criteria A4 (exhibits a high quality of architectural design without regard to the time built or historic associations) and A5 (exemplifies the work of a nationally or intonationally known architect, or major local architect or master builder).

William Carbys Zimmerman (February 25, 1859-April 11, 1932) studied architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1877 to 1880. After working as a draughtsman in the office of Burnham & Root in 1881, he then spent three years on his own. Zimmerman was first listed as an architect in 1885, working in the office of John J. Flanders. Flanders (June 30, 1847-May 6, 1914), who had worked in the offices of August Bauer, Theodore V. Wadskier, and Edward Burling during the period 1866-74, saw the enormous changes in Chicago wrought by the 1871 fire. Architect of Chicago's first twelve-story building, the J. B. Mailers Building (1884), Flanders took Zimmerman into partnership in September 1886.

Flanders served as Architect of the Chicago Board of Education from 1884 to 1887 and from 1891 to 1892. The partnership of Flanders & Zimmerman, which lasted until 1898, also saw commissions such as the Kimball Building (1892) and the second Mailers Building (1892), but included a number of outstanding residences: the Edward O'Brien house, 26 E. Bellevue, Chicago (1886); Zimmerman's own house, 5621 Blackstone Avenue, Chicago (1886); the C. E. Matthews house, 4830 Kenwood Avenue (1892); the Gustavus Swift house, 4848 Elli s Avenue, Chicago (1897); and the Anna Rew Gross house, 1100 Ridge Avenue, Evanston (1897). From 1898 to 1912 Zimmerman carried on his practice alone and moved his offices to Steinway Hall, the building designed by Dwight H. Perkins in which the Praine School was born. Named Illinoi s State Architect in 1905, a position that he held until 1913, Zirnnerman had a varied practice that included courthouses, park structures, office buildings, hospitals, armories, and several buildings and a campus plan for the University of Illinois. In 1913 he formed a new firm, Zimmerman Saxe & MacBride, taking into partnership his son-in-law Albert Moore Saxe (1888-?) and former employee E, Everett MacBride (7-1968); the following year MacBride was replaced by Zimmerman's son, Ralph Waldo Zimmerman, and the firm was thenceforth known as Zimmerman Saxe & Zimmerman.

Despite the variety of commissions, the firm seems to be remembered as the architect of the Illinoi s State Penitentiary at Joliet (Statesville). In an article in Brick builder (August 1914) Zimmerman, to his credit, advocated the humane treatment of prisoners; he felt that "the acceptable plan must permit an abundance of light and air if the cells are arranged in a circular form, . . . each cell has a window admitting direct sunlight and ai r . . . [because] the side walls of the individual cells radiate toward the center of the light court, where an observation tower is located, from which point it is possible to see the entire interior of every cell , . . . the inmates are under constant observation and escape is practically possible." As the building neared completion in 1922, it was widely viewed as a part of a new, progressive penal system "in which meritorious contract and the development of character upon the part of the prisoner is rewarded by increased freedom and responsibilities that, as time progresses, more and more nearly approximate the conditions under which normal society outside prison walls operates" At the time of Zimmerman's death of a heart attack at the age of 76, the firm was busy on the design and construction of the Pennsylvania State Prison near Philadelphia.

Throughout his career, however, Zimmerman remained in demand as a designer of houses, from Queen Anne and Shingle Style designs during the Flanders & Zimmerman years to Georgian and Tudor Revival designs after the tum of the century, as well as houses that reflected his contact with the Prairie School architects in Steinway Hall. Zimmerman took the opportunity of describing his feelings about architecture in "The Basis of Beauty," in an imagined dialogue between Plato and Socrates, published in Atlantic Monthly (February 1921 Through Socrates he stated, "You know that Architecture is the fine art of building, and arises only when you appeal to the aesthetic sense. Art cannot, in the very nature of things, be subject to laws. If the fine art of Architecture were subject to laws, it would then be the science of Architecture.

For Henry Cunningham Rew, the father of Anna RCM Gross, Zimmerman designed a superbly detailed Georgian Revival house at 1128 Ridge Avenue, Evanston, in 1898. In 1901 Anna Rew Gross commissioned two houses that she built as rental property: the pair of houses at 1100 and 1106 Oak Avenue, Evanston, recall the architecture of colonial New England. In 1925 she asked Zimmerman Saxe Zimmerman to design yet another house for her at 1110 Ridge Avenue, Evanston. Zimmerman's other clients included meat packer Louis Franklin Swift, Lake Forest; limber merchant Charles A. Goodyear, 4840 Greenwood Avenue, Chicago; lumber merchant Frank Burrill Stone, 4940 Woodlawn Avenue, Chicago; lawyer James Henry Barnard, 1325 Astor Street, Chicago; contracting engineer Frank Kryder Hoover, 4841 Woodlawn Avenue, Chicago; contractor and builder Joseph Downey, 6205 N. Sheridan Road, Chicago; the assistant treasurer of Amour & Company, Robert James Dunham, Hubbard Woods; contractor Richard Francis Conway, 6200 N. Sheridan Road, Chicago; lawyer Franklin B. Hussey, Highland Park; contractor and builder William M. Crilly , 5001 Ellis Avenue, Chicago; Charles u. Hill , 1139 Sheridan Road, Evanston; lawyer Roy Owen West, 5633 Woodlawn Avenue, Chicago; Lois Cook Johnson, 4906 Greenwood Avenue, Chicago; and insurance broker David Beaton, 628 Colfax Street, Evanston. Of these residential designs the two most closely related to the Warren house are the Stone house (1908) and the Goodyear house (1902). The Stone house, featured in Architectural Record (November 1909), is arranged around a center entrance and hall; brick with cut stone trim, it turns its narrow side to the street and lacks the grandeur of the Warren house. The Goodyear house, of dressed ashlar masonry, another Tudor Revival design in Zimmerman's oeuvre, has painted gables, label moldings, and strapwork to supply the requisite details, but the house i s an earlier and smaller version that is less complicated in its massing. The Warren house is the Tudor Revival masterpiece of Zimmerman's residential work, designed as it was in 1910 and built 1911-12, at the peak of his career.

The house was designed for the then sixty-three-year-old Edward Kirk Warren, a successful entrepreneur who was well-known for his contributions to the Sunday School movement. While his factory and home were still in Three Oaks, Michigan, Warren opened offices in Chicago in 1896; he and his wife moved to Evanston early in 1912 while awaiting completion of their new home.

Born April 7, 1847, in Ludlow, Vermont, Edward Kirk Warrren was the son of Caroline Clarissa Parsons and the Reverend Waters Warren. He attended school In East Berkshire, Vermont, until 1858 when the family moved to Three Oaks, Michigan, a village founded by Henry Chamberlain, which had been platted in 1857. The Reverend Warren was sent as home missionary to the Congregational Sunday School when it was started the following year. After completing his education and working in Three Oaks, Edward K. Warren organized the general merchandise store of McKie & Warren in 1868. Both he and his partner James McKie had worked in the general store owned by Henry Chamberlain; in 1879 they were able to bity him out. Married November 3, 1867, to Sarah E. Stevens, twelve years later Warren found himself a widower with two small children. In 1880 he married Mary Louise Chamberlain, the daughter of Henry Chamberlain.

As proprietor of a general store Warren listened to the complaints of his customers about how uncomfortable whalebone was. When he was in Chicago buying feather dusters for his sturdy, he noticed that the turkey wing feathers were discarded because they were unsuitable for making dusters. After experimenting about a year, he devised a way to manufacture the wing feathers commercially as a substitute for legbone: "The first thing is to strip the feathers of their plumage; rollers with knives attached split the quills in half, the pith is removed by sandpaper rollers revolving rapidly; then a series of interlocking knives reduce the quills to fiber. In this state the material is fed into a machine which forms it in a strong, fine cord which is at the same time wound with thread. In another machine four of these cords are wound together with thread, in such a manner as to form a flat tape. A sewing machine sets a line of stitching between each cord giving increased strength and elasticity. It is finished for market by being passed between heavy rollers which smooth it out and give a uniform surface." On October 3, 1883, Warren was granted a patent for "Featherbone."