Granddaughter Returns to Graycliff Estate

Invited to view progress of property's restoration

By TOM BUCKHAM
News Staff Reporter
8/17/2005

During her visit to a chapel-free Graycliff on Tuesday, Margaret Foster, the granddaughter of Darwin D. and Isabel Martin, stands next to a photograph of her as a child, with her grandparents and Darwin, her brother.

From the long stone terrace in front of Graycliff, Margaret Foster took in a breathtaking view through the windows flanking the great room and beyond to Lake Erie, sparkling in the golden sunlight of mid-August.

Tuesday was the first time the granddaughter of Darwin D. and Isabel Martin had seen that unimpeded panorama since a Catholic brotherhood bought the family's abandoned lakeshore estate in the late 1950s - and planted a brick-walled chapel squarely in the middle of the main house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

The Piarist priests were educators, not aesthetes.

"I am so happy to see the chapel gone. It changed the whole atmosphere of the house," said Foster, 75, who moved from Buffalo seven years ago after retiring as an Episcopal Church deacon.

Unfortunately, Foster, from Sugarland, Texas, could not enter the boarded-up Foster House, the Graycliff outbuilding where she spent idyllic summers with her parents and younger brother, Darwin, before the family fell on hard times in the 1940s.

Restoration of the two-story Foster House was to have begun this summer but has been delayed. It is the next step in the continuing multimillion-dollar restoration of the eight-acre estate on Old Lake Shore Road in Derby.

Work is now expected to start in October, said Reine Hauser, executive director.

Graycliff Conservancy, the nonprofit volunteer group leading the project, invited Foster to view the progress in order to pick her brain for historical facts, Hauser said.

"It's one thing to talk to her over the phone in Texas and another to talk to her here, where her memories are revived," Hauser said.

Let there be no doubt that Foster's memory is eminently intact.

Pointing to the Graycliff veranda, she said she remembered a shady spot where she and her mother, Dorothy Martin Foster, "used to sit in the afternoon and make flower arrangements for the whole house."

Indoors, she remembered playing with neighborhood children, who because of the distance between homes sometimes came to the Martin summer house for mini-camps. She talked about her mother's rose garden near the "heat house," and about the toolshed used by the gardener - a fellow by the name of Lawrence Sprague.

"Snakes would come up and sun themselves on the stones," she said. "I wasn't afraid of them at all."

The family's financial troubles, which forced them to abandon Graycliff in 1945, never infringed on her sense of well-being, Foster said.

"I did not sense that anything was different. That was from the lack of importance that money played as far as our family values and lifestyle."

The chauffeur and gardener had been let go, and in the end there was no money to buy gasoline for the car ride from Buffalo - or even for the lawnmower, "but that didn't make a difference in anyone's personality," she said.

One of Foster's few regrets is her decision years ago to part with keepsakes from the Martins' heyday, including curtains and a Wright-designed chair, which she donated to Goodwill.

"I didn't know Frank Lloyd Wright was going to be such an interesting man," she said.