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Authors: Loren D. Estleman
Tags: Historical
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convictions lead to a fight.
On October 15, 1903, old Abner, with Edward in tow, stormed onto Harlan’s dock, shaking a bony fist and denouncing his second son’s conspiracy to ruin the company Abner had rescued from bankruptcy. In later years Harlan would declare his life’s brightest moment to be the time his father fired him, only to be confronted with a sheaf of letters assigning Harlan power of attorney to dispose of the largest single block of Crownover stock as he saw fit, signed by three members of the board and Edith Hampton Crownover—his mother, to whom Abner had presented ten thousand shares on the occasion of their wedding. Thus began the Harlan Crownover Era, and Crownover Coaches’ period of greatest prosperity.
Abner died in 1918, having spent his final decade and a half in forced retirement, wandering the halls of the River Rouge house he had bought back out of his first year’s dividend as board chairman and muttering to himself about family ingratitude. The sight of the belching chimneys of the Ford Rouge plant outside his windows must have seemed to him the final insult.
Harlan’s wife, the debutante daughter of a failed NewYork banker who had blown out his brains with an English dueling pistol when his books were opened, was barren. To compensate her for this lack, her husband—in his only known act of human compassion—granted her request to construct a house that would reflect the status of one of Detroit’s first families on Lake Shore Drive in Grosse Pointe. He could hardly have realized the size of the Pandora’s Box he had opened. For months, materials arrived at the River Rouge docks by the shipload: slabs of marble from Italy, oak timbers from Germany, ceramic tiles from Mexico, carved mahogany panels from the Brazilian rain forest. From Spain came an entire eleventh-century chapel, dismantled stone by stone and packed in numbered crates for reassembly in the garden. A 1,600-piece chandelier landed from a villa in France, each crystal pendant individually wrapped in blue tissue and placed in boxes lined with shredded newspaper. Tapestries from Berne and rolls of carpet from Tehran and Cairo went directly from the hold of the S.S. Mauritania into a warehouse on East Jefferson to await installation. Behind the materials came the craftsmen: Greek stonemasons; Belgian cabinetmakers; Florentine sculptors; and an army of painters, carpenters, and bricklayers whose foreign chatter drowned out the general din of construction like the excited babble of immigrants at a train station. And above the peaks of the other houses in a community not known for the modesty of its dwellings rose the shining slate gables of Xanadu, sheltering thirty-six thousand square feet on a twelve-acre lot studded with stately oaks that had witnessed Chief Pontiac’s siege in 1763.
No sooner was the manor house at The Oaks completed, in 1922, than the Crownovers set sail for Europe. While Harlan met with financiers and industrialists in London, Paris, Weimar, and Rome, wife Cornelia descended upon the museums and auction houses. Back home, servants worked far into the night opening and unpacking crates she had shipped. Into the foyer they carried a marble bust by Michelangelo of a prosperous Venetian merchant; over the arch in the Great Hall they hoisted an eleven-by-twenty-foot Tintoretto of Babylonian maids bathing in a spring, encased in a bronze frame weighing half a ton; along the walls in the parlor they arranged the only known complete set of Louis Quatorze chairs outside the palace at Versailles; and from the west wing to the east, starting at the rooftop observatory and ending in the vast flagged basement, maids in white aprons and footmen in breeches and leggings filled shelves with porcelain vases from Pompeii, jeweled masks from Constantinople, Athenian reliefs, Gothic shields, Viennese miniatures, Portuguese lace, and a curious jewelry box made of native Corsican woods, said to have been a gift to
On October 15, 1903, old Abner, with Edward in tow, stormed onto Harlan’s dock, shaking a bony fist and denouncing his second son’s conspiracy to ruin the company Abner had rescued from bankruptcy. In later years Harlan would declare his life’s brightest moment to be the time his father fired him, only to be confronted with a sheaf of letters assigning Harlan power of attorney to dispose of the largest single block of Crownover stock as he saw fit, signed by three members of the board and Edith Hampton Crownover—his mother, to whom Abner had presented ten thousand shares on the occasion of their wedding. Thus began the Harlan Crownover Era, and Crownover Coaches’ period of greatest prosperity.
Abner died in 1918, having spent his final decade and a half in forced retirement, wandering the halls of the River Rouge house he had bought back out of his first year’s dividend as board chairman and muttering to himself about family ingratitude. The sight of the belching chimneys of the Ford Rouge plant outside his windows must have seemed to him the final insult.
Harlan’s wife, the debutante daughter of a failed NewYork banker who had blown out his brains with an English dueling pistol when his books were opened, was barren. To compensate her for this lack, her husband—in his only known act of human compassion—granted her request to construct a house that would reflect the status of one of Detroit’s first families on Lake Shore Drive in Grosse Pointe. He could hardly have realized the size of the Pandora’s Box he had opened. For months, materials arrived at the River Rouge docks by the shipload: slabs of marble from Italy, oak timbers from Germany, ceramic tiles from Mexico, carved mahogany panels from the Brazilian rain forest. From Spain came an entire eleventh-century chapel, dismantled stone by stone and packed in numbered crates for reassembly in the garden. A 1,600-piece chandelier landed from a villa in France, each crystal pendant individually wrapped in blue tissue and placed in boxes lined with shredded newspaper. Tapestries from Berne and rolls of carpet from Tehran and Cairo went directly from the hold of the S.S. Mauritania into a warehouse on East Jefferson to await installation. Behind the materials came the craftsmen: Greek stonemasons; Belgian cabinetmakers; Florentine sculptors; and an army of painters, carpenters, and bricklayers whose foreign chatter drowned out the general din of construction like the excited babble of immigrants at a train station. And above the peaks of the other houses in a community not known for the modesty of its dwellings rose the shining slate gables of Xanadu, sheltering thirty-six thousand square feet on a twelve-acre lot studded with stately oaks that had witnessed Chief Pontiac’s siege in 1763.
No sooner was the manor house at The Oaks completed, in 1922, than the Crownovers set sail for Europe. While Harlan met with financiers and industrialists in London, Paris, Weimar, and Rome, wife Cornelia descended upon the museums and auction houses. Back home, servants worked far into the night opening and unpacking crates she had shipped. Into the foyer they carried a marble bust by Michelangelo of a prosperous Venetian merchant; over the arch in the Great Hall they hoisted an eleven-by-twenty-foot Tintoretto of Babylonian maids bathing in a spring, encased in a bronze frame weighing half a ton; along the walls in the parlor they arranged the only known complete set of Louis Quatorze chairs outside the palace at Versailles; and from the west wing to the east, starting at the rooftop observatory and ending in the vast flagged basement, maids in white aprons and footmen in breeches and leggings filled shelves with porcelain vases from Pompeii, jeweled masks from Constantinople, Athenian reliefs, Gothic shields, Viennese miniatures, Portuguese lace, and a curious jewelry box made of native Corsican woods, said to have been a gift to
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