Connections: A Florida Masterpiece, Georgia Marble and a Small- Town Gem

On a recent trip to Desoto Falls State Park in northwest Georgia, we opted for a “trail talk” by a volunteer who did a great job of explaining the local geology to all four of us in his audience. The other couple peaked our interest when they mentioned that they volunteered at Bok Tower in Mountain Lake, Florida. After the lecture we connected and chatted about the tower and the the fact that it was built out of Georgia Marble. We live in Tate, Georgia where the great quarry of the Georgia Marble Company is located. Georgia marble is famous for its hardness and durability. It was used in the Lincoln Memorial and many other public monuments.

All this reminded me that I had been given a copy of Edward W. Bok’s America’s Taj Mahal: The Singing Tower of Florida, Descriptive Sketches by Milton B. Medary, Architect, and Lee Lawrie, Sculptor Originally published by Scribner’s and reprinted by the Georgia Marble Company, n.d. but likely in1929 or the early 1930’s. The tower is an established “must see” for visitors to central Florida so check out their website online. The two-hundred foot tall tower is home to a great carillon and is the focal point of a wonderful garden -all open to the public. Decorating the building are sculptural features by Lee Lawree.

I am a (very) amature sculptor and enjoy sculpture as you will have seen in my articles about Daniel Chester French and the Oglethorpe statue in Savannah and Saint-Gauden’s sculpture honoring the 54th US Colored Troops at Boston Common. Bok Tower is also connected to another once-famous but now largely forgotten sculptor, Lee Lawree. Truthfully, the names of the great sculptors are unknown to the general public. When lecturing I make it a practice to ask if anyone can recall the name of a single sculptor. Of course Rodin’s name pops up, but Americans do not recall the great sculptors America has produced, even though we can often identify one or more of their works -French’s statue of Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial, or Saint Gaudens’ “Diana” for example.

Lawree practiced in a very specialized field sometimes referred to as “architectural sculpture.” This implies he designed decorative elements that were part of the great skyscrapers of New York and other large cities. This sort of work is especially associated with the Art Deco movement and one best known remaining work in this style is Lawree’s “Atlas” at the Rockefeller Center in New York. My point in relating this is that the Bok Tower is not just a tower. It is a work of fine art -and it reflects the era in which it was built, when Art Deco was all the rage. Everything from automobiles, to refrigerators and airplanes were wrapped in this style, a style that dominated the 1930’s and 1940’s. And, it was durable and often indistinguishable from the later style known as Art Moderne.

Much of Lawree’s work was done in collaboration with the architects at Cram and Ferguson. Ralph Adams Cram was a diehard Gothics man and practiced with little formal training. Lawree and Cram seemed to have begun collaborating while both were “into” the Gothic style, which was widely thought to be the ideal style for churches and colleges in the early twentieth century -and even much later. (“Collegiate Gothic”). Cram is perhaps best known for his redesign of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y.: and his firm redesigned St. John the Divine in New York, transforming its appearance to Gothic.

For many years I attended one of the Episcopal Church’s designed by Cram, Calvary Church, Americus. The design was donated by Cram when he and a vacationing clergyman from Americus met during their summer vacations in Maine. I have written elsewhere on this site about how lovely Calvary Church is, but below is another view of this strikingly beautiful church located in southwest Georgia.