Heritage, Volume 5, Number 1, Spring 1987 Page: 15
50 p. : ill. ; 28 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Menke House. Following the death of
C. A. Menke, the house had to be moved
from its original site. Along with the
moving costs it was donated to the
Festival-Institute by Mr. and Mrs. Theodore
Menke, long-time friends of the
project. Theodore Menke himself was
born in the house in 1903. Restoration
costs were raised by the Festival-Institute
from individuals and foundations across
Texas and the nation.
The Menke House was restored to
serve as a faculty residence and teaching
center during the summer festival and for
conferences and meetings on Festival Hill
throughout the year. The house contains
in the details of its woodwork a rich heritage
of historic artifacts from other buildings.
Upon entering the home through
the original front door with its etched
glass curtain, on the left one sees four
connecting rooms, the Hoblitzelle Parlors.
These rooms are used for teaching,
recital programs, seminars, and meetings.
They can be divided by beautiful, elevenfoot,
floor-to-ceiling cypress doors, which
were originally in the late nineteenth
century Giddings family townhouse in
nearby Brenham. A six-light chandelier
hangs from the twenty-five-foot ceiling in
the fourth parlor. Each of these four parlors,
which form the main teaching studios,
has an intricate inlaid ceiling with
over 3,000 pieces of wood cut and placed
by hand in the Jacobean Revival style.
Geometric designs in stained beaded
board represent the four elements of fire,
water, air, and earth.
The Menke House, in addition to its
adaptability for Festival-Institute programs,
has served to further develop and
refine the skills of the carpenters at Festival
Hill. The front staircase of the
Menke House was built of pine and oak
incorporating Gothic turned spindles,
while turned half-spindles complete the
unusual stairway wainscoting. The curving
staircase leads to a second-floor sitting
room, which features a large inlaid Star of
Texas ceiling and two large Gothic Revival
cabinets, known as Grandfather
and Grandmother, with design details
drawn from an American Gothic Revival
bedroom suite in the Clayton House. Six
bedrooms open off of the upstairs sitting
room, and all feature appropriate period
furnishings from the Festival-Insitute
collections.
The restoration of the Menke House
has greatly benefited the FestivalInstitute by providing spaces for teaching,
rehearsals, concerts, meetings, and accommodations.
The Menke House is also
the Food Service center at Festival Hill.
When the house was on its original site,
it had a dirt-floor basement where family
members stored potatoes and other vegetables
as well as plants during the winter
months. One corer of the basement
housed a generator that provided electricity
for the Menke ranch. When moved to
Festival Hill the basement was replaced
with a concrete slab, concrete walls, and
steel beams. A stone staircase from the
front terrace, as well as an interior oak
staircase from the parlors, leads down
into what is now a paneled dining room
with warmly stained, beaded board walls
and heavily molded wooden ceiling
beams in the Jacobean manner, highlighted
by inlaid panels featuring a Turkish
knot design. Last summer more than
7,500 meals were prepared for students,
faculty, and staff in the full commercial
kitchen. Meals are prepared throughout
the year for activities associated with the
Festival-Institute's concerts, retreats,
tours, conferences, seminars, classes, and
forums.
Close attention to historic designs, including
revival styles such as Gothic and
Jacobean, has prompted the creation of
a unique woodworking laboratory and
training center at Festival Hill. These designs
will all be used in creating the interiors
of the Festival Concert Hall. The
Concert Hall is presently under construction
and when completed will seat nearly
one thousand people on its main floor
and in three levels of box seats. The interiors
will feature hand-turned spindles
and an inlaid, patterned wood ceiling inspired
by the work already done in theJames Dick, American concert pianist and
founder of the Festival-Institute, has guided the
progress of hundreds of students for the past
fifteen years in Round Top, Texas.
Clayton and Menke Houses. Sixteen
solid cypress doors have been carved
for the building, and on July 5, 1986,
the Festival celebrated its 500th public
concert in the hall. The building is in
use even while it is being completed
and houses two particularly outstanding
rooms. The William C. Wiederhold Music
Library features custom cabinets and
bookcases for housing the music, manuscripts,
scores, recordings, and archival
materials. The cabinetry features arched,
glass-fronted cases with antique gold
and amber glass. A wooden ceiling in
a quilted-diamond design was created
for the library and required more than
21,000 saw cuts. Cabinet doors are inlaid
with intricate compass stars and the traditional
Star of Texas.
The Festival-Institute, through the
adaptive use of its historic structures and
their restorations, carefully fosters a growing
interest in the relationship between
music and history, with particular emphasis
on the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. Music and history are
specially joined in the recently completed
David W. Guion Room in the Concert
Hall. David W. Guion was a noted Texasborn
pianist and composer as well as a
discriminating collector of Americana.
His collection of furniture, paintings,
glass, photographs, music, and archival
materials range from the early colonial
period through the late Victorian period.
At the time of his death in 1981 the collection
from his ten-room family home in
Dallas came to the Festival-Institute. The
collection was installed in the Menke
House until a room in the Festival Con15
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Texas Historical Foundation. Heritage, Volume 5, Number 1, Spring 1987, periodical, Spring 1987; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth45438/m1/15/: accessed March 28, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas Historical Foundation.