Bragdon family papers

George Chandler Bragdon, Claude Bragdon's father, was born April 29, 1832 at "Chestnut Hill," a well-known station on the Underground Railroad near Lake Ontario in Richland, New York. After attending Union College, he taught briefly before embarking on a career as a newspaperman. He edited a succession of newspapers across upstate New York before he and his family settled in Rochester in 1884. An accomplished poet, ardent Emersonian, and early Theosophist, G.C. Bragdon published a volume of verse, Undergrowth (1895), various pamphlets on New York State, and edited Notable Men of Rochester and Vicinity (1902). He died August 7, 1910.

Katherine Elmina Shipherd was born December 30, 1837 in Walton, New York to Catherine Schermerhorn, a temperance and women's rights advocate, and Fayette Shipherd, a Congregationalist minister and abolitionist. Like the Bragdon's Oswego County home, Fayette Shipherd's house was a station on the Underground Railroad. In 1858, Shipherd moved his family to Ohio where his younger brother John J. Shipherd had been a founder of Oberlin College. Katherine Shipherd taught at Pulaski Seminary in Oswego County, New York prior to her marriage to George C. Bragdon on March 22, 1860. The couple had two children, May (1865-1947) and Claude Fayette (1866-1946). Katherine Bragdon died September 6, 1920.

Claude Fayette Bragdon was born at the Shipherd family home in Oberlin, Ohio on August 1, 1866. His family moved often until shortly after Bragdon and his sister graduated from Oswego High School in 1884 and they settled in Rochester. Bragdon immediately began work as a draftsman for a series of Rochester architects, most notably Charles Ellis, for whom he worked 1886-1889. During this period Bragdon helped to organize the Rochester Architectural Sketch Club and entered numerous architectural competitions, often winning a top prize. In January 1890, Bragdon struck out for New York where he was briefly employed by Bruce Price before returning upstate for a job with the Buffalo firm of Green & Wicks. He returned to Rochester in 1891 to go into partnership with Edwin S. Gordon and William H. Orchard (Gordon, Bragdon and Orchard). Among the firm's most notable projects were competition designs for a New York City Hall and a re-design of Boston's Copley Square, as well as several railroad stations and a commission for a new building for the Rochester Atheneum and Mechanics Institute.

Following his firm's dissolution in 1895, Bragdon went to England, France, and Italy for the summer. Upon his return, he wrote and lectured on his travel experience and on poster art while producing a substantial body of graphic design work for publishers, civic groups, and others. During the 1890s, Bragdon's competition entries and articles, e.g. a series on Colonial architecture in the American Architect and Building News, earned him notice in national architectural circles. His 1901 lecture to the Architectural League of America, "Mysticism and Architecture," further enhanced his rising status. In January 1897, J. Con Hillman joined Bragdon and his young draftsman James Arnold in practice; the partnership was amicably dissolved in 1904. The firm's important commissions included residences for Nathan Stein (1897) and other members of Rochester society, an addition to the Livingston County Courthouse (1898), and with J. Foster Warner, the Otis Arch (1900).

On November 3, 1902 Bragdon married Charlotte Wilkinson of Syracuse after a two-year engagement. The granddaughter of Samuel Joseph May, a Unitarian minister, abolitionist, and influential reformer, Charlotte graduated from Smith College in 1894 and taught there while obtaining a Master's degree in sociology. After college, she worked at the Hartley House settlement in New York City, served as Secretary and then President of the National League of Women Workers, and lobbied in Albany for legislation to protect women workers. The pair moved into a house of Bragdon's design and had two sons, Henry (1906) and Chandler (1907). Charlotte died on December 15, 1907 shortly after childbirth.

At the time of Charlotte's death, Bragdon was designing the First Universalist Church in Rochester along with several residences. By the following spring, he was immersed in Theosophy and soon founded the Genesee Lodge of the Theosophical Society and his Manas Press, through which he published Theosophical tracts and The Beautiful Necessity (1910), Man the Square (1912), A Primer of Higher Space (1913) and other works. By the end of 1909 he had the biggest and most important commission of his architectural career, a Rochester station for the New York Central Railroad. Other important projects of the 1910s were the Canandaigua Historical Building, the Maplewood Branch of the YMCA, Bevier Building, Police Precinct buildings, Chamber of Commerce, and a garden for George Eastman.

During the three years of the New York Central Railroad Station's construction, Bragdon began writing on hyperspace and met the actor Walter Hampden and Eugenie Julier Macaulay, a widow whom he married July 8, 1913. A mystic who received psychic communications recorded by "automatic writing," Eugenie died November 6, 1920.

In 1915, Bragdon introduced his new system of ornament, which was based upon four-dimensional geometry, in his Scammon lectures at the Art Institute of Chicago and in Projective Ornament. He integrated this ornament in several of his built works, including the Chamber of Commerce and Central YMCA (1917), and the Hunter Street Bridge near Toronto (1918). At the same time, Bragdon was working with the community singing movement as "master of light" for a series of Song and Light festivals in Rochester, New York's Central Park, and other locations. Using projective ornament and color theory, he created complex installations marrying choral music to colored light. These festivals, with stage sets framed by thousands of lanterns and screens fashioned like stained glass windows, were witnessed by audiences of up to 60,000. For the next thirty years, Bragdon explored various means of animating color and light, including "color organs" that linked chromatic and musical scales with electricity to play four-dimensional colored light forms.

Following the death of his second wife in 1920, Bragdon moved to New York. In 1919, Bragdon had designed Walter Hampden's Hamlet, beginning nearly two decades of collaboration in the theater. A pioneer in New Stagecraft, Bragdon's theater designs used "invisible sets," bold color, and inventive lighting. Bragdon formally closed his architectural practice and the Manas Press in 1923, let his Rochester house to his sister May and, in 1924, moved into Manhattan's new high-rise Shelton Hotel, where he lived for the rest of his life. In his final decades, Bragdon continued to publish and lecture on a broad range of topics: architecture, theater, film, color, hyperspace, art, yoga, feminism, and the occult. He built concrete bridges, pursued mobile color, designed book jackets and dance sets, and exhibited stage designs and paintings. Claude Bragdon died at home on September 17, 1946.

May Bragdon (1865-1947), the sister of Claude Bragdon, was born May 16, 1865 in Adams, New York. She went to work at Warner's Safe Cure Company in Rochester in 1885, studied stenography and typing, and became secretary to architect James G. Cutler in 1889. In 1910, she left Cutler's to work as office manager for her brother's architectural practice and his Manas Press. In 1918, economic pressures led Bragdon to reduce his office staff, and May found work with the Employment Office of the Combined Metal Trades (1918-1919), the Clothiers' Exchange and, in 1924, the Gannett Publishing Company, where she remained until her retirement in 1938. May Bragdon died March 21, 1947.

Henry Wilkinson Bragdon, Claude Bragdon's eldest son, was born September 6, 1906. He attended Harvard University (B.A. 1928) and Trinity College, Cambridge. He taught history at Brooks School in North Andover, Massachusetts (1930-1945) and Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire until his retirement in 1974. Henry W. Bragdon was the author of The Story of a Free People, Woodrow Wilson: the Academic Years, History of a Free Nation, and other works. He and his first wife Katherine Fowler had two sons, David (1932-1998) and Peter (1936- ). His second wife was Jane Hamlin. Henry W. Bragdon died March 15, 1980.

Chandler Bragdon, Claude Bragdon's younger son, was born December 15, 1907. He attended Princeton University and Peterhouse College, Cambridge, and received a Ph.D. from the University of Rochester in 1961. He was History Master at Connecticut's Kent School (1929-30), History Professor at the University of Idaho (1939-44) and the State University College, Plattsburg (1946-65). Chandler and his first wife Elizabeth Fowler had one son, Sam (1943-1983). In 1954, two years after the death of his first wife, Chandler married Sue Roberts Rose. Chandler Bragdon died January 3, 1969.