Oral History Interview Robert L. Douglas

Bob: Yes, when I was a youngster, maybe eight or nine years old I lived on Kenwood Hill, in fact, I spent most of my life on Kenwood Hill and before the hill was developed there were just loads of hillsides, [one] with an exposed top and we referred to it as Devil’s Backbone because it had a lot of Indian arrow heads, and relics and fossils. So all the kids in the neighborhood would run up on top of the hill and play.

I suppose that’s what I did one day [when] I came over the top of the hill to look at a cave immediately above the cabins. We all spotted the little Loomhouse [cabins] and I didn’t know what they were at that time. And I hadn’t known of Lou Tate, although later, I found out that my parents knew her very well and what she’d been doing for a number of years.

And so I came down to the cabins and I think all of us were invited to do a little loom lesson. I don’t [remember] what was going on or what day of the week it was, but it all started at that point. That was my first impression of Lou Tate and of the little loom houses. And later on I went back and told my parents about it and they said that, of course, she was well known and it was interesting that [I] had met her this way.

I’m sure I was fascinated with the cabins. It was a new experience for me; coming upon a cabin with someone living in it. And, of course, Lou Tate always, to me, looked like a pioneer lady; the way she cropped her hair, she wore a smock type dress, and dressed very plainly, very unusual for me.

I was really taken by the whole experience. That was my first encounter. And I suppose I had brief encounters. I took weaving lessons that following summer and did some placemats that I still have; did a few things like that. My sisters took weaving, as well. And then later on I went off to school and got involved in other things and moved out of state. So I was apart from the Loomhouse for maybe fifteen years while I was living out of state and going to school.

So my first weaving with Lou Tate was in 1950, or round about that time. Later on, when I graduated from high school and went away to the university, to study architecture, I was away from Kentucky for about fifteen years living in other places and doing some traveling.

It wasn’t until the early seventies, 1971, when I came back to Kentucky, not knowing whether I would stay or not., that I encountered Lou Tate at the Kentucky State Fair. She had an exhibit there; demonstration as she did for many years on weaving on textiles, and coverlets, and so forth, and I just accidentally ran in to her and she asked me if I could help her on the cabins--she knew my architecture background.. And innocently enough, I said I would and so I’ve been working steadily on that since about 1971, trying to do what I can for the cabins.

I suppose the real work, my part of the work, was less in weaving and more in what to do with the buildings, what to do with the cabins, to stabilize and to secure them because they were in very bad shape. The development of the hillside in the twenty years or so since I’d first met her had caused a lot of erosion and damage and water [damage was] deteriorating the upper two cabins: Tophouse and Wisteria cabins.

And she was concerned about what to do about them and not having money to restore the buildings or to protect them against the erosion, so she asked me to become involved and that’s when I approached the city and a number of departments in the city to try to get them to prevent the erosion and the minor mud slides that were happening immediately above the cabins.

And I suppose in about 1972 or ’73 I learned of the community development agency and the possibility of money being provided to restore the buildings, and I also thought, too, the desires she expressed to me and through talking to others she knew over the years, that what she really wanted was to be designated a landmark and have the cabins put on the National Register or the Kentucky Landmark. And so, that’s the work that I began in the early seventies.

And it wasn’t until late in June--I think, June 30 of 1975, after several years of pulling together historic data and information from Lou Tate, from records, that we were designated on June 30, 1975 to the National Register of Historic Places.

That, to me, was a great step forward. It allowed us to apply for grant money to restore the cabins. We did apply and we were awarded a twenty thousand dollar grant. But over the next year or so, a number of difficulties arose: Lou Tate’s health, her emotional condition concerning the on-going of her work and the frustration with her cabins, interfered with our ability to complete that project. So we lost the grant and later on we continued to work to seek funds from another source.

In the interim, after the designation of the Little Loomhouse to the National Register, we, in effect, took that information that we’d worked on for several years and parlayed that into a designation as Kentucky Landmark and a year later, Louisville Landmark in April of 1776. So after many, many years of worry about what would happen to the cabins and whether or not the work on the cabins would be recognized, it all came together in a very short span of time. So in about a year and a half, the cabins were designated for National, State, and Local Landmark.

And this was, I think, a fortunate thing, due Lou Tate’s health, since she died just a few years later, but we were able to, at least, do that much for her; it made her feel very good.

Oddly enough, the National Register appealed to me because I thought that was the leverage we’d use to get gain the other designations and it did work. But for her, the Kentucky Landmark was the important one. And she had often been called the first lady of folk art in Kentucky and she liked that. She also referred to herself as a living legend and so having the Kentucky designation was more important to her than the national or the local designation so it was good we were able to do that for her during that time..

After the various designations, the Kentucky Weavers and the Loomhouse Friends continued to patch the cabins back together, much the same way that Lou Tate had done and had people do for her over the forty-odd years that she’d been on Kenwood Hill. And we had no funding, no money to do much work with, so we continued to apply for funding from the community development agency, fiscal court and a number of other public agency. The entire history of the Loomhouse was one of just personal dedication on behalf of Lou Tate. She literally kept the thing going out of own funds; her own pocket. And at no time did she use any public money or any public funding. So we thought that the only way to solve the problem of restoring the cabins, even though there’d long been a preservation fund gathered from the one dollar per visitor that would go for the preservation of the cabins, there wasn’t nearly enough to meet the basic patchwork needs to keep the buildings occupied and useful. So we thought we would have to analyze exactly what it would cost to restore the buildings and to stabilize them against further damage.

So working with various people that I’m acquainted with in architectural practice, I was able to put together figures which would estimate the amount of work which we needed to do to restore the cabins. And it was well over a hundred thousand dollars which was certainly beyond our grasp so we decided to take a look at it, in terms of, perhaps one cabin at a time.

In the meantime, before any funding came the way of the Lou Tate Foundation, Lou Tate’s health deteriorated, first with a heart attack and later with cancer of which she died of June 2, l979. She left, in her will, stipulation that the cabins be turned over to the foundation that might be established to maintain the work of the Little Loomhouse, primarily the teaching program for children. If that was possible, the cabins would be the property of that foundation. If not, she said, in her will, that she wanted the cabins given to the government of the United States. We assume from that, she meant the Smithsonian Institution, which had expressed very serious interest in much of her materials and equipment over the years.

We worked at that point to try to establish a foundation so that the properties could be restored and the materials retained in Kentucky rather than being out of state.

So, after her death in 1979, her attorneys, Lynch, Sherman and Cox, called a meeting at the University of Louisville conference room in the Student Center on September 26, 1979 and there the friends of Lou Tate met and started the Lou Tate Foundation, Inc. which held its next meeting the following month, in October.

The person in charge of establishing the Foundation initially was Mr. Arnold Lynch who was the personal attorney for Lou Tate and helped her with a number of issues late in her life, maybe fifteen or twenty years or so. He appointed Mr. Earl B. Fowler, associate in his firm to work with us in setting up the legal structure for the Lou Tate Foundation.

So Mr. Fowler became, after the board was founded, the first executive director of the Lou Tate Foundation. The initial board, or the founding board of the Lou Tate Foundation consisted of nine members: Sue Kendrick, John Ryan, Jr. , Mike Kirk, Vivian Hyatt, Ann Kiper, Charles Moberly, Thelma Hogan, Earl Fowler, and myself. At our meeting in October, October 25 of ‘79, I was elected the president of the Lou Tate Foundation, on its first board.

We started immediately developing the Articles of Incorporation and trying to define exactly what it is that the foundation was going to try to do; what our goals and ambitions were. And we generally agreed on three basic things.

First of all, we were going to maintain the children’s teaching program which was the vital length throughout the entire history of the foundation and the thing that was the most important to Lou Tate; the whole purpose for having the Little Loomhouse; to teach the children the art of cloth making and folk history. And so that was our primary purpose, to find a way to do that.

The second was to obtain some kind of funding that would allow us to restore the cabins, to stabilize them and to maintain the site.

And the third was to preserve the very valuable collection of weaving drafts, antique weaving drafts, and coverlets which we understood were probably the largest collection of drafts and coverlets in the United States. And in subsequent travels, I discovered even in Canada and various museums throughout the United States, that indeed, Lou Tate’s collection was most extensive and we still have that within Lou Tate Foundation property.

As we continued to work as the Lou Tate Foundation, Inc. we set about to try to reach some of the three primary goals that we had developed. Of course, we continued seeking funding, not only to maintain and to stabilize the structures, but to pay a director who might be able to work part-time or full-time on the premises and coordinate all our efforts. We soon learned that it was easier, at least at that time, to obtain monies for ‘bricks and mortar,’ so to speak, rather than for funding the agency for the directorship or paying someone to maintain the work of the organization.

So we set out in that direction to obtain funds from the community development with the help of several people at the community development and through local landmarks associations and people I’d worked with in the architectural office in town, we were able to apply for a forty-five thousand dollar grant in community development.

When we were awarded that grant, later in 1980, we were at least on the first leg of restoring the three structures. We decided, as a foundation, that we had two possible alternatives: one, the first might be to re-roof all three structures and to try to stabilize the foundations, or to take the forty-five thousand dollars, which was about a third of the total funding that we needed and take that and restore one of the buildings. And so it was the decision of the foundation and primarily inspired by the older members reminding us that the most important thing was the children’s teaching program. So we [decided that we’d] like to take the forty-five thousand dollars and restore one of the cabins and that was Tophouse, where we are today.

So the next drive was my working with the executive director to find the appropriate architectural firm to do the work for the cabins. And we interviewed a couple of firms and decided to work with the firm of Ward and Taylor Architects; Jasper Ward, who was well known in the community and had a lot of experience in preservation and restoration work. And the paramount importance in the restoration of the cabin was not to modernize or not to make it look new, but it was to restore it, stabilize it, to restructure so that it would have another thirty to fifty years of use out of the building without major maintenance, and yet walk away from the building when it was all over and have a sense that it was unchanged.

This was a very difficult challenge because, other than that, a lot of time consuming work was in the contractor’s work that they were not always interested in participating in, but also saving the site. In other words, you couldn’t have bulldozers and large equipment come up the hillside to do the work which is the normal way that modern construction is done. We had to do a lot of hand work and small work and so we were fortunate when we did find a contractor after bidding the job and awarding a contractor in February of 1982.

We had a contractor whose main carpenter contractor also had a son and daughter who were good at working on construction and had experience, so it was a family affair and the three of them primarily did most of the work, except for plumbing and electrical work. So all the carpentry work was a major portion of the work at Tophouse was done by the family of three.

So it worked very and they were careful to protect the trees and the many thousands of bulbs and plants that Lou Tate had put on the hillside over the years. It took a long time; it took almost a year before the work was completed. And it’s interesting to see the photographs of the work during the construction because they literally took the cabin apart. We discovered many interesting and frightening things about the weakness of the structure. And so we spent a lot of energy and time below the surface, so to speak. A lot of money and effort was spent researching the building to have the same profile that it always had; the same outward appearance, but you’d completely restructured internally. The cabin had originally, three separate, small rooms on the main floor and a lower porch on the downhill side of the building and it had just a mud swamp underneath it. It had originally not been a closed in foundation. So we put in a new foundation and were able to create a workroom on the lower level and restored the porch.

And we took the partitions out of the upper level of the cabin and made one large room. We retained the board floor and restored and repaired it where it was necessary and retained as much of the old structure as possible, but in renovating into one space, we elected to open the ceiling which exposed the truss structure which held up the roof. This gave the Tophouse cabin, the main workroom,-- we thought more flexibility in the use of the number of groups coming and how many people who could fit into it at one time, because we knew that we could no longer use it in quite the same way that Lou Tate had used it over the years. It had earlier been a summer cabin, so these small rooms were bedrooms, in fact, and a kitchen, so we turned it into one large workspace that has a contemporary flavor on the inside but we think suitable to the nature of the structure in its setting. But the outside is essentially the way it was when it was constructed in about 1896.

Wisteria Cabin, which we were anxious to work on, needs much the same kind of work that Tophouse did. It was built in about 1895.

And lower house which we refer to as the Little Loomhouse and we have since learned that Lou Tate referred to it as Esta Cabin; it was the oldest cabin. It was built in 1870. Being the first structure, it was the caretaker’s house and office for a rock quarry, which was-- the quarry was above the cabins on the hillside where much of the foundation rock for the Third Street, Strawberry Lane and a number of areas in South Louisville came from--this rock quarry.

In addition in being concerned about the internal structure of the building and installing a toilet, and so forth, plumbing, which it never had previously, we were interested in maintaining the exterior appearance of the structure; the board and batten, the vertical board and batten siding, much of it the original oak, about an inch and a quarter thick which was cut from trees on Kenwood Hill. In fact, all of the cabins’ structures, all three were cut from native timber, native growth from Kenwood Hill.

The cabins were visited by a very famous architect, Frank Lloyd Wright in 1940. He came to Louisville for a convention, the Institute of Architects, and visited a number of sights in Louisville. He came to the Loomhouse and took photographs of the buildings and later referred to them as board and batten summer houses set in the dignity of nature. And this was a quotation of Lou Tate. She really took it to heart and used it a great deal over the years.

And so among the number of illustrious visitors who came to the Loomhouse, the architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, was here and thought it was probably one of the nicest things that he saw on his trip to Louisville. Of course, his philosophy was to work with the natural site and of course, these buildings did just that. They originally were perched on poles and had no foundations above the ground. They had a natural weathered appearance; they were unpainted and they blended very well into the hillside and that’s what we sought to maintains as much as possible and still make them contemporary with our ability to use them.

Also, during the restoration when we took the attic out, in order to restructure the roof and install the new trusses, we discovered a sky light; a light on the north side of the cabin, and we’re not sure why the light was in the attic space because it was an unused attic; an unfinished attic, and very small; you couldn’t stand up in the attic. But it was one of the things we left, incorporated very well into the contemporary interior of Tophouse cabin. In fact, all the windows and door openings that now exist in the cabins, are original to the cabin and consequently when you’re in this one large room you see various size windows at various locations and various shapes. [That seems] a very odd arrangement to be sure, if it were one room originally. And so a visitor who came would see the same windows and the same views as the people apparently had since 1896.

We’ve also installed, we thought, in keeping with the nature of the building and with the attitude which we think Lou Tate had toward the building and the site, a wood stove which does a really good job of heating the cabin. and we think it’s in keeping with in the structure of the building. So these things are new in modern concern with energy conservation today [which] led us to decide, in addition to the use of the heat pump, which is a temporary device, we’d also use the closed wood stove. So we now have that in our Tophouse room.

Now that Tophouse has been stabilized and restored, we spent the forty-five thousand dollars, we estimate the need for approximately forty-five or fifty thousand dollars to restore Wisteria Cabin, which happens to be my favorite cabin.

It gets its name because of the large wisteria vine that’s in front of the cabin. And it was originally built very much like the old Kentucky dog trot type cabins. They are two pen (sic) cabins, a room on either side of the breezeway and in this instance, I really don’t know how it was, but it was built out of board and batten timbers from the hillside here, a very light weight structure and the dog trot as a breezeway, of course, it was between the two major rooms which were closed on both ends with French doors and glass. So it’s a very pleasant place to be and you can open the doors and get a nice breeze through there. And originally, that’s where a lot of people would choose to sleep in the summer months because the air could move through the cabin. It’s the one I remember most or best from the time I first encountered the Little Loomhouse and so I’m very anxious to see that building restored.

And later we hope to restore the home where Lou Tate lived, that’s the lower house. Some people refer to it as the Little Loomhouse. And she referred to it as the Esta cabin. It is probably the most substantial of the three buildings. We’re hoping that time will allow us to restore Wisteria and then later go on to the work we feel we have to do on the lower house.

Lou felt that Wisteria cabin offered an opportunity for South End or local artists or anyone from this area to exhibit their work, and although the gallery type space is quite small, it would give an opportunity for someone to display their work and to have meetings. This is the kind of thing we’d like to see done for civic clubs, garden clubs and so forth, to have a place to meet in the South End, so that we could share this site, as Lou Tate always did with all people in the neighborhood.

The cabins have long been a part of the history of Louisville and particularly South Louisville from 1870 onward. A number of people have owned the property prior to Lou Tate’s mother buying the buildings in 1939. Interestingly enough, after the original use as a rock quarry and later, some twenty odd years later when the upper two cabins were built for summer houses, the property has always been maintained by people interested in the arts. Not just folk arts, but in writing and painting and then music and teaching. And a number of people have been well-known in the area of their work in the arts.

Mary Wolff, Lou Tate’s mother, and a number of interesting people have visited the cabins over the years, prior to ownership by Lou Tate. The St. Mark’s Lutheran church, which is located in South Louisville, first held a meeting at the Little Loomhouse and founded that church and later moved out to their own building.

The Happy Birthday song that everyone is aware of was first sung at the Little Loomhouse in the lower cabin. In addition to that, a number of the previous owners, Etta Hest, and others held weekly meetings where they invited numerous writers and painters, and artists and so forth to come and visit and talk about their work. And so I think it’s appropriate that later on when Lou Tate’s mother purchased the buildings and left them to Lou Tate to be used for weaving, these buildings have played such a key role in the artistic history of this community; not just the South End, but Louisville itself.

And from this point then, Lou Tate became very widely known throughout the United States and, in fact, internationally for her work in weaving and in textiles. Oddly enough, it was almost by accident that she became involved this because she primarily was interested in history and had studied at Berea College in Kentucky and later at the University of Michigan where she worked on her masters degree in history. And the professor had suggested to her that she do a paper on weaving and textiles because she had gone to Berea and because she was from Kentucky and so, she did that.

And it coincided at that time in the late thirties with the Depression and the need for people to be able to have cottage industries or home kind of work in order to make a meager living. So I think a situation with the right person came together at the right time, and [she] seized the opportunity. She did so with the support of the President and Mrs. Hoover and later with the President and Mrs. Roosevelt because they were very much interested in knowing more about the opportunities of folk arts and how people in the mountains, particularly in the Appalachian region, who were well below the poverty line, might have an opportunity to earn some kind of income from the art work they did. And also stimulate interest in maybe folk and art work all over the United States. And so all these things came together in the late thirties.

In 1938 Lou Tate had been asked to see what she could do about developing a small loom. She worked with Bob McKnight and Dr. Mather, who literally helped her build the first little loom which might be more portable, transportable and would not occupy so much space in the middle of the house, as the old floor looms had taken up space. And so working with these two and with Mrs. Hoover, she began to work with the Little Loom and developing the program for the Girl Scouts, the young people, to learn something about the folk art of weaving.

After the first loom was built in 1938, it underwent a number of refinements… hoped to improve its appearance and to make it a stronger unit…

End of Tape One, Side One.

Beginning of Tape One, Side Two

Teka Ward: …For an interview with Bob Douglas in Tophouse.

Bob: Later refinements of the small loom were made to make the unit a stronger unit so the children would use it and not literally destroy the loom, [because] the earlier versions did not hold up so well. And so Mr. Sam Kendrick, husband of Sue Kendrick, who was a cabinet maker and worked with Emel (sic) Brothers locally, elected to use a hard rock maple material which is very, very sturdy and we have, of course, many of those looms still today. But he refined and in a sense re-engineered [the loom]. And in addition to that, he built a special loom table, which is collapsible and can be stored or carried about, with various pedals that will allow you to attach foot pedals to the various harnesses of the looms.

The little looms were primarily two harness or four harness looms and so the foot pedals would allow you to change the frames as you’re using your hands to run the shuttle and weave. He also designed a bench, a very simple maple bench that would go with the entire piece of equipment: the loom, the table, and the stool. We have many of these today. Now, the last one hundred twenty-five looms that were made before Lou Tate’s death were leathered (sic) after her death and when the Foundation was formed, were assembled by Mr. Roy Heimerdinger. He was a cabinet maker in the Foundation and he worked very hard and generously to put these things together for us.

And so we have looms that are, maybe, as much as forty-five years old and looms which are relatively new and they all sit side by side in the Loom house. Some are painted various colors.

At some point throughout the history of the Loomhouse, Lou chose to make some of the looms colorful, so you might find some of them that are green and blue and robin egg blue, and red and yellow. The children liked this. This was part of the entire teaching program, or the idea, as Lou Tate put it, of the Little Loomhouse, even though she was a weaver and a master weaver, and was sought for her opinion throughout the world, she was by nature and by training, a historian. And so when you came to the Little Loomhouse as a child, you not only learned something about the simple mechanism of weaving, very simple patterns of the primary cloth…?, but you learned a great deal about the history not only about the Loomhouse and the loom, but also, you learned something about this hill which the Indians had earlier called Sunshine Hill.

And so you would hear stories from Lou Tate about the various wild animals on the hill; the bobcat, the bobcat skin that she had hung on the wall and this, of course, was fascinating to children. And she would tell stories about the red foxes and wolves that were on the hillside when she first came out in ’39, in fact, during the construction of the cabins,-- the reconstruction of the Tophouse cabin, we ran a little red fox out of Wisteria cabin. So we know these things did, in fact, exist on the site and they were not just little tales made up for the children’s benefit.

But she told a lot about the history of the Indians, how they used the hillside. The Sunshine Hill on the top of the hill was generally exposed. Of course this thing that the Iroquois built is now Iroquois Park. It’s referred to as Burnt Knob, but at the top of the hill or the top of the knob, we call them the chain of the knobs or the Western Knobs; geographical definition for the Bluegrass area of Kentucky. That’s how we got the names.

And so the Indians used the hillside as a way of looking out for game that would run through the valley and head for the hills. And so what was generally thought of now as Kenwood Hill Road was a buffalo trace, or a way that the buffalo would move between the hills to various watering places and then the Indians would be on the hill looking out for the game and they would come down and shoot them or spear them with the arrows.

This was a part of what you learned at the Loomhouse and it was an irresistible temptation for Lou to teach this and tell this along with the weaving. So you came away with a lot more than a piece of cloth and learning how to weave a piece of fabric. I think she was appropriately referred to as ‘First Lady of Folk Art in Kentucky’ because she really did talk about the history of the state, and about folk art, and not just about weaving.

Even the simple Kindergarten loom that she developed for very, very young children had large strips of fabric that she placed the gauze, white tape, on the back, and on the back she would write the color of the fabric, if it had a pattern, the pattern, the name of the person whose clothing it came from, the age of the person and something about them, so even as a young child, weaving on a simple potholder type loom, you learned something about color, about pattern and about the history of the person whose clothes this came from. This kind of teaching was very, very important to her.

This is the sort of thing that we’ve probably found most difficult about maintaining the concept or the idea of the Little Loomhouse the way Lou Tate did it. Even though almost everything we do is permeated with her thoughts and feelings and our remembrances of her; her desires, this is the sort of thing that we believe, finally, that you can’t really capture in an organization the way you can with an individual. So whenever we’ve had to face certain changes we’ve had to respond to the needs of the day, keeping in mind as much of the historical aspects the idea of the Loomhouse as possible. The thing that we do lack today that we had, before we even realized it, was this special kind of person who can take such complete and total interest in what they were doing. Forty years on this hillside, and so this literally was her life; every aspect of her life focused on the Little Loomhouse and everything going on here.

Of course, as friends grateful to Lou Tate and her weaving, and the prospect of doing otherwise and doing other things, [we’re] taking as much time as we can to go on with the work that she began. This is the one thing we have not been able to capture, though we’ve been able to save some of the buildings. and much of the material. We hope that there are people in our organization who might be persuaded at a later time when we can receive funding for a directorship; a person paid to do this work, who has potential for the kind of teacher that Lou Tate was. So we keep different pieces and articles about Lou Tate all around the cabins to remind people who had not met her during her lifetime; that’s what this whole thing is about.

So it’s not just a loom she developed; it’s not just cabins that she maintained, but it was the idea that she referred to as the Little Loomhouse idea. She thrived off of working with young children. I think we all agree that once we passed the age of about fifteen, she considered us adults for the children and we then became workers for her. And this is the one way she survived, quite literally, by working young people and bringing them up and we’d all go away for a number of years and do different things and slowly trickle back and that’s how she kept everything going. And we realized that with the foundation, if we were going to maintain ourselves over a similar period of time, that we were going to have to do the same kind of thing. And so [we’ve been] more and more focused on efforts trying to introduce younger people to the Loomhouse This year has been very good by bringing Girl Scout and Boy Scout troops, school children in great numbers, back to the Loomhouse. This is the basic idea and really our primary goal: teaching.

Lou Tate’s real teaching program actually began in 1935, 1934. Her history paper on weaving led her to be a part of the National Committee of Folk Arts. She was asked to be a representative for Mrs. Hoover. She was asked to design a show of folk arts in Kentucky. This was held in New York and in Washington, DC. And her earlier acquaintance with Mrs. Roosevelt was renewed at this exhibit that Mrs. Hoover visited to see and once again became interested in (?)a few small looms to use for teaching people the art of weaving, of folk weaving. It was through the educational interest of Mrs. Hoover and Mrs. Roosevelt that the small loom was developed and the concept of the Loomhouse continuing the art of weaving and sharing the knowledge of hand weaving was born.

In 1936 Mrs. Hoover wanted a program to be developed for the Girl Scouts and asked Lou Tate to work out that program. And later on, with the development of the small inexpensive loom, Lou Tate had the blueprints printed so others might be able to build their own loom.

And Lou, throughout her life, had no particular interest in amassing great fortune of property for her work and so she freely made these things available in the early years. And so working with Bob McKnight and Dr. Mather, she had a plan drawn which suggested how the loom might be made and assembled and it was mentioned by Mrs. Hoover in her national newspaper article. And Lou immediately received over seven hundred requests for blueprints This is really how, in the early years, the whole idea of the Loomhouse and the Little Loom was spread across the country.

At a reception at the White House Mrs. Hoover was introducing Lou Tate in the reception line and a number of times stumbling over her name which I only later learned was Louisa Tate Bousman. I always knew her as Lou Tate and later on as Lou. But her real name was Louisa Tate Bousman and Mrs. Hoover kept trying to pronounce this name as she introduced her in the reception line and stumbled over it a number of times and [finally] said, “I’m not going to call you that anymore, from now on you’ll be just plain, Lou Tate.” So I’ve always enjoyed that story and folks in the Foundation might put together some book on Lou Tate which might bear that name.

This is really how Lou Tate was born, quite literally, with Mrs. Hoover, the name was born and many people throughout her lifetime refer to her as Miss Tate or Lou Tate. She never bothered to correct anyone, and she was very taken by being referred as Lou Tate by Mrs. Hoover.

Later on through her work on the National Committee on Folk Arts in the mid thirties she also became acquainted with the very prominent (?) local person, Haddie Bishop Speed, who visited the exhibit in Washington and met Lou Tate and suggested that they develop a similar exhibit to be presented the very newly opened Speed Museum in Louisville that now sits on the campus of University of Louisville. And so she, very early on in her career, was fortunate to meet with very illustrious people; people in position to help spread the word and help encourage the work that she was [doing] and her exhibit at the Speed Museum. I think, two or three years after the opening of the Speed, hers was one of the first one-woman shows, you might say, that was held at the Speed Museum.

Part of the interest in Lou’s teaching interest and ability was based upon the fact that she had for a number of years gathered weaving drafts; these are patterns, or so to speak, blueprints of how various weaving patterns are made and laid out on a loom, how you would warp the loom and thread count and pattern count that she was very, very knowledgeable of. And she spent her entire life seeking copies or original drafts, quite literally of probably over thousands of weaving drafts or weaving patterns, that were made over one hundred fifty, to two hundred years [ago] in American history.

Fortunately enough, I know this was another situation of being at the right place at the right time. A lot of the Scottish, English, and Irish immigrants to the United States settled in the Ohio River Valley and brought with them their textile art and their weaving background and with many of them, the patterns. One time Lou Tate, in fact, developed a booklet entirely on Scottish tartans, which, of course, was of great interest to me. But she also collected weaving drafts that are on the backs of wools (?), rolls(?), summons, tax notices, and on any bit of paper, in fact, she had one weaving draft on the back of a leaf; a large leaf, which she collected from people who brought them to her, or sent them to her, once they were aware that she was looking for this kind of thing.

So there was a wealth of historical patterns in weaving that she collected and these were little, but valuable things. Throughout her life she denied herself numerous opportunities to become wealthy in the (?) sense of the word and to have many things and material possessions, but she chose to do her work here and continue-- and I’ve often wondered, on a personal level, whether it was an artistic decision on her part or simply accepting as a matter of fate her opportunity for her work experiences with these important people, getting her started, somehow helped her to commit to an entire lifetime of work to this endeavor with very little financial reward and a good deal of hardship because of lack of money. She [could have] lived a more comfortable life.

But she did have many, many valuable things in these weaving drafts and wonderful coverlets which on pure monetary basis might bring several hundreds of dollars or, in some instances, thousands of dollars each, by any number of museums who would pay that kind of money for them. She collected them and maintained them and people, over the years, would bring coverlets to her and say, well, this came from this attic and this place, … my grandmother,… my great-grandfather, and so forth. And so along with a lot of these patterns there are stories of where they came from and they gave this information to her. So she might have a bit of an old coverlet, or remnant, of an old coverlet, or simply a photograph and the drawing that she made, and a draft that she would make, based on patterns of that particular coverlet. And many of these were very individual.

(Seems to be a break in the conversation. Jean R, Editor)

Later on the particular Scottish tartans, and so forth, that are based on the clan tartans, but later on they were very individual and it was what the particular weaver might choose to do and so that might be that particular weaver’s pattern and so a lot of the drafts are, maybe, a one time, very personal thing to the person who did the weaving.

I’ve been fortunate enough to travel in the last few years and have, --I’m not sure if it’s because of my Loomhouse experience or just by my natural interest-- have made part of my travel to include knowing something about the local textiles and bringing back samples of things and blankets, and so forth, from other countries and England and Scotland and Ireland, and more recently in Canada.

In fact, I visited Canada prior to Lou Tate’s death. I went to Nova Scotia and Cape Breton and met with a lady there: Florence Mackley, who was considered the foremost person in folk art, particularly in textiles in Canada and who had corresponded over a number of years with Lou Tate and knew her right well. They worked together on several books and she freely acknowledged to me that Lou Tate was, far and away, superior in knowledge, to herself, in terms of coverlet patterns and textiles and drafts and some of the old weaving things.

In fact, Lou was asked by the Canadian government to cipher the remnants of old cloth from the French fort innkeeper-- what the fabric was, how it might be reproduced in new uniforms to outfit the various people who would inhabit this restored French fortification. So even though they had a, you know, very important person right under their nose for a little bit, they came to Lou Tate to find out how they might reweave this kind of fabric today to have a similar appearance, and how they might achieve the original color which, at that time, came from natural dyes.

I know, as part of the experience at the Loomhouse, the young people always included, at least once a year or so, the entire process of cloth making and I recall instances where sheep were brought to the Little Loomhouse, were sheared right on the premises, the wool cleaned, spun, dyed, and later woven. This is the thing now, the Kentucky State Fair crafts and a number of fairs in this area have taken on, that challenge of going through that entire process of cloth making. In fact, they have speed contests at the State Fair to determine [which group of] people can do this process most quickly and come up with the best product at the end. So Lou would take her students and have the entire experience from the sheep to the final product. This was an important experience to know where things come from and how they come about and Lou Tate was wonderful at being able to convey that sort of thing.

You learn so much more that just weaving, you learn a lot about how people go through the various things they had to do to accomplish the things they did to have the things that they needed, of necessity and for luxury.

Also, on my travel to Canada, I was surprised, you know, as you so often do, take people that you know for granted and maybe don’t really feel appreciation for their work in general, and at large. I happened to mention that I knew Lou Tate and worked at the Little Loomhouse in Louisville, to a number of weavers at an exhibit in Cape Breton and the room literally came to a hush when I mentioned her name because they knew, as weavers, just how important a person she was. That was probably one of my first inclinations that I had known someone that lived literally on the other side of the hill from someone who made such an impact internationally in weaving.

All of us who knew her, later on, as Lou, had a hard time always appreciating that because we knew her at all levels: as children, as young adults, and then as older adults and worked with her literally from cleaning windows and sweeping floors and waxing this and that, assembling looms, carting things off to exhibits for her. We saw her at all times and on the move and this was part of the total Loomhouse experience. I don’t know if it was part of the Loomhouse idea or not. But this was part of what we all knew about Lou. So it was very hard to appreciate her and to gain proper perspective on just how important she was. I think we will all agree that she was a very special kind of person and, as I said, it’s a most difficult challenge to restore that aspect to the Little Loomhouse.

Lou may have been dubbed ‘just plain Lou Tate,’ but I have learned in the years that I’ve been acquainted with her that she was, in fact, a very complex individual. And there were many aspects of her personality and nature that I didn’t learn until I was an adult. A very interesting and memorable event which --I don’t know if I’ll get all the details or not, but I know of one experience--the first one when I literally set foot in Lower house and it wasn’t until actually the moment that I entered that, I realized I had never been in the house before, all these years. I suppose it was my own sense of privacy or her very private nature, in fact, I learned only later from other people, that very few people had, in recent years, been in her home, or her lower cabin where she lived.

It was a very interesting experience to know that it was, and, in fact, I felt privileged to be asked or invited in to where she really did her work; where she spent many, many long hours in the evenings--she had exceptional work habits-- working all night, literally, on research work for various colleges and universities with whom she corresponded about weaving matters, about history.

A number of them, including several colleges in Ohio, were constantly asking her to come join the faculty and be a part of them and they offered many lures to take her away from the cabins and from the Little Loomhouse. I think, toward the end of her life, when she was frustrated with the number of difficulties that she had to deal with physically, difficulties personally, and with the buildings, she was probably tempted to do so. On occasion when she did not feel up to par, it reminded some of us who worked with her on a day-to-day basis that she was practicing to do that, if we didn’t help her better than we had. So these were the things that many of us just took in stride and realizing it was frustration being expressed and her concerns being expressed. And she really never gave to us any notion that she might take her things away, or might, in fact, leave this hillside. I think we knew, as well as she did, that this was her place to be and she was going to stay here to the last moment. But on seeing her house or personal material the first time, I was surprised at the number of things about her.

She had, in spite of the fact that you could walk into any of the cabins and see hundreds of looms and hundreds, maybe thousands of pages and papers and yarns and skeins and things everywhere, literally, at what seemed to be random and haphazardly scattered. But she was, in fact, quite orderly in her thinking and in her total ambition towards the Little Loomhouse.

Literally, everything she did focused on the Little Loomhouse. And so that might, at first, appear to be physical disorder, when, in fact, it had an underlying structure and a purpose in it. As we all grew up and knew her better, we realized that she had interminably probably as we had as friends to extract this order, this sense of order, purpose in everything she did.

That was a very secretive aspect of her personality. And so once having seen her home in this maze of papers and looms and yarns and so forth, that she literally nested among I was surprised to find that there was an underlying structure and purpose to everything she did.

She spent her morning hours with visitors, who literally come from all parts of the United States, to learn something about the Loomhouse and Lou Tate. They’d come for a visit spontaneously, very often unannounced, and she was always making herself available to Open House visitors. She then spent her personal time working in research assuring documentation of weaving with various colleges and universities late into the evening.

I always thought it was very humorous that this so-called Pioneer lady, the way I viewed her, would have a stack of dime mystery novels, paperback novels beside her bed because she really feasted on these things for many hours when she couldn’t sleep very well after she’d finished her work. She also could be seen in the corner of her very small kitchen which was piled high with looms and papers and pages, as she referred to them, of weaving information that she had written.

Her kitchen, incidentally, consisted of a sink, a very small refrigerator and a hot plate. It was a very, very meager living and she thrived, --well, I’ve often wondered, how--off of TV dinners, that she would put on a hot plate and, you know, she would eat it at very irregular, odd hours of the day or night.

But she would sit at this very small typewriter, portable typewriter, that sat on a loom stand in the corner of the kitchen among all this, what initially appears to be, at first, debris; and work on this research paper which she’d be sending out all over the country. These were pages that some of the members of the foundation, for several years now, are sorting through; pages about weaving and all aspects of weaving that she was interested in, and also, weaving drafts. She sent out literature to the University of Louisville, personal friends in Louisville and others who were interested in Loomhouse work.

I always thought that this nature was a very curious thing because when she emerged from her house she took on a different atmosphere and attitude. And whenever there was Open House, she seemed very reserved and content not to be the focal point of attention. She, in fact, immediately made the youngest child available the focal point of her attention and, therefore, everyone else’s attention so that a child at a loom or a child at a spinning wheel, was her way of letting all of us know what the purpose of the Loomhouse was all about.

And so her personal work and any important work that she did was put aside until the early hours of the morning when she just sat at the typewriter and typed, all night in many instances, cigarette hanging out of her mouth; another thing we didn’t see about her in the public when she worked with the children. She was aloof in her nature when she worked …..

Part of the experience was to have pink lemonade which we often would spike after visitors would leave.

Teka: This is the end of Side Two, Tape One

Bob: We are now on the porch of Tophouse; the top porch which was added to the original structure in about 1955. It is made up of a number of window sizes that are actually storm windows that were gleaned from leftovers of building projects by friends that Lou Tate knew. And a carpenter she knew assembled all this and then enclosed the porch. It now houses a number of walking wheels and various other spinning wheels, and weaving paraphernalia.

We use this very often as a work place, summer office, so to speak. The walls along the glass and the back walls are lined with bookcases and shelves; open, very simple board shelves where she had thousands of pages that she had written and stacked.

She could work from this vantage point and look down the hill and see Wisteria cabin and the lower house, Esta cabin, and see any visitors who might show up unexpectedly. So this was a good working place for her. And it was, in effect, her public office. This is where she liked to meet people and Tophouse, not only today, is it the main activity center, but has always been the main focal point of the three Loomhouse cabins.

I think if we go downstairs now and out on to the graveled area in front of the cabin we can see where most of the Open House events were held throughout the years. Like so many other things that were done at the Loomhouse, the gravel was donated by friends, even the work to the Little Loomhouse over the years built up this area as sort of a terrace on the hillside immediately below this cabin.

These picnic tables that we’re now standing in front of are very similar to picnic tables that Lou Tate had out in this area for visitors to use, for the Loomhouse people to use, and [where] most of the events took place during the summer months. The cabins were unheated through many of the years that I’ve experienced the Loomhouse. And so most of our activity took place outdoors [especially] in the summer months.

In fact, there’s a privy just over the hillside here which, until just recently, was actively used by visitors to the Loomhouse. The tables are new tables built by Orville Moss; friend, sculptor, and husband of Sally Moss who is now the executive director of the Little Loomhouse. He constructed these tables for us as part of our restoration of Tophouse cabin structure,

As you look back at Tophouse, you’ll see the board and batten structure which is very much the way it has always been, although we had placed on it a coat of preservative stain to even out the color between the new board when we had to replace the rotted old board. But it essentially looks the way it did so many, many years, certainly since the fifties.

The many Open Activities that took place on this graveled terrace not only included the annual spring and summer Open House events that Lou held each year, but also, was a place where the designation ceremony took place, designating the Little Loomhouse as a Louisville Landmark. And now just to the right of the lower door is a plaque signifying the Louisville Landmark.

The plaque that is on the wall now reads 1975. It is not the original plaque; the original plaque was given in 1976, but either through vandalism or through accident, was damaged and cracked. We saved that but as a part of the restoration ceremony for the Tophouse we wanted to install another plaque and so the local landmark people had available a plaque that read 1975, so we put that one up. So that’s part of the inconsistent history of the Little Loomhouse…( Editor’s note: tape machine noise)

From this terrace, even at this time of year, you can begin to see hundreds and hundreds of daffodils and bulbs and spring flowers that are starting to emerge through the leaves. No one really has an active count of how many flowers and bulbs are planted on the hill. It probably numbers in the thousands. But they were done in interesting rows, very much like the contour of the land which is quite irregular. So over this half acre site you will see maybe thousands of daffodils and jonquils and various early spring flowers starting to bloom, and not too long from now you’ll see natural native redbud trees and dogwood trees will start blooming around Easter time. And then, later on, of course, the huge old oak trees, some as old as three hundred years or so will start providing a canopy for the Little Loomhouse, in fact, in mid-summer it’s very hard to find the cabins unless you look for a small woods on the hillside. Most of the adjoining property owners have built since the fifties and had generally a great deal of land, although some are still somewhat wooded. But it’s very easy to spot the Little Loomhouse when most of the trees are not in full leaf.

The cabin that is immediately below the Tophouse--we’ll walk down the roadway which was part of the original oxen trail that came from the rock quarry down to the base of the hill. This next cabin is Wisteria cabin. Many people like this cabin and many great photographs are available showing activities going on in front of Wisteria cabin. It’s made of essentially just two large rooms and a small shed room on the upper side of the hill. Of course, the central dog trot breezeway space has been enclosed with glass. The Wisteria cabin is in considerable disrepair at this point and yet it still has much the same character that it had when it was originally constructed. The board and batten style of building which was cottage style and yet boards are an inch and a quarter thick cut from the native oak on this hillside. There is one chimney on the upper hillside room which has three different clay chimney pots on it. And this is the only room in this cabin with any indication of how it might have been heated, there was a fireplace in that room. And so we can only imagine it might also have been a kitchen or the little shed structure on the northern uphill side might have been a very small kitchen to prepare a light meal when it was a summer house. We hope that this building will be used by the community later on once we’ve had an opportunity to restore it. We found many, many documents, valuable papers stored in the attic of this structure. And it’s the same one where we’ve seen a red fox, a number of squirrels, and local creatures running in and out pretty freely.

The cabin right below is Esta cabin, the Little Loomhouse, or Lou Tate’s home. On the uphill side of the cabin is a small lean-to kitchen. This was the kitchen where I referred to earlier, that Lou Tate did her work, doing research on the papers and typing up the many hundreds of pages that she wrote over the years. Winding along the sidewalk and you can still see all the spring flowers coming into bloom. This cabin is also covered with the board and batten style and originally was a vertical log, a split log, structure which is a good deal more sturdy than the other two cabins. And has many curious shaped and oddly placed windows around all the walls of the cabin. Early on, in regard to foundation work, we elected to remove a small stair and a kind of a landing way, so to speak, that extended out from the stairway to the second floor which had been added in the late eighteen hundreds to allow for a caretaker who lived in this building to go freely without interfering with the office on the lower level of the house or the main building. The cabin is made up of essentially the kitchen, a small area which now includes the bathroom, a small hallway extending to the second level. And one large room with a massive fireplace filled with mortar and a large iron arm, which hadn’t been used in many years. I don’t know if Lou Tate ever did [use] that, but I suppose she did. One of the features of Open Houses was the lemonade that we all drank, pot luck and a covered dish, and save it for burgoo, a dish. She always liked to have that after the guests left at the end of the day and people working at the Loomhouse would get together and all had supper. So I’m sure she used………Editor’s note: the volume on the tape is too low to transcribe correctly.

The cabin even though it was in …..state, was relatively unchanged…