This collection is available for use by appointment in the Department of Drawings & Archives, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University. For further information, please email avery-drawings@library.columbia.edu.
The typescript is the only surviving evidence of a fictitious journal called The Diary of Mary, a Little Farmer's Wife, written by Walter V. Davidson, an important client of the architect Frank Lloyd Wright. It is part of a larger collaboration with Wright in which Davidson proposed a nation-wide network of small farms and marketplaces as a solution to the environmental and economic crises of the Great Depression. Typescript in a binder titled "Little Farms and Davidson Markets Prospectus and Manual."
This collection is available for use by appointment in the Department of Drawings & Archives, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University. For further information, please email avery-drawings@library.columbia.edu.
Acquired from Jean Cross (grandchild of Walter Davidson) in 2019 (2019.003)
Columbia University Libraries, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library
While working as the advertising manager at the Larkin Company in Buffalo, New York, Walter V. Davidson meet architect Frank Lloyd Wright through Larkin executive Darwin D. Martin. In 1908, Davidson commissioned Wright to design a house for him in Buffalo. In the 1930s, Davidson and Wright collaborated on numerous projects, such as the Little Farms Unit and Wayside Markets projects. It was Davidson, an efficiency expert working in the food industry, who first imagined networking small farms and markets together, and he approached Wright to contribute architectural designs to the project. Davidson's concept is the basis for many of Wright's important projects of the 1930s, including Broadacre City and the founding of the Taliesin Fellowship.
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