Kitty Turgeon, a preservationist credited with saving East Aurora’s Roycroft Campus and winning it National Historic Landmark status before preservation was fashionable, died Monday in Buffalo. She was 81.
She was known for her warmth, kindness and passion for the Arts and Crafts movement’s local roots.
The former Edythe Smith, an elegant, imposing woman with striking red hair, moved to Buffalo after she married restaurateur Frank Turgeon. The couple, who had two children, eventually divorced, but the restaurant he introduced her to in East Aurora became part of her life’s work.
Ms. Turgeon was nicknamed Kitty because her big, bright eyes were compared to a cat’s.
After her first tour of the Roycroft Inn, which would become one of the 21 restaurants in a collection owned by her former husband and his brother Ralph, she asked of the Roycroft founder, “Who the hell is Elbert Hubbard?” That was the beginning of her shift from interior decoration to historic preservation and her championing of the Roycroft movement, the eclectic turn-of-the-last-century community with printing press, farms and artisans making furniture and pottery, where 500 were once employed.
“I’m devastated” by Ms. Turgeon’s death, said Sandy Starks, a longtime friend. Reflecting on the Roycroft, she said, “If it wasn’t for her, it wouldn’t have landmark status … She really started the renaissance back in 1976.”
Ms. Turgeon, author of cookbooks and histories, was in the midst of writing about the Roycroft’s current renaissance. She lived in a Roycroft artists’ house at the edge of the historic South Grove Street campus and was at the inn as recently as last month giving tours and attending about at the Roycroft arts and crafts conference.
She grew up in Chicago, earned an undergraduate degree at Cornell University and returned to her alma mater in 1975, commuting from Buffalo to Ithaca to study for a master’s in historic preservation, the first of its kind at the time. “By then, I was already in love with the Roycroft,” Ms. Turgeon said in a recording from a recent talk at the Central Library in downtown Buffalo. “It was because it fit my philosophy of life. My way of thinking and Elbert Hubbard’s way of thinking were just alike.”
Hubbard, a former salesman at Buffalo’s Larkin Soap Co., left his job and moved to East Aurora in the late 1800s to found a community of artisans whose goods were sold nationwide. It was part of the Arts and Crafts movement, in the United States and Europe, which celebrated handmade things in opposition to the profusion of the industrial age’s factory-made goods.
“Arts and Crafts is not a style,” she said in her library talk. “It’s a philosophy.” Ms. Turgeon was known to friends for her heart-to-heart hugs, an embodiment of a Roycroft theme. The words “head,” “heart” and “hand” were carved on the door to Hubbard’s wife Alice’s office, which is now at the entry to guest rooms at the inn. They were a nod to a John Ruskin quote and fundamental Roycroft creed: “A belief in working with the head, hand and heart and mixing enough play with the work so that every task is pleasurable and makes for health and happiness.”
The inn is now owned by the Margaret L. Wendt Foundation, which paid $9 million to help restore and reopen it in 1995. It is a centerpiece of the campus, with assorted buildings that have been undergoing gradual restoration by the inn’s nonprofit neighbor, Roycroft Campus Corp.
After Ms. Turgeon arrived at the aging inn in the 1970s, she struggled with its expensive needs. It closed in 1987 and reopened after the Wendt Foundation took over. Her Cornell studies, and an enthusiastic professor, led her to decide that landmark status could lead to grants and support to cover the high price of restoration. When the landmark office lost her application for the Roycroft, then-Rep. Jack Kemp stepped in, Starks said. He was having a Republican fundraising party at the inn, and Ms. Turgeon mentioned her difficulties. The next day, an aide called and began to shepherd the process: Kemp, a former Buffalo Bills quarterback, had stayed at the inn with teammates while the fledgling team practiced on the polo fields of what is now Knox Farm State Park.
Now the campus has the nation’s highest historic distinction, like the White House and the Empire State Building.
With its vaulted ceilings and lobby murals of world landmarks such as Egypt’s pyramids, the Roycroft is the kind of place that families go for special occasions. “What it means to the community is invaluable, and Kitty always recognized that,” said Martha Augat, innkeeper who oversees the 26-room hotel and the restaurant.
Ms. Turgeon was a founder of the Roycrofters at Large Association, the Foundation for the Study of the Arts and Crafts Movement and the Preservation Coalition of Erie County. She designed the “Road Scholar” program to bring guests to East Aurora to learn about the Arts and Crafts movement. She served on many boards and committees at institutions such as the Burchfield Penney Art Center, the Buffalo History Museum, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and the Historic Preservation Commission of East Aurora. She was given an Arts and Crafts Lifetime Achievement Award at a national Arts and Crafts conference in North Carolina.
Survivors include her former husband, Frank Turgeon; two sisters, Josepha “Rusty” Kunz and Lynn Mousseau; a son, Mark Turgeon; a daughter, Gillian Turgeon; a grandson; and a great-grandson. A memorial service is being planned for later this month at St. Matthias Episcopal Church in East Aurora.
More by Michelle Kearns at www.BuffaloNews.com