Susan Lawrence Dana was a woman of her time and decades ahead at the same time. In the early 1900s, Susan was searching for the meaning of life as so many of us do after experiencing personal tragedy - and Susan’s life had been full of tragedies up to this point.
She had been pregnant twice but both children had died as infants. Her husband, Edwin Dana and her father had both died just months apart in 1900 and early 1901. Susan’s mother died just four years later.
Her father’s death had left her with a fortune. Rheuna Lawrence had started as a bricklayer and through hard work and thrift he had become a prominent businessman and mayor of Springfield. With money he borrowed from friends, Abe and Mary Lincoln, he bought a piece of property near the edge of town (now Fourth street and Lawrence). There he built a big Italianate-style brick home as evidence of his success.
Devastated at losing her entire family in just a few years, Susan used the
inheritance to become occupied with something else. In 1902, she decided to
remodel the now-outdated 30 year-old home her father had built. Instead of going
with a local Springfield architectural firm that had worked with her
father,
Susan chose a 35 year-old architect from Chicago known for his innovative style.
Frank Lloyd Wright had never had a patron as wealthy as Mrs. Dana up to this
point and turned her "remodeling" into a grand experiment for his
ideas. Wright not only designed the structure of the building, but also the
stained glass windows, the furniture, vases, fireplace screens and even
specifying some of the art pieces to be used around the house. Many of Wright’s
ideas about organic architecture, which were first demonstrated in the Dana
house, are echoed in his later works like the Martin House in Buffalo, NY, the Robie House in
Chicago and Fallingwater,
the most well-known private residence in the world.
Building on a grand scale, Wright designed the home around entertaining.
After almost two years of construction, Susan opened the new house, by hosting a
Christmas party for the artisans and workers who had built her home and their
families.
Known for her expensive clothes, frequent trips and extravagant parties, a busy social calendar didn’t fill the emptiness in Susan’s life. In an attempt to find direction and comfort, Susan tried reaching out to her father and husband through seances and spiritualist letters, asking them for guidance. Answers from the beyond indicated that Susan could anticipate a "very high mission" and that she would know her "great mission" when it appeared.
In 1912, Susan found love again. She fell in love with and married a young Danish concert singer, Lawrence Joergen-Dahl and they traveled together to his many concerts. Shortly after their first wedding anniversary, Lawrence Joergen-Dahl collapsed while they were on a trip to Chicago and died.
In 1918, Susan Lawrence Dana found herself in her third marriage, a loveless relationship to a close family friend, Charles Gehrman. Still believing that life held some great purpose for her, Susan began attending lectures at the First Christian Church on "Applied Psychology".
Suffrage for women arrived in 1923 and Susan spent five hectic months leading a campaign for equal rights for women as the legislative chair for the Illinois branch of the National Women’s Party. Enlisting the help of her friends in the Society for Applied Psychology, the National Women’s Party circulated campaign literature to legislators, their wives, and women across Illinois. In June 1923, the bill failed but Susan continued to be active in politics, joining other prominent local women to form the Sangamon County Republican Women's Club.