Innkeeper emeritus Kitty Turgeon earned degree in preservation, Roycroft

By Linda Grace-Kobas

When Kitty Smith Turgeon says she earned a "master's in Roycroft" from Cornell in 1980, she's only half joking.

Turgeon, who graduated with her bachelor of science degree from the School of Hotel Management in 1955, returned to Cornell more than 20 years later to learn how to restore the historic, but decrepit, inn she had acquired in 1977.

Built by master craftsmen in 1905, the Roycroft Inn accommodated thousands of people, many of them famous, during its heyday when Elbert Hubbard reigned as leader of the Roycroft Arts and Crafts Community in East Aurora, N.Y. Professor Michael Kammen, in American Places, describes the inn as "a huge fieldstone and wood building with an elaborately raftered superstructure -- a blend of English and Arts movement architecture for the Niagara Frontier countryside." See story.

After Hubbard's tragic death in 1915, his son Bert operated the inn until 1938. Interest in the movement, and its mecca, waned over the years, and the neglected building passed through several hands, until it fell into Turgeon's loving care. Dedicated to preserving the inn and the ideals of the arts and crafts movement, she came to Cornell to earn a master's degree and learn about architectural preservation in one of the country's first programs at the College of Architecture.

"When I went back to get my master's degree, I braided my own program together," she related. In addition to hotel courses, she went to the colleges of Architecture and Human Ecology for courses in preservation and design. At the Hotel School, she tested recipes later published in a cookbook of original Roycroft recipes. For an architectural preservation class, she prepared a walking tour of the Roycroft campus that is still in use there. In one design class, in lieu of a paper, she did a presentation of the restoration of one of the inn's main suites into a museum.

"Almost half the course work for my master's was Roycroft related," she said.

Turgeon spent years fund raising for the inn's restoration and raising public interest not only in the Roycroft campus buildings but in the holistic philosophy of the arts and crafts movement, whose trademark mission-style furniture is now widely popular. In 1986, thanks to her leadership, the inn was granted national landmark status. The Margaret L. Wendt Foundation donated $8 million for the restoration, and the grand structure reopened as a working inn in 1995.

After serving as innkeeper for five years, Turgeon moved to "innkeeper emeritus" status. The Wendt Foundation now owns the Roycroft Inn and manages it through a private company.

Turgeon now owns and operates Roycroft Shops on the original Roycroft campus. She has a close relationship with the staff at the Erie County Cornell Cooperative Extension, which is housed in a former Roycroft print shop. She helps promote their events, which will include a garden fair this fall.

But her real mission -- pardon the pun, she says -- is to help educate the public not only about the style but about the ideals of the arts and crafts movement, saying, "My new love is making people understand that this is a very good lifestyle." She has written two books on arts and crafts design and one history of the Roycroft campus, all with Robert Rust. She often signs them with one of the Roycroft epigrams, "Hand Head and Heart."

Turgeon has two grown children. Her son, Mark, is a 1977 Hotel School graduate who runs the Riverside Inn and Lewiston Brew House in Lewiston, N.Y.

She attended her 45th reunion last year. "I always thought my originally falling in love with the Roycroft was because it was all Gothic, ivy-covered buildings and had a tower that played chimes," she explained, laughing, in an interview. "I thought I was back at Cornell."