Transcribing the George A. Crawley Letters

by Emily Werner, Curator

“I keep awake thinking of it all at nights & hopeing it will be quite successful…I shall have put so much work into it & somehow things generally do go right in this world if you take unlimited trouble.” – George Crawley to Jay Phipps, 1/6/1905

Written in an energetic script with variable punctuation, spelling, and abbreviations, the letters can be difficult to understand at times. The Preservation Department has been hard at work organizing the collection and transcribing the letters to make them more accessible to staff and researchers. I have studied the letters and become an expert at reading Crawley’s handwriting. Crawley occasionally used cross-writing, in which he wrote lines of text first horizontally, and then vertically, on the same piece of paper in order to save on postage and paper costs.

The Archives at Old Westbury Gardens contain a collection of letters written by English designer George A. Crawley to John S. “Jay” Phipps during the construction of Westbury House and the surrounding estate. These letters, dating from 1904 into the early 1920s, give us invaluable insight into the creative mind that brought our beloved house and gardens to life.

As Crawley and Jay were rarely in the same place–or even the same country–while discussing plans for the house, their letters cover everything from the location of drainage pipes and light switches to designs for the mantle pieces and placement of trees across the landscape.

Crawley gave Jay regular updates on the project. He coordinated contracts and negotiated payments with various artists, craftsmen, art dealers, landscapers, and other workers. He held everyone to his exceptionally high standards and refused to compromise on quality, often asking for work to be done again if it wasn’t to his liking the first time around. In a 1906 letter to Jay, he wrote “The work at Westbury is going on satisfactorily & I am hopeful that you & your wife may be satisfied with the result. I think that every room will be found to have some distinct interest & will show care & thought. I am myself very hard to please & fastidious to a degree…”

Some letters even contain quick sketches of design elements, like this one showing his vision for the landscape in 1906. The sketches are fun to compare to his formal plans and even the finished results!

Our Archivist, Vanessa, is working on scanning the letters and adding them to our internal database to aid in preservation efforts. This collection remains a constant source of information as we continue to learn more about Crawley’s process and the construction of Westbury House.