"A Pleasure House for My Soul": Lew Wallace and His Study

The U.S. minister to the Ottoman Empire in 1885 found himself in a quandary. He had just prepared a telegram offering his resignation to President Grover Cleveland, whose party affiliation he did not share. Writing to his wife, Susan, in Crawfordsville, Indiana, about his plans, he told her that he was sure he would not be going back to his old law practice, terming it “the most detestable of human occupations.”

Instead, he dreamed of building a study where he could “write, and . . . think of nothing else. I want to bury myself in a den of books. I want to saturate myself with the elements of which they are made and breathe their atmosphere until I am of it. Not a book worm . . . but a man in the world of writing—one with a pen which shall stop men to listen to it, whether they wish to or not.”

Those were big plans, and Lew Wallace, a man whose “noblest dream of life has been one of fame,” got his wish. More than a decade after sharing his plans for a study with his wife, Wallace began building in Crawfordsville what one magazine called “a harmonious mingling of Romanesque, Greek and Byzantine architecture.” The study, which contributed greatly to Crawfordsville's designation as “the Athens of Indiana,” is maintained today as the General Lew Wallace Study and Museum. The study and grounds, once part of the Major Isaac Compton Elston estate, were declared a National Historic Landmark by the federal government in 1977. The study’s eclectic architectural mix matched the remarkable diversity of its builder's own career.

At various times in his life Wallace was a lawyer; an Indiana state senator; a major general during the Civil War; vice president of the court-martial that tried the conspirators behind the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln; New Mexico Territory governor; American minister to Turkey from 1881 to 1885; and, the role for which he is best remembered today, author of the classic historical novel, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. One of Wallace’s biographers, Irving McKee, noted that the Hoosier Renaissance man was “never content with the ordinary business of existence—working for dollars, rearing a family, snatching at comforts and petty advantages. He dreamed grandly of adventure and sought it, adventure fit for the American hero as well as the foreign knight.”

Lewis Wallace, born on April 10, 1827, second of four sons raised by David and Esther French Test Wallace. David Wallace, graduate of U.S. Military Academy at West Point, served for a time as mathematics teacher, settled in Brookville, studied law and became lawyer, and involved in Indiana politics, became sixth governor of Indiana. Described by his son as “a man of noble presence in the slender elegance of youth, straight and tall, with a well-shaped head set squarely on his soldiers.” His father influence Lew’s interest in the military, one of his earliest childhood memories was seeing the uniform David wore while a student at West Point—the “shining bullet buttons of the coat captured my childish fancy.”

“The noblest dream of life has been one of fame,” Wallace said in his journal. Instead of concentrating on his schoolwork, he spent his time in class filling his slate with drawings of soldiers fighting. Although he had little luck with most teachers, one, a private instructor at a school in Centerville, Indiana, Professor Samuel K. Hoshour, was the first to observe a glimmer of writing ability in Wallace. The professor had Wallace read such great English writers as William Shakespeare and the New Testament from the Bible, including the story of the birth of Jesus Christ. “Little did I dream then what those few verses were to bring to me—that out of them Ben-Hur was one day to be evoked,” said Wallace.

Living in Indianapolis at the age of eighteen, the young Wallace grew tired of copying records in clerk’s office and decided to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a lawyer, studied in his father’s law office. Wallace also began writing a novel and joined a local literary society. When the United States declared war on Mexico in 1846, Wallace abandoned his law studies, and recruited a company to join the fight, and became a second lieutenant in the First Indiana Regiment. He did not see action himself, but did see the aftermath of battles, which did not dampen his enthusiasm for the glory of battle. Returned home and resumed his law studies, obtaining his license in 1849.

 At the age of twenty-one, Wallace was described by a female friend as a handsome man. “In a crowd anywhere,” she said, “you would single him out as a king of men.” During a visit to Crawfordsville, he met a young woman named Susan Arnold Elston, the daughter of a local businessman. “She was beautiful in my eyes when I first saw her,” he said; they were married on May 6, 1852. “What of success has come to me, all that I am, in fact, is owing to her.” Moved to Covington to open a law practice, served as prosecuting attorney, and served in the Indiana Senate for a term.

With the outbreak of the Civil War, Wallace joined the Union cause, rising to the rank of major general and drawing the attention of the national media. A correspondent from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper reported that Wallace was “loved by his officers and by his men to a point of devotion; and it is little to say that they would follow wherever he led, not matter what lay before them.”

Wallace found early success as a soldier, saying, his “greatest personal satisfaction was due to the discovery of the fact that in the confusion and feverish excitement of real battle, I could think.” He won plaudits for his leadership and skill at the battles for Fort Henry and Fort Donelson in support of General Ulysses S. Grant, but was blamed, unfairly, to many Civil War historians, for the near-disaster for the Union cause at the Battle of Shiloh. A chagrined Wallace tried to win back his reputation, and do so through saving two Union cities from a Confederate attack—Cincinnati and, more importantly, the nation’s capital, Washington, DC, at the Battle of Monocacy.

Following the war’s end, Wallace continued to find ways to contribute to his state and country. He was on the military court that tried those involved with the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln; aided Mexican freedom fighters in their struggles to rid their country of its French ruler Louis Napoleon; received an appointment as governor of the New Mexico territory during a bloody period in that area’s history involving a young outlaw named Billy the Kid; and later became the U.S. minister (today an ambassador) to the Ottoman Empire (Turkey), spending four years in the Middle East.

All of these achievements, however, failed to heal for Wallace the “old wound” of the Battle of Shiloh: “Shiloh and its slanders! Will the world every acquit me of them?” he once wrote Susan. “If I were guilty I would not feel them so keenly.” That stain on his reputation, however, began to fade as Wallace won popular acclaim through his writing. He had published his first book, The Fair God, in 1873, but won his greatest fame with a work, Ben-Hur, published on November 12, 1880, by Harper and Brothers. Readers across the country and around the world were moved and thrilled by Wallace’s romantic tale, especially the exciting chariot race between Ben-Hur and his friend and enemy, Messala. “It seems not that when I sit down finally in the old man’s gown and slippers, helping the cat to keep the fireplace warm,” Wallace mused, “I shall look back upon Ben-Hur as my best performance.”

An 1893 visit to the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago inspired Wallace to become involved in architecture, which he called “the greatest of the three Arts.” Using profits from the success of Ben-Hur and his other works, including his third novel, The Prince of India, he, with the help of his son, Henry, and a Scottish-born Indianapolis architect named John G. Thurtle, financed the construction of a seven-story apartment building in Indianapolis called the Blacherne, named for a palace in Constantinople. Wallace kept an apartment at the Blacherne and used it whenever business matters took him to the Hoosier capital.

In addition to the Indianapolis apartment building, Wallace set out to finally fulfill his grand dream of constructing a “pleasure-house” for his soul, a study near his home in Crawfordsville. A July 13, 1895, article in the Indianapolis News reported that Wallace was preparing to build on approximately four acres one of the most unique “dens” in the country. The piece noted that in the rear of the Wallace residence “is a large grove of magnificent beech trees, some of which spread over a circle of eighty feet in diameter. In this grove, beautiful, quiet and secluded, the General will carry out his pet idea.”

The study's construction began in 1895 and was finished three years later at a cost of anywhere from $25,000 to 40,000—not an insignificant sum in nineteenth-century Indiana. Working under specifications drawn up by Wallace himself, architect Thurtle produced what one newspaper called “the most beautiful author's study in the world . . . a dream of oriental beauty and luxury.”

Wallace kept a close eye on construction, especially the material used for the structure. In the fall of 1895 he wrote Thurtle that the brick that had been delivered was not the type he had requested. “They are a dull brown color, absolutely without life or rose tint—dark as the brick in the Blacherne.” He called upon the architect to bring out to the site the sample Wallace and chosen and compare them for himself. He signed his letter: Yours (in bad humor), Lew Wallace.

The study incorporated a number of different architectural styles, including an entrance modeled on the abbey of the church of St. Pierre in France; a forty-foot-high tower with arched windows designed from the Cathedral of Pisa; and a copper dome and stained glass skylight that reflected the mosques Wallace had come to know while U.S. minister to Turkey. Also, a limestone frieze, which included likenesses of characters from Wallace's novels, ran around the tower and study. The face of Judah Ben-Hur stands above the study’s entrance. A moat stocked with fish was located on the building’s east side. However, concerns about the building’s foundation and the safety of the neighborhood’s children prompted Wallace to fill in the moat. In its place Wallace built a circular garden with gravel paths.

The study’s interior had electric and gas lights and a gas fireplace. White oak bookcases lined three of the four walls and were stuffed with books on history, law, and the military. Wallace also filled the structure with mementos from his life, including the arms and shield of an Apache warrior killed by Wallace’s bodyguards during his days as New Mexico’s territorial governor; a Confederate flag captured during the Battle of Monocacy; and a painting of a Turkish princess given to him by the rule of the Ottoman Empire, Abdul Hamid II.

Wallace did not sit idle in his “pleasure-house.” Instead, he established a regular schedule for his writing, working from nine in the morning until lunch, then resuming work and completing his efforts at four in the afternoon. “I write from 1,000 to 1,500 words every day,” he told a reporter. “Then, every day I carefully go over what I have written the previous day, and generally cut it down to 200 or 300 words or throw it out entirely.”

Although he had made progress on an autobiography, Wallace endured ill health during the last few years of his life. He could walk only with the help of a cane and became so weak he had to stop work on his autobiography. He had completed writing up to the Battle of Monocacy. Nearly a lifetime of smoking had caught up with him. Stomach cancer robbed his body of its ability to absorb nourishment from food. At the end, only his doctors, nurses, his wife, son, and daughter-in-law were at his side.

According to newspaper reports, the seventy-seven-year-old Wallace turned to Susan, and with his last words said: “I am ready to meet my Maker.” He then lapsed into unconsciousness and died at 9:10 p.m. on February 15, 1905. The Wallace family released a statement to newspapers saying: “He fought the good fight and died, as he had lived, without fear.”

Following his death, Wallace's beloved study was under the care of his family. In 1941, however, the Community House, an organization established by the women of Crawfordsville, purchased the study and grounds from Lewis Wallace, the general's grandson, and presented the property to the city for use as a memorial to Wallace's life.

Today, the study features an impressive array of Wallace memorabilia, which is maintained by the city's Park & Recreation Department. The grounds surrounding the study include a bronze statue of Wallace, which is a duplicate of the one in the U.S. Capitol in Washington, DC. The statue is west of the study and stands in place of a beech tree under which Wallace wrote much of Ben-Hur.