Florence Rand Lang: Artistic Wood Carver

If you’ve visited the Montclair Art Museum or attended a graduation in the Montclair High School amphitheater, you have already connected with Florence Rand Lang. As the sole surviving child of an extremely wealthy Montclair family, she became a philanthropic force, shaping the town in enduring ways, among them funding those two local landmarks.

In the 19th century, her father and uncle established a business whose equipment achieved mighty construction feats. The Rand & Waring Drill and Compressor Company eventually merged to become Ingersoll Rand, instrumental in building the Panama Canal. Florence was born into an industrialized world in 1861, growing up good at math and engaged with the family business. Had she been a man, she would have pursued engineering, she told a group of Cornell University officials when she was 50 years old.

Instead, 80 years after her death, she is best remembered for being philanthropic. Much of her largess supported art from coast to coast, be it in Massachusetts (a Nantucket artists’ colony) or California (an art building at Scripps College). Often overlooked, though, is that Florence was an artist herself – both a painter (she received a medal in 1934 for a landscape) and a sculptor (she spent a year studying in Philadelphia).

Little of her artistic work survives, but one example that still does graces the exterior and interior of Red Gables, her former home at 99 S. Fullerton Avenue in Montclair. When Florence Rand married Henry Lang in 1906 (they met through the Montclair Camera Club, another creative pursuit), her mother gave the midlife newlyweds this house as a gift. It had not yet been designed or built, so Florence played a significant role in shaping the house. Her carved woodwork, inside and out, contributes to the building’s distinctive character.

Its architectural style is eclectic, featuring elements of California Craftsman, Gothic and Queen Anne in stucco and brick. The roof is sheathed in red tiles, hence the name Red Gables. In this home Florence unleashed her creative expression though wood carving, embracing the spirit of craftsmanship celebrated by the flourishing Arts and Crafts movement.

Her exterior carvings highlight the architecture, accenting bargeboards with organic, Swiss-like ornament and punctuating brackets with acanthus leaves and corbels with Gothic grotesques. Most personal is the date carved below a projecting bay of windows: 1906, both the year of construction and the year of Florence and Henry’s union.

Indoors, her artistry continues in abundant rich wood detailing. Most special is the grand oak staircase, which she decorated with a pattern of deeply incised flowers and crisscrossing diagonals that form six-pointed stars.

Florence and Henry owned this house until around 1919, by which time they had built themselves a baronial mansion around the corner. (That was demolished in the early 1960s to construct Hawthorne Towers.) After Florence and Henry’s tenure, Red Gables remained a private home for another half-century, then housed the Yard School of Art, and was later placed on the National Register of Historic Places. Since 1995 it has been part of the Bnai Keshet synagogue, where the six-pointed stars carved into the staircase can be seen anew as the Star of David.

Through more than a century and various roles in the community, Red Gables has survived as a quiet showcase to the creative vision of Florence Rand Lang, one of Montclair’s most revered art patrons and a lesser-known artist in her own right.

By Lisanne Renner, with special thanks to Judy Hinds and the Nantucket Preservation Trust.

Portrait of Florence Lang, 1927, by Elinor M. Barnard (1872-1942).

Bargeboards on Red Gables, carved by Florence Rand Lang. Credit: David W. Lowden

The oak staircase at Red Gables carved by Florence Rand Lang. The sunflower and crisscrossing design can also suggest the Star of David now that the building is occupied by Bnai Keshet synagogue. Credit: David W. Lowden.

Emilie Koehler Greenough: Montclair Artist Colony Member

Emilie Koehler Greenough was an artist who, with her husband Walter (also an artist), moved to Montclair in 1890 to join the art colony established here by George Inness.

Emilie may be best known for the ecclesiastical stained glass window designs she completed while working at the John La Farge Studio in New York. The quality of skin tones in her stained glass work was especially noted. (She and Walter actually met at the studio and were married in 1885.)

She was born in Sharpsburg, Pennsylvania in 1863. She attended the Philadelphia School of Design and then Cooper Union in New York City. Her original training as a portrait artist may have contributed to her skill with skin tones.

After moving to Montclair, she, like George Inness, seems to have been captured by the beauty of the surrounding landscape, and she produced a number of landscape paintings at that point.

Emilie and Walter had four children. Their Montclair home became a popular gathering spot for fellow artists who collaborated on creative endeavors including pageants, plays, poetry readings, and concerts. The Greenough’s second home at 340 Highland Avenue even included a studio and a stage for productions.

Unfortunately, Walter died from pneumonia in 1898 at the age of 41. He had been not only an accomplished artist, but a musician and an early adopter of color photography.

Widowed in her mid-30s, Emilie continued to support her family through her artwork. The larger art colony also showed their support by holding benefits for the family.

Emilie continued to paint figures for stained glass projects, and worked in other media including oil, watercolors, pastels, and etchings. She was one of the first women to join the American Water Color Society. She also taught art classes in Montclair.

She continued to create art until her death in 1955 at the age of 92. She and Walter are buried at Mt. Hebron Cemetery in Montclair.

By Board of Trustees Vice President Helen Fallon

Emilie Koehler Greenough at her home studio, 1946. Photo courtesy of Christine Stehli Glickson

Walter and Emilie Greenough family, possibly 1898. Photo courtesy Christine Stehli Glickson

Mary Wilson Travis Arny

Mary Travis Arny, known to generations of Montclairians as "The Bird Lady", was born in a house on Park Street on October 13, 1909. Her father, Dr. Thomas Travis, was the minister of Watchung Avenue Congregational Church and her mother, an accomplished artist and Metropolitan Woman's Golf Champion, was also a champion of good causes including planting trees along Montclair streets and establishing a Tuberculosis Sanitarium in Essex County.

Mary's childhood experiences camping and fishing with her father, a dedicated Naturalist, in the Canadian wilderness and in then-wild Florida helped to foster her love, appreciation and knowledge of all things wild. She often told of her father calling her outdoors in Florida to observe when she was 7 years old. Pointing to the ivory-billed woodpecker in a nearby tree he admonished her to remember it, as "by the time you are grown up there won't be any more of them." Sadly his statement proved to be prophetic.

Mary earned her B.S. at Douglass College (then NJ College for Women) and her M.S. from Rutger's University, both in science with an emphasis on Botany and Ornithology. She taught at Hillside School from 1936 until 1940. On June 25, 1938 she married Robert A. Arny, an engineer who had grown up in the house on the other side of Watchung Church from her parent's home. They shared a love of the out-of-doors and passed it on to their children.

Mr. and Mrs. Arny raised three children in the family home which became one of the first registered Backyard WiIdlife Habitats in New Jersey. It was here that Mary banded birds and collected scientific information on them for the U.S. Geological Survey for over three decades. She wrote and spoke to many organizations, gaining a reputation as being both knowledgeable and entertaining. She served as Director of the Federated Naturalists of New Jersey and on the Linnean Society. Her weekly column "Out On A Limb" in the Montclair Times was so popular it was syndicated in other papers in New Jersey and New York. It may have been the four baby screech owls she saved, following destruction of their nest in a storm, that anchored her fame as "The Bird Lady." She wrote articles about them and about banding osprey fledglings that appeared in several national magazines. Mrs. Arny published Seasoned With Salt in 1954, a story of her home and the people who had lived, laughed and loved in it

Her love of history led her on frequent research journeys to uncover the history of her family home and the history of her hometown. She authored Red Lion Rampant, a history of Essex County which won the NJ Association of Teachers of English Author Award. In 1963 she became one of the founders of the Montclair Historical Society, now The Montclair History Center.

In between these activities, she served as Professor of Biology at Montclair State College, Visiting Professor at Upsala College and Director of Christian Education at Watchung Avenue Congregational Church. She testified before the U.S. House of Representatives to ban leg hold traps from use on wildlife species and she nursed back to health hundreds, if not thousands of birds, bunnies, possums, raccoons and other injured, lost or abandoned animals brought to her door by friends, neighbors and strangers. Mary Arny was a wildlife rehabilitator before there was such a word. She also conducted nature activities for Montclair's Summer Playground Program at schools throughout the township and created a set of stepping stones with animal foot prints that graced the outside of the children's section of the Montclair Public Library on South Fullerton Avenue.

She was a woman ahead of her time, as were many Montclair women of her generation, speaking out for the environment and actively working to protect and conserve wildlife and wild places wherever she found them. One of her drawings of an owl decorates her gravestone at Mount Hebron cemetery.

By Nancy Arny Pi-Sunyer