martinhouseclr

176 DARWIN D. MARTIN HOUSE // CULTURAL LANDSCAPE REPORT praise from his peers. 32 As a businessman, having pioneered advances in business record keeping, Martin is credited with expanding the Larkin Soap Company to rival that of Sears and Roebuck Co. 33 Also an intellectual and autodidact uniquely borne of the Progressive Era, Martin was known to have a Transcendentalist’s appreciation of nature and a lifelong sentimentality toward the idyllic countryside landscape of his childhood. This is expressed in many ways: his personal library and known reading subjects, his fleeting desire to live in the rural countryside with Isabelle, his eventual decision to set down a home in the designed “rural beauty” of Olmsted Sr.’s new garden suburb, the physical and sentimental association of individually selected tree specimens with his childhood landscape, and as his interests in horticulture and his more-than-passing involvement and influence in the detailed design of the Martin House garden. The landscape was, after all, “one of the details we [Martin and Isabelle] are permitted to have fun with.” 34 It is these characteristics that likely drew him to seek out Wright and gave him a unique awareness of Wright’s ideas regarding the integration of house and landscape. It is also for this reason that Martin can be credited with bringing Wright to Buffalo, a community where 32 Ibid., 36. 33 Darwin D. Martin, The first to make a card ledger: Story of the Larkin Card Indexes, Larkin, Buffalo, 1932. 34 DDM-FLW, 15 October 1904, Trans. Jack Quinan 2003, WMP-UB. Fig. 174 The Martin Family, 1907. Darwin Martin center standing, Isabelle Martin center-right sitting.