Fourteen original buildings still stand on South Grove Street in East Aurora: rough-cut stone, hand-hewn beams, tile roofs. They are what is left of the most complete Arts and Crafts colony in the country, a place where close to 500 people once printed books, hammered copper and built oak furniture for a living. It was a factory. It simply refused to be called one.
The soap salesman who quit
Elbert Hubbard made his money in Buffalo at the Larkin Soap Company, where he was good enough at mail-order promotion to help push Larkin near the top of that industry. He left business in 1892 to write. In 1894 he traveled to England and saw William Morris's Kelmscott Press, and in 1895 he started printing in East Aurora under the Roycroft name. The first purpose-built shop on the campus went up in 1897. Everything else grew outward from there.
The press paid the bills, and one piece of filler paid a lot of them. In the March 1899 issue of Hubbard's magazine The Philistine he ran a short, untitled essay about a soldier handed a message who delivered it without asking questions. "A Message to Garcia" was reprinted by railroads, department stores, the Navy and the Boy Scouts. Hubbard claimed 40 million copies by 1914. Nobody has ever verified that number. Later claims climbed to 80 million and past 200 million, which is reason enough to doubt all of them. But the essay made him a national name, and national names move furniture.
What they actually made
Roycroft was a stack of guilds sharing one campus: a print shop, a bindery, a furniture shop, a copper shop, a foundry, a leather shop. Books came off handmade paper and went into tooled leather. The furniture was heavy quartersawn oak with the joinery left visible and no apology offered for it. The copper shop turned out lamps, vases, bookends and trays that collectors still hunt down a century later.
By 1910 the payroll was near 500 people, in a village small enough that you could take in the whole operation from the sidewalk. The working creed was head, hand and heart, with enough play mixed into the work to keep it bearable. Whether Hubbard personally lived up to that is a fair argument. That the buildings got built and the work got made is not.
The Inn
Enough people came to see the place that Hubbard had to put them up. The Roycroft Inn opened to visitors in 1905: Roycroft furniture, Roycroft lamps, murals on the walls, all of it a showroom that happened to serve breakfast. The federal documentation behind the campus's landmark listing names Henry Ford, Booker T. Washington and Clara Barton among the guests who passed through.
May 7, 1915
Elbert and Alice Hubbard sailed for Europe in the spring of 1915, hoping to report on the war and, if they could arrange it, interview Kaiser Wilhelm II. A German submarine torpedoed the Lusitania off the Irish coast on May 7. Both of them died.
Alice Moore Hubbard usually gets a footnote in this story and deserves better. She married Hubbard in 1904, served as general manager of the Roycroft, ran the Inn, and was principal of the Roycroft School for Boys. She was also a suffragist. She marched in the first Washington suffrage parade on March 3, 1913, and published Woman's Work in 1908. The colony ran on her administration at least as much as on his publicity, and after 1915 it had neither.
What survives
Roycroft declined through the 1920s and the business failed in the Depression. The buildings stayed put. The campus went on the National Register of Historic Places on November 8, 1974, and was designated a National Historic Landmark on February 26, 1986. The Inn had been closed for years by then. A nine-year, $8 million restoration funded by the Margaret L. Wendt Foundation finished in 1995 and returned it to service as a working inn. Artisans are back in the shops. You can buy a hammered copper piece a few feet from where the originals were made.
The Hubbard name did not stop at the campus gate, either. Down Main Street, the Aurora Theatre opened in 1925 with Elbert Hubbard II, the founder's son, among the local businessmen who financed it. A few streets over sits the Millard Fillmore House, saved by one of his partners in that theater. For everywhere else in the region, there is the full town-by-town guide.
Wear it
The Roycroft Campus tee is part of our ALL America City collection, one Western New York landmark per shirt. Hubbard sold a simple argument for forty years: an ordinary object is worth making well enough to keep. That holds up on a bookend, on a copper lamp, and on a shirt.