Minerva Montooth is 101 years old, but the most surprising thing about her isn’t her age, it’s her address.
“I think I lucked out,” she said.
Montooth lives at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin in Spring Green, Wisconsin. As one of the last living apprentices to work alongside Wright, she is surrounded daily by memories of their time together.
“We were all apprentices,” she said, flipping through photo albums with her daughter, Margo. “I remember very well helping build the theater, which is where Mr. Wright suggested we have our wedding, which we did.”
Montooth met Frank Lloyd Wright and his wife, Olgivanna, through her childhood friend and eventual husband, Charles Montooth.
“Charles was a very good architect,” she recalled. “I didn’t know what an architect was. You know, in a farm community, they just all built their houses themselves.”
Montooth grew up on a dairy farm in Illinois. She and her sister graduated at the top of their high school class, earning scholarships to college. She went on to graduate from Northwestern University with a degree in English.
“I went to Chicago. I worked for the Encyclopedia Britannica doing research,” she said with a smile. “Then I got bored with a little city like Chicago. I wanted the big lights, so I went to New York. My office was right over Fifth Avenue, and I just looked down and there was the whole city.”
Her career took a turn when she joined her sister on a trip to Arizona, where Charles Montooth had been studying and working alongside Frank Lloyd Wright. It was the first of many visits to the desert over the years.
“Charles had been asking me to marry him for five years,” she said. “And so I finally said yes.”
The couple made their home in Arizona, where Montooth raised their three children. Over time, she became an integral part of not just her own family, but also to the Wrights’ family and eventually their foundation.
“Having Mr. Wright speak to me on a very familiar level, I mean, we just were friends from the moment we met.”
In 1959, Olgivanna Wright became president of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, and Montooth began serving as her assistant.
“Assistant to Mrs. Wright. That’s what she called me. I was there for 25 years,” she said.
Decades later, Montooth remains the last living fellow who spent time with the original apprenticeship.
“Absolutely incredible,” she said. “That I was ever here… that I was ever married to Charles… that I was ever with Mrs. Wright so long… and that I’m here, still.”
And for the youngest members of her family, visiting great-grandma’s house is a little extra special.
