SLIDESHOWS: Iowa to assume costs to maintain Frank Lloyd Wright's Cedar Rock

For Cedar Rock, the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed home two miles north of here, perpetuity ends in fiscal 2011.

Lowell and Agnes Walter, who in the late 1940s commissioned the famed architect to build their dream home, left at their deaths “a trust fund for the perpetual maintenance of the property,” according to the Web site of the Department of Natural Resources, which since 1982 has operated the site under its state parks system.

The trust fund, which has covered almost all of Cedar Rock's expenses for the past 27 years, is rapidly shrinking, and the site's annual $300,000 operating expenses will have to be included in the state parks budget starting in fiscal 2011, said Kevin Szcodronski, chief of the DNR's parks bureau.

“We will pledge as a department by all means to take care of it. That's part of the deal,” Szcodronski said.

When Lowell Walter died in 1981, he willed the house and a $1.5 million trust fund for its care and operation to the state. When his wife died in 1986, she left an additional $500,000 to the trust fund, said Pat Schmitz, site manager at Cedar Rock.

Most of that second bequest was spent on more than 200 acres of farmland and Wapsipinicon River bottom timber adjacent to the house and construction of a visitor center on the property, Schmitz said.

That farmland, now valued at slightly more than $1 million, accounts for 78 percent of the trust's remaining value of $1,292,000, according to the trust's most recent annual report for the year ending Feb. 28, 2009. It produces annual income of only $22,650, and the DNR would be loathe to liquidate it, Szcodronski said.

The land was bought to buffer the property from development and to maintain the natural setting in which it was built, he said.

Szcodronski and Schmitz said the current recession, with its widespread devaluation of securities, may have hastened the depletion of the trust fund.

“But that's not the reason for the transition to taxpayer funding. There just was not enough money in the trust fund to sustain its operation indefinitely,” Szcodronski said.

Besides routine maintenance and operating expenses, the fund also paid for such major projects as a new boiler system and two replacements of the house's flat roof, Schmitz said.

The next major project entails a new flat roof and tuckpointing for the two-story boathouse at the river's edge, she said.

“Wright pushed building materials to the limits,” so maintaining one of his properties in its original condition is much more expensive than maintenance of normal buildings of a similar size, Schmitz said.

John Maehl, parks supervisor for the DNR's Northeast District, said he expects the trust fund to be nearly exhausted within two years.

Maehl said legislators will have to be persuaded to increase the state parks general fund appropriation for fiscal year 2011, which begins July 1 of next year - a particular challenge in light of the pending 10 percent state budget cut.

Maehl said he believes the Walters “would have been tickled” that the fund has lasted as long as it has. The people of Iowa should be extremely grateful for the free use of a magnificent attraction for 27 years, he said.