Frank Lloyd Wright’s Allen House offers outdoor walking tours beyond its walls

If you missed last fall’s series of walking tours of select homes in Wichita’s College Hill area, you’re in luck.

The entirely outdoor tours, organized by Frank Lloyd Wright’s Allen House and featuring about 20 homes in the neighborhood of the landmark attraction at 255 N. Roosevelt, are returning this spring, starting March 28 and running through mid-May.

The six tours, which last between 1 ½ and 2 hours, focus on the architecture and history of the early residents who lived in the homes.

Allen House volunteer docent Alan Snowden, who leads the tours, has also added another outdoor walking tour series this spring called Belmont: Between the Arches, which kicks off March 29 with an already sold-out tour and continues with six more tours from early April through late May. About 30 homes are featured on that tour.

A century ago, Belmont Place was Wichita’s most affluent neighborhood, home to the city’s early movers and shakers. Distinctive, ornamental limestone arches built in 1924 mark the Douglas and Central entrances to the street, which was the first residential street to feature outdoor electric lights.

As he did last fall, Snowden will also offer a downtown history and architecture tour of about 12 blocks, starting at Wichita’s original City Hall and current home of the Wichita-Sedgwick County Historical Museum at 204 S. Main. That tour happens at 1 p.m. Sunday, April 26.

Snowden, who started volunteering at the Allen House about a year ago after retiring, said he’s always had an interest in history and he loves old houses.

“My wife and I moved 21 years ago to the Hillcrest Apartments in College Hill, and before that, we had an old Victorian home in Midtown,” Snowden said.

As part of the Allen House’s architecture and history tour series, he also led five tours during the past several months of the historical cooperative building where he and his wife live.

So, how did Snowden find himself in charge of creating multiple neighborhood tours offered outside of the Allen House?

“There are a lot of beautiful homes in College Hill around the Allen House. We get visitors from all around the country and sometimes they ask questions about the other houses. Amy (Reep) said she always wanted to have walking tours in the neighborhood but just needed somebody willing to do the research and write the script. So, I said, ‘Well, I’ll give it a shot.’ And that’s how we got started last fall,” Snowden said.

Reep is the executive director of the Allen House Foundation, the nonprofit organization that maintains and operates the Allen House as a museum. Wright designed the distinctive prairie-style home for statesman and Wichita Beacon newspaper publisher Henry J. Allen. It was commissioned in 1916 and finished in 1918.

One of the Allens’ early neighbors on Roosevelt was oil tycoon Warren E. Brown, whose home built in 1921 was reportedly billed as “the largest, the finest and the most expensive private dwelling in Kansas.” At the time, it cost about $200,000, or about $3.4 million in today’s dollars, to build. Another prominent neighbor was C.M. Jackman, a flour miller and president of the Kansas Milling Co.

Initially, Snowden said, the College Hill walking tour series started with just four tours scheduled starting at the end of this past September.

“We ended up doing 16, because they kept selling,” he said.

Snowden said tour participants have seemed to enjoy the historical information he includes about the early residents of the homes.

‘It makes it more interesting,” he said.

In researching the residents of Belmont Place, which included W.C. Coleman, who founded The Coleman Co., and investment banker RDW Clapp, Snowden discovered that another early homeowner on the street was Fern Jordan, the widow of Wichita founder J.R. Mead, who had remarried and was the first owner of the 1914-built home at 134 N. Belmont.

The affluent neighbors on Belmont Place were very “interconnected,” Snowden said.

Along with stabling their polo ponies together, “some of them went up to Colorado on vacation in the summer together to get away from the heat. They did business with each other. … And there were marriages between the families,” he said.

Tickets for all the architecture and history walking tours are $22 per person per tour and can be purchased through the Frank Lloyd Wright’s Allen House website at flwrightwichita.org/events.

The College Hill tours begin at St. James Episcopal Church at 3750 E. Douglas, where parking is available, and conclude at Blessed Sacrament Church at 124 N. Roosevelt. Tours are scheduled for 1 p.m. Saturdays, March 28, April 4, 18 and 25; and 9:30 a.m. Saturdays, May 9 and 16.

Belmont: Between the Arches tours begin at the Douglas Avenue and Belmont Place arch. The remaining Belmont tours are 2 p.m. Sundays, April 12 and 19; 1 p.m. Sunday, May 3; 9:30 a.m. Wednesdays, May 13 and 20; and 9:30 a.m. Saturday, May 23.

The Allen House has also started offering what it calls combo tours of the Allen House and the other Wright-designed building in Wichita, the Corbin Education Center on the Wichita State University campus. The 3-hour docent-led tours are scheduled for 9 a.m. Saturdays, April 4 and May 2; and noon Saturdays, April 18 and May 16. Participants must provide their own transportation. Tickets are $60, and are available on the Allen House website, as well.