Ragdale

Based on Wikipedia: Ragdale

If you've ever picked up the bestselling book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, you've already met Ragdale without knowing it. That haunting sculpture on the cover—a bronze girl holding two bowls at her sides, her eyes closed in peaceful contemplation—was born in a prairie studio on a rambling estate in Lake Forest, Illinois. The sculptor was Sylvia Shaw Judson. The place was her childhood home. And the story of how that home became a sanctuary for artists stretches back more than a century.

A Name Borrowed from England

In 1897, Chicago architect Howard Van Doren Shaw built a summer retreat for his family about thirty miles north of the city. He named it Ragdale, borrowing the name from an old Tudor house in Leicestershire, England. Shaw didn't choose the name because he particularly admired that English house. He simply liked the sound of it—the way it conjured images of meadows and woods and hollow apple trees.

The raggedy look was intentional.

Shaw wanted shrubbery that looked unkempt, tree branches that hung low, and violets that invaded the lawn as if no one had planned them there. This wasn't the manicured estate of a wealthy industrialist. It was something more intimate: a place designed to feel like it had always been there, growing wild at the edges.

The house and barn followed the Arts and Crafts style that Shaw championed throughout his career. This movement, which emerged in late Victorian England and flourished in America through the early twentieth century, rejected the mass-produced ornamentation of industrial age buildings. Instead, it celebrated handcraftsmanship, honest materials, and harmony with nature. You can see it in the way Shaw's buildings at Ragdale seem to emerge from the landscape rather than impose upon it.

The Outdoor Theatre

In 1912, the property gained a distinctive feature: the Ragdale Ring. This was an outdoor theatre, a simple clearing where benches could accommodate more than two hundred spectators. During the 1930s, Shaw's family and friends would gather here to perform plays written by Frances Shaw, Howard's wife.

Imagine it: summer evenings in the Chicago suburbs, the sun setting over the prairie, and a community coming together to watch amateur theatrical productions in a meadow. This wasn't Broadway or even proper regional theatre. It was something more fragile and more valuable—a creative tradition held together by family, friendship, and a shared love of making things.

The Ragdale Ring represents an idea we've largely lost in our era of professional entertainment and passive consumption: that ordinary people might gather to create and perform for each other, simply for the joy of it.

The Bird Girl and the Meadow Studio

Howard Van Doren Shaw's daughter Sylvia was born the same year Ragdale was built, in 1897. She would grow up to become a sculptor of considerable reputation, though her fame took an unexpected turn decades after her death.

In 1943, when Sylvia was forty-six, a new studio was built for her on the prairie portion of the Ragdale property. The Meadow Studio gave her the space she needed for her sculptural work—the kind of work that requires room to step back, to walk around, to see a piece from every angle.

It was here that she created Bird Girl.

The sculpture depicts a young girl in a simple dress, holding shallow bowls in her outstretched hands. Her eyes are closed. Her posture suggests waiting, or perhaps offering. Originally, Sylvia made a few bronze casts of the piece, and one of them ended up in Bonaventure Cemetery in Savannah, Georgia, as a grave marker.

For decades, Bird Girl stood quietly among the cemetery's famous live oaks and Spanish moss, visited only by those who wandered past by chance. Then, in 1994, writer John Berendt published Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, a nonfiction account of a sensational murder trial in Savannah. The book became a phenomenon—spending a record-breaking 216 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list—and its cover featured a photograph of Bird Girl in the atmospheric cemetery setting.

Suddenly, Sylvia Shaw Judson's quiet sculpture became one of the most recognized images in American popular culture. Tourists flocked to Bonaventure Cemetery in such numbers that the sculpture had to be moved to the Telfair Academy museum for its own protection.

Sylvia had created other notable works in that Meadow Studio too—pieces with names like Cats and Summer—but it is Bird Girl that secured her place in the public imagination, all because of a book cover chosen years after her death in 1978.

A Granddaughter's Gift

Two years before Sylvia died, her daughter Alice Judson Hayes made a decision that would give Ragdale a second life.

Alice was a poet. She understood what artists and writers needed because she was one of them. In 1976, she founded the Ragdale Foundation as a nonprofit organization with a simple mission: to provide a place of rest and relaxation for creative people of all disciplines.

The concept Alice Hayes pioneered—what we now call an artist residency—has become a fixture of the creative landscape. But in the 1970s, such programs were far less common. The idea was straightforward but radical: give artists time and space away from their daily responsibilities, feed them, house them, and ask nothing in return except that they work on their art.

In the beginning, Alice ran the foundation almost single-handedly. She managed the landscaping. She cooked the meals. She maintained the facilities. It was a labor of love sustained by one person's conviction that Ragdale could serve a purpose larger than a family's summer retreat.

Years later, reflecting on this period, Alice wrote about her gratitude: to her mother Sylvia for giving her the house, to the ancestors and relatives and what she called the "ghosts" she communed with when she returned to live there, to all the artists and writers whose creativity validated her vision. And finally, she expressed gratitude to the house itself—for its smell and taste and texture, for the views out its windows, for what she called its "nurturing spirit."

The Foundation Grows

In 1980, the Ragdale Foundation expanded when it acquired the Barnhouse. This building had passed through several hands since Howard Shaw's time—his youngest daughter Theodora had sold it to the Preston family in the late 1940s, and they had remodeled it in the 1950s. Now it returned to the Ragdale fold, and today it houses the Foundation's offices.

Six years later, in 1986, Alice Hayes made an even more significant gift. She donated both the buildings and five acres of grounds to the City of Lake Forest. This wasn't merely generosity; it was strategy. By transferring ownership to the municipality, she ensured that the Ragdale property would be preserved—not just the structures, but what she called its "environmental integrity." The meadows and woods and hollow apple trees that her great-grandfather had cherished would remain protected from development.

In 1991, a new building rose on the property: the Friends' Studio. This was the first new construction since Howard Shaw's original work, and it presented a delicate challenge. How do you add a modern building to a historic site without disrupting its character?

The architect Walker Johnson, who served as a Ragdale board president, recalled the anxiety surrounding the project. The site was carefully selected, the design created with what he called "a little fear and trepidation." Would the new studio intrude, or would it complement what was already there?

The answer came months later, in the form of an unintentional critique from a former Ragdale resident. Looking at the completed building, she asked: "What did we used to use that building for?" She thought it had always been there. The architects could breathe again.

The Friends' Studio provided something the Foundation increasingly needed: a flexible workspace for disciplines that required more than a writing desk. Choreographers could rehearse there. Visual artists could spread out. Composers could make noise. The well-lit space also served beautifully for exhibitions and performances, bringing Ragdale's creative work before a public audience.

Continuity and Loss

In 2006, the Ragdale Foundation celebrated its thirtieth anniversary. That same year, Alice Judson Hayes died.

The coincidence of these two events—the celebration and the loss—captures something essential about places like Ragdale. They are sustained by individuals whose vision and dedication bring them into being, but they must eventually survive those founders. The transition from a personal project to an institutional one is always precarious. Many artist colonies and residency programs have withered when their animating spirit departed.

Ragdale did not wither.

Two years after Alice's death, in 2008, the Foundation completed a project she would have appreciated: the restoration and reopening of the Meadow Studio where her mother Sylvia had sculpted Bird Girl. The building had suffered extensive damage over the years due to poor roof maintenance—a prosaic reminder that even the most storied structures require mundane upkeep.

The restoration brought an unexpected collaboration. Twelve fourth- and fifth-year architecture students from the Illinois Institute of Technology worked on the project under the direction of their professor Frank Flurry. They preserved the original footprint of the building while creating something light on environmental impact—a contemporary structure that honored its predecessor.

What Ragdale Offers

Today, the Ragdale Foundation hosts artists from an impressive range of disciplines: nonfiction and fiction writers, composers, poets, playwrights and screenwriters, visual artists, choreographers, and those working across disciplinary boundaries. The common thread is not medium but need—the need for uninterrupted time to work.

This might sound like a luxury, and in some ways it is. But consider how difficult it has become to find sustained concentration in contemporary life. The average knowledge worker is interrupted every few minutes. Creative work—the kind that requires holding complex ideas in mind simultaneously, that depends on entering a state of flow—becomes nearly impossible amid constant digital pings and obligations.

Ragdale offers something increasingly rare: permission to focus.

The motto Alice Hayes coined for the Foundation was characteristically direct: "A place for artists and writers to work." Not to network, not to build their brands, not to take meetings or answer emails. To work. The simplicity of that mission is itself a kind of radicalism in our age of side hustles and self-promotion.

The Opposite of Ragdale

To understand what Ragdale represents, it helps to consider its opposite. The opposite is not simply a lack of space for artists—it's an entire culture that has forgotten why such spaces matter.

We live in an era that values productivity, measurable outcomes, and immediate returns. Art is permitted when it can be monetized or used for therapeutic purposes. The artist residency model pushes back against this logic. It says: some things are worth doing that cannot be measured by engagement metrics or quarterly reports. Some work requires incubation time that cannot be compressed. Some creative breakthroughs happen only when people are freed from the pressure to produce.

The Arts and Crafts movement that Howard Van Doren Shaw championed over a century ago was also, in its way, a rebellion against industrial values. William Morris and his followers rejected the dehumanizing effects of factory production and the ugliness of mass-manufactured goods. They believed that how we make things matters as much as what we make.

Ragdale carries this tradition forward. The question it implicitly asks is: what kind of culture do we want? One that treats creativity as a commodity to be optimized, or one that recognizes it as a fundamentally human capacity requiring nurture and patience?

A House That Holds Memory

When Alice Hayes wrote about communing with ancestors and ghosts at Ragdale, she wasn't speaking metaphorically—or not entirely. Places accumulate meaning over time. The walls of a house that has sheltered three generations of artists absorb something of that creative energy. Writers working in rooms where Sylvia Shaw Judson once rested between sculpting sessions are participating in a continuum.

This is not mysticism; it's simply how culture works. We build on what came before. We draw strength from traditions that precede us. The artist struggling with a difficult passage in a novel at Ragdale is surrounded by reminders that others have struggled similarly and prevailed.

Howard Van Doren Shaw wanted his summer retreat to look a little raggedy, a little wild. He wanted violets invading the lawn. He was designing against formality, against the polished perfection that freezes a place in time. He was designing for life—messy, growing, changing.

More than a century later, Ragdale continues to grow and change while remaining, somehow, essentially itself: a place where the creative spirit can find room to breathe.