From "The American Architect and Building News", April 10, 1880
Casimir Werk certainly had money to burn. He was the eldest son of Michael Werk, founder of Cincinnati’s “other” great candle and soap company and succeeded his father as president of that firm. He served variously as a director of the Cincinnati Gas & Electric Company, the Cincinnati Stock Yard Company, the Foulds Milling Company, and the Dayton & Michigan Railroad Company.
And so, following his marriage to brewery heiress Pauline Herancourt, Casimir engaged one of Cincinnati’s premier architects to design a prestigious home for himself and his bride. The mansion would be magnificently sited atop an elevated ridge on the Werk family’s large estates in Westwood. The architect, Edwin Anderson, had been for several years the partner of Samuel Hannaford, with whom he designed the Cuvier Press Club and the Cincinnati Workhouse. After dissolving his partnership with Hannaford, Anderson planned the Cincinnati, Hamilton & Dayton Railroad terminal and the Cincinnati Commercial Gazette building, but his true métier was magnificent homes for munificent clients, including the Cox-Hord House in Maysville, Kentucky.
For Mr. Werk, Mr. Anderson came up with a real zinger. He was so proud of his creation that he provided schematics to The American Architect and Building News, which published Anderson’s rendering as a full-page illustration in its April 10, 1880 edition. Accompanying this image (which can be purchased even today, framed, from several online vendors) was the following commentary:
“This building is to a great extent made fire-proof by the use of iron beams, and ceilings of artificial stone built in position in monolithic form, an example which might be followed to advantage by those building homesteads, as the additional cost in this building over the ordinary methods of wood construction was only about $3,000. The interior finish throughout is of hard wood.”
The operative phrase here, as we shall see, is “to a great extent made fire-proof.” That’s what Mr. Anderson told The American Architect and Building News. What he told Mr. Werk may have been a tad more affirmative, as indicated by the fact that, although his new house and its furnishings were reportedly valued at more than $50,000 (nearly $2 million in today’s dollars), Mr. Werk purchased only $3,500 worth of insurance coverage.
That calculation was revealed to be abnormally optimistic on the evening of Sunday, October 21, 1894, when a fire broke out as the Werk family was preparing for bed. The local Cincinnati newspapers reported that the occupants were barely able to escape the flames in their nightclothes and that the conflagration destroyed the house because the all-volunteer Westwood fire department was unable to assist due to lack of water. The New York Tribune [October 24, 1894] told a very different story:
“The house of Casimir Werk, at Westwood, seven miles from this city, was burned yesterday. Mr. Werk, deeming the house fire-proof, shut up the room in which the flames
started, and waited for the fire to burn itself out, refusing to admit the firemen. Instead, the whole house was soon destroyed, with all its contents. Loss, $50,000; insurance, $3,500.”
The nationally distributed Insurance News [October 1894] tut-tutted about Mr. Werk’s lack of foresight and blind faith in his architect’s sales pitch:
“We rather think the too sanguine Mr. Werk won’t get any of that $3,500 insurance, under the extraordinary circumstances related by the Tribune.”
For the Cincinnati Catholic Telegraph-Register [November 8, 1894], there was a morality lesson revealed by Mr. Werk’s credulity:
“A Cincinnati man has shown himself almost as unsophisticated as the youth who was asked by a woman to hold her baby a minute in a railroad station. Mr. Casimir Werk built what the architects assured him solemnly was a fireproof house. The funny part is that Mr. Werk solemnly believed them. A fire broke out in the mansion. Mr. Casimir Werk, the Cincinnati man who pinned his faith to architects’ assurances, shut up the room in which the fire appeared, so as to let it burn itself out. He would not let the firemen in, so entirely did he pin his faith on the architects. There is something touching in this childlike confidence. The room and the fire burned themselves out. But when they stopped Mr. Casimir Werk’s house had utterly vanished from this earthly scene, with everything in it.”
It appears that Mr. Werk carried negligible insurance on the house itself. The insurance he did hold seems to have covered a collection of diamond jewelry owned by him and his wife and an old violin of some sentimental significance.
The Telegraph’s snippy little squib was reprinted in newspapers from coast to coast, elevating the chairman of the Werk Soap Company to national laughingstock. It does not appear that Mr. Werk was at all abashed by his newfound notoriety. The Cincinnati society pages report that he and Mrs. Werk attended social functions within days of the fire. Rumors that Werk would sue Edwin Anderson were unfounded; Anderson had been dead for two years when the fire broke out.
Werk announced within a week that he had hired an architect to build a new house, this time truly fireproof. The new architect was Gustave Drach, and his selection was not by happenstance. Drach was known for his fireproof designs for the Burkhardt Fur Company, for the Live Oak Distilling Company, the Johnson Department Store in Springfield and the Cincinnati Tuberculosis Hospital. Drach was also lead architect of the Gibson Hotel, the old Woodward High School and portions of Good Samaritan Hospital.
From "Cincinnati Commercial Gazette," May 12, 1895
Drach generated plans for a fourteen-room house constructed on a framework of steel beams, with concrete floors, solid brick walls and almost all decorative elements shaped out of terra cotta. Drach’s masterpiece is still standing. In a fine example of architectural irony, Drach succumbed to tuberculosis in 1940, spending his last weeks at the tuberculosis hospital he himself had designed.
On Casimir Werk’s death in 1919, the house passed to his sons, first George and then Casimir Jr., who married Elsie Haberthear in 1933 after her divorce from Casimir’s neighbor, Urban Heyker. Casimir died in 1955 and Elsie married again, to Doctor Wilmer Lloyd Grantham. Dr. Grantham died in 1971 and Elsie in 1986, at which point the house passed out of the Werk family.
Elsie Haberthear Heyker Werk Grantham guaranteed that the house would be remembered. She was generous to a fault, but outrageously forgetful, writing generous checks to her favorite charities but neglecting to mail them. The executors of her estate discovered more than $600,000 worth of unmailed checks squirreled away throughout the house but were unable to locate nearly $1 million in stock and bond certificates. They appealed to anyone who had acquired any furnishings at the estate sale (one hesitates to call it a “fire sale”) to examine their purchases and to report any missing securities, and offered a $10,000 reward.
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