Description

The property was originally acquired in 1895 by Hugh Taylor Birch, a Chicago lawyer, and given to his daughter Helen and her husband, artist Frederic Clay Bartlett, as a wedding gift in 1919. Bartlett built a plantation-style home on the property and wintered there with his wife and child from a previous marriage, Frederic Jr, until Helen died in 1925. As a memorial to his late wife Bartlett donated his extensive art collection to the Art Institute of Chicago.[4] Bartlett was a self-taught architect; the main house is based on his interpretation of Caribbean plantation-style architecture.[5] Bartlett then married Evelyn Fortune Lilly, ex-wife of Eli Lilly, and they continued to use the home as a winter residence until his death in 1953 and hers in 1997.[6] She deeded the property in 1983 to the Florida Trust for Historic Preservation, which maintains the property as a historic house museum called the Bonnet House Museum & Gardens.[7] The estate was valued at $35 million, the largest single private donation in state history.[4] In 1988 Jon Nordheimer of The New York Times described it as “an unrivaled time capsule neatly preserved from an era earlier in the century when the wealthy elite could afford a cozy 35-acre winter hideaway in Florida.