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EARL FRIEND'S VIEW SELECTED INTERIORS (QUICKTIME) |
  We’d like to introduce you to Earl Friend, a longtime Fallingwater staff person whose work with this house began when he was a teenager in 1936. As a young man, Earl actually helped build Fallingwater’s guest house, and later became a trusted employee of the Kaufmanns. Earl still works here although now that he’s over 80, he only comes in a few days a week but his knowledge about the house and grounds remains unmatched.Earl’s memories reach back to the old summer camp days at Bear Run. A "local boy," as a child Earl attended the one-room schoolhouse at Bear Run, a tiny mountain community of farmers and woodsmen. |
 Before the Kaufmanns discovered this beautiful property, Bear Run was the site of a summer camp run by a group of Masons from Pittsburgh. City folks would take a two-hour train ride from the "Smoky City" to the mountains, to take the clean mountain air, and enjoy the natural beauty of the region in general. Eventually, Kaufmann’s Department Store purchased the property for its employees, who used the camp until the Great Depression. At age 17, Earl took the first of many jobs here on site – as a general maintenance worker. In 1939, he joined the crew at the quarry, when the guest house was under construction. Quarrying Fallingwater’s famed Pottsville sandstone – a dense, hard sandstone that is common in this region – was a labor-intensive project. So was the concrete construction. Later in 1939, Earl married and left the mountains to work construction jobs and in the mills in Pittsburgh. In 1948, he returned home. We definitely think he is! Today, if you visit Fallingwater early in the week, you might catch a glimpse of Earl working around the house – a world-famous house that Earl Friend can almost call home. Earl was interviewed by Brian Gregory, an intern at Fallingwater in 1997. |
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