Enchanted Estate: Broadway's Time Capsule in Rural Wisconsin

Although the Lunts welcomed reaching people across the country by taking their performances on the road, they did not solidify their spot in history with a long list of films. In fact, the Lunts only made one film in 1931 titled, “The Guardsman,” a popular play previously performed on stage by the couple. When the Lunts were later offered hundreds of thousands of dollars to film additional movies, they declined. The Lunts loved the stage and the presence of an audience, not the shouts and demands of a director.

Michael David Rose
The cottage on the Ten Chimneys' estate provided a welcoming home to Alfred Lunt's mother, sister and brother-in-law.

“[The Lunts] found something they were both passionate about doing in the theater, and they weren’t lured away by something like the movies where they could have made in the millions of dollars over the length of their careers,” Greenhalgh said. “That wasn’t what they wanted and they were willing to stick with what they were passionate about, which was live theater.”

Although the Lunts performed in front of people across the country and throughout the world for more than 40 years, the inability to experience their performances through old films causes their memory to be largely lost on the theatergoers and performers of today. In 1960, the Lunts retired to Ten Chimneys, where they lived out the end of their lives, indulging in the less public passions they had sought on their estate over summer vacations.

Alfred died in August 1977, and Lynne died nearly six years later, in July 1983. When George Bugbee pulled the shades closed at Ten Chimneys and locked the door in the late summer of 1983, he created what Greenhalgh calls a “time capsule.”

“Thanks to George Bugbee, the house was closed up, all the stuff was there and there it stayed,” Greenhalgh said.

For more than 12 years, the time capsule that contained memories of the life and livelihood of Fontanne and Lunt remained sealed within the walls of Ten Chimneys, with Bugbee only living in several rooms in the estate’s cottage. Gradually, however, the dormancy of Ten Chimneys became too much for the old estate to bear. Behind locked doors and shaded windows, Ten Chimneys slowly began to deteriorate.

However, when the successful Wisconsin businessman and film historian Joe Garton stepped into Ten Chimneys with Bugbee for the first time in 1994, neither drooping wallpaper nor rotting curtains could discourage him from taking in the sights of the home he had long heard about as a young boy in Sheboygan. Looking beyond the estate’s peeling paint and leaky roof, Garton fell in love with Ten Chimneys.

Matthew Wisniewski/Curb
The Lunts retreated to Genesee Depot, Wisconsin to surround themselves in nature.

“When they opened the house, they had drawers full of clothes...stockings and slips and scarves still labeled by Alfred where everything should be,” Greenhalgh said. "Lynn and Alfred’s correspondence was still there… their briefcases. Play scripts with their handwritten notes were there….”