Frank lloyd wright house bartow fl

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LAKELAND — Many Lakeland residents have probably driven past “The Compound” and never paid it much attention.

Even Ben McConnell, the property’s owner until recently, admits the odd amalgam of structures seems “nondescript” from the outside. The only hint of its idiosyncratic character comes if you look closely enough to notice how far the structure extends along Frank Lloyd Wright Way.

Those who venture inside the three-sided complex often make the same statement.

“The typical speech is, ‘Gosh, I didn’t know this was here,’ ” said McConnell, 55.

The Compound probably won’t be there much longer.

McConnell, whose family has owned the property since the 1950s, recently sold it to neighboring Florida Southern College.

The college received approval Thursday from the Lakeland Design Review Committee to demolish the connected structures on the half-acre site. Florida Southern must now apply for a demolition permit from the city's building inspection department.

The property is in the Biltmore-Cumberland Historic District but is not considered a contributing element to the area’s historic status, said Emily Foster, Lakeland’s historic preservation planner. Though the Marshall House officially dates to the 1920s, Foster said it lost its historic status because of its many alterations.

In the short term, Florida Southern has proposed using the property as a grass overflow parking lot for special events. Ultimately, the college plans to build an early learning lab on the site to replace the pre-school lab currently located in Edge Hall.

Lakeland's design review committee gave conceptual approval for plans FSC submitted showing two possible designs for the new pre-school lab prepared by the Lunz Group, a Lakeland architecture firm.

Loads of memories

The imminent demise of The Compound has sparked nostalgia among McConnell and his friends who recall it as a popular gathering place.

“The house had it going in the ‘70s and that time period,” said Kris Yerton, a longtime friend of the McConnell family.

Until two months ago, McConnell and his wife, Alcira, were still living at the property along with McConnell’s mother, Drucilla Baca McConnell, who is 93.

The sale marks the culmination of at least 20 years of discussions between his family and Florida Southern College, McConnell said. He said parting with the property so closely tied to his family’s identity is easier now than it would have been in the past.

“Twenty years ago, it would have been harder, but now it’s not,” he said. “We came to the point we realized it’s way too big for us. We would never be able to put it back into pristine shape.”

The property occupies three lots that McConnell’s father, Dr. Ben H. McConnell Jr., bought in 1956 wrapping around the corner of Jefferson Avenue and Frank Lloyd Wright Way (formerly McDonald Street).

The sale to Florida Southern was finalized June 27.

A spokeswoman for Florida Southern said college leaders have not yet decided how to use the property, which lies directly east of Roberts Academy, a private school FSC operates for children with dyslexia.

“Our campus master plan committee will be evaluating several possible uses for that site in the coming months,” FSC spokeswoman Rebecca Paul said.

In recent weeks, Ben and Alcira McConnell have been sorting through the fixtures and possessions in the approximately 7,500-square-foot complex, deciding what to keep and selling just about anything else that can be removed.

The process has revived memories for Ben McConnell of the property’s unusual past.

McConnell said his father, an Oklahoma native, graduated at the top of his class from the Georgetown University School of Medicine in 1950 and had the nation’s highest score on the medical board exams. The elder McConnell came to Lakeland in 1956 to become medical director at Florida Southern.

Grand scheme

The same year, Dr. McConnell bought a house on the corner of Jefferson and what was then McDonald Street.

Polk County Property Appraiser’s records list the house as built in 1924, though Ben McConnell said it’s actually more than a century old.

McConnell calls it “the Marshall House” for the family that built it and still occupied it when his father bought the house. Dr. McConnell agreed to let the former owner’s widow continue living in the house until her death in the mid-1960s, McConnell said.

The 1,500-square-foot house has heart of pine floors and such distinctive features as a wide window with narrow vertical sections on the front and curved, wooden ornamentation on the front porch.

The elder McConnell also bought two adjacent lots to the west.

“He had the idea for this grand compound,” Ben McConnell said.

Starting in 1964, Dr. McConnell built an L-shaped structure that eventually connected to the Marshall House, forming a three-sided compound.

Ben McConnell said his father received design guidance from Nils Schweizer, a protégé of the famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who created about a dozen structures on the FSC campus. Schweizer designed the Wright-like Roux Library.

The complex includes a two-story house with outside stairs leading to the second-floor, a type of home once common in central Lakeland, McConnell said.

After Mrs. Marshall died in 1965, Dr. McConnell converted the old house into a medical office for his private practice. One peculiar touch that remains from that period is a metal mailbox built into the front wall of the house.

The doctor traveled to more than 100 countries, his son said, and had a fondness for international touches. The bathroom of the former medical office includes a bidet.

McConnell said his father turned a room in the Marshall House into a print shop to produce literature for his nonprofit organization, the Association for International Medical Studies.

Family zoo

The addition of a covered walkway on the north side of the property created what Ben McConnell calls a 360-degree veranda.

McConnell, who was born in 1962 and has three older sisters, said the courtyard held “the McConnell menagerie” during his childhood.

“We used to have Shetland ponies, peacocks, ducks and rabbits, and you name it in here,” McConnell said. “The peacocks drove the neighbors wild.”

On one occasion, McConnell said, a Shetland pony got out of the courtyard and wandered into the street, where a Volkswagen Beetle collided with it.

The car was badly damaged, yet the pony had no serious injuries, he said.

Yerton, who dated one of McConnell’s sisters, recalled seeing chickens in the courtyard. He said he arrived for a visit once and was instructed to kill a chicken that would be that evening’s meal.

“I did a botched job and had to clean it up,” Yerton said.

The complex ultimately had 30 rooms, and a NuTone intercom system allowed the family to communicate.

Although the family called it The Compound, McConnell said, he learned that Florida Southern students referred to it as the Frankenstein House — “kind of because it was mysterious to them and they knew there was more here than met the eye.”

McConnell described his father as “thrifty,” recalling how the doctor salvaged elements for the complex from other places. The elder McConnell scavenged fluorescent light fixtures from the defunct Lake Morton Elementary School after it burned down and installed them on the ceiling of a living room.

The former medical office contains clothes drawers and a three-way, dressing-room mirror McConnell thinks his father acquired from the former Maas Brothers department in downtown Lakeland.

Period details

The L-shaped connective structures clearly represent the era in which they were built, the mid-1960s. Both the living room and a recreation room are split level with terrazzo floors.

The rec room has a movie projection booth built into one wall, though Ben McConnell said he doesn’t remember the family ever showing movies in it. He said his sisters often held parties and invited local bands to play in the room.

McConnell’s parents divorced in 1980, after which they lived in different parts of the complex. Dr. McConnell built a concrete wall on the east side of the veranda to block their views of each other.

Ben McConnell said it wasn’t mere eccentricity that drove his father to construct the unusual complex.

“He said, ‘One reason I built this place is if any family member needs a place to go or needs help, it’s here,’” McConnell said. “Ironically enough, he was one of the ones that needed help because he suffered from dementia in his later years and we were able to take care of him.”Dr. McConnell died in 2007.

Other family members moved in and out of the complex over the years, and recently Ben McConnell and his wife lived there, along with McConnell’s mother.

McConnell bought a new home in June, and his mother now lives there with him and his wife.

Even after completing the sale to Florida Southern, McConnell mused about how the complex could have been restored and used as something other than a residence.

“I entertained the idea and made some effort to attract deep-pocket people that could renovate it into something,” McConnell said. “It would make a great day-care center, a great assisted-living facility, a great small, private school.

"That was all the ideas my dad had when he built it going forward," he said."It could be a lot of things.”

McConnell said the crash of the real-estate market in 2008 dashed his hopes of selling the property to anyone other than the college, which he knew would demolish it.

Since word began to spread about the sale, McConnell said, he has been hearing from many people. Their reaction?

“What? The Compound? No!”

Gary White can be reached at or 863-802-7518. Follow on Twitter @garywhite13.

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