133 ~ Speckled trout and champagne

A Lowery Creek ‘speckled trout’

In early winter of 1936 Frank Lloyd Wright nearly died of pneumonia at Taliesin, his home near Spring Green, Wisconsin. When his fever finally broke, his daughter Iovanna wrote to friends with the good news that her father was at last feeling better, and in fact had asked for a meal of “speckled trout and champagne”. “Speckled trout” is a common nickname for our beautiful native brook trout in Wisconsin, and it seems someone was catching brookies for Wright in the stream below the house, Lowery Creek.

The ensuing decades were not kind to Lowery Creek or its trout, and I recently had a chance to tell the inpirational story of the creek’s eventual restoration for the fall issue TROUT, the quarterly magazine of Trout Unlimited, in a piece titled “A Shining Success in Wisconsin”. If you like you can read the story here.

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