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The General Lew Wallace Study and Ben Hur Museum By Glynne Robinson Monumental and classical, in a style borrowing from Turkey, ancient Greece, France, and Italy, the General Lew Wallace Study and Ben-Hur Museum in Crawfordsville, Indiana, is as eclectic as the man himself. Wallace is best remembered for his nineteenth-century blockbuster historical novel, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. He was also a Civil War general with a checkered career, Indiana legislator, lawyer, governor of the New Mexico Territory, minister to Turkey, painter, and violinist. But what he really wanted to do, he wrote his wife in 1888 from his post in Turkey, was build a study where he could bury himself "in a den of books." Eleven years later, in 1899, his study was finished. Architect John G. Thurtle had translated Wallace's dreams into brick, limestone and glass. The forms they took definitely stood out in Crawfordsville—and would anywhere. A blocky building with few windows, the study has a squared-off dome with a raised glass skylight reminiscent of Turkey. Beneath the dome, a Grecian-style frieze bands the building with characters from Wallace's novels, and a Grecian portico shelters the entrance. To the side stands a 40-foot Italianate tower. Entrance to the study's tree-shaded compound is through a gate copied from an ancient French abbey. The study was built on the grounds of Wallace's house. Surrounded by more than three landscaped acres, a moat, and massive brick wall, the general's "den of books" also houses a collection of memorabilia as diverse as the interests of its owner, from costumes used for MGM's 1959 production of the movie Ben-Hur to artifacts from several wars, including stone cannonballs from the 1453 seige of Constantinople, paintings, manuscripts, tiles, swords, movie posters, photographs, and other items related to Wallace's life and interests.
Trained as a lawyer, Wallace served as an Indiana state senator before volunteering in the Mexican and American Civil Wars. His Union Army service began promisingly when he was promoted to brigadier general after routing Confederate forces at Romney, Virginia. He earned a second star for operations against Fort Donelson, but the battle of Shiloh proved to be Wallace's undoing. In a confusion of contradictory orders from General Ulysses S. Grant, he took his troops down the wrong road and had to retrace his steps, missing the first day of the battle altogether. Wallace became a scapegoat for the near disaster and spent the rest of his military career trying to restore his reputation. In July 1864 Wallace redeemed himself at the Battle of Monocacy in Maryland. Though considered a Union defeat, the battle delayed Confederate Lieutenant General Jubal Early's advance on Washington, D.C., giving Union forces time to come to the city's defense. Early in 1865, Lincoln dispatched Wallace to the Mexican border to stop the flow of contraband over the Rio Grande. The general returned home to find the nation in mourning for its fallen president, and he was appointed vice president of the trial of those accused of conspiring to assassinate Lincoln. Next Wallace presided over the trial of Confederate Captain Henry Wirz, commander of the infamous Andersonville prison camp. President Rutherford B. Hayes then appointed Wallace governor of the New Mexico Territory for four years, during the "Lincoln County War," followed by a post as U.S. minister to Turkey. During his years of public service Wallace filled notebooks and journals with impressions of the places he visited and later incorporated them into his novels. In addition to Ben-Hur (1880), he wrote The Fair God (1873), The Boyhood of Christ (1888) and The Prince of India (1893). The general's autobiography had grown to a quarter-million words when he died in 1905. It was published the following year. Writing was Wallace's passion. When The Fair God, drawn from experiences in Mexico, was published, the general wasted no time in starting on Ben-Hur, a novel that would inspire two plays and three films. A formidable classicist and scholar, Wallace researched political and religious conditions surrounding the time of Christ's birth and painstakingly crafted the setting for his novel. When President James Garfield sent him to Turkey, Wallace visited the ancient sites depicted in Ben-Hur and was delighted by his accuracy, finding there was "no reason for making a single change in the text of the book. "I want to write, and to think of nothing else," Wallace said on his return from Turkey in 1885. "I know of no happier way of passing time . . . I have tried many things—the law, soldiering, politics, authorship, and, lastly diplomacy—and if I may pass judgement upon the success achieved in each—I shall look back upon Ben-Hur as my best performance." With all the general's travels and experiences, the small agricultural community of Crawfordsville was the home he and his family always returned to, and where he died in 1905. And it was the women of Crawfordsville who secured General Lew Wallace's study for posterity. In 1941, a local women's group known as Community House purchased the study from his descendants and presented it to the city as a museum to honor its most famous citizen. It is on the National Register of Historic Places and is a National Historic Landmark.
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