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[title]A couple of bachelors shack up on a country estate, throwing lavish parties where guests receive kimonos at the door. Add in a 26-year age difference and, sure, it raises a few eyebrows. Questioning glances aside, Robert Allerton (1873–1964) and his younger companion, John Gregg (1899–1986), enjoyed a 40-year relationship notable for its artistic collaboration and generous philanthropy.
Allerton’s and Gregg’s spirits live on at Allerton Park and Retreat Center near Monticello, Illinois (three hours by car), featuring 1,500 acres of formal gardens, outdoor sculptures, wilderness areas and hiking trails, and crowned by the Georgian-style mansion in which Allerton and Gregg spent their early days together. The pair collected the park’s many sculptures during their travels and designed the breathtaking gardens over two decades. Thanks to their donation of the estate to the University of Illinois in 1946, the park is free and open to the public.
While the Allerton vision endures, so does speculation about the men’s relationship, which involved an unusual legal arrangement: In 1959, 87-year-old Allerton adopted 60-year-old Gregg. While the park’s website describes Gregg only as Allerton’s “protégé and, later, adopted son,” Jim Gortner, director at Allerton Park and Retreat Center, readily acknowledges the ongoing conjecture. “It’s a generally assumed fact in the area that they probably had a romantic relationship, because Robert never married, John Gregg never married…. [But] to my knowledge, there’s no evidence, no smoking gun, so to speak.” By adopting Gregg, Allerton, the son of stockyard and banking magnate Samuel Allerton, ensured that he could pass his estate to Gregg when he died.
The two men first met in the early ’20s. One of their earliest encounters was at a University of Illinois pre-football-game lunch. Gregg lived at the Zeta Psi Fraternity house while studying architecture; many of the fraternity members’ fathers attended the luncheon, but Gregg was an orphan. In a 1984 oral-history interview, he recalled the event this way: “Robert Allerton was invited over there for lunch, and he didn’t have a son and I didn’t have a father, so we were paired off and lived happily ever after.”
After Gregg’s 1926 graduation, Allerton got him a job in Chicago with architect David Adler. Around that time, Allerton started introducing Gregg as his son, using his own last name for them both. The traveling companions began designing the gardens that are now the Allerton Park and Retreat Center. In 1938, their travels took them to Hawaii; a few months later, they bought a seaside estate there.
After their move to the tropics, the Allertons maintained strong ties to Illinois and, in particular, the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC), where they were trustees. Allerton senior gave many art pieces to the AIC, including works by Modigliani and Degas. An early-’60s newspaper gossip page pointed out that “millionaire bachelor” Allerton, then 90, was the AIC’s most generous living benefactor, to the tune of $2 million. The AIC’s main building is named after him.
In 1964, Allerton died, leaving much of his estate to John. For the next 20 years, Gregg lived in Hawaii, making regular trips to Allerton Park. During these visits, he got to know Jennifer Eickman, who, along with her husband, managed Allerton House and Park starting in 1970. Eickman, who considered Gregg a close friend and beloved mentor, deflects questions about the nature of his relationship with Allerton: “They certainly were lifelong companions…. That was a different time, and maybe in a certain circle, people knew what it was, but it’s not something I could attest to one way or another.”
Maureen Holtz and Martha Burgin, authors of the upcoming book Robert Allerton: The Private Man and the Public Gifts (News-Gazette), which comes out this fall, are a little more definitive about whether the relationship was romantic: “I believe so,” Holtz says. “Based on when I spoke with people in Hawaii and everything they said, it confirms they had that kind of relationship,” adds Burgin. “But their relationship worked for them on a lot of different levels. You can’t just call it one thing.”
What is definitive are the beautiful gardens that Robert and John Allerton built together: both Monticello’s Allerton Park and Retreat Center and Hawaii’s Allerton Garden, which John left in trust to the National Tropical Botanical Garden when he passed away in 1986.
Allerton Park and Retreat Center is at 515 Old Timber Road in Monticello, Illinois; allerton.illinois.edu; 217-333-3287. The park is open from 8am to sundown every day except Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Day.