The Collector Warda Stevens Stout
Grow ing u p at the end of the nineteenth century on a farm in Salem, Indiana, Warda Stevens never dreamed that one day she would be recognized internationally as a collector of highly sophisticated European porcelain. Nevertheless, by the end of her productive life at age ninety-nine, Warda Stevens Stout had realized nearly all her dreams. She had formed a comprehensive collection that would tell the story of eighteenth-century European porcelain. Born on May 10, 1886, Warda was the second child of Warder W. Stevens and Mary Alice Caspar. Her brother, Ray Caspar Stevens, had preceded her in 1884. His death from diphtheria in 1898 marred a childhood that had been idyllic. Warda entered Indiana University in 1903 with the intention of satisfying her father’s ambition for her to become a doctor. However, medicine was not her calling.1 She focused instead upon Charles Banks Stout (1881–1965), the fifth of seven children born to Adeline McCarnell and John T. Stout, a prosperous banker in Paoli, Indiana (twenty miles west of Salem). In 1904, Charles had just graduated from Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, and had entered the family flour mill business. The two met at a party; they were married on November 1, 1906. After the birth of their first child, Alice Adeline, in 1908, Charles Stout moved his small family to eastern Oregon and opened the first flour mill in the area. The project was successful and shortly thereafter, Stout sold the mill and moved his household to Astoria, Oregon, where he founded the equally successful Portland Flour Mills Company.2 In 1915, the entire family relocated to Memphis, where, while retaining his Oregon interests, Charles Stout in 1920 founded the Dixie-Portland Flour Company (a flour-blending operation). He subsequently opened plants in Mobile, 7
Alabama; New Orleans; Jacksonville, Florida; Savannah, Georgia; Charleston, South Carolina; Wilmington, North Carolina; and Norfolk, Virginia. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, he expanded his mills and acquired others in Missouri and Kansas. Although Stout sold the business to Federal Compress and Warehouse Company in 1959, he was known as “The Flour Baron of Memphis” until his death in 1965 at age eighty-three With the arrival of their second daughter, Charlotte, in 1919, the Stouts moved from their Memphis apartment into a modest house. Warda Stout began creating a garden—her lifelong passion. When the family moved to a substantial Spanish-style house at 517 Goodwyn Avenue, she acquired what would become her three acres of gardens.3 In 1977, she gave The Dixon Gallery and Gardens the many plants she lovingly cultivated over decades. Nobody remembers how she discovered chinapainting, but Warda brought to it the same fervor
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Fig. 1 Exterior view of Mrs. Stout’s home at 517 Goodwyn Avenue, Memphis.