Living Rock Studios

After Brownsville resident Howard Taylor’s heart attack and strokes in 1964, he had to retire from his work as a surveyor. His dear wife, Faye, cleaned houses to provide for their family of three daughters, and Howard began to create, to plan something to do with the rock specimens he had collected over the years. To quote the brochure for the studios, “Taylor and his family started building the Living Rock Studios stone by stone.” The building was completed in 1985, and Howard died in 1996, three years after Faye had passed on.

The walls are dotted with rocks, crystal and fossils. Pillars of petrified wood provide support, and paintings and mosaics line the walls and recesses of one of the most unusual buildings in Linn County.

It’s a studio. It’s a chapel. And it’s a dream. To Howard Taylor it is that and a good deal more. It is a 20-year testimony to one man’s determination and it is a reason for him to carry on.

Howard Taylor gives sincere assurance that he isn’t happy with people who”heap too much praise” on him for his hard work in designing, developing and constructing Brownsville’s Living Rock Studio, next to his house, along Highway 228, just east of the Bohemia, Inc. sawmill operation.

Howard Taylor’s conversation is drifting toward the Bible so he stops short. “I don’t want to preach to you young man,” he tells a visitor. Still, it’s apparent that for 20 years Taylor has been preparing a sermon of solid rock adjacent to his home along Highway 228.