Brookline, MA
July 18, 2019
My second site! I had a routine doctor’s appointment in Cambridge, MA in the morning, so I figured I had time to see a NHS in the afternoon. Frederick Law Olmsted is a twenty minute drive from my primary care physician’s office, so as soon as I left the doc’s, I drove over to Brookline.
I had looked at the website before arriving, so I understood the gist — Olmsted was a man who designed many of the famous landscapes we know today. Central Park, the Boston area’s Emerald Necklace, the grounds at Stanford, the grounds at Biltmore, Arnold Arboretum..the list goes on and on and on. He believed in having a wild and natural look, and nothing too artificial in appearance. He also had a team of women working for him in jobs that women were allowed to do at the time, and he paid them wages that were above the national average for those particular jobs. His family moved into the house at the Site in 1883 after he had already completed some of his famous work, and he built offices where he and his sons’ landscape design firm resided up through the mid-1900s.
The site was well-marked and easy to find. Parking was on the same block, just down the sidewalk from the main entrance.
The entrance directs your attention to a tree that was planted by Olmsted himself when he first acquired the property (I found this out later on the tour). I don’t have a good photo of that tree unfortunately. All you see below is the trunk. It’s quite majestic and now rises tall and beautiful beside and above the main building.
The entrance is up ahead to the right.
There are a ton of displays with the history and photos of many (but certainly not all) of the parks and landscapes Olmsted and his sons/company designed. Here are just some, along with a photo of Yosemite, which inspired one of Olmsted’s sons to write and circulate a paper describing parts of Yosemite and advocating for the protection of wild lands. That paper, Yosemite and the Mariposa Grove: A Preliminary Report, helped influence the decision to create the National Park system.
The Olmsted legacy reaches far and wide. The Site had several laminated cards which provided links for more information. Here’s one of those cards:
There are tours offered nearly every hour on the hour and, though I was the only one there (hurray for visiting National Historic Sites on weekdays!), a bubbly tour guide whose name ends with “isa” (her overshirt covered her name tag and I was too shy to ask her name) happily gave me the tour anyway. The tour goes through the public area that you can see on your own (where you can see all the things in the photos above), and then the guide takes you to the offices themselves. My friendly guide politely asked me not to touch anything as we went through, and then she proceeded to give an interesting talk which I am sure she has given a million times before, but she managed to make it all sound like we were having a casual conversation. I am normally uncomfortable with being the only member of an audience (it’s happened a few times in my life), but Lisa (I’m going to assume her name was Lisa…I apologize if I’m wrong) was easy-going, and the tour felt fun and relaxed.
The following is where many of the planning-stage requests/files were stored.
Below you see tables on which plans and designs were drawn (in different rooms). I found it especially interesting that designs included not only where flowers and plants should go…but the specific species of flowers/plants and exactly how many of each should go where (see the bottom photos of this next collection). This must have required great knowledge of exactly what kind of plants grew best where and in what exact conditions all throughout the country.
There was a room in which copies of designs were made. Since they didn’t have printers or iPhones etc back then, they had some interesting techniques. At first, they traced the design onto special paper that had certain chemicals on it, then they put that paper between two sheets of regular paper. The whole thing was then put out the window for sun exposure for a few minutes. The sunlight could not get through the traced part of the paper but penetrated the rest, which means what was left on the regular paper was the traced outline of the design. And if I didn’t explain that in a way that makes any sense, then go to the Olmsted site and take the tour, where they can explain it to you better than I can. 🙂
In addition to the windowsill method, there was a large column-type machine (pictured below). The design was pressed against the glass and kept there by unrolling the material seen in the photo around and against the glass. Then someone would raise and lower what amounts to an extremely bright and special kind of light bulb up and down the inside of the tube by using a rope/pulley system from the outside of the contraption (and while wearing special goggles).
Since the entire house and workshop was made of wood, designs were stored in a brick vault to avoid catastrophe in the event of a fire. The inside of the vault is see below. The first photo shows how the filing person stored all the designs, and the second photo compares that with how the park rangers today store everything.
After seeing the office areas, Lisa took me outside and showed me the small but beautiful grounds. Olmsted wanted his office area to be surrounded by nature and beauty, so he designed two walkways. One, going around to the side of the house, goes through an area of vegetation that has been carefully layered. The walkway opens into a grassy field, which is made to look larger than it is by not being perfectly rectangular, but “dented” in parts to create an illusion of there being other grassy locations just outside the immediate area. The other, which goes through a sunken part in front of the house, was built by scooping out the dirt and exposing some of the natural rock, then planting various vegetation. The scooped-out dirt was used to make the driveway one uses to approach the main building.
When the tour concluded, I asked if I could give Lisa anything for her time..I wasn’t sure what the protocol was for tipping. I felt grateful for her going through all that info just for me. She thanked me but refused, explaining that Park service employees cannot accept tips. I then looked for a place to donate when I reentered the building to use the restroom, but didn’t see a donation box. The site’s “Donate” webpage doesn’t have a donate button, but rather a phone number. Here’s the page — https://www.nps.gov/frla/getinvolved/donate.htm .
It was a lovely afternoon. I felt I took my time and did all there was to do there that day, and my visit lasted just under two hours. One thing I did not do, which I regret, was ask Lisa about Olmsted’s role (assuming he had one) in the destruction of Seneca Village for the construction of Central Park. A solid community of African Americans and Irish people lived in part of what is now Central Park, and their land was seized and the community was extinguished for the sole purpose of creating Central Park (see http://www.centralparknyc.org/about/blog/uncovering-seneca-village.html). Given what I’d read on the National Park website concerning Olmsted, I think that would not have sat well with him…he seemed to have been an abolitionist, and I know he paid the women on his staff (all clerical positions, which was the standard for the times) quite well. He therefore doesn’t seem to have been a horrible person…so how did he justify the theft of the land? I would have liked to have known more about that, but I was too shy to ask. I need to get over this shyness if I ever want to learn all I want to learn.
One thing of personal note: on this tour, and on the last tour, I noticed that I cannot stand still for more than thirty seconds without my left leg starting to hurt. It’s post-thrombotic- syndrome from having had two extensive blood clots in the same veins. It’s funny — I can hike twenty miles a day, day after day, with little problem…because I am moving that leg and my calf pumps the blood constantly. When I am standing still, however, my calf isn’t pumping any blood, and my leg begins to feel heavy and ache. At home, I am almost never standing still. I am moving about or I am seated with my leg up. When I drive, I do so with my left foot up to the side of the steering wheel (a habit I acquired in my carefree youth, which serves my circulation well now and, as far as I know, is not illegal in any state). So I am not able to stand still (I paced a bit on my tour with Lisa) without pain, but I can hike over mountains with speed and strength. Perhaps I’ll bring a hiking pole or a walking stick on future tours so I can lean on something while standing on my right foot and swinging my left leg a bit.
The next National Park visit will be in early August, on my way back down to pick up my kids from their camps. Between now and then, I’ll continue my more immediate quest of hiking all the trails in the White Mountain National Forest (NH). I am almost 75% finished with that goal. I hope to get to 85% this year, and then finish during fall of next year.