The Codman Estate-“The Grange”: a Landscape Chronicle ALANEMIMET
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The Codman Estate-“The Grange”: A Landscape Chronicle ALANEMIMET efore the Revolution, the sixteen list of his library reveals a person of broad acres which comprise SPNEA’s culture. IO addition to many books on law, B Codman property in Lincoln, Mas- history, and religion, Russell read Ovid, sachusetts were only a tiny fraction of a Pope, Bacon’s New Atlantis, Miltons’ seven hundred acre estate, albeit the esseo- Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, tial fraction. since they held the house and John Gay’s Rural Sports, and practical barns. The estate was assembledsoon after volumes on husbandry by William Ellis and 1700by Charles Chambers of Charlestown, Edward Lisle.2 Chambers Russell was a Massachusetts,a merchant, legislator, and lawyer, legislator, and a judge, but not a judge who had amassed a fortune in the merchant as were his grandfather, father, West Indies trade. Although the config- and brothers. He was as noted for his ioteg- uration of the property changed over rity as for his hospitality and generosity. the years, the major part of this great Chambers Russell, a founding father of farm remained in the Chambers-Russell- Lincoln in 1754, bestowedon the new town Codmao family for more than two ceo- the name of his grandfather Chambers’s turies, with the exception of one fifty-year birthplace in England. interval, until SPNEA acquired it in 1%9. After Chambers Russell died in 1767, the The history of this landscape can be or- estate was administered by his executors ganized accordingto the successionof fam- during the disruptive years of the Revolu- ily members who had the greatest impact tionary War, and by 1790, belonged to 00 it. Chambers Russell, Jr. IO that year he died, and, having no children, left the property to Chambers Russell his six-year-old nephew, Charles Russell Codman. Little Charles’s father, John, as Charles Chambers bequeathed the land one executor, began immediately and for he had acquired to his grandson and pro- the remaining thirteen years of his life to tig& Chambers Russell, who between 1735 treat the place as his own. and 1741 built the two-story Georgian The first glimpse we have of the house in house now encased within the present its landscape setting comes from two brief mansion. The original house was a mao- phrases in an inventory of 1778. The ap- sioo, too, according to the 1767 inventory praiserslist “The Mansion House with the of Chambers Russell’s estate.’ (See fig. 1.) Front Yard,” and “The Octigoo piece of Russell owned barns and farmhouses in mowing Front of the Grate House about Lincoln, as well as another family farm in Five acres.“” The particular mention of the Charlestown. Of his six slaves, five were “front yard” indicates that there may have listed as having no monetary value, proba- bly because of old age or infiity. Their This articleis a revision of a report preparedby master, who had always treated them as Christine Fernandez and Alan Emmet for the “entitled to the rights of humanity,” pro- SPNEA Properties Department. Aan Emmet, vided in his will for them to be supported author of Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Changing of a Landscape, is a consultant in for life on his farm. Russell grew corn, hay, landscapehistory who is presently conducting oats, and flax. He raised sheep, cattle, an inventory of landscape-relatedphotographs oxen, swine, and poultry. The three-page and engravingsin SPNEA files. 6 Old- Time New England FIG. 1. CHAMBERS RUSSELL’S FARM, LINCOLN (ca. 1767). SPNEA’s present holdingsare indicated by a dotted line at the center. The balance of the acreage now includes conservationand residentialland, MassachusettsAudubon Society’s Drumlin Farm, and Lincoln’s entire businessdis- trict. (Drawn by the author.) been somethingspecial about the treatment upper and lower platform by a high glacis of that sloping ground. [artificial slope] surrounded by a richly The placement of the Russell-Codman wrought railing decoratedwith gilt balls.“6 house on an elevated site is typical of the The Russell-Codman forecourt may have eighteenth century. Landowners of wealth been as ornate. In the 1920s it was still and culture in England through mid- partially enclosed by a balustrade (fig. 8). century and in America for longer built “Octagon” is a term which has con- their mansions atop hills to gain “pros- tinued to be applied to the wet meadow and pect.” The slopes were then shaped into a pond embraced by the two accessroads on series of platforms, with terraces and steps the Codman property (fig. 11). Though axial to the facade. These features at the neither pond nor meadow display the Russell-Codman house may well be con- geometry implied by their name, it is likely temporary with its construction shortly be- that the pond was at one time a “bason” in fore 1740. One similar local example was a formal setting. John James, in his 1712 Thomas Hancock’s house on Beacon Hill, Theory and Practice of Gardening, in- where a landscape gardener contracted in cluded the octagon in his suggestedforms 1735to “lay out the garden, trim the beds, for pieces of water. Or “ifa bason be circu- and sodd ye Ten-as.“” Bulfinch’s 1792 lar,” he wrote, “the walk that surrounds it house for Joseph Barrel1 at Charlestown, should be octangular.“7 Stowe, one of the “Pleasant Hill,” was one of many set upon greatestand best known English landscape grassed terraces.s gardens, included a “large Octagon Piece A contemporary account describesPeter of Water” with an obelisk fountain seventy Fanueil’s Boston mansion soon after 1738: feet high at its center.sThe garden at Stowe “The deep courtyard, ornamented with was laid out in the 1720s by Charles flowers and shrubs, was divided into an Bridgeman, with parterres, terraces, and a The Codman Estate canal descendingon an axis with the south self and his heirs.9 Up went a new barn, front of the houseto the Octagon Lake near stable, farmhouse, and fences. Fields were the entrance gates (fig. 2). It is not unlikely ditched and wells were dug. Agricultural that Chambers Russell had visited Stowe, production rose swiftly under a new man- even though the scant surviving records of ager. In 1792 Codman became founder of his life provide no evidence of it. The gar- the Massachusetts Society for Promoting den was, in any event, well known through Agriculture, organized to share knowledge published plans and poems. It is entirely and encourage experimentation. John possible that Russell may have been creat- Codman’s major impact on the estate was ing a simplified imitation in Lincoln just the transformation of the house into a when, ironically, William Kent, Bridge- three-story high style Federal mansion, its man’s successorat Stowe, was engaged in design attributed to Bulfinch. With respect reshaping and “naturalizing” the Octagon to the landscape, we can read in his letters there in the 1750s. The lake at Stowe, de- what he admired and what he wanted to do, spite further softening of the outline by but it seemsprobable that he accomplished Capability Brown, continued to be called no major change. His accounts include bills the Octagon, just as have the meadow and for repairs and refurbishments between pond at the Codman estate. 1791and 1796. Thomas Clement, his estate carpenter, charged Codman for “fences and espaliers” , “ arches, stepts,and border John Codman III boards”, “pickett posts and rails for gar- When John Codman took over the run- den”, “poles for trees”, “fence at house” down estate in 1790, he began immediately and a “large hottbed.“iO In 1799 Codman to build and refurbish the property for him- ordered thirty-nine “Alm” trees. FIG. 2. THE OCTAGON LAKE AT STOWE, BUCKINGHAMSHIRE, 1739.One of Rigaud’s draw- ings from Sarah Bridgeman’s PIans of&we. This view shows the lake in its original geometric shape, with the long axial approach rising to the great house far beyond. (Photograph from Frances Loeb Library, Harvard University; Courtesy of the Newberry Library, Chicago.) Old- Time New England John Codman’s delightful letters to his And six weeks later: beloved second wife Catherine, written I do not know any place in America during a business trip to England in 1800, so much like Gentlemens’ seats in this reveal a pride in his own estate, as well as country as Lincoln (dear Lincoln) all it his changing tastes in response to what he wants is the foreyard all knocked away observed as he traveled. He was charmed and the house to stand in the midst of a lawn . _ . .I4 by the seclusion of the English country seats. The hedgesand clumps of trees en- At the start of the eighteenth century, circling them-products of the Enclosure nearly every English country seat por- Acts and of deliberate reforestation, as trayed by Kip, Knyff, and others in their much as of fashion-were to Codman bird’s_eye view engravingshad an enclosed pleasantly unlike his homeland. He visited front courtyard. A hundred years later, several seats, where he was impressed by however, when John Codman made his the fine distant views, and the deliberate tour, most great houses had had their concealment of roads and structures. foreyards “knocked away,” along with Kitchen gardens, greenhouses, and farm every other formal element. Lawns and buildings were all “covered from sight” drives now swept up to the very door, a and “of course hid by trees.“‘] He mar- result of the stylistic revolution which veled at the clean gravel walks “in serpen- Capability Brown had carried to its tine and twisted forms,“r2 which circum- extreme. navigated the grounds.