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Home , Biltmore Estate, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Cornelius Vanderbilt II, Electra Havemeyer Webb, Florham, Moravian Cemetery

Field Notes - Spring 2016 Issue

RETROSPECTIVE BOOK REVIEWS By Esley Hamilton, NAOP Board Trustee

We have been reviewing new books about the Olmsteds and the art of landscape architecture for so long that the book section of our website is beginning to resemble a bibliography. To make this resource more useful for researchers and interested readers, we’re beginning a series of articles about older publications that remain useful and enjoyable. We hope to focus on the landmarks of the Olmsted literature that appeared before the creation of our website as well as shorter writings that were not intended to be scholarly works or best sellers but that add to our understanding of Olmsted projects and themes.

THE OLMSTEDS AND THE VANDERBILTS

The Vanderbilts and the : Architectural Aspirations 1879-1901. by John Foreman and Robbe Pierce Stimson, Introduction by Louis Auchincloss. : St. Martin’s Press, 1991, 341 pages.

At his death, William Henry (1821-1885) was the richest man in America. In the last eight years of his life, he had more than doubled the fortune he had inherited from his father, Commodore (1794-1877), who had created an empire from shipping and then done the same thing with the New York Central Railroad. William Henry left the bulk of his estate to his two eldest sons, but each of his two other sons and four daughters received five million dollars in cash and another five million in trust. This money supported a Vanderbilt building boom that remains unrivaled, including palaces along in New York, aristocratic complexes in the surrounding countryside, and palatial “cottages” at the fashionable country resorts.

John Foreman and Robbe Pierce Stimson recount the family’s history through the lens of about a dozen houses built by and his children. The architectural coverage includes floorplans, stories of the often lengthy construction periods, and many old photos, and for the eight country estates, considerable analysis of the landscapes. Olmsted was not associated with Hunt’s Newport houses, for Cornelius Vanderbilt II and for William K. Vanderbilt, but he did at least some work for all the other siblings, culminating in one of his crowning achievements, the . Many people have written about Biltmore, and monographs have been published about in and Shelburne Farms in , but Foreman and Stimson remain valuable sources for these projects and almost unique sources for several others.

Frederick Law Olmsted had been a neighbor of the Vanderbilts back in his farming days on in the 1850s, when both he and William Henry were members of the Richmond County Agricultural Society. One of his first projects for the family was the fourteen-acre site adjacent to the in New Dorp for ’s Vanderbilt Mausoleum. This six-year effort (from 1886 to 1892) included an irrigation system with a reservoir, a well, and pumps.

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For Frederick William Vanderbilt (1856-1938), Olmsted landscaped another Newport estate, Rough Point, which his client used for only a few years before turning his attention to his non- Olmsted landscape at Hyde Park on the . Fortunately Rough Point was acquired in 1922 by James B. Duke, whose daughter Doris continued to maintain it, and it is now managed by her foundation. One surviving Olmsted feature is the bridge connecting promontories on the famous Cliff Walk.

Margaret Vanderbilt (1845-1925) and her husband Elliott Shepard selected a site overlooking the Hudson for their country place, in Scarborough, just north of Tarrytown. Elliott died in 1893 before their McKim, Mead & White-designed house at Woodlea was finished, but Olmsted Brothers continued work on the landscape for another five years. Sleepy Hollow Country Club took over the property as early as 1912 and has maintained for over a century with only a few false steps.

Emily Vanderbilt (1852-1946) and her husband William Douglas Sloan joined the burgeoning summer colony in the Berkshires at Lenox, Massachusetts in 1886 and kept adding to Elm Court, their rambling shingle-style house, until 1900, by which time it encompassed 55,000 square feet. Olmsted Brothers worked there off and on until 1924. Eventually Lenox lost its social cachet and Elm Court fell into ruin, but after 2000, family members began a renovation that is well along. The family finally sold the house and 90 acres in 2012 to a company that has been negotiating contentious zoning issues with Lenox and Stockbridge for an “experiential resort.”

Florham: The Lives of An American Estate by Carol Biere, Samuel Convissor, and Walter Cummins for the Friends of Florham. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University, College at Florham, 2011, 135 pages.

Hamilton Twombly (1849-1910), the husband of Florence Vanderbilt (1854-1952), was considered the most capable businessman in the family and in addition to managing the Vanderbilt investments sat on the boards of as many as 59 other corporations. The Twomblys decided in 1890 to settle east of Morristown, New Jersey on Madison Avenue, already known as the “Street of Millionaires.” Under the guidance of Olmsted and Stanford White of McKim, Mead & White, they acquired nearly a thousand acres and erected an enormous red-brick Georgian house on a high point from which almost all the land they could see belonged to them. By the time they occupied it in 1897, responsibility for the landscape design had passed to Rick, who continued to consult into the 1930s. The estate included a large dairy complex and a stud farm for coach horses, a family interest. The “park” of about 150 acres around the house was approached from the road by way of a picturesque stone tunnel under the railroad line, reminiscent of the separations in Central Park. Closer to the house, the Italian Garden and Sunken Garden were supported by ten greenhouses. A few years after Florence died at the age of 98, surviving family members sold off the contents of the house and divided the grounds. The farm became a research center for Exxon and has recently been further developed with, among other things, the New York Jets training facility. The house and surrounding park became in 1958 the Florham Campus of Fairleigh Dickinson University, which over succeeding years has further encroached on the grounds from every direction. In recent years, however, the Friends of Florham have worked to restore the house and gardens and in 2003 set aside a portion of the

2 surviving woodland as the Frederick Law Olmsted Cut-Leaf Maple Garden. This book is largely an annotated album of illustrations, including many previously unpublished family photos documenting the estate’s creation, decline, and revival.

The House at Shelburne Farms: The story of one of America’s great country estates by Joe Sherman. Middlebury, VT: Paul S. Eriksson, 1986, 95 pages.

The History of Shelburne Farms: A Changing Landscape, an Evolving Vision by Erica Huyler Donnis, Foreword by Tim Slayton. Barre VT: Vermont Historical Society, 2010, 343 pages.

Shelburne Vermont, just south of Burlington, is today best known for the , the cluster of historic buildings (and the ) moved to the site beginning in 1947 by Electra Havemeyer Webb and stuffed with her peerless collection of Americana. It is, however, outside the four thousand acres assembled in the 1880s by Electra’s in-laws, (1851-1926) and Eliza (known as Lila) Vanderbilt (1860-1936). The property was away from fashionable society but exceptionally fine, extending into , with the peaks of the Adirondacks seen on the horizon. FLO visited in 1886 and made his specific recommendations by letter the following year, designating farm, park and forest divisions linked by curving drives. Webb built the house near the lake instead of on the hillside site proposed by Olmsted, and the limited surviving documentation suggests that Olmsted did not continue a close relationship with the site. Yet as realized under Webb’s manager Arthur Taylor, Shelburne Farms has matured into one of the nation’s best examples of an estate in the Olmsted style and has been recognized as a National Historic Landmark. Seward Webb was intensely interested in scientific farming, and his Farm Barn, completed in 1890, expressed that interest in a big way, enclosing a courtyard measuring 400 by 260 feet. Webb’s participation was curtailed long before his death by his addiction to morphine, but his children, led by J. Watson Webb, and grandchildren led by Derick Webb, kept the farm going. They incorporated Shelburne Farms as early as 1922, and in 1984 Derick Webb bequeathed 1150 acres to Shelburne Farms Resources, a family-led non-profit educational corporation. It now maintains 1400 acres, while other tracts are protected by scenic easements. The main shingle-style house has become a seasonal inn, still with many original furnishings. Of these two publications documenting this property, Joe Sherman’s little book was originally published for visitors to the Inn at Shelburne Farms, while the much larger book by Erica Donnis, originally intended to be an in-house record, combines family stories with a history of the farm as a business and land management vehicle over three generations.

G. W. Vanderbilt’s Biltmore Estate: The Most Distinguished Private Place. by John M. Bryan. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., 1994.

The Biltmore estate in Ashville, was the life’s work of Vanderbilt (1863-1914), the youngest of William Henry’s children, and it also became the valedictory achievement of both its architect, Richard Morris Hunt, and its landscape architect, Frederick Law Olmsted. The scale of Biltmore was unprecedented in this country, involving the restoration of 120,000 acres of Appalachian forest and the construction of the nation’s largest residence with its surrounding park and gardens. This large-scale book was published in

3 observance of the centennial of the estate’s opening, with the assistance of the American Architectural Foundation, the charitable affiliate of the American Institute of Architects. The AIA owns Hunt’s drawings, and several are included among the color plates which are gathered into two groups between chapters. Bryan follows the development closely through the original correspondence, while numerous historic photos show just how challenging the landscape was for Olmsted and complex the construction for Hunt.

Lady on the Hill: How Biltmore Estate Became an American Icon By Howard E. Covington, Jr. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 2006, 331 pages.

After George Washington Vanderbilt died in 1914 at the age of only 51, his widow Edith, following his wishes, sold about 86,000 acres to the U. S. government to form but retained the house and about 12,000 acres. Cornelia Vanderbilt, their only child, married John Francis Amherst Cecil in 1924. He was a British diplomat, the third son of Baroness Amherst of Hackney and a grandson of the third marquess of Exeter, whose Burghley estate in Lincolnshire is one of the grandest in Britain. He loved the life of a country squire and remained in North Carolina until his death in 1954, even after Cornelia decamped to Europe in 1932. The savior of Biltmore, however was Ashville attorney Junius G. Adams, who persuaded the Cecils to put the house and land into a corporation, the Biltmore Company. The house opened to the public in 1930, long before similar strategies were considered in England or France. It has become one of the nation’s top historical attractions, its size enabling it to comfortably accommodate enough visitors to make a profit. Shrewd management by Judge Adams and then by the couple’s younger son William A. V. Cecil extended to ancillary businesses, too, including a large dairy. Their success was fortunate, because repair bills were on a scale with the estate. Fixing the Olmsted-designed flume that kept the Bass Pond from silting up cost nearly half a million dollars in1990. By the time this book was written, Biltmore had become the national model of private stewardship of a national treasure.

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