RETROSPECTIVE BOOK REVIEWS by Esley Hamilton, NAOP Board Trustee

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 Gilded Age: Architectural Aspirations 1879-1901. by John Foreman and Robbe Pierce Stimson, Introduction by Louis Auchincloss. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991, 341 pages. At his death, William Henry Vanderbilt (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 Cornelius Vanderbilt (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 Fifth Avenue 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 William Henry Vanderbilt 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, the Breakers for Cornelius Vanderbilt II and Marble House for William K. Vanderbilt, but he did at least some work for all the other siblings, culminating in one of his crowning achievements, the Biltmore Estate. Many people have written about Biltmore, and monographs have been published about Florham in New Jersey and Shelburne Farms in Vermont, 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 Staten Island 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 Moravian Cemetery in New Dorp for Richard Morris Hunt’s Vanderbilt Mausoleum. This six-year effort (from 1886 to 1892) included an irrigation system with a reservoir, a well, and pumps. 1 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 Hudson River. 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 Shelburne Museum, the cluster of historic buildings (and the steamboat Ticonderoga) 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, William Seward Webb (1851-1926) and Eliza (known as Lila) Vanderbilt (1860-1936). The property was away from fashionable society but exceptionally fine, extending into Lake Champlain, 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, North Carolina was the life’s work of George Washington 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.

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