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Untitled, Undated Fragment of Newspaper Article Describes the Cellars One Hundred Years Later

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Untitled, Undated Fragment of Newspaper Article Describes the Cellars One Hundred Years Later This page intentionally left blank PREFACE This report was commissioned by the Taft Museum of Art and Reed Hilderbrand Associates, Inc, Landscape Architecture, as part of the museum's expansion and renovation program. In early 2001, as it became clear that the Taft gardens would be thoroughly renovated and rebuilt, the need emerged for a documentary history that captured the design intentions, construction and evolution of several generations of landscape development. The following narrative records that history and anticipates a new chapter in the Taft's relationship to its site. The author gratefully acknowledges the invaluable assistance of Phillip Long, David Johnson, Lea Emery, Susan Hudson and Mark Allen of the Taft Museum of Art; the staff of the Cincinnati Historical Society, in particular Linda Bailey; the staff of the Cincinnati Public Library and that of the Lloyd Horticultural Library; Beth Sullebarger of the Cincinnati Preservation Society, and Nicholas Longworth's two great-great-great granddaughters, Mary Mitchell Cushing and Rosalie Mitchell Robertson. TAFf MUSEUM OF ART 2 A LANDSCAPE HIsTORY INTRODUCTION The Taft Museum of Art houses one of America's notable private collections of art, one that distinctly reflects Anna and Charles Taft's desire to leave an outstanding and permanent contribution to cultural life in Cincinnati, Ohio. No less important is the extraordinary inheritance embodied in the site and the impressive structure in which the collection is displayed, a building considered among America's finest early nineteenth­ century homes. This study documents and interprets the valuable inheritance conveyed through the history of the Taft site and its associated designed landscape at a moment when the museum itself is undergoing significant changes to revive and extend its legacy-changes that will make its collection and its site more manageable and more accessible to a wider audience. The remaking of the Taft involves the full rehabilitation of the original Federal-style mansion, the preservation of its main front gardens and drive, the construction of new space for galleries and enhanced visitor services, accommodation of parking and adequate servicing facilities, renovation and new construction in the main museum garden and the provision of accessible circulation to the museum's public spaces including the gardens. The history of the building and the philosophy of its rehabilitation have been well documented. The evolution of its landscape and its significance in the context of American gardens have not. Because little remains of the early Taft gardens or of their most recent incarnation, it is essential that we recount the story of the design intentions as well as of the construction and alteration of the land and its components. The resulting information will facilitate interpretations of both character and scale in the ongoing rehabilitation and change. In 1975, the Taft Museum building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a work of national significance. The Martin Baum house of 1820, which became the Taft Museum of Art in 1932, is considered a fine example of Federal-style domestic architechlre. Although several periods of expansion and stylistic renovation occurred in the first one hundred years of the property's existence, it was restored to its Federal appearance in 1931-32. The house retains its historical integrity, evidenced to varying degrees through the standard characteristics of location, setting, feeling, association, design, workmanship and materials. The significance of the landscape associated with the Taft Museum of Art is more complex. TAFf MUSEUM OF ART 3 A LANDSCAPE HISTORY Those components of the site most publicly visible to Cincinnatians, the front lawn and the museum entrance drive, relate to the nineteenth century and the 1930s restoration period and will not undergo substantial change of character or fabric in the museum expansion project. The rear of the property, which is much lower in elevation and not spatially contiguous with the gardens, retains no valued historical conditions and has been principally dedicated to parking for the museum staff and visitors for many years. The main gardens related to the museum proper were built in the 1940s according to plans by Cincinnati landscape architect Henry Fletcher Kenney. Although notable in the memory of the Taft's visiting public, much of the fabric of Kenney's garden has been substantially altered, lost to age and overmaturity, or removed to make way for museum expanSIOn. There are many significant turns in the history of the land surrounding Martin Baum's mansion; This report details the site's evolution from Baum's initial construction of Belmont, the name he gave his mansion due to its prominent position among the hills, to its later development by owners Nicholas Longworth, David Sinton and the Tafts, and finally to its role as a museum setting. It is the first attempt to define a site history distinctly related to urban context, ownership and tenure, garden development, and public use of the property. With respect to urban history, the Taft and its associated entrepreneurs form a legacy of evolving domestic taste and localized agrarian enterprise paralleling the nascent economic progress of an industrializing nation. With respect to garden culture, the most significant part of this story is Nicholas Longworth's expansion of Belmont into one of the best-known and most ambitious places of horticultural production in the nineteenth-century American Midwest. There is evidence that Martin Baum developed a substantial garden on the site several years before building his home, however no known images survive from that period. During the difficult financial days of the Panic of 1820, he was forced to sell the house and gardens and a significant portion of the surrounding land. The purchaser, Nicholas Longworth, possessed an lIDcanny combination of entrepreneurial skill, artistic sensibility, moral suasion, and a keen intellectual bent toward botanical and horticultural experimentation. While no vintage photographs or detailed plans survive from the ensuing long period of development, it was Longworth's enterprise that brought the site to the pinnacle of its importance prior to becoming a museum. His garden became one of the most notable examples of the American ornamental farm-a ferme ornee-in the tradition of John Bartram and Thomas Je£ferson. In its prime it was a large holding consisting of well over two thousand acres, extending northward up the slopes of Mt. TAFf MUSEUM OF ART 4 A LANDSCAPE HISTORY Adams. The widely known experimental work that went on there made Longworth a national figure in botanical, agricultural, and viticultural sciences. His story is well documented; but this more detailed study of his gardening expertise will enable the Taft to give greater emphasis to this legacy in the museum's interpretive program and its publications. Subsequent owners of the site put their efforts into other aspects of the property-David Sinton to the mansion itself, and his daughter and son-in-law, Anna and Charles Taft, to assembling an outstanding collection of a~t objects to be located there. By the time the site was dedicated as a museum in 1932, the land area had been vastly reduced and a new scale of building and industry had considerably altered the neighboring parcels and the distant hillsides. If Martin Baum's original home was principally a retreat and an overlook upon the emerging mercantile town, and Longworth's holdings consisted principally of a site for experimental cultivation, then the new museum garden of the 1940s, set in a more urban context, was a direct response to the need for enclosure and inward orientation. The museum's original curator and second director, Katherine Hanna, requested of Kenney a "green architectural garden" that would serve as an extension of the museum's interior. Kenney delivered ably on that request. His garden became well loved; indeed, for a time it was a central part of the Taft Museum experIence. The current generation of the Taft's friends and visitors knew the Kenney garden, and some experienced it in its prime. The first museum garden he designed, it was a significant addition to Kenney's body of work and one of his most public commissions up to that time. One function of this report is to document the Kenney garden'S original design intent, its construction and maturation, and the subsequent alterations that occurred during recent decades. Contemporary descriptions draw allusions to a "restored" nineteenth-century character of the design, but, in fact, Kenney's garden resembled more closely the kind of spatial organization and detail popular in American residental garden fashion of the 1920s and '30s, universally taught in the landscape architechlre schools of his era. This familiar garden type incorporated dependable characteristics: enclosure for privacy and separation; a clear functional organization of uses; axial, symmetrical figures of lawn and path, moving toward asymmetry at the edges against winding paths with full shnlb borders; dense and varied foundation plantings; and diverse broadleaf evergreens, flowering shrubs and perennials to give emphasis to seasonal change. TAFT MUSEUM OF ART 5 A LANDSCAPE HISTORY Photographs in this report reflect Kenney's success in the Taft Museum garden, illustrating its delicate balance of domestic character and public accessibility while displaying a pleasing relationship to the Federal architecture
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