Peirce Mill: Cultural Landscape Inventory, Rock Creek park, National Park Service
Hanna J, Joseph M, Wheelock P. 2009. Peirce Mill: Cultural Landscape Inventory, Rock Creek park, National Park Service. Cultural Landscapes Inventory Report. 600108. NPS National Capital Regional Office. National Capital Regional Office/CLI Database
The Peirce Mill component landscape is approximately 24 acres in size. Situated on the western bank of Rock Creek immediately north of the intersection of Park Road and Beach Drive, Peirce Mill serves as a cultural destination within Rock Creek Park. Containing picnic grounds, historic structures, and naturalistic environments, this landscape possesses a combination of cultural and ecological resources. Visitor access to Peirce Mill is by automobile via Tilden Street, by foot, and by bicycle via trails developed from nineteenth-century roads and early twentieth-century bridle paths. The western edge of the Peirce Mill component landscape is marked by woods that cover the steep east-facing slope. The northern and eastern edges are formed by roads, Broad Branch Road and Beach Drive respectively. The southern boundary of the landscape is the Melvin Hazen tributary. The fairly flat landscape surrounding the mill is primarily open with individual trees growing in meadows both to the north and south. Riparian vegetation borders the edge of the creek. The land surrounding Peirce Mill is a remnant landscape defined by its use through three periods of development from 1800 to 1950. During the nineteenth-century, Peirce Mill, as a privately owned milling and agricultural enterprise, contained orchards, transportation routes, agricultural clusters, and pasture land. After the transfer of the property with the creation of Rock Creek Park in 1890, Peirce Mill was renovated as a picturesque tea house and picnic grounds. With the restoration of the mill and wagon barn/stable in the 1930s, the landscape underwent extensive alteration to function as a living history museum interpreting nineteenth-century milling activities. Currently the site is used for visitor recreation and historic interpretive programming. The Peirce Mill component landscape retains significant landscape elements as defined through complicated interactions among remnants of a nineteenth-century utilitarian landscape, an early twentieth-century picturesque design and a mid twentieth-century living history interpretative site. These eras are then overlaid with the current ecologically oriented management approach, which reflects the need to accommodate an increasing variety of visitor uses. This multi-layering of history has resulted in a site which retains limited integrity to any one period of significance, but provides an interesting chronology of park land development and preservation philosophy.
- Type
- Published Report
- Authors
- Hanna, Jennifer; Joseph, Maureen; Wheelock, Perry
- Date of Issue
- 2009-09-01
- Publisher
- NPS National Capital Regional Office
- Units
- NCR , ROCR
- Keywords
- Agriculture, Architecture, Business, Commerce, Conservation of Natural resources, domestic, Education, Farming for Local Markets, Garage, historic site, Historic Vernacular Site, Industrial Processes, Industry, Intrepretive Landscape, Landscape architecture, Leisure, outbuildings, Parks Produce a New Profession, Picnic Grounds, Pierce Mill Springhouse and Barn, Recreation, residential, Rock Creek Historic District, Rustic style, Scenic Preservation, Single Family House, Tea House, technology, The 1930's: Era of Public Works, The Romantic Period, trade