Cultural Landscape Report, Volume I: Fairsted

Zaitzevsky, Cynthia; Zaitzevsky and Associates, Inc.; Griswold, Mac

The grounds of Fairsted, since 1980 the Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site, are a rare resource in the history of American landscape architecture. For almost a century, they formed the working environment of the nation’s most important firm of landscape architects. Fairsted was also the home of Frederick Law Olmsted Sr., the founder of the firm, from 1883 until his retirement in 1895. Unlike many cultural landscape reports, in which the history of a landscape, usually a site of considerable acreage, is discussed broadly by ownership periods, this first volume of Fairsted: The Cultural Landscape Report for the Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site has focused intensively on archival research and documentation at a very fine-grained level. There are several reasons for this. First of all, as is usually the case with an Olmsted-firm project, a great deal of documentation exists for this landscape. Secondly, the site is small enough so that virtually all of the documentation could be presented in the form of text, illustrations and appendices. Finally, it was known from the outset that the treatment plan would be implemented in the near future, and the staff of the Olmsted National Historic Site wanted all decisions to be based on the most solid evidence possible. For larger sites with equally heavy documentation, such an approach would probably not be feasible, except perhaps for zones within the larger landscape. However, most sites, especially those with long histories and several periods of ownership, are not nearly as well documented as Fairsted. In these cases, site histories must be painstakingly pieced together from fragmentary information. Most of the documentation for the Fairsted landscape is located in the archives of the Olmsted National Historic Site. For most of its history, there is substantial photographic coverage. There also appears to be a quite complete sequence of plans, although some early studies may be missing and not all areas of the site are equally well represented by plans. Detailed plant lists also exist, as the appendices to this report attest. However, the F.L. Olmsted Papers and Olmsted Associates Records at the Library of Congress were not nearly as helpful for this project as for most Olmsted jobs. There is an obvious reason: the Olmsted firm was its own client and had no need to correspond with itself. Another valuable resource was the John Charles’ early photographs of the site. The Special Collections Department of the Loeb also yielded a previously unknown 1902 plan of the Fairsted grounds. Useful photographs and other sources were located at the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities and the Brookline Public Library.

Cultural Landscape Report, Volume I: Fairsted

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