Cultural Landscape Report for the Nelson House Grounds, Colonial National Historical Park
Auwaerter J, Riley B, Fritz P, Curry GW. 2011. Cultural Landscape Report for the Nelson House Grounds, Colonial National Historical Park. Cultural Landscape Report. U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Olmsted Center for Landscape Preservation. Boston, Massachusetts
The Nelson House and its two-acre walled grounds occupy a prominent place along Yorktown’s quiet Main Street of mostly small colonial buildings. Initially acquired in 1706 by Thomas “Scotch Tom” Nelson, the property reflects the village’s eighteenth century prosperity and its early twentieth century revival. Scotch Tom built the existing Georgian-style house in ca. 1730, and during the Revolutionary War and its final major battle, the 1781 Siege of Yorktown, it was the home of Governor Thomas Nelson Jr. His descendants remained through the nineteenth century during a period of marked decline in Yorktown. In 1914, the property was purchased by wealthy industrialist George Preston Blow and renovated into a Colonial Revival-style country place known as York Hall. Charles Gillette, one of Virginia’s most prominent early landscape architects, designed the grounds. In the 1970s, after acquiring the York Hall estate in 1968, the National Park Service restored the Nelson House to its colonial appearance. Due to a lack of historic documentation and desire to retain some York Hall estate features, the park did not complete a corresponding restoration of the colonial landscape. Instead, it removed features that were overtly twentieth century in character, leaving the major structures, organization, and plantings of the Colonial Revival landscape. Today, the Nelson House grounds reflect three centuries of changing use and design. Over the years, this layered landscape has posed challenges for park interpreters and managers. This cultural landscape report is the first comprehensive documentation of the Nelson House grounds, undertaken to inform planned rehabilitation of the formal garden as well as maintenance and interpretation of the entire two-acre site. Through documentation of the landscape’s physical history and existing conditions and evaluation of its historic character, this report establishes a sound basis for management and clarifies the relationship between the eighteenth-century origins of the landscape and its twentieth-century Colonial Revival overlay.
- Type
- Published Report
- Authors
- Auwaerter, John; Riley, Bryne; Fritz, Paul; Curry, George
- Date of Issue
- 2011
- Publisher
- U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Olmsted Center for Landscape Preservation
- Units
- COLO , NER
- Keywords
- Charles E. Peterson, Civil War, CLR, Colonial National Historical Park, Colonial-era commerce, cultural landscape, Cultural Landscape Report, early historic preservation movement, George Washington, John D. Rockefeller, Lord Cornwallis, Mission 66, Nelson House Grounds, OCLP, Olmsted Center for Landscape Preservation, Revolutionary War, SUNY, Virginia, Yorktown, Yorktown Historic District
- Subjects
- CRIS-CL: 975707: Nelson House (975707)