Cultural Landscape Report for Weir Farm National Historic Site, Volume II: Updated Treatment Plan and Record of Treatment
Layton TW, Foulds H, Waters G. 2013. Cultural Landscape Report for Weir Farm National Historic Site, Volume II: Updated Treatment Plan and Record of Treatment. Cultural Landscape Report. National Park Service, Olmsted Center for Landscape Preservation. Boston, MA
The Cultural Landscape Report (CLR) is the primary document used by the National Park Service to guide the treatment and management of a cultural landscape. Park staff, regional specialists, and public participants articulated Weir Farm National Historic Site's management goals in the park's General Management Plan, completed in 1995. The General Management Plan specifically recognized the cultural landscape as significant for its association with the work of Julian Alden Weir and contemporary artists such as Childe Hassam and John Henry Twachtman. The landscape was further acknowledged as a primary cultural resource of equal value to and inseparable from the site's buildings. Beginning in the mid-1990s with plans to restore the Secret Garden and working through 2012, Weir Farm National Historic Site has completed forty-six treatment tasks that preserve and enhance historic landscape character and address park management, interpretive, and visitor services objectives. Twenty-two of the completed treatment tasks were identified in the 1997 Volume 2 report and addressed restoration and rehabilitation of features including agricultural outbuildings, two orchards, rustic picket fencing, and ornamental gardens. Between the fall of 2010 and the end of 2012, twenty-four landscape treatments tasks were completed focusing on small-scale features and dry-laid stonework that provided agricultural function, rustic ornamentation, and recreation opportunities during the treatment period. An additional twenty-four treatment tasks from the 1997 Volume 2 report remain to be completed and are reiterated in this report along with nineteen newly identified tasks. Tasks retained from the 1997 Volume 2 report have not substantively changed and should be implemented following the site-specific programmatic agreement entered among Weir Farm National Historic Site, the Connecticut State Historic Preservation Office, and the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation. The nineteen new tasks are not included in the programmatic agreement and will need individual Section 106 compliance review. The new and remaining treatment tasks continue to improve historic landscape character and include the reconstruction of the Wagon Shed, the replanting of missing foundation and other ornamental plants, and the replacement in kind of historic trees. Of all the remaining tasks, the removal of successional woody vegetation from the Triangular and Ridgetop meadows and the re-establishment of meadow turf in these spaces will have the greatest impact on historic landscape character at the park.
- Type
- Published Report
- Authors
- Layton, Timothy; Foulds, H Eliot; Waters, Greg
- Date of Issue
- 2013
- Publisher
- National Park Service, Olmsted Center for Landscape Preservation
- Units
- WEFA
- Keywords
- Burlingham Complex, Cora Weir Burlingham, Doris Andrews, Dorothy Weir Young, Ella Baker Weir, Julian Alden Weir, Mahonri Young, Nod Hill Road, Orchard, Pelham Lane, Pond and Woodland Area, Ridgetop Meadow, Secret Garden, South Garden terraces, Sperry Andrews, Sunken Garden, Town of Ridgefield, Town of Wilton, Triangular Meadow, Truants' Meadow, Weir Complex, Weir Farm, Weir Farm National Historic Site, Weir Pond
- Subjects
- CRIS-CL: 650059: Weir Farm NHS Landscape