Last updated: June 11, 2024
Place
Smith College
Olmsted Archives
Quick Facts
In 1891, Smith College Trustees began planning to beautify their campus, while also developing a scientifically organized botanic garden, to serve the new botany department established the year before. They brought in Frederick Law Olmsted to turn the entire campus into an arboretum.
Smith College was only twenty years old when Olmsted delivered his first set of plans the following January. Olmsted formed the upper campus in an irregular circle of buildings, which he approvingly characterized as “informal and unpretentious…irregular [and] homelike”.
Olmsted’s views were formed by the New England village setting he grew up in, and when laying out any college campus, he proposed a “domestically scaled suburban community, in a park-like setting”. The founders of Smith shared these views, wanting curved lines, open spaces, and diverse plantings.
There were several arguments on what would be included in the final design, and after going behind his back and hiring a young botanist to procure all the plantings, correspondence between Olmsted and Smith College stopped.
In 1897, when the need for expansion became too pressing a matter to ignore, Smith College again reached out to Olmsted, this time, John Charles, and Frederick Jr. Olmsted Brothers was now faced with the difficult task of putting more buildings on a college campus that had grown in every way but acreage. In one of their final correspondences with Smith College, Olmsted Brothers warned against clipping shrubby, instead encouraging it to grow wild.
Source: "The Botanic Garden of Smith College," Smith College
For more information and primary resources, please visit:
Olmsted Research Guide Online
Olmsted Archives on Flickr
Smith College was only twenty years old when Olmsted delivered his first set of plans the following January. Olmsted formed the upper campus in an irregular circle of buildings, which he approvingly characterized as “informal and unpretentious…irregular [and] homelike”.
Olmsted’s views were formed by the New England village setting he grew up in, and when laying out any college campus, he proposed a “domestically scaled suburban community, in a park-like setting”. The founders of Smith shared these views, wanting curved lines, open spaces, and diverse plantings.
There were several arguments on what would be included in the final design, and after going behind his back and hiring a young botanist to procure all the plantings, correspondence between Olmsted and Smith College stopped.
In 1897, when the need for expansion became too pressing a matter to ignore, Smith College again reached out to Olmsted, this time, John Charles, and Frederick Jr. Olmsted Brothers was now faced with the difficult task of putting more buildings on a college campus that had grown in every way but acreage. In one of their final correspondences with Smith College, Olmsted Brothers warned against clipping shrubby, instead encouraging it to grow wild.
Source: "The Botanic Garden of Smith College," Smith College
For more information and primary resources, please visit:
Olmsted Research Guide Online
Olmsted Archives on Flickr