Collecting area: Landscape & gardening

Temporarily stored offsite; contact SCUA to request materials from this collection.

The seat of seven generations of the Blanchard and Means families, Elm Hill Farm was established prior to 1797, when the joiner Amasa Blanchard began acquiring property in Brookfield, Mass., as he looked forward to his marriage. The success he enjoyed in farming was a spark for his family’s prosperity. Amasa’s son Albert Cheney Blanchard left Brookfield in the 1830s to pursue commercial opportunities out west as a partner in the Richmond Trading Co., in Richmond, Ind., and by the time he returned home to take over operations after his father’s death in 1857, Albert had earned a fortune. In the years after the Civil War, Elm Hill grew to 1,300 acres crowned by a mansion built in 1870 that became the center of a compound of eight buildings. Each subsequent generation at Elm Hill has left its own distinctive mark. Albert’s son Charles P. Blanchard, a minister and talented amateur photographer, developed a renowned herd of Morgan horses, and Charles’ daughter Abby and her husband, the minister Oliver W. Means, added a herd of Jersey cattle that included a prize-winning bull, Xenia’s Sultan, imported in 1923, and the cow, You’ll Do Lobelia, better known as the original, real-life Elsie the Cow. Abby’s daughter-in-law, Louise Rich Means, laid acres of spectacular gardens on the estate. Following Louise’s death in 2009, Elm Hill left family ownership.

Consisting of nearly two centuries of papers that accumulated on the Elm Hill estate, the Blanchard-Means collection stretches from a handful of documents from the late eighteenth century relating to landholdings and Amasa ‘s work Blanchard as a joiner, to a blossoming of correspondence, photographs, ephemera, and realia dating from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Well-educated, well-traveled, and well-informed, the Blanchards and Means were prolific letter writers, and their papers provide wonderful insights into the lives of a religiously-devoted family from the New England elite. Among the highlights of the collection are the extensive records from the Richmond Trading Company and from the farm’s livestock and gardening operations (both Morgans and Jerseys) and a remarkable photographic record that document the family, the evolving landscape of Elm Hill, and the town of Brookfield, as well as hundreds of images from C.P. Blanchard’s world tours in the 1890s.

A member of of QTV fraternity, Charles Meade Boardman graduated from the Massachusetts Agricultural College in 1920 with a degree in landscape gardening.

Boardman’s Papers include two of his college yearbooks, a smattering of correspondence from the 1920s relating to landscape gardening, and approximately 30 photographs, apparently taken during or shortly after his time at MAC.

The horticulturist, Jim Crockett (1915-1979) earned wide acclaim as host of the popular television show, Crockett’s Victory Garden. A 1935 graduate of the Stockbridge School of Agriculture at UMass Amherst, Crockett returned home to Massachusetts after a stint in the Navy during the Second World War and began work as a florist. A small publication begun for his customers, Flowery Talks, grew so quickly in popularity that Crockett sold his flower shop in 1950 to write full time. His first book, Window Sill Gardening (N.Y., 1958), was followed by seventeen more on gardening, ornamental plants, and horticulture, culminating with twelve volumes in the Time-Life Encyclopedia of Gardening. He was the recipient of numerous awards for garden writing and was director of the American Horticultural Society. In 1975, he was contacted about a new gardening show on PBS, Victory Garden, which he hosted until his death by cancer in 1979.

Documenting an important career in bringing horticulture to the general public, the Crockett Papers contain a mix of professional and personal correspondence and writing by Jim Crockett from throughout his career. The collection includes a particularly extensive set of letters from George B. Williams, Crockett’s father in law, and copies most of his publications.

Temporarily stored offsite; contact SCUA to request materials from this collection.

Born on a farm in Hungary in 1932, the landscape architect Julius Fabos survived the Second World War and the onset of Stalinism before escaping to America during the Revolution of 1956. Able to resume his studies, Fabos received his BS in plant science from Rutgers (1961) and MLA from Harvard (1964), joining the faculty at UMass Amherst shortly thereafter while continuing toward a doctorate in Resource Planning and Conservation at the University of Michigan (1973). A charismatic teacher and prolific writer, Fabos is noted internationally for his work on landscape assessment and planning and greenways. In the early 1970s, he helped establish the METLAND (Metropolitan Landscape Planning) interdisciplinary research group, which pioneered the use of GIS technology in landscape planning. Fabos has received numerous honors in his career, including recognition as a Fellow of American Society of Landscape Architects (1985), as a Medalist for the ASLA (1997), and recipient of an honorary degree from the Hungarian University of Horticulture. Fabos retired in 1997.

The Fabos papers contain a record of a distinguished career in landscape architecture, including Fabos’ numerous publications, grey literature, conference materials, notes, and selected correspondence.

Although Henry Flagg French was selected as the first president of the new Massachusetts Agricultural College, he served in that office for barely two years. A graduate of Dartmouth and Harvard Law School, French was a strong proponent of scientific agriculture, but in 1866, after falling out with the college administration over campus design, he resigned his office, leaving before the first students were actually admitted.

The French collection includes a suitably small body of correspondence, including 16 letters (1864-1866) from French to the original campus landscape designer, Frederick Law Olmsted, and letters and reports from French to college officials, together with published writings, biographical material about French and his son, sculptor Daniel Chester French (1850-1931), and photographs. In part, these are copies of originals in the Frederick Law Olmsted Papers at American University, Washington, DC.

Barrie Barstow Greenbie was a key member of the Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning at UMass Amherst from 1970-1989. In a long and remarkably diverse career, Greenbie worked as an artist with the Works Progress Administration, as a soldier and journalist, as a professor of theater, an architect, inventor, author, and landscape planner. After earning a BA in drama from the University of Miami (1953), he worked for several years in the theatre program at Skidmore College. While there, he added architecture to his array of talents, designing the East 74th Street Theater in New York in 1959, and founded a company to produce a “self-erecting” building designed to substitute for summer tent theaters. Two years after joining the faculty at UMass in 1970, he completed a doctorate in urban affairs and regional planning at the University of Wisconsin and continued with a characteristically broad array of creative pursuits, designing the William Smith Clark Memorial, among other things, and conducting an extensive aerial survey of the landscapes of the Connecticut River Valley. In monographs such as Design for Diversity and Spaces: Dimensions of the Human Landscape, Greenbie examined the interactions between humans and nature. He died at his home on South Amherst in 1998.

The Greenbie Papers document a long career as academic, writer, artist, architect, and theatrical designer. Of particular note is the extensive and engrossing correspondence, which extends from Greenbie’s years as a student at the Taft School in the late 1930s through his World War II service with the Sixth Army in the South Pacific and Japan, to his tenure at UMass Amherst (1970-1989). The collection also includes a small but interesting batch of correspondence between Greenbie’s parents (1918-1919).

The horticulturist Tom S. Hamilton was a member of the faculty at UMass Amherst in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning. A specialist in ornamental plants, Hamilton worked at UMass from prior to 1950 until his retirement in 1986.

The Hamilton Papers contain three works on ornamental plants published by the Dept. of Landscape Architecture, along with a mimeographed laboratory manual that Hamilton used in his courses on landscape operations in 1979.

A landscape architect and extension horticulturist, Hal Mosher was born in Sterling, Mass., in August 1920. Mosher started his undergraduate studies at Mass. State College in the fall of 1942, but after an interruption while he fulfilled his military obligations, he completed his bachelor’s and master’s degrees after the war. Beginning his academic career at the University of Missouri, Mosher returned home to Massachusetts in 1960 as an associate Extension Professor of Horticulture, joining the Department of Landscape Architecture in 1969. He was an enormously popular instructor, known particularly for his introduction to landscape ecology, nicknamed by students ‘Hiking with Hal.’ Mosher retired to emeritus status in 1987 and remained in Amherst until his death on October 3, 2019, aged 99.

Documenting the career of a popular faculty member and distinguished landscape architect, this collection contains materials from throughout Mosher’s career, with an emphasis on the years 1960 through 1987. Volumetrically, almost half of the collection consists of 35mm slides taken during Mosher’s numerous travel throughout the United States and Europe, but there is a good cross-section of materials relating to his teaching, landscape projects, and research, and small number of photographs and ephemeral items from his undergraduate years.

An urban planning firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that assisted New England cities and towns with initiating and managing urban development projects. The firm had two main types of contracts, urban renewal and comprehensive community planning, and many of their projects were supported with funds designated by the Federal Housing Act of 1949.
Includes organizational histories, memoranda, correspondence, proposal guidelines, materials for citizen participation, job inventories and reports, brochures that document urban growth management and the problems of suburbanization in New England, background studies, planning reports, growth management policies, zoning bylaws and amendments, and the files of Katharine Kumala.

A graduate of UMass Amherst (’71) and the son of a faculty member, Jim Ricci had a childhood encounter with a Locke Power Lawn Mower that led to lifelong fascination with reel lawn mowers. As an historian ofthe field, Ricci has written extensively on mowers and the industy, culminating in his book Hand, Horse, and Motor: The Development of the Lawn Mower Industry in the United States (2016). He and his wife Margaret McCarthy are also advanced collectors of vintage lawn mowers and associated paper and ephemera.

The Ricci and McCarthy collection cuts a wide swath through the subject of pre-World War II lawn mowers, and includes materials ranging from scarce catalogs, trade publications, and letters and documents, as well as Ricci’s extensive research files organized by manufacturer. The collection is rich in visual content, with early tradecards, advertisements, postcards, and photographs.