National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior

Analysis of Historical Significance and Integrity by Resource Type
While the Country Place Era, as so styled by Newton, is most often associated with large
new Neoclassicist residential designs on formerly undeveloped ground, the Vanderbilt
modifications to their property at Hyde Park illustrate an important subdivision of Country
Place Era landscape design. This is by virtue of the inherent scarcity of pre-existing country
properties. Not to be too closely linked with the historic preservation movement in the United
States, the Vanderbilts' 1895 purchase of the historic Hyde Park property from the Langdon
family exhibits interesting parallels to the habit of wealthy northerners to purchase and
refurbish the plantation homes of displaced or distressed southern gentry within the
reconstructed southern states. 1433 In Virginia, many of the plantation homes of the Founding
Fathers had been purchased by wealthy northerners. Examples of this include Montpelier, the
home of James and Dolly Madison, purchased by the DuPonts in 1900, and Carter's Grove, near
Williamsburg, purchased first by T. Perceval Bisland in 1906, and then by Molly and Archibald
McCrea in 1926. 1434
The landscape design philosophy and approach for the Country Place Era is well
synthesized in the 1917 publication by Hubbard and Kimball, An Introduction to the Study of
Landscape Design, a volume which served as the major design textbook at Harvard University's
landscape program through the late 1940s. This important book spells out the predictable
programmatic requirements of wealthy owners of country places.
In the great majority of designs for private places which the landscape architect makes, in our
time and country, the owners are not very widely different one from another in their ways of
living and in their more important requirements in use and enjoyment for living on their
land. Each man will wish, first of all, a proper and convenient house in scale with the life
which he expects to lead. He will also wish to own a piece of land which, together with the
house, satisfies his sense of possession and plainly expresses his ownership. Usually a part of
that expression will be some sense of boundary between that he owns and the neighboring
properties. He will want a place for hospitality, for entertainment of his friends; and for
himself and for his friends he will want a variety of interesting things to look at, and a
number of interesting things which can be done. Further, he will wish to enjoy the expanse
of free spaces, he will be glad to have a piece of property from which a distant view is
obtained. He may wish to take more or less active exercise of various kinds; he will also wish
an opportunity to sit and rest, at his ease. He may wish to make his life as much as possible
that of a "country gentleman," and so he may develop at least a part of the estate as a farm,
even though he knows that it may never be a financially successful farm. 1435
Regarding the organization and design of formal gardens, and a measure of how
exceptional a garden bearing no relationship to the house would be during this period, Hubbard
and Kimball offer:
The garden is ideally a place enclosed, protected, restful, a private area for the leisurely
enjoyment of outdoor beauty. It has, therefore, some functions similar to some of those
1433 Apparently, in 1914, the private owner of Thomas Jefferson's Monticello had "declined an offer of
one million dollars for Monticello from the 'head of the Vanderbilt family' who had once been a guest
there." American Scenic, Appendix F. "Monticello, Virginia," 519-541. As related by Charles B. Hosmer,
Jr. in Presence of the Past, 173.
1434 Richard Guy Wilson, "Picturesque Ambiguities: The Country House Tradition in America," in the
exhibition catalog for The Long Island Country House: 1879-1930 (Southampton, NY: The Parrish Art
Museum, 1988).
1435 Hubbard and Kimball, 248.
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