National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior

Analysis of Historical Significance and Integrity by Resource Type
Place Era, the group of professionals practicing landscape architecture was incredibly small;
Warren Manning estimates it included only four or five individuals nationally. 1440
Middle Country Place (1894-1917)
Owing to the influence of the Chicago World's Colombian Exposition and Charles
Platt's popular book on Italian gardens published in 1894, the national trend during this middle
period was the consolidation of competing revival styles, resulting in the dominant application
of Neoclasssical and Beaux-Arts site planning principles to residential grounds. This trend was
further strengthened and identified with the elite tastes of the wealthy through the 1913
monograph of Platt's integrated house and garden designs. This middle period extended to the
establishment of the personal income tax and the United States' entry into World War I. Many
of the homes of the Vanderbilt siblings were completed during this time, including Hyde Park.
Continuing to dominate the young profession of landscape architecture, the Olmsted
firm of Brookline, Massachusetts, was the landscape advisor of choice for the Vanderbilt family
including consultation and designs regarding Biltmore, Rough Point, Point d'Acadie, Woodlea,
Shelburne Farms, Florham, and Elm Court. The Olmsted firm, having begun to move toward a
more architectonic expression of outdoor spaces in collaboration with Hunt at Biltmore, moved
even more resolutely in this direction after the retirement of Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr. in 1895.
Olmsted, Sr.'s retirement from the firm, coupled with family reaction to the cost of the
landscape improvements at Biltmore, may be behind Frederick Vanderbilt's decision to seek
landscape advice elsewhere, eventually resulting in the employment of Greenleaf as a relative
newcomer to the profession.
Late Country Place (1918-1930)
This period extends from the end of World War I to the beginnings of the Great
Depression. Owing to the conservative nature of its wealthy patrons, residential landscape
design in the northeast United States during this period was not greatly influenced by the
new thinking behind the International and Modern styles. The landscape design work of
this later period is generally represented as hackneyed for using pre-figured spatial
arrangements at the expense of the unique qualities of site and for an excessive elaboration
of details and stock features. Many of the Country Place designs during this later period
were overdone, sharing much in common with the eclectic excesses of the earlier Victorian
era. 1441
1440 Newton, 385.
1441 Philip Pregill and Nancy Volkman, Landscapes in History, 2nd ed. (New York: John Wiley & Sons,
1999), 587.
261