Reflections on environmental history with a human face: Experiences from a new national park

Environmental History, Oct 2003 by Diamant, Rolf

NEW LIFE FOR HISTORIC PLACES

IN THE SUMMER of 1995, while I was superintendent of the Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site in Brookline, Massachusetts, I was asked to serve as an adviser on planning and start-up of the Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park. When MBRNHP opened in 1998, I became the park's first superintendent. Throughout my career I have enjoyed working on a number of "transitions and start-ups," including assignments at Golden Gate National Recreation Area in California, Gateway National Recreation Area in New York, Lowell National Historical Park in Massachusetts, and Weir Farm National Historic Site in Connecticut. I also had the opportunity to develop broader utilization of public/private conservation partnerships, both for newly created park units and in the establishment of national heritage areas and wild and scenic rivers. However, it was my experience as superintendent of the Olmsted site that was perhaps most instructive for what lay ahead in Vermont.

The Olmsted site is the home and office of park maker Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr. and his sons, John Charles Olmsted and Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. Visitors tour the restored landscape of "Fairsted" and the century-old design office that remains virtually unchanged from the days when the Olmsted firm was at its height. Housed in a vault within the office complex are nearly one million original design records detailing work on many of America's most treasured landscapes, including New York's Central Park.

At the Olmsted site, the National Park Service has built upon traditional visitor programs by also creating a center for the study and preservation of American landscapes. Ernest Allen Connally had originally articulated this vision in the mid-1970s, when the legislation to create the Olmsted National Historic Site was moving through Congress. Connally, then NPS associate director for the preservation of historic properties, testified: "I hope we can come up with a positive meaningful approach to the preservation problem ... Rather than the usual house museum, I think the place should be a functioning study center and national historic site at the same time. The Historic Sites Act of 1935 provides broad authority for cooperative agreements to effect such compatible uses."5

Connally's concept of a combined historic site/study center, went largely unrealized for the first decade of the Olmsted Site's operation. Most of the vast archives were unprocessed and essentially off-limits, and with little visitation and few programs or partners, the park seemed to drift along. When I arrived as superintendent in 1988, implementing Connally's original vision offered the most promising strategy for turning things around. Beginning in 1990, funding was secured to begin an ambitious ten-year initiative to process and catalog the Olmsted archives. This initiative provided for enhanced public research access to the archives, and enabled park and city planners from across the United States to use the records for the rehabilitation of some of the nation's most significant landscapes. In 1991, the Olmsted Center for Landscape Preservation was established at the Olmsted National Historic Site, making available expertise in horticulture, landscape architecture, and history to promote the stewardship of important cultural landscapes throughout the National Park System. In 1992, the Olmsted National Historic Site and the Olmsted Center established an educational partnership with Harvard University's Arnold Arboretum and Graduate School of Design and a number of state and national conservation and historic preservation organizations that, over the years, invited scores of leading environmental historians and practitioners to share their current research and work in public forums.6 Taken together, the Olmsted Archives, the Olmsted Center, and the educational partnerships enlivened and enriched the Olmsted National Historic Site with a steady stream of visiting scholars, park and landscape professionals, new collaborations and constituencies, and a variety of cosponsored public programs and discussions-adding value, context and contemporary relevance to the site's mission and message.