Stockbridge, Massachusetts
Wheatleigh
Built in 1893 and 1894 for Henry Harvey Cook, from drawings that begin in 1892. The house is by Peabody & Stearns; the grounds by Olmsted, Olmsted & Eliot, whose job 01295 runs to forty-seven drawings.
The property
- Original owner
- Henry Harvey Cook
- Architect
- Peabody & Stearns
- Landscape architect
- Olmsted, Olmsted & Eliot (job 01295) — forty-seven drawings, 1892–94, the job file running to 1919
- Town
- Stockbridge
- Location
- 42.32693, -73.31086
- Size
- 165 acres on the 1894 general plan; 26 acres today (Wikipedia says 22)
- Today
- Standing — a hotel
The stories
- IntroductionThree Families and a FirmWho built Wheatleigh, who lived in it, and who drew the ground it stands on — and why the drawings are catalogued under the wrong name and the wrong town.
- OneSeven Plants Olmsted Specified That Massachusetts Now BansThe 1894 planting list for the Wheatleigh gate names roughly a hundred kinds of tree, shrub and vine. Seven of them can no longer be bought or planted in this state.
- TwoWhat Happened to the Trees Olmsted OrderedTwenty-seven American chestnut. Eleven American elm. Thirty-five white ash. Read the 1894 list now and it is a casualty report.
- ThreeThe Road Was Moved, and Then It Was PlantedIn the autumn of 1893 a public way through Stockbridge was taken up and laid down somewhere else. Thirteen months later the Olmsted office planted the new one.
- FourThe Burying Ground That Nobody OwnsA Stockbridge farm family stopped burying their dead here around 1850. Forty years later the most famous landscape office in America measured the plot to the inch and drew a line around it. Today the town mows it.
- FiveWhat Was There BeforeA hundred and sixty-five acres, two buildings, a burying ground, and a boundary cornered on an American chestnut. The Olmsted office drew Wheatleigh straight on top of it.
- SixThe Tower Is a Water TowerOne sheet in the Olmsted file is a blueprint, and it is not a landscape drawing at all. It is the estate's plumbing — a spring, a pump house, a buried brick vault, and two thousand gallons standing at elevation 229.
- SevenWhat It TookTwenty-eight thousand plants, most of them counted off the sheets. Then the harder question: how many days of work, with the tools of 1893, to find them, cart them, set them out on a hundred and sixty-five acres, move the ground and a public road to receive them, and keep them alive.
The drawings
From the Olmsted firm's file for the estate, 1892–1919. Select any sheet to open it full size, then zoom in to read the draftsmen's notes.
The land before
What the surveyors found in 1886, 1892 and 1893: a farm, its fields and walls, and a family burying ground.
The design takes shape
From a color sketch in December 1892, through four preliminary plans in five weeks of spring 1893, to the general plan of August 1894.
Planting
The species key, the schedules, the planting plans, and the sheet that records what had already gone in the ground.
Engineering
Roads, grades and water.
Period photographs
From a de Heredia family album now at the Lenox Library.
Keep up with it
New properties go up here as the research turns them up.