Sixty-three jobs

I. The list this works from

The Olmsted office numbered its commissions from 1857 to 1979 and kept a register of them. That register is now searchable as the Olmsted Research Guide Online, maintained by the National Park Service at the Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site with the National Association for Olmsted Parks. It gives, for every job: the number, the name the office filed it under, any alternative names, the town, the project type, how many plans survive, what years those plans cover, what years the correspondence covers, and whether there is further correspondence at the Library of Congress.

It has no county field. So the way to get Berkshire out of it is to ask for one town at a time — each Berkshire town and city in the City-County field, and Massachusetts in the location field — and then to check the answer against the whole Massachusetts run, which is 2,156 jobs in 273 places.

Berkshire County comes to sixty-three jobs, carrying 2,021 plans between them. Twelve of the sixty-three have no surviving plans at all and exist only as correspondence. The earliest date on any of them is 1882 and the latest is 1975.

II. The name on the sheet is not the name in the register

Look at the drawing at the top of this page. It is lettered H. H. Cook Esq. Lenox, Mass. and dated 29 December 1892, and it is job 01295 — the job this site calls Wheatleigh. In the register that job is filed as:

Project: 01295
Job Name: DeHeredia, Carlos M. Mrs.
Alt Names: Wheatleigh; pre-1919 under H.H. Cook; Cook, Henry H.
City-County: Lenox  ·  Number of Plans Available: 47

Henry Cook commissioned the work and Cook is the name on every sheet of 1892. The register calls the job by the woman who owned the place in 1919, when the file was reopened. The office indexed by current client, not by the person who paid for the drawing, and it went back and relabeled.

That is not a curiosity; it is the thing that makes this list hard to search. A house is in here under whoever held it last. Nobody looking for Wheatleigh finds Wheatleigh.

III. Lennox, with two n’s

Working through the towns one by one produced sixty-two jobs, and this site had already published a sixty-third — job 01041, twelve plans, June to August 1888, the house now called Belvoir Terrace. It was not in any of the town queries. Asking for it directly explains why:

Project: 01041  ·  Job Name: Jessup, Morris K.
City-County: Lennox  ·  State-Prov: Massachusetts

The town is misspelled in the record, so the job does not answer to the name of the town it is in. The Belvoir page already noted that the archive spells the client wrong — Morris K. Jesup filed as Jessup. Both halves of the entry are wrong, and the job survived forty years of finding aids that way.

It is worth saying what follows from that. A complete county list cannot be built out of town queries alone, because a town query only finds the jobs whose town was typed correctly. The sixty-three below are the sixty-two the towns give up, plus one that had to be caught by scanning all 273 Massachusetts place-names for near misses.

IV. What the county’s Olmsted work actually is

Set out by town, the list is not the list a reader of this site would predict.

Count jobs and the answer is Pittsfield seventeen, Dalton fourteen, Lenox eleven, Stockbridge six. Count sheets and the table turns over. Williamstown has four jobs and eight hundred and forty plans — forty-two per cent of every drawing the office made in this county. Six hundred and sixty-eight of them are one client, Williams College, job 00318, worked from 1902 to 1963. The next largest job in the county is a fifth of that.

Stockbridge, for comparison, has six jobs and thirty-one sheets. Lenox and Stockbridge together are under a sixth of the drawing. The cottage era is where the photographs are, and where the ornament is. It is not where the sheets are.

Dalton is almost entirely the Cranes: ten of the sixty-three jobs carry the Crane name, and the town’s community house, its cemetery, its library and its paper company are in here as well.

Thirty-three of the sixty-three are private estates. The rest are a college, three other schools, six cemeteries and burial lots, five industrial and commercial grounds, four subdivisions, three village-improvement schemes, three public buildings, a park, a country club, a church and a summer camp.

And the work does not stop when the cottage era does. Counting each job from its earliest date:

The busiest decade in the whole Berkshire file is the 1920s, with fourteen jobs — after the great houses stopped being built, and while several of them were being pulled down. The last job on the list is a Lenox subdivision drawn in 1973 and 1974.

Four sheets, from four of the eight type headings the register uses. None of them is a cottage lawn.

V. The sixty-three

Job number, the name the office filed it under, the town as the register spells it, the project-type code, the number of plans that survive, and the years those plans cover — or, where no plan survives, the years of the correspondence. The last column says where this site has written the job up. 21 of the sixty-three have a page; forty-two do not.

Type codes: 01 parks · 02 city and regional planning · 03 subdivisions · 04 college and school campuses · 05 grounds of residential institutions · 06 grounds of public buildings · 07 private estates and homesteads · 08 cemeteries, burial lots and monuments · 09 commercial and industrial grounds · 10 country clubs, resorts and hotels · 11 grounds of churches · 14 miscellaneous.

VI. What is not on it

This matters as much as what is. Blantyre, Shadow Brook, Bellefontaine, Erskine Park, Ventfort Hall, Groton Place, Tanglewood, Spring Lawn, Stonover, the Aspinwall, Coldbrooke, Brookside, Ethelwynde, Allen Winden, The Mount — none of them is in this list. For all but one that is because the Olmsted office did not do them; the exception is Shadow Brook, where two secondary accounts credit the office and its own page leaves the question open. Eighteen of the forty-one pages on this site carry an Olmsted job; the other twenty-three are here for other reasons, and their grounds were laid out by somebody else or by nobody in particular.

The landscape-office story makes that argument from the other end. This list is the evidence for it: a complete register of one firm’s work in one county, in which most of the famous houses do not appear.

VII. Nine plans in the wrong state

And there is one on the list that is not here at all.

Three of the sixty-three are Sloane jobs in Lenox. Two are accounted for: 01027, ninety-two plans, is Elm Court, W. D. Sloane’s, now filed in the register under Mrs Henry D. White for the reason section II sets out; 01346, eighteen plans, is his brother John’s Wyndhurst. The third reads:

Project: 01229  ·  Job Name: Sloane, W. M.
City-County: Lenox  ·  Number of Plans Available: 9
Plan dates: 1891–1894  ·  Correspondence: 1887–1895

A third Sloane, in the same town, in the same decade, in the years between Elm Court and Wyndhurst. It is the obvious next thing to look for, and this site said as much before looking. Then the file itself:

JOB# 1229, PROFESSOR WILLIAM M. SLOANE, PRINCETON, NJ, 1891-1894

That is the series title the archive gives the job, and every one of the nine plans under it is titled the same way — PROFESSOR W.M. SLOANE, PRINCETON, NJ. The drawings are in New Jersey. Not one of them is in Massachusetts.

Only one file unit in the job is headed for this county:

W. M. SLOANE, LENOX, MASS., #1229  ·  CORRESPONDENCE

Twenty-two items, opening with a letter of 7 June 1887 — four years before the first Princeton plan — and closing with one written to a Willard W. Gay on 5 May 1894. The Lenox letters are real; the Lenox drawings do not exist.

The man is a third party to Elm Court. W. M. Sloane is William Milligan Sloane, professor of history at Princeton from 1883, which is why a landscape job in his name has a New Jersey college town on every sheet. Whatever he was doing in Lenox in 1887 is in the correspondence and nowhere else.

So the register’s town, once again, is the address at the top of the letter. Section II showed that producing the wrong client; this produces the wrong state. Sixty-three jobs are filed under Berkshire County and at least one of them was drawn for somewhere else — which is worth knowing before anybody counts plans by town, including the counts in section IV of this page.

Every row queried from the Olmsted Research Guide Online, Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site, National Park Service, and the National Association for Olmsted Parks. Berkshire County was assembled by searching each of the county’s towns and cities in the City-County field with Massachusetts in the location field, then checking the result against the full Massachusetts run of 2,156 records so that no misspelled place-name was missed — which is how job 01041 at “Lennox” was recovered. Names, alternative names, town spellings, plan counts and dates are reproduced as the register gives them; the alternative-names column has had the archive’s internal separators replaced with semicolons and nothing else. Cummington is in Hampshire County and is on the list because the office filed it with the Berkshire work. The plan total of 2,021 is the sum of the register’s Number of Plans Available column across the sixty-three as it stood in September 2026; other pages on this site quote 1,952, taken from an earlier scanned version of the job list, and the difference is the archive’s own cataloguing rather than a disagreement about what exists. Job 01229 was checked item by item in the same guide: the series title, the nine plan titles and the heading of the correspondence file unit are quoted exactly as it gives them, and the identification of W. M. Sloane as the Princeton historian rests on the Princeton address the plans themselves carry. The whole table is published here as a tab-separated file.