Charles Eliot

A Land Trust Reading List

1. [25 October 2003] Eliot, Charles W. 1902. Charles Eliot, Landscape Architect. Houghton Mifflin (reprinted 1999, University of Massachusetts Press). 770 pages.
The founding father of the land trust movement was Charles Eliot, who started the Trustees of Reservations (originally the Trustees of Public Reservations) in Boston in 1891. Eliot died young, at 37 years of age, only six years after the Trustees was begun. This book was written by his father, Charles W. Eliot, who was president of Harvard from 1869 to 1909. The book describes the son's early life, his decision to become a landscape architect (at that time an almost non-existent field inhabited chiefly by Frederick Law Olmsted), how he prepared himself for his work, and what he accomplished before his untimely death.

Photo from Charles Eliot, Landscape Architect

Much of the book consists of Charles Eliot's writings on conservation, landscape architecture, and what would now be called land use planning. The idea for the Trustees, for example, was broached in "The Waverly Oaks: A Plan for Their Preservation for the People," which had been published 5 March 1890 in Garden and Forest and is reprinted in Chapter 18 of this book.

The book is long, but anyone seriously interested in the land trust movement should read widely in it. Particularly important are Chapter 18 dealing with the founding of the Trustees of Reservations, Chapter 19 on the creation of the Boston Metropolitan Park Commission (also Eliot's idea, though the journalist Sylvester Baxter was an important collaborator), and Chapter 21 on the work of the Commission. Several of the later chapters also have information on the operations of and land saved by the Commission. Perhaps the most interesting of these is Chapter 38 containing Charles Eliot's report "Vegetation and Scenery in the Metropolitan Reservations," (1897) which forms an important early contribution to the developing science of ecology.