Between 1895 and the waning years of the Great Depression, thousands of American estates were created from Mount Desert, Maine, to Santa Barbara, California. Together, as the Library of American Landscape History describes them, their designs comprise an important, virtually unexamined art movement—the Country Place Era. If you want to understand American garden history, this is the chapter where wealth, artistry, and a new philosophy of place converged.
The American Country Place Era: An Introduction
The Country Place Era was not simply a fashion for large gardens. It was a distinct movement in American landscape design, roughly bounded by 1895 on one end and the Great Depression and World War II on the other. Its designers took the estate—the country place of a wealthy American family—and treated it as a work of art in its own right.
What made the era new was its guiding principle. Designers worked to celebrate the "spirit of the place," the genius loci, letting each site's unique character and views shape the design rather than imposing a single fashionable formula. The result, according to the Library of American Landscape History, was a period of intense artistic exploration in American landscape design, one that integrated European garden traditions with a distinctly American sensibility.
The scale was extraordinary. Thousands of these estates rose across the country during these decades, from the rocky coast of Maine to the hills above Santa Barbara. Seven of them—including Gwinn near Cleveland, Stan Hywet in Akron, Winterthur in Delaware, and Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C.—became the subjects of a photographic exhibition devoted to illuminating their meaning.
