The Alexander Craig House garden at Colonial Williamsburg.
(Sangjib Min / Daily Press / January 5, 2006)
WILLIAMSBURG — Just 18 days after forming Colonial Williamsburg Inc. and the Williamsburg Holding Corporation on Feb. 27, 1928, preservation pioneer W.A.R Goodwin made one of his most important hires.
Over the following 13 years, landscape architect Arthur A. Shurcliff would not only help define the look and feel of the emerging Historic Area but also make Colonial Revival garden design a nationally influential force in shaping the 20th-century American landscape aesthetic.
“From the very beginning, Williamsburg’s restorers appreciated the importance of reconstructing the gardens and greens as well as the houses and shops,” write M. Kent Brinkley and Gordon W. Chappell in “The Gardens of Colonial Williamsburg.”
Arthur Shurcliff was the original and principal architect behind the Colonial Revival gardens that helped make Colonial Williamsburg’s landscape design world-famous.
(Lombardi; Barbara Temple / February 4, 2009)
And the “clear, simple, direct, energetic and, personally, very charming” Shurcliff — as he was described by his colleague and lead restoration architect William Graves Perry — served not only as the original and principal architect of the Historic Area’s world-renowned landscape but also — as Brinkley and Chappell note — “a pivotal figure in the development of the discipline of landscape architecture in America.”
Educated in engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and in art history, design and horticulture at Harvard University, Shurcliff began his career in 1896 working in the famed Brookline, Mass. office of Frederick Law Olmsted — the father of landscape architecture in America.
In 1904, he set up his own practice in Boston, where he drew national attention for his work on the layout of Old Sturbridge Village and the Charles River Esplanade in Boston, among many other projects. He also was influential in the early development of the American Society of Landscape Architects, where he served two terms as president (1928–1932).
Shurcliff had more than 30 years experience, in fact, when he began developing designs for Colonial Williamsburg on March 17, 1928, and he was well known for an academic style marked by its fondness for symmetry and geometric features.
But long before such distinctive elements began to show up in the Historic Area, he conducted an intensive investigation of nearly 40 surviving colonial-era gardens in the Virginia Tidewater, measuring and photographing plans that reflected the period’s conservative fondness for the formal Anglo-Dutch tradition born nearly a century earlier.
He also made an exhaustive study of the detailed garden maps and sketches left by French cartographer Claude Joseph Sauthier in 1769 after studying towns in northeastern North Carolina.
Shurcliff traveled to historic Charleston, South Carolina, too, in addition to exploring surviving period gardens in England. He then combined these critical sources with the physical evidence being unearthed by Colonial Williamsburg archaeologists as they explored the Historic Area.
With gardens and open green spaces making up nearly 30 percent of this 300-acre expanse, the impact of Shurcliff’s synthesis was felt almost immediately in a design vocabulary characterized by brickbat, marl and oyster-shell paving; evergreen and flower plantings; and symmetrical geometric patterns laid out in fence-enclosed spaces.
So great was the influence of the resulting gardens that Colonial Williamsburg has been cited as one of the Top Ten gardening sites in the world, Brinkley and Chappell note.
Though some critics later complained that Shurcliff’s designs did not reflect the colonial era as accurately as originally believed, they still rank among the most influential and widely recognized examples of the American Colonial Revival style that grew out of Colonial Williamsburg’s efforts.
In 2006, five of the Historic Area’s most scenic formal gardens — including those at the Orlando Jones House and the Custis Tenement — were endowed by donors to insure the preservation of Shurcliff’s legacy.
“(He) has by extensive investigation and rare imagination recaptured the form and beauty of the colonial gardens,” Godwin wrote, “and created vistas of loveliness to intrigue the thought and vision of visitors to recapture a vanished past.”
— Mark St. John Erickson
Pioneering landscape architect Arthur A. Shurcliff designed the renowned Orlando Jones House garden in 1939.
(Courtesy of Colonial Williamsburg / April 23, 2004)
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