Beyond the Emerald Necklace: Charles Eliot’s role in expanding the Olmsted vision to regional and statewide landscape planning. The first unpaid intern in the Olmsted office in Brookline, Charles Eliot (1859-1897) later traveled in Europe for self education before establishing an independent practice in Boston. In 1893, Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr. and John Charles Olmsted convinced Eliot to join in a new partnership named Olmsted, Olmsted and Eliot. He brought to the new firm his roles as one of the founders of the Trustees of Public Reservations (1891), the nation’s first statewide private organization for landscape conservation and historic preservation and the Metropolitan Park Commission (1893), the first regional landscape planning authority.
Keith N. Morgan, FSAH, is an emeritus professor of History of Art & Architecture, Boston University, a former national president of the Society of Architectural Historians and the current president of Library of American Landscape History. Among his relevant book publications are the new edition (1999) of Charles Eliot, Landscape Architect, for which he wrote an introduction, and Community by Design: The Olmsted Firm and the Development of Brookline, Massachusetts (2013), both published by LALH.