This atlas is designed to mark Mount Holyoke College's commitment to stewardship. It views our historic campus as a treasured piece in the national tapestry of cultural landscapes. In our piece of the tapestry are woven many of the very threads that form major features of our country's culture and history. Viewed broadly, we can see in our campus motifs prominent in the whole fabric. Viewed up close, we see the particular richness, texture, and color of our piece of the whole, a segment created by a pioneering experiment in women's education and the ongoing activities of a women's college in South Hadley, Massachusetts.

Hence, this atlas is many faceted history with multiple perspectives. It seeks to enhance historical understandings in several ways:

• Contexts and Connections: the historical contexts in which the College developed and the broad historical patterns that are embedded in our campus. (Historical Contexts)
• The Environment: the evolving historical environment of campus landscapes and buildings, and the story of the College community interacting with land, stone and wood, animal and plant life. (Campus Environment)
• Living and Learning: the prominent features of past academic and student life. (Academics and Student Life)
• Sites of Memory: student, staff, and faculty memories of activities and experiences on specific places on the campus. (Memories)
• Stewardship: the study of our cultural heritage to better inform decisions where commitment to intelligent preservation and desire for change often come in conflict and need to be harmonized.
  

Mount Holyoke College and the Modern Pastoral: A Work of Art and Artifice
by Robert Schwartz

The Mount Holyoke campus represents a work of art and artifice, the core of which embodies the tradition of American pastoralism. Although this tradition moved beyond the ancient Arcadian idyll of shepherds living the virtuous rustic life, it proudly carried forward a key belief: landscapes reflecting the "natural" beauty of rural settings were needed as places of inspiring contemplation and soothing relaxation for a society increasingly dominated by urban life, its stresses, and its many problems. In this sense, the modern pastoral was a combination of moral, social, and aesthetic ideas.

These ideas—and much more—were developed into the modern art of landscape architecture by Frederick Law Olmsted. One tenant of his art and philosophy found early expression in his reflection "On the Value of Natural Places," written in 1865. There he echoed a romantic, Wordsworthian appreciation of natural scenery as a source of solace and emotional recovery while extending it into a practical principle of landscaping, which in urban parklands would be beneficial not just to the cultural elite but to all.

At Mount Holyoke, the influence of Olmsted and his two sons, Frederick Law Jr. and John C., are evident in archives documenting the firm's involvement with the College from the 1880s to the 1920s.  And even though Olmsted and his firm cannot be counted among the principle designers of our campus, Olmsted ideas and designs were very influential here, just as they were in the some 300 other college and university campuses that the firm had a hand in designing. It could scarcely have been otherwise.  In the last decades of the 19^th century and the first decade of the 20^th, President Mead, Treasurer Lyman Williston, and Mary Woolley emulated parts of the Olmsted designs that had been executed for the campuses of Smith College and Wellesley College, as they began to introduce what was then called the cottage system of individual dormitories and buildings. Underway before fire destroyed the old seminary building in 1896, these plans were rapidly put into execution in the years that followed. In his consultations with the Olmsted firm, Williston absorbed the principles and philosophy that defined the Olmstead approach to landscape, something to which the development of the campus under Williston and Wooley attests clearly, as we shall see.

Before then, the modern pastoralism of Frederick Law Olmsted was inscribed in his landscaping for Pageant Field, Goodnow Park, and Prospect Hill in the 1880s. An essential element of Olmsted's approach was the preservation and shaping of open spaces that were defined at their edges by walkways, trees, plantings, and buildings. This framing by walkways on the edges enhanced the experience of the landscape by guiding pedestrians around park-like greens with their long and open perspectives. As in Olmsted's Central Park in New York City and in his Fenlands in Boston, roads designed for vehicles were hidden or subordinated by being put below grade or kept at the extreme outer edges of the park. In the case of Pageant Field, Olmsted developed the allées of trees that served as former property boundaries to create paths that led people along the edges of the field to the water's edge of Lake Nonotuck (Lower Lake), enhancing their view of the gently rolling green and the approach to the lake.

Although further research will clarify the extent to which Olmsted ideas were consciously incorporated in the landscaping leading from Skinner Green past Blanchard and on to Lower Lake, it seems clear, as mentioned above, that Treasurer Lyman Williston was significantly influenced in his landscaping decisions of the 1890s and early 20^th century by John C. and Frederick Law Jr. Hence, after fire destroyed the old Seminary and as the new dormitories and Blanchard Hall were constructed in rapid order, Williston was careful to preserve the pastoral tradition of Mount Holyoke's landscape. In so doing he found further encouragement in developments at Wellesley. At the turn of the century there, the Trustees adopted the designs of Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. and the faculty continued to insist that its remarkable natural landscape be preserved. In moving forward with Wellesley, Mount Holyoke consciously rejected the transformations unfolding at Smith where an increasingly dense collection of tightly spaced buildings gave the campus the look of the surrounding town. So with advice from the Olmsted brothers and his own sense of taste and conviction, Williston preserved and improved what we now call Skinner Green by siting the new buildings around its perimeter with generous spacing between them to retain long perspectives and open areas. The siting of Blanchard generously apart from Wilder dormitory framed and enhanced the view from the Green to Lower Lake.

During a period of considerable expansion up to the 1950s, spaciousness, open perspectives, and modern pastoralism continued to shape and distinguish the College. With help from Frederick Law Jr. the classic gothic buildings constructed under Mary Woolley were placed along College Street, giving a confident, stately face to the world while retaining the distinctive spaciousness of the campus. In the 1920s when the College shifted from the Olmsted to the Shurtleff architectural firm, the Shurtleff plans envisioned an expansion of Blanchard Hall and modifications that would have replaced the curvilinear flows of Olmsted inspiration with rectilinear quadrangles. Fortunately, the depression made the execution of the Shurtleff plans impossible. As the years wore on, visual and physical access to Lower Lake was preserved in the gentle slope down to the (former) tennis courts and in a broad expanse at the water's edge. In this park-like green, the Outing Club constructed a stone fireplace in 1942 to enhance the place for picnics and other social activities. Of key importance, Lower Lake road remained near the buildings and away from the lake, echoing the Olmsted principle of keeping vehicle traffic to the edges of park-like spaces and subordinating vehicle traffic to the pedestrian's enjoyment of the park and scenic surroundings.

It was only in the 1950s that the rectangular modernism of that era established itself on campus via the building of new dormitories (Torrey, Ham, McGregor, Prospect, and Buckland), the row academic structures in the Clapp Hall area (the Psychology and Education Building, the Art Building, Carr, and Elliot House), and Gattell Amphitheater. This had the regrettable effect of separating the campus into upper and lower parts. Nevertheless, the open, rolling, and spacious qualities of the Olmsted inspired landscape and campus remain predominant overall, a situation on which the oft-remarked beauty and harmony of the campus continues to rest. In that sense, it remains in keeping with another tenant of Frederick Law Olmsted's art and philosophy, as expressed in his 1886 notes on his plan for Franklin Park in Massachusetts: