Program will explore the work of Tuxedo Park's landscape architect
Tuxedo - The Tuxedo Historical Society will host garden historian Dr. Elizabeth S. Eustis on Sunday, May 1, to deliver a program about Ernest W. Bowditch (1850-1918), the landscape architect of Tuxedo Park. Bowditch was a member of the first class at MIT and the first American landscape designer to receive a formal education in civil engineering. At the age of 27, his work for Pierre Lorillard at “The Breakers” in Newport, R.I., launched his public reputation. Within a few years he employed 60 assistants and 15 to 20 crews, working from Bar Harbor to Topeka, from St. Paul to Atlanta, on projects ranging from gardens and parks to campuses, cemeteries and municipal sanitation systems. Beginning in 1885, Lorillard brought him to the land that would become Tuxedo Park to plan and construct the layout, infrastructure and deceptively rustic amenities of Tuxedo Park and its adjacent communities, centered on new dams and reconfigured bodies of water. Bowditch had previously created for himself and his friends a smaller, planned summer community on an island in Maine, with various improvements for the year-round population. According to information from Deborah Harmon, the executive director of the Tuxedo Historical Society, “Lorillard’s expansive vision combined with Bowditch’s expertise to produce an unprecedented ideal of modern luxury in an enhanced wilderness. “Bowditch continued a long, productive and prosperous career; but inspired by Lorillard, his work at Tuxedo represents in many ways the pinnacle of his achievement in landscape design,” Harmon wrote in her press release announcing the program. About the speaker Eustis is a scholar, professor, writer, landscape designer, gardener and curator. Her illustrated program will describe Bowditch’s local work in great detail. She lives with her husband in Milton, Mass., in a home designed by William Ralph Emerson in 1878 with landscape architecture by Ernest Bowditch.
If you go
The Ernest W. Bowditch program by Dr. Elizabeth S. Eustis will take place Sunday, May 1, at Tuxedo Historical Society, beginning at 2 p.m.
The program is free and open to the public.
onations are gratefully accepted.
Please register at 845-351-2926 or tuxedohistory@gmail.com.
The Tuxedo Historical Society is located at 7 Hospital Road in the hamlet of Tuxedo.