Horace Cleveland - Life

Life

Horace William Shaler Cleveland was born to Richard Jeffry Cleveland and Dorcas Cleveland on December 16, 1814 in Lancaster, Massachusetts. Horace was later educated at the Lancaster School, a Unitarian Universalist school organized by his parents in accordance with the theories of Swiss educator Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746–1827). The school emphasized frequent excursions for direct observation and study of nature through drawing and map-making. The family was socially linked to philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson through Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Horatio Greenough, and one of Emerson's cousins. As a result Transcendentalism strongly influenced Cleveland's upbringing.

In the late 1820s Richard Cleveland moved his family to Cuba where Horace's father served as Vice-Consul in Havana. Horace later returned to the United States in the 1830s. During this time he was employed as a railroad surveyor in Illinois. While in Illinois, Cleveland studied civil engineering. A few years later, in the late 1830s, Cleveland returned to Massachusetts.

In 1841 Cleveland left Massachusetts to purchase a farm on the Delaware River in Burlington, New Jersey, where he became a scientific farmer. He joined horticultural societies, and became corresponding secretary of the New Jersey Horticultural Society. Cleveland also wrote articles for the "Horticulturist, a periodical edited by renowned landscape gardener, architect, and horticulturist Andrew Jackson Downing" (Wilson).

In 1854, at the age of 40, Cleveland returned to Massachusetts to establish the Cleveland and Copeland landscape practice in Boston with partner Robert Morris Copeland. Their first job was the design of the State Farm at Westborough, Massachusetts, followed by Cleveland's first major design, Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts (1855). The town report in Concord shows they were paid $75 for their work on the cemetery. Cleveland also assisted in the design of Boston's park spaces, emphasizing his famous concepts of open spaces and interconnected byways.

In 1857 Cleveland and Copeland entered a competition to be the designers for Central Park in New York. They lost the competition to another duo, landscape architect Fredrick Law Olmstead and his partner, Calvert Vaux, an architect. Cleveland's and Copeland's design of central park was not unlike that of Olmstead and Vaux's. "In a pamphlet accompanying his design Cleveland wrote, 'The tract of land selected for the Central Park comprises such an extensive area and such variety of surface as to afford opportunity for the construction of a work which shall surpass everything of its kind in the world ...'. Cleveland, like Olmsted, prescribed broad lawns, undulating surfaces, clothed with the rich verdure, dotted here and there with graceful trees and bounded by projecting capes and islands of wood ...'" (Oxford). Later in 1857, Cleveland designed Eastwood Cemetery (1872) in Lancaster, Massachusetts with his son. Cleveland and Copeland parted ways during the Civil War when Copeland joined the war. After the war Copeland started his own practice which continued to grow till his death in 1872.

Cleveland moved to Chicago in 1869 and opened his own landscaping firm. Throughout his career he designed major parks and private landscapes in Illinois, Minneapolis, and throughout the Midwest. This included Highland Park, Illinois (1869). In 1872, Cleveland was retained by the city of Chicago to rebuild South Park, originally designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, after the great Chicago fire. Cleveland wrote his landscaping guide, Landscape Architecture as Applied to the Wants of the West, in 1873 and was afterward hired by William Rainey Marshall to design Saint Anthony Park, a neighborhood in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

From 1878 until his death in 1900, Horace Cleveland not only completely revised the park systems of Minneapolis and St. Paul, but lent his extensive knowledge of landscaping to numerous projects, completing his last major project, landscaping for the campus at the University of Minnesota, in 1892. He died on December 5, 1900 in Hinsdale, Illinois. His body was returned to Minneapolis and is buried in Lakewood Cemetery.