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Warren Manning with Rex. Courtesy
University of Massachusetts, Lowell.
Town of Gwinn, Mich., showing mine
buildings. Postcard.
J. D. Wooster Lambert House, St. Louis, Mo.
Photo by A. G. Elderedge. From the LALH
collection.
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World's Columbian Exposition. From J. W. Buel,
The Magic City, 1894.
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Landscape architect, horticulturist, planner, author
Warren Manning was born in Reading, Massachusetts, a small town northwest of Boston, near Concord. His parents were Jacob Warren Manning, a well-known nurseryman, and Lydia Manning, a watercolorist, whom Manning credited with instilling in him a lifelong devotion to “making America a finer place in which to live.” Jacob, who began a thriving nursery business in 1854, helped nurture the horticultural basis for his son’s distinguished career. Young Warren often traveled with his father to collect plants, to botanize, and to see other nursery operations, including that of Charles Downing, brother of Andrew Jackson Downing. By 1884, Manning had developed an interest in design, for a nursery pamphlet from that year advertises that he had become available to “make sketches and lay out grounds.”
In 1888, Manning left his father’s business, having secured work as an assistant in the office of Olmsted, Olmsted & Eliot. For the next eight years, Manning specialized in horticulture and planting design, gaining invaluable experience and training through contact with the talented landscape architects in the firm, including Olmsted Sr., John Charles Olmsted, and Charles Eliot. He eventually supervised about one hundred projects there.
With the Olmsted firm, Manning got his first experience with planned industrial communities, a type of work in which he later specialized and a field in which he made significant contributions. He also acquired considerable experience with planting design, particularly at Biltmore, the 125,000-acre estate of George Vanderbilt, in Asheville, North Carolina. In 1893, Manning supervised the final installation of planting at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition. During the period, he also worked on dozens of park projects in Milwaukee, Buffalo, Rochester, Chicago, Trenton, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere.
Of critical importance to Manning’s later career was his exposure to the ideas of Charles Eliot, who was working on the Boston Metropolitan Park System during Manning’s tenure in the firm. Manning prepared sketch maps of the area's vegetation which were then overlaid with sheets detailing road layout, topography, and water features. This methodology directly influenced the development of Manning’s own version of resource-based planning. Manning, no doubt, was also aware of the political side of Eliot’s regional planning efforts, which had resulted in unprecedented gains in public land for Boston and a remarkable organization dedicated to protecting land for public use, The Trustees of Reservations.
In 1896, when it became apparent that the Olmsted mantle would pass to Eliot and both Olmsted sons before it came to him, Manning decided to open his own Boston-based office. One of his first projects was a report on the flora of the Boston Metropolitan Park System, produced as a consultant to the Olmsted firm. Within the year, Manning wrote to Eliot and others for help in founding a new professional organization for landscape architects. Manning continued to advocate a professional organization, and with Samuel Parsons Jr., convinced the younger Olmsteds to endorse the idea. In 1899, eleven charter members of the American Society of Landscape Architects, including Manning, met for the first time in New York City. Manning served as president of the organization in 1914.
Between 1901 and 1904, Manning’s brother, J. Woodward, joined him as a partner. One of their major projects was the design and planning of a park system for Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where Warren Manning worked in close collaboration with engineers in laying out new drainage and sanitation systems. Beautiful, usable open spaces resulted from the carefully coordinated efforts, as they had from Olmsted’s treatment of the Charles and Muddy rivers in Boston. The project earned Manning’s firm national attention and cemented a decades-long relationship with the city.
Some of the clients Manning found during his early years in practice would prove similarly enduring. James Tufts retained him for several jobs, including Pinehurst, the well-known resort in North Carolina. Manning also worked for several other members of the Tufts family. In 1896, Manning began working for iron ore magnate William G. Mather. Over three decades, he eventually designed 60 separate projects for Mather, among them Gwinn, Mather’s Cleveland estate, where he collaborated with Charles Platt on the grounds and laid out a 21-acre wild garden. Manning also designed several mining towns in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula for Mather, including the town of Gwinn, the first planned community on the Marquette Iron Range. Here Manning undertook an extensive site inventory to help determine the layout of community facilities, open space improvements, and worker housing.
In 1915, Manning moved his practice to Billerica, near his ancestral home, the Manse, and enlarged his staff. Over the years, his roster of employees included many influential practitioners, including A. D. Taylor, Fletcher Steele, Wilbur D. Cook Jr., Marjorie Sewell Cautley, Helen Bullard, Stephen Hamblin, Charles Gillette, and Dan Kiley, his last employee. A significant number of his assistants were women, which was unusual for the time.
Manning also undertook large regional mapping projects, one of which was done in support of the National Park Service Bill, 1915–1916. In time, Manning combined the regional data into a “National Plan.” This 927-page document synthesized information about many kinds of resources—forests, animals, waterways, minerals, climate, railroads, highway systems, etc.—and made recommendations for their use and protection. A condensed version of the plan was published as a supplement to Landscape Architecture Quarterly in 1923. Despite the appalling nativist views it expresses, the document is valuable for Manning’s conception of a land classification methodology based on natural resources and systems, and the use of this methodology to attempt to control the exploitation of resources and to preserve scenic beauty.
Manning’s principles of resource-based planning also informed his town planning. His plan for Birmingham, Alabama (1919), recommended a scheme of multiple neighborhood-based centers determined by available resources. The approach was revolutionary and conceived in direct opposition to the prevailing City Beautiful movement, which featured monumental civic centers and Beaux Arts public buildings.
Manning’s seemingly inexhaustible energy took him to nearly every state in the nation, where he undertook almost every type of job. Among many important residential projects are estates for Gustave Pabst (Milwaukee), August and Adolphus Busch (St. Louis), Cyrus and Harriet McCormick (Lake Forest, Ill.), F. A. Seiberling, J. J. Borland (Camden, Me.), Galen Stone (Marion, Mass.), Jeptha Wade (Hunting Valley, Oh.), and Clement Griscom (Haverford, Pa.). Manning designed parks or park systems in Milwaukee; Minneapolis; St. Paul; Providence; Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania; Ithaca (N.Y.)i; and many other regions. He also designed college campuses, subdivisions, golf courses, institutional grounds, and projects for government and community groups. Manning was an active advocate for community participation in many of the public design projects. His client list chronicles more than 1,700 jobs, not all of which were realized.
Manning was also a prolific author. His many articles covered a wide range of topics of interest to the profession and the general public. Liberty Hyde Bailey invited him to prepare several entries for Cyclopedia of Horticulture, including the essay on landscape gardening. Invariably, Manning’s underlying themes echoed those of his mentors, all of which emphasized improving the lives of American citizens in the rapidly urbanizing culture. These articles were charged with an almost Transcendentalist reverence for the wonders of nature. Manning’s practice dwindled during the Depression years, and by the mid-1930s he had almost no work at all. He died in 1938 at the age of seventy-eight. His practice passed to Arthur Sylvester but was soon terminated. Most of Manning’s papers were destroyed.
—Robin Karson. Adapted from, Pioneers of American Landscape Design. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000.
Karson, Robin. The Muses of Gwinn: Art and Nature in a Garden Designed by Warren H. Manning, Charles Platt, and Ellen Biddle Shipman. New York: Sagapress/Abrams, 1995. A detailed narrative about one of Manning’s major residential projects in Cleveland; heavily illustrated.
Karson, Robin. A Genius for Place: American Landscapes of the Country Place Era. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press in association with LALH, 2007. One chapter is devoted to Manning’s life and work; his work at Gwinn and Stan Hywet Hall is covered to two other chapters.
Manning, Warren H. “A National Plan Study Brief.” Landscape Architecture Quarterly 8 (July 1923). A 23-page brief presenting Manning’s statistical analysis of the country’s resources.
Neckar, Lance. “Developing Landscape Architecture for the Twentieth Century: The Career of Warren H. Manning.” Landscape Journal 8 (Fall 1989), 78–91. Comprehensive and detailed overview of Manning’s long career.
There are two major repositories for papers relating to Warren Manning. The first, and larger, is the Warren H. Manning Collection, Parks Library, Iowa State University, Ames; it consists primarily of plans, drawings, and photographs and is indexed. The second is the Warren H. Manning Collection at the Center for Lowell History, University of Massachusetts, Lowell; these papers include some correspondence and photographs, copies of some office records, Manning’s unpublished autobiography, and various ephemera. Plans, photographs, and correspondence relating to Stan Hywet are at Stan Hywet Hall, Akron, Ohio; and plans, photographs.
About the Warren H. Manning Research Project
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