Garden History and Design
Ruth Eppig & Carol Michel
Henry Alden Sherwin Garden designed by the Olmsted Bros. Firm
Since the Garden Club of America is celebrating Frederick Law Olmsted this year, and our own club has been reading about his life, our column this month will continue to highlight the impact of Frederick Law Olmsted and his sons’ firm in Cleveland area gardens.
The Smithsonian archives include information about the summer home called “Winden” of Henry Alden Sherwin, the founder of the Sherwin-Williams Company. “Winden,” built in Willoughby, Ohio, became the home of his daughters, Belle, Prudence, and Eda Sherwin. The grounds were designed by the Olmsted Brothers’ firm around 1915. The archives continue: “A series of garden rooms were fitted into different levels on a hillside and combined effects from both English and Italian gardens. Included were flower gardens, walls, terraces, stairways, water features, meadows and arbors leading to the site of a working farm. The gardens fell into decline by the 1960s and had vanished by the 1970s.” This is the fate that our Fine Arts Garden avoided, only by the grace of a committee of commissioners and an endowment.
What precedes and follows are the research and remembrances of Carol Michel about her husband’s family’s garden.
My husband Dick’s great grandfather, Henry Alden Sherwin, had a very large garden designed and installed on his summer home property which was adjacent to what is now the Kirkland Club. The garden and most of the buildings, including the house, are now gone, but a few elements can be seen if you drive down Sherwin Road and turn right onto Figgie Road, which cuts across what was a large pool that included features like the Lagoon at the Museum. Several years ago, I was researching this lost garden as part of a project for the Smithsonian. Leslie Marting discovered, while researching her previous garden, that this garden had been designed by the Olmsted firm. At that time I was in contact with the Olmsted Archives in Washington and learned that this was true and that extensive correspondence existed about this garden, which dates to the early 1900s. I have many contemporary photos of it as well as later ones. Dick remembers visiting his own grandparents who continued to use the property when he was a child. It was sold to Figgie International in the late 1960s or early ’70s to be their company headquarters, and to be used for developing homes.
Current Sherwin garden, as seen from Figgie Road
It’s so interesting to think that these creations which seem so permanent can literally just disappear, and I’m sure the people who live in the homes there have no idea what existed before.
I find it fascinating to think about what was here before and is now changed or lost forever. This aerial photo is undated but early. Today I 90 would run along the upper half where those open fields are shown.
I did find the Olmsted Archive information, incredibly detailed, which says that the early correspondence was in 1903 but the work was done in 1915.
This property became the summer home of Belle Sherwin, 1868-1955, who was my husband’s unmarried aunt. She was a famous early Cleveland philanthropist and women’s rights advocate, the first woman on the Cleveland Foundation Board, and president of the League of Women’s Voters, from 1924 - 1934, a critical period for women’s suffrage. In 1900 she became president of the Consumers League of Ohio, a group that tried to improve working conditions for women and children; she helped found what is now known as the Visiting Nurse Association of Cleveland; during WWI she was appointed to the Negro Welfare Association; in 1916 she helped form the Women’s City Club. She and her sister Eda, Dick’s grandmother, shared Winden after the death of their father, Henry Alden Sherwin, in 1916.
I became curious about the Olmsted website and found the on-site construction photos. So amazing what is online. Way too much information.
I think it is interesting to notice that the ponds have "beach-like " edges like the one at the CMA and I have read that Olmsted wanted the water features to appear very natural so that was how they designed them.
