Charles Eliot was born and educated in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and he practiced landscape architecture from 1887 until his death from spinal meningitis in the spring of 1897. His reputation rests on two key accomplishments. In 1891, he led the fight to establish Massachusetts’s Trustees of Public Reservations, the first private sector, statewide organization for the conservation of natural areas and the preservation of historic sites, which became a model for subsequent efforts in the United States and abroad. Second, Eliot was the landscape architect for the Boston Metropolitan Park System, the first regional landscape authority in the United States.
Eliot was the son of Charles W. Eliot, the influential president of Harvard University for four decades and the author of the modern American university system. The younger Eliot developed an intimate love of nature by hiking throughout the Boston area as a boy and sailing along the coast of Maine during summers. At Harvard, he formed the Champlain Society, a group of undergraduates who spent two summers camping and recording the natural history of Mount Desert Island in Maine. After graduation from Harvard, young Eliot attended courses at the Bussey Institute and spent two years as an apprentice in the Brookline office of Frederick Law Olmsted. There he worked on a wide range of projects, including the Boston Metropolitan Park System and the Arnold Arboretum. From the fall of 1885 through the end of 1886, Eliot traveled and studied independently in Europe, where he read the literature of landscape architecture and gardening and visited private estates, public parks, and the offices of landscape architects from England to Italy to Russia.
When he returned to the United States, he began a career writing on landscape issues for the professional and the popular press and as a landscape architect. His important early commissions included the Longfellow Memorial Park (1887) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the White Park (1890) in Concord, New Hampshire, where he began to develop a philosophy of landscape design and landscape conservation. In frequent contributions to Garden and Forest, he began devising schemes to preserve and manage landscapes of natural, scenic, or historic significance.
Early in 1893, he formed a partnership with Frederick Law Olmsted and John Charles Olmsted. Until his death in 1897 he was consumed with the rapid development of the Boston Metropolitan Park System and the Cambridge Municipal Park System. His ideal of a regional plan that would include diverse types of landscape—ocean beach, harbor islands, tidal estuaries, woodland reservations, and public playgrounds—led to the emergence of city planning as an extension of landscape architecture.
