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History of Early American Landscape Design

Elizabeth Pitts Lamboll and Thomas Lamboll

[http://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/research/casva/research-projects.html A Project of the National Gallery of Art, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts ]

Elizabeth Pitt Lamboll (1725-1770) and Thomas Lamboll ( ) developed one of the earliest gardens in Charleston, South Carolina, and contributed to the expansion of the Bartram Botanic Garden and Nursery through the exchange of seeds and information with the Philadelphia botanist and explorer John Bartram.


History

In one of several fiery sermons delivered in Boston during the summer of 1740, the English evangelist George Whitefield ( ) commanded the children in his audience, “If your parents will not come to Christ, you [should] come and go to heaven without them.”[1] Heeding his call, fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Pitts left Boston two months later and enrolled at Whitefield’s Bethesda Home for orphans near Savannah, Georgia, on December 13, 1740. One of only a handful of girls, she was categorized as "poor," with one or more parent still living.[2] At Bethesda, she received religious instruction, picked cotton, and practiced skills intended to make her “serviceable," such as sewing, spinning, knitting, washing, house cleaning, and “housewifery.” [3] During her first months at the orphanage, Whitefield erected new accommodations for the children— a brick “great house” with “a piazza of ten feet wide…all around it, which will be wonderfully convenient in the heat of summer.”[4] Twenty acres of land was cleared around the house, some of it dedicated to a garden.

Elizabeth left Bethesda in June 1742, most likely to go into service in Charleston, where on November 19, 1743 she married the widower Thomas Lamboll, whose second wife had died two months earlier.[5]


--Robyn Asleson

Texts

  • Bartram, John, July 11, 1765, diary entry while traveling through South Carolina (1942: 14)[6]
"I have Just been on James island with Thomas Lambol & his lady to his countreyseat oposit to Charlstown....This day I spent in writeing letters & observing ye fine improvements of ye town & ye adjacent countrey seats."
  • Bartram, John, August 15, 1765, diary entry while traveling through South Carolina (1942: 19)[7]
"We observed many good farms & gentlemens seats.... Landed at Charlstown...& walked to our friend Lambols where we was accommodated in ye most civil & best manner. inn A large chamber. one side fronting ye street with a large window & balcony with A [[prospect] down ye bay [;] ye south side fronting ye garden & orange walks over which A lovely prospect apeared of James island over As[h]ley river[,] two mile broad[,] from two large windows[.] ye farther end of his garden reaches to within A few yards of ye rivers bank; ye north front hath A fine prospect of ye town through two large windows."
  • Shecut, John Linnaeus Edward Whitridge, 1819, describing the city of Charleston(1819: 42) [8]
"Sometime about the year 1750, Mrs. Lamboll excited great interest in the science of horticulture and gardening, by planting a large and handsome flower and kitchen garden, upon the European plan. It was the first of the kind in Charleston, and occupied the site, corner of King and Lamboll-streets."

Images


References

Notes

  1. Thomas S. Kidd, George Whitefield: America’s Spiritual Founding Father (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), view on Zotero.
  2. George White, Historical Collections of Georgia: Containing the Most Interesting Facts, Traditions, Biographical Sketches, Anecdotes, Etc., Relating to Its History and Antiquities, from Its First Settlement to the Present Time; Compiled from Original Records and Official Documents; Illustrated by Nearly One Hundred Engravings (New York: Pudney & Russell, 1854), 335 view on Zotero.
  3. George Whitefield, “An Account of the Money Received and Disbursed for the Orphan House in Georgia” (December 23, 1741), quoted in Eric McCoy North, Early Methodist Philanthropy (New York: The Author, 1914), 157, view on Zotero.
  4. George Whitefield, “An Account of the Money Received and Disbursed for the Orphan House in Georgia” (December 23, 1741), quoted in Eric McCoy North, Early Methodist Philanthropy (New York: The Author, 1914), 158, view on Zotero.
  5. Elizabeth Pitts left Bethesda prior to the evacuation of the orphan home on July 10, 1742, when the children took refuge in the Charleston plantations of Jonathan Bryan (1708-1788), his brother Hugh (1699-1753), and their brother-in-law Stephen Bull ( ). See George Whitefield, The Works of the Reverend George Whitefield, M.A., Late of Pembroke-College, Oxford, and Chaplain to the Rt. Hon. the Countess of Huntingdon Containing All His Sermons and Tracts Which Have Been Already Published; with a Select Collection of Letters ... to Which Is Prefixed, an Account of His Life, Compiled from His Original Papers and Letters, 6 vols. (London: Edward and Charles Dilly, 1771), 3: 455-59, view on Zotero; Alan Gallay, The Formation of a Planter Elite: Jonathan Bryan and the Southern Colonial Frontier (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 2007), 41, view on Zotero.
  6. John Bartram and Francis Harper, "Diary of a Journey through the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida from July 1, 1765, to April 10, 1766,' Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 33 (1942), view on Zotero.
  7. John Bartram and Francis Harper, "Diary of a Journey through the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida from July 1, 1765, to April 10, 1766,' Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 33 (1942), view on Zotero.
  8. John Linnaeus Edward Whitridge Shecut, Shecut’s Medical and Philosophical Essays...The Whole of Which Are Designed as Illustrative of the Domestic Origin of the Yellow Fever of Charleston; And, as Conducing to the Formation of a Medical History of the State of South-Carolina (Charleston: A. E. Miller, 1819), view on Zotero

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History of Early American Landscape Design contributors, "Elizabeth Pitts Lamboll and Thomas Lamboll," History of Early American Landscape Design, , https://heald.nga.gov/mediawiki/index.php?title=Elizabeth_Pitts_Lamboll_and_Thomas_Lamboll&oldid=10061 (accessed March 29, 2024).

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