Green

[See also: Bowling Green, Common, Lawn, Plot, Square]

History

The term green in American landscape design was used to describe two types of landscape features. The first was level plats or lawns, often the setting for garden buildings such as the summerhouse described in 1762 at Belmont Mansion, Judge William Peters’s estate near Philadelphia, Pa., or other garden features, such as the basin at Crowfield, William Middleton’s plantation near Charleston, S.C., reported by Eliza Lucas Pinckney in 1743. These lawns sometimes had utilitarian functions, as with the “bleaching green” that Walter Elder described in 1849 for whitening laundry in the sunshine. The usage of the term to describe a level lawn may have been related to “greensward” (used rarely but synonymously with lawn) or bowling green, although these connections are not articulated in any of the treatises or descriptions (see Bowling green and Lawn).

The second and more frequent use of the term referred to open public spaces, generally centrally located in towns or villages and particularly characteristic of New England settlements, such as that described by John Warner Barber (1844) at Taunton, Mass. For a detailed discussion of the variety of New England settlement patterns, and the history of open spaces in town planning, see Common. Like commons and squares, greens were admired for their spaciousness within the close confines of a town, as conveyed by the descriptions of Newcastle, Del., in 1727 and New Haven, Conn., in 1750. Town greens also provided open space for communal gatherings such as military exercises, markets, or special ceremonial occasions such as the Cherokee dance performance on the green of the Governor’s Palace in Williamsburg, Va. [Fig. 1], or the Marquis de Lafayette’s procession in Newark, N.J., in 1824. Greens set the stage for the kind of social promenading and recreation depicted in William Russell Birch’s illustration of the State House Yard in Philadelphia [Fig. 2]. In addition to serving multiple purposes as a communal space, the green was often a setting for prominent public buildings: meetinghouses, watch houses, and government buildings. Greens were also used for the purpose of burying grounds, as at New Haven, Conn., and Chambersburg, Pa.These public greens were landscaped with grass, walkways or paths, and shade trees, often planted around the perimeter or alongside the walks. The level of ornamentation ranged from the simple tree plantings, as depicted in Barber’s view of Newark [Fig. 3], to more elaborate plantings, such as the rows of elms and poplars and gravel walks described by William Dickinson Martin in 1809 in Philadelphia. Chronologically, these designs register an increasing use of ornamentation, particularly in New England in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, reflecting the prosperity and development of the village commercial centers.

New Haven Green, one of the best-known and documented examples of this feature in the United States, provides an interesting case study of communal space in the history of American landscape design. The nine-square plan was laid out in 1638 by London merchant Theophilus Eaton. As the 1748 plan [Fig. 4] indicates, the outer squares were divided into lots. The central square, however, was kept intact and used for a variety of purposes and public buildings at different points in time. In 1639, it was the scene of a public display of the decapitated head of a Native American accused of murdering English settlers, and in 1645 it was the gathering place for the Artillery Company. Between 1638 and 1665 it was the location of the watch house, the prison house, and a schoolhouse. A meetinghouse was authorized on the site in 1639, one of a series whose successor may be seen on the 1748 map. The various civic uses of the central space are reflected in its numerous early appellations. The first reference to the space as a “markett place” occurred in 1639, but it was not until 1759 that the term “green” first appeared in print in an advertisement in the Connecticut Gazette. These two designations were used interchangeably until 1784 when the officials of the newly incorporated city began to use the more cosmopolitan sounding “Public Square” and “Great Square.” According to recent scholarship, the term “green” continued to be used popularly in New Haven, but it was not until after the Civil War that the “New Haven Green” became the clear title of the city’s central space.

-- Elizabeth Kryder-Reid