Archive for the ‘William Merchant Richardson French’ Tag
Cleveland’s Connections
Filed under: Minneapolis parks | Tags: H.W.S. Cleveland, Horace Cleveland, William Merchant Richardson French
Comments (2) What brought H.W.S. Cleveland to Minneapolis as a guest lecturer in 1872 may have been his connection to a famous family.
Find the complete story here, an article originally posted in 2011. Since that article was posted, I learned that William’s father, Henry, and Cleveland almost certainly knew each other before Cleveland took on the young engineer as a partner in Chicago. Henry and Horace had both written on the subject of irrigation and were both active in Massachusetts horticultural societies. Their paths would have crossed.
Cleveland later proposed a collaboration in a Minneapolis park with French’s older brother, the famous sculptor Daniel Chester French.
David C. Smith
And the answer is….French
Filed under: Landscape Architects, Minneapolis parks | Tags: Daniel Chester French, H.W.S. Cleveland, Horace Cleveland, William Merchant Richardson French, William Watts Folwell
Comments (3) In a post on December 29, 2010 I asked how these two pictures were related to the creation of Minneapolis parks.
Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln Memorial, Washington, D. C. (Jeff Kubina)
Minute Man, Minute Man National Historical Park, Concord, Massachusetts
Nobody has come up with the right obscure answer! So I’ll tell you.
The photos are of the most famous works of American sculptor Daniel Chester French. (The best example of French’s work in Minneapolis is the statue of John Pillsbury at the University of Minnesota.)
Here is the connection — and the key word is “related”:
Daniel Chester French’s older brother was William Merchant Richardson French. That’s this guy:
William Merchant Richardson French (Louis Betts, Art Institute of Chicago)
(Their father was Henry Flagg French who was the number two man in the U. S. Treasury Department. For eight months in 1881 he worked under Secretary of the Treasury William Windom, a U. S. Senator from Minnesota who resigned his Senate seat to become Treasury Secretary for President James Garfield. After those eight months, Windom resigned at Treasury and was elected to fill his own open seat in the Senate. He served as Secretary of the Treasury again from 1888 until his death in 1891.)
The important connection of William French to Minneapolis parks is that after graduating from Harvard in 1864 and a year at MIT studying engineering he moved to Chicago and met a man in the new and unusual profession of landscape gardening. It’s not clear how it came about, but in 1870 William French became the partner of a man thirty years older than he was. That pioneering landscape architect was Horace Cleveland.
Of course, young William, who was eager I’m sure to earn his keep with his much more experienced partner, went through his list of connections to identify potential clients. He likely recognized that one name on his list might provide useful contacts in a young city west of Chicago, Minneapolis. That contact was his cousin, George Leonard Chase, who was rector at the episcopal church in the small town of St. Anthony, which was springing up beside the falls of that name. Now it just happened that Chase had married one of the Heywood girls, Mary. And that was a funny thing because Chase’s best friend married Sarah Heywood, Mary’s sister. He and his best friend had lived together while they were students at Hobart College in New York. In fact, Chase had apparently had some influence with the regents of the University of Minnesota when they were hiring the university’s first president in 1869. Chase’s friend and brother-in-law by marriage was hired for that job. His name was William Watts Folwell.
Minneapolis Park History 