Cultural Landscape Report: Dumbarton Oaks Park, Rock Creek Park, Pt. 1: Site History, Existing Conditions and Analysis and Evaluation

By Maureen De Lay Joseph, et al. Documents the history and existing conditions of Dumbarton Oaks Park,  a public park located in the 3100 block of R Street, Northwest, Washington, DC, in the Georgetown neighborhood.

In 1920 a career U.S. diplomat and his wife, Ambassador Robert and Mildred Woods Bliss, returning to Washington from twenty years abroad, purchased an early 19th century mansion surrounded by six acres of disheveled gardens and “gentleman’s farmland” in north Georgetown.  Over the next twenty years they vastly expanded that acreage and, under the guidance of renowned landscape architect Beatrix Farrand, created one of the greatest garden ensembles in American landscape history.

Farrand’s 1921 design envisaged a carefully phased transition from formal gardens near the mansion to informal gardens further away, ending in a designed pastoral/woodland landscape in the valley below the mansion, centered on a stream with numerous constructed waterfalls and ponds.

In 1940 the Blisses donated their estate.  The Dumbarton mansion, out-buildings, and formal gardens nearby went to Harvard University (Mr. Bliss’s alma mater) for use as one of the world’s leading research institutes in three fields in the humanities. 

The majority of the estate, comprising the informal, naturalistic gardens, 27 acres which are now Dumbarton Oaks Park, was donated by the Blisses to the American people, and is maintained by the National Park Service as a unit of Rock Creek Park in Washington, DC.

NOTE: NO FURTHER DISCOUNTS FOR ALREADY REDUCED SALE ITEMS.

This book would interest toursits or members of the general public who are interested in National Parks, spcifically Dumbarton Oaks Park and Rock Creek Park in Washington, D.C.