Francis Parkman As Horticulturist
Francis Parkman as Horticulturist
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(This address was presented on Sept. 26, 1972 as part of the "Evening
With Friends" series at the Case Estates, Weston. It is published here
in its entirety. Ed.)
Samuel Eliot Morison, in the sketch that introduced The
Parkman Reader, selected from the historical writings of Fran-
cis Parkman, remarked that "it used to be a joke in Boston that
visiting Englishmen and Frenchmen asked to be presented to
Mr. Parkman the historian, while the first person whom visi-
tors from the Netherlands wished to see was Mr. Parkman the
horticulturist." This dual career sprang, in an unpredictable
combination, from the unusual circumstances of Francis Park-
man’s life and health. He was born in Boston on 16 September
1823 into a family of old Puritan stock that was both solvent
and cultivated. His father, Francis Parkman of the Harvard
class of 1807, was from 1813 to 1849 minister of the New
North Church in Hanover Street, the handsome Bulfinch meet-
ing house that in 1862 became St. Stephen’s Roman Catholic
Church. This Unitarian clergyman, who was a Harvard Over-
seer from 1819 to 1849, received the honorary degree of S.T.D.
from the University in 1834. As the North End was becoming
unfashionable, he preferred to live near Bowdoin Square, where
his father, Samuel Parkman, a substantial shipowner and East
India merchant, had a spacious house and garden between
Chardon and Green Streets. In 1835, after the death of his
mother, the Reverend Francis Parkman took over his father’s
house.
His son Francis Parkman was so high-strung a child that at
the age of eight he was sent to live in Medford with his maternal
grandfather, Nathaniel Hall, whose property adjoined the wild,
rocky area that later became the Middlesex Fells Reservation.
For four years the boy attended a local private school in Med-
ford ; out of hours he roamed in the woods, trapped squirrel
and woodchuck, and generally acquired a taste for the wilder-
ness. Even when he returned to his family in Boston at the age
of twelve, he had more of the outdoors around him than was
usual in the city, for behind Samuel Parkman’s house, to which
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170
his parents soon moved, were extensive terraced gardens, de-
voted to the cultivation of fruit trees, especially the Bergamot
pear.
Just before his seventeenth birthday in 1840 Francis Park-
man entered Harvard college with the class of 1844. He was a
highly energetic, sociable, lively, and handsome young man.
In later life his friends were struck by his resemblance to the
Venetian equestrian statue of the Condottiere Colleoni; if one
sought an analogy closer to home one might suggest that he
had the pronounced jaw that characterizes many Saltonstalls.
A member of an undergraduate literary club to which Parkman
belonged recalled that he "even then showed symptoms of ’In-
juns on the brain.’ His tales of border life, his wampum, scalps,
and birch-bark were unsurpassed by anything in Cooper." Park-
man himself recalled: "All my summer vacations were passed
in the forests chiefly those between Maine and Canada, or in
Canada itself -
or else in examining the scenes of battles,
raids, and skirmishes in the various French and Indian wars."
As a sophomore he sought the advice of Professor Jared Sparks,
the first teacher of American history at Harvard, on historical
sources concerning the Seven Years’ War. Thus, at eighteen,
between forests and books, his thoughts "crystallized into a plan
of writing the story of what was then known as the ’Old French
War,’ that is, the war that ended in the conquest of Canada.
... My theme fascinated me, and I was haunted by wilderness
images day and night." Soon he "enlarged the plan to include
the whole course of the American conflict between France and
England, or, in other words, the history of the American for-
est." Parkman’s zest for outdoor life led him during his summer
wilderness holidays to feats of energy that wore out his com-
panions. Such excess of activity, combined with hard study,
having brought on a physical breakdown early in his senior
year, his parents sent him to the Mediterranean for his health.
Although he returned from Europe only in time to take final
examinations, he received his A.B. on time in 1844, standing
in the top third of his class and being elected to Phi Beta Kappa.
He then entered the Harvard Law School, and received his LL.B.
in 1846, fitting in between his two years of law a summer
journey to the Great Lakes to see the physical scenes of the
first book that he planned to write, The Conspiracy of Pontiac.
Over forty years later he wrote: "The best characteristic of my
books is, I think, that their subjects were largely studied from
real life."
Francis Parkman at 20 years of age.
In May 1846 Parkman’s cousin, Quincy A. Shaw, who was
setting out on a hunting expedition in the Rocky Mountains,
asked him to come along. The expedition, which gave Parkman
adventure, acquaintance with a new frontier, and first hand
sight of Sioux warriors on their own ground, provided unique
experience with Indians and the wilderness. It also, through
over-exertion, permanently undermined his health. By the time
he returned home in October he was unable to use his eyes, and
constantly suffered from insomnia and raging headaches. This
second breakdown was particularly galling for a man who
so prized robustness and strenuous activity. The remaining
forty-seven years of his life were an unremitting struggle
against the ills that he personified as "the enemy". Living in a
darkened room, unable to read, he drafted the record of his
Western travels with the help of a sister or friend who read his
rough notes aloud and took down his dictation. So the account
of this "tour of curiosity and amusement", which had had a
serious purpose for him, reached book publication in 1849 as
The Oregon Trail. Although "for about three years, the light
of day was insupportable, and every attempt at reading or
writing completely debarred", he bravely tackled The Conspira-
cy of Pontiac, relying upon faithful helpers to read him the as-
172
sembled sources and take down his drafts. Gradually "the
enemy" retreated. By means of a frame with parallel wires placed
over a sheet of paper, he became able to write slowly. In spite
of these obstacles the book was completed in two years and a
half, and published in two volumes in 1851, dedicated to his
teacher Jared Sparks, by then president of Harvard.
By 1850 Parkman’s health had so improved that on 13 May
he married Catherine Scollay, daughter of Dr. Jacob Bigelow of
Boston. A daughter was born in 1851 and a son, Francis, in
1853. The marriage proved an extremely happy one. Although
they started housekeeping with an annual income of only a
few hundred dollars, their finances soon improved, for after
the death of his father in 1852 Parkman inherited property that
made him comfortably off the remainder of his life. He soon
bought three acres of land on the shore of Jamaica Pond,
where, in a relatively modest cottage, they lived in the late
spring, summer, and autumn, returning to Boston only for the
winter months. Yet "the enemy" plagued even this happy scene,
for in the autumn of 1851 Parkman had had an attack of water
on the left knee, which led to almost permanent lameness. To
give him an interest that would occupy him when physical pain
kept him from intellectual concentration, his wife -
as Henry
Dwight Sedgwick noted in an early biography - "had given
173
him the suggestion, ’Frank, with all your getting, get roses.’ Up
he got and made a garden of roses. He had three acres, his
man Michael, such enrichment of the soil as a horse, a cow,
and a pig could supply, a few garden implements, and a wheeled
chair, or in happy seasons a cane; with these he grew his beau-
tiful roses." Parkman’s knee complaint returned in force in
the spring of 1853, incapacitating him completely for two years.
A gardener’s life at Jamaica Pond proved beneficial, however,
for in 1855 he was back at his desk, working again on his great
project concerning the French colonization of North America.
He had not completed a volume, however, when even more
severe blows fell. Young Francis, his only son, died in 1857 when
only four years old; the boy’s mother, who never completely
recovered from this loss, died the following year, not long after
giving birth to a second daughter. This dual tragedy precipitated
another return of "the enemy". Gravely ill again, Parkman re-
turned to Boston with his two motherless daughters to live with
his widowed mother and unmarried sister Eliza at 8 Walnut
Street.
In 1859 he went to Paris for medical treatment. Although
specialists there achieved some improvement in his eyes and
knee his recovery was never complete. Parkman’s Harvard
classmate Edward Wheelwright recalled how "when crippled
by disease and needing two canes to support his steps, he might
often be seen in the streets of Boston, walking rapidly for a
short distance, then suddenly stopping, wheeling round, and
propping himself against the wall of a house, to give a mo-
ment’s repose to his enfeebled knee. Whatever he did, he must
do it with all his might. He could not saunter, he could not
creep: he must move rapidly, or stand still."
On returning from Paris, he went to Jamaica Pond, where
his sister Eliza kept house for him and his daughters for over
half of each year. To occupy himself in time of grief, when
he could no longer concentrate on historical work, Parkman
turned to horticulture. This, too, he did with all his might.
Edward Wheelwright thus recalled his house: "It stood on ris-
ing ground, close to the shore of Jamaica Pond. Here he had
his gardens and green-houses, and here he came early in the
spring, and remained late in the autumn of every year. He
kept on the pond a boat, into which he could step from his
garden, and obtain in rowing the exercise that was essential
to him when walking was difficult and painful. Frequent friend-
ly visits to a muskrat, his neighbor on the shore of the pond,
added to the pleasure he took in his boat. It was pleasant to
Parkman’s home at Jamaica Pond.
174
visit him in his garden. He took not only pride in his flowers,
but loved them, speaking of their characters, their habits, their
caprices, as though they were sentient beings."
Francis Parkman’s extraordinary energy and determination
soon carried him into other fields of horticulture than his first
love of roses. Howard Doughty in his 1962 biography of Park-
man wrote: "Already in 1861, only a year or so after he had
started gardening, his success was notable enough to put him
in possession of a unique collection, his development of which,
together with his work as a rosarian, gave him a permanent
name in the annals of American horticulture. This was a col-
lection of Japanese plants -
the first of its kind to arrive in
America - made in Yokohama by the botanist George B. Hall,
and turned over to Parkman by his college mate and neighbor,
Francis Lee, on Lee’s departure for the war. Among other speci-
mens, the collection contained the double-blossomed apple, now
known as the Parkman crab, and bulbs of the Lilium auratum,
which he was the first known person in America or Europe to
bring to flowering outside Japan. With such material to work
on, he devoted himself particularly to the hybridization of lilies,
his chief triumph in this field being the Lilium parkmanni, a
crossing of L. auratum with another Japanese stock, which he
sold in 1876 to an English florist for one thousand dollars. But
he was also among the foremost of American rose-growers. He
is said to have had at one time over a thousand varieties in his
garden, and The Book of Roses, which he published in 1866,
was for many years a standard manual of the subject."
The extent of Francis Parkman’s gardening and growing
briefly tempted him into business, for in 1862 he formed a
partnership with William H. Spooner, a nurseryman specializing
in roses, who was active in the Massachusetts Horticultural So-
ciety. On 4 April 1862 he wrote to his cousin-in-law, Mary
Dwight Parkman, then in Europe: "I am daily here -
in Jamai-
ca Plain -
and am at last really busy, having formed a partner-
ship with Spooner which will absorb all the working faculties
I have left. So you find me a man of business. I am content
with the move, & resolved to give the thing a fair trial and, by
one end of the horn or the other, work a way out of a condition
of helplessness. At all events, this is my best chance, & I will
give it a trial. Spooner wants me to go to England & France
in the Fall, to look up new plants. The thing has difficulties
& risks, not a few under my circumstances; but it is attractive,
& doubly so as it gives me a prospect of meeting you. So I
cherish it, as probably an illusion, but still a very pleasing
one." Parkman did not go to Europe in the autumn, as Spooner
175
had proposed; indeed the partnership in the nursery business
was of the briefest duration.
Matters were quite different with the Massachusetts Horti-
cultural Society, then located in its first Horticultural Hall in
School Street on the site of part of the present Parker House.
For several years Parkman had been exhibiting there; Howard
Doughty notes that he won over three hundred awards from
the society between 1859 and 1884. In 1863 when he became
chairman of its library committee, he vigorously underlined
the importance of that aspect of the society’s work. In his first
report Parkman made this classic statement: "To despise the
aid of books is no evidence either of practical skill or good
sense. This is particularly true of horticulture, in which the men
of greatest practical eminence have without exception been
those possessing the recorded knowledge of their predecessors
or contemporaries. Horticulture is an art based on the broad
principles of science, and has never found its most successful
cultivators among those who have blindly ignored those prin-
ciples." When the society moved in 1865 to the second Horti-
cultural Hall in Tremont Street (between Bromfield and Bos-
worth Streets) Parkman asserted that the library, which ex-
tended across the entire front of the second floor, "may be said
to bear to this noble building the relation which the brain
bears to the body."
To a man who idolized courage and physical endurance as
Parkman did, it was shattering to remain at home tending
plants as his friends went into the Union Army. In September
1862 he spent a day and a night in camp at Readville with the
Forty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry, of which Frank Lee, who
had given him the Japanese plants, was colonel, and which
numbered some forty Harvard alumni among its officers and
men. Returning home he wrote of "the banners I was not to
follow, the men I was not to lead, the fine fellows of whom I
could not be one." But as he worked with his plants, his spirits
and strength so returned that he began to dream of asking Louis
Agassiz’s daughter, Ida, to become his second wife, although
carefully avoiding "the expression to her of anything beyond
a simple though a very cordial friendship." Her marriage on
5 December 1863 to a dashing cavalryman, Major Henry Lee
Higginson, who had returned to Boston to convalesce from se-
vere wounds, ended such hopes for all time. Parkman remained
a widower, bringing up his daughters with the aid of his sister.
Despite such disappointments, Parkman’s ceaseless activity with
horticulture so benefited his health and spirits that before the
176
end of the Civil War he was again at work on his great historical
project that he had set himself as an undergraduate two dec-
ades before. In March 1865 Little, Brown & Co. gave him proofs
of The Pioneers of France in the New World, the first of six
parts of France and England in North America.
Thenceforth he advanced steadily with the project, which
was completed in nine volumes in 1892. This fortunate return
to history did not mean the abandonment of horticulture, for
he published The Book of Roses in 1866 and devoted his leisure
to growing and hybridizing plants. Between 1867 and 1872
he published not only the second and third parts of France and
England in North America but twenty-six articles in Tilton’s
American Journal of Horticulture. His historical friends under-
stood the role that horticulture had played in his life. The
Canadian historian, the Abbe Casgrain, who visited Parkman in
May 1871, noted that, after his severe illness, "what agreed
with him best was the cultivation of his garden, which he first
oversaw while remaining seated near his employees. When his
strength began to return, he tried to work with his own hands,
while seated for the most part of the time in a folding chair.
In this position he would cut his plants and the edge of his
flower beds, or weed the ground nearby." The Abbe Casgrain
was impressed by the tasteful simplicity of Francis Parkman’s
home at Jamaica Pond. He recalled particularly how "the in-
terior of the cottage corresponded to the exterior; everything
was comfortable, but no display of luxury. What I most ob-
served, and comes back to me when my thought returns to
that American home, was the perfume of flowers spread through
all the rooms. Everywhere there were very beautiful bouquets,
or rather bunches, composed principally of rhododendrons of
the most delicate rose tints."
Soon after the Abbe Casgrain’s visit, Parkman began the reno-
vation and substantial enlargement of his Jamaica Pond cot-
tage. The region now had an additional attraction for him,
for in the spring of 1871 he had been appointed Professor of
Horticulture at Harvard’s Bussey Institution. This new under-
graduate school of husbandry and gardening, which opened to
students in September 1871, was located on a farm in the Ja-
maica Plain-Forest Hills section of West Roxbury, scarcely a
mile from Parkman’s house. On thus becoming an active mem-
ber of the Harvard faculty, he resigned from the Board of
Overseers, on which he had served since 1868, on the ground
that it seemed "essentially unfit that the member of a supervisory
body should himself be one of those whom it is his duty to super-
177
vise." Although Parkman planned and oversaw the building
of greenhouses for the new institution, his career as a profes-
sor was almost as brief as that of a commercial nurseryman a
decade earlier, for he resigned at the end of the academic year.
The death of his mother in August 1871, followed by that of a
beloved brother in January 1872, brought on a period of illness
that made him feel unable to offer the course on plant propaga-
tion and the management of hothouses, nurseries, and gardens
that the Harvard catalogue had announced for the following
year.
Paradoxically one might claim that Francis Parkman’s great-
est contribution to horticulture was his resignation from the
Harvard faculty, for his successor as Professor of Horticulture
was the thirty-one-year-old Charles Sprague Sargent who created
the Arnold Arboretum and ruled it until his death fifty-five
years later. Although the evidence is only circumstantial, I
firmly believe that Parkman must have played a crucial part in
the selection of his successor. Otherwise, how would a young
man who had stood eighty-eighth in his class of ninety on his
graduation have reappeared ten years later on the Harvard
scene as Professor of Horticulture? This then undistinguished
scholar had entered the Union Army, which Parkman would
have dearly loved to have done; made an extended Grand Tour
of Europe, as Parkman had done before him more briefly, and
settled down on his father’s estate in Brookline, close to Park-
man’s smaller one, to occupy himself with horticulture, which
was then a rich man’s amusement rather than a profession.
Parkman was thoroughly at home in the administrative strato-
sphere of a simpler Harvard, where people knew each other as
they cannot today. He was re-elected to the Board of Over-
seers in 1874, and became a member of the seven-man Corpora-
tion in 1875, where he served until 1888. There being no body
of professional candidates to draw from, President Charles W.
Eliot had the previous year, when rounding up a faculty for the
new Bussey Institution, filled the chair of horticulture with a
Boston gentleman of property, living nearby, where he passed
his time with the embellishment of his own grounds. President
Eliot, facing so soon a second appointment in this unfrequented
field, would, I suspect, have sought Parkman’s suggestions about
his successor. What could have been more natural than for
Parkman to propose his young friend and neighbor? The
promptness of Sargent’s appointment in May 1872 supports
this hypothesis
178
I
Although Francis Parkman ceased to profess horticulture
after a year, he continued to study and practice it. In part
three of the second volume of the Bulletin of the Bussey Insti-
tution, Parkman published in 1878 an article on "The Hybridi-
zation of Lilies" that represented a dozen years of personal ex-
perimentation on this subject. He told how he had attempted
to combine the two superb Japanese lilies, L. speciosum ( lan-
cifolium) and L. auratum, the former as female parent. After
five or more years he was rewarded on 7 August 1869 with a
bud that "proved a magnificent flowcr, nine and a half inches
in diameter, resembling L. auratum in fragrance and form, and
the most beautiful varieties of L. speciosum in color. In the
following year, it measured nearly twelve inches from tip to
tip of the petals, and in England it has since reached fourteen
inches." Several years later Parkman sent a bulb of this new
lily to Max Leichtlin of the botanical garden at Baden-Baden
and another to the English grower Anthony Waterer, the pro-
prietor of the Knap Hill Nursery at Woking, Surrey. Both re-
sponded with enthusiasm.
Leichtlin wrote to Parkman on 13 November 1875:
In no small degree I am obliged to our mutual friend
Mr. Sargent for his kindness to introduce myself to your
notice, an introduction which I appreciate the more as
it is to a gentleman who really seems to be a more suc-
cessful hybridizer and grower of Lilies as even celebrated
Marshall Wilder.
You had the kindness to send me a splendid bulb of that
costly and more remarkable hybrid L. Parkmanni. The
bulb arrived in excellent condition and I call it welcome,
and shall take every particular care to preserve and in-
crease it; it is however so valuable a plant that I fairly
cannot accept it and merely say my thanks! I rather re-
gard it as still your property confided to my care to make
sure of its preservation and propagation. Of course it will
always be at your disposal.
However I feel much obliged for your kind intention to
procure to myself the pleasure of seeing it flowering; look-
ing through my garden I find not much worth to recipro-
cate for but the only one bulb I can dispose of still of L.
Hansoni and some 7 small bulbs of L. polyphyllum from
the Himalayas. Through the kindness of Mr. Sargent you
will receive the parcel.
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Here I beg to enclose a few seed of my own hybridising
L. giganteum as parent female and L. Thunbergianum as
male.
This was apparently sent by way of Professor Sargent, for in
the Parkman Papers in the Massachusetts Historical Society is
preserved this undated letter:
Monday, P.M.
Dear Parkman,
The enclosed came for you today, The bulbs have not
yet arrived, but they no doubt will in a day or two, when
I will hand them over to Charlie.
Your Lily seems to be having a great success, and you
seem in a fair way to out strip even "celebrated Marshall
Wilder."
Come and see us when you can.
Sincerely,
C. S. Sargent
Anthony Waterer wrote on 18 October 1875 of the bulb sent
to him: "I believe it was the most beautiful flower I ever be-
held and that was the opinion of all who saw it. It must be a
most desirable plant and if it is not distributed will doubtless
prove of considerable commercial value. I note your kind prom-
ise to communicate with me before parting with any more.
I shall be very glad of the opportunity of purchasing any you
have to spare." This letter led to Parkman selling the lily to
Waterer for exclusive distribution, apparently for the thousand
dollars mentioned by Parkman’s earliest biographers. Waterer
gave it the name of Lilium Parkmanni. Parkman on 15 January
1876 wrote Waterer thus in regard to terms:
My proposal is to send you all the bulbs of the hybrid
L. Parkmanni which are in my possession..
These consist of three about as large as I sent you, and
two or three smaller ones. The three larger ones (just
mentioned) grow attached together in one pot, and each
threw up a stem last season as large as a small goose
quill.
I do not propose to reserve any bulbs for myself or Mr.
Sargent; but to take the risk of success or failure in rais-
ing bulbs from the scales of which I spoke in my last. If
I succeed in doing so, I shall reserve two of the bulbs thus
obtained -
one for myself, and the other for Mr. Sargent.
180
All the rest will be sent to you, as soon as they are strong
enough to bear transportation.
The only bulbs which have left my hands are one sent
to you and one to Mr. Leichtlin. I have lately received a
letter from Mr. L. He promises not to part with the bulb
or with any bulbs that may be raised from it; and I believe
his word is entirely to be trusted.
An account of the lily appeared in England in the March 1876
issue of Florist and Pomologist, illustrated by a colored plate.
After completing a decade as Chairman of the Library Com-
mittee of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, Parkman was
elected president on 7 November 1874. Although it was the
custom only to seek a portrait of a president on his retirement,
a committee was appointed for such a purpose one month after
Parkman’s election on the ground that his "valuable services to
horticulture should not be entirely eclipsed by this world-wide
reputation as a historian." Accordingly a bust of Parkman by the
Irish-born Boston sculptor Martin Milmore was completed and
in Horticultural Hall early in February 1876, almost two years
before its subject, having declined re-election, made his fare-
well address as president on 5 January 1878.
Early in the 1880’s as the tempo of his historical writing and
his lameness increased, Francis Parkman gradually withdrew
from horticultural activities beyond the care of his grounds. The
beauty of this place above Jamaica Pond continued to attract
his many friends. Henry Dwight Sedgwick wrote of the place
a decade after Parkman’s death:
Sometimes in the richness of the blossoming time the
colors were too heavily laid on by the horticultural hand;
The fayre grassy grownd
Mantled with green, and goodly beautifide
With all the ornaments of Floraes pride,
Wherewith her mother Art, as halfe in scorn
Of niggard Nature, like a pompous bride
Did decke her, and too lavishly adorne -
was too red and pink and yellow. The azaleas, rhododen-
drons, magnolias, syringas, lilacs, and the big scarlet
Parkman poppies were too bold for a less scientific eye,
and overshadowed the columbine, foxglove, larkspur, vio-
let, even the Japanese iris, whose seeds had been fetched
from the Mikado’s garden, and all the wee, modest flowers;
but people would drive thither many miles to see the splen-
dor of the blossoms.
181
The garden was of modest dimensions and sloped down
sharply to the shore, so that the little walk from the house
to the dock on the pond’s edge ran past all the vegetable
friends, trees, shrubs, and plants. There was a tall, wide-
spreading beech, elms sixty feet high, a big chestnut, a tu-
lip, a plane-tree, two white oaks, a sassafras, Scottish
maples and scarlet maples, lindens, willows, pines, and
hemlocks; and holding themselves a little aloof, as befittted
their rarity and breeding, a Kentucky coffee-tree, a gingko,
the magnolia acuminata, and the Parkman crab, first of its
kind in New England, radiant with its bright-colored flow-
ers.
Francis Parkman died on 8 November 1893, a year after the
publication of the final part of his great historical work. Soon
after his death his property on Jamaica Pond was bought by
the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to enlarge the Olmsted
parkway that extends from the Back Bay to the Arnold Arbore-
tum and beyond. A new road, bearing his name, runs through
the former location of Parkman’s rose garden. On the site of
his house was placed an allegorical monument by Daniel
Chester French with a bronze bas-relief of Parkman. Alas, the
portrait relief has recently been stolen by vandals. At the base
of the monument are carved these lines: "Here where for many
years he lived and died friends of Francis Parkman have placed
this seat in token of their admiration for his character and for
his achievements." The chairman of the committee that raised
the funds for this memorial was Major Henry Lee Higginson,
founder of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Parkman’s suc-
cessful rival for the hand of Ida Agassiz in 1863.
Although Francis Parkman’s garden has vanished, the study
in which he did much of his writing is still preserved, nearly
eighty years after his death, substantially as he left it in 1893.
His mother in 1864 bought a pleasant early nineteenth century
brick house on the lower slope of Beacon Hill, where he and
his children and his sister Eliza lived with her in the winters.
On Mrs. Parkman’s death in 1871 the house was left to her
daughter Eliza, with whom Parkman continued to live during
the winter, just as she lived with him at Jamaica Pond during
the more clement months of the year. The 50 Chestnut Street
house eventually passed to the Misses Cordner, nieces of Francis
and Eliza Parkman, who made few changes in it, piously keep-
ing his third floor study much as he had left it, save for his
historical books and manuscripts, which were given, respective-
182
ly, to the Harvard College Library and the Massachusetts His-
torical Society. When Miss Elizabeth Cordner died in 1955 at
a great age, 50 Chestnut Street was sold, but her heirs generous-
ly gave much of the furniture to the Colonial Society of Mas-
sachusetts, which had recently come into the ownership of a
large Bulfinch house at 87 Mount Vernon Street. During the
autumn of 1955 the contents of Parkman’s study were moved,
lock, stock, and barrel, to the Colonial Society’s house, together
with doors, mantlepiece, gas fixtures, and other details that
permitted the reconstruction of this touching little room on the
fourth floor of 87 Mount Vernon Street in a manner that would
make Francis Parkman feel at home. Particularly so because in
a corridor outside the study stands his wheel-chair, while on
the walls hang numerous photographs of his house and garden
at Jamaica Pond, and a print of Lilium Parkmanni, taken from
his desk and framed. As I had the pleasure eighteen years ago
of transferring Parkman’s Lares and Penates from one part
of Beacon Hill to another, I have welcomed the opportunity to
remind the Friends of the Arnold Arboretum of the horticultural
activities that he carried out on the shores of Jamaica Pond, so
close to the Arnold Arboretum, whose first director I firmly be-
lieve he chose.
WALTER MUIR WHITEHILL
Director and Librarian, Emeritus
Boston Athenaeum
Notes
Most of the details of Parkman’s career as a horticulturist are
scattered through his biographies by Charles Haight Farnham (1900),
Henry Dwight Sedgwick (1904), Mason Wade (1942), and Howard
Doughty (1962). Wilbur R. Jacobs, who edited Parkman’s letters
(1960) has another biography in project. Edward Wheelwright’s
memoir is in Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts,
I (1892-1894); Parkman was elected to that society, which today
preserves his study, at its first meeting on 18 January 1893. Samuel
Eliot Morison’s The Parkman Reader (1955) is a delightful selection
from Parkman’s work by the twentieth century historian who has
best emulated Parkman’s style and practice of seeing at first hand
the scenes that he describes.
Selections from the letters of M.
Leichtlin, Anthony Waterer, and Charles S. Sargent are published
by permission of the Massachusetts Historical Society which owns
Parkman’s papers.
183
Francis Parkman and fnend on porch of his Jamaica Pond home.
