Warren H. Manning

Warren Henry Manning (1860-1938) was one of the founders of the profession of landscape architecture in the United States, and for more than three decades he was also one of Billerica's most active citizens. He was born in Reading, Massachusetts, on November 7, 1860, the son of Jacob Warren Manning, who ran a nursery there, and his wife Lydia, a watercolorist. He grew up in the nursery business, attended Saturday study sessions at Harvard's Arnold Arboretum, and by the mid 1880s was designing grounds for his father's customers. In 1885 he married Nellie Hamblin Pratt.

In 1888 he joined the office of Frederick Law Olmsted as planting supervisor. In eight years there he worked on some 125 projects in 22 states, among them the planting of the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago and the Biltmore estate, and he collaborated with Charles Eliot on the Boston metropolitan parks. He opened his own office in Boston in 1896, and over his career it handled more than 1,700 commissions: estates such as Stan Hywet Hall in Akron and Gwinn near Cleveland, park systems for Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Louisville and other cities, city plans such as Birmingham, Alabama, and a "National Plan" urging national and state systems of forests and parks. He was one of the founding members of the American Society of Landscape Architects in 1899 and its president in 1914, and he trained a generation of designers, including Fletcher Steele and Dan Kiley.

Billerica was his ancestral town. He restored the Manning Manse, the family homestead of about 1696 in North Billerica, and was secretary and treasurer of the Manning Association, incorporated in 1901, which kept the house as the family's shrine and held its reunion there every June 17. He made his own home in North Billerica, on land reaching to the Chelmsford Road, and there built a large octagonal office where as many as thirty of his staff worked; his firm, Warren H. Manning Offices, Inc., was in Cambridge by the 1920s. He was president of the Billerica Improvement Association, founded in 1902, until 1912, and with John E. Rowell deeded the Jacob and Lydia Trails through the hilltop reservation on Gilson Hill to the Appalachian Mountain Club. Elected Tree Warden in 1903, he used his report to urge a systematic study of the town's roadside trees and to warn of the gypsy and brown-tail moths, but he lost the office to T. E. Smith the next year. In 1912 he was treasurer, managing editor and publisher of the monthly magazine Billerica, in which he published a serial "Town Plan for Billerica" with maps of the town's hills, streams, roads and soils.

When Billerica created a park commission in 1913 he was one of the first three park commissioners, with J. Nelson Parker and Frederic S. Clark, and he was its chairman by 1917, remaining on the board until 1924. In the coal famine of the winter of 1917-1918 he lent several tons of his own coal to North Billerica. He chaired the Town Forest Committee appointed in 1923, gathered gifts of land on Gilson Hill and along the Middlesex Turnpike, much of it his own, and in 1931 gave land on the Chelmsford Road for Farmer Park, where Boy Scout Troop No. 1 had built its "Camp Manning." The same year his firm prepared the town's first zoning by-law and map for the new Planning Board, which credited the work to his intimate knowledge of the town through residence in it.

Manning died of a heart attack on February 5, 1938, at the age of 77. The Warren H. Manning State Forest in Billerica is named for him.

References

1. Wikipedia, Warren H. Manning
2. The Cultural Landscape Foundation, Warren H. Manning
3. The Autobiography of Warren H. Manning (Library of American Landscape History transcript)
4. BILLERICA magazine, vol. 1 no. 1 (June 1912), masthead and first Town Plan article
5. BILLERICA magazine (1912), Societies and Clubs: Manning Association and Billerica Improvement Association
6. Tree Warden Report, 1904
7. Town Forest Committee Report, 1925
8. Planning Board Report, 1931

Deed References Expand all

Recorded is Book/Page at the Middlesex North Registry of Deeds unless noted.