by Frank Edgerton Martin, MSLA

The NAA houses over 300 collections containing the drawings, construction documents, business papers, and other primary and ephemeral information. They document the stories of midwestern architects, practices, engineers, landscape architects, fabric designers, and other creative fields.

From Glensheen to the Great River Road: Morell & Nichols Collection

The Northwest Architectural Archives houses the most important collection of letters, marketing materials, and personal papers from the Morell & Nichols landscape architects. Operating through much of the 20th century, Morell & Nichols is arguably the most important landscape architecture firm in Minnesota. Their built legacy embraces parks, campuses, and innovative new roads. One of the most important objects in the collections is Arthur Nichols’personal journal/album, “Summary of Events And Trips of Arthur R. Nichols” which he created in his later years, covering the personal and professional landmarks of his life. Morell and Nichols material can also be found in the Minnesota State Historical Society’s Highway Department Files.

Moving from the East Coast to Minnesota

In about 1909, Morell and Nichols first traveled west to Duluth, Minnesota for site visits while working the Leavitt estate project, “Glensheen”— then under construction in Duluth for the Congdon family. They worked for Charles Leavitt, a leading designer of estates on the east coast.

Nichols’ scrapbook captures the crucial year of 1909 when he made the decision to form a partnership with Anthony Urbanski Morell, his European-trained landscape architect and colleague in the Leavitt office. Even more daringly, they decided to move to Minnesota, then a state only fifty years old.

It is likely that the pair sensed a remarkable business opportunity to create a new firm to design not only estates, but campuses, roads, and entire towns in Minnesota’s burgeoning economy. At that time, fueled by the boom of northern Minnesota’s iron ranges, Duluth led the country in millionaires per capita; and it is likely that the city of 100,000 was rich in professional opportunities for experienced landscape designers.

Planning for Institutions: The West Central School of Agriculture

Morell & Nichols based their new landscape architecture firm in Minneapolis. In the scrapbook entry for 1910, Nichols records, “Plans for the University of Minnesota” and the Home School in Sauk Center.” Most likely, it was their lucrative ongoing retainer with the State Board of Control, essentially that era’s unit of State Government overseeing project construction, which, a year later, brought Morell & Nichols to the West Central School of Agriculture (WCSA) now, the University of Minnesota, Morris.

At that time, as protégées of the Leavitt office, the European-educated Morell and the architecturally-trained Nichols had far more experience in grand estate design in tandem with high-society architects than in planning for public institutions. Yet, they were also virtually the only self-proclaimed landscape architects in Minnesota.

In Morris, their design to transform the vestiges of a former Indian school into a boarding high school for rural students, the West Central School of Agriculture. The designers envisioned a compositional balance of buildings by architect Clarence Johnston framing open spaces. The entire plan, typified by the curving campus entry drives is one of Morell & Nichols’ early masterworks. Set on a windswept site, their plan of 1911 called for orthogonal windbreaks, gracefully paired entry drives, and a formal central quad.

Their bi-lateral plan developed for the WCSA in Morris shares many of the elegant conventions of scale, grading, site circulation and layout present in the estate grounds of the era on the fringes of such cities as Cleveland, Chicago, and Buffalo and along the eastern seaboard.

Because it is so intact today, the pre-WWII Morris campus is one of the Midwest’s purest expressions of the fusion of American and European aesthetics and early 20th century institutional design. It was the subject of a Getty Foundation Campus Heritage preservation study and is listed as a district in the National Register of Historic Places. The University of Minnesota-Morris campus heritage plan is in the Morell & Nichols papers, however it is too large to include here.

Engineering New Roads and Towns

Morell & Nichols’ early designs for Minnesota’s tuberculosis sanitaria, and colleges all displayed a planned formality that evoked the Cartesian ideal of a new town rationally and elegantly planned by one mind. Their first chance to build a stand-alone community came very quickly after their move west when United States Steel commissioned them to plan a new community for its workers in Duluth.

In 1910, Minnesota’s Mesabi Range yielded thirty million gross tons of iron ore annually—70 percent of all iron ore mined in the United States and a quarter of the world’s output. For U.S. Steel, the spectre of Minnesota’s government passing into law the threat of “tonnage taxes” seemed as daunting as the prospect of labor unions or organized strikes.

Thus, St. Paul legislators and governors had leverage to bargain for new investment and more and better Minnesota jobs from the corporate giant. Morgan Park (named for the ultimate East Coast titan, financier J. P. Morgan who did much for U.S. Steel) is the result of a compromise to build a new steel plant in Duluth, close to the ore but far from the coal sources needed to refine it. Beginning in 1907, U.S. Steel began planning for a complex that would not only refine ore but to create “added value” products such as nails and specialized steel.

Morell & Nichols developed a town plan for nearly 400 housing units for skilled workers and executives. Like the Morris campus, their design, a superb response to topography, views, and ravines; and it remains largely intact today. Chicago architects Dean and Dean created thirteen distinct designs for houses, duplexes, row houses, and apartments. Morell & Nichols’ curving, beautifully graded avenues and front lawns set the foregrounds to dwellings that remain remarkably harmonious yet varied within each block. Losses such as the demolition of the Good Fellowship Club in the 1980s compromise some of Morgan Park’s original paternalistic, socially-engineered character. Yet its residential streets remain as nationally-significant vestiges of American corporate planning from the time.

By the mid-1920s, Morell & Nichols’ were the leading landscape architects and campus planners in Minnesota. With the sudden death of Morell in 1924, Nichols retained the firm’s name, Morell & Nichols while incorporating with two new partners, landscape architects George Nason and William Cornell.

Engineering the Highway of the Future: Lilac Way

With his private sector work dwindling due to the Depression, Nichols turned to federal relief projects, including Highway 100, a new beltline highway to wrap the western edge of Minneapolis. The project included the development of seven roadside rest areas/parks. The corridor was characterized by the landscape planting palette that prominently featured lilac trees; and the highway became known and promoted as “Lilac Way” with local volunteers contributing to the planting work.

In 1935, the Minneapolis Journal announced the forthcoming beltline in a feature article entitled, “Highway Department Approves Lilac Way west of City; Flowers Planned to Line Six-Lane Route.”

The article noted that Lilac Way would be a federal relief project with “cloverleafs” that would eliminate the need for left hand turns. Nichols, as designer and advisor to the Highway Department for the project, was quoted in the article introducing the city’s first “freeway”.

As a matter of general practice we do not plant flowers or flowering shrubs along trunk highways, we believe it better as a rule, to preserve or restore nature’s own growths of shade trees, evergreens, or other native trees…. However, in the case of the beltline we do not have a rural highway and the lilac experiment can well be made.

As indicated by his articles in professional publications such as the ASLA’s Landscape Architecture, Nichols was a strong advocate of the need for integration/cooperation between engineers and landscape architects in project planning and throughout the construction process. He advocated for highway design that was not “beautification” as an afterthought, but as an integral part of the design and construction with particular attention paid to the problems of location, alignment, profile, and cross section (April 1940).

Nichols’ design work for Highway 100 included seven roadside parks built with retaining walls, council rings, and distinctive “beehive” fireplaces constructed by Works Progress Administration (WPA) stone masons and laborers from locally quarried limestone. The beehive fireplaces were conical in shape and approximately 12 feet in height with grill openings on each side to accommodate up to four users. Several of the wayside parks included ponds and water features. Landscape plantings included the requisite lilacs, along with cedars, white pines, and shrubs. Site plans from Nichols’ office include full plant lists for trees, shrubs, and flowers that provide useful insights about plant availability and design styles of the time. They also provide guidance for contemporary rehabilitation and restoration treatments with the possibility of substituting more sustainable or hardy contemporary cultivars.

Through road widening and changes in the public’s motoring habits, only one of the few waysides that remain today is now part of the Robbinsdale, Minnesota city park system, as Graeser Park. Although deteriorated, the area retains its distinctive beehive fireplace, stone benches, retaining walls, and remnant system of ponds and fountains. As part of the Highway 100 corridor improvements near the park, a portion was removed; the main park however, includes newly planted lilacs and shrubs in the highway right-of-way.

The Great River Road

The origin of the idea to establish a Mississippi River Parkway, extending through ten states, from the river’s origins at Lake Itasca in northern Minnesota, is difficult to verify. By the 1930s, however, several states along the corridor began working toward such a parkway. In 1936, an interstate commission, known as the Mississippi River Parkway Planning Commission, of which Nichols was a member, was formed at a meeting of the National Association of Planning Officials, held in Minneapolis. The newly-formed commission worked over the next several years to build support for the endeavor, and to encourage the passage of state resolutions for the parkway. Legislation introduced in Congress however, failed to be passed.

The idea had support however, from noteworthy individuals such as Conrad Wirth, then Supervisor of Recreation and Land Planning of the National Park Service and later as its Director. In 1939, Wirth delivered an address to the National Conference of State Parks, held near the beginning of the Mississippi River at Itasca State Park in Minnesota. He cited the importance of the potential 2,000 mile parkway “through the heart of the Nation,” which would average 800 feet in width. He called for establishing a national system of parkways, and cited the Blue Ridge and Natchez Trace Parkways that were under construction at that time.

A strand of roadside overlooks, designed by Nichols were constructed on U.S. 61 along the Mississippi River as part of what would become the Great River Road. Constructed by the New Deal’s National Youth Administration (NYA), the roadsides capitalized on scenic views and featured low indigenous limestone walls. His objectives included emphasis on scenic advantages in determining the route and through harmonizing the road alignment with natural topography. Nichols argued that this process necessitated “coordinating the work of the engineer with the landscape architect in all stages of reconnaissance, planning, and construction.”

In the 1990s, MnDOT utilized the services of a private Minnesota historic preservation consulting firm, Gemini Research, to complete documentation regarding the history and current condition of waysides and similar structures along the states’ highways. The historic context report, “Historic Roadside Development Structures on Minnesota Trunk Highways,” identified those sites, buildings and structures in accordance with National Register Criteria

Design for Change

Shortly before his death in 1970, Nichols was interviewed by the St. Paul Pioneer Press to recount the highpoints of his career. In describing his continuation of the plans of Cass Gilbert at the University of Minnesota and the State Capitol Approach, Nichols described flexibility in successful design that remains a goal in urban and highway design today. “What I did,” he claimed, is to “adapt these [plans] to the present…and here I would like to caution people who develop plans for cities or architectural areas…. Do not try to develop a master plan and say ‘this is it’ and hope you have anticipated the future…. Rather, work out site planning that is based on the present but flexible enough to be changed as the future changes.”

From campuses to new towns and broad highways, Morell & Nichols and later Arthur Nichols built a practice by understanding the engineering of roads to achieve effective vistas. Nichols linked landscape architecture and engineering to achieve viewsheds that connected travelers with neighborhoods, revealed buildings through sculptural siting, and celebrated the native landscape and design. As he matured, he adapted to faster travel with anmulti-disciplinary early, and, perhaps, a more humanely-scaled model for Interstate Highways as they pass through suburbia, around cities, and across the county.

FURTHER READING:

• Highway 100: Lilac Way. 2001 Twin Cities Public Television.
• Landscape Design in Highway Development: A Coordinating Factor in the Layout of Traffic Ways,” Arthur R. Nichols, Landscape Architecture, April, 1940
• Morgan Park: Duluth, U.S. Steel, and the Forging of a Company Town. Arnold R. Alanen with Photographs by Chris Faust. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
• Pioneers of American Landscape Design, edited by Charles Birnbaum FASLA, and Robin Karson. McGraw-Hill, 2000.