Strauch,Adolph b.August 30, 1822; Eckersdorf (Silesia), Prussia d.April 25, 1883; Cincinnati, Ohio
Strauch came to the United States and transformed American landscape architecture through his designs of many private estates, cemeteries, and public parks. His father managed the model farm of Count Magnis and lived in the castle.
After studies in botany in the Birez Gymnasium, Strauch began six years of training in landscape gardening at age sixteen in 1838 with an appointment to Vienna’s Schonbrunn and Laxenburg Imperial Gardens under Habsburg gardeners. There he struck up a lifelong friendship with Hermann Ludwig Heinrich, Furst (prince) von Puckler-Muskau. Acclaimed as “the great European park reformer,” Puckler- Muskau’s design credo insisted on magnificent pastoral spatial sequences along clearly defined sightlines, well-groomed expanses of lawn or “greenswards” carefully framed by masses of trees and shrubs—the “beautiful” rather than the overgrown, woodsy landscape of the “picturesque.” He hired Strauch on his Silesian estate in Muskau, prescribing readings including his own influential Andeutungen uber Landschaftsgartnerei verbunden mit der Beschreibung ihrer praktischen Anwen- dung in Muskau (Notes on Landscape Gardening, 1834) and Briefe eines Verstorbenen (Letters of a Defunct). The prince then urged Strauch to make a tour of major gardens in Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands in 1845. Strauch worked for three months in Louis van Houtte’s famed gardens in Ghent, then studied landscape gardening in Paris until the Revolution of 1848. Strauch moved on to work in London’s Royal Botanic Society Gardens, Regent’s Park, for three years. When the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851 drew visitors from abroad, Strauch, fluent in German, Czech, Polish, French, and English, busied himself as a freelance guide for tours of the fair and other great English gardens and parks. Thus he met Cincinnati businessman Robert B. Bowler, an avid horticulturalist, who gave Strauch his calling card, encouraging him to visit if ever in the “Queen City.”Fascinated with images of the American Far West at the Fair, Strauch sailed to Galveston in 1851, determined to see it himself.
He got only as far as Texas, unable to reach the Southwest due to hostilities between the U.S. Cavalry and the Comanches. He wintered with Germans in Boerne, Fredericksburg, New Braunfels, Sisterdale, and San Antonio, then headed back east in the spring, intending to visit Niagara Falls en route to investigate a potential job on the Belmont estate near Boston or to return to Europe. He got as far as Cincinnati, but his steamer ran late and he missed his train. He remembered Bowler’s card and called on his acquaintance.Bowler was delighted and asked Strauch to stay to design the landscape of his new 73-acre estate, “Mount Storm” (now a public park) in the picturesque, hilltop village of Clifton, newly incorporated just north of the city. Bowler introduced Strauch to his friends in the Cincinnati Horticultural Society (1843). Strauch “improved” the landscapes of Robert Buchanan’s 43-acre “Greenhills,” George Neff’s 25-acre “The Windings,” Henry Probasco’s 30-acre “Oakwood,” William Resor’s “Greendale,” and George Schoen- berger’s 47-acre “Scarlet Oaks”—all without walls or fences so that the whole neighborhood looked like a large, unified park reached by sinuous drives through undulating terrain for a processional revealing a sequence of carefully designed, gradually unfolding views. Clifton, one of the first picturesque designed suburbs, was acclaimed as the “Eden of Cincinnati Aristocracy” by Emperor Dom Pedro of Brazil and the Prince of Wales. Lippincott’s Magazine judged that “the incomparable mountain suburb” had only one rival, “the mountain paradise of Wilkemolke which the Elector of Hesse adorned at the expense of a hundred ill gotten millions” (Hurley 1982, 82).
Those horticulturists who had founded Spring Grove Cemetery (1845) as a model “rural” landscape persuaded Strauch to become the cemetery’s landscape gardener in 1854 and superintendent in 1859; but Strauch insisted on having full authority to reform the place with “good taste” through “the pictorial union of architecture, sculpture and landscape gardening,” blending the “well-regulated precision of human design with apparently wild irregularities of divine creation”—his “landscape lawn plan” and “scientific management.” He decreed that the grounds not be crowded with gravestones to look like “a marble yard where monuments are for sale.” He banned the vogue for enclosing lots with cast-iron fences.
He advocated low-lying markers around family monuments, ideally “extra fine works of art,” with trees and shrubs framing views. His ideal combined “cheerfulness, luxuriance of growth, shade, solitude, and repose... as to imitate rural nature” (Strauch 1857, 30).Throughout the 1870s Strauch sculpted acres of low-lying, unusable wetlands to create a series of serpentine lakes with “wooded” peninsulas and islands, applying design principles from Puckler- Muskau and famed, eighteenth-century English gardens. Their shapes and sizes play tricks with perceptions of distance, scale, and space. Their limits are not quite perceptible, so they seem much larger. Strauch also introduced diverse plant materials from around the world, making Spring Grove by the 1860s one of the nation’s first arboretums. He imported many species of waterfowl and song birds, aiding Andrew Erkenbrecher’s Society for the Acclimatization of Birds. Spring Grove became an attraction, drawing over 150,000 visitors in 1875, not including mourners.
Strauch’s transformation of Spring Grove into a “garden” or parklike showplace attracted national attention and made him much in demand to reform existing “rural” cemeteries and to design new ones. He laid out Cincinnati’s German Catholic Maria Cemetery and Greenlawn in Hamilton, Ohio, then worked on Chicago’s older Oakwoods (1853) and Indianapolis’s new Crown Hill in 1864. He designed Buffalo’s Forest Lawn (1864—1866). In 1869 he laid out Detroit’s Woodmere and went to Cleveland to prepare plans for Lake View Cemetery as a museum, arboretum, bird sanctuary, park, historical archive, and landmark. His theories influenced the design of Woodlawn (1863) in the Bronx and Philadelphia’s West Laurel Hill (1869). Nashville cemetery administrators called on him to consult. Oak Ridge Cemetery (1860) in Springfield, Illinois, called upon Strauch in 1877 to “improve” the grounds after Lincoln’s interment there.
The Swiss German Jacob Weiden- mann used Strauch’s “landscape lawn
Adolph Strauch, park designer and landscape reformer who came to the United States in 1851.
He became Spring Grove Cemeterys landscape gardener in 1854 and superintendent in 1859. (Collection of Blanche M.G. Linden)plan” in designing Hartford’s 252-acre Cedar Hill Cemetery in 1863. Trustees of Louisville’s Cave Hill (1848) visited Strauch in 1867 and then applied his principles in 1875. Osian C. Simonds used Strauch’s ideas from 1881 on, designing additions to Chicago’s Graceland (1860) after visiting Strauch at Spring Grove. Even the directors of London’s Abney Park Cemetery asked Strauch’s advice in 1883 to lay out 80 more acres based on his “American System.” New sections added in the 1890s to Boston’s Mount Auburn (1831) and Richmond’s Holly-Wood (1849) followed Strauch’s “landscape lawn plan.”
Strauch also designed the grounds of Cincinnati’s Longview Lunatic Asylum in 1860. As superintendent of the city’s first park board from 1871 to 1875, he designed the first public parks as Volksgartens—the 207-acre Eden Park (1870) overlooking the Ohio River and the 170-acre Burnet Woods (1872) in Clifton. Following German precedents, Strauch added a deer preserve to Eden Park as a prime site to develop a waterworks pumping station with reservoirs resembling natural lakes. Strauch redesigned the older, smaller Lincoln Park near the city’s heart. He even had a hand in the Cincinnati Zoo (1875), the nation’s second-oldest zoological gardens, providing advice to German landscape designer Theodore Findeisen.
Scribner’s Monthly lauded Strauch as “the most accomplished landscapist in America” (“Where Shall We Bury Our Dead?”) in 1871; the Atlantic Monthly, as a “Natural Artist” in 1867 (Parton, 237). Frederick Law Olmsted, incorrectly acclaimed the “father of American landscape architecture,” knew and admired Strauch’s work, calling Spring Grove the nation’s best cemetery “from a landscape gardening point of view” in 1875. The Philadelphia Press judged that Cincinnati in the 1870s had become “a center of correct taste in rural architecture, landscape gardening, and the various arts associated with suburban and more rural life”; that Strauch had made the city “a long way in advance of Philadelphia, New York, or Boston” and that Strauch’s name was “as highly cherished in this line as is that of Olmsted in New York, in the Central Park connection, or Agassiz or Gray in science in Boston.” Appletons Encyclopedia judged that Spring Grove “ranks as the first park in the world.” Blanche M.
G. LindenSee also Central Park; Cincinnati; Fredericksburg, Texas; Landscape Architects, German American; New Braunfels, Texas; Olmsted, Frederick Law; Texas
References and Further Reading
Hurley, Daniel. Cincinnati: The Queen City. Cincinnati: Cincinnati Historical Society, 1982.
Linden, Blanche M. G. Spring Grove: Celebrating 150 Years. Cincinnati, OH: Cincinnati Historical Society, 1995.
Linden-Ward, Blanche. “The Greening of Cincinnati: Adolph Strauch’s Legacy in Park Design.” Queen City Heritage (Journal of the Cincinnati Historical Society) 51, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 20-39.
Linden-Ward, Blanche, and David C. Sloane. “Spring Grove: The Founding of Cincinnati’s Rural Cemetery, 1845-1855.” Queen City Heritage 43, no. 1 (Spring 1985): 17-32.
Moore, John Travers. Cincinnati Parks. Cincinnati, OH: Cincinnati Park Board, 1953.
Olmsted, Frederick Law, to Adolph Strauch. Olmstedt Associates Papers, Library of Congress, microfilm edition, reel 14 (March 12, 1875).
Parton, James. “Cincinnati.” Atlantic Monthly 20, no. 118 (August 1867): 237.
Ratterman, Heinrich Armin. Spring Grove Cemetery and Its Creator: H. A. Rattermans Biography of Adolph Strauch. Ed. Don Heinrich Tolzmann. Columbus: Ohio State University, 1988.
Strauch, Adolph. “Reports from the Landscape Gardener and Superintendent” (October 1, 1856). In The Cincinnati Cemetery of Spring Grove. Cincinnati: C. F. Bradley, 1857, 30.
------. Spring Grove Cemetery: Its History and Improvements with Observations on Ancient and Modern Places of Sepulture. Cincinnati, OH: Robert Clarke, 1869.
Vernon, Noel Dorsey. “Adolph Strauch.” Pioneers of American Landscape Design. Eds. Charles A. Birnbaum and Robin Karson. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000, 384-388.
“Where Shall We Bury Our Dead?” Scribners Monthly, 1871.