In 2018, I joined a friend for a weekend writer’s retreat in Hull, MA. Never having been to the area, I looked around on the web for places to visit when I wasn’t busy writing. Much to my surprise, I found there was a property in the neighboring town called World’s End that was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted.
World’s End is the name for a small, hilly island in a corner of Boston Harbor that’s connected to an isthmus off the mainland by a slender causeway. Surrounded by seawater, its alternately expansive meadows and rocky coastline are reminiscent of both the Cotswolds in England and the Maine coastline a boat ride away. Out on the island, there’s a wooded valley where you can see deer, and there’s an oak grove on a hilltop with a ring of stones for a campfire.
The place feels entirely like a park and is used as such by locals and flocks of visitors. I was shocked to learn it was designed to be a housing development.
In the 1800s, the land along the isthmus and the attached island was slowly bought up and consolidated by John Brewer, a Boston businessman who had a small, trophy farm on Hingham Bay. He hired Frederick Law Olmsted to lay out a system of roads that would divide the property into as many lavish housing plots as possible.
When Olmsted arrived, the land was windswept, rocky grassland with only two or three trees on the property. After Brewer’s work teams implemented the plan, It became a classic Olmsted landscape, blending meadow, forest, and water into a destination to be explored and savored.
Brewer died before his vision was realized. His family had no interest in building on it. For years, the farm grew and became well established, but eventually the property was passed down to family members who sought buyers. At different times, it was seriously considered a possible site for a nuclear power plant and the United Nations. Thankfully, local advocates and the Trustees of Reservations were able to buy the property, protect it, and now manage and maintain it.
The official blurb is below:
Unless you visit an Olmsted park, it’s difficult to know what it’s like being there. Plans and individual photos only tell you so much. World’s End: a panoramic tour of a Frederick Law Olmsted classic, a new book by Mark Roessler from Levellers Press, aims to solve that dilemma for the property the landscape architect designed on a pair of islands in Boston Bay.
Photographed over four years and during all seasons, the book combines original Olmsted firm drawings, correspondence, maps, and modern photography in a guide to this remarkable property.
Designed initially to be a deluxe housing development in the 1880s, construction never followed. Instead, World’s End is a rarity among Olmsted works: a masterpiece left largely unmodified from its original vision. Without the usual buildings, bridges and tunnels created by other architects, it’s instead an example of raw Olmsted vision. If he were a rock musician, this would be his acoustic, solo album.
Over 60 full-color panoramas illustrate every part of the property. Just by turning the pages, you travel through the pathways designed by the Olmsted firm.
Original drawing from the Olmsted firm and maps by the book’s author show how the design developed and was finally implemented.
1.6 lbs
9.5 × 8 × .75 in
$35.00 from Levellers Press.
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