I have received and read with interest your letter of the 30th ult. The newspaper which you sent has failed to reach me.

You write that you do not ask an answer to your letter, but you would hardly have written at so much length without other object than to inform me of your difference of judgment with the Park Commissioners, and I infer that you would like to know how the matter looks to me.

You say that you greatly respect Dr. Moore and other of the Commissioners of Parks of your city with whom you have a personal acquaintance, but having been studying the subject of Public Parks for the last five years and having read whatever you could find upon it, you cannot resist the conviction that the Commissioners have been unwise in selecting one situation for a Park and rejecting another. You intimate that the public opinion of the city is with you in this respect, and that you are sustained by the Press.

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You will excuse me if I do not undertake to argue the question. To do so fully, would involve the writing of a treatise on the fundamental principles of my profession, for which I lack the literary qualifications, but I can give you my opinion for what it is worth, without argument.

As to what it is worth, I may say that I have been diligently studying the subject for fifty years. In the study of it, I have four times visited the principal public parks of Europe and had close debate with those responsible for them. During one period of six months, hardly a day passed without my visiting a park and watching the manner of its use and judging as best I could of the conditions of its value to the public. Since doing so, I have designed a number of parks, including several of those which you name as having been objects of study with you, and I have been, for some years, in superintendence of the public use, one after another, of several of these. I have thus had an unusually instructive experience in regard to the degree in which their sites and their plans have been wisely devised. In the course of this experience, the views which I once had, not only as to the means to be used for the purpose of a park, but as to what that purpose can most wisely be, have been somewhat advanced, as I presume that yours might be as an effect of a similar course of education. In determining, that is to say, what is desirable in a site and in a plan for a park, I should not now have quite the same standards in view that I had forty, or even thirty, years ago.

The Park Commission of your city is the largest of any of thirty Park Commissions that I know. Several others have not more than three, four or five members. There is, in this circumstance of the Rochester Commission, an element of safety against inconsiderate action. And in fact, I know of no Park Commission in all the country which gives more time and study to matters of its duty, or in which more earnest debate is had, or in which there is more candor and openness to argument. The Park Commission of Rochester is the only Park Commission that I have known to have begun its work by taking deliberate counsel with a number of persons who had had actual experience in the management of parks, and by making a personal study of the sites and plans of parks in actual use, with the object of proceeding upon some practical knowledge of the subject, rather than upon preconceived ideas and imaginings of its members. If the Commissioners have been unwise, as your study of the subject leads you to think, you can, I presume, hardly have seen reason to suppose that this is because they are less intelligent, or less thoughtful of the interests of the city as to which they are officially responsible, than the majority of citizens who you think differ with them, or than those who write contemptuously of them for the newspapers. I happen to have seen some apparently labored criticisms upon them in the newspapers, but it has not appeared to me that the authors of these criticisms were better qualified to pass judgment on their work, or had given the questions at issue any more careful study than the Commissioners themselves. It has not seemed to me that they were more [217]candid men, or more public-spirited, or that they had gone deeper in to the study of these questions.

As to my personal judgment upon the question you more particularly discuss, I may say that I have closely examined the site adopted by the Commissioners, as you think unwisely, and that declined to be taken by them, as you also think unwisely. I regret to say that I cannot agree with you. The action of the Commissioners was determined, in my opinion, with adequate knowledge of the conditions to which you refer; it was taken after prolonged {and} serious deliberation, and with a cautious forecast of how the lasting interests of the entire city would be affected by it.

Although I cannot undertake to reason the whole matter out, I will call your attention to one notion, the unsoundness of which you do not seem to have quite sufficiently realized. It is that a ground that is to be highly valued as a part of the home of a single family, and that is laid out, furnished and equipped with excellent suitability to the daily use of that family, and of its occasional guests, is necessarily a ground to be desired with a view to the most important leading object of your Park Commission. That object may loosely be defined, I think, to be that of making a lastingly well guarded provision in the borders of the town by which the mass of its people may, as easily as practicable, in the future history of the town, find agreeable relief and means of counter action from the depressingly crowded, confined condition of their ordinary urban life. That is to say, it is to make an outing-place for the people. An outing-place in which not ten or twenty, but many thousand, people may spread themselves out as they might if rambling in the open country; that they may do so with the least practicable temptation to crowding or disorder; free from all unnecessary confinement, restriction or disturbance, and thus without excessive wear or any part of it.

Considered fairly with reference to this object, the advantages of the Valley Park seem to me too plain to need specifying.

As to the objection you make of its remoteness, I do not know of any other town as large as Rochester, and with its prospects of further enlargement, that has been able to find as spacious a body of land, suitable for the most important purpose of a park, as near to its center of population, or to which as agreeable and refreshing means of access can be provided for the mass of its people. The largest two parks of Chicago are six miles from its center. Central Park is not less than four miles, and other large parks of New York are as much as eight miles, distant from that city’s center. The parks of Boston, Baltimore, Buffalo, Providence, Philadelphia and San Francisco are all, I believe, a good deal further from their centers of population than Valley Park from the center of Rochester.

As far as I am qualified to form a sound judgment, there has been no Park Commission on this continent, the movements of which have, during a corresponding period, been as surely judicious, as prudent and as closely [218]economical, as those of the Park Commission of Rochester. I think it has made some mistakes, but not at all in the direction that your convictions lead.

Yours Respectfully

I sent you a T.W. letter yesterday, address, Wellington Hotel, but not being perfectly sure that that was right will address this care of Director Columbian Ex. I told you that I was planning to go to Atlanta Wednesday, returning Saturday to spend Sunday here. If you feel that I can justly to our interests in Chicago stay longer, and write me so, I shall.

Mr Vanderbilt and all are pleased with the work on Ram Branch but I am much dissatisfied with it in several respects, Gall having missed the idea so that to make it as I would have it a great deal of work must be wasted. I don’t know that he is to be blamed. He simply is not familiar enough with what I aim at to rightly understand my instructions and goes ahead in full confidence that what he does will please me. I am sorry that I did not pull that bridge down. I have been all along on the ground for four hours this Sunday afternoon trying to find some way out of the scrape. I feel mortified and conscious-stricken. John writes that we ought to spend more time at Rockwood, which is what you say. But the precept is many times more applicable to Biltmore. What is going to become of us if we get engaged with Chicago?

Our plan for the Pergola essentially approved and applauded, but Hunt suggests improvements, which are good and wh. I adopt cheerfully.

I wish that I had your help about the Ram Branch muddle.

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At all other points yet studied matters are shaping well—but I see some clouds rising from the Agricultural side.

While writing, Mr. V. brings me your letter of 17th. I take your view of every thing. I shd hardly think that you wd succeed in getting the compensation & terms you propose, but I don’t object to your feeling your way to it, and striking for it, if you wish. I am prepared to say that we had better retire if we cannot get it. If we take it, we must make some enlarged arrangemts for other business and must decline commissions that we wd otherwise take. I was never before so impressed with the wrong of our present position. I should like to give myself up to this place. We cannot do it instead by visiting a week at a time three times a year. I rode this morning over some of the newly bought farms, seeing more interesting ground and better trees than any I had seen before. It struck me that I had never begun to think what a big chore we had before us when the Topog. Survey shall be complete to duly plan out the laying out of the Estate. We shall need, one of us, to be familiar with the topography of a region twelve times as large as Franklin Pk. divided by two rivers and a dozen brooks before we can begin. I think that it would take me a week, clear of all other duties to piece out what I know of at present, sufficiently to feel that I could safely adopt a provisional theory of roads. Mr Vanderbilt said today that he had been planning a scheme of roads that would require but three bridges over the French Broad. I can see that our difficulties are to be greatly increased by the schemes of Burnet and the Baron. I heard part of a long letter from the Baron, in which he was contemplating a sort of magnified Deerfoot Farm, but with additions to the sausage and butter departments of sheep, orchards, vineyards, &c. &c. all on a great scale.

Let me hear from you here, next Sunday, advising if I can safely stay two to four days, before going to Nashville.

Faithfully,