I enclose a quotable professional opinion of the character of your property of Perry Park as a site for a summer resort.

In the present communication I propose to offer suggestions for the carrying out of your purpose to establish a small summer colony in the park at any early day.

The ultimate value of the whole property will depend much on the impression which this proposed early settlement will make upon possible future purchasers of land, even at considerable distance from it. The success of the early settlement, therefore, is to be measured but very partially by its immediate profit to you or by the satisfaction that shall be taken by those having part in it. The settlers you count upon will be, for some time, chiefly Denver people of a [557]class disposed to make but very moderate outlays for buildings; not ambitious of display, yet unready to dispense with neatness and taste even while passing a vacation in a region mainly attractive to them because of its wildness and seclusion from the fashionable world. Among the people that you want to be prepared to impress favorably in the future there will be many of more luxurious tastes and who are readier to make liberal outlays to gratify them.

The point of policy to be considered is: How the pioneer settlement can be made, without excessive cost, to acquire and hold a character and reputation by which the value of the whole property will be favorably affected? Answering this question, there are, in my opinion, two reasons why you should stringently insist that the settlement shall not be made in a straggling, fragmentary or scattered way. They are:—

First, that spaces of bare ground which may have a not unpleasing aspect if in the midst of a region generally in a state of nature, when seen as waste places between neat houses and planted door-yards, are, in the climate of Colorado apt to appear forlorn, untidy and the reverse of attractive. If the houses are at all fine they will, by contrast with the vacancies, make the village as a whole appear a jumble of incongruities. If they are rude their association with the waste ground will give the village a raw and hopelessly mean character. A collection of even extremely rude cabins on the other hand, is apt to be pleasingly picturesque if they are seen to form parts of a group or composition the other parts of which are in good proportion pleasingly natural.

More or less this objection to scattered settlements is of general application but it often happens that in our eastern villages, what would otherwise be dreary waste places between houses are quite as agreeable elements of the local landscape as if they were under the highest garden cultivation because in the spontaneous course of nature they are clothed with rich turf and decorated with pretty bushes and perennials. The course of nature is very different on Colorado.

Second, the cost of providing common conveniences such as walks and roads and those of water supply and for the removal of waste, and of keeping them always efficient and neat, will be much less in a closely built than in a scattering settlement. And cost in this case does not mean money cost alone but house-keeping trouble. It is also to be considered that in a compact village a man would be ashamed to neglect the simplest requirements of good taste in the care of his place who, living in an isolated house, would allow its surroundings to fall into a condition likely to impress a passing stranger unpleasantly and injure the prestige of the property.

Assuming that the Company will not sell or lease land to people who are unwilling to live in a moderately compact village and to take obligations which will insure between each house and its neighbors a constant state of tidy verdure, what character in other particulars is it desirable than the village should acquire with respect to the lasting advantage of the park property as a whole?

It appears to me that the aim should be to give it some general excellence of its own, distinguishing it at least so far that no visitor will be liable to remember [558]it only as one of numerous villages that he has seen. Even though to give it such a distinction there should be some elements to which many people would object it is better that it should provoke discussion on these points rather than fail to be distinguished. The great point is to make it complete in its own way and prevent the introduction of features confusing and out of character with that which is its notable excellence.

How could such a distinction be obtained without excessive expense?

Suppose that one who had been travelling for a few weeks in Colorado should come into a village in which there were no raw, dry, dusty and dirty places either in the streets or adjoining them: in which there were no houses so big and “stuck up” as to dwarf the greater numbers of all others; in which no house called for particular notice solely because of its evident newness or the freshness of its paint, none in which less seem to have been done for immediate display than for a kind of beauty that, nourished by nature would be increasing from year to year and would express unobtrusive domestic taste rather than fashion or smartness. Suppose that owing in part to local circumstances, in part to customs universally followed by its people, the houses of the village did not hold the eye of one passing among them more than the verdure growing before between and about them and that, notwithstanding the unassuming style of its constructions and the informal and apparently unarranged character of its natural elements, the village, as a whole, appeared strikingly pretty. Suppose a village so different as this must be from what is commonly brought about by the ambitions of those through whose efforts, moved more by a competitive than a cooperative spirit, villages are generally formed. Suppose this and you will see that situated in the midst of a naturally attractive region it could not fail to acquire celebrity in a degree greatly disproportionate to the necessary cost of securing it, a celebrity due, first, to its modesty and the apparent absence of effort with its people to make a display; second, to the evidence it presented of genuine refinement, good sense and good taste.

It is not to be supposed that such a distinction could be gained without cost both in the way of outlay for common improvements and by restrictions upon private enterprise that would prevent as rapid and early growth of the place as might otherwise be secured.

But it is my opinion that the cost would be well repaid in a few years and that much more would be gained by aiming steadily at such a distinction and keeping under control whatever would interfere with the pursuit of it than by taking a course more nearly parallel with that commonly followed in the building of summer resorts.

On one of the above points I will dwell a little more.

As a rule people will go to Perry Park rather than to some other place, under the lead of men who, in the first instance, will have taken land because its natural landscape was particularly pleasing to them. Now upon such a natural landscape a village—a settlement of summer visitors—never failed to jar unless its houses were not only subdued in color as houses only can be brought to be [559]slowly, without paint, but unless they were comparatively unimportant features in the midst of a wealth of foliage growing on and about them.

But wealth of such foliage as would be desirable does not come of itself to a village, and when it is made to come in Colorado, it does not appear to belong to the natural landscape. Two precepts follow: First, you should choose a locality and devise a plan for your village favorable to a rapid growth of foliage in the midst of it. Second, you should seek to have the village so situated that it will not be a prominent feature in the general landscape but rather an episode.

The required conditions will be fully provided on the shores of the pond which you propose to form, surrounded as they will be at a short distance by hills that will frame in and give landscape seclusion to the locality.

Suppose that you have a road made along the natural margin of this pond, far enough from it to allow a nearly continuous belt of trees and bushes to grow with their roots in its moist edges, the road as narrow as convenience will permit in order to avoid all unnecessary exposure of dead earth and all unnecessary expense of keeping it smooth and tidy. Suppose that a little back from this road you let a series of “bungalows” be built, all low walled and roofed with only the face toward the pond presented distinctly to view and this face mostly shaded by verandas, galleries or awnings. Suppose that there is a little garden in front of each with a hydrant for watering it supplied by pipes from higher points of the brook which is to feed the pond, and you will see that you have the leading elements of a very charming sort of village.

As a centre to such a village nothing could be so pleasing as a pond such as you expect to have embowered with such foliage as could be soon established on its banks. Given such an oasis with a road about it, and it would be natural and reasonable that a circle of cultivated people should cluster closely about it, and, having only summer quarters in view and an intention to live much out of doors, that they should build inexpensively just the class of rustic and unassuming but neat and cozy habitations that would be more desirable from the point of view of an artist. It would be equally natural and agreeable that, these houses being on a hill side, those living in them should terrace off little gardens before them from the road with rustic walls made of the loose stone abounding on the hill-side in their rear; that there should be seen a profusion of vines falling over these walls and climbing over the gate ways, trellises, porches and verandas of the cottages, and that they should be flanked and backed by such trees and bushes as with little effort could be grown for the purpose.

It is unnecessary at this point to carry the general suggestion thus presented into fuller particulars. If it strikes you favorably and you are disposed to have it elaborated in the form of a plan, the topographical map of the ground, for which we have already furnished instructions will be a necessary preliminary to our aiding you to obtain it.

It seems to me premature to undertake to plan the improvement of the park much further at present than has thus been proposed.

But to guard against others gaining to your disadvantage from such [560]work as you may do, I advise that the Company get into its own direct possession enough additional land at a point that I indicated to you when on the ground to hold the control of all from which a good general view could be of the rock district and the two prairies, one stretching northwardly, the other southwardly, from near the old saw mill site.

Respectfully Yours

Brookline, Mass. 15th January, 1889.

Having been asked to report on the availability of Perry Park as a summer resort, on the 26th and 27th of December, 1888, I made such examination of it as was at the time practicable.

The ground being frozen and lightly powdered with snow and an unusual drought prevailing, my observations were not such as would be needed for an assured judgment on questions of water-supply and cultural capabilities but I saw three streams flowing from as many ravines in the adjoining mountains, and evidences elsewhere of water beneath the surface. The form of the ravines seemed favorable for the storage of water at high elevations.

It was, however, as a place for the enjoyment of local scenery and for rural rides and rambles that I more particularly considered the park. In this respect it’s more important features are to be found in several bodies of prairie land each bordered and separated from others by low and gently sloping, rounded hills. The comparatively small extent of the glade-like openings and the more continuous slight undulations of the surface, both of the openings and the wooded ground, make the term park a perfectly descriptive designation of the topography—much more so than it is as usually applied in Colorado to much broader and less varied surfaces, unbroken it may be for miles, by trees.

Although in Perry Park all trees of certain age had been taken out for timber some years since, enough remain of good size and so disposed, singly and in loose groups, as to give the landscape not only a well-furnished but in its distances an intricate and mysterious character. One can move in no direction that new and attractive passages do not open before him adapted to act subtly upon the imagination.

With the territory to which the above observations more particularly apply there is closely associated, first, the grandeur of an immense mountain range with bold acclivities divided by darkly shadowed glens, and second, the interest of a remarkable body of rocks projecting in great variety of towering [561]

“The Ideal Sketch of the Village of Lake Wauconda” from promotional pamphlet Perry Park (1890)

[562]

View of Perry Park, Colorado

forms from the surface of the ground. Few of these are smaller than an ordinary dwelling, many are larger than the grandest of cathedrals. Most are so scattered and disposed, and associated with the other landscape elements as to form interesting and agreeable incidents of scenery. Looked at one by one, some are entertaining because of their extremely fantastic forms which bring to mind the quaint rocks often represented in Japanese pictures. Others might be taken from a distance for stately monuments. There are several extended ranges which present splintered, craggy and curiously crannied cliff-like faces. Often these are topped with lofty pinnacles and serrated crestings. Some have much beauty from the fretted texture of the stone of which they are composed and its varied soft tints.

Kept clear of such puerile and cockneyfied structures as are too generally allowed to put nature out of countenance in places of summer resort, as well as of such as would be offensive from their rudeness and shabbyness, I should think that Perry Park would soon be found very attractive, first, to tourists, led chiefly by curiosity, second, to persons seeking rest and refreshment under the influence of invigorating mountain air, of a landscape that will grow more pleasing as it becomes more familiar and of incitements to out of door contemplative occupations such as are to be found abundantly in the conditions that have been described.

I shall elsewhere offer a few suggestions as to the manner in which [563]

View of Perry Park, Colorado

provisions for sojourners in the park may be made with the least injury to its natural attractions.

F. L. & J. C. Olmsted,
Landscape Architects.