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To Endicott Peabody
| My Dear Sir; | 19th April 1886. |
I want to be sure that you fully realize the considerations which had us after full discussion to place your buildings on the north side of the “campus”. You never get a good thing except by sacrifices, and the question is one of compensations. Blessings heighten to the imagination as we contemplate them flying away.
The consideration which you are most likely not to have continued to give due weight to is this:—
Place your intended main school buildings on the north side, the north view may always be held from their north windows and from the flanks of the {group} of buildings; then on the south of them you may obtain a sheltered, comparatively sequestered assigning home-like ground without sacrifice of any important prospect. You rapidly move the institution out of its present somewhat bleak, bare, cold and hard aspect.
Place the buildings on the South Side and you have the view from a smaller number of windows and from the carriage front. There is no question of front and rear; buildings of the character contemplated should be conceived as of two fronts; the analogy being that of large villas, “halls” or palaces in which usually there is an entrance or court yard front used {…} fronts. (To bring carriages and general service roads between your best windows and your best view is to be avoided when practicable.)
But suppose you overrode this consideration. You have your buildings on the south side, and you have the view then to the north from their north windows—the smaller number of windows—that is your advantage. You cannot grow a higher tree without obscuring your view from some of your windows.
Plan for Groton School Grounds and Plantings, April 8, 1885
]You can have no body of trees without destroying the advantage. For the sake of having the view from the smaller number of windows you accept the permanent disadvantage of a cold, bare bleak and hard aspect for the entire group of buildings as they will be seen by everyone intending to enter them or wishing to step out of them. Your approach roads and your campus will remain frozen two or three weeks later every spring. They will be damp and chilly longer. They will have an earlier winter and a shorter summer. Every man and every horse standing before a door will be raked by the north west wind.
You can think out the disadvantages on this line. I am strongly disposed to believe that if you do so fully—looking well ahead, giving the imagination its proper task and with due caution not to be imposed upon by purely temporary and transitional conditions and habits formed under different circumstances and with reference to different motives, you will come back to your original conclusion—that the balance of advantages lies with a plan which promises shelter, sunniness and geniality to the school centre.
Yours Truly
Fredk Law Olmsted.
The Revd S. E. Peabody.