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The Wellesley College campus, outside of Boston, Massachusetts,
is one of the most beautiful in North America. Its three hundred
acres include a private lake, groves of conifers and hardwoods,
and winding paths through open meadows. Handsome brick and stone
buildings rise from wooded hills. From almost every window on
campus, the view opens out to an inviting vista - through pine
trees to the shores of Lake Waban, down sweeping lawns to century-old
oaks with magnificent gnarled branches.
The look and feel of the landscape has always been central to the identity of Wellesley College and to the experience of its students. Henry Fowle Durant, who founded the college in [1870, which opened in] 1875, believed that young women should be educated in the midst of beauty. Landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. described Wellesley's landscape in 1902 as "not merely beautiful, but with a marked individual character not represented so far as I know on the ground of any other college in the country." Glacial topography, he believed, gave the campus "its peculiar kind of intricate beauty." Throughout the history of the college, maps and views have captured that "intricate beauty" while recording striking changes to the built environment. These cartographic portraits reflect the college community's evolving sense of itself and its relation to the outside world. |