Gardens and Nurseries Sites

Anacostia Park is one of Washington DC's two largest parks and recreation areas, along with Rock Creek Park.  It covers over 1200 acres along the Anacostia River from South Capitol Street SE to the Maryland boundary in NE.  The New Deal improved the park in major ways, after the Capital Parks system was put under the control of the National Park Service (NPS) by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1933. New Deal public works agencies developed such key features of the park as Kenilworth Park and Aquatic Gardens, Langston Golf Course and Anacostia Pool (see linked pages). Besides those major elements, improvements included,...

Kenilworth Park & Aquatic Gardens is situated on the banks of the Anacostia River at the north end of Anacostia Park.  It is a marsh area that includes several cultivated ponds preserving rare waterlilies and lotuses. Originally known as the Shaw Lily Garden, it was saved from destruction by dredging in the Anacostia River in the 1930s. The park and gardens were taken under the wing of the National Park Service (NPS) as part of Anacostia Park and the Capitol Parks system and expanded with the help of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), which worked in Anacostia Park for several years...

The Works Progress Administration (WPA) funded and provided labor for an improvement and beautification program in Norfolk’s Ballentine Park in 1937. The WPA allocated $12, 836 for the project with the city adding an additional $4,884. “The project call for the extension of drains, building of a culvert, excavation for a lake, the grading and building of walkways and the planting of shrubs and trees.” The efforts of WPA work crews resulted in a beautiful park that shared property with the old Ballentine School. In recent years, the vacant school building was demolished and replaced by new townhouses and lofts. Nonetheless, the...

The federal National Youth Administration (NYA) built circular walls surrounding Barton Springs and created a terraced sunken garden. The site can be found along Barton Creek in Zilker Metropolitan Park, just off the Lady Bird Lake Bike Trail. There are two sets of steps leading down into the garden.

The Civil Works Administration (CWA) conducted development work at Ben Ficklin Park in San Angelo, Texas. Work included $3,095 on a garden.

The Berkeley Rose Garden lies on the west side of Euclid Avenue in the Berkeley Hills. It was constructed in the little valley of Codornices Creek, which emerges in a viewing pool at the bottom of the garden.  The rose garden was likely begun by the Civil Works Administration (CWA) in 1933-34, as they built the adjoining ball courts.  But the Rose Garden itself was a project of  the Works Progress Administration (WPA), completed in 1940.    "The Garden is designed like an amphitheater with wide stone terraces facing magnificent views of San Francisco Bay. A semicircular redwood pergola, which extends...

"The Boyce Thompson Arboretum was established in 1923. Franklin Crider, a University of Arizona botanist, managed the research unit to study soil retention by plant roots. In 1933 a small group of Civilian Conservation Corps enrollees from camp F16A at Pinal Mountain was brought in to develop a plant nursery. The young men built raised beds and grew thousands of grasses and plants for range revegetation and forestry projects. Supervised by the Forest Service rangers and arboretum staff, the enrollees supplied the labor to continue the important work of soil conservation in central Arizona."

The Works Progress Administration (WPA) completed improvements in Brookdale Park NJ (Essex County) in 1937. Initial construction of the park began in 1928 following an Olmstead Brothers’ design. “The basic work was in place by 1930,” suggests the Essex County Parks Department. But hen the Depression hit, the work that was originally estimated to take only a few years was extended to many years. Construction became dependent upon labor available from the WPA and ERA agencies, who completed the major work by 1937. The result is one of the County's most beautiful parks.” The WPA provided most of the funds and labor...

The federal Civil Works Administration constructed the old entrance, Huntington's Gate, to Brookgreen Gardens outside Murrells Inlet, South Carolina. Living New Deal believes that the old gate is no longer extant. "Huntington's Gate, Route #49, CWA Project #99. Archer and Anna Huntington built Atalaya, a Moorish-style home between 1931-33. At that same time, they were building Brookgreen Gardens, which was intended to preserve the native flora and fauna and display objects of art within that natural setting. Brookgreen Gardens continues to operate as a National Historic Landmark and a display garden for figurative sculpture." (Georgetown County Digital Library) A photo of the...

The New Deal supported various improvements to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden during the Great Depression, among which was the Herb Garden: "Works Progress Administration (WPA) labor was used to build the 1938 Herb Garden, a Caparn design taken from a 1577 Elizabethan knot garden." The herb garden is no longer extant. Other New Deal-funded efforts, such as bronze busts of noted naturalists that reside in the Laboratory Building rotunda, also grace the Botanic Garden.

The New Deal supported various improvements to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden during the Great Depression, among which was the Osborne Garden. "Works Progress Administration (WPA) labor was used to build the 1938 Herb Garden, a Caparn design taken from a 1577 Elizabethan knot garden. The Italian-style Osborne Garden was also constructed with labor from the Civil Works Administration and the WPA in 1939." Other New Deal-funded efforts, such as bronze busts of noted naturalists that reside in the Laboratory Building rotunda, also grace the Botanic Garden.

The buildings of Brooklyn College were financed by a massive federal Public Works Administration (PWA) project undertaken during the Great Depression. After the buildings were constructed, Works Progress Administration (WPA) laborers worked on improving the campus, primarily through landscaping efforts, beginning in 1938. The above image of WPA workers doing landscaping on the Brooklyn College campus comes from the Brooklyn Public Library. The caption reads: "Planting new shrubs on the grounds of Brooklyn College, between the hockey field and proposed tennis courts, has kept WPA gardeners busy these fall days." The WPA even maintained a plant nursery and a tulip garden on the campus, as the lower image...

This sunken garden is chiseled out of the hill adjacent to the 1871 Governor’s Mansion that overlooks the Missouri state capital. The gardens were started in the late 1930s by the WPA. Work included extensive rock wall work. There is a grand stairway that ascends to a pergola that is lit with original lighting. The view of the capital is stunning. The gardens were renamed the Carnahan Memorial Gardens after the untimely death of former governor Mel Carnahan in 2001.

Camp NA-1 was located in the National Arboretum, Washington, DC, and was home to Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) Company 1360, an all African-American unit. Many of the enrollees in Company 1360 were young men from the city itself. Company 1360 formed on June 7, 1933 at Fort George Meade, Maryland and, after initial work assignments in Chester, Virginia (Camp P-61) and Williamsburg, Virginia (Camp SP-9), the men settled into Camp NA-1 in November 1934. From then until 1941 these young African American men made the earliest significant developments to the National Arboretum – a project of the Bureau of Plant Industry...

The creation of the Cedars of Lebanon State Park in Tennessee was a multifaceted joint project of the Resettlement Administration, the CCC, the forestry division, NPS and the WPA: "Project development began in the fall of 1935, with forestry personnel, along with RA and CCC workers, planting new seedlings of juniper cedar, black walnut, black locust, ash, yellow poplar, and mulberry trees. The crews introduced erosion controls and built roads and trails... The WPA constructed recreational facilities, including picnic areas, overlook shelters on the Jackson Cave Trail, and the original park lodge. Lebanon Cedar Forest was officially opened in September 1937...

"The Conservatory Garden is a six-acre formal garden named after a conservatory (i.e. greenhouse) that was built here in 1898. During the Depression, Parks commissioner Robert Moses (1888-1981) decreed the aging structure too expensive to maintain and had it demolished during a major renovation of the park in 1934 that was paid for largely with WPA funds. The garden that replaced the Conservatory was developed by architects Gilmore Clarke (1892-1982) and Betty Sprout (1906-1962) (who later married) and opened officially on September 18, 1937. The garden is divided into three separate sections: the central Italian-style garden, the southern English-style garden...

Three different community gardens were built under one State Emergency Relief Administration (SERA) project in the cities of Alhambra (at Orange & Fremont streets), Pomona, and Arcadia. The gardens are no longer extant.

"The Gardens were developed as a joint effort between Cleveland’s ethnic communities, the City of Cleveland and the Federal Government – namely the Work Progress Administration. This is one of the aspects that sets this park aside as a historically significant place; it is a living memorial to the role WPA played in the recent US history and to the notion of multi nationalism that was surfacing at the time." "As early as 1935, the city of Cleveland began to subsidize their construction and also endorsed requests to the Works Progress Administration for garden construction. Eventually, the WPA funded much...

"When the Great Depression hit in the 1930s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt used landscape and park projects to provide relief and hope for America. The second great period of park building occurred during this ten year period when the CWA and WPA work teams focused much of their attention on our "City Park" building the Rose Garden, bathhouse, wading pool, bandstand, and the stone armory, now known as Fort Decatur Recreation Center." (decaturparks.com)

The historic Dutch Gardens in New City, New York, part of Courthouse Park, were constructed between 1935 and 1938 with federal Works Progress Administration (W.P.A.) labor. This was significant as the only W.P.A. outdoor construction project to be designed and supervised by a woman, Mary Mowbray-Clarke.

Miami and the surrounding Dade County were effectively without city or county parks until the 1930s.  The city got its first park in 1925, after which the city was devastated by a hurricane the following year. The county received its first donation of land for a park in 1929, which became Matheson Hammock Park.  In 1930, the park system got its own director and a beach park, Surfside, was added in 1932. The county began improvements on the parks using mostly convict labor and men sent by the Charity Office once the Depression hit, as well as starting a Roadside...

"This structure houses rare and beautiful plants, trees, and flowers, and is an important unit of the general park improvement program for St. Louis. The steel frame of the building supports structural glass panels on its vertical surfaces which are reasonably hailproof, and the horizontal roofs are metal covered. Great care was taken with the lighting, which was carefully studied with a model of the building before installation. The interest of the public in the displays is so great that more than 1,000,000 people have visited the 'jewel box' since its opening. It was completed in May 1937 at a construction...

The Fort Worth Botanic Garden had its origins in 1912 when the park board purchased a tract of land southwest of Trinity Park and named it Rock Springs Park. In his 1909 park master plan for Fort Worth, landscape architect George E. Kessler recommended that the city acquire the parcel because of its natural flowing springs and dense stand of native trees. The park remained largely unimproved until 1929 when work began on the creation of a lagoon and an arboretum under the direction of landscape architect S. Herbert Hare and Raymond C. Morrison, the city’s forester. In 1930 Hare and...

Frank Newhall Look Memorial Park was constructed between the years 1928 and 1930, as the result of a large one hundred and fifty acre land grant from Mrs. Fannie Burr Look who was the wife of the late Frank Newhall Look. At the time of construction Mrs. Look provided the land and the money needed to develop the land, and she established a trust fund so that the park could be kept up and maintained for future generations to enjoy. The original park contained a variety of paths, ponds, streams, gardens, and sitting areas to enjoy nature. There were also...

Several lava rock terraces at the Hawaii Nature Center (formerly the Department of Forestry's Nursery) were built by FERA in 1934.  

The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) worked to improve what is now the U.S. Department of Agriculture's High Plains Grasslands Research Station (then Cheyenne Horticultural Field Station), located northwest of Cheyenne, Wyoming. USDA.gov: "1935 – Many inprovements were made to the station; the main road was oiled from the entrance to the buildings. Civilian Conservation Corps camp of 200 men opened on station. They constructed roads, 2 miles of concrete lined ditches, irrigation system, planted thousands of trees and shrubs. They picked up hundreds of tons of stones from the experimental plots. And manure collected from nearby ranches was hauled in and spread over...

"In Clovis, the Curry County Court House is listed as one of the buildings built in 1936. Twila Ky Rutter, Grant Facilitator and Procurement Clerk, unable to locate a photograph of the building as it was originally, referred me to Don McAlavy, a local historian. He didn't have the photo I was chasing but he gave me other valuable information: i.e., the sunken garden and the arch over Hillcrest Park as WPA projects. The City provided materials, much of which were found in the area, and WPA provided manpower. There are other evidences of WPA work in Clovis but remodeling...

The Houston Federation of Garden Clubs (HFGC) was founded by several Houstonian women in 1936 with the goal of building a garden center to hold their meetings and educational forums. That dream bore fruition five years later when Mayor Oscar Holcombe applied and was approved for fifteen thousand dollars in labor by the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Originally, the HFGC ladies raised $1,100 through flower shows, fashion shows, and train trips east. The involvement of the whole city illustrated the extent of manpower for funding the garden center. In 1939, four-hundred volunteer garden club ladies along with sixty-five businessmen from...

The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) developed the International Peace Garden during the 1930s.

A site devoted to the history of the park (www.letchworthparkhistory.com) has compiled an extensive list of CCC work done in the park: During the Great Depression, Letchworth Park was the site of several Civilian Conservation Camps. (See the Glimpse of the CCC) The information highlights the work done by the CCC "boys" in the Park, and is taken from Annual Reports of the Genesee State Park Commission during the time period. Great Bend Camp SP-5 (in operation for 30 months) constructed the camp built 6 miles of 18 ft wide gravel road installed 400 ft of 6" under drain constructed 15 concrete...

The Works Progress Administration (WPA) made extensive improvements to Lithia Park, a 100-acre park at the heart of Ashland OR, from 1935 to 1938. Lithia Park was established in the early 20th century along Ashland Creek above the main town plaza, next to a small Chautauqua Park (added to Lithia Park in 1917).  A duck pond with waterfall was built on the site of an old flour mill in 1910 and then John McLaren, the designer of San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, was invited to landscape the park in 1914-15.  McLaren transformed the little valley around the creek into a romantic...

The Morcom Amphitheater of Roses – originally known as the Municipal Rose Garden – is one of the grandest city rose gardens in the country.  It began as a project of the Oakland Businessmen's Garden Club in 1930 and the main force behind it (and the later Berkeley Rose Garden) was Dr. Charles Vernon Covell, a dentist and member of the Garden Club. The New Deal played a vital role in building the rose garden, but it was not the Works Progress Administration (WPA) that did the work, as commonly thought. Instead, help came from the State Employment Relief Administration (SERA),...

Nipmuck State Forest's Mountain Laurel Sanctuary began "as a beautification project of the Civilian Conservation Corps" in 1935. Located along Snow Hill Road, it features Connecticuts state flowers, and is particularly beautiful during peak bloom.

The United States National Arboretum was established as a public center for scientific research, education, and gardens to conserve and showcase the floral bounty of America and the world.  It was authorized in 1927, but the actual development of the arboretum was accomplished during the 1930s by the New Deal. The Public Works Administration (PWA) funded land acquisition, as well as extensive planning and mapmaking, for the Arboretum. Young men of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) performed the work under the supervision of the Bureau of Plant Industry (today's Agricultural Research Service) of the Department of Agriculture (USDA)  The Arboretum was established by an...

In an effort to beautify the area around a pond in Neshotah Park, the City of Two Rivers had rocks hauled to the park over a period of about three years. In late October 1938 50 WPA workers were transferred from other work in the city to finish the park project. A contemporary newspaper description outlined the scope of the project: "The pond will be lined with the rocks and several elevations provided so that the water will cascade from an outlet rock cap to a pool several feet below and will then go to a lower pool several feet below...

The Federal Writers' Project wrote of the New York Botanical Garden: "The botanical garden, incorporated by the State Legislature in 1891, after a two-year campaign for funds, is maintained by city appropriations, membership fees, and funds from the sale of publications. In recent years considerable improvements have been effected by PWA and WPA grants." WPA work at the gardens included the construction of "ome 14,000 linear feet of 10- foot paths" and "the transplanting of 54 large conifers, 41 large deciduous shrubs and 93 medium- sized plants of Ilex opaca." (https://mertzdigital.nybg.org)

The Civilian Conservation Corps (C.C.C.)'s Camp Graves operated between May 27, 1933 and April 22, 1936 at Nipmuck State Forest in Union, Connecticut. Among the C.C.C. accomplishments were "8 miles of truck trails" and "fire suppression on the Connecticut—Massachusetts border." Additional projects are linked to from this page.

The Norfolk Botanical Garden is a 155 acre garden with 12 miles of paved trails and 65,000 plants. It receives about 300,000 visitors every year. Among the many interesting things at the Garden are tram tours, boat tours, a library, and a Children’s Adventure Garden. The beginning and early development of the Norfolk Botanical Garden is described on the Garden’s website (see source note below): “On June 30, 1938, Representative Norman R. Hamilton announced a Works Progress Administration (WPA) grant of $76,278 for the Azalea Garden project. Since most of the male labor force was at work with other projects for the...

The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was present in Death Valley National Monument  from 1933 to 1942.  The main CCC camp was at Cow Creek, just north of the park headquarters and visitors center at Furnace Creek.  CCC 'boys' built the basic infrastructure of the new monument, such as grading roads, erecting buildings for park staff and operations, and building campgrounds – activities so large that they are treated on separate pages.  In addition, the CCC worked to develop wells and springs, install water pipes, and string electric and telephone lines to make the park habitable.  Other improvements were an airplane landing strip and...

The Civil Works Administration (CWA) and Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) supplied labor for the development of a "Rhododendron Gardens Park" in Asheville, North Carolina. The project cost was $4,089.29, all footed by the federal government. The location and status of this project is unknown to Living New Deal, although there was a Rhododendron Park reputedly located in West Asheville. A 1936 USGS map places Rhododendron Park at the coordinates shown.