The Garden History of Heiress Huguette Clark, Part Two

Sometime on their coast to coast travels, the family stopped in at the rootstock of their great wealth: Butte, Montana. They were photographed there around 1917; Huguette, age 11, and her 15 year old sister Andree. The girls were isolated together in their cocoon of wealth, and Huguette seems never to have recovered from her sister's death from meningitis just two years after the photo was taken.

They are standing at an outlook over Columbia Gardens, 68 acres which then-Senator William A. Clark purchased in 1899 and spent $125,000 to improve to serve as a family recreation park for the citizens of Butte.   

"During my late teens, I often danced the night away at the Columbia Gardens Pavilion. The Gardens, an oasis on the edge of a mining camp, was a magical place with hundreds of acres of gardens, lawns, and thrill rides. The Pavilion’s dance floor—the largest west of the Mississippi—occupied fifteen thousand square feet. An evening in that elaborate pavilion, with its many windows opening to the hanging flower baskets and surrounding gardens, was a delight. One danced to the live music of Glenn Miller, Duke Ellington, Guy Lombardo, Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, and Harry James. America’s big bands were attracted to the nation’s Mining City and to its antithesis, the green lawns and gleaming white buildings of the Columbia Gardens." (Pat Williams, Drumlammon Views, Spring 2009)
  

Butte-Silver Bow Public Library


Clark is supposed to have been ungenerous, a hoarder rather than a sharer of his riches, but he was a local hero for making the Gardens as a retreat for citizens of a city "blasted by the poison fumes from the smelteries in the neighborhood....he [Clark] saw grass fade under the withering touch of the fumes and the branches of the green trees turn to gray, brittle fingers of the decaying body...the arsenic contaminated air of the busy city...to spend frequent afternoons in the groves of the Gardens is to enhance one's desire to live and to forget that Butte is such a terribly dusty, smoky, barren place."
   

from "Sights and Scenes and a Brief History of Columbia Gardens"

He did own the streetcar line that carried visitors to the garden, though (he owned all the streetcars in town) and there were 150,000 visitors the year it opened in 1899, and 375,000 in 1902 when Adolf H. Heilbronner  wrote "Sights and Scenes and a Brief History of Columbia Gardens" (available in its entirety at Google books).  Those visitors could traverse woodland walks with streamside "alluring spots", rustic seats and bridges; dine al fresco in the picnic grove, stop by the zoo and aviary, or visit the Chinese pagoda and the fish fountain.  They could ride a boat down a gigantic 'chute' and into the lake, play on the swings, see-saws and carousel, eat at the cafe, try their hand at the shooting gallery or see a moving picture show.  If more enamored of nature than attractions one could embark on a mountain climb into the Rockies, whose dramatic scenery hovered just behind. Soon, there was a baseball diamond (center field has never had a better view) and later a roller coaster.

from "Sights and Scenes and a Brief History of Columbia Gardens"

And yet even with all this, "...the overshadowing feature, so regarded by the great majority, is the immense floral display. Columbia Gardens, as a pleasure resort, is famed from sea to sea and from Labrador to the Rio Grande River and in foreign countries, as the home of the prettiest collection of flowers in the Northwest...today there are in the Gardens and hothouses more than 150,000 different kinds of growing plants, including most delicate products of the tropics, which are housed in the large glass nurseries. The hothouses are on the list of attractions most enjoyed by the visitors, for here are shown a variety of plants of the most classic order."

"In the hothouses are seeded the thousands of pansies that ultimately adorn the flower plots throughout the Gardens. This climate is congenial to the pansy, which, at the Gardens, grows to enormous size, some measuring as large as three inches in diameter. Fifteen thousand pansy plants were transplanted this season, which yielded millions of vari-colored blooms."

The children were allowed to pick the pansies on certain days, an event preserved as one of the many postcards of Columbia Gardens that can be found scattered around the web.

found at Penny Postcards from Montana

 The pansies were the primary component of the millions of flowers planted out into pictoral beds in a naive, folk-art style.  There was a gigantic harp, an anchor, US flags and a butterfly, all superintended by head gardener Victor Siegel, a German immigrant to Butte.

 
The butterfly was one of most remembered sights of Columbia Gardens, which were permanently closed on Labor Day in 1973 in spite of the strenuous objections of Butte residents.  The Anaconda Company, which had purchased the Gardens from Clark famiy heirs in 1928, wanted to expand their mine and took not only the Gardens but the neighborhoods that had over the century grown up around them.  In 2004, the city of Butte restored the butterfly, though they were unable to do so at its original location, which is now a mine pit.  


by darwinsbulldog at flickr

So were Huguette and Andree allowed to partake of the park's delights rather than just pose at its edge?  I think so...Clark was justly proud of his what he had made, one of several donations to the city including Montana Technical College and the Paul Clark home for orphaned boys, and said "The Columbia Gardens is my monument.  Of my many business enterprises it is the one I love best, and it is practically the only one on which I lose money."


It must have been a scandal, though:  Clarks only granddaughter, Katherine Culver Clark, had been photographed on the swings for Heilbronner's book.  She looks to be perhaps five in 1902....the same year that Andree was born to a new supposed bride who was younger than Clark's daughters.  Huguette did not follow until 1906.  It is unlikely that the town residents would have forgotten. 


Katherine Culver Clark on the Columbia Gardens Playground,
from Sights and Scenes of Columbia Gardens



The Garden History of Heiress Huguette Clark, Part One

There’s been a kerfuffle on the internet lately about Huguette Clark, the still-living daughter of a copper baron who was eligible for service in the Civil War, and who in spite of a great fortune that funds silent shuttered estates stays alone in a hospital at the age of one-hundred-and-four.

Her sudden celebrity has led to lawsuits against her attorney, accountant, and bankers for improperly handling her estimated $500 million fortune…some actions brought by distant relatives who have suddenly (conveniently) appeared on the scene. All of this seems unlikely to add happiness to an aged woman who long ago chose a deeply private, even reclusive, life for her own reasons.

A MSN piece by Bill Dedman has largely searched out Huguette’s biographical details in an online article that started the Huguette furor. I thought I’d see what remnants could be found of a gentler place:  the gardens she knew.

(The biographical details and dates in this piece are taken from Dedman’s article.)

Huguette’s first garden was Central Park itself. By the time she was born in 1906, her father had already made a fortune in the Montana copper mines, bought a senatorial seat, and lost his first wife. Speculation was rampant as to why the Senator was now building a massive new abode in New York City, but the answer became clear in 1904 when he acknowledged Anna, nee La Chapelle as his second ‘wife’, and the already two-year old Andree as his daughter. At the time of their unrecorded vows, he was 62 and she was 23. Their new house was a bombastic accretion that billowed from corner to corner of its its Fifth Avenue lot and had its own private coal train. No space was wasted on a garden, but right across the street was the Central Park of the early century. It is unlikely that Huguette was allowed to join the rabble on its newly installed playgrounds. But perhaps she was taken to sail boats at the Conservatory Water which was just down from the house.

The William C. Clark house at 5th and 77th in New York City (New York Historical Society)



Boats on the Conservatory Water at Central Park c. 1900 (wikimedia commons)

William C. Clark established the family’s bicoastal presence when he bought their Santa Barbara estate from Eleanor Graham, wife of a Tulsa oil man gone bust, in 1923. Huguette was 16. The 23 acre estate encompassed an Italianate house with extensive gardens, and its name, ‘Bellosguardo’, was probably chosen as much for its European cachet as for its translation--‘beautiful place’--though it did, and still does, command an astonishing Pacific view. New oil millionaires frequently used Italianate architecture, gardens, and art to cover backgrounds with more determination than education and draw attention away from boots still wet with the muck of the gusher fields. It was a way of joining themselves to the club of old, east coast money, whose self-assured members had taken on those lofty stylings. And besides, Edith Wharton, arbiter of all that was tasteful, had written of the real, Italian, Bellosguardo. It was a choice within easy reach, like naming your child after a movie star, or a president.



 

Bellosguardo Gardens c. 1920, from the USC Digital Archives

Before the Graham’s marriage went bad and their finances even worse, Bellosguardo had been abuzz with Santa Barbara social life and far more documentation exists of the garden from this era than that of the Clarks' own. Nevertheless, this is how Huguette would have initially known the place, with terracing and classical balustrades and faux-roman sculptures. Its setting, if not its architecture, is sublime. It may be the terrace below the house that can be seen in stills from In the days of Trajan, a silent film shot there in 1913 for which its classicism was ideal—Mrs. Graham was a lover of theatre and an early supporter of the film industry. (I haven’t been able to obtain this film, but see Silent Era Filmmaking by Robert Birchard). It also gives a glimpse of the lush semi-tropical plantings that were judged ‘a marvel of landscaping skill’, according to Santa Barbara historian Michael Redmon.



View of Bellosguardo c. 1920, from the USC Digital Archives



Still image from Days of Trajan (from Silent Era Filmmaking by Robert Birchard)



They had been created by Austin Strong, an associate of Francis Wilson (architect of the Graham’s villa) and a fascinating, peripatetic character who grew up in Hawaii, New Zealand, and in Samoa with his step-grandfather—none other than Robert Louis Stevenson. He studied landscape architecture at Harvard, designed Cornwall Park in Aukland and practiced briefly in California before chucking it all to become a playwright in 1905. The Graham’s gardens, those the Clarks knew for the first nearly ten years of their residence in the house, must have been one of his final commissions.



So though the reports about Huguette often feature prominently the house and garden in their current state (as below, they are conveniently visible from the air) it was the earlier landscape of Austin Strong, and the Francis Wilson house, that she may have known best.  They, not the existing house and garden, were the setting of her ill-fated marriage and would be torn down, for a fresh start in more ways than one, not long after.  More soon. 

Found Functions: Math in the Garden

 

Searching for fractals in the landscape is by now common, but Nikki Graziano, a student in both math and photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology has expanded the hunt to include functions.  When she "finds a function" in nature, she uses a graphing package to generate (something close to) its mathematical equivalent, and overlays it on the photograph for a new way of seeing.  (Thanks, Ryan!)