Park History

From the moment that Ninah Cummer made contact with the Olmsted Brothers landscape design firm in Brookline, Massachusetts, Memorial Park was destined for national significance. The Olmsted Brothers were renowned for designing national and city parks, private residences, campuses, libraries, and state capitol buildings, with projects ranging geographically from all corners of the continental United States. The firm was run by stepbrothers John Charles Olmsted (1852-1920) and Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. (1870-1957), sons of the preeminent landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903), who famously designed Central Park in Manhattan, New York and the emerald necklace of Boston and is considered by many to be the inventor of the modern urban park. Both brothers were also founding members of the American Society of Landscape Architects and helped start the first professional training program for landscape architects at Harvard.

Perhaps the Olmsted Brothers firm’s greatest contribution was its legacy of park planning and design, seen in individual parks and in comprehensive park systems all over the United States. From Baltimore to Seattle, Louisville to Yosemite, the Olmsted Brothers made recommendations for well-thought-out systems of public space and provided specific designs for hundreds of sites. In their reports they wrote eloquently of the purposes and benefits of parks: providing fresh air and visual beauty for stressed and crowded city dwellers, exercise for people ever more engaged in “confining occupations,” structured and unstructured play, both physical and mental for children, youth, and adults, and the “social recreation” of meeting up, people-watching, and seeing and being seen. Always of key concern were the aesthetics of good design, pleasing compositions, and fitting into the sense of place that is unique to each locale. They applied their theories and principles, with clarity of each park’s or each space’s purpose, with functionality and with elegance, in countless designs.

Memorial Park is forever linked with the outstanding legacy and body of work created by one of the most important landscape design firms in the history of the profession. In addition, because of the intimate size of Memorial Park in relation to other Olmsted Brothers’ projects, as well as the quality of its plan and the degree to which it remains intact, Memorial Park has been called by some architectural historians the finest small urban park in the nation designed by the Olmsted Brothers still in existence today.

Of course, Memorial Park would not be the park we know today without the local connection between Ninah Cummer and the Olmsted Brothers. Although the initial connection with the Olmsted Brothers was made in 1921 upon a recommendation to the Citizens Committee by noted horticulturist Dr. Harold Hume of Glen St. Mary Nurseries “Florida’s oldest nursery, established in 1881,” the ultimate connection was made in 1922, when Ninah Cummer invited the Olmsted Brothers to have a representative come to Jacksonville to discuss the park. By correspondence dated February 3, 1922, Olmsted Brothers principal J.F. Dawson met with the Citizens Committee, learned about Pillars’ concept for the memorial, and developed an initial plan and sketch for Memorial Park. In an instant, the park went from an open vision to a detailed plan with intimate design and purpose. Ninah Cummer led the charge from there. With her penchant for style and careful detail, she engaged in correspondence and friendly debate with the Olmsted Brothers leading up to the construction of Memorial Park. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Charles Adrian Pillars (1870-1937) was a mature, accomplished, and nationally known sculptor before the Citizens Committee selected him in 1920 to design the memorial he named Spiritualized Life. Born and trained in the Midwest, Pillars settled in northeast Florida in 1894. He was a student of the Beaux Arts tradition of dramatic, romantic, classically inspired, and often allegorical sculpture that had dominated much civic art in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Pillars studied under renowned Chicago sculptor Lorado Taft, creator of the monumental Columbus Fountain at Washington’s Union Station, and a number of famous works in Chicago and elsewhere.

In his composition of Life for Memorial Park, Pillars made powerful use of the grand, theatrical style of Beaux Arts sculpture. Even though this style was regarded as somewhat old-fashioned by the 1920s, Pillars nonetheless found it fitting to tell a moving story of the true spirit of those who served. He wrote that he “desired this memorial to present the idea of life, its struggle and its victory” and summed up his inspiration for Life as follows:

While striving to make a composition visualizing this, I found a poem by Alan Seeger, a soldier-victim of the war. At once I saw the typical spirit of the boys who went overseas saw with their eyes a world in the insane grip of greed and ambition, caught in the ceaseless swirl of selfishness, hate and covetousness, ever struggling against submergence. I saw these boys giving up their homes, sweethearts, wives, and mothers to go overseas and through the supreme sacrifice make secure the happiness and safety of their loved ones. With this vivid picture in mind, I constructed a sphere to represent the world, engirdled with masses of swirling water typifying the chaotic earth forces. In this surging mass of waters, I shaped human figures, all striving to rise above this flood, struggling for mere existence. Last, surmounting these swirling waters, with their human freight, I placed the winged figure of Youth, representative of spiritual life, the spirit of these boys which was the spirit of victory. Immortality attained not through death, but deeds; not a victory of brute force, but of spirit. This figure of Youth Sacrificed wears his crown of laurels won. He holds aloft an olive branch, the emblem of peace.

It was that inspiration that led to the creation of arguably the most iconic sculpture in Jacksonville.