Allen Steiger, left, great grandson of Albert Steiger — who donated land for Chauncey Allen Park and Grandmothers’ Garden — talks with John Davies of Westfield in front of a painting of the garden at the Westfield Athenaeum.
Reminder Publishing photo by Mike Lydick
WESTFIELD — Anne Wellington delved into the history of Grandmothers’ Garden, something she’s been researching for nearly 30 years, during a recent presentation at the Westfield Athenaeum as part of the garden’s 90th anniversary celebration.
A self-employed Amherst landscape designer since 1997, Wellington is a founding board member of the Friends of Grandmothers’ Garden. Her talk on Aug. 19 before a packed crowd of nearly 90 people in the Athenaeum’s Lang Auditorium was based on a manuscript that began as a college thesis. She soon hopes to publish it as a book titled “An Old-Fashioned Garden: The Story of Grandmothers’ Garden and Chauncey Allen Park.”
Reminder Publishing photos by Mike Lydick
Wellington shared how Albert Steiger — part of an immigrant family that came to Westfield — worked in the woolen mills of Huntington, then founded a chain of department stores throughout Western Massachusetts. He worked with other volunteers to transform a 10-acre parcel of land into a public park and an award-winning colonial revival garden.
“This garden is a garden about memory. It’s a memorial garden, but it’s also about the nostalgia of what we think about when we want to embody our fondest childhood memories. And a lot of this happens in gardens. It happens in landscapes, and this garden is certainly extraordinarily reflective of that notion,” said Wellington, who started her thesis in 1996.
The original property for what now is Chauncey Allen Park — named after Albert Steiger’s father-in-law — was first surveyed in 1924 and encompasses Grandmothers’ Garden. Both are on Smith Avenue, across from Westfield Technical Academy, a building that originally housed Westfield High School.
Wellington added that a design for the park was done in 1929, but Albert and his wife Izetta Steiger decided they would donate the land to the city of Westfield for the new high school.
“The high school was built, and then the stipulation for getting the rest of the land to the city was that they were going to request putting in a garden to commemorate Albert Steiger’s grandmother, Mary Steiger — which is how it became known as Grandmothers’ Garden,” she said.
Elizabeth Bush Fowler, then president of Springfield Garden Club, spearheaded the design and direction of the garden. She traveled to Virginia, and worked with Thomas Desmond, a landscape architect from Connecticut, to design the garden. In 1933, after researching colonial gardens, Desmond prepared plans for an old-fashioned garden.
Workers from the Works Progress Administration, and volunteers, constructed the garden during the Great Depression. Plants were donated by citizens and the garden was dedicated in 1934. The first Grandmothers’ Garden Grandmothers Day celebration took place in 1936.
Wellington said what is unique about this garden is the amount of community support: “When it was designed and built, it was an incredible effort by the community to do both the labor and to provide plants that were put into the garden. Nobody was getting grants back in those days. We weren’t getting gifts of money. So, it was really gifts of plants.”
She said the garden exists today because of this ongoing community support and community effort.
“The garden is blessed with the fact that it not only is maintained by volunteers, but I think it looks better than ever. It’s just re-markable. Every time I go, I can’t get enough photographs of how beautiful it is,” she said.
The Friends group was formed in 1994 when the city wanted to close the garden and turn it into a parking lot for the school. In 1995, the city signed a lease to the Friends for 75 years. Wellington is hopeful the city will renew the lease in 50 years.
Wellington became involved in the effort to restore the garden in the 1990s when the Friends were just maintaining the beds. She has a bachelor of science degree in landscape architecture from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and a master’s certificate in landscape design from the Radcliffe Seminars at Radcliffe College in Cambridge.
In 1997 — when Wellington finished her thesis — the Friends used it to hire a landscape architect to draw up plans. Documents in her thesis were the basis for information to begin rehabilitating the garden — which included a year-long fundraising effort that raised $150,000 for the first phase of that restoration. There was a grand reopening in 2000.
The garden is important because it’s “an exceptional” example of the colonial revival style that was popular in the 1920s and 1930s — which is when the famous gardens of Williamsburg, Virgina, were being redesigned.
“This was an important style of a very specific era,” Wellington said. “One of the main aspects of the garden was its formal layout withe bilateral symmetry, with one side the same as the other, brick edge walks and terraces of different elevations.”
She noted, however, that “in the garden today, you won’t see some of those elevation changes that were in the original. In the 1990s renovation, the lower terrace was brought up so that it could be ADA compliant, and also to help alleviate with some of the wet soils that weren’t very good for the herbs. So, it was a good reason to change it.”
Allen Steiger, the great-grandson of Albert Steiger, and his wife Diane, were in the audience for Wellington’s presentation. A member of the Friends board of directors, he said Wellington was a “catalyst” for work to restore the garden.
“Grandmother’s Garden was saved with the help of community volunteers like Anne, and donations. We’re hopeful that our 90th anniversary celebration will help draw more volunteers as well as more donations to help maintain the garden,” he said.
Wellington’s presentation was one of several events the Friends have organized during the spring and summer. One of the final events will be an old-fashioned garden party at Chauncey Allen Park on Sept. 7. For more information about the celebration, visit grandmothersgarden.org/90th-anniversary-events.
