Cultivating the History of Place

In the middle of the urbanized, ever-changing D.C. landscape, the museum and collections of Dumbarton Oaks sits on sixteen acres of land designed by landscape architect Beatrix Farrand and once included the twenty seven acres now known as Dumbarton Oaks Park. Located in Georgetown, Dumbarton Oaks is today a center for Byzantine and Pre-Columbian studies, as well as garden and landscape studies, under the stewardship of Harvard University, some 450 miles away. Once primarily known as an elite garden and museum, Dumbarton Oaks is now leading radical change in how we think about the history of place, informing future scholarship and activism.

This groundbreaking work is being led by Dr. Thaïsa Way, director of garden and landscape studies at Dumbarton Oaks. “We all live our lives in place, and I think we know relatively little about how that impacts us and how we impact the places that we are in,” says Way. “If we are going to tell rich and thick public histories, we actually need to know more.”

To support a more robust, multivocal understanding of the histories and experiences of place, Dumbarton Oaks is partnering with Mellon through funding from the Humanities in Place grantmaking area. Through a five-year initiative, “Democracy and Landscape: Race, Identity, and Difference,” the institution is hosting public events, developing programs to advance the teaching of place, and fostering new scholarship to support that teaching.

Under Way’s guidance, the program has worked to attract a richer diversity of disciplines and scholars, recognizing that the study of place goes beyond the traditional spheres of landscape studies, art, and architecture to encompass fields like history, geography, sociology, and even comparative literature. Way wants to change the perception that Dumbarton Oaks is focused largely on garden history, making it a destination for “scholars working on topics of race and identity and difference in place that probably did not see themselves at Dumbarton Oaks at one point.”

Dumbarton Oaks welcomes these scholars through a number of fellowships ranging from one month to an academic year. In particular, Dumbarton Oaks is supporting new scholarship around the concept of spatial justice, which centers the role of space, place, and land in histories of social and racial justice. In addition to understanding how racist policies like redlining have shaped the lived experience of a place, scholars are examining how place-making has played a role in resistance and activism. Way and her colleagues are also interrogating what spatial justice could look like in the future. “I think that is critical to activism in the future, not to be talking in grand generalities but to be able to talk with specificity about the lived experience in place.”

But what about the lived experience of Dumbarton Oaks itself?

Most histories of Dumbarton Oaks begin around 1920, when the property was purchased by Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss, patrons of art and scholarship in the humanities. The Blisses transferred a portion of the property to Harvard University in 1940 for use as a research center and museum focused on Byzantine art and studies. Over time, the institution expanded its purview to include pre-Columbian and garden and landscape studies.

Now, the team at Dumbarton Oaks is looking inward and examining how they understand and tell their own history of place. As Way puts it, “What we’re asking other places to do, we’re asking of ourselves, which is to understand ‘how did this place come to be?’”

The first step is ongoing, in-depth research to uncover the multiple narratives of the place. Way recently invited an archaeologist to the property to explore where they might conduct an archaeological dig. She is also enlisting the expertise of Dr. Gabrielle Tayac, who serves on the Mellon Initiative Advisory Board and is a member of the Piscataway Indian Nation, which inhabited the land and shaped it for generations before being displaced by colonization.

In addition to Indigenous histories and narratives, Dumbarton Oaks is examining how the lived experience of enslavement is inscribed in the land with two scholars, Abner Aldarondo and Kyra March (both Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellows), investigating a variety of archives. The gardens were designed by the landscape architect Beatrix Farrand in the early 1920s. However, we now know that her designs left much of the existing landscape intact. Research has uncovered that this landscape was shaped by enslaved labor—some of the trees on the property were planted by enslaved gardeners, and many of the boxwoods were originally from the James River plantations in Virginia. While these gardeners also contributed to the beauty and the lived experience of the gardens, their history has largely been erased.

As Dumbarton Oaks examines its own history, the impact of this research will extend well beyond its garden walls. “I hope this is a model for how other places might begin to think of a different way of looking at our legacies,” says Way. While many scholarly institutions are beginning to grapple with their histories, most center on the history the founders, the donors, or the prior inhabitants—few are examining the place itself. “Another way to understand our legacy is to actually think about the built environment that we learn and teach and engage in community in. How did this land come to be? How did this place come to be? Why did we come to think of it the way we think of it?”

The next step for Dumbarton Oaks is to reveal the newly uncovered narratives, both through public scholarship and by rethinking how they interpret their gardens for guests. By understanding and telling a more complete and complex narrative of who has shaped and been shaped by the place, Dumbarton Oaks aims to become a more welcoming space for visitors and scholars who may not have previously seen themselves reflected in the place. Says Way, “My biggest hope is that this will be a place where scholars of place know they are welcome and will want to engage with our community.”