Rehabilitative Ground Disability, Labor, and Ecological Legacies of the Arnold Arboretum

Project Summary

I received $2,935 to conduct dissertation research from October 3, 2025 to March 15, 2026. I proposed studying how the Arnold Arboretum’s physical landscape developed alongside discussions of urban parks, ecology, space, and health from 1880 to 1910. This research has laid the groundwork for the first two chapters of my dissertation

 

Archival Outcomes:

The generous funding from HMUI enabled me to travel to and request the digitization of several archives in Cambridge and Boston, MA, and Washington, D.C. These archives contained maps, property development records, historic landmark reports, letters, medical records, business transactions, drawings, and academic lecture notes. From them, I learned more about the landscape around the Arnold Arboretum and its relationship to urban Boston and the Caribbean. For a full list of archives I accessed during this grant period, see Appendix A.

I was also able to take a GIS course through the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences’ January Term offerings. Here, I started mapping the medical communities surrounding the Arnold Arboretum in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries

 

Project Finding Summary:

The archival material I have been able to view and digitize, which will serve as the foundation for the first two chapters of my dissertation, revealed the relationships that Boston’s merchants and physicians had to physical land in Jamaica Plain, South Boston, and the Caribbean. Seth Adams, who posthumously endowed the Adams Nervine Asylum, which operated alongside the Arnold Arboretum, operated a sugar refinery in South Boston on land physically built out into the harbor. In the refinery, he employed Irish immigrants to handle sugar imported from Cuba. While this hard urban labor disabled and even killed his employees, it was also said to have disabled Seth Adams, with the pressures of overwork in an industrial labor setting driving him to madness. Before his death, Seth Adams pursued treatments deeply rooted in landscape, especially by investing in a homeopathic institute in a small community of Westborough, Massachusetts, where patients engaged in physical exercises and bathing rituals in clean, rural air.

Adams perhaps sought to replicate this experience by demanding in his will that the asylum be at least 15 miles from Boston and in a rural area. For their part, the first physicians at the Adams Nervine Asylum grew up in rural communities throughout Massachusetts, including Jamaica Plain, where they and their siblings experimented with medicinal botany. The letters I have collected help me understand how these doctors grew from boys pulling medicinal flowers from local swamps to paternalists intent on constructing their own particular healing landscape next to the Arboretum: one curated with perfect grass and a horse pasture, but near enough the Arboretum for the familiar rambles and medicinal flora. These findings directly address the grant’s goals of supporting research on design, urban life, and social structures across historic built and natural environments.

 

Immediate Deliverables:

During the grant period, I completed and submitted a prospectus for my dissertation (attached).

 

Next Steps:

Building on this work, I have developed a concrete plan for completing these dissertation chapters and sharing my findings with scholarly and public audiences:

  • Because of this grant, I was able to receive training in mapping local landscapes. With this training, I am developing maps of the South Boston and Jamaica Plain landscapes central to my archival findings, which will supplement my writing in Chapter 1.
  • Because this grant enabled me to access numerous archival records, I am on track to complete my first draft of the dissertation, Chapter 1 by the end of Summer 2026, and a first draft of Chapter 2 in Spring 2027.
  • I am applying to present my Chapter 2 findings on a panel at the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Gender, and Sexualities’ Big Berks Conference in June 2027.

  • I am continuing to discuss my work with Hidden Jamaica Plain and the Arnold Arboretum and to think alongside them about how it can contribute to public programming and local historical narratives.

     

Appendix A: Archival Collections Accessed During Grant Period
  • Arnold Arboretum Special Collections and Archives, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
    • Legal documents, 1872–
  • Baker Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 
    • Adams Sugar Refinery Records
  • Boston Public Library Special Collections and Archives
    • Seth Adams Estate Papers ○ Papers of Sullivan and Barbour
  • Center for the History of Medicine, Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Boston, MA
    • Henry Pickering Bowditch Papers, 1809–1961
  • Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
    • William James Papers
    • Robert Edes Correspondence
    • Parkman Family Papers
    • Correspondence, Immigration Restriction League (U.S.) Records
  • Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, MA
    • Adams Nervine Coal Bin Serials
  • Massachusetts Trial Courts Record Center, Boston, MA
    • Equity File Papers, Adams v. Adams
  • Smithsonian National Museum for American History, Washington, D.C.

    • Sugar, Warshaw Collection of Business Americana

       

Grant recipient: Riley Sutherland

(To access the prospectus, please reach out to Reiley directly: rileysutherland@fas.harvard.edu)