A lawn can look timeless. It is not.
The landscapes of Tufts have been inhabited, divided, cultivated, built, cleared, planted, maintained and redesigned.
This is based on research by:
Tufts Archival Research Center (TARC) collections and photograph series; History of Tufts College, 1854–1896; Tufts University’s Deep Roots at Tufts; the Massachusett Tribe at Ponkapoag; Unsettling the Archive and related Tufts University Art Galleries research; the Center for the Humanities at Tufts project University Ecologies and the Question of the Commons; the 2024 Bromfield-Pearson Outdoor Space Design Proposal; and the project’s Tufts AR Living Archive Register.
Site-specific claims are being checked against original archival records, mapped evidence and present-day community review where appropriate.
Indigenous homelands
The history of this site does not begin with the university. Indigenous presence is treated in the present tense: continuing homelands, sovereignty, knowledge and community.
Parceling, ownership, institution
The research follows how land became institutional property and how those changes altered who could use it and for what purposes. Current research does not establish whether this lawn falls within any specific donated parcel.
Bromfield-Pearson and grounds labor
A contemporaneous Tufts history documents the Bromfield-Pearson School and an expanded grounds and maintenance workforce, naming Patrick Byrne and Nicholas Dwyer.
Open grass beside Bromfield-Pearson
Archival photographs show short, open grass adjoining the building from approximately 1900 onward. They do not establish when it was planted, its species, or exact overlap with the present project lawn.
“The Hill a Garden”
President John Cousens promoted a campus-beautification program known as “The Hill a Garden.” It is evidence of an institutional commitment to campus beautification and the deliberate shaping of the university landscape during this period. While it is not evidence of a particular intervention on this lawn, it places Bromfield-Pearson within a broader culture of planned grounds, horticulture and campus image-making.
Reading the living site
Trees, paths, desire lines, shade, drainage, soil, maintenance, accessibility, noise and patterns of use are evidence too. Field observation is part of the historical method.
Making a lawn
A lawn is produced through labor.
Grading, seeding, mowing, watering, fertilizing, leaf removal, pruning and repair continually remake the surface. The research asks when the lawn took its current form, who maintained it, how mechanization changed that work and what institutional ideas shaped it.
The lawn is not empty land. It is a designed ecological, social and institutional condition.
AR: a living archive
Site-specific layers include continuing Indigenous homelands; parceling and institutional ownership; college expansion; lawn-making and maintenance; construction and mechanization; managed turf and alternate ecologies; and the question of the commons.
In progress.