Elm Bank Horticulture Center

The Elm Bank Horticulture Center, home of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, occupies 36 acres (15 ha) of Elm Bank Reservation, a 175-acre (71 ha) recreational area of woodlands, fields, and former estate property on the Charles River managed by the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation. The estate's entrance is located at 900 Washington Street (Route 16), Wellesley, Massachusetts, United States, with the major portion of the grounds located in the neighboring town of Dover. In 1987, the entire site was added to the National Register of Historic Places as Elm Bank.

History

Property records date back to 1732 when Thomas Fuller owned the tract on land then known as the Natick Plain. The property earned the sobriquet Elm Bank after Colonel John Jones acquired the land in 1740 and planted elm trees along the riverside. After being occupied by families named Loring, Broad, and Otis, the property was sold for $10,000 in 1874 to Benjamin Pierce Cheney, a founder of a delivery company that became American Express. At the time of Cheney's death in 1895, the property contained over 200 acres (80 hectares), and passed to his eldest daughter Alice in 1905. In 1907, Alice and her husband, Dr. William Hewson Baltzell, engaged the architectural firm of Carrère and Hastings to design a Neo-Georgian manor house. They also commissioned the Olmsted Brothers firm, the most prominent landscape designers of the era, for the estate's site planning and to design new gardens and improve existing ones. In the 1940s, the property became a seminary housing a group of Stigmatine Fathers, who constructed a school building and ran a summer camp in the 1960s and 70s. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts purchased the property in the mid 1970s. It then served as the home of the Quinobin Regional Technical School.