What may appear at first glance to be an overgrown pile of boulders and vegetation on a small triangular parklet in the village of North Easton, Massachusetts, is actually a significant landscape feature designed through the partnership of the country’s most prominent architect, Henry Hobson Richardson, and landscape architect, Frederick Law Olmsted. Beginning in 1877, the wealthy Ames family, led by Frederick Lothrop Ames, commissioned elite architect, H. H. Richardson, to design a town library, the Ames Free Library. Years later in 1879, the children of Congressman Oakes Ames, hired Richardson to design another building immediately south of the library, to serve as the town hall, named Oakes Ames Memorial Hall. After these structures were completed, landscape architect, Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer of New York’s Central Park and Boston’s Emerald Necklace parks, was hired to landscape the site surrounding the Memorial Hall. Richardson had mentioned the desire to create a continuous site here, which would flow into the triangular parcel south of his two landmark buildings. For this small site, Olmsted designed the Rockery, built as a Civil War memorial to the town’s dead and a small landscape as a cairn, drawing from the ancient symbolism of the cairn as a memorial or burial marker.
