User:Tdesmond7/sandbox

= Thomas Henry Desmond =

Biography
Thomas Henry Desmond was a registered engineer, land surveyor, and landscape architect in the Northeastern US. He was born on December 19, 1884 in Hyde Park, MA and died on May 20, 1950.

Family
Married Olive Antoinette Eddy (born August 20, 1884 in Brunswick, N.Y.) in Simsbury, CT on June 1, 1910. The Eddy family has traced ancestry back to Charlemagne and Charles (the hammer) Martel, as well as four (five?) passengers on the Mayflower.

Thomas and Olive raised six sons and two daughters, he often joked, "we have two and a half dozen children."

John Eddy Desmond 1911 - 1985

Thomas Conway Desmond 1913 - 1973

Robert Collins Desmond 1914 - 1969

Philip Dater Desmond 1916 - 1993

Elizabeth Desmond Keil 1917 - 2016

MacChesney Desmond 1919 - 2001

Brian Desmond 1922 - 1922

James Maxson Desmond 1924 - 2007

Sylvia Eddy Desmond 1926 - 1996

Education
1897-99 Roxbury Latin School, West Roxbury, MA

1906 Connecticut Agricultural College- Diploma in Horticulture

1908 Cornell- BS Architecture

Career
Thomas entered the profession of landscape architecture through an agricultural education at Cornell. After several years working at a firm based in Buffalo, New York, he opened a practice of his own in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1913. In his practice, he worked on landscape design projects on a variety of scales. During WWI, he worked as a town planner for the United States Housing Corporation. Later he joined with other colleagues to form a consulting firm that would help municipalities update their city plans. This firm was later known as of Desmond & Yarwood, Inc. Desmond served as an active member of the American Society of Landscape Architects for many years, including several years as its treasurer and as its vice president.

1908-13 worked in Buffalo NY

1913 studied landscape architecture in Europe (Passenger on the "Arabic" from Liverpool)

1913-18 worked in Hartford, CT

1918 worked in Washington DC

1919-50 worked in Simsbury, CT

Center Springs Park, Manchester CT (1929)

Inspector CCC State Park Development in New England

National Park Service 1934-7

Supervisor landscape construction Pentagon Building 1942-3

Willow Brook Park, New Britain ct

estates of FB Rentschler, George J. Mead, etc

US Coast Guard Academy, New London CT

University of CT campus, Storrs, CT

developed plans for Westminster School, Taft School

member of President Hoover conference on small home building and ownership

In 1939 as a consultant to the National Park Service under the C.C.C. program, Thomas proposed the creation of the Cape Cod National Seashore and Historic Parkway. The plan called for the acquisition of 38,000 acres, including Duxbury Beach, Sandy Neck Beach, and the land north of Eastham's Nauset Beach. The three areas would extend from Cape Cod Bay to the Atlantic Ocean, and be linked by a parkway extending from Duxbury to Provincetown. He described the fifty square miles north of Eastham as "wild, sparsely populated land, sea and bay shore, sand dunes and forest" and recommended that all of the land north of Eastham purchased, except for the small village centers of Wellfleet, Truro, and Provincetown. "The upper arm of the Cape from Eastham to Provincetown is largely undeveloped, outside of a few small villages ... It consists of scrub oak and pitch pine areas, with a number of freshwater ponds, and great bluffs on the ocean shore, rising in places more than a hundred feet above the surf... It is very little occupied, but it is only a question of a short time before it will become exploited unless it can be saved by public purchase." He urged, "the use of all possible means to achieve the preservation of the area," estimated the cost of the acquisition to be ten dollars an acre.

VP Society of Landscape Architects 1942-9

Plan for Simsbury, Connecticut (1948)

Norwich Rose Garden (1948)