THIRD ANNUAL YEAR BOOK — PART X. 585 



The cares of this world and the deceitfulness of riches have so engrossed 

 the attention of our men of affairs that opportunity for public service 

 has not been found and the solution of this public problem has been left 

 to the women whose hands are always free for every good endeavor. 

 But what the women need, what we all need, what every community needs, 

 is intelligent direction. There is every where demand for the landscape 

 architect. The proper laying out and erection of a city park requires 

 expert skill and intellectual gifts of no mean order. But we Iowans except 

 in our largest cities have much yet to do before the landscape architect 

 arrives. 



In the first place we must have a place for our park proposed. It 

 is just as necessary to have a location for your park before calling in 

 the landscape man as it is to have a lot for your building before you seek 

 the services of your architect. Now in the case of the greater number 

 of Iowa towns and cities there is no trouble about appropriate and suitable 

 convenient sites. Many of our cities are near streams and rivers whose 

 banks and hills are all ready to our purpose. We must give up the idea 

 of city squares; they perhaps have had their place in city building but 

 we have outgrown them. I may not take time to discuss here the mistakes 

 of Wm. Penn and their consequences; what the present day demands is a 

 wider area set apart for public use, but under absolutely just regulations 

 and thoroughly efficient control. We may have to have some special 

 park legislation before we get far in our work, but that will be suggested 

 as we go on. The first thing is to secure suitable location. Of course, in 

 the smaller towns for outdoor assemblies and the like, the public square 

 of a single block, or of two adjacent blocks, may sufficie; but what we 

 should plan for is something very much larger, which shall afford op- 

 portunity for complete retirement from all the ordinary sights and sounds 

 of life's routine and enable your people rich and poor alike a taste of 

 nature's purity and sweetness. 



I shall show you presently on the screen some of Iowa's possibilities 

 in this direction. Nature, of course, does the work for us; in some places 

 she has already for our people done much more than in others. There is 

 often, right close to the city limits, or even within the corporate enclosure, 

 just what we want. Perhaps it is a river with rough, rocky, or furrowed 

 wooded shores; perhaps it is a hilltop commanding a wide view of a 

 peaceful country rich in homes and farms; perhaps in the more distinctly 

 prairie and level regions of our state it is a farmstead by its owner, now 

 grown old, more richly planted than any farm in all the country. I have 

 seen many such places, where hundreds, perhaps thousands, of trees 

 were set out to decorate the home of some pioneer. If this property is to 

 be sold it should go to the community; it must not be wasted by being 

 divided up and stripped of the accumulated beauty of many years. 

 But generally it will be found that the land which ought to go to parks 

 in Iowa is otherwise nearly waste land. At any rate waste land about 

 the town should go to parks. It often happens that park land may be had 

 for the asking if the community will show a disposition rightly to use and 

 govern. There is no reason why we should not have parks as bequests; 

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