Schuyler N. Nolan collection

DESIGNATION:

8-

SIZE:

COLLECTION DATES:

1939-1973

PROVENANCE:

RESTRICTIONS:

None

FINDING AIDS:

Inventory (PDF), ArCat

Biographical Sketch

Schuyler Nicholas Nolan was born March 11, 1894 at Monroe City, Indiana, son of William Nicholas Nolan and Hattie Elizabeth Williams Nolan. After graduating from Plymouth (Indiana) high school in 1912, he moved to South Bend and then Chicago, where he completed the Chicago Technical School mechanical drafting course.  From the end of the First World War until 1930, Nolan did residential landscape work in Danville, Peoria, Elgin, and River Forest, Illinois.  In the 1930s, he was employed by the Indianapolis Parks Department (1933-35) and the Indiana State Highway Commission (1935-37), and he was landscape architect for the Indianapolis Home Shows of 1933, 1934, 1937, and 1939.  Except for a short period during WW II, he ran a single-person landscape architecture practice in Indianapolis from 1937 until his retirement in 1976.  He also owned and operated a plant nursery (Amherst Nurseries) in Nora, Indiana, 1949-1961.

Scope and Content

Records pertaining to landscape architecture projects by Schuyler N. Nolan, of Indianapolis, Indiana, 1939‑1973.  The collection comprises:

•        drawings for ca. 56 projects (ca. 168 sheets),

•        48 photograph negatives (b & w), and

•        ca. 60 pages of scrapbook material (photocopies).

Included are landscape and garden plans for private homes and estates as well as banks, insurance companies, schools, churches, Washington Park Cemetery, and the 1937 Indianapolis Home Show.  Some of the commercial work is for Glendale Shopping Center, L. S. Ayres & Co., and Indiana National Bank.  Among the residential clients are Wm. C. Griffith Jr., Robert C. McDermond, and Mrs. J. K. Lilly. 

Most of the projects are in Indianapolis and surrounding communities.  The collection also includes drawings for the Floyd J. Bailey estate in Peru, Indiana, and the Mariemont Apartments in Cincinnati.