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Clarence McKenzie Lewis (1877-1959) graduated in 1898 from Columbia College with a degree in engineering. After practicing as a civil engineer with the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, he joined the investment banking house of William Salomon and Company and later Blair and Company. In 1922 Lewis bought Skylands, a thousand acre estate in the highlands of northern New Jersey, from the prominent attorney, Francis Stetson. He replaced Stetson's Victorian house with a 45-room Tudor manor, designed by the distinguished architect, John Russell Pope, and transformed the property into a botanical showplace. The most prominent landscape architects of the day, Feruccio Vitale and Alfred Geiffert, designed the gardens.
For thirty years Lewis collected plants from around the world, resulting in one of the finest collections of plants in New Jersey. In 1966 the state of New Jersey purchased the estate and in 1984 the 96 acres surrounding the house was designated as the New Jersey's official botanic garden, and was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1991.
Lewis was a trustee of the New York Botanical Garden and in 1953 donated to the Library a collection of 1177 bound volumes, 439 unbound, over 1000 periodicals and the same number of reprints and bulletins.
The Clarence McKenzie Lewis collection contains incoming and outgoing correspondence from various agricultural and academic institutions. Items include seed requests, seeding advice, and requests for books and reprints of articles pertaing to a variety of horticulture subjects including care, identification, and general gardening techniques.
Arrangement |
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| The Collection is organized into two series: | ||
| Series 1: Miscellaneous. 1939-1959. | ||
| Series 2: Correspondence. 1915-1953. arranged alphabetically. | ||
| Series 3: Artifacts. | ||
This collection is open for research with permission from Mertz Library staff.
Requests for permission to publish material from the collection should be submitted in writing to the LuEsther T. Mertz Library of the New York Botanical Garden.
Indexing Terms |
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| The following terms have been used to index the description of this collection in the library's online public access catalog. | ||
| Persons | ||
| Lewis, Clarence McK. (Clarence McKenzie), 1876-1959--Archives. | ||
| Subjects | ||
| Horticulture--New Jersey. | ||
| Plants--Identification. | ||
| Organizations | ||
| New Jersey Botanical Garden--History. | ||
| New York Botanical Garden--History--Sources. | ||
| Document Types | ||
| Clippings. aat. | ||
| Correspondence. aat. | ||
New York Botanical Garden
VF Clarence McKenzie Lewis
Clarence McKenzie Lewis (PP), Archives, The New York Botanical Garden.
This collection was donated to the library by Clarence McKenzie Lewis in 1953.
Processed April 2005 by Kathleene Konkle under a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) PA-50678-04.
| Series 3. Artifacts. |
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Scope and Content: 36 Chinese reed pigeon whistles; 11 "rose rocks". Objects dated May 1, 1953; "from the library of C. Lewis." |
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| Box | Title | Date | |
| 2 | Whistles and Rocks | ca. 1953 | |
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