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By Jane Roy Brown
Reprinted with permission from VIEW (Summer 2006, no. 6), published by Library of American Landscape History, Amherst, Massachusetts
The fact that the mascots for local sports teams are still called the “Model Towners” is one clue that residents of Gwinn, Michigan, are proud of their history. Built between 1906 and 1915, Gwinn started out as a “model town,” a planned community for employees of the Cleveland-Cliffs Iron Company on the Marquette Iron Range of the Upper Peninsula.
Cleveland-Cliffs president William Gwinn Mather (1857–1951) commissioned landscape architect and planner Warren H. Manning (1860–1938) to design Gwinn and parts of Ishpeming, another mining town in the Upper Peninsula. But Gwinn was the first anywhere, according to landscape architect and historian Lance M. Neckar, to consider industrial housing in the context of environmental planning. (Another collaboration between Mather and Manning—the Gwinn estate in Cleveland, Ohio—is the topic of a book by Robin Karson, The Muses of Gwinn. The other “muses” in Karson’s title are Charles A. Platt and Ellen Biddle Shipman.)
Manning located his model town on an island at the confluence of the East and Middle branches of the Escanaba River. He emphasized Gwinn’s connection to the surrounding forest by planting abundant trees and preserving existing ones. “Over 8 percent of the town’s budget was spent on open-space improvements,” Karson notes in her background on the company town. Today, older residents of Gwinn (population 2,700) recall the beauty of their tree-lined streets, especially the central boulevard called Pine Street, which was thickly planted with white and Norway pines as well as deciduous trees. The road later became part of state highway M-35. In the 1960s, road projects destroyed all the trees in the boulevard’s median strip, and though trees along Pine Street were spared at the time, many of them have since died or been removed. “It’s an eyesore compared to what it was,” says Rick Wills, museum director at the Forsyth Township Historical Society.
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Above and below: Landscape Architect Warren Manning created a design that brought nature into the townsite of Gwinn by preserving existing trees and shrubs and planting an additional 2000 trees purchased and gathered from the surrounding forests. Manning and his assistants were the only ones authorized to cut down a tree. The Pine Street Boulevard is significant because it became an extension of the forest rather than a formal planting typical of other boulevards of the time. The boulevard and natural reservations surrounding Gwinn put residents “within ten minutes of wild wood and river reservations”.
Fences surrounded the Gwinn home sites, protecting yards from free ranging livestock. Fences replicating the originals along with period lighting will be returned to
Pine Street
by the end of October 2007.
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