F. A. Waugh

Frank Albert Waugh (July 8, 1869 – March 20, 1943) was an American landscape architect whose career focused upon recreational uses of national forests, the production of a highly natural style of landscape design, and the implementation of ecology as a basis for choices in landscape design. He essentially pioneered the role of the landscape architect as an integral part of national forest design and development through such projects as the Mount Hood Scenic Byway and the Bryce Canyon scenic roadway. His ideas spread via his diverse writings, including Recreation Uses in the National Forests and The Natural Style in Landscape Gardening. He also wrote prolifically about education, agriculture, and social issues in such works as The Agricultural College and Rural Improvement.

Biography

Frank A. Waugh was born in Sheboygan Falls, Wisconsin, but his studies and career would take him far from his birthplace. Waugh earned his B.S. degree in 1891 from Kansas State Agricultural College and a subsequent M.S. from Oklahoma State Agricultural and Mechanical College in 1893. He worked in the newspaper business in Topeka, Kansas, Helena, Montana, and Denver, Colorado. In 1895, graduate studies in landscape architecture and horticulture would take him to Cornell University, Europe, and finally to the University of Vermont. He found his way to the Massachusetts Agricultural College, now the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he became the head of the agriculture division and founded an undergraduate landscape gardening program in 1903, only the second program of its kind in the United States. He was one of the first practitioners to formally recognize American landscape architecture history.