Oldfields, Indianapolis
Near Indianapolis, Indiana
Oldfields is a twenty-six-acre country estate in Indianapolis that was home to the Lilly family, of Eli Lilly pharmaceutical fame. The house was built in the nineteen teens by Hugh McKennan Landon and purchased by J. K.
Lilly Junior in nineteen thirty-two. The estate features formal gardens designed by noted landscape architect Percival Gallagher of the Olmsted Brothers firm, the firm that shaped parks and campuses across America in the early twentieth century. The property passed to the Indianapolis Museum of Art, now known as Newfields, in nineteen sixty-seven and is now open to the public as part of the larger Newfields campus, which includes one of the finest art museums in the Midwest.
The house and grounds represent a particular Gilded Age and Progressive Era ideal: that a private home should aspire to a landscape of deliberate beauty.
