Cylburn: Iron Money, Japanese Maples, and an Olmsted Plan

Jesse Tyson began building his mansion here in eighteen sixty-three and did not finish it until eighteen eighty-eight. Tyson was a chromite and iron ore merchant whose family had worked the mines at Bare Hills for generations. He quarried the gneiss stone for the house from his own land, laid out the formal gardens himself, and planted a grove of Japanese maples that still stands. He completed the project at age sixty-one, the year he married a nineteen-year-old debutante named Edyth Johns.

Edyth outlived him and continued living on the estate until her death in nineteen forty-two, when the city purchased the property for forty-two thousand three hundred dollars. The Olmsted Brothers landscape firm had recommended preserving it as parkland as early as nineteen oh three. The grounds were formally designated Cylburn Arboretum in nineteen eighty-two. Today the estate covers about one hundred and seventy acres of mature woodland, formal garden, and nature trails open to the public.