By Gretchen Rabinkin, Affil. ASLA, AIA
 
In the mid-1890s, there was discussion about forming a national professional association for landscape architects in Boston, but several key figures, including Charles Eliot, rejected the idea for this tiny, not-well-understood profession.

Instead, Boston practitioners Warren Manning, John Charles Olmsted, and Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. joined eight other colleagues in New York to found ASLA in 1899. Fast forward fourteen years, and the local situation had changed.
 
“The Boston Society of Landscape Architects was organized January 23, 1913, with twenty-seven Charter Members….” — Transactions of the American Society of Landscape Architects, 1909-1921
 
As the editors of Landscape Architecture Magazine wrote in April 1913:
 
“The American Society of Landscape Architects seems to have come to the next important point in its development. The members of Boston, New York and Minneapolis – almost at the same time – have taken steps to form local chapters of the parent society. There is definite and important work for these chapters…. First, perhaps, is the social pleasure and professional advantage to the practitioner in getting in closer touch with his fellows, but these bodies should serve also as a means of voicing the sentiments of landscape architects on local public questions. We have opinions worth hearing in our own field. It is time we were heard, as architects and engineers are heard, when matters are before the public bearing on the subjects of our own profession.”
 
Sound familiar? These goals -- supporting local communities of practice while also serving as professional voice and advocate on larger issues endure -- are essential aspects of local ASLA Chapters today.
 
The founding of the Boston Society of Landscape Architects (BSLA) prompted the ASLA Executive Committee to consider admitting chapters into the national structure. All 27 original members of BSLA were also members of ASLA.

In early 1914, ASLA by-laws were formally amended. Boston officially became the first local chapter on December 21, 1914. The first chapter officers were Professor James Sturgis Pray, President; Arthur Shurtleff, Vice-President; and Fletcher Steele, Secretary-Treasurer. Then, as now, the chapter was led by leading landscape architects in practice and teaching.
 
Chapter activities in those early years included regular meetings as well as “field days, visiting works of landscape architecture in Boston” and an exhibition.

In April 1915, Landscape Architecture Magazine published:
 
"This was, we believe, the first exhibition purely of landscape work held by the profession in the United States. Besides examples of the work of most of the practitioners near Boston, there were exhibitions from the School at Amherst and the School at Harvard, which showed that it will not do for the present practitioners to rest upon their laurels, unless they expect to be outdone, at least on the side of presentation of design, by the rising generation." (LAM, vol 5, no 3, April 1915, pages 151-152)
 
And let’s cheer our students. Over a century later, an exceptionally robust “rising generation” continues to inspire established practitioners forward, just as a large array of field visits continue to serve as means for learning and connecting across our contemporary practice community.
 
Through the first half of the 20th century, BSLA was the only chapter in the New England region. In 1948, Rhode Island and Connecticut formed the Connecticut chapter. The Vermont chapter was founded in 1999 and New Hampshire in 2012. All of Maine and Massachusetts remain part of the “Boston” chapter to this day.