Correspondence of William L. Phillips with Prentiss French and Julia A. Field

William Lyman Phillips (1885 - 1966), landscape architect, town planner and architect, worked primarily in Florida where he designed such sites as Fairchild Tropical Gardens, Bok Tower Gardens, Mountain Lake Colony, Greynolds Park and Matheson Hammock Park. Phillips graduated from the Graduate School of Design in 1910. He worked for Olmsted Brothers landscape architecture firm from 1911 - 1913, 1915 - 1917, 1920 - 1922 and as a field representative for the Olmsted firm from 1923 - 1931. He also assisted in designing the town of Balboa, Panama, was the superintendent of graves for the American military cemeteries in France after World War I, and was a project superintendent for the Civilian Conservation Corps (1933 - 1941). From the 1930s until his death WLP worked for the state and as an independent landscape architect working on private residences, public buildings, hospitals, hotels, cemeteries, airports, parks and highways.

Prentis French (1894 - 1989) graduated from Williams College in 1917 and earned his M.L.A. from Harvard University School of Landscape Architecture in 1921. He worked for the Olmsted Brothers for three years, taught for one year at the University of Massachusetts, and later was employed by the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers on the planning of Venice, Florida. He married the architect Helen Douglass, with whom he established a professional practice in Massachusetts. Later they moved to Sarasota, Florida to work with the architect Clarence Martin. During the Second World War, French was enlisted with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. After the war, they moved to the San Francisco area and operated their firm there until the 1960s. The Archives of Prentiss and Helen French are held at the UC Berkeley Environmental Design Archives.

Julia Allen Field (1927 – 2010), was a graduate of Radcliffe College (A.B. 1960) and of Harvard GSD (M.L.A. 1965). She was an environmental and animal rights activist, and environmental planner. She worked as a lion trainer in Thousand Oaks, California, and the Director of the Crandon Park Zoo in Miami. She worked as a planner on the protection of the Colombian Amazon River and forest. The GSD holds the records of Amazonia 2000 Initiative, of which she was the President, related to that work. She was a friend of and corresponded with both Phillips and French.