Collection Guide
Collection Title:
Collection Number:
Get Items:
View entire collection guide
Search this collection
Table of contents
Contributing Institution:
University of California, Berkeley. College of Environmental Design. Environmental Design Archives
Title: Louis Smaus Collection
Creator:
Smaus , Louis
Identifier/Call Number: 2018.002
Physical Description:
.5 Linear Feet:
Date (inclusive): 1915-1922
Abstract: The Louis Smaus Collection spans the years c.1915-1922 and documents Smaus's career. The collection is one series: Project
records and Professional Papers, and consists of drawings, photographs, and blueprintsclippings, film reels and Kelley's personal
scrapbook.
Language of Material:
English
.
Collection is open for research. Please contact designarchives@berkeley.edu to
schedule an appointment in the reading room.
All requests for permission to publish, reproduce, or quote from materials in the collections shopuld be discussed with the
Curator.
[Identification of Item] Louis Smaus Collection, Environmental Design Archvies, University of California, Berkeley.
Louis Smaus (born 1885-died 1962) was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now Slovakia. Smaus attended horticultural school
near Hamburg, Germany where he began his career working as a landscape gardener at Paul Hauber Baumschulen. Smaus emigrated
to the U.S. at age nineteen and found work, with a large firm in New York, as a landscape gardener of private and commercial
grounds. He was in charge of the greenhouses for five years at Lyndhurst, the Jay Gould New York estate. He and Marie Muller,
the Gould girls' governess, were married there.
In 1910, Smaus moved to California where he then worked at Stanford University and had charge of the Lathrop grounds. Following
this Smaus became an employee of A.B. Spreckels, sugar magnate, and maintained the Spreckels estate in Napa, CA for five years.
In 1919, he was briefly involved with his brother-in-law's poultry farm in Los Gatos which quickly grew to 6,000 birds.
In the early 1920s he joined the MacRorie-McLaren Company in San Mateo which did landscaping for major clients such as Mrs.
Henry Allen and Andrew Welch and provided a majority of the trees and plants for the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition.
Smaus went into business for himself as a Landscape Engineer, working on Milton Haas estate in Los Altos starting in 1931
while continuing to work on the Lachman estate among others, retiring in the early 1950's. He lived in Burlingame where he
had a garden and greenhouse filled with begonias hybridized by friend and fellow Czech Frank Reinelt.
Sources:
Sawyer, Eugene T.
History of Santa Clara County California with Biographical Sketches of the Leading Men and Women of the County Who Have Been
Identified with Its Growth and Development from the Early Days to the Present.
Palo Alto, CA: Bay Microfilm. 1524-1525.
The collection is organized into a single series. Within the series, original order has been maintained where evident. In
the case of no evident order, an order has been imposed by the archivist.
The Louis Smaus collection spans the years 1920-1922 and documents the projects that Smaus primarily worked on during his
time with the MacRorie-McLaren Company. The collection is represented in one series: Project Records.
The Project Records series is primarily comprised of reproductions of plans and proposed plans for educational, recreational,
and residential properties. Distinguished projects include University of California Memorial Stadium, The Stanford University
Stadium, and The Carolands Estate.
The Smaus collection also contains photographs from his time with the MacRorie-McLaren Company, including images of the nursery
and showcases of plants used for the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition. Many of the photographs within the collection
were taken by the well-known Moulin Studios as seen by the stamp on the back side.
There is one oversized folder that contains four blueprints from projects such as:___
Subjects and Indexing Terms
California Memorial Stadium (Berkeley, Calif.)
Carolands (Hillsborough, Calif.)
Florist Shops
Gardens -- California
Panama-Pacific International Exposition (1915 : San Francisco, Calif.)
Plants--California.
Landscape architecture--California.