Marjorie Sewell Cautley papers

Landscape architect.

Cornell University. Class of 1917. Marjorie Sewell Cautley, the daughter of Elbridge Sewell and Minnie Moore, was born into a Navy family and spent part of her early years in Japan and Guam. She was educated at the Packer Institute for Collegiate Studies in Brooklyn, N.Y., received a B.S. in landscape architecture from Cornell University in 1917, and an M.A. in city planning from the University of Pennsylvania in 1943. After graduating from Cornell, she worked for Warren Manning in Massachusetts, and was employed by California architect Julia Morgan. She returned to New Jersey to start a private practice. In 1921 she began work on Roosevelt Common, a community park in Tenafly, NJ. She married Randolph Cautley in 1922; they were divorced in 1944. They had one daughter, Patricia Cautley Hill, born in 1925. In 1924, Marjorie S. Cautley was hired by Clarence Stein and Henry Wright, and worked on Sunnyside Gardens (1924-1928), Phipps Garden Apartments (1930, 1935), Hillside Homes (1935), and Radburn, NJ (1928-1930). She also taught site planning and landscape design as a part-time lecturer at Columbia University and at MIT. She published Garden Design in 1935 and oversaw CCC projects in New Hampshire state parks. In 1937, she was stricken with an illness that dominated the rest of her life. Although she was hospitalized for several years, she continued to write articles and completed her graduate work. Her thesis was published in part as an article in American City.