John Nolen

Who was John Nolen?

John Nolen was an American landscape architect. Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Nolen was orphaned as a child and placed in Girard College. After he graduated first in his class in 1884, he worked as a grocery clerk and secretary to the Girard Estate Trust Fund before enrolling in the Wharton School of Finance and Economics at the University of Pennsylvania in 1891. Nolen earned a Ph.B. in 1893, and for the next ten years worked as secretary of the American Society for the Extension of University Teaching. He married Barbara Schatte in 1896.

In 1903 Nolen sold his house and used the money to enroll in the newly established Harvard School of Landscape Architecture, under the famed instructors Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., Arthur Shurtleff, and B.M. Watson. He received an A.M. in 1905 from Harvard.