Pioneer Information
Although his date of birth and early life are unknown, Cridland worked as an architect and landscape architect in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with offices in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Atlanta, Georgia. He rose to prominence after publishing Practical Landscape Gardening (1916). The book, aimed at both professionals and the public, was enormously popular and by 1929 was in its third edition and fifth print run.
From 1913 to 1934, Cridland created numerous garden and foundation planting designs as well as modifications to existing structures at the Vanderbilt estate (now Vanderbilt Mansion National Historic Site) in Hyde Park, New York. During this period, he also designed the landscape at the Hudson View Gardens housing complex in Manhattan, New York (1923-1925).
Cridland worked extensively in the South, most notably developing the grounds at the Berry Schools and Oak Hill estate (now Berry College and Oak Hill and Martha Berry Museum) in Rome, Georgia, from 1923 to 1933. He also designed residential landscapes in the planned communities of Peachtree Heights, Druid Hills, and Tuxedo Park in Atlanta, Georgia; and various suburbs, including the redesign of the Irving Park neighborhood and the adjacent Country Club apartments in Greensboro, North Carolina; Dry Creek Park and the drives and gateways of McKiver Park, North Carolina; the roadways and landscape at Hope Valley Country Club suburb in Durham, North Carolina; and the Avondale Estates near Decatur, Georgia.
In addition to residential work, Cridland designed Pilot Life Insurance Company’s campus plan in Greensboro, North Carolina (1927-1928); the lawn cemetery addition at Rockville Cemetery in Rockville, Maryland (1936); and several exposition landscapes, including for the Atlanta Exposition (1895), the High Street gardens at the Philadelphia Sesquicentennial (1926), and the New York World’s Fair grounds in conjunction with Norman Bel Geddes (1939).
Cridland died of a heart ailment in Abington, Pennsylvania at the age of 73.
