LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT
CLERMONT LEE From her first job beautifying Depression-era housing projects, to saving downtown squares from bus traffic, to designing gardens for the Isaiah Davenport House and other noted structures, lauded landscape architect Clermont Lee gradually staked out a lasting legacy in the historic district. Born in 1914 in Savannah, she earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Smith College and worked for the Sea Island Co. before opening her own landscape architecture practice in her hometown in 1949. Over the next 50 years, she worked with Mills B. Lane Jr. and others on projects at many prominent local sites, including the Juliette Gordon Low Birthplace, the Andrew Low House, the Scarbrough House, the Green-Meldrim House and Fort Pulaski National Monument. In the 1950s, she adamantly opposed a proposal to place drive-thru lanes in several squares for ambulances, fire trucks, police cars, other emergency vehicles and buses. Instead, the city chose to follow her suggestion to simply round the curves of entry. Lee also convinced the city to remove utility poles and concrete walks that were diminishing the appeal of the squares. Lee also, over a 20-year-period, teamed with Lane to improve the Northeast Quadrant of the Historic District. Those efforts included designing private gardens and enhancing Greene and Washington squares. Her English-inspired parterre garden at the OwensThomas House, completed in 1954, fits seamlessly into the context of that National Historic Landmark. Those, and her many other accomplishments, she told
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columnist Jane Fishman in a 1992 Savannah Morning News article, resulted from a lucky guess. Lee decided to major in landscape architecture because “I didn’t see anything I could pass until I spotted (that major) in the catalog. It was a gamble.” A student at the Pape School, and a graduate of the oh-so genteel Ashley Hall boarding school in Charleston, where the girls wore white gloves and could not go to town without an escort, Lee moved to New York City in 1932. It was an exciting time to live there, she told Fishman, recalling Katherine Hepburn movies, stores that sold liquor during Prohibition, and “short, stocky” men that wore derbies. She enjoyed living in the North so much that she stayed an additional three-and-a-half years to attend graduate school. She graduated in 1939, and, upon moving back to Savannah, became the first female landscape architect in the state. In 1940, she supervised landscape projects at Fellwood Homes and Yamacraw Village. From that start, working through six decades, she amassed an astonishing architectural record. The Clermont Huger Lee architectural drawing and negatives collection at the Georgia Historical Society largely chronicles her career. It lists many private homes, of course, along with doctors’ offices, churches, cemetery lots, charitable organizations, industries and at least one bar, the old Night Flight on River Street. Lee retired in 1999, and died in 2006 at age 92. Sources: Savannah Morning News files; Georgia Historical Society documents; www.telfair.org.
