Arthur Lee Peck was born November 14, 1882 in Ansonia, Connecticut to Wilbur Norton Peck and Lois Lucinda Norton Peck. Peck graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree from Massachusetts Agricultural College (now the University of Massachusetts at Amherst) and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Boston University in 1904. On September 3, 1906, Peck married Sara Browning Root, a telephone operator from Montague, Massachusetts. The couple had three children: Norton Lee Peck (1908-2002), Nella Browning Peck (1910-1988), and Eliot Root Peck (1915-2007).
Between 1907 and 1908, Peck worked at the Kansas State Agricultural College, joining the faculty of Oregon Agricultural College’s as an Instructor in Floriculture and Landscape Gardening in 1908. He was later promoted to Professor, and made Superintendent of Campus and Greenhouses. Within the Department of Horticulture, Peck developed the curricula for Floriculture and Landscape Gardening, and was responsible for much of the site planning and plantings across campus.
Peck took a brief leave of absence from OSC from 1911 to 1913 to work on private projects; even after his return to OSC, Peck continued to take private commissions, including “designing the site plan for the Visitor’s Center at Oregon Caves National Park in 1923, and serving as landscape architect for the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, University of Oregon, completed in 1930.”
In 1928, the first professional landscape architecture program in the Pacific Northwest was established at the OAC, and Peck was placed in charge. The landscape architecture program was ultimately transferred to the University of Oregon in Eugene in 1932, where it was expanded to a full five-year Bachelor of Landscape Architecture (BLA), degree program.
In addition to his contributions to the plantings and landscape design of campus, Peck also helped found the OSC chapter of Phi Kappa Phi, a multidisciplinary collegiate honor society. Peck also contributed to the creation of an Oregon state park system, the landscape design of the Oregon State Highway system, and the city park layout of Corvallis, Oregon.
Arthur Peck died April 19, 1961, and is buried at Mount Crest Abbey Mausoleum in Salem, Oregon.
Author: Rachel Lilley
