Louis Smaus (1885-1962)

Born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now Slovakia, Smaus attended horticultural school near Hamburg, Germany, where he began his career working as a landscape gardener at Paul Hauber Baumschulen. Smaus emigrated to the U.S. at age 19 and found work with a large firm in New York as a landscape gardener of private and commercial grounds. In 1910, Smaus moved to California ,where he worked at Stanford University and had charge of the Lathrop grounds. Following this, Smaus became an employee of A. B. Spreckels, tje sugar magnate, and maintained the Spreckels estate in Napa, CA. In the late teens, he joined the MacRorie-McLaren Company in San Mateo, which worked with major clients such as Mrs. Henry Allen and Andrew Welch and provided a majority of the plants for the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition. Smaus went into business for himself as a landscape engineer in 1931, working on Milton Haas estate in Los Altos and the Lachman estate, among others. He retired in the early 1950s.

The Louis Smaus collection spans the years circa 1915–1922 and documents the projects that Smaus primarily worked on during his time with the MacRorie-McLaren Company. The collection is represented in one series: Project Records. Notable projects from this time include: University of California Memorial Stadium, The Stanford University Stadium, the Carolands Estate, and The Panama Pacific International Exposition of 1915.