Further to the south, the city had also just purchased the former Lloyd Nicholas Rogers estate "Druid Hill", first settled by Europeans in the mid-1660s and with manor plantation houses reconstructed several times since, most recently in 1800 with what later became called the "Mansion House". It formed the third largest municipal landscaped park in the country (after Central Park in New York City and Fairmount Park in Philadelphia). Druid Lake was carved out, constructed and landscaped to add capacity to the newly expanded first municipal water supply system using the waters of the inter-connecting Jones Falls which flowed south through the central city to the Northwest Branch of the Patapsco River and the Baltimore Harbor. The system of parks for the City of Baltimore along the various stream valleys with inter-connected landscaped boulevards or parkways was designed and laid out by the famous landscape architect and developer Frederick Law Olmsted and the company later established by his sons in two famous reports in 1904 and 1926, of which Lake Roland and its Dam formed and integral part.Roland Park, Maryland History.Sherwood Gardens.
