English: View of north end of Nellie's Lawn. Nellie's Lawn is a small open area east of the Long Meadow in Prospect Park, Brooklyn New York. This small meadow lies just north of Battle Pass, where the East Drive descends through a gap in the terminal moraine that in the 19th century separated the old city of Brooklyn from the town of Flatbush; the moraine is a feature left by the Wisconsin Glacier. In the 19th and early 20th century, the meadow was better known as Valley Grove meadow, from the Valley Grove House that once occupied the site in the American Revolutionary War period.^[1]. The present name of this meadow stems from an elm tree that grew near this lawn in the 19th century. According to a contemporary article in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle ^[2] John Yapp Culyer, then chief engineer and supervisior of the park, placed a metal marker, inscribed with the single name Nellie on the elm tree in 1877. Placed without further explanation, various notions about the sign's meaning soon arose, including the popular idea that Nellie had been murdered and her remains buried at the base of the tree. Some of these notions persist to the present day.

The year before, in 1876, early morning habitues of the northern end of the Long Meadow became accustomed to seeing a mother and her young teen-aged daughter frequently drive up to the elm tree and, leaving their carriage drawn up at the side of the drive, would engage in long and earnest conversation while sitting on grass at the base of the tree. In the formal customs of the time, the mother eventually approached the chief engineer for permission to rest by the tree, presumably because unattended women in the park at that extraordinary early hour might otherwise raise eyebrows. Permission was granted by the park commissioners and the two women continued their customary activities throughout the fair seasons of 1876. The custom ceased as the weather turned cold. Late in 1876, the young girl travelled abroad with family friends, spending the winter in Rome Italy. Sadly, the young girl became ill and died in Rome. In the following spring, the bereaved mother again approached the park commissioners and chief engineer for permission to place some kind of memorial by the tree. Permission was again granted, and the mother gave Col. Culyer the metal plate to place on the tree. In the following years, according to a recent guidebook by Richard Berenson and Neil deMause^[3] the Brooklyn parks department augmented the memorial with flower plantings in the small meadow.

The elm tree is now long-gone, as is the custom of memorial plantings in the meadow, but in a curious kind of transfer, the lawn itself now bears the girl's name, so the memory persists in a transformed way. The large Tulip Tree right of center of this photograph, is now often called 'Elizabeth's Tulip Tree.' It is an old tree, possibly a part of the original planting and thus a contemporary of the now-departed elm.

The rest of Nellie's Lawn is off-camera to the left, obscured by foreground bushes. Battle Pass is further to the left. The Vale of Cashmere is off-camera to the right.