Pargolovskaya manor on the plans of 18th century: from peasant arable land to Shuvalovsky park

Abstract

The article is devoted to a little-studied period in the history of the lands belonging to Pargolovskaya manor, located in the northern environs of St. Petersburg, on the route of the ancient Vyborg road. The early history of the famous manor is considered in the context of a general history of reclamation of the North-East coast of the Gulf of Finland in the first half of the 18th century which was closely connected with construction of the «Sestroretsk factories» and giving them vast forest lands for permanent use in accordance with the Tsar Peter the Great decrees of 1719 and 1720. The article presents the results of archival, bibliographic, historical and landscape research carried out with a considerable amount of primary sources, most of which have been researched for the first time. Among the new data is the list of owners of the Pargolovskaya manor in the 18th century, which was opened by R.K. Areskin and L.L. Blumentrost, the Tsar Peter the Great's personal physicians, and the documented date of transfer of the land estate to the Shuvalov family, which is a subject of much discussion among historians and local historians of St. Petersburg. Particular attention is paid to previously unpublished plans of the Pargolovsky estate of 1747 («Mordvinov's Plan») and 1799–1804 («A reduced plan of Disputable and Uncontested parts» of the factory forests). The revealed plans are analysed and compared to the well-known plan of the Pargolovskaya manor of Count A.P. Shuvalov («Okunev's Plan») of 1770. The paper resulted in an attempt to trace the regularity of changes in territorial and spatial organization of the Pargolovsky estate, which throughout the 18th century underwent transformation from modest «economic» estate of the Tsar's personal physicians, two-thirds of which were forests assigned to the «Sestroretsk factories», to one of the most respectable noblemen's estates near St. Petersburg.