Two 1851 land claims, to Quinn and Davidson, cover the ground here. Later it became Hazel Fern Farm, part of the Ladd holdings, and stayed farmland while the city grew toward it. Development began in 1909, when the property sold to the Laurelhurst Company. The plan drew on the planning influence of John Charles Olmsted, which is why the streets curve with the terrain instead of cutting across it, and why the sandstone Laurelhurst Gates still mark the entrances. At Coe Circle, a gilded statue of Joan of Arc was given by a Portland physician in 1925 as a World War I memorial, and it remains the neighborhood’s landmark intersection. The park came first, in a sense. Laurelhurst Park was designed in 1912 by Emanuel Mische of the Olmsted Brothers, with Firwood Lake shaped from a spring-fed pond. In 1919 it was named the most beautiful park on the West Coast, and in 2001 it became the first municipal park in the country listed on the National Register of Historic Places.