Thomas Chalmers Vint (1894-1967) received the national level Pugsley Medal in 1955 when he was chief of the Design and Construction Division of the NPS. Vint was born in Salt Lake City of Scottish-Irish parents recently arrived in the U.S., and grew up in Los Angeles, where he attended Polytechnic High School. Having decided on a career in landscape architecture, he enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley. While in school, Vint worked in the offices of several Los Angeles landscape architects, architects, and builders.
In 1921 he studied city planning at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and then worked a variety of short jobs while intermittently attending classes at Otis Art Institute. He designed and supervised the landscaping of large-scale residential grounds.
n November 1922, Vint became an architectural draftsman in the office of Daniel Ray Hull, the NPS chief landscape engineer, in Yosemite National Park. In 1923 the office moved to Los Angeles, where Hull and Vint rented space in the architectural offices of Gilbert Stanley Underwood, who was designing park lodges for concessionaires. Vint became an assistant landscape engineer in the NPS in 1923 and an associate landscape engineer in 1926. When the office moved to San Francisco in 1927, Vint succeeded Hull as chief landscape architect with responsibility for the location, character, and quality of construction and planning in all the parks in the system.
By July 1929, Vint had transformed the Landscape Division into a design office with an increasing emphasis on general planning. The division prepared the architectural and landscape plans for government projects under the direction of the park superintendents, reviewed the plans for tourist facilities to be built by the concessionaires and the plans for roads, and prepared the architectural plans for bridges constructed by the Bureau of Public Roads.