Frederick Law Olmsted, born on this day in Hartford, Connecticut, is considered to be the father of landscape architecture. Most notably, along with his partner Calvert Vaux, he created Central Park in New York City. Olmsted was also designer of the US Capitol grounds as well as other public parks and spaces around the country.
Olmsted began his professional career as a journalist. He was commissioned by the “New York Daily Times” (now “The New York Times”) to embark on an extensive research journey through the American South from 1852 to 1857. Olmsted sent back periodic dispatches to the newspaper about the lives and beliefs of Southerners. Olmsted was convinced – at first, anyway – that there had to be common ground between the two increasingly bellicose sides of North and South, if only he (and they) could discover what it was.
[Fans of the late Tony Horwitz may be aware that he decided to follow in the path of Frederick Law Olmsted for his final book, “Spying on the South” (2019).]
Frederick Law Olmsted in 1857 – Credit: U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service/Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site
Olmsted’s articles were eventually collected into three volumes: A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States (1856), A Journey Through Texas (1857), and A Journey in the Back Country in the Winter of 1853-4 (1860). [Horwitz, who was writing around the time of the 2016 election, wondered if the same sort of divisions were tearing apart the country as had characterized the pre-Civil War years. Thus, to get a better handle on what was happening in America, Horwitz used Omsted’s books as tour guides to plan his own trip, or, as he called it, “a ramble across America with long-dead Fred as my guide.” Both men thought the divisions they saw to be irreconcilable.]
Olmsted also took other trips that influenced his switch into landscape design. In 1850 he traveled to England to visit public gardens, where he was greatly impressed by Joseph Paxton’s Birkenhead Park. He subsequently wrote and published Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England in 1852. His visit to Birkenhead Park inspired his later contribution to the design of Central Park in New York City. As the website for Fund for a Better Waterfront notes:
Central Park looks like a natural landscape but in fact was a major engineering feat. More than 10 million cartloads of material were removed. Four million trees and shrubs were planted. It was the partnership of Vaux and Olmsted that established one of the world’s greatest parks.”
Interestingly, this site also observes:
The cost to build Central Park in the 1850s and 1860s was $13.9 million, greatly exceeding the original $1.5 million budget. Olmsted fought bitterly with some of his superiors to justify park expenditures. Olmsted estimated that the three wards surrounding Central Park were valued at $26.4 million in 1856, a year before construction began. After completion of the park in 1873, this same property was worth $236 million. In the years ahead, the tax revenues generated more than compensated for cost of building Central Park.”
Olmsted & Vaux original design for Central Park
In 1861 Olmsted took leave as Director of Central Park to work in Washington, D.C., as Executive Secretary of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, a precursor to the Red Cross. He tended to the wounded during the American Civil War, and helped design a system of “floating hospital” ships to transport the ill and wounded of the Union Army. In 1862 during Union General George B. McClellan’s Peninsula Campaign, Olmsted headed the medical effort for the sick and wounded in New Kent County, in Virginia. Olmsted was also one of the six founding members of the Union League Club of New York.
After the war, as Library of Congress historian Barbara Bair observed, he emerged as the foremost spokesperson for the public parks movement:
His treatises on the planning, access and use of public parks influenced the creation of the Emerald Necklace system of greenways in Boston and the formation of Yosemite National Park by an Act of Congress in 1890. The Olmsted legacy reached into Canada with Mount Royal Park, and was manifested at Niagara Falls, in the Stanford and University of California, Berkeley, campuses in California and Gallaudet University in the District of Columbia.”
In 1895, senility forced Olmsted to retire. After Olmsted’s retirement and death, his sons John Charles Olmsted and Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. continued the work of their father, doing business as the Olmsted Brothers. The firm lasted until 1980. Many works by the Olmsted sons are mistakenly credited to Frederick Law Olmsted today.
Portrait of Frederick Law Olmsted by James Notman, Boston via Wikipedia
The Library of Congress Manuscript Division holds both Olmsted’s personal papers and the records of Olmsted Associates. These collections are digitized and available online, which you can access here.
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