Frederick Law Olmsted

Frederick Law Olmsted (April 26, 1822 – August 28, 1903) was an American landscape architect, journalist, social critic, and public administrator. He is considered to be the father of landscape architecture in the United States. Olmsted was famous for co-designing many well-known urban parks with his partner Calvert Vaux, beginning with Central Park in New York City, which led to numerous other urban park designs including Prospect Park in Brooklyn, Cadwalader Park in Trenton, New Jersey, and Forest Park in Portland, Oregon.

Olmsted's projects encompassed comprehensive park systems, planned communities, and institutional campuses across North America. His major works included the country's first coordinated system of public parks and parkways in Buffalo, New York, the Emerald Necklace in Boston, Massachusetts, the Grand Necklace of Parks in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and parks for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. He designed one of the first planned communities in the United States, Riverside, Illinois, and created master plans for universities including University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University, and the University of Chicago. Notable individual projects included the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina, Mount Royal Park in Montreal, Quebec, and landscape work for the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C.

In 1883, Olmsted established his landscape architecture and planning consultancy at Fairsted in Brookline, Massachusetts. The firm was carried on and expanded by his sons, Frederick Jr. and John C., under the name Olmsted Brothers. Beyond design work, Olmsted was an early leader in the conservation movement, contributing to the preservation of Niagara Falls, the Adirondack region, and the National Park system. During the Civil War, he served as head of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, organizing medical services for the Union Army. The quality of his work was widely recognized by contemporaries; Daniel Burnham said of him, "He paints with lakes and wooded slopes; with lawns and banks and forest-covered hills; with mountainsides and ocean views...." His work set a standard of excellence that continues to influence landscape architecture in the United States.

Olmsted was born in Hartford, Connecticut, on April 26, 1822. His father, John Olmsted, was a prosperous merchant who took a lively interest in nature, people, and places; Frederick Law and his younger brother, John Hull Olmsted, also showed this interest. His mother, Charlotte Law (née Hull) Olmsted, died from an overdose before his fourth birthday in 1826. His father remarried in 1827 to Mary Ann Bull, who shared her husband's strong love of nature and had perhaps a more cultivated taste. Their children were Charlotte, Mary, Owen, Bertha, Ada, and Albert Olmsted. The Olmsted ancestors arrived in the early 1600s from Essex, England.

Olmsted began attending Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, in 1837 to study surveying with Frederick Barton, leaving when Barton left in 1838. When he was almost ready to enter Yale College at a young age, sumac poisoning weakened his eyes, so he abandoned college plans. After working as an apprentice seaman, merchant, and journalist, he settled on a 125-acre (51 ha) farm in January 1848 on the south shore of Staten Island. His father helped him acquire this farm, and he renamed it from Akerly Homestead to Tosomock Farm. It was later renamed "The Woods of Arden" by owner Erastus Wiman. The house in which Olmsted lived still stands at 4515 Hylan Boulevard, near Woods of Arden Road.

Olmsted had a significant career in journalism. 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. This supported his getting additional work. His visit to Birkenhead Park inspired his later contribution to the design of Central Park in New York City.

Interested in the slave economy, 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 and Texas from 1852 to 1857. His dispatches to the Times were collected into three volumes: A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States (1856), A Journey Through Texas (1857), A Journey in the Back Country (1860). The critic Charles Eliot Norton described the books as "the most important contribution to an exact acquaintance with the conditions and result of slavery in this country that have ever been published."

These are considered vivid first-person accounts of the antebellum South. A one-volume abridgment, Journeys and Explorations in the Cotton Kingdom (1861), was published in England during the first six months of the American Civil War, at the suggestion of Olmsted's English publisher.