Frederick Law Olmsted

Frederick Law Olmsted (born April 26, 1822, Hartford, Connecticut, U.S.—died August 28, 1903, Waverly, Massachusetts) was an American landscape architect who designed a succession of outstanding public parks, beginning with Central Park in New York City.

When Olmsted was 14 years old, sumac poisoning seriously affected his eyesight and limited his education. As an apprentice topographic engineer for a brief period, he received the fundamental skills needed for his later career. In 1842 and 1847, his sight having improved, Olmsted attended lectures in science and engineering at Yale University. For a time he was interested in scientific farming, which he studied under George Geddes, who had a well-known model farm at Owego, New York. During an extensive holiday in Europe, Olmsted was profoundly impressed with English landscaping and wrote about his observations in Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England (1852).

Olmsted’s open opposition to slavery led the editor of The New York Times to send him to the American South from 1852 to 1855 to report weekly on how slavery affected the region’s economy. His report, published as The Cotton Kingdom (1861), is regarded as a reliable account of the antebellum South. In 1857 Olmsted was appointed superintendent of New York City’s projected Central Park. A competition was held to select a new plan for the park, and Olmsted collaborated with the young British architect Calvert Vaux in developing the successful design. In 1858 he became chief architect of the park, and from then until 1861 he worked assiduously in one of the first attempts in the United States to apply art to the improvement of nature in a public park. The work attracted widespread attention, with the result that he was engaged thereafter in most of the important works of a similar nature in the United States: Prospect Park, Brooklyn, New York; Fairmont Park, Philadelphia; Riverside and Morningside parks, New York City; Belle Isle Park, Detroit; the grounds surrounding the Capitol at Washington, D.C., between 1874 and 1895; Stanford University at Palo Alto, California; and many others. He also designed Mount Royal Park, Montreal.

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From 1864 to 1890 Olmsted chaired the first Yosemite commission, taking charge of the property for California and succeeding in preserving the area as a permanent public park. Plans for the Niagara Falls park project, among the last in which Olmsted and Vaux collaborated, did much to influence New York state to preserve the Niagara reservation.

After 1886 Olmsted was largely occupied in laying out an extensive system of parks and parkways for the city of Boston and the town of Brookline, Massachusetts, and in working on a landscape improvement scheme for Boston Harbor. He was commissioned in 1888 to design the grounds for Biltmore, the estate of George W. Vanderbilt (grandson of the railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt) near Asheville, North Carolina. It was one of Olmsted’s last great efforts in the picturesque style. In the late 1880s, when the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition was being planned for 1893, Olmsted was chosen to head the landscape project, which he later redesigned as Jackson Park. He spent his last years mainly at his home in Brookline.