Frederick Law Olmsted

American landscape architect and critic

• Born: April 26, 1822
• Birthplace: Hartford, Connecticut
• Died: August 28, 1903
• Place of death: Waverly, Massachusetts

Olmsted traveled extensively in the antebellum South and wrote some of the best critical descriptions of American slavery on the eve of the Civil War. Considered the founder of the profession of landscape architecture in the United States, he also designed Central Park in New York City and other urban parks across the country.

Early Life

Frederick Law Olmsted (OHM-stehd) was the son of a prosperous dry-goods merchant. His family’s material wealth and deep roots in the community gave Olmsted both the economic freedom and the personal confidence to pursue a leisurely course toward his major life works. On the other hand, he was physically frail and suffered from an eye problem that hampered his efforts at formal education. Olmsted was attracted to strenuous outdoor physical activity as compensation for his physical weakness and developed a keen appreciation of nature and the outdoors. During his early years, Olmsted acquired a taste for travel, and by the time he was in his mid-teens he had made several lengthy trips through various regions of the northeastern United States and Canada.

Olmsted matriculated at Yale, where he studied engineering, but his eye problem prevented regular study, and after practical training in surveying he worked briefly and unhappily for a dry-goods firm in were chosen. This was followed by an extremely unpleasant year’s experience as a sailor on a voyage to China. Returning to Yale, he studied agricultural science and engineering and then undertook practical training as a farmer on 130 Staten Island acres purchased by his father. As he became absorbed with scientific agriculture, Olmsted began to publish articles on rural subjects and drifted toward a career as a writer.

Life’s Work

During the 1850’s, Olmsted embarked upon his first noteworthy career as he traveled extensively and published accounts of his journeys. His first book, Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England (1852), was well received and demonstrated his aptitude for keen social observation. It is also significant that Olmsted was quite favorably taken with the landscape and rural life of the country, reflecting his continuing interest in the scenic. With sectional tension between North and South escalating, he was commissioned by The New York Times to travel through Dixie and report on the region’s social and economic conditions.

Olmsted was chosen because of his connections among rationalist intellectual circles, his moderate antislavery views, and his established literary reputation. Although the publisher of The New York Times was himself a moderate Free-Soiler, Olmsted was not chosen primarily because of his views on slavery but because of his reputation as a perceptive observer who could produce an objective report on the “peculiar institution.”

In December of 1852, Olmsted began a fourteen-month tour that took him through much of the South and as far as Texas and across the Rio Grande. He sent back lengthy letters over the signature “Yeoman,” which were published on the first page of the newspaper, beginning in February, 1853. These were followed by several volumes under various titles, which were finally distilled into his classic two-volume work, The Cotton Kingdom (1861).

Olmsted’s works were immediately hailed by contemporaries as the most important sources of objective information about the life and customs of the slaveholding states and became significant references as Europeans discussed the relative merits of the Northern and Southern causes in the American Civil War. Olmsted’s works remain essential sources for modern historians, who regard them as classic contemporary portrayals and analyses of the plantation slavery system of the antebellum South. If Olmsted had done nothing else, his descriptions of slavery would have established his lasting reputation, but, remarkably, even as he was producing these works, he was embarking upon a second career for which he would become even better known.

In 1857, because of his continuing interest in landscape, Olmsted accepted the position of superintendent of the preparatory work on Central Park in New York City. Soon after, with his partner Calvert Vaux, Olmsted won the competition to provide a new design for the park. He signed his plans with the title “Landscape Architect” under his name, supposedly becoming the first to use this title formally. In 1858, he became the park’s chief architect and began to implement his and Vaux’s plan to make the park both materially and artistically successful. His work was interrupted by service during the Civil War as general secretary of the United States Sanitary Commission, the forerunner of the American Red Cross, but by this time his philosophy of landscape design was well established.

Olmsted started from the premise that it is essential for human beings to maintain a balance between civilization and nature in their lives and that for city dwellers, particularly, it is imperative that places should be provided as retreats from the pressures of overcrowded, overly civilized urban existence. Although he had an appreciation for nature in the raw, “wilderness,” Olmsted’s real preference was for the pastoral, a natural environment that was ordered, designed, structured, but which provided the illusion of nature’s own handiwork. Thus, the construction of Central Park would involve the movement of tons of dirt, the creation of lakes, sunken roads, bridges, and other features to manufacture the illusion of nature for the city dweller. Ironically, considering the fact that much of his later career was spent in the service of the wealthy and influential, Olmsted’s interest in urban parks was shaped in part by a strong democratic impulse to provide facilities where all classes could find refuge and recreation.

In 1863, Olmsted left Washington to become superintendent of John C. Frémont’s Mariposa mining estates in California, and while there he became a leading figure in the movement to set aside the Yosemite and Mariposa “big tree” reservations that culminated in the establishment of Yosemite Park. Yosemite eventually became part of the national park system. Olmsted was a consistent promoter of preserving scenic regions and often manufactured “wilderness” areas as part of his design scheme for urban parks.

After the Civil War was concluded, Olmsted returned to New York City and carried Central Park nearly to completion. When the project was begun, the site was an area containing pig farms and squatters’ shacks that had no distinguishing physical features; twenty years and the labor of more than thirty-eight hundred workers were required to construct the hills, lakes, and paths that became so important to New Yorkers. Central Park established Olmsted’s reputation and became the prototype for urban parks across the United States.

Olmsted’s services were now much in demand, and he moved on to design additional parks for New York City and other cities across the nation, the Capitol grounds in Washington, D.C., a preservation plan for the Niagara Falls area, and numerous college campuses. Some consider his design for the system of lagoons, wooded islands, and plantings in Chicago’s Jackson Park for the Columbian Exposition in 1893 his crowning achievement. He also became a fervent advocate of suburban living, balancing the features and values of both city and country in new planned communities on the borders of older urban centers. Olmsted and Vaux designed suburbs for several cities, the most famous being Chicago’s Riverside, which opened in 1869.

Emotionally exhausted by the constant political maneuvering and compromise required for work in the public sector, in his later years Olmsted retreated to the service of precisely those wealthy plutocrats whose stranglehold on scenic outdoor areas his urban parks had helped to break. His clients included Andrew Carnegie, Leland Stanford, and George Vanderbilt, for whom he helped design the famous Biltmore estate in North Carolina. Olmsted suffered a mental collapse in 1893 and disappeared from public view until his death in 1903.

Significance

Frederick Law Olmsted was one of those amazingly talented individuals who was able to achieve striking success in several areas. He was a gifted social observer and writer who left some of the best contemporary American descriptions and analyses of the life and economy of the antebellum South. Shaped by an aesthetic appreciation for wilderness and the pastoral and by a strong democratic impulse, Olmsted became a passionate advocate of the need for balance between urban and natural experiences if one were to maintain a healthy existence. He thus became the first great proponent and designer of large urban parks that would be open to all people and allow city dwellers to maintain that necessary balance in their lives. His Central Park in New York City was the progenitor of the urban parks movement in the United States, and Olmsted fathered the profession of landscape architecture.

Bibliography

Beveridge, Charles E., and Paul Rocheleau. Frederick Law Olmsted: Designing the American Landscape. Edited and designed by David Larkin. Rev. ed. New York: Universe, 1998. A survey of Olmsted’s landscape projects, with textual descriptions and color photographs. The text also discusses Olmsted’s work as an administrator and social reformer.

Fein, Albert. Frederick Law Olmsted and the American Environmental Tradition. New York: George Braziller, 1972. Evaluates Olmsted’s significance in the broad development of environmentalism.

Huth, Hans. Nature and the American: Three Centuries of Changing Attitudes. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957. Discusses Olmsted’s work as a landscape architect, as well as his efforts in the campaigns to preserve Yosemite and the area around Niagara Falls.

Mitchell, John G. “Frederick Law Olmsted’s Passion for Parks.” National Geographic 207, no. 3 (March, 2005): 32. An overview of Olmsted’s life, philosophy, and landscape projects, richly illustrated with color photographs.

Newton, Norman T. Design on the Land: The Development of Landscape Architecture. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971. Includes an assessment of Olmsted’s role in the development of the profession.

Olmsted, Frederick Law. The Slave States Before the Civil War. Edited by Harvey Wish. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1959. Wish has written an excellent introduction discussing Olmsted’s life and publications.

Robczynski, Witold. A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Scribner, 1999. Comprehensive biography, describing Olmsted’s occupations and interests and his vision for the American landscape. Olmsted is portrayed as a humanist who saw city parks as a civilizing force for a growing urban population.

Roper, Laura Wood. FLO: A Biography of Frederick Law Olmsted. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973. The definitive biography, combining social history with a nuanced portrait of its subject. Makes generous use of Olmsted’s letters. Massively documented, though lacking a bibliography.

Runte, Alfred. National Parks: The American Experience. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979. Although the focus is upon cultural and economic influences in the creation of the American national park system, this work also discusses the contributions of Olmsted to park design, wilderness appreciation, and the Yosemite and Niagara Falls campaigns.

Tobey, George B. A History of Landscape Architecture: The Relationship of People to Environment. New York: American Elsevier, 1973. Includes considerable material dealing with Olmsted.