Olmsted, Frederick Law
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
um'sted, Frederick Law (1822-1903), an American landscape architect. He was born at Hartford, Connecticut. He was educated as a civil engineer at Yale. His early manhood was passed as a farmer and horticulturist. In 1850 he traveled in Great Britain , France, and Italy, studying the condition of agriculture and public parks of those countries. On his return he traveled extensively in the South, and published two or three volumes of his observations relative to the effects of slavery on agriculture. They were republished in Great Britain under the title of The Cotton Kingdom and, during the Civil War, they had no little influence in molding sentiment in favor of the North. Olmsted's personality and writings had so far attracted attention that, when New York City embarked on the project of creating a central park , he was made superintendent. Among the ideas which governed him in laying out that and subsequent parks may be mentioned an avoidance of artificial or mathematical lines. He believed that each park should take advantage of the natural lay of the land, and that it should be a combination of cultivation and wildwood. In his judgment, a rocky ledge covered by a thicket should not be disturbed. In other words, nature should be aided, not destroyed, by art. His work in New York City made him the leading landscape architect of America. He laid out parks for Brooklyn, Chicago, Boston, Detroit, Louisville, Buffalo, Milwaukee, Baltimore, and many other less prominent cities. He gave valuable advice relative to the beautifying of the capitol grounds at Washington. He was also one of the first commissioners of the Yosemite National Park and the Mariposa Grove. He was connected with many charitable organizations, being one of the founders of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History at New York. In his later years he opened an office in Boston. He died at Waverly, Massachusetts. His name and work have descended to his son, now professor of landscape architecture in Harvard University . See Central Park ; Yosemite ; Vanderbilt
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's in 1910 treated Olmsted as the leading American park-maker whose practice had passed to his son; today he is treated as a founding figure of American landscape architecture and of the conservation movement generally, and his 2022 bicentennial was marked by parks and institutions across the country. His Brookline home and office, Fairsted, is now the Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site, preserving the firm's drawings and plans. The account tactfully omits that he died at Waverley in the McLean Asylum, whose grounds he had himself designed, after years of mental decline. Two of its claims need adjusting: Olmsted served on the 1864 commission for the Yosemite Valley state grant, not the national park created in 1890, and Central Park was co-designed with Calvert Vaux, whose share is now given equal weight. The Cotton Kingdom is still read and cited as a firsthand source on the slave South, and Central Park itself was rescued from serious decay by a restoration effort begun in the early 1980s.
Written for this edition, 2026.