Center. Library of Congress Record of the Olmsted Associates Riel 224 Frames 77-84. conge B. Dorr JOB FILE 37 Bar Harbor Maive 1902-69 2 2nd June. 1902 Mr. George Dorry Bar Harbor, Me : Dear Sir:- I. am sorry you had to send me a remind : by Mr. Pinchot before getting n answer from Me in the Bar Island matter I had postponed gritina to talk the matter over with my brother As I telegraphe a you, I will make a visit about end of June for examination of the islame written report setting forth my advice development, illustrated, if it seems sketch map. Such advice as I can give in this may would probably be sufficient to enable the owners to subdivido the island into two parts without danger or subsequent development. This In I unders the immediate object of calling upon me at the present time. How much more could in accomplished be it is rather hard to tell in advance Was one hundred dollars return. ? 3 Borr-2 we have received a from 77 Main Street, Bar Harbor, stating that he nas been anked by the owners of Bar Island to make vitat surveys we shell need in laying out the island, and stating that he has a plan drawn to the scale of two hundred feet to the inch. enlarged from the (joast Survey char We have replied and for the purpose 01" the preliminary visit. If, however, it should be definitely at the present time to have a complete plan made for the sub.. division of the island, of course a more accurace and detailed survey will be necessary and some time and expense would saved by dispensing with the preliminary visi and going into the problem in more detail when I visit the island at the end of June. For such a complete plan our charge would be rectioned at the rate of five dollars per acre for the land included, together with all expenses of traveling, etc as set forth in the enclosed statement As a basis for such i. plan we should be provided with 8 survey on the scale of one hundre feet to the inch with 5 foot outlines of masses of follage and any important and other prominent objects. Detailed specifications a map as is desirable are enclosed herewith. Unless I hear from you to the contrary I shall assume that you wish me to make a preliminate end of June, to be followed by a written report, after which Dorr-3 4 separate arrangements car datailai advice Very only yours, Enclosures 5 GEORGE B. DORR, BAR HARBOR. Visit by F. L. O 4th September, 1909. After loking at Blair (?) garden and Kennedy garden, went through Dorr's nursery ha astily (great show of phlox and a lot of other interesting stuff - also noted the new irri- gation scheme after market garden pattern inch (or in) gal - * vanized pipes supported on wooden posts at syitable height ac- cording to crop (a little above tops- from 11' to 371 from ground) with nipples about 3' apart. Pipes can be turned on their own axes through 1800 to squirt toward either side and at any angle of elevation. They are about 60' apart and squirt 30' each way at maximum. Said to work fine. Then advised with him about a pergola he is going to build and about design of a library building of which he is a committee. No charge, I guess. I think it would be a god thing for Dawson and Greatorex and me to spend a day looking over some of the Bar Harbor places and Dorr's nursery while foliage is on as bearing on style of planting, etc. for James place and Perry. There is some very good work to be seen and studied. Mg 6 13th September, 1909. Y Mr. Georgo B. Dorr, Bar Harbor, Maine. Dear Sir:- We beg to inform you that we have this morning made definite arrangements with Mr. Goorge H. Weatherbee, OF 15 Ashburton Place, Boston, to 80 to Bar Island on Friday next to make the toro- graphical survey of your property. We regret exceedingly that there should have been such a delay in getting started on this work, bilt, we had difficulty in getting hold of Mr. Weather- bee owins to the fact that he WAS on his vacation in New Hampshire, and 90 out of reach for several days. we feel confident, however, that Mr. Weatherbee will make good progress in the survey and that the delay thus far will not prove serious. Yours very truly, 4 8.955 far Marbor the Sept to 1909 ANS'O n Dear the Mentled Thank do you interest our library - its letter X the Cut Let Mu know when you an Coming down 1 nell about BM Island; I have another math of family Interest Twat Mau but yru here_ You finderly R. Ihally they Hodyder dim When you Che hill than 8 OLMSTED BROTHERS, REC'D OV 1) 1909 18 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston. ACK'D 13 BY 7 ANS'D BY November 9th, 1909. READ BY Frederick Law Olmsted, Esq Brookline, Mass. } Dear Olmsted, This is just an answer to your question about aspar- agus at Mt Desert. I have never succeeded in establishing a sat- isfactory bed of it there, and one of my neighbors who takes special interest in his vegetable garden and is usually very successful with it told me this summer that his experience with asparagus had been the same. on the other hand, I do not feel that I have experimented sufficiently with different conditions in its culture there to feel sure that it has not been rather a question of failing to get the right ones than of the impossibility of growing it satisfactorily in that region. For one thing, I question whether my bed has ever had any dressing of salt given it - a matter of which I was thinking myself lately in connection with its poor success. It is plain however that it will not grow there as vigorously as elsewhere with- out some special care, though the quality and flavor of what we get is excellent. Sincerely yours, (25 9 Halford true lunah math Zourt allerging at communication Club not once / Friday Freshing a It Ford th American Landscape autiticiture Designeral Places. Wm. H. Tishler. Editor. 1989. Preservation Press. American Landscape Architecture Frederick Law Olmsted 39 38 FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED Frederick Law Olmsted, the father of American landscape architec- Charles E. Beveridge ture. (National Park Service, Olmsted NHS) Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903), the leading landscape architect of the post-Civil War generation and acknowl- edged father of American landscape architecture, created a firm that dominated the profession until World War II. With his first partner, Calvert Vaux, he designed Central Park (1858-63; 1865-78) and planned some 50 additional projects including Prospect Park (1865-73) in Brooklyn, Buffalo's northside park system (1868-76), Chicago's Plan for Prospect Park, Brooklyn, South Parks (1871) and the residential community of Riv- N.Y., a classic park design, dem- erside, Ill. (1868-70). Between 1872 and his retirement in constrating the flow of walks and 1895, he and his partners and staff carried out an additional drives leading the visitor through 550 commissions, including Mount Royal Park (1874-81) a series of landscapes. (National Park Service, Olmsted NHS) in Montreal and Belle Isle Park (1881-84) in Detroit; the United States Capitol grounds (1874-91); the campuses of Lawrenceville School (1883-87) in New Jersey and Stan- PROSPECT PAINS ford University (1886-91); several park systems on which work continued beyond Olmsted's retirement, among them Buffalo's southside park system (1888) and systems in Boston (1878), Rochester, N.Y. (1888), and Louisville (1891); and his last two great projects, the site plan for the World's Columbian Exposition (1888-93) in Chicago and George W. Vanderbilt's Biltmore estate (1888-95) in Asheville, N.C. Two of his most talented young students and partners, Henry Sargent Codman and Charles Eliot, died before him; but his stepson and partner, John Charles Olmsted, and his son and namesake, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., carried on his design tradition. As senior partners in the firm, they oversaw some 3,000 new projects between 1895 and 1950. Born in Hartford, Conn., Olmsted moved to the New York City area in 1848 and finally settled in Brookline, Mass., in the early 1880s. The Olmsted firm remained in Brookline until 1980, when the National Park Service pur- chased his home and office to create the Olmsted National Historic Site. Olmsted drew his professional training from a variety of experiences. Between 1837, when illness pre- vented him from entering college, and his appointment as superintendent of Central Park in 1857, he was variously a clerk, seaman in the China trade, farmer, traveling corre- spondent in the slave-holding South for New York City newspapers and partner in a publishing firm. During the next eight years he was an administrator-first as architect-in-chief of Central Park, in charge of its construc- tion; next as the administrative head of the U.S. Sanitary Commission (a Civil War forerunner of the American Red Cross); and then as manager of the vast Mariposa gold mining estate in California. In all his activities Olmsted attempted to improve Amer- ican society. He envisioned the creation of public institu- tions of culture and recreation, including parks, that would be available to all people. He also sought to foster "communitiveness"- - a sense of shared community and dedicated service. His concept of the role of the landscape architect was as broad as his social and political concerns. The profession would shape the American city by design- ing public parks and park systems to meet a wide range of ample Long Meadow, of Prospect Park, an expanse of pastoral and an ex- the "beautiful." National Park Service, Olmsted scenery NHS) recreational needs. It would also create a new kind of com- nlanned for the single purpose of American Landscape Architecture Frederick Law Olmsted 41 40 Mitchell) Opposite top: Picturesque scenery of the Ramble, Central Park. (Herbert Opposite center: Central Park's second transverse road for crosstown traffic. West Side Manhattan is in the background beyond Eighth Ave- nue. (The New-York Historical Society) able the best aspects of city and country life. There, land- scape architects would design residential grounds with nu- merous "open air apartments" by which domestic activities could be moved out of doors. Olmsted had high expectations for the visual and psy- chological effects of his designs. He believed that "pasto- ral" park scenery, with a gracefully undulating greensward and scattered groves of trees, was a powerful antidote to the stress and artificiality of urban life. Such scenery, he suggested, unconsciously promoted a sense of tranquillity by subordinating individual elements in the landscape to the overall design. He heightened this sense of calm by carefully separating different landscape themes and con- flicting uses. Olmsted applied these principles of separa- tion and subordination more consistently than any other landscape designer of his era. Subordination is found in his parks, where carefully constructed walks and drives flow through the landscape with gentle grades and easy curves, requiring a viewer's minimal attention to the process of movement. At the same time, structures merge into the landscape. Separation is found in his park systems, where large parks designed for the enjoyment of scenery are sup- plemented by smaller recreational areas for other activities and where "park ways" handle the movement of pedes- trian and vehicular traffic. In addition to designing for urban living, Olmsted was anxious to preserve areas of great natural beauty for public enjoyment. He served as head of the first commission in charge of Yosemite Valley and was a leader in establishing the Niagara Reservation, which he planned with Calvert Vaux in 1887. As a designer, Olmsted drew from American natural scenery, the social values of his native region and the writ- ings of Andrew Jackson Downing and other precursors. At the same time he benefited from visiting the parks and landscapes of Britain and the Continent. He learned about landscape art from John Ruskin's writings and carefully studied the treatises on landscape and gardening by Wil- liam Gilpin, Humphry Repton, Uvedale Price and William tive tions, Robinson. he importance heavily developing English tradi- Although he drew from recognized the of distinc- landscape styles for the American South and Midwest, and while in California and Colorado he began to develop a water-conserving style appropriate to the semiarid Ameri- can West. As an American, Olmsted provided his fellow citizens with recreational and residential amenities that had previ- ously been monopolized by the privileged classes of Eu- rope. In addition, he sought to produce a landscape design profession that rejected mere decoration in order to create spaces meeting the social and psychological needs of Amer- icans in a comprehensive and imaginative way. 92 (Library Olmsted's concern with separate ways for different modes of traffic. Opposite: Section of Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, 1868, showing of Yosemite History: Frederick Law Olmsted, Landscape Architect Page 1 of 2 Home A - Z Bookstore Art Prints History Muir Weather FAQ Lodging Forum Search Yosemite History: Frederick Law Olmsted, Landscape Architect Yosemite and the Mariposa Grove: A Preliminary Report, 1865. Introduction "Written in 1865 by landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted when he served briefly as one of the first Commissioners appointed to manage the grant of the Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Big Tree Grove from Congress to the State of California as a park, this Report offers one of the first systematic expositions in the history of the Western world of the importance of contact with wilderness for human well-being, the effect of beautiful scenery on human perception, and the moral responsibility of democratic governments to preserve regions of extraordinary natural beauty for the benefit of the whole people. The Report also includes characteristically thoughtful suggestions for managing the Park for human access with minimal harm to the natural environment. Olmsted read the Report to his fellow Commissioners at a meeting in the Yosemite Valley on August 9, 1865; ultimately intended for presentation to the state legislature, it met with indifference or hostility from other members of the Commission, and was quietly suppressed. Olmsted himself left California for good at the end of 1865; he had arrived there just a little more than two years before to assume responsibilities as Superintendent for the Mariposa Mining Estate. Only in the twentieth century has his Preliminary Report come to be widely recognized as one of the most profound and original philosophical statements to emerge from the American conservation movement. "The original draft of the Preliminary Report is in the hand of Henry Perkins, Olmsted's secretary. It is accompanied here by a twentieth-century typed transcipt. Pages 5 through 14 of the original document are missing; these are believed to have contained the material represented in the second typed transcript, taken from a letter to the New York Evening Post written by Olmsted in 1868. Olmsted scholar Laura Wood Roper surmised that Olmsted had removed that portion of the Report in order to incorporate it in the letter; her explanation has been generally accepted by other scholars, and a typescript of the relevant portion of the letter is accordingly included here as part of the Report's transcription." --From "The Evolution of the Conservation Movement, 1850-1920" Full text of Frederick Law Olmsted's Yosemite and the Mariposa Grove: A Preliminary Report, 1865. Click here to buy the 1865 report. Related Links Frederick Law Olmsted's Biography and Philosophy A View of Frederick Law Olmsted Back to Yosemite, California History Back to Yosemite, California Home Credits: The above note is from the Library of Congress Exhibit "The Evolution of the Conservation Movement, 1850-1920" as part of its American Memory Project. The production of this collection was supported by a generous gift from Laurance S. and Mary French Rockefeller. Copyright © 1997-2000 Dan Anderson. All rights reserved. Internet access graciously provided by Precision Mold Base Corporation. Last updated 23 March 2002. http://www.yosemite.ca.us/history/olmsted/ 6/21/2002 Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site (NPS) - Facilities Page 1 of 1 RATIONAL SERVICE experience 3088 AMERICA Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site PARK FACILITIES BOOKSTORE HOME I TRAVEL BASICS I ACTIVITIES FEES/PERMITS CONTACT LINES Visitor Centers VOLUNTEER FACTS/DOCS FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED NHS VISITOR INFORMATION AREA Open All Year 10:00 am - 4:30 pm inDEPTH Phone - 617/566-1689 Location - Frederick Law Olmsted NHS 99 Warren Street Brookline, MA Closures - Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years Day Special Programs - A 17-minute orientation video entitled "From Pencil to Park: Preserving Olmsted Landscapes" is shown prior to guided tours. Tours include restored portions of the historic Olmsted Office where thousands of public and private landscapes were created by the Olmsted firm over the course of a century beginning in 1883. Seasonal tours of the newly-restored "Fairsted" grounds also provide visitors with a living exhibit of Olmsted's design principles and craftsmanship. Exhibits - Exhibits explore the history and "innovations" of Frederick Law Olmsted and his firm through a study of some of the thousands of Olmsted designed landscapes throughout the United States. Available Facilities - Visitor desk providing brochure information on Olmsted NHS nearby national parks and historic designed landscapes including Boston's "emerald necklace" parks; visitor restrooms; Eastern National bookstore featuring landscape design and NPS histories. Privacy Disclaimer Freedom of Information Act park guide | search main http://www.nps.gov/frla/pphtml/facilities.html 11/28/2001 NPS People and Places Directory Page 1 of 1 directory People & Places Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site Superintendent/Site Address: Visitor Information: 617-566-1689 Manager: Office of the Superintendent x223 Myra Harrison 99 Warren Street Business Offices: 617-566-1689 Brookline, MA 02445 Fax: 617-232-4073 EMAIL: FRLA_Superintendent@nps.gov Shipping Address: 99 Warren Street Your search found 1 employees NAME/TITLE PHONE/EMAIL Margaret D. Coffin/LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT Back to the Search Page http://165.83.219.72/npsdirectory/employees.cfm 11/28/2001 DEC 04 2000 DO NOT REMOVE THIS SLIP U.S. l IBRARY OF CONGRESS INWANUSCRIPT DIVISION. FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED A Register of His Papers In the Library of Congress * MANUSCRIPT DIVISION REFERENCE DEPARTMENT LIBRARY OF CONGRESS WASHINGTON : 1963 8643.3 PREFACE 45 The development of "registers" as used in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress has been gradual. Miss Katharine E. Brand, former Head of the Recent Manuscripts Section, is largely responsible for their present form and for their adoption by the Manuscript Division as finding aids, guides, or organizational surveys of manuscript collections. She described this evolu- tion in two articles published in the American Archivist, entitled "Develop- ments in the Handling of Recent Manuscripts in the Library of Congress" (Vol. 10, No. 2, April, 1953), and "The Place of the Register in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress" (Vol. 13, No. 1, January, 1955). The register is a necessary implement in the Division's handling of massive unindexed collections. It serves a variety of purposes, providing a means for exercising custodial control over a collection; assistance to the reading room staff in issuing the collection to readers and to the reference staff in drafting replies to written inquiries and a source of the information necessary to enable a cataloger to prepare a catalog entry for a collection in accordance with estab- lished rules for cataloging groups of manuscripts. By their publication, registers may be useful to other repositories by illustrating the Library's methods of organizing collections. The information on the size and organization of a collection furnished by a register may also enable a distant research student, with reasonable knowledge of his subject, to decide whether or not to come to the Library to consult the collection and, if he comes, to make more profitable use of limited time. Frequently a register describes a collection largely left in the arrangement it had as a "live" file and which has been accorded only external processing. A register does not describe the piece-by-piece arrangement or contents of a collection. It is not a definitive finding aid, catalog, calendar, or index. Ordinarily it will not enable the Library to furnish from a collection photo- copies of itemized pieces, all the correspondence of an individual, or all the material on a given subject. Even the most detailed register will not preclude the necessity of research in locating specific documents. It is merely an aid to research, not a substitute for it. From time to time, full-length registers, which may vary from 5 to 200 pages in length, will be published in order to disseminate more widely infor- mation about the Division's holdings. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS MANUSCRIPT DIVISION FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED PAPERS The papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, author and landscape architect, were given to the Library of Congress in 1947 and 1948 by the Olmsted family. Literary rights in the unpublished writings of Frederick Law Olmsted in these papers, and in other collections of papers in the custody of the Library of Congress, have not been dedicated to the public. A note concerning the Frederick Law Olmsted Papers appeared in the Library's Information Bulletin, December 16-22, 1947, pp. 2-3; and the material was described in the Library of Congress Quarterly Journal of Current Acquisitions, Vol. 6, No. 1 (November, 1948), pp. 8-15. Linear feet of shelf space occupied: 23 Approximate number of items: 24,000 -2- Scope and Content Note The papers of Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903) number approximately 24,000 items and have the inclusive dates 1777-1928. Included are some early family papers and some posthumous papers contributed by his contemporaries to Olmsted's biographers in the form of reminiscences. Most of the material, however, is dated between 1838 and 1903. The collection includes journals, correspondence, letterbooks, notebooks, business and financial papers, maps and drawings, reports, speeches, lectures, articles, essays, books, scrapbooks, and newspaper clippings. General correspondence and a subject file constitute the bulk of the collection and document 'Olmsted's private life as well as his career as the foremost landscape architect of his time. Included are papers relating to his administration of General Frémont's Mariposa mining estates in California and considerable correspondence and other materials dealing with the design and planning of parks (especially New York's Central Park), towns, private estates, sub- divisions, and public buildings throughout the United States. A few scattered items relate to Olmsted's journeys through the ante-bellum South and to his work for the United States Sanitary Commission (1861- 63), but most of this material is presumed to have been destroyed when his Staten Island home burned in 1863. A speech, article, and book file contains holograph drafts and typescripts of Olmsted's lectures, essays, books, and other writ- ings. Of particular interest in this series are the notes, clippings, and uncompleted chapter drafts for his unpublished History of Civili- zation in the United States. Prominent among his correspondents were William James, Charles Eliot Norton, Samuel Bowles, Whitelaw Reid, Charles Francis Adams, Henry J. Raymond, Edward Everett Hale, Charles McKim, Daniel Burnham, Andrew H. Green, Edwin Lawrence Godkin, Calvert Vaux, and several members of Olmsted's family. Page 1 of 3 Birthplace of American Forestry Biltmore Estate Forest Historical Information HOME The magnificent forest that covers more than two thirds of the Estate's total acreage today continues to be managed as a living testimony to the ABOUT US vision and conservation-mindedness of Frederick Law Olmsted At a time when America was still relentlessly devastating its forests, Olmsted was enunciating the need to stop the thoughtless destruction and turn to long- term, scientific management of forests as a wise investment for COLLECTIONS landowners. In the late 1880s, when George W. Vanderbilt had already purchased several thousand acres of mostly denuded land that had been cut-over and burned repeatedly and overgrazed for decades, he called HISTORICAL INFOMATION upon Olmsted to advise him on what to do it. After listening to Vanderbilt's supposition that he might like to make a park of it, Olmsted expressed to his client, "The soil seems to be generally poor. The woods are miserable, all the good trees having again and again been culled out and only runts Carl A. Schenck left. The topography is most unsuitable for anything that can properly be called park scenery." In response to Vanderbilt's question on what could be done with it, Olmsted replied, "Such land in Europe would be made a Biltmore Forest School forest; partly, if it belonged to a gentleman of large means, as a preserve for game, mainly with a view to crops of timber. That would be a suitable and dignified business for you to engage in; it would, in the long run, be Biltmore Estate Forest probably a fair investment of capital and it would be of great value to the country to have a thoroughly well organized and systematically conducted attempt in forestry made on a large scale. My advice would be to make a NC ECHO WEB-SITE small park into which to look from your house; make a small pleasure ground and garden, farm your river bottom chiefly to keep and fatten live stock with a view to manure; and make the rest a forest, improving the CONTACT US existing woods and planting the old fields." In a letter to his friend, Fred Kingsbury in January, 1891, Olmsted reported, "This advice struck him [Vanderbilt] favorably and after thinking it over several months, he told me that he was prepared to adopt it. Since then I have been giving it practical form and have each division of the scheme in operation. Having a commercial forest in view, he has since added to the property, piece by piece, until now it amounts to quite 6000 acres. We have been forming a nursery for the Estate in which we already have growing 40,000 trees and shrubs and are propagating a much larger number; these for the borders of the roads and home grounds. We have planted on the 'old fields' 300 acres of white pine and are preparing schedules of stock for the forest planting and are instructing and breaking in two foremen with small gangs for taking out the poor and dilapidated trees of the existing woods." Olmsted attributed the degraded condition of the existing patchwork parcels of woodland to a variety of reasons. He noted that he had seen the remains of several sawmills on the Estate that must have been at work a good many years, and for those mills, "every tree desirable for any sort of saleable lumber has been felled. What is seen now is the refuse. As is always the case, to get out the best trees, many a little less choice have been felled or broken down and ruined. Of what remained the settlers have taken great numbers for their cabins, fences and fuel. Big fires are the one luxury of the pioneer cabins. Then more have been taken to feed Asheville hearths than you can readily imagine." http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/archives/forestry/bef.html 10/18/2002 Page 2 of 3 In the last statement, Olmsted was referring to the local custom of bartering firewood for store goods in town; the firewood of course, having been taken from the region of the Estate. Upon the recommendation from Charles Sprague Sargent, Director of the Arnold Arboretum and noted authority on North American trees, Olmsted contracted with Robert J. Douglas, an Illinois nurseryman who specialized in the production of native tree species, to make an inspection of the Estate land in regards to reforestation possibilities. The results of Douglas's examinations and recommendations were incorporated into a comprehensive thirty six-page report that Olmsted prepared and sent to Mr. Vanderbilt on July 12, 1889. The largest section of the report, sixteen pages, was devoted to describing the condition of the forest along with suggestions for improvements. A subsequent report titled "Project Of Operations For Improving The Forest Of Biltmore" may very well be one of the earliest written forest management prescriptions in the United States. In the report, Olmsted indicates his awareness of the current situation in forestry on a national level and states that, "The management of forests is soon to be a subject of great national, economic importance, and as the undertaking now to be entered upon at Biltmore will be the first of the kind in the country to be carried on methodically, upon an extensive scale, it is even more desirable than it would otherwise be that it should, from the first, be directed systematically and with clearly defined purposes, and that instructive records of it should be kept." The report contains fairly explicit instructions regarding selective thinning under a variety of situations to improve the forest, as well as instructions for training foreman who would work under the superintendent, Mr. Gall, the resident Landscape Architect and Forester. Besides guidelines for practical forestry improvements, Olmsted encouraged the superintendent to "look ahead -for opportunities of forming points of special landscape interest by the development and exhibition of particular trees and groups." This concept for combining practical silviculture with landscape aesthetics was far ahead of generally accepted thought. After this initial forest management scheme was in place and three hundred acres of old fields had been planted to white pine by Robert Douglas, Olmsted realized that the long-term success of the forestry program would be dependent upon professional guidance by a trained forester. He wrote to George Vanderbilt on the 27th of November, 1891, recommending that he consider hiring Gifford Pinchot as his consulting forester. (Pinchot, at the time, was just beginning his career that would lead him to national acclaim as the first chief of the federal agency that came to be known as the U. S. Forest Service.) Pinchot, if Vanderbilt desired, would make an initial study of the Estate's woodlands, noting the species of trees, growth conditions, densities, quantities of board feet per acre, condition of the soil and forest floor, and silvicultural requirements, etc., and then block out a scheme or permanent plan of operations. Olmsted advised, "If you are to have the benefit of Mr. Pinchot's service in any way, it would undoubtedly be desirable with respect to the forest proper that nothing be done except under his advice. I say this the more confidently because I am satisfied that he would be glad to be identified with the undertaking, look to make his reputation upon it, and serve you with a degree of zeal that you could not expect to obtain from any one else." Vanderbilt was agreeable to Olmsted's recommendation and Pinchot began his work at Biltmore on February 3, 1892. In a report describing what was meant by the term forestry and how forestry applications could be applied to benefit both the forest and the landowner, Pinchot stated that the "Biltmore Working Plan" would draw "attention to the fact that there is such a thing in America "as forest management-As the first attempt of its kind in the United http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/archives/forestry/bef.html 10/18/2002 Page 3 of 3 States, the experiment at Biltmore will have, it is hoped, a distinct national bearing and importance." The greater part of Pinchot's efforts as Biltmore's forester were devoted to cruising the forests, gathering data, devising the management plan, and supervising improvement thinnings and timber harvests. He also continued the program of converting old farm fields into forest plantations. In 1895, Dr. Carl Alwin Schenck succeeded Pinchot, who left to pursue his career as a consulting forester and by 1898 as the chief of the federal government's Division of Forestry. Schenck was a young forester from Darmstadt, Germany, who was recommended by Sir Dietrich Brandis, an internationally renowned forestry expert and Pinchot's mentor. (Schenck is credited with the establishment and operation of the Biltmore Forest School [1898-1913], the first school of forestry in America, and now, listed in the National Register, open to the public as the "Cradle of Forestry In America" in Pisgah National Forest.) During his fourteen-year tenure at Biltmore, Schenck devoted a great deal of time and effort to the reforestation of hundreds of acres of old, abandoned farm fields. Through his many experiments with plantations of both hardwoods and conifers, much of the previously abused and exhausted farm land was transformed into productive forests that remain today as living examples of the dawn of scientific forestry in America. The approximately 5,500 acres that currently make up the forested land of Biltmore Estate constitute the combined legacies of George W. Vanderbilt. FOREST HISTORY SOCIETY NCSU LIBRARIES THE BILTMORE COMPANY HM Billmore@state This project is 100% supported with federal LSTA funds made possible through a grant from the Institute o Museum and Library Services, administered by the State Library of North Carolina, a division of the Department of Cultural Resources. Last Modified: 2002-10-16 URL: http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/archives/forestry/bef.html http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/archives/forestry/bef.html 10/18/2002 Olmsted Archives - Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site (U.S. National Park Se.. Page 1 of 5 National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior Find a Park Discover History Explore Nature Get Involved Working with Communities Olmsted Massachusetts Explore This Park Park Home Olmsted Archives Plan Your Visit Photos & Multimedia Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site History & Culture Archives and Museum Collections For Teachers The Olmsted Archives is one of the For Kids most widely researched museum News collections in the National Park System containing over 1,000,000 historic Management documents. Support Your Park The Olmsted Plans Vault, c.1980 Park and city planners from across the NPS/Olmsted NHS United States use these records each year to rehabilitate and rebuild many of the nation's most significant an Park Tools beloved landscapes to the lasting benefit of millions of people. FAQs Historians, students, and preservation planners use the collection to Contact Us document historic areas and to produce exhibits, films and scholarly publications. Site Index Español The National Park Service has cataloged and conserved the collection which contain landscape photographs, initial surveys, field sketches, general plans, planting lists, presentation drawings, business records and scale models. http://www.nps.gov/frla/olmstedarchives.htm 1/19/2014 Olmsted Archives - Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site (U.S. National Park Se.. Page 2 of 5 Researchers have the opportunity to survey and study historic records related to parks, gardens, communities, estates, and campuses designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and the Olmsted firm, including: Acadia National Park, Maine Atlanta Parks, Georgia Baltimore Park System, Maryland Boston Park System, Massachusetts Buffalo Park System, New York Central Park, New York, New York Chicago Park System, Illinois Denver Park Commission, Colorado Louisville Park System, Kentucky Prospect Park, Brooklyn, New York Seattle Park System, Washington Stanford University, California US Capitol Grounds, Washington, DC West Point Military Academy, New York White House Grounds, Washington, DC Yosemite National Park California Archival Collections at Olmsted NHS The surviving records of the Olmsted firm are held primarily at the Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site and at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. Originally together in Brookline, these collections complement each other and are often best studied in tandem. The Archival collections held at the Olmsted National Historic Site date from 1839 to 1980. The collections include an estimated 139,000 landscape architectural plans and drawings, 70,000 sheets of planting lists, 60,000 photographic prints, 30,000 photographic negatives, 12,000 lithographs, financial records, job correspondence, records and reports, and models relating to over 5,000 design projects. The Archives also contain study and reference collections on urban design, landscape architecture, and the fine arts in general. Descriptions and Linked Finding Aid Documents to the Collections Archival Collections Elsewhere The bulk of the firm's earlier correspondence (ca. 1885-1950) is located in the Frederick Law Olmsted Papers and Olmsted Associates Records held by the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress in http://www.nps.gov/frla/olmstedarchives.htm 1/19/2014 Olmsted Archives - Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site (U.S. National Park Se Page 3 of 5 Washington, D.C. A guide to the Olmsted materials at the Library of Congress can be found here. Click here for the finding aid to the FLO Personal Papers. Click here for the finding aid to the Olmsted Associates Records. Often times, materials from other repositories will prove useful to a researcher's work. Click here for information about other Olmsted related collections. Olmsted Research Guide Online (ORGO) With the Olmsted Research Guide Online (ORGO), it is possible to search a single database for records held at the Olmsted National Historic Site and the Olmsted collections at the LC: plans and drawings, photographs, lithographs, planting lists and correspondence. ORGO features a "Master List" search that allows researchers to search for Olmsted projects through a variety of access points: client name, historic job number, project type, city and state. In addition, ORGO includes a database with basic document information such as date and author/draftsman responsibility, as well as information on specific microfilm locations to simplify interlibrary loan requests from the Library of Congress. The database can be accessed at www.rediscov.com/olmsted. Reference Assistance and Research Appointments The Olmsted Archives is open to the public, Monday through Friday, by appointment. Reference assistance, finding aids, and reprographic services are available. Contact the Olmsted Archives reference staff to determine which landscape design or other records relate to your research. Olmsted NHS Research Policy Some materials have been reproduced electronically and are available to researchers without necessitating a research appointment. The Olmsted Archives may be contacted by telephone, mail, fax and e- mail at: Olmsted Archives Frederick Law Olmsted NHS http://www.nps.gov/frla/olmstedarchives.htm 1/19/2014 Olmsted Archives - Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site (U.S. National Park Se. Page 4 of 5 99 Warren Street Brookline, MA 02445 PHONE: (617) 566-1689 FAX: (617) 232-3964 E-mail: FRLA Olmsted Archives@nps.gov Please contact the Archives staff for research assistance and information, as well as to request permission to reproduce, publish or exhibit material from the Olmsted Archives. All requests will be answered in the order in which they are received. Please include the words Research Request in the subject line of e-mail correspondence. Copyright Notice The Copyright Law of the United States (Tiltle 17, USC) governs the making of photocopies and other reproductions of copyrighted material. Under certain conditions specified in the law, libraries and archives are authorized to furnish a photocopy or other reproduction. One of the specific conditions is that the photocopy or reproduction is not to be used for any purpose other than private study, scholarship, or research. If a user makes a request for, or later uses a photocopy or reproduction in excess of "fair use," that user may be liable for copyright infringement. Accessibility Wheelchair accessible parking is available. Please contact the reference staff regarding accommodations for research visits. Did You Know? Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. helped draft the language that defines the NPS. Its mission: "to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the l life therein and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyme future generations" http://www.nps.gov/frla/olmstedarchives.htm 1/19/2014 Emerald Necklace - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Page 1 of 4 Emerald Necklace From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The Emerald Necklace consists of an 1,100-acre Emerald Necklace (4.5 km2), or 445 hectare chain of parks linked by parkways and waterways in Boston and Brookline, Massachusetts. It gets its name from the way the planned chain appears to hang from the "neck" of the Boston peninsula; to this day it is not fully constructed. Contents 1 Overview 2 History 3 Shape Boston Public Garden, the second "jewel" of the 4 Jurisdiction Emerald Necklace 4.1 The Emerald Necklace Type Public park Conservancy Location 5 Plans Boston and Brookline, Massachusetts, 6 See also United States 7 References Created 1860's 8 External links Operated by Emerald Necklace Conservancy Overview Open All year The Necklace comprises half of the City of Boston's park acreage, parkland in the Town of Brookline, and parkways and park edges under the jurisdiction of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. More than 300,000 people OLMSTED ARCHIVES live within its watershed area. The Original plan of the necklace from 1894 Emerald Necklace is the only remaining intact linear park designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, America's first landscape architect. From Boston Common to Franklin Park it is approximately seven miles by foot or bicycle through the parks. [1] The Emerald Necklace includes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emerald_Necklace 1/19/2014 Emerald Necklace - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Page 2 of 4 Boston Common Public Garden Commonwealth Avenue Mall Back Bay Fens The Riverway Olmsted Park Jamaica Pond Jamaicaway Arborway Arnold Arboretum Franklin Park Several components of the Emerald Necklace pre-date the plan to unite them. Some links of the Emerald Necklace not only offer an opportunity for recreation in a wooded environment, but are also ecologically important urban wilds that provide nesting places for migratory birds and improve the air quality of the city. History This linear system of parks was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted to connect Boston Common, dating from the colonial period, and Public Garden (1837) to Franklin Park, known as the "great country park." The project began around 1878 with the effort to clean up and control the marshy area which became the Back Bay and the Fens. In 1880, Olmsted proposed that the Muddy River, which flowed from Jamaica Pond through the Fens, be included in the park plan. The current was dredged into a winding stream and directed into the Ward's Pond in Olmsted Park Charles River. The corridor encompassing the river became the linear park still in existence today. Olmsted's vision of a linear park of walking paths along a gentle stream connecting numerous small ponds was complete by the turn of the century. Over the past decade, almost $60 million in capital expenditures for parks and waterway improvements have been made in the Emerald Necklace by the City of Boston and the Town of Brookline. These efforts have included improved pathways, plantings and signage, bridge repairs, and the restoration of boardwalks and buildings. In some areas (especially the woodlands of Franklin Park and Olmsted Park) these efforts have only begun to address the over 50 years of neglect the Emerald Necklace has suffered. [1] Several dedicated parks organizations, including the Emerald Necklace Conservancy, the Friends of the Public Garden, the Franklin Park Coalition, and the Arboretum Park Conservancy, were created to protect, maintain, restore and advocate for the Emerald Necklace parks through the work of their staff, the donations of their constituents and the efforts of their volunteers. [2] Shape The Emerald Necklace begins near Boston's Downtown Crossing, proceeds along the Boston/Brookline http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emerald_Necklace 1/19/2014 Emerald Necklace - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Page 3 of 4 border, then curves into Jamaica Plain. At the south border of Arnold Arboretum, at the point most distant from its beginning, the Emerald Necklace is in Roslindale. It then hooks back up into Roxbury and Dorchester. Olmsted's original plan called for a "U" shaped necklace which terminated at Boston Harbor. The final link, The Dorchesterway, was never realized. [3] Jurisdiction Arnold Arboretum is leased to and managed by Harvard University. The west banks of Olmsted Park and the Riverway are under the jurisdiction of Brookline Parks & Open Space. The majority of the Emerald Necklace is maintained by Boston Parks and Recreation with a small portion belonging to the Department of Conservation and Recreation. [4] The Emerald Necklace Conservancy The Emerald Necklace Conservancy was created to protect, restore, maintain and promote the landscape, waterways and parkways of the Emerald Necklace park system as special places for people to visit and enjoy. The Conservancy's programs and funding support and complement initiatives by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, City of Boston and Town of Brookline who began the Necklace's restoration in the 1980s. A public-private partnership, the Conservancy was formed in 1996 and incorporated in 1998 as a non- profit organization. The organization brings together government, business, residential and institutional representatives, community leaders and organizations, and environmental and park advocates in support of the Olmsted legacy. President Julie Crockford and the staff work closely with the Board of Directors, the Park Overseers (representing all of the parks and friends groups within the Emerald Necklace), the Stewardship Council, and hundreds of volunteers to accomplish our mission. Plans The Emerald Necklace Parks Master Plan was completed in 1989, and updated in 2001. [5] The parks have long been subject to flooding from the Muddy River. The Muddy River Restoration Project[6] will dredge contaminated sediments and implement other major structural improvements, unburying the river and improving its integrity, appearance, and flood control capabilities. Phase I - Daylighting the river at the Landmark Center is set to begin in spring of 2009. [7] Fens from footbridge opposite See also Forsyth Dental building, looking north. Prudential building in background http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emerald_Necklace 1/19/2014 Emerald Necklace - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Page 4 of 4 Charles River Esplanade Columbia Road Forest Hills Cemetery Larz Anderson Park Massachusetts Audubon Society Southwest Corridor Park Rose Kennedy Greenway Cleveland Metroparks References 1. rab "City of Boston - The Emerald Necklace". 2. ^ "The Emerald Necklace Conservancy - Welcome!". Emeraldnecklace.org. Retrieved 2012-05-20. 3. ^ "Heart of the City Project, Center for Urban and Regional Policy, Harvard University and Northeastern University" 4. ^ "Parks & Recreation | City of Boston". Cityofboston.gov. 2012-01-18. Retrieved 2012-05-20. 5. ^ "Olmsted's Emerald Necklace". Muddyrivermmoc.org Retrieved 2012-05-20. 6. ^ "Welcome to the MMOC". Muddyrivermmoc.org. 2012-04-11. Retrieved 2012-05-20. 7. ^ "Muddy River Restoration Project" Muddyrivermmoc.org Retrieved 2012-05-20. External links The Emerald Necklace Conservancy City of Boston Website Friends of the Public Garden A complete 1894 plan Retrieved from"http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Emerald_Necklace&oldid=584733600" Categories: Emerald Necklace Hiking trails in Massachusetts Parks in Boston, Massachusetts This page was last modified on 5 December 2013 at 19:17. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emerald_Necklace 1/19/2014 Frederick Law Olmsted and the American Environmental Tradition 1 1 ALBERT FEIN 1992 ) 893. George Braziller New York A Modern Arcadia -FOREST-HILLS.GARDENS. Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. and the -DESIGNED-FOR-THE-SAGE-FOUNDATION-HOMESCO- Plan for Forest Hills Gardens Susan L. Klaus An illustrated history of one of America's most notable planned communities "Bright, cheerful houses, well arranged, well trimmed lawns, hedging carefully cut distinctly joyous," wrote architec- tural critic Herbert Croly in 1914 about the Forest Hills Gardens community in Queens, New York. The New York Tribune agreed, reporting that the place was a "modern Garden of Eden, a fairy tale too good to be true." STATION-SQUARE- Conceived as an experiment that STORESAND-NON+HOUSEKEEPINGAPARTMENTS: would apply the new "science" of city planning to a suburban setting, Forest Hills Gardens was created by the Russell "A Modern Arcadia illuminates the fasci- SUSAN L. KLAUS is an independent scholar Sage Foundation to provide housing for nating intersection of social and aesthetic with particular interest in urban and middle-class commuters as an alternative reform movements in the Progressive landscape history. to cramped flats in New York City. Era, as well as the early career of a pro- Although it has long been recognized lific and influential planner and landscape as one of the most influential planned architect."-David Glassberg, author of Urban Studies / Landscape Architecture communities in the United States, this Sense of History: The Place of the Past in American Studies is the first time Forest Hills Gardens American Life 272 pp., 100 illus., 7" X 10" format has been the subject of a book. $39.95t cloth, ISBN 1-55849-314-X Susan L. Klaus's fully illustrated history January 2002 "Forest Hills Gardens has been little chronicles the creation of the 142-acre studied by modern historians. Everyone Published in association with the Library of development from its inception in 1909 knows of it, but the details of its planning American Landscape History through its first two decades, offering and development are not readily avail- critical insights into American planning able. The scholarship in this work is history, landscape architecture, and the exceptionally thorough, clearly the result social and economic forces that shaped of lengthy research. A Modern Arcadia will housing in the Progressive Era. Klaus make a significant contribution to the focuses particularly on the creative genius fields of landscape and planning history." of Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., who served -Cynthia Zaitzevsky, author of Frederick as planner and landscape architect for the Law Olmsted and the Boston Park System project. Drawing on his father's visionary ideas but developing his own perspective, the younger Olmsted redefined planning for the modern era and became one of the founders of the profession of city planning in the United States. 8 University of Massachusetts Press fall/winter 2001-2002 UMass Press Online at www.umass.edu/umpress PAUL BROOKS Speaking for Nature How Literary Naturalists from Henry Thoreau to Rachel Carson Have Shaped America BY PAUL BROOKS Roadless Area The Pursuit of Wilderness The House of Life: Rachel Carson at Work with drawings by the author The View from Lincoln Hill Speaking for Nature HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY BOSTON 1980 way with all her mystery and glory, with those vague indescribable spoke even better than he wrote; those who heard him in New emotions which tremble between wonder and sympathy. York's Century Club - which published a memorial volume Yet the scientist was always present. On a mission to Yosem- after his death in 1901 - considered him one of the great ra- conteurs of his time. But unlike Burroughs, who wrote almost ite in the autumn of 1864 (four years after Starr King's visit) easily, or Muir, who drove himself with a missionary's to survey the boundaries of the newly created park, he zeal too to get his message on paper, King talked away the books watched the falls in spate during a violent storm, when gusts he might have written. With his wit, his charm, his zest for of wind would swing "the whole mighty cataract like a pen- life, he became a sort of romantic hero to Henry Adams and dulum would gather up the whole fall in mid-air, whirl it the intellectuals of the Adams circle. Eventually, however, in a festoon, and carry it back over the very summit of the the Panic of 1893 and the subsequent collapse of his financial walls." In the midst of all this, he "got out the theodolite to enterprises led to a nervous breakdown and the untimely end measure the angle of its deflection." of a spectacular career. For Adams, he was always "young Clarence King's adventures in the High Sierra were but the and bloomful He remained the best companion in the prelude to a precocious scientific and administrative career. world to the end." When only twenty-five he persuaded the federal government to launch the most important scientific expedition of his gen- e eration: a survey of the so-called Great American Desert When Clarence King, in the autumn of 1864, undertook to sur- along the fortieth parallel between the Rockies and the vey the boundaries of the newborn Yosemite Park, he did not Sierra - with himself, naturally, in charge. His technical know that the man who gave him the assignment would have study, entitled Systematic Geology, marked a high point in a unique influence in shaping the American landscape. Fred- government scientific publications.* But alas he never wrote erick Law Olmsted, an ardent advocate of both city parks and a popular account of this pioneering expedition along the fu- wilderness preservation, was chairman of the first board of ture route of the transcontinental railroad. Mountaineering Yosemite Valley Commissioners. A forty-two-year-old New remains his only book for the general reader, for the growing Englander, he was a pioneer in the - for America - new pro- number of nature lovers who were responding to the gentle fession of "landscape architecture." The previous year, owing essays of Burroughs and who would soon be reading Muir. to a disagreement with the city authorities, he had inter- Like other brilliant persons before and since, King apparently rupted the monumental task of creating Central Park in New York to take over the management of the Mariposa Estate, General Frémont's huge gold-mining property that King had In the words of Henry Adams, King "was creating one of the classic scien- tific works of the century." The two young men first met in the summer of been studying for the Geological Survey, and from which he 1871 when Adams, then editor of the North American Review, joined a field had had his first close view of the peaks he was soon to climb. trip to the Rocky Mountains as a guest of the Fortieth Parallel Survey. They fell into each other's arms. "King had everything to interest and delight Thus, through a happy accident of geography, Olmsted had Adams. He knew more than Adams did of art and poetry; he knew America, come to know the Yosemite country at the precise moment in especially west of the hundredth meridian, better than any one He knew even women; even the American woman; even the New York woman, which history when his leadership was most needed to ensure its is saying much" (The Education of Henry Adams). Soon thereafter, in Wash- preservation. ington, D.C., King became an intimate friend of the Adamses and the John Olmsted was a complex character: a man with the imagina- Hays, the fifth member of a brilliant group of conversationalists that called itself "The Five of Hearts." tion and sensitivity of an artist and the iron will of an execu- 48 SPEAKING FOR NATURE East Meets West: The Yosemite Story 49 tive; an idealist, a perfectionist with a driving social con- ally added to, and which I remember but little like at home." science who nevertheless remained uncertain for many years In other words, wild scenery such as Yosemite and, in con- about the choice of a career. Born in Hartford in 1822, he trast, the sort of thing that he would seek to create in Central came of Puritan stock, dating back to the early days of the Park. Bay Colony and the founding of Connecticut; his forebears For a time it seemed as if he would become a professional were simple people, seafarers, farmers. Fortunately his father writer. Shortly after Walks and Talks was published, he was had an innate love of nature, which expressed itself in family commissioned by the New York Times to produce a series of excursions through the Connecticut River Valley, the White articles on conditions in the slave states. These essays (in the Mountains, and along the coast of Maine; to Lake George and words of Arthur M. Schlesinger) "present a uniquely candid the Hudson; to Quebec and Niagara Falls. These vacation and realistic picture of the pre-Civil War South." They be- trips sharpened young Olmsted's powers of observation. They came the basis for The Cotton Kingdom, published in 1861. By gave him a feeling for rural scenery and a firsthand acquain- now he was "a recognized litterateur" both at home and tance with agricultural practices, which he put to good use abroad. Ironically, this distinction all but lost him the great when, at the age of twenty-six, he took up scientific farming chance of his life, which led to his final decision on a career. on Staten Island. And out of this experience grew his second When the New York State legislature - prodded by William career, that of writer. He began with a series of articles on Cullen Bryant and the famous landscape gardener, Andrew American farming and later, after a summer's study abroad, Jackson Downing - authorized the establishment of Central he wrote Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England. Park, Olmsted, with his experience in land use and his famil- This, his first book, reflects his almost passionate response to iarity with the parks of Europe, was the obvious choice for the English countryside "green, dripping, glistening, gor- superintendent. The commissioners, however, questioned geous." It also recognizes the close bond between land- whether a literary man could also be "practical." Despite scape design and the other arts and foreshadows his own life this, he got the job, thanks to the backing of Bryant and of a work: "Probably there is no object of art that Americans of number of prominent citizens, including Washington Irving, cultivated taste generally more long to see in Europe, than an Asa Gray, Horace Greeley, Bayard Taylor, and the artist Al- English park. What artist, SO noble, has often been my bert Bierstadt. Today when we look back on his amazing ac- thought, as he, who with far-reaching conception of beauty complishments in shaping and refining not only the land it- and designing power, sketches the outline, writes the colours, self, but also the American public's attitude toward it, we and directs the shadows of a picture SO great that Nature realize that his gift for words was one of his greatest assets. shall be employed upon it for generations, before the work he Shortly after the outbreak of war, Olmsted was appointed has arranged for her shall realize his intentions." In another director of the United States Sanitary Commission, predeces- passage Olmsted makes the distinction between two equally sor of the American Red Cross, an appallingly difficult job valid approaches to the appreciation of nature: the joy in that he handled with distinction, and that all but ruined his pure wildness on the one hand and, on the other, the age-old health. In 1863, when he resigned and went west to take over love of the pastoral scene. "The sublime or the picturesque in Mariposa, he met Starr King, head of the California Commis- nature is much more rare in England, except on the sea-coast, sion (who doubtless told him something of the glories of Yo- than in America; but there is everywhere a great deal of quiet, semite) At about this time, Charles Eliot Norton described his peaceful, graceful beauty which the works of man have gener- appearance in a letter to a friend: "All the lines of his face 50 SPEAKING FOR NATURE East Meets West: The Yosemite Story 51 imply refinement and sensibility to such a degree that it is not till one has looked through them to what is beneath, that the Brewer, recently returned from leading the Geological dramat- force of his will and the reserved power of his character be H. expedition that Clarence King describes SO Survey in Mountaineering in the High Sierra. Together they come evident." He had already shown these qualities in his government service and in cutting his way through the politi- ically climbed among the high peaks, which impressed Olmsted as of cal thickets that had blocked the establishment of Central they had King with their variety of form: "some being Park (a struggle to which he would presently return). He grand tellated and fantastic." In all his travels, this was the most simplicity, while others are pinnacled, columnar, cas- would show them again as he planned the future of Yosemite. In the summer of 1864, accompanied by his family and a awesome scenery he had ever encountered. group of friends, Olmsted got his first view of the Valley. En Olmsted's concern with the influence of the natural scene the mind of man went very deep. He had always been route the party explored the Mariposa Big Trees and enjoyed on of the limited power of words to convey the total im- a visit from Clarence King, just back from the high country, aware of a beautiful landscape. On his walking trip in England, who "spent several days in camp squiring the ladies on rides and entertaining them with stories of his adventures." pact e had made precisely the same observation that he would re- When at length they reached the Valley itself, the impact was iterate twelve years later in his report on Yosemite. "Beauty, overwhelming: grandeur, impressiveness in any way, from scenery," he had written in An American Farmer, "is not often to be found in a There are falls of water elsewhere finer, there are more stupendous few prominent, distinguishable features, but in the manner rocks, more beetling cliffs, there are deeper and more awful chasms, and the unobserved materials with which these are connected there may be as beautiful streams, as lovely meadows, there are and combined. Clouds, lights, states of the atmosphere, and larger trees. It is in no scene or scenes the charm consists, but in the circumstances that we cannot always detect, affect all land- miles of scenery where cliffs of awful height and rocks of vast magni- This last comment is particularly true, perhaps, tude and of varied and exquisite coloring, are banked and fringed scapes of mountain scenery such as he encountered in the Sierras, and draped and shadowed by the tender foliage of noble and lovely where the timeless and the ephemeral are SO closely wedded.* trees and bushes, reflected from the most placid pools, and as- sociated with the most tranquil meadows, the most playful streams, His approach to landscape, however, was not purely esthe- and every variety of soft and peaceful pastoral beauty. tic. Everything he had set his hand to - scientific farming, The union of the deepest sublimity with the deepest beauty of na- the study of the South under slavery, the Sanitary Commis- ture, not in one feature or another, not in one part or one scene or sion - was directly concerned with human welfare. So in his another, not in any landscape that can be framed by itself, but all official report on the preservation of Yosemite for public pur- around and wherever the visitor goes, constitutes the Yo Semite, the greatest glory of nature. poses he writes: "If we analyze the operation of scenes of beauty upon the mind, and consider the intimate relation of After leaving the Valley, Olmsted joined Professor William the mind upon the nervous system and the whole physical economy, the action and reaction which constantly occur be- Laura Wood Roper, FLO: A Biography of Frederick Law Olmsted (1963). tween bodily and mental conditions, the reinvigoration Another distinguished visitor that summer was Olmsted's friend and enthu- which results from such scenes is readily comprehended." siastic supporter, Henry Whitney Bellows, who wrote an article for the Atlan- tic Monthly on the progress of Central Park. A popular Unitarian minister, he was temporarily filling the pulpit left open by the tragic death of Starr King. (See p. 42.) Olmsted's comment is beautifully illustrated in the great photographs of Yosemite and the Sierra by Ansel Adams. 52 SPEAKING FOR NATURE East Meets West: The Yosemite Story 53 The great virtue of natural scenery, the secret of its restora- Trees to the state of California, the United States Congress tive powers, lies in the fact that it is divorced from any utili- had stipulated that "the premises shall be held for public use, tarian purpose, from any future goal: resort, and recreation, and shall be inalienable for all time.' Thus a precedent was set for the founding of the first national park, Yellowstone, eight years later, and eventually for the It is for itself and at the moment it is enjoyed. The attention is aroused and the mind occupied without purpose, without a continu- whole national park system. ation of the common process of relating the present act or thought or Olmsted was ahead of his time in recognizing man's joy in perception to some future end. There is nothing else that has this nature as an integral part of his culture, comparable to his quality SO purely. There are few entertainments with which regard appreciation of art or literature or music. "The power of scen- for something outside and beyond the enjoyment of the moment can ery to affect men is, in a large way, proportionate to their ordinarily be little mixed In all social pleasures and all pleasures civilization and the degree to which their taste has been cul- which are usually enjoyed in association with the social pleasures, tivated." This does not mean, however, that such an esthetic the care for the opinion of others, or the ideas of others largely min- gles. In the pleasures of literature the laying up of ideas and self- experience need be confined to the privileged few. On the con- improvement are purposes which cannot be kept out of view. trary, he shares the prediction of the great authority on land- This, however, is in very slight degree, if at all, the case with the scape gardening, "the revered [Andrew Jackson] Downing" enjoyment of the emotions caused by natural scenery. It therefore that the day would come when those who "have no faith in results that the enjoyment of scenery employs the mind without fa- the refinement of a republic will stand abashed before a tigue and yet exercises it; tranquillizes it and yet enlivens it; and thus, through the influence of the mind over the body, gives the ef- whole people whose system of voluntary education embraces fect of refreshing rest and reinvigoration to the whole system. common enjoyments for all classes in the higher realms of art, letters, science, social recreation and enjoyments." Olmsted also looked upon the Yosemite reserve as "a mu- Downing was employing the word "recreation" in its root sense of "re-creation," as was Olmsted later when he sought seum of natural science" in which, for example, rare species to save islands of tranquillity in urban areas for what he of plants endangered by the invasion of exotics would be pro- called "passive recreation" - a term widely used today in tected - thus anticipating the current view of our parks and wilderness areas as "living museums." The point is worth land-use planning. Olmsted was an idealist who dreamed of a harmonious re- stressing, since it is often said that the first two parks, Yo- lation between man and nature that has yet to be realized. semite and Yellowstone, were established for the sake of their "The essence of Olmsted's theory of environmental plan- "natural curiosities" rather than to save wilderness as such. True, this was the main motivation, but in the case of Yo- ning," writes Albert Fein, "was a reverence for the fundamen- tal characteristics of all living matter If ecological laws semite it was by no means the only one. were violated, there was little hope for social planning based As a young man, Olmsted's pleasure in the splendid private on a belief in a rational relationship between human beings parks of England had been tempered by the realization that and the physical environment." It is not surprising that they could be enjoyed only by the rich and powerful, a minute Olmsted should have been an ardent admirer of Charles Dar- proportion of the population. The great mass of society, in- win - who, incidentally, had praised his writings on the pre- cluding those who would most benefit from them, were ex- war South, and who later became a personal friend. In es- cluded. He was determined that this should not happen in tablishing the importance of the environment in the America. In granting Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Big East Meets West: The Yosemite Story 55 54 SPEAKING FOR NATURE development of all living creatures, The Origin of Species gave scientific support to Olmsted's own philosophy of life. Unfor- clusters of trees I felt the charm of the Yosemite much more at of a week than at the end of a day, much more after six weeks tunately Darwin's theories were soon to be perverted by Her- when the cascades were nearly dry, than after one week, and when, bert Spencer, who coined the term "survival of the fittest" after having been in it, off and on, several months, I was going out, I and became the father of "social Darwinism" - a devil-take said, "I have not yet half taken it in." the-hindmost theory completely at variance with Olmsted's concern for the common man which he had expressed so In the decade following the cession of Yosemite Valley to eloquently in the report on Yosemite, and which remained his the state of California, its fame spread rapidly throughout the guiding principle throughout his life. country. In 1866 there appeared a charming travel book by Olmsted was not primarily a writer; his extraordinary ac- Samuel Bowles of the Springfield (Massachusetts) Republi- complishments are to be read in the landscape itself, in the can, who had visited the Valley with Olmsted and a large parks he designed from coast to coast, rather than on the party the previous summer, and who subsequently became printed page. Yet few writers have had a more sensitive re- one of his warmest friends and supporters. Bowles' reaction sponse to nature, or held to their beliefs with a fiercer convic- to such scenery was one of inexpressible awe: "The Yo- tion. In 1890, when Yosemite Valley and the surrounding high semite!" he begins. "As well interpret God in thirty-nine ar- country finally were made a national park after years of mis- ticles as portray it to you by word of mouth or pen." But he management and neglect by the state of California,* he wrote goes on to do his best, with considerable success, and more- a pamphlet on Governmental Preservation of Natural Scenery, over has the foresight to recognize in the saving of Yosemite a in which he looked back across a quarter of a century to an ex- precedent for similar action elsewhere: Niagara Falls, the perience that the hurried tourist could never know. There is Adirondacks, the Maine Woods. an almost religious quality in his growing love for the Valley, The main event of this period, in the light of Yosemite's fu- his discovery of new levels of beauty and meaning on each ture, occurred with no fanfare whatever. This was the meet- visit, his sadness at departing with SO much still beyond his ing - described earlier - between John Muir and Robert Underwood Johnson, Century magazine's crusading conserva- grasp. For Olmsted, landscape - be it the Sierra or Niagara Falls or Yellowstone or any "natural wonder" - was no mere tionist, which led to the founding of Yosemite National Park spectacle, to be gaped at and checked off in the guidebook: (and indirectly to Sequoia and General Grant national parks as well). There have been few clearer illustrations of the The distinctive charm of the scenery of the Yosemite does not de- power of the printed word. pend, as it is a vulgar blunder to suppose, on the greatness of its However, the last word had yet to be spoken. The national walls and the length of its little early summer cascades; the height of park, created by Congress in 1890, did not include the Valley certain of its trees, the reflections in its pools, and such other matters itself, which still belonged to the state of California. In the as can be entered in statistical tables, pointed out by guides and early nineteen-hundreds the Sierra Club, led by Muir and its represented within picture frames. So far, perhaps, as it can be told in a few words, it lies in the rare association with the grandeur of its dynamic secretary, William E. Colby, launched an all-out rocky elements, of brooks flowing quietly through the ferny and drive on he state legislature to re-cede Yosemite Valley to the bosky glades of very beautifully disposed great bodies, groups, and federal government. The timing was good. Muir's book, Our National Parks, had engendered widespread support for the national park movement. And in the spring of 1903 President See p. 23. Roosevelt invited Muir to guide him through the Valley. The 56 SPEAKING FOR NATURE East Meets West: The Yosemite Story 57 result was the famous trip when the two of them escaped all the elaborate ceremonies planned in the President's honor and went off to camp by themselves, spending one night tent- less in a snowstorm, and another beneath the great rock face of El Capitan. "Just what I wanted!" cried Roosevelt. "This has been the grandest day in my life!" From then on, there CHAPTER III was no doubt in the President's mind that Yosemite Valley should belong to the nation. Thanks to Muir's friendship with E. H. Harriman, president The Gentle Art of Seeing of the Southern Pacific Railroad (and leader of the 1899 Har- riman Expedition), the powerful railroad lobby went into ac- tion, and the California legislature passed the bill for re-ces- sion by a single vote. "I am now an experienced lobbyist," wrote Muir to Johnson. "My political education is complete." Finally, with the backing of Theodore Roosevelt, the Valley was incorporated into the park by Act of Congress, and Yo- "Sight is a faculty; seeing, an art." semite National Park as we know it today was complete. - George Perkins Marsh, MAN AND NATURE 58 SPEAKING FOR NATURE Exceptional Grounds: The Landscapes of Institutions Laurie Olin. The Campus: An American Landscape the campus buildings were generally arranged closely enough gian buildings placed in the open. Subsequently they were merican universities have been, and probably still for convenient communication, although sufficiently separated augmented in a gradual, neighborly fashion with additional, A are, one of the glories of our culture. Eight of the for fire protection and differentiation of purpose. They were freestanding structures. Despite not being attached or con- ten most highly regarded universities in the world small enough to finance and build without too much nected, the buildings eventually formed an architectural com- are located in the United States. Many thousands difficulty. munity, set off by relatively level or gently sloping areas of turf of students from all over the world come here Early schools such as Harvard (1636), William and Mary and trees that soon grew higher than the buildings themselves. annually to study at the undergraduate or graduate level. Col- (1695), Yale (1717), and Princeton (1755) possessed what might be The mess and distraction of horses and carts, goods and ser- leges and universities are major contributors to our economy, described as a loose-fit formality. They tended to comprise vices, washhouses and outhouses were banished from one or both directly-through institutional purchases; the buying reasonably attractive buildings, well designed but not grand, more quiet, roughly rectangular, loosely bounded spaces that power of students, faculty, and staff; the creation of local jobs; arranged orthogonally to each other or the adjacent commu- were called "quads." the building and expansion of facilities - and indirectly, nity and facing a principal street or road. While at least one Near the end of our colonial era, an alternative convention through the generation of ideas and the training of students campus (William and Mary) was originally intended to be built for the American university began in Pennsylvania with the who will be influential in their chosen fields. All this creates around a contained courtyard in emulation of the Oxford College of Philadelphia (1754). This was the urban academic jobs, innovation, commodities, and commerce. quadrangles of the founders' alma mater, none of the Ameri- institution, which would later cross-pollinate with the earlier Far less attention has been paid to another aspect of the can schools were enclosed. Unlike Oxford or Cambridge - the rural type. Unlike its New England predecessors, the College of American university: its physical structure; the way its campus institutions where a number of early American ecclesiastics, Philadelphia wasn't a divinity school. Founded by Benjamin is set into the landscape and interacts with and changes the tutors, intellectuals, and politicians had been educated - with Franklin in polyglot post-Quaker Philadelphia, it was intended surrounding community. Today such interrelationships are in their late medieval, Jacobean, and Georgian courts, cloisters, to foster science, the practical arts, and humanities such as the purview of the landscape architect, but they existed well arcades, towers, and quadrangles formed by conjoined struc- history, law, and the classics. The young school soon turned Penn before landscape architecture was a profession; in fact, since tures, these New World institutions were simply a set of Geor- into the University of Pennsylvania, America's first true univer- the first American schools were founded. Because the Ameri- sity. Like its religiously can university campus is a homegrown product, its physical oriented, country-bred pre- form has grown from its own needs and setting. It is part of decessors, it too consisted of the larger community as well as a community unto itself, and well-mannered, three-story it has evolved along with its changing landscape and environs. Georgian architecture. After The earliest and best-known institutions of higher educa- all, these were Englishmen tion in the English colonies were divinity schools. Although of the Enlightenment - not exactly monasteries, they were usually founded in rural vil- Franklin and others were lages like Cambridge, Massachusetts, or on the edge of towns members of the Royal Soci- like New Haven, Connecticut, set among farms, dozy lanes, and ety - albeit on the edge of scraps of relict forest. Almost all these schools, like many that the wilderness. Here medical would come later, began as a single building surrounded by and science buildings, like some trees, a bit of grass, and unpaved lanes. As they grew, the neighboring town houses number of their buildings increased, and campuses pushed and shops, sat on streets against or encroached upon the communities that had devel- with trees, sidewalks, and oped at their edges. The oldest institutions began to replace traffic, in what was the sec- the mud with lawn and shade - particularly American ond-largest English-speaking elms, but also other native hardwoods such as ash, oak, and hickory. Like the houses and outbuildings on Yankee farms, Blanche Levy Park: proposed redesign of College Hall Green from the 1976 Landscape Architecture Master Plan for the University of Pennsylvania. 3 John Galen Howard's Beaux Dx Arts Library at the University of library addition Frontality California, Berkeley. The emergence after the Civil War of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux's landscape-architectural firm Olmsted, Vaux and Company- which continued under the name of Olmsted Brothers for nearly a century, had an extra- ordinary and beneficial effect upon the landscape planning and design of the American campus. Working at public and private institutions across the country, its partners and staff provided a clear vision and superb technical support to a remarkable number of institu- leges, among them Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Other schools where they worked possess spaces that are tions of all sizes and in nearly every region. The sheer number Colorado, Oregon, Oregon the list of institutions rolls grand but verge upon being overblown and vacuous, as at Ohio of institutions they shaped physically - beginning in many on. There is an enormous range in the work, from schemes State, Notre Dame, and Illinois. In part this may be an artifact cases soon after a campus was founded - reveals that between that have become iconic, even paradigmatic, such as those for of their prairie settings, but it is also a function of the dimen- the beginnings of Frederick Law Olmsted's practice and the Stanford and Duke, to projects that were modest and at times sions of the quadrangles. The buildings, too far apart to pro- end of his sons, their firm virtually codified the American formulaic. At their best, they demonstrate as clearly as any vide comfort or intimacy, appear small. They seem to pull campus. Between 1865 and 1900 they produced plans and plans of the firm's best-known member, Frederick Law Olm- away from each other, rather than forming a warm ensemble designs for over thirty-six college campuses. These included sted, a concern and genius for engendering a social vision as they do at Duke and Washington University, where the trees, Amherst (1867), Trinity (1872), and, during the 1890s, Princeton, within the exigencies and particularity of a given place. in a manner similar to those at the University of Virginia, Smith, Harvard, Northwestern, Dartmouth, Cornell, Columbia, Despite the simple underlying diagram and kit of parts that produce a marvelous cross-sectional ratio of apparent height Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, and Vassar. Between 1900 and Olmsted Brothers frequently employed, a surprising and lively to width, creating spaces that are human in scale.² 1960 the firm was even more prolific, creating schemes for variety and sense of place usually resulted. Some campuses, Nowhere does one find a better example of how responsive more than 180 campuses. Just between 1900 and 1915 they were like Wellesley and Radcliffe, are charming and intimate in Olmsted could be to the genius loci, the spirit of the place, employed by institutions that included Brown, the University form and detail. Other Olmsted work is plain, calm, and than in the two contrasting schemes he himself developed on of Chicago, Wheaton, Wellesley, Williams, the University of straightforward - almost simple-minded, even - at Harvard, opposite sides of San Francisco Bay. These were his plans for Washington, Johns Hopkins, Ohio State University, the Univer- for example, and Colorado College. A handful of the campuses the University of California at Berkeley and Stanford Univer- sity of Colorado, the University of Pennsylvania, New York are rather loose-limbed, carved out of the woods and fash- sity in Palo Alto, prepared in 1865 and 1888, respectively. The University, Swarthmore, and Oberlin. They worked at both ioned from other, earlier ventures. The University of Washing- former was located on a partially wooded site against the hills Annapolis and West Point and at dozens of the land-grant col- ton in Seattle, which began with an oval carriage drive and a of the East Bay; the latter, in the South Bay area, in the warm few buildings, became the Alaska Yukon Exhibition. This rain shadow of the foothills of the coastal range. resulted in a fragmentary Beaux-Arts layout with a monumen- tal axis focused on Mt. Rainier - the sort of show-stopping 1 See Wall Street Journal, Dec 15-16, 2012: C1, for discussion of the landscape feature that bestows grandeur on any composition financial dilemmas of public universities in the current economic and that includes it. political context. 2 In each of these cases, when the author first saw them they were still magnificent. Today, however, the original plantations have reached the end of their normal life and replacements are seriously needed, and need to be done carefully and with understanding of the value of long-lived, tall-canopy trees, which does not appear to be evident, nor well understood by some involved at these institutions. 5 The Collegiate-Gothic towers and a courtyard. If ever one needs an Beaux Arts dome of Yale University. example to demonstrate that architecture can convey mean- ing, this is it. A clear message in Jefferson's open-ended scheme was embodied by the view from the library: in a place of learning and privilege, one was always made aware of the world beyond, its potential and challenges. McKim, Meade, and White's gesture in closing it off suggested not only smug confidence and complacency but also, perhaps, disdain and anxiety. It was as if the university was turning its back on the wider world, with its lower classes, immigrants, and recently liberated blacks. The contemporaneous outburst of Gothic Revival architec- ture on American campuses, with its departure from the vil- lage-green typology and a return to the medieval European prototype of an enclosed monastic court with connected struc- tures, also seems to have grown in part out of a desire for the At Berkeley, Olmsted incorporated a relict redwood grove ranch and the legacy of Spain and Mexico in the region, he security and distinction of the past. Oxford and Cambridge along Strawberry Creek, developing a set of spaces bounded produced what amounted to a xeric landscape. Linked build- were the most obvious models, but SO too were Salamanca, loosely by freestanding buildings with trees and verdant ings, colonnades, and courtyards were arranged orthogonally Padua, and Heidelberg, which were often visited on tours of glades. The result amounted to a Yankee settlement in the in a hierarchy from one grand, open court (rather like a Europe. Despite a longstanding desire for a classless society woods, not dissimilar to the camps and lodges in the foothills maidan or a Mexican zocalo) to a series of smaller, more inti- on the part of many Americans, from the country's beginning of the Sierras where Olmsted had been involved in planning mate, and lushly planted ones, with a community of bunga- there have been differences in wealth, education, and power a mining company after the Civil War. A visit to Wawona lows, an arboretum, a ranch, and hills beyond. This plan among its inhabitants. Buildings in the Gothic Revival and Hotel near Yosemite or an examination of historic photos of resulted in one of the greatest campus landscapes of all time other European revival styles popular in the late nineteenth New England villages, with their irregular commons and a peer to Jefferson's early nineteenth-century composition for and early twentieth century were often commissioned by edu- shade trees, give some flavor of what his plan for Berkeley the University of Virginia. cated leaders and paid for by rich patrons eager to build would have been. Unfortunately it was abandoned for a Beaux- But at Stanford as at Berkeley, in part due to hubris and impressive facilities. Arts design by John Galen Howard, with a central mall and lack of comprehension, Olmsted's successors abandoned his But if the trend was conservative, the results were often library that never quite fit the site topographically, leaving the master plan. They too were beguiled by the fashion for Beaux- exciting. There were spectacular stone towers and picturesque campus an awkward jumble to the present day. Once you Arts planning and neoclassical architecture that had been ush- compositions, such as the chapels and theological school put something as large and important as a main library in the ered into America at the end of the Victorian era, in part by at Duke by Julian Abel, who worked in Horace Trumbauer's wrong place, it's hard to make things work forever after. the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. During the Gilded office, or Harkness Tower at Yale by James Gambell Rogers. Unlike Christopher Robin, who was charming when halfway Age and the decade prior to World War I, an insular class rose There were more modest Collegiate-Gothic, brick-and-lime- up and halfway down the stair, the disastrous building that embraced the Grand Tour of Europe, imported masses of stone quadrangles by Cope and Stewardson at Washington arrangement at Berkeley has produced one of the most disor- art, and indulged in a remarkable building spree. One result University, Penn, and Princeton as well as in Bebb and Gould's derly and unfortunate campus landscapes in America. was a turning inward - and not just into suffocating, dark, and plan for the University of Washington. Under the planning At Stanford Olmsted persuaded both client and architect overladen domestic interiors that made Frank Lloyd Wright and design influence of Olmsted Brothers, a number of these that a New England, greensward-based campus was unrealistic, and European modernists want to dynamite architecture to let sites were ample and lined with canopy trees (Duke, Washing- given the climate, soil, limited water, and cultural history. the light and space back in. Institutions were closed off or ton University). Pointing to the Mediterranean quality of Leland Stanford's cocooned as well. The most dramatic and blatant example of this was Stan- ford White's unforgivable design and construction of a build- ing that closed off the great open lawn at the University of Virginia, turning it into a conventional, if elegant, internal FEATURED PUBLICATION Brookline A Laboratory for Planning and Design new book from LALH and the University A of Massachusetts Press, Community by Design, chronicles the growth and devel- opment of Brookline, Massachusetts, a wealthy suburb of Boston that resisted annexation- again and again-unlike many surrounding com- munities eventually brought under Boston's domain. Based on a report commissioned by the National Park Service, the book focuses on the constellation of nationally prominent design practitioners who lived and worked in Brookline during a critical period of its growth, particularly the practitioners working out of Fairsted, the Olmsted home and office, located in H. H. Richardson's private study and library at 25 Cottage Street, Brookline c. 1886. Courtesy Historic New England the heart of the elite suburb. The authors, Keith N. Morgan, Elizabeth Hope Cushing, and Roger G. Reed, experiments in planning and design. In a detailed analy- developed this report into a richly illustrated volume sis of the Brookline iteration of the Olmsted firm, which that will interest a wide range of readers. In these was distinctly different from the one that preceded it pages the authors trace the web of relationships that in New York City, they examine at close range how developed among the nation's leading lights in land- projects came into the office, how they were managed, scape architecture, architecture, municipal government, and how a training program for new practitioners was civil engineering, and horticulture as they converged established, in some measure influenced by the atelier in "the richest town in the world" at the same moment system run by the architect Henry Hobson Richardson, the professions of landscape architecture and urban one of many design luminaries to set up a professional planning were newly codified. office in Brookline during these same years. Morgan, Cushing, and Reed describe the influ- The rural beauty of Brookline, the authors argue, as ences that drew these tastemakers to Brookline and well as the potential for new business, drew Frederick explain how the setting served as a laboratory for their Law Olmsted Sr. to a town that was widely regarded as one of America's loveliest. They also emphasize other Opposite: View of the South Lawn and West Slope. Fairsted. Photograph by Jack E. Boucher. Courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs BY ROBIN KARSON Division. Washington D.C. VIEW 3 suburban development plans that structured Brookline commissions. The best known of these are in nearby well before the Olmsted firm arrived, such as Linden North Easton (Massachusetts) for the Ames family, Place, laid out by Alexander Wadsworth as a constel- completed just before and after Olmsted's move to lation of streets, house lots, and small parks on twenty Brookline The two men also collaborated on aspects of acres in 1843. the Boston parks (Richardson contributed designs for The charms of the suburb were touted in a lot- some of the bridges and buildings) and, more signifi- auction notice four decades before Olmsted moved cantly, on the Robert Treat Paine estate in Waltham, his family and office there in 1883, and they had not where they achieved a nearly seamless blend of resi- changed much in the interim. "The situation is delight- dence and landscape. Richardson's premature death in ful, commanding a full view of the city, and connected 1886 came as a severe blow to the landscape architect. with a rural spot that is unequaled in the country. Another important neighbor was Charles Sprague Omnibuses run at accommodating hours." Although Sargent, whose 150-acre estate, Holm Lea, attracted aesthetics and transportation linkages between city visitors from around the globe. In 1897 Mariana van and country were key concepts in the sales campaign, Rensselaer identified it as "the most beautiful subur- other municipal amenities also appealed to prospective ban country place that I know." The estate featured a residents; Olmsted was not immune to these either. He five-acre meadow where Jerseys were pastured and claimed that he was sold when he observed the town's thousands of narcissus emerged each spring, as well as snow removal crew at work on a Saturday. a thriving apple orchard and a two-acre pond covered The authors make an equally persuasive case that with water lilies, surrounded by willow and tupelo trees. Olmsted Sr. was drawn to Brookline to be closer to The abundant plantings of rhododendrons, some twelve Henry Hobson Richardson, with whom he had enjoyed feet high, attracted the attention of John Muir, who close professional and personal ties for decades. Olmsted wrote to his wife in 1893, "This is the finest mansion relished collaboration, and in Richardson he found a and ground I ever saw." robust source of inspiration. The opposite was also true. In the 1870s, Sargent consulted Olmsted on his Richardson's growing responsiveness to landscape was plan for the new Arnold Arboretum (in nearby Jamaica undoubtedly spurred by his deepening relationship Plain), where he intended to merge scientific and with Olmsted, with whom he collaborated on many aesthetic goals. Olmsted was at first dubious, but in Charles Sargent estate, Holm Lea, Brookline. © President and Fellows of Harvard College. Arnold Arboretum Archives. 4 VIEW "The situation is delightful, commanding a full view of the city, and connected with a rural spot that is unequaled in the country. Omnibuses run at accommodating hours. " (Right) Olmsted office workers. Courtesy National Park Service, Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site (Below) Detail, "Study of Plan for Extension of Commonwealth Avenue on the Line of Beacon Street" from "Preliminary Plan for Widening Beacon Street," October 2, 1886. F. L. & J.C. Olmsted Courtesy National Park Service, Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site. 1880 he did lay out a system of roads that both were implemented in 1891, and by the following year responded to the varied topography and also provided the extensive grading, excavating, and filling necessary a basis for Sargent's "Tree Museum." Sargent grouped to remake the stream had been accomplished and the the trees according to family and genus in the Bentham adjoining land prepared for new plantings that would and Hooker classification system, which is still main- include nearly 24,000 trees. When disagreements about tained today. The ingenious arrangement isolated some planting compositions erupted between the Olmsted specimens to achieve full growth and elsewhere massed firm and Sargent (representing Brookline), Sargent's them, SO that the groupings contributed to a picturesque opinions prevailed. He retained his post on the planning effect. commission until his death in 1927. Sargent's influence extended well beyond either Morgan, Cushing, and Reed demonstrate the of these properties. In 1880, he was appointed one of myriad ways in which the Olmsted office used Brookline three commissioners to the newly formed Brookline to test its emerging planning principles, helping guide Park Commission, whose charge included improve- the town in its sometimes fraught development realized ments to the Muddy River, which had become, in effect, through new roads and parkways, housing enclaves, an open sewer. The Olmsted plans to redesign the river estate plans, and institutional grounds, including The DRIVEWAY 35 10 Section 01 Proposed Extension of Commonwealth Ave. on line of Beucon St., Brookline Seate 20 R to inch. VIEW 5 Brookline Country Club, one of the first in the nation. system in Boston "launched a radically new and larger The authors also make a case that Brookline, by its framework through which to analyze growth patterns own example, helped the firm articulate an increas- and the need for public landscape in expanding urban ingly strong sense of what a community could offer its areas." (Ironically, Brookline itself stood aloof from most residents and, further, a sense of the role that planning of these efforts, in large part because the private prop- could play in achieving these goals. The planning prin- erty owners in the southern half of the town chose to ciples behind many of the firm's boulevards and park- remain independent and, therefore, in control.) ways, residential subdivisions, and estates informed the As the field of landscape architecture expanded to influence of the firm through its reports to the planning include city, town, and regional planning, Olmsted's board, whose first chairman was Olmsted Jr. professional descendents became the leaders develop- Differing from the comprehensive plans that the ing academic programs in both landscape design and Olmsted office created for new towns such as Riverside, planning. Olmsted Jr. (Rick) and Arthur A. Shurcliff, Illinois (1869), and Forest Hills Gardens, Queens (1908), who trained at Fairsted, created the curriculum for the Brookline grew incrementally, as the authors point out, new program of landscape architecture that opened at "in response to new development opportunities, chang- Harvard in 1900, which in turn educated many of the ing demographics, economic evolution, transportation nation's most important landscape architects and plan- innovations, and expanding models of government con- ners. Among them was John Nolen, who wrote City trol. As such, it typified patterns of growth seen across Planning, the first manual for the field in 1916, with an much of the country." In this sense Community by Design introduction by Rick Olmsted. offers analysis that is applicable to many communities. The lessons Olmsted Jr. learned in Brookline The story is seminal in other respects as well. informed his entire career as one of the preeminent city Charles Eliot, a firm partner at Fairsted from 1893 planners of the twentieth century. After working on until his early death in 1897, pioneered new perspec- the development of the McMillan Commission plan for tives in planning during the course of his work with the Washington, D.C., he served as the first president of the Boston Metropolitan Park Commission, where he cam- National Conference of City Planning in 1909. During paigned for an approach that widened the planning lens his long career, he shaped park systems, subdivisions, to the regional level. Eliot's schemes for the new park campuses, and city plans throughout the nation. His Beacon Street near Carlton Street, Brookline, C. 1910. Courtesy Brookline Public Library. 6 VIEW stepbrother, John Charles Olmsted, continued the park to 1896), viewed planning as a dynamic process in planning begun by Olmsted Sr. Shurcliff also became a which many streams of influence converged. Like planner of note, redesigning aspects of the Boston park Nolen, each developed a signature approach to planning system and adding new elements, such as the Charles strongly shaped by his own personality and philosophy. River Esplanade. Shurcliff's masterwork was Colonial The formative experiences that the Brookline "labora- Williamsburg, the most ambitious preservation project tory" offered these practitioners provided fertile ground of the era and the subject of a forthcoming LALH book. for their emerging ideas-ideas that would shape Olmsted Jr., J.C. Olmsted, Shurcliff, and Warren American cities, towns, parks, and park systems for Manning (who worked in the Fairsted office from 1888 decades to come. CHESTNUT HILL PORD RESERVOR E N H MATHING COUNTERN MAIN THOROFARES FOR SOUTHWESTERN PART OF JAMAICA P,NO BROOKLINE SCALE 1325 Main Thoroughfares for Southwestern Part of Brookline Report of the Brookline Planning Board, 1925 As the field of landscape architecture expanded to include city, town, and regional planning, Olmsted's professional descendents became the leaders developing academic programs in both landscape design and planning. FEATURED PUBLICATION DESIGNING The American Park AMERICAN LANDSCAPE HISTORY ENCOMPASSES the study of a diverse range of places that are rich in multiple meanings and associations. Powerful cultural expres- sions as well as significant works of art, perhaps no landscape type is more expressive, in this sense, than the public park. Places called "parks" range from neighborhood playgrounds to large scenic reservations, but at all scales parks share certain social goals and environmental values. Historically, governments have created or acquired parks for "the benefit and enjoyment of the people," as the 1872 legislation establishing Yellowstone National Park phrased it. Those benefits have included improving public health, fostering democratic community, and preserving scenic and historic landscapes. Park advocates have also promoted other advantages of park making, such as enhanced real estate values and the economic stimulus of tourism. Whether large or small, urban or remote, public park landscapes embody contemporary values and the cultural narratives that gave rise to them. This year the Library of American Landscape History of American park design is, to a significant degree, the inaugurates a new series, Designing the American Park, history of scenic and historic preservation. From Yosemite to publish outstanding new research on the history of Valley to Colonial Williamsburg, governments and American park landscapes. The series is based on an nonprofit entities not only preserved-but also created- understanding that park history is primarily design powerful and mutable social constructions of nature history: planning, design, and development are shared and history through the design of public landscapes and elements that allow for comparison, periodization, and experiences. historical analysis. A remote wilderness, a historic site, Designing the American Park will explore the history or a recreation area are all landscapes set aside and of often understudied municipal parks and park systems, developed for some level of public use, usually justified in historic sites and commemorative landscapes, play- broad terms of a public interest served. Development may grounds, and regional, state, and national parks. While be as limited as possible in order to minimize intrusion on these are indeed diverse places, the continuities of pur- a landscape already valued for its scenic, environmental, or pose and the aspirations behind them can yield significant historical significance and integrity. But preserving places historical insights not apparent when each is considered by transforming them into parks has always entailed separately from the other and in isolation, again, from some level of public access and therefore landscape design the history of historic preservation. The practice of as an integral part of landscape preservation. The history landscape design provides the salient common thread Opposite: Chapin Parkway, Buffalo, N.Y. Photograph by Andy Olenick BY ETHAN CARR VIEW 5 Outstanding moments and eras of American park undertaken, just as it is today. The public landscapes of design have also occurred at times of social, geographic, our cities and states, and of the nation, have, as works and ecological disruption. Parks have been a means of design, done as much as any category of art to define to preserve, apparently unimpaired, past conditions, a national identity and a shared aesthetic sense and pur- whether cultural or ecological. But they have done SO pose. This important new series will attract a generation during times of great landscape change, and in fact have of contributors who are ready to put forward, together, themselves been the agents of change as components a mature vision of this unique chapter in American of new landscape patterns and uses. The study of the cultural history. The first three volumes will address history of park design, treated as a comprehensive phe- significant and understudied subjects in park history. nomenon, offers significant avenues of inquiry into the The Best Planned City in the World: Olmsted, Vaux, and larger history of geographical and social modernization. the Buffalo Park System by Francis R. Kowsky is a compre- Park landscapes are among the most significant hensive treatment of the first municipal park system of achievements of American art and society of the nine- its type. When asked by the Buffalo park commissioners teenth and twentieth centuries. Their advocates and in 1868 for their advice on the location of a new park, designers were some of the preeminent intellectuals, Olmsted and Vaux proposed instead that they create artists, and public figures of their day. The historical three parks: The Parade, for recreation and large events; events and themes that surrounded their creation-the The Front, a smaller park commanding views of Lake reform of the city, the roots of environmentalism, the Erie; and The Park, a large, pastoral landscape at the meaning of nature in American art-give park history expanding edge of the city. Broad, tree-lined parkways, a broad appeal. But even though parks are often touted inspired by contemporary Parisian boulevards, con- as "America's best idea," until now there has been no nected the parks and provided the settings for new series of scholarly publications devoted specifically to the residences and institutions as the city grew. By the history of their design. Social histories of public parks mid-1870s, as Buffalo experienced a period of great are more common-and certainly worthwhile in their commercial success and expansion, the city could claim own right-but they typically do not emphasize the role to be one of the best planned in the country. The cam- of design in realizing the aspirations of park advocates. paign to preserve nearby Niagara Falls involved many Without design, public parks would never have assumed of the same Buffalo park advocates as well as Olmsted a central place in American culture and imagination. and Vaux, who produced their design for the Niagara Historically, park design has been among the most Reservation in 1887 Although the result was a state significant work that American landscape architects have park (the nation's first), the preservation of Niagara as Delaware Park (formerly, The Park), Buffalo, N.Y. Photograph by Ethan Carr. 6 VIEW One of the most difficult and understudied aspects of twentieth-century park history is public park design in the South during the Jim Crow era. Jones Lake Negro Recreation Area, Elizabethtown, N.C. 1940. Photograph courtesy North Carolina State Archives a public park illustrates the continuities between munic- in the southern states between the 1930s, when New ipal park and scenic preservation advocacy, theory, and, Deal programs funded the creation and expansion of ultimately, landscape design. The Buffalo park system state parks, to the 1960s, when protests, court rulings, constituted a landmark of park design history. and legislation ended the "separate but equal" policies In the second volume in the series, Elizabeth Hope that had motivated the design of parks specifically for Cushing examines the life and work of one of the African Americans. Although state governments never most important and yet little known figures in early came close to providing "equal" park facilities, their twentieth-century municipal park design and historic intentions resulted in the design and development of preservation. Arthur Shurcliff (born Arthur Asahel a series of park landscapes that are vital if mute testi- Shurtleff) trained in Olmsted's Brookline office begin- mony to this chapter in American social history. The ning in 1896 and worked there until he started his own parks themselves are crucial documents that supplement office in Boston in 1904. Shurcliff adapted many Boston the often insubstantial official records of segregation public parks, including the Back Bay Fens and Franklin in the United States. But as the Jim Crow era waned, Park, to new purposes in the twentieth century, and he the history of these places and their design also faded, designed new parks as well, including the Charles River as the parks came to be used by the general public and Esplanade. He was also a prolific city planner who were managed as undifferentiated elements within state created a number of the earliest comprehensive city park systems. O'Brien uncovers this neglected history, plans in the United States. documenting and analyzing the legal and social contexts Shurcliff also had a lifelong interest in the study and of these landscapes as well as the particular features of documentation of historic landscapes, such as the New their design. England commons and farmsteads he had known all Designing the American Park will present a wide his life. He made his greatest professional contribution range of research on public park landscapes, some of the to the field of historic preservation beginning in 1928, most complex and meaningful artistic endeavors ever when he became the consulting landscape architect undertaken in the United States. Its aim is to help read- for the Williamsburg Restoration in Virginia, the most ers reconsider what parks are and what the implications ambitious and influential preservation project of the of the history of their design might be. With this series, era. Over the next thirteen years, Shurcliff created not LALH carries on its commitment to publishing books only an idiom of Colonial Revival garden design, but an that expand the field by making available new explora- entire landscape that became a new kind of park (albeit tions and interpretations in American landscape history. one created by a private entity) based in part on research and archaeology and intended to convey and interpret the significance of the historical place to the public. One of the most difficult and understudied aspects Ethan Carr is associate professor of landscape architecture, of twentieth-century park history is public park design University of Massachusetts Amherst, and serves on the board in the South during the Jim Crow era. William E. of the directors of LALH. He is the author of Mission 66: O'Brien's Landscapes of Exclusion: State Parks and Jim Crow Modernism and the National Park Dilemma and is the in the American South, examines the design of state parks editor of the new Designing the American Park series. VIEW 7 7/6/2015 LALH Blog-Olmsted and Scenic Preservation Search home books magazine exhibitions films in pact membership LALH Library of American Landscape History about calendar CEMETERY people places news blog news blog contact OLMSTED AND SCENIC PRESERVATION Subscribe donate connect Friday, March 27, 2015 I Posted by Ethan Carr posts Frederick Law Olmsted is rightly remembered as the most accomplished landscape PRESERVATION HERO CHARLES architect in U.S. history, the designer of great municipal parks and other landscapes. He E. BEVERIDGE also was a key figure in the nation's most significant early examples of scenic JUST RELEASED! JOHN NOLEN. preservation. These endeavors were not mutually exclusive, and in fact park design and LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT AND scenic preservation were both aspects of the practice of landscape architecture Olmsted CITY PLANNER developed in the second half of the nineteenth century. Public parks of all types-from 2015 FILM AWARD FROM THE municipal pleasure grounds to state and national reservations-made it possible for the SOCIETY OF ARCHITECTURAL general public, not just a wealthy few, to experience a wide range of landscape scenery. HISTORIANS/THE BEST PLANNED Olmsted believed such experiences were vital to the health and well being of individuals, CITY IN THE WORLD: OLMSTED. and therefore of society as a whole. If Central Park provided beautiful and picturesque VAUX AND THE BUFFALO PARK scenes for New Yorkers, Niagara Falls and Yosemite Valley gave visiting tourists a SYSTEM different scale of sublime landscape experience. In the first case, extensive grading, EASTERN DESIGN IN A WESTERN planting, and other improvements were required to transform the Central Park site into a LANDSCAPE: OLMSTED. dramatic sequence of landscapes. At Yosemite and Niagara, the challenge for the RICHARDSON AND THE AMES landscape architect was to protect existing features from the damage that visitors could MONUMENT do, and to choreograph the sequence and pace of their experience in the design of roads, OLMSTED AND SCENIC paths, and other facilities. PRESERVATION NEW FILM UNDER WAY FROM LALH/HOTT PRODUCTIONS! UPDATE: FUTURE OF HANNAH CARTER JAPANESE GARDEN UNRESOLVED CONCERN FOR THREATENED RUSSELL PAGE GARDEN GROWS COMMUNITY BY DESIGN IS ONLINE! LALH WELCOMES NEW BOARD MEMBER DEDE DELANEY Archives 2015 (14) June (1) Olmsted described these intentions for preserving an existing scenic landscape as a public May (1) park in the Yosemite Valley report he prepared while Central Park was still under April (2) construction. 1 In 1864, Olmsted was living in Bear Valley, California, when Congress March (2) passed the Yosemite Grant that ceded the nearby Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias to the State of California for public park purposes. Olmsted had no hand in February (2) the legislation but the governor appointed him to head the commission charged with January (6) managing the new park. The report Olmsted wrote in 1865 outlined a program of minimal. unobtrusive development (including paths, overlooks, carriage roads, and 2014 (30) camping facilities) that would allow what he foresaw would eventually be millions of 2013 (11) visitors to the valley to have a full experience of it, while keeping the landscape as 2012 (5) undeveloped and undisturbed as possible. Tags Alexander von Humboldt (1) http://lalh.org/olmsted-and-scenic-preservation/ 1/6 7/6/2015 LALH Blog-Olmsted and Scenic Preservation American parks (7) Ames Monument (1) Arthur A. Shurcliff (4) award (1) Beatrix Farrand (1) Beaux Arts (1) Beveridge (1) Boston (1) botanical gardens (2) Buffalo (2) Buffalo Park System (1) California (1) cemetery (1) Central Park (1) Charles Eliot (1) Clark Art Institute (1) Contemporary design (1) Environmental Design Series (1) Olmsted went much further in his report (as he often did in his park reports), providing events (12) the fundamental intellectual framework for federal park making. He noted that it was Fletcher Steele (4) "the main duty of government" to protect and provide the means for the "pursuit of Frederick Law Olmsted (9) happiness." That pursuit, for Olmsted, depended on preserving places such as Yosemite Hare & Hare (1) Valley and creating public access to them. "It is a scientific fact," he asserted, "that the occasional contemplation of natural scenes of an impressive character, particularly if this Jens Jensen (1) contemplation occurs in connection with relief from ordinary cares, change of air and John Nolen (1) change of habits, is favorable to the health and vigor of .beyond any other LALH (10) conditions that can be offered them." Government had nothing less than a duty to assure LALH Book(s) (10) "enjoyment of the choicest natural scenes in the country and the means of recreation LALH Exhibitions (4) associated with them" be "laid open to the use of the body of the people," because if LALH Film (2) government did not act, those places would be monopolized by the few and experienced LALH film series (5) only by the elite. "The establishment by government of great public grounds for the free landscape achitects (4) enjoyment of the people" therefore was justified-in fact was required-of a republican form of government that derived its authority from its people, not an aristocracy. modernism (1) native plants (2) Olmsted returned east in 1865, and while his Yosemite report was not made the basis for natural history (1) state management of Yosemite Valley, he was soon involved in another landmark scenic New American Garden (1) preservation project. Olmsted advocated for the preservation of Niagara Falls beginning at New England (3) least the late 1860s, when he was at work designing the municipal park system of nearby New Urbanism (1) Buffalo. Hotels and tourist attractions had grown up around Niagara for decades, forcing Niagara (1) tourists to pay to gain access to overlooks and creating what many considered an Nolen (1) inappropriate setting for the awesome spectacle. In 1879 the New York legislature Notable books (1) appointed Olmsted, with the Director of the New York State Survey, James T. Gardner, to obituaries (1) prepare a special report on conditions at the Falls.4 Their report emphasized the need to Olmsted (3) preserve the surrounding landscape, especially Goat Island, which separated the park history (6) American and Canadian falls, and the shoreline along the rapids above the falls, which was lined with buildings. The report also contained a petition. which Olmsted and his preservation (6) friend the Harvard art historian Charles Eliot Norton had drawn up and circulated Preservation Hero (1) Signed by leading cultural and political figures in the United States, Canada, and Great R. Bruce Stephenson (1) Britain, the document urged the state to acquire the private property around the falls and Reed Hilderbrand (1) provide for a better form of public access. Olmsted worked with a number of colleagues, restoration (4) especially Norton, to orchestrate a campaign to influence public opinion, a first of its type Richardson (1) in the cause of scenic preservation in the U.S. The two men hired journalists Henry Ruth Shellhorn (1) Norman and Jonathan B. Harrison to write articles on conditions at Niagara and on the SAH (1) legislation proposed to remedy them. Their efforts received a boost following the 1882 Tado Ando (1) election of a supporter, Grover Cleveland (then the mayor of Buffalo), as governor of New York State. Olmsted and Norton helped found the Niagara Falls Association early in technology (1) 1883, a group that intensified the effort to persuade the state legislature to act. Later that Vaux (1) year the legislature approved a bill to establish the Niagara Reservation, and Cleveland William O'Brien (1) signed it. In 1885, the same body finally appropriated funds to establish the reservation, Williamstown (1) and it became the first park of its type to be created by a state government. 3 Yosemite (1) http://lalh.org/olmsted-and-scenic-preservation/ 2/6 7/6/2015 LALH Blog-Olmsted and Scenic Preservation In 1886, Olmsted finally had the opportunity to design the state reservation around Niagara Falls, working in collaboration with his old partner, the architect Calvert Vaux. Olmsted had been far more involved than Vaux in planning and advocacy for Niagara, but he acknowledged that Vaux had an important role in their work together, which they completed in early 1887. The Niagara report demonstrated how landscape architecture could be used to preserve and to restore a scenic landscape through the acquisition of private property, the removal of previous development, and the facilitation of public access through the construction of park drives, paths, overlooks, and limited visitor amenities.4 4 Through the development of the area as a park, more destructive forms of resort development were avoided and the public had opportunities for more meaningful experiences of a place that otherwise might be dominated by commercial enterprises. Olmsted was able to see his plans for Niagara come to fruition, but the management of Yosemite Valley had taken a different direction. Olmsted would return to California several times in the 1880s, after he received the important commission to design the Stanford campus. On none of these trips did he return to Yosemite Valley. On the first trip in 1886, he did travel to the nearby Mariposa Grove and visited with Galen Clark who had been a fellow member of the first Yosemite Commission. Clark and Olmsted probably discussed conditions in the nearby valley where, since Olmsted's last visit in 1865, much of the development and damage that he had warned against had occurred Without the road to Stockton, supplies of all types were expensive to bring into the valley. As a result, many of the valley's delicate meadows were now cultivated or used for pastures, and trees were harvested and milled into lumber. Large hotels were built, rather than the simple camping stations Olmsted had advised, and numerous other businesses were established through permits issued by the state commissioners. The valley was changing in other ways, as well. By the 1880s, some visitors complained that new tree growth was cutting off views and changing the character of the landscape. Although it was not well understood at the time, for centuries Native Americans had used fire to control the growth of vegetation in the valley, a practice that ended after 1864. By the 1880s, vegetation was rapidly encroaching into the valley's meadows, and park concessioners and managers reacted by removing and pruning trees, a practice that soon incited a negative reaction among preservationists who felt such Irec cutting was inimical to the park's purpose. 5 5 During his 1886 trip. Olmsted was under pressure to work on the Stanford commission and to complete other business in California. But he may have had other reasons for choosing not to enter the valley that he had described movingly in 1865 as "the greatest glory of nature." http://lalh.org/olmsted-and-scenic-preservation/ 3/6 7/6/2015 LALH Blog-Olmsted and Scenic Preservation Olmsted was drawn into commenting on conditions at Yosemite, nonetheless. In 1889, Robert Underwood Johnson, then associate editor of Century magazine, spent two weeks camping in and around Yosemite Valley with John Muir, the writer and wilderness preservation advocate. Muir enlisted Underwood in the cause of creating a larger Yosemite National Park around Yosemite Valley itself (which remained a state park at this time). Muir and Underwood also sought to reform the state's management of Yosemite Valley and criticized many aspects of the Yosemite commission's policies. Johnson wrote Olmsted and described what he considered the destructive removal of trees and other vegetation and the generally poor condition of the valley landscape. He wanted Olmsted to consider taking a consulting position with the state park commission, and he offered to intercede with Governor Leland Stanford to make the appointment possible. At the very least, the editor wanted Olmsted to write on the subject for Century.7 Olmsted, who had just completed his definitive statement on the "use of the axe" in landscape management -a long and thoroughly documented defense of tree thinning-replied to Johnson only after considerable reflection He eventually declined to write the article or to become more actively involved in the criticism of the Yosemite commissioners. While he sympathized with his friend's position and knew the management of the valley needed improvement, he was unwilling to condemn the commissioners without better knowledge of what exactly had been done and why. "All I could say," he wrote that fall, "is that, having at an early day spent several months in the valley under peculiarly favorable circumstances for contemplating it, I know that the question is one of far greater importance and of far greater difficulty than can be generally realized; that it is most loolish to take it up in an occasional and desultory way as a question of details, or as a question the answer to which will be chiefly important to the people of the present century. It is preeminently a question of our duty to the future. Olmsted might have continued to remain silent on the subject of Yosemite Valley, but in the spring of 1890 the governor of California, Robert W. Waterman, made a ludicrous claim that Johnson was disparaging the Yosemite commission solely for the purpose of obtaining a professional appointment for his "uncle," Frederick Law Olmsted Olmsted now felt compelled to address the situation, and did SO with a pamphlet published at his own expense, Governmental Preservation of Natural Scenery. 10 He gave an account of his http://lalh.org/olmsted-and-scenic-preservation/ 4/6 7/6/2015 LALH Blog-Olmsted and Scenic Preservation involvement with Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove since 1864, and he declined once again to criticize the state commissioners since he had not made a thorough study of their policies and actions. He refused to condemn tree removal, per se, in the valley, but clarified that done incorrectly (as Johnson and others had claimed it was) the effects would be disastrous. The Yosemite commissioners, who had other areas of expertise, should not be expected to know the difference; landscape architects, who were specifically trained to make such judgments, should While Olmsted declined to give any further advice on the management of valley landscape specifically, he gave a long quotation from the 1887 Niagara report that he felt should serve the general purpose of guiding Yosemite policy, and in SO doing made it clear how closely these two great experiments in landscape preservation were linked. "Nothing of an artificial character should be allowed a place on the property," he and Vaux wrote regarding the Niagara Reservation. "no matter how valuable it might be under other circumstances, and no matter at how little cost it may be had, the presence of which can be avoided consistently with the provision of necessary conditions for making the enjoyment of the natural scenery available." Scenic preservation was not ancillary to Olmsted's practice of landscape architecture, but integral to the theory as well as techniques of landscape design he developed. Today, we tend to think of landscape design on the one hand, as changing and adapting landscapes to new or altered purposes, and preservation on the other, as almost the opposite, preventing change and maintaining existing uses and character. But in fact Olmsted's approach to landscape design involved a lot of preservation, while the preservation of Niagara, for example, required extensive new design. Public parks of all types also shared a basic purpose for Olmsted: assuring that varied and profound experiences of landscape beauty, from the pastoral expanses of his city parks to the most dramatic landscape features of the continent, would be accessible to everyone. The common thread was the benefit to individuals and to society that could only be achieved through the creation of a full range of accessible parks and reservations, assuring a more healthful and functional civilization. Ethan Carr. FASLA Professor, University of Massachusetts Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning Images from top to bottom: Olmsted and Vaux, 1887, State Reservation at Niagara. Photo courtesy of FLO National Historic Site: Yosemite Falls; Niagara Falls and Goat Island; Yosemite Valley in April; Yosemite Valley from Wawona Road Entrance; Yosemite Valley from Glacier Point. All photos courtesy of the author unless otherwise noted. 1. FLO. "Preliminary Report on the Yosemite and Big Tree Grove," 1865 (Papers of FLO. 5: 488-516). 2. FLO, "Notes by Mr. Olmsted," in Special Report of New York State Survey on the Preservation of the Scenery of Niagara Falls for the Year 1879 [c. March 22, 1880 (Papers of FLO 7: 474- 481). 3. See Papers of FLO SSI: 46-53. 4. FLO and Calvert Vaux, "General Plan for the Improvement of the Niagara Reservation," 1887 (Papers of FLO, SSI: 535-75). http://lalh.org/olmsted-and-scenic-preservation/ 5/6 7/6/2015 LALH Blog-Olmsted and Scenic Preservation 5. Alfred Runte, Yosemite: The Embattled Wilderness (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1990). pp. 38- 39;49-54. 6. See FLO to Richard W. Gilder, July 10. 1889 (Papers of FLO, Library of Congress) 7. Robert U. Johnson to FLO, June 23, 1889 (Papers of FLO, Library of Congress). 8. FLO and Jonathan B. Harrison, Observations on the Treatment of Public Plantations, More Especially Relating to the Use of the Axe, [1889] reprinted in Landscape Architecture 3, no. 4 (July 1913): 145-152. 9. FLO to Robert U. Johnson, Oct. 9, 1889 (Papers of FLO, Library of Congress). 10. FLO, Governmental Preservation of Natural Scenery, March 8, 1890 (Papers of FLO, Library of Congress) 2 comments Interesting article! Other readers may wish to note two other things Olmstead also designed Wellesley College's campus (which has an extensive arboretum). and his grandson F.L. Olmstead, III, was instrumental in developing the artificial heart at the Cleveland Clinic in the 1960s. Comment by Ware Petznick on March 27, 2015 at 7:08 pm Thanks for getting back to us on this! Traces of the Olmsted firm's work can be found almost everywhere. Comment by Robin Karson on April 28, 2015 at 11:57 am The comments are closed. http://lalh.org/olmsted-and-scenic-preservation 6/6 3/30/2020 Century Archives - The Century Association Archives Foundation NICHINES CENTURY ASSOCI I ARCHIVES About the CAAF CENTURY ASSOCIATION BIOGRAPHICAL ARCHIVE Important Materials Earliest Members of the Century Association Publications View all members Online Reference Shelf Collection Access FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED Board of Trustees How to Donate Landscape Architect/Journalist Centurion, 1859-1903 Century Association Biographical Archive Born 26 April 1822 in Hartford, Connecticut Died 28 August 1903 in Belmont, Massachusetts Finding Aid to the Collection Buried Old North Cemetery [, Hartford, Connecticut Finding Aid to the Platt Proposed by Thomas P. Rossiter Library Centurions on Stamps Elected 4 June 1859 at age thirty-seven FDR: A Man of the Century (Audio File) Archivist's Note: Brother of A. H. Olmsted; father of Frederick Law Olmsted Jr.; uncle (and Hot Buttons: adoptive father) of John Charles Olmsted Presidential Campaigns and the Century Proposer of: Note: See also Charla 5. Sargent Association Charles S. Sargent on F.L. olmsted's contributions in Century Association George E. Waring Jr. Nobelists Frederick C. Withers The Later Years of the When the Clubhouse Was New (Photo Gallery) Saturday club- Pp. 183f. Century Memorials It does not often fall to a man not in public life to render public service SO distinctive, valuable, and lasting as that of Frederick Law Olmsted. On the eve of the Civil War, his letters to the New York Times from the Southern States, and the books made from them, gave to the country a body of observations as to that obscure and peculiar region, singularly fair, accurate, acute, and soundly reasoned. There had been nothing like them, and they can yet be consulted with profit. During the first two years of the Civil War he took upon himself the very great and difficult labor of the Executive Officer of the Sanitary Commission appointed by the Government to organize and apply a system for the care of the health of the vast and hastily recruited, ill-equipped army of volunteers. The energy, sagacity, patience, and fidelity with which he performed his task were nowhere surpassed in that period of tremendous effort. In the meanwhile he had, with the lamented Calvert Vaux, devised the plan by which the desolate and intractable area of rock and swamp which is now Central Park was made into one of the noblest pleasure-grounds of the world. From the beginning of this work, for more than forty years his rare powers were exercised with brilliant and solid success in all parts of the country in the peculiarly difficult art of the landscape architect-he in who builds with, as well as on, the face of the earth, and wins the forces of nature to continue the development of his ideal for years, possibly for generations after he is gone< In Central Park, in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, in the park system of Boston, in that of Buffalo, and in numerous other cities, in the wonderful grounds and structures of the World's Fair at Chicago, the work done by him and his associates may be said to have established a new art for our country and a new and precious development of the art as old as the Gardens of Babylon The of lay in getting by insight by acute observation by systematic study of 3/30/2020 Century Archives - The Century Association Archives Foundation free from the temptations of the hobby and unambitious of a style to be recognized as his. Each problem was a new one, since no ground was like another, and every terrain was to be wooed rather than conquered. Thus a secret-if not the secret-of his varied and remarkable triumphs was the attitude of his mind toward that with which and in which he wrought. A delightful companion withal, a friend loyal and inspiring. Edward Cary 1904 Century Association Yearbook Olmsted was born in Hartford and was prevented from attending Yale fulltime because of poor eyesight. In 1844, he embarked on a farming career on Staten Island and, following an extended trip to England, he published the popular Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England. In 1852, he traveled the Atlantic coast and wrote A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States. Olmsted believed that slavery was not only morally wrong, but expensive and economically inefficient. His dispatches to The New York Times were collected into multiple volumes; the last of these, Journeys and Explorations in the Cotton Kingdom, was published during the first six months of the Civil War. In 1859, Olmsted married Mary Cleveland (Perkins) Olmsted, the widow of his brother John, who died two years earlier. He adopted her three sons (his nephews), among them John Charles Olmsted. Frederick and Mary had two children who survived infancy: a daughter and a son Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. Olmsted was introduced to the English-born architect Calvert Vaux, and the two entered the Central Park design competition together, against Egbert Ludovicus Vielé among others. They emerged the winners in 1858. For the next four years Olmsted worked assiduously to create a park that would be both a work of art and a functional part of the city. (From 1863 to 1865, Olmsted was in California, where he secured the establishment of the magnificent Yosemite Park and served as the first president of the park's commission. Returning to New York, Olmsted and Vaux designed Brooklyn's Prospect Park; Chicago's Riverside; the park systems of Buffalo and Milwaukee; and the Niagara Reservation at Niagara Falls. Olmsted designed works for dozens of colleges including Auburn, University of Chicago, Cornell, Stanford, Yale, and Wellesley. Somehow he found time, in 1865, to cofound the magazine The Nation Olmsted was a frequent collaborator with Henry Hobson Richardson, for whom he devised the landscaping schemes for six projects. He retired in 1895 and died in 1903. James Charlton "Centurions on Stamps," Part I (Exhibition, 2010) Questions, comments, corrections: email caba@centuryarchives.org C 2012-2020 Century Association Archives Foundation Frederick Law Olmsted play by Gerry Wright Page 1 of 9 FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED Passages in the Life of an Unpractical Man Photo credit: Renee DeKona one-man play by Gerry Wright FRIENDS OF JAMAICA POND, INC 36 Perkins St., PO Box 300040, Jamaica Plain, MA 02130-0030 Gerry Wright, Founder and President Telephone: 617-524-7070 Email: FrederickLawOlmsted@yahoo.com TTY/MA RELAY 800-439-2370 www.FriendsOfJamaicaPond.org Celebrating Olmsted's Legacy: "A hundred years after his death, America continues to be challenged with issues of social justice, health and conservation for which Olmsted was a most persevering, principled pioneer." http://www.friendsofjamaicapond.org/Olmsted.html 4/13/2010 Frederick Law Olmsted Passages in the Life of an Unpractical Man A one-man play by Gerry Wright Friends of Jamaica Pond, PO Box 300040, Plain, MA 02130-0030 Telephone: 617-524-7070 Email: FrederickLawOlmsted@yahoo.com www.FriendsOfJamaicaPond.org/Olmsted.html Celebrating Olmsted's Legacy A hundred years after his death, America continues to be challenged with issues of social justice and conservation for which Olmsted was a most persevering, principled pioneer. Gerry Wright has researched, written and produced a one-man show honoring the life and work of Frederick Law Olmsted, the father of landscape architecture. The play provides insights into Olmsted's passionate vision as he played critical roles in the dynamics of slavery as a writer, as an appointee of Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, and as the landscape architect and catalyst for New York City's Central Park, Boston's Emerald Necklace, the US Capitol grounds, along with multiple palns for colleges, communities and private estates. Olmsted was a key pioneer in the movement to preserve land as national parkland, both at Yosemite and Niagara Falls. Olmsted's life story, from "vagabond," to farmer, traveller, journalsit, author, publisher, executive (including a goldmine in California), to becoming the father of landscape archetecture in America is both inspiring as history and reason for continued commitment in the 21st century. "Passages in the Life of an Unpractical Man" has toured from the Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site in Brookline, Massachusetts to the New Horizons Project in Vologda, Russia; Derby Academy in Hingham, MA to the New York City Central Park Celebration, Olmsted Parks Conservancy in Louisville, Kentucky to the "Biltmore" in Ashville, North Carolina. Gerry Wright works in areas of human services, environmental advocacy, international relations. In the 1960s he founded DARE Incorporated, a nonprofit agency in Massachusetts which pio- neered new community services for adolescents with social and emotional problems due to poverty and neglect. He has also championed projects that foster international communication, beginning at the time he ran the Moscow Marathon in 1982, and co-founded the Worldwide Running Club for Peace with the president of the Moscow Running Club. He has received numerous awards, including the 2008 Robert F. Kennedy Embracing the Legacy Award and named Father of Community Based Caring in Massachusetts by president of the State Senate. Wright is founder and president of Friends of Jamaica Pond and has been portraying Frederick Law Olmsted since 2003. He holds a BS from the forestry school at the Univeristy of Maine and a MS in wildlife conservation from Cornell University, Further graduate study include philosophy, theology, sociology, and psychology at Boston University and Harvard University. Previews, Calendar Picks & Reviews: Boston Sunday Globe A dedicated follower of Olmsted First the kinship, then one corner devoted to the works of Olm- the one-man show sted and those who wrote about him, books spill off the shelves. The more I've pursued my research By Shari Rudavsky the more kinship feel with Olmsted," @LOBE CORRESPONDENT Wright said. Memphis has its Evis look-alfkes. The 68-year-old Wright first discov- pliadelphia its wanzia-be Ben Franklins ered Olmsted in the 60s when be moved amaica Plain has its very own Frederick to Boston to pursue divinity degree at Last Law Olmsted impersonator Boston University. A marathon runner, he With his long white beard, frequently jogged around the pond, ord intelligent gaze, and gentleman- whose paths had fallen into disrepair. ty demeanor Getty Wright does Already fan of Emerson - be had left have to don his 19th-centory costume Cornell's doctoral program in conserva- channel the landscape architect when tion pursue career that gave him more does bis impersonations at various people Wright instantly community events. But this year-the appreciated Olmated's efforts to create 100th anniversary of Olmsted's death and public green spaces in the city. The more 20th anniversary of Jamaica Pond he read about the man considered to have Stanup effort which Wright helped fathered landscape architecture, the more The impersonator, Gerry Wright of launch the Jamaica Plain man has been he grew to respect him. Jamaica Plain suiting up as Olmsted more often than While Wright, the founder of resi- atual in one-man play he created that dential program for troubled youth in draws liberally from Olmsted's own Jamaica Plain, has never worked full-time he has made forays into Originally, Wright, years ago, he and founded the Jamaica his Pond neighborhood group that formed than 15 times at such the and restored the venues schools, and the working condition. Qlinsted in Brookline, and requests as Olmsted came in 1996, keep pouring in for more. when the Parks Commission celebrated "Frederick Law Olmsted: Passages in the centennial of the Emerald Necklacc the Life of an Unpractical Man" strives to During party preparations Wright was be more than biography of the man chatting with then-Parks Commissioner behind Boston's Emerald Necklace and Justine Liff, who told him some of the New York's Central Park. It's party guests planned to appear in Victori- garb. Dirnsted?" Wright asked Tribute to Olmsted costume, Wright character and proved made periodic appear- and the great landscape architect even traveling to New himself. coming to Easton commemorative The guests at rooftop his typewriter or use e-mail must do- asked him what he did cide what the future holds for him and his moved California responded in the play. And once more, he notes similarity him Olmsted, "What do between himself and bis idol. the He's coming pinting to the park "Olmsted went through life and kept finding things that grabbed him," Wright Theo Moore, of 30 no refuses to give up said. Olmsted The Olmsted show Federic in Page Gerry Wright natural one-man Calendar is a HA Mont GUEST CO Monday TAB THURSDAY, Olmsted legacy celebrated historic site Download press kit, teacher curriculum guide and photos at: www.FriendsOfJamaicaPond.org/Olmsted.htm Friends of Fairsted Home Page Page 1 of 3 HOME ABOUT US EVENTS LINKS JOIN US THE FRIENDS OF FAIRSTED Advancing the mission of Olmsted National Historic Site. A LIST OF BOOKS BY AND ABOUT FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED PREPARED BY ANNE CLARK, BROOKLINE ROOM LIBRARIAN, PUBLIC LIBRARY OF BROOKLINE WHA Find exciti More. WHA 2013 the I sure of al annua HOV Frede Natio regula tours Satur Furth hours direct Image courtesy of the National Park Service Frede Natio Art of the Olmsted Landscape websi Kelly, Bruce. New York: New York City Landmarks Preservation 1689 Commission: Arts Publisher, 1981. Satur The California Frontier, 1863-1865 Olmsted, Frederick Law. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990 Civilizing American Cities: Writings on City Landscapes GET Olmsted, Frederick Law. New York: Da Capo Press, 1997. A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the Want nineteenth century Fairst Rybczynski, Witold. New York: Scribner, 1999. and The Cotton Kingdom; a traveller's observations on cotton and slavery in the mail American slave States. Based upon three former volumes of journeys and contr investigations by the same author. Olmsted, Frederick Law. New York: Knopf, 1953. Creating Central Park, 1857-1861 Olmsted, Frederick Law. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983. http://www.friendsoffairsted.org/books.htm 3/24/2014 Friends of Fairsted Home Page Page 2 of 3 Defending the Union: the Civil War and the U.S. Sanitary Commission, 1861 -1863 Olmsted, Frederick Law. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986. Emerald Necklace Master Plan 1990 Template Copyright © 2006 Leafy Boston: Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Dept. of Environmental Green. Designed by Free CSS Management, 1990. Templates Emerald Necklace Parks: master plan Boston: Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Dept. of Environmental Webiste Copyright © 2007-2014 Management, 2001. Friends of Fairsted. FLO: A biography of Frederick Law Olmsted Roper, Laura Wood. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973 The Formative Years, 1822 to 1852 Olmsted, Frederick Law. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977. Frederick Law Olmsted, 1870-1957: an appreciation of the man and his achievements Whiting, Edward Clark. Boston: American Society of Landscape Architects, 1958 Frederick Law Olmsted and the Boston park system Zaitzevsky, Cynthia. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1982. Frederick Law Olmsted: designing the American landscape Beveridge, Charles E. New York: Rizzoli, 1995. Frederick Law Olmsted, landscape architect, 1822-1903 Olmsted, Frederick Law. New York, London: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1922- 1928 Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr.: founder of landscape architecture in America Fabos, Julius Gy. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1970. Frederick Law Olmsted: the passion of a public artist Kalfus, Melvin. New York: New York University Press, 1990. Frederick Law Olmsted's New York. Rogers, Elizabeth Barlow. New York: Praeger, in association with the Whitney Museum of American Art, 1972 General management plan, Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site, Town of Brookline, Norfolk County, Massachusetts United States. National Park Service. North Atlantic Regional Office. Planning and Design. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Dept. of the Interior, National Park Service, North Atlantic Region, Planning and Design, 1983 A Journey in the Back Country Olmsted, Frederick Law. New York: Mason Bros., 1860. The Slave States, before the Civil War Olmsted, Frederick Law. New York: Capricorn Books, 1959. A Journey through Texas, or, a saddle-trip on the south-western frontier: with a statistical appendix Olmsted, Frederick Law. New York: Dix, Edwards & Co. ; London: S. Low, Son & Co., 1857. Landscape Gardening in Brookline Collins, Hazel G. 1903. Landscape into Cityscape; Frederick Law Olmsted's plans for a greater New York City Olmsted, Frederick Law. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press 1968. The Master List of design projects of the Olmsted firm, 1857-1979 Washington, D.C.: National Association for Olmsted Parks: National Park Service, Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site, 2008. The Master List of design projects of the Olmsted firm in Massachusetts: 1866-1950 Boston: Massachusetts Association for Olmsted Parks, 1986. A Modern Arcadia: Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. & the plan for Forest Hills Gardens Klaus, Susan L. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002. The Nature of Recreation; a handbook in honor of Frederick Law Olmsted, using examples from his work Wurman, Richard Saul. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press for the American Federation of Arts, 1972. http://www.friendsoffairsted.org/books.html 3/24/2014 Friends of Fairsted Home Page Page 3 of 3 Olmsted Brothers landscape architects, Brookline, Massachusetts. New York: Architectural Catalog, 1937. The Olmsted National Historic Site and the growth of historic landscape preservation Allen, David Grayson. Boston: Northeastern University Press; Hanover: University Press of New England, 2007. Olmsted South, old South critic, new South planner Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979 Olmsted's America: an "unpractical" man and his vision of civilization Hall, Lee. Boston: Little, Brown, 1995. The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted. Supplementary series. Olmsted, Frederick Law. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997- Slavery and the South, 1852-1857 Olmsted, Frederick Law. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981. Walks and talks of an American farmer in England Olmsted, Frederick Law. Amherst: Library of American Landscape History: Distributed by University of Massachusetts Press, 2002. Works of the Olmsteds on parks and city planning Olmsted, Frederick Law The Years of Olmsted, Vaux & Company, 1865-1874 Olmsted, Frederick Law. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. FOR KIDS Frederick Law Olmsted: partner with Nature Johnston, Johanna. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1975. The man who made parks: the story of park builder Frederick Law Olmsted Wishinsky, Frieda. Toronto: Tundra Books, 1999. http://www.friendsoffairsted.org/books.html 3/24/2014