Frederick Law Olmsted

Olmsted was not yet four when his mother died of an overdose, and his father, a prosperous Hartford merchant with a taste for scenery, raised him largely by taking him places. He went to Phillips Academy in 1837 to learn surveying. Then sumac poisoning weakened his eyes and the plan to enter Yale was abandoned. A decade of near-misses followed: apprentice seaman, merchant, and in January 1848 a farmer on 125 acres of Staten Island bought with his father's help. England in 1850 showed him a public park at Birkenhead. Then the New York Daily Times paid him to ride through the slave South for five years and write down what he saw.

Calvert Vaux, who had designed things, invited Olmsted, who had not, to enter the Central Park competition with him. Their Greensward Plan won in 1858, and Olmsted spent the rest of his working life proving the accident was not one. Prospect Park followed from 1865 to 1873, then the first coordinated system of parks and parkways in the country, at Buffalo, and Boston's Emerald Necklace, and Milwaukee, and Riverside, Illinois, among the earliest planned communities in America. He laid out campuses for Berkeley, Stanford and Chicago, the grounds of the United States Capitol, Mount Royal in Montreal, the Biltmore Estate, and the parks of the 1893 Columbian Exposition. In 1863 he and Vaux gave the trade its name: landscape architect.

The Civil War nearly finished him. As executive secretary of the U.S. Sanitary Commission from 1861 he ran the Union's medical relief and refused to hand any part of it to anybody. A friend wrote in January 1863 that he worked with feverish intensity until four in the morning, slept on a sofa in his clothes, and breakfasted on strong coffee and pickles. He resigned on September 1, 1863, exhausted and without the backing of the men who had installed him, and within a month was on his way to California to manage a gold-mining estate that went bankrupt by 1865. He had married his dead brother's widow in 1859 and adopted her three children. Their own first child, born in 1860, died in infancy.

Senility forced him out of the firm in 1895. By 1898 he was a patient at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, an institution whose grounds he had once submitted a plan for that was never executed, and he died there on August 28, 1903. He is buried in Old North Cemetery in Hartford. His sons carried the practice as Olmsted Brothers until 1980, which is part of why the work was long read as scenery rather than authorship. The office at Fairsted is a national historic site now, and the parks — most of them still doing what he built them to do — make the case better than any monument would.

Frederick Law Olmsted's life against the full span of the corpus.

• A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States book
  First of three volumes of dispatches from the South 1856
• Central Park building
  The Greensward Plan, with Calvert Vaux 1858
• The Cotton Kingdom book
  A one-volume abridgment published in England during the war 1861
• Buffalo park and parkway system building
  The first coordinated system of parks and parkways in the country 1870
• Prospect Park, Brooklyn building
  Designed with Vaux from 1865 1873
• Biltmore Estate grounds building
  His last great commission, at Asheville, North Carolina 1895

• 1826 aged ~4 His mother dies before his fourth birthday
• 1837 aged ~15 Enters Phillips Academy to study surveying Sumac poisoning weakened his eyes soon after and ended the plan to enter Yale.
• January 1848 aged 25 Takes up farming on 125 acres of Staten Island
• 1850 aged ~28 Sees Birkenhead Park in England
• 1852 aged ~30 The New York Daily Times sends him through the slave South Five years of travel produced three volumes.
• 1858 aged ~36 The Greensward Plan wins the Central Park competition
• June 13, 1859 aged 37 Marries Mary Perkins, his late brother's widow, and adopts her three children
• September 1, 1863 aged 41 Resigns from the U.S. Sanitary Commission Within a month he was bound for a California gold estate that failed by 1865.
• August 28, 1903 aged 81 Dies at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts

• Frederick Douglass 1818–1895
  Former slave who became a leading abolitionist, orator, and advocate for equal rights. wrote against the same system
• John Muir 1838–1914
  Naturalist and organizer whose advocacy helped create national parks and the modern wilderness movement. fellow advocate for wild land
• Gifford Pinchot 1865–1946
  First chief of the U.S. Forest Service and leading advocate of scientific conservation and managed public lands. conservation heir
• Robert Moses 1888–1981
  Master builder whose roads, parks, and public works reshaped metropolitan New York while displacing communities and entrenching car dependence. rebuilt his parks
• Jane Jacobs 1916–2006
  Writer and activist whose defense of mixed, walkable neighborhoods transformed urban planning. inherited the fight over cities