gold-mining enterprise.

He was no dilettante, though. He simply did a lot of different things and did them well. It was the nineteenth century, and a younger nation was in the grip of a frontier mindset. All things seemed possible to many Americans. People didn’t have to carve out narrow areas of specialization. It was an ideal time for someone of Olmsted’s gifts. Seeking varied experience was his essence, as surely as Mark Twain’s was to turn a phrase.

At the same time, there’s a common theme that runs through many of Olmsted’s diverse endeavors. First, last, and always, he was a reformer. No disrespect to Americans who came of age in the 1940s, often called the “Greatest Generation,” but Olmsted’s cohort (those who came of age in the 1840s) was pretty great in its own right. It was an especially socially conscious period in the country’s history, and it produced people who fought for the rights of the physically disabled and the mentally ill and — in the North — for the freedom of slaves.

Olmsted was very much a part of his generation. He didn’t become a scientific farmer merely as a way to make a living. He did so because, at a time when America was a predominantly agricultural nation, the vocation represented a chance to benefit society by demonstrating the latest cutting-edge practices. He became a maker of parks because, at a time when cities were becoming overcrowded and often unhealthy, they were a way to provide recreation and relief to the masses.

When it comes to reform, Olmsted also made his most notable contributions as a journalist. That’s what Burnham alluded to when he said “his pen has taught” in his tribute to Olmsted.

During the 1850s, Olmsted traveled throughout the American South as a reporter for a brand-new paper, the New York Daily Times. (The paper later dropped Daily from its name.) His mandate was to approach the region almost like a foreign correspondent. In the course of his travels, Olmsted interviewed both white plantation owners and black slaves and produced a series of extraordinary dispatches — balanced, penetrating, humane. As a consequence, he managed to lay bare the evils of slavery in a way that other more polemical works of the era often did not. For Northerners anxious to understand the South in the tense years before civil war broke out, Olmsted’s dispatches were one of the best windows.

See also “Spying on West Virginia” by Tony Horwitz,
about Olmsted’s travels in the South

When war finally erupted, Olmsted’s writings from the 1850s continued to furnish a vital perspective, this time to readers in Britain where the

government was undecided about whether to side with the Union or Confederate states. In 1861, Olmsted’s The Cotton Kingdom, an updated compendium of his collected Southern writings, was published in England and helped sway public opinion toward the Union cause. It remains in print to this day.  While in prison, Malcolm X read The Cotton Kingdom and later credited Olmsted with providing a startlingly unvarnished look at the institution of slavery. In an introduction to the 1953 edition, historian Arthur Schlesinger described this book as “the nearest thing posterity has to an exact transcription of a civilization which time has tinted with hues of romantic legend.”

Olmsted did eventually settle down to work exclusively as a landscape architect. Demand for his designs was such that he really didn’t have a choice. But, when finally forced to pick a career, he brought the sum of all his wildly varied experiences that had come before. That’s why Olmsted’s work is so gorgeous, so inspired, so dazzlingly set apart. It draws on the numerous disciplines to which he’d been exposed. When Olmsted created the landscape for the Biltmore Estate near Asheville, North Carolina in the 1890s, for example, he looked to memories of his long-ago travels throughout the antebellum South. When he designed the grounds for the 1893 World’s Fair, he drew on his experiences in China as a sailor a half century earlier.

Biographies of Olmsted have tilted into hagiography, casting him as a kind of radiant figure—a deeply devoted husband and sweet, gentle father. Such portrayals conflate his pastoral park creations with his personal demeanor, which is a mistake. Yes, he created beauty, but he was capable of being a very hard man.

But reading letters in different archives and deciphering Olmsted’s distinctive handwriting provides a more accurate portrait of Olmsted. He was a great artist and a hard-driving reformer, to be sure. He also happened to have had a strained marriage and serious tension within his family. In many ways, the two things were related.

Olmsted had a big life, but also a difficult one. He faced more — much more — than his share of tragedy, even by nineteenth-century standards. He contended with the untimely deaths of children, close relations, and dear friends. He suffered various physical ailments, such as the ravages of a near-fatal carriage accident. And he endured assorted forms of psychological torment: insomnia, anxiety, hysterical blindness, and depression. “When Olmsted is blue, the logic of his despondency is crushing and terrible,” a friend once said. Olmsted spent his final days in a psychiatric hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts; in a great irony, it was one which he had designed the grounds for.

He accomplished more than most people could in three

lifetimes. As a park designer, environmentalist, and abolitionist, Olmsted helped shape modern America. He designed more than thirty major city parks and such planned communities as Riverside, Illinois and Druid Hills in Atlanta. His work on campuses included Trinity College and Gallaudet University, and assorted places such as the grounds of Moraine Farm in Beverly, Massachusetts.

He died in 1903, uncertain whether his creations would survive into the future. His proposition — maintain valuable center-city land as green space — was tenuous and vulnerable to the developers of housing tracts and racetracks and shopping districts. But Olmsted’s worst fears haven’t been realized. Instead, his creations have become centerpieces, points of pride for scores of communities across the country. Far from receding, Olmsted’s influence has only increased in the century since his death, spreading like the Ramble in Central Park, his beloved wild garden.

Olmsted Brothers turned out to be a smashing success, far beyond anything he could reasonably have expected. Just as Olmsted was the foremost landscape architect of the nineteenth century, the firm run by his sons John and Rick became the preeminent practice for a new age. Much of its business involved circling back around to Olmsted’s original creations to do maintenance or to add modern touches, such as swimming pools. Olmsted Brothers did such work on their father’s parks in Chicago, Louisville, and Rochester, as well as at Mountain View Cemetery. In 1908, the firm revised a plan for Bryn Mawr College that Olmsted had done some work on in the spring of 1895 — one of his very last projects.
 
Over time, Olmsted Brothers also built up an impressive list of original works, such as Orange Park in Essex County, New Jersey, the grounds of the University of Idaho, and the Seattle park system.

Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. fulfilled his uneasy destiny and truly became a “leader of the van.” He helped Harvard, his alma mater, set up the first university course in landscape architecture in America. Following in his father’s footsteps, he also became a pioneering environmentalist. When the bill to create the National Park Service was written in 1916, he contributed some of the key language and phrases. He helped establish national parks in the Everglades, the Great Smoky Mountains, and Acadia in Maine.

Rick also served alongside Daniel Burnham on the prestigious McMillan Commission, which reorganized various Washington, D.C., public spaces such as the Mall, the White House grounds, and the Jefferson Memorial into a more coherent scheme. This experience pushed him farther into urban planning than his father had ever ventured. He drew up plans for the future growth of cities such as Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Boulder, Colorado. He also designed Forest Hills Gardens, a lovely, verdant 147-acre community smack

in the middle of New York City. (This community is not to be confused with nearby Forest Hills.) This is Olmsted, Jr.’s masterpiece as surely as Central Park is his father’s. Robert A. M. Stern, dean of the Yale school of architecture, described Forest Hills Gardens as “one of the finest planned communities ever.”

Olmsted Brothers carried on — in one form or another — for many decades. Along the way, the firm employed such notables as Frank Lloyd Wright Jr. and Arthur Shurcliff, known, among other things, as the landscape architect of Colonial Williamsburg. Marion Olmsted, who never married and continued to live at Fairsted, was also involved in the family business. Although she showed a talent for site photography and drafting, the full extent of this Olmsted sister's contributions to the Olmsted Bros. firm may have gone unacknowledged. 

The firm continued well beyond John’s death in 1920, one year before Mary’s death. It was still going strong when Marion died in 1948. It even outlasted Rick, who retired in 1949 and died in 1957.

After there were no brothers (or sister) involved in the business, the name was changed to Olmsted Associates (never mind that no Olmsteds were involved, period). The name held considerable equity, enough to propel the firm to 1980 — when the offices moved from Brookline to Fremont, New Hampshire — enough even to carry it all the way to 2000. In the final year of the millennium, the business finally shut down. By then, the impact on the American landscape of Frederick Law Olmsted and his successors was — quite simply — indelible.

And then there are all the names and terms that have entered the language — Olmsted loved to come up with these. Drive down any divided road, even one of terribly modest and uninspired design, and chances are it will be called a “parkway,” a term coined by Olmsted and Vaux. Visit the wild section of a fair, filled with rides and carnival barkers, and chances are it will be called the “midway.” That’s a nod to the Midway Plaisance, a stretch of Olmsted and Vaux’s original 1871 Chicago-parks plan that wound up housing the Ferris wheel and other attractions during the 1893 World’s Fair. Or you can visit Millbrae, California. In 1865, the Bank of California president Darius Mills rejected Olmsted’s design for his estate. But the name that Olmsted suggested stuck, and today Millbrae is a community of 20,000 people just south of San Francisco International Airport. And then there’s Fenway Park. The home of the Boston Red Sox takes its name from the nearby place that Olmsted called the Back Bay Fens.

Yes, Olmsted is still very much with us. You can read his work; let one of

his choice phrases “fall trippingly from your tongue,” as he once put it. Better yet, you can visit one of his green spaces. These transcendent creations provide a window into his spirit as surely as "Starry Night" evokes Van Gogh.

Perhaps you have a favorite Olmsted spot. I know I do. I walk down the steps of Central Park’s Bethesda Terrace, past the Angel of the Waters statue, and make my way to the edge of the lake. Then I follow the shoreline to the Bow Bridge and walk across. I like to stand at the water’s edge, soaking up this peerless composition: Vaux’s beautiful bridge, both spanning the lake and reflected in it, and Olmsted’s untamed ramble all around.

But this is so far beyond a mere work of landscape architecture. Looking around, I’m always struck by the variety of people — every income group, every nationality, young and old, enjoying a dizzying variety of activities. Here it is, the twenty-first century, and one of Central Park’s original purposes remains very much intact. In the truest sense, this place belongs to everyone. I think Olmsted would be proud.