1822–1903, American landscape architect and writer, b. Hartford, Conn. He first attained fame for accounts of his travels in the South in the early 1850s, in which he painted vivid pictures of slaveholding society—A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States (1856), A Journey through Texas (1857), A Journey in the Back Country (1860), and Journeys and Explorations in the Cotton Kingdom (1861). His Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England had already appeared in 1852. When Central Park in New York City was projected, he and Calvert Vaux prepared the plan that was accepted, and Olmsted superintended its execution. The well-planned park was a new departure, which was developed by Olmsted in other cities, e.g., Prospect Park, Brooklyn, N.Y.; South Park, Chicago; Mt. Royal Park, Montreal; and park systems in Buffalo and Boston. Perhaps his most spectacular achievement was the laying out of the grounds (afterward Jackson Park) in Chicago for the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893. He also took an interest in the creation of state and national parks and in city planning.

His son, Frederick Law Olmsted, 1870–1957, b. Staten Island, N.Y., grad. Harvard, 1894, was also a landscape architect and city planner. He studied with his father and began practice in 1895. He taught (1900–1914) Harvard's first course in landscape architecture. As a city planner he served on many committees and government boards. In 1901 he was influential in the plan for beautifying Washington, D.C.

See F. L. Olmsted's Forty Years of Landscape Architecture: Central Park, ed. by F. L. Olmsted, Jr., and T. Kimball (1928, repr. 1973); biographies of the elder Olmsted by L. W. Roper (1974) and W. Rybczynski (1999); studies by J. G. Fabos et al. (1968), E. Barlow (1972), and C. E. Beveridge and P. Rocheleau (1995).

The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright© 2004, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products N.V. All rights reserved.

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