Frederick Law Olmsted
Landscape Architect
1822-1903
Frederick Law Olmsted is well known as the founder of American landscape architecture and the nation's foremost parkmaker. During the late 1800's cities in America were noisy, crowded and dirty places. Cities needed to be changed into more hospitable places, and not just places for business. A new idea was that the more beautiful you make a city, the more people will want to live in that city, and the happier they will be. One of the greatest champions of the City Beautiful movement was Frederick Law Olmsted.
Olmsted was born in Hartford, Connecticut. He never fully attended college but he did become a very learned man. When he was 18, Olmsted moved to New York and later Europe. Eventually he became the Superintendent of Central Park, New York City, in 1857, just when the park was being developed..
In 1859, Olmsted married the widow of his brother, John, and he adopted her children. In 1861, Olmsted he served as the head of the United States Sanitary Commission, an early version of the Red Cross. (They were responsible for helping the soldiers of the Union Army during the Civil War.) In 1863, he was involved in a gold mining venture north of San Francisco. He later returned to New York, and began to design parks.
