INTRODUCTION

The Olmsted Firm

Olmsted had purchased an old farmhouse at the corner of Dudley and Warren streets in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1883 and renamed it Fairsted after the family’s ancestral home in Thaxstead, England. His first task was to enlarge the north parlor and transform it into his office. John Charles Olmsted had become his father’s assistant upon graduating from the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale in 1875 and three years later became a limited partner. In 1884 Olmsted renamed the firm F. L. & J. C. Olmsted. As the number of employees and apprentices increased, Olmsted built, in 1889, an addition to provide space for drafting tables and a brick vault for the firm’s records. Still another addition two years later created more space to meet the firm’s increasing workload. The various additions vastly enlarged the former farmhouse into both a family residence and a significant place of business.

Two of Olmsted’s apprentices from the 1880s were his partners during the years of this volume. Upon his return from an extended period of travel and study in Europe, Codman had become a partner in 1889, when the firm was renamed F. L. Olmsted & Co. Following Codman’s death, Charles Eliot joined the firm. Warren H. Manning became the firm’s horticultural specialist in 1888 and later its superintendent of planting. Manning frequently worked directly with clients, ordering plants from nurseries, drawing up planting plans, and overseeing planting. In January 1890 Olmsted wrote his old friend Charles Loring Brace that John and Henry Sargent (Harry) Codman were “ready to take up all my work and on an average [are] better qualified for it than I am. My office is much better equipped and has more momentum than ever before.”

The Olmsted firm worked on projects near, such as the Boston park system and a number of private estates and homesteads in and around Brookline, as well as far, especially the design of Biltmore. In November 1890, as the firm was planning the World’s Columbian Exposition, Olmsted wondered “how in the world are we ever going to work through all before us! We must have more head power. We must have more of the Manning rank.” Edward D. Bolton became superintendent of construction in 1892, and he relieved some of the pressure on the partners by traveling to sites and working directly with clients. The geographical extent of the firm’s business led Olmsted on occasion to contemplate opening a branch office in the Midwest and another in New York City.

Harry Codman’s death in January 1893 was devastating to Olmsted and John, both personally and professionally. Shortly thereafter, Eliot joined the firm, renamed Olmsted, Olmsted & Eliot, which was announced on [4]March 1, 1893. By September 1893 Olmsted described his son John’s responsibilities as managing an office with fifteen to twenty draftsmen and clerks, as well as Manning and Bolton, coordinating the travel of the partners, and corresponding with clients.

The Olmsted firm worked in a manner different from other landscape architects or gardeners at the time. As Olmsted explained to his partners, “our way of doing business” set them apart from other landscape architects or engineers, in the United States, England, and France, and he was confident that the firm’s practices were “pretty well established & justified by results, with reference to Public Parks.” Most of their contemporaries, such as Ernest Bowditch, H. W. S. Cleveland, Jacob Weidenmann, Samuel Parsons, Jr., and Édouard André, worked on one project for an extended period of time. By contrast, the Olmsted firm had many projects under way simultaneously and a large staff in the Brookline office. For both public and private work Olmsted and his partners employed a local surveyor or engineer to prepare a topographical study of the ground, always at the expense of the client. Following an initial site visit the partners would prepare a preliminary plan as a basis for discussion with the client, then a comprehensive plan of the property along with detailed instructions to a gardener or superintendent of works who would be responsible for carrying out the plan. One or more partners would return to the site periodically to oversee improvements, and for complex works Manning also visited to supervise planting and Bolton to advise clients on engineering questions.

Although Olmsted invariably received most of the credit for the firm’s projects, he insisted on the importance of the collaborative nature of the practice. In 1893 he pointed out that John had contributed to “quite half of my works … in an important degree.” He insisted that it was “impossible to apportion credit, so much to one, so much to another, for the general result that may come from the striking together of two or more minds in prolonged, practical discussions.” Olmsted pointed to Harry Codman, whose contributions to the firm’s work were largely underappreciated even by as discerning a critic as Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer. “Not one of us has done anything that the others have not helped him to do. In every one of our works there has been a merging of thought into thought, so that to differentiate individual originations is quite out of the question.” The collaborative nature of the firm, and the need for a large office staff to carry out projects in all parts of the country, continued to define Olmsted’s firm far into the twentieth century.

The two “last great projects” that dominated these years were Biltmore and the World’s Columbian Exposition.

Biltmore

George W. Vanderbilt had traveled to Asheville in 1888 because of its reputation for a healthful climate, and he was enthralled with the scenery of [5]the Blue Ridge Mountains. A quiet man who loved the arts and the outdoors, Vanderbilt dispatched his trusted advisor Charles McNamee to acquire property, initially approximately 2,000 acres and ultimately a vast expanse of one hundred square miles. He then called upon two men who had collaborated on the design of the family’s mausoleum in New Dorp, Staten Island, Olmsted and architect Richard Morris Hunt, to help him realize his dream of a country house in the Appalachian foothills.

Olmsted visited the site with Vanderbilt in late 1888. Olmsted recalled in a January 1891 letter to Frederick Kingsbury that Vanderbilt wondered if he had been foolish to acquire the land, which he intended to make a park. Olmsted assured him that the climate was indeed salubrious and the scenery spectacular but offered an alternative to Vanderbilt’s vision of a park or a gentleman’s farm. The best use of the land, he suggested, was as a scientifically managed forest “with a view to crops of timber.” The problem was that much of the land had been deforested and poorly farmed, so the soil was severely lacking in nutrients. Nevertheless, Olmsted was convinced that the region, with a climate that allowed trees from the northeast and southeast alike to thrive, would be an excellent testing ground for scientific forestry. He assured Vanderbilt that the forest would be a profitable investment that would be “of great value to the country” at a time when so much of the primeval forest had been felled.

Vanderbilt’s initial plan for Biltmore envisioned a more modest house than the majestic chateau Hunt designed. But as his enthusiasm for the property grew, and he and Hunt visited England and France in 1889 in search of inspiration for the house, they determined that Biltmore would be a French-inspired dwelling like the chateaux they had seen in the Loire Valley.

Olmsted’s task was more difficult than simply designing a house, even the enormous one Hunt projected. He took a holistic approach to Vanderbilt’s property and the reason Vanderbilt was so enthralled with the site. Thus one of his first recommendations was to realign Hunt’s building to a more north-south axis, to maximize the view west toward the mountains. Olmsted directed the construction of two scaffolds so Vanderbilt could visualize the vistas from the music room in the house and from the South Terrace, and Vanderbilt agreed to the new orientation of the dwelling. Olmsted then suggested placing the stables north of the house to block the blasts of winter air, but which he proposed to carefully screen with trees and shrubs so that utility would not compromise beauty.

Planning Biltmore was especially challenging for Olmsted because it was never a set piece: Vanderbilt kept buying more land. An essential task was preparing an accurate topographical survey of the ground, largely done under the direction of the estate’s engineer, William A. Thompson, and then fitting a plan to Vanderbilt’s desires and to the landscape. Preparing accurate maps took time: in October 1890 Olmsted reported that Thompson would be sending the survey of the northern part of the estate, an area of 500 acres, in two months, [6]but feared that it would take two years before the rest of the surveying could be completed, which frustrated Olmsted and Vanderbilt. But Olmsted judged the quality of Thompson’s work excellent and came to consider him the best engineer with whom he had worked over his career. Indeed, as Thompson was leaving Biltmore Olmsted rued, “we shall never have another man here whom we can trust as much.”

Constructing the landscape was especially difficult because of the estate’s distance from the firm’s office in Brookline and the numerous other commissions already under way. The pressures of work and the time Olmsted could devote to Biltmore became even more challenging when he and his partners were appointed landscape architects to the World’s Columbian Exposition in August 1890. To direct the work, Olmsted hired a superintendent of landscape, James Gall, Jr., who had previously worked in minor capacities on the construction of Central and Prospect parks and later, independently, on several national cemeteries in the South. Gall was an engineer, not a landscape architect, and he had never before faced such challenging responsibilities. Olmsted relied on Gall to follow the intent of his instructions, but he frequently made what Olmsted called “blunders” that resulted from Gall’s not understanding the spirit of his designs. This became a leitmotif in numerous letters, with Olmsted frustrated because Gall so desperately wanted to be recognized as a landscape architect that he was initiating projects or imposing his own ideas as refinements to Olmsted’s designs. Still, Olmsted conceded, Gall was probably the best superintendent the firm could have hired for Biltmore, though he frequently expressed the belief that Gall needed closer supervision and that someone from the firm needed to be at the estate much more frequently than was possible given his own health and the firm’s other commitments.

As he tried to create a landscape in keeping with Hunt’s chateau and Vanderbilt’s interest in the natural world, Olmsted conceptually divided the vast estate into four workable pieces—the Approach Road, the grounds around the chateau, the arboretum, and the forest.

The Approach Road is the introduction to the estate. In his 1889 letter to Vanderbilt, Olmsted located the approach in the land already acquired, which necessitated a circuitous drive over difficult terrain from the entrance to the house. When Vanderbilt purchased land from a small African American community surrounding the Shiloh Baptist Church, however, Olmsted seized the opportunity to relocate the road to the south, along Ram Branch, a picturesque stream. From the entrance gate the Approach Road follows the Swannanoa River and then, south of the quarry, abruptly turns southwest to follow Ram Branch. The road in the vicinity of the quarry was the last to be completed, as the quarry was providing gravel used in construction and a temporary railroad that carried the gravel to the house site crossed the eventual line of the road. When the quarry was no longer needed, Olmsted directed that it be shaped into a picturesque pool, with climbing plants covering much of the face of the overhanging wall of rock. The result, he anticipated, “will have a natural, [7]unsophisticated but intricate and somewhat mysterious character.” This emphasis on picturesque effect is the key to Olmsted’s conception of the Approach Road. From the quarry south he wanted the Approach Road to present a different landscape experience from the view west toward the mountains. It should, he wrote Vanderbilt, have “a natural and comparatively wild and secluded character; its borders rich with varied forms of vegetation.” He shaped the watercourse with small cascades, pools, and dense plantings and added five “balconies”—crescent-shaped extensions of parapet walls along the Approach Road—so that persons riding in carriages or on horseback could alight and sit on stone benches to look over especially picturesque scenery along Ram Branch. Throughout the Approach Road he wanted the plantings to be rich and variegated and convey a sense of wonderment, “an aspect more nearly of sub-tropical luxuriance than would occur spontaneously at Biltmore.”

From the stretch of the Approach Road along Ram Branch, which Olmsted described as the pond district, the road begins to ascend in gently curving lines toward Shiloh Road, where it crests at a ridge, and the remainder of the journey is relatively level. Here too there were challenges, as Olmsted had to design retaining walls and parapets to accommodate the rugged topography. Nevertheless, the Approach is classic Olmstedian design. For approximately three miles the drive presented precisely the picturesque landscape Olmsted intended, and the result was spectacular: Richard Morris Hunt believed that Olmsted had “done wonders” with the landscape along the Approach Road and stated that “It alone will give him lasting fame.” Vanderbilt drove through the lower Approach Road in early July 1895, when

[8]the rhododendron were in bloom, and described it as “a vale of delights.” He added, “I only wish everyone could see it at this season for the first time.”

The Approach Road structures the visitor’s experience of place. It culminates at the Esplanade, the formal, tree-lined lawn directly east of Hunt’s chateau. The Esplanade is a majestic space, framed by the ramp douce at the east, a classically inspired wall with a pair of stairways that lead toward the Vista, by the house to the west, and by symmetrically planted pairs of tulip trees along the lawn that frame the view toward the house. A circular basin with fountain in the center of the lawn is yet another feature of this dramatic setting. Olmsted described his intent as visitors passed from the Approach Road to a “trim, level, open, airy spacious, thoroughly artificial Court, and the Residence, with its orderly dependencies, breaks suddenly and fully upon him. Then, after passing through the building, the grandeur of the mountains, the beauty of the valley, the openness and tranquility of the park would be most effectively and even surprisingly presented, from the windows, balconies and terrace.”

The Esplanade at Biltmore is so different from the landscape of the Approach Road, and from so much of Olmsted’s work in public landscape design, that it deserves attention. Olmsted was not averse to formal elements

[9]in the landscape, as he and Calvert Vaux had included the Mall, or pedestrian promenade, in their Greensward plan for Central Park (1858), and Olmsted employed a similarly formal space, the Greeting, in his 1885 design for Franklin Park. Moreover, he had designed the grounds of a number of estates that included formal terraces as outdoor living spaces. But the Esplanade is of such a vast scale to provide an appropriate formal setting, really the entrance court, for the building Hunt had designed. The overall impression is breathtaking. The Blue Ridge Mountains in the distance, never seen from the Approach Road, convey why Vanderbilt was initially so attracted to the property. The house is sited as Olmsted advised, to take advantage of the vista west.

The formal Esplanade is only one part of the “home grounds,” as Olmsted described the landscape adjacent to Hunt’s chateau, and elsewhere he shaped a more naturalistic landscape. East of the Esplanade and the ramp douce is the Vista, a greensward that gently rises, framed by deciduous and evergreen trees, to a statue of Diana. The Vista is Olmsted’s counterpoint to the formality of the Esplanade. Here, above the ramp, the landscape unfolds, with vistas to the northwest and southwest that Olmsted carefully created, as well as toward the chateau and the mountains to the west.

Other parts of the home grounds are equally important to Olmsted’s conceptualization of the landscape. A large terrace, originally the Garden Terrace but now called the Italian Garden, parallels the Esplanade at a lower level to provide shelter from harsh winter winds. Here Olmsted designed three pools for a fountain and water plants as well as beds for plants (since replaced by panels of grass). Classical statues adorn the ground, which is really an extension of the formality of the house and Esplanade.

From the library at the southwest end of the house there is another terrace, and beneath that a larger, more impressive one that looks toward the mountains. Olmsted conceived of the South Terrace as “a great out of door general apartment.” Originally a bowling green was to be in the center of the terrace, but the aspect of the design over which Olmsted was most insistent was the need for a structure, at the southwest point of the terrace, as a destination. Only over several years of conversation did he persuade Hunt, and ultimately Vanderbilt, that what he envisioned for the terrace was essential to its overall design. The Tea House, as he suggested it be called, is a simple structure that looks out toward the mountains and also down to the landscape west of the house that Olmsted created.

The remaining elements of the home grounds are, respectively, the Ramble (now called the Shrub Garden), the Pergola, the Spring Garden, the Walled Garden and Conservatory, the Deer Park, and the Glen. The topography of each of these sites falls away from the house, which is perched on a ledge, and thus they are sheltered from winter winds. Stairways lead from the principal terraces down to the Ramble, where Olmsted created a walk heavily planted with evergreen shrubs that would be as attractive in the winter as in more seasonal climes. At the west end of the Ramble, extending the length of [10]

[11] [12]the South Terrace, is the Pergola, supported by classical columns, which he intended to cover with climbing vines and wisteria. Adjacent to the Ramble is the Spring Garden, another naturalistic space now filled with nurseryman and longtime estate manager Chauncey D. Beadle’s beloved azaleas, although Olmsted had initially chosen different plantings as Vanderbilt was unlikely to visit Biltmore in the spring, when those shrubs would be in bloom. West of the Spring Garden is the Walled Garden, a four-acre enclosure that Olmsted hoped would be devoted to flowers, espaliered fruits, and choice vegetables, and the Conservatory filled with tropical plants. West of the house are the Deer Park and Glen. Olmsted described the Deer Park as an expanse of approximately 250 acres visible from the house and the South Terrace as the landscape falls off toward the French Broad River. The park would differ from forest land on the estate “in having a much larger proportion of un-wooded ground; in having a larger proportion of its trees standing singly and in groups, in being more free from underwood; and in having a turf surface, forming a fine pasture and giving a pleasant footing for riding or walking freely in all directions.” Just as the Approach Road reflected Olmsted’s longstanding interest in creating landscapes of picturesque beauty, the Deer Park was the part of the estate where he developed pastoral scenery. From the Esplanade a second key drive, Glen Road, meanders in a winding course down the hillside to the Lake (now called the Bass Pond), while two paths leave the Walled Garden and Conservatory and lead south toward the Lake. At the Lake Olmsted shaped the shores and two small islands to convey a sense of mystery through aquatic and herbaceous plants, and he insisted on the islands both to create the impression of greater breadth of water and as a nesting place for waterfowl. The final piece of the home grounds, and the last created during the years of Olmsted’s involvement at Biltmore, is the Lagoon, located on bottomland adjacent to the French Broad River, which provides a spectacular reflection of Hunt’s chateau as well as the landscape of the Deer Park.

The other major components of Olmsted’s vision for Biltmore were the arboretum and the forest. Olmsted sketched his idea of an arboretum in his initial report to Vanderbilt, proposing that it be “by far finer and more instructive than any other in the world” and a place “to which naturalists would resort from all parts of the world.” Designing the Arboretum Road was particularly vexing because it kept changing in length, eventually growing to twelve miles. As Olmsted conceptualized it, the Arboretum Road would serve multiple functions. Much of the adjacent land would be devoted to economic forestry, and so the road would be the principal means of getting harvested timber to sawmills on the estate. But in addition to this practical use Olmsted believed that the Arboretum Road would present a scientific museum of trees, displayed as pictures in a museum, and become a school where students of landscape could study the use of trees in composition. It would also be a pleasure drive that presented handsome views of nearby and distant scenery for Vanderbilt and his guests.

[13]

As the arboretum took shape in his mind, Olmsted consulted with Charles Sprague Sargent, who initially supported Olmsted’s plans but ultimately discouraged the idea. In the end Sargent concluded that the mixture of functions would make a truly scientific display of trees impossible. He also worried that it could not survive as a private venture and urged Olmsted to convince Vanderbilt to donate the land to a non-profit corporation controlled by independent trustees and provide it with a generous endowment. Whether this reflected Sargent’s fear that Biltmore might become a formidable competitor to the Arnold Arboretum as the finest arboretum in the United States, which Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., believed, or indicated legitimate professional concerns cannot be determined from surviving documents. But it must have been obvious to Sargent, who reviewed the early plans, that the Biltmore Arboretum would be vastly larger than the 265-acre Arnold and that, because of climatic differences, could include a much greater variety of trees. Olmsted realized that Vanderbilt was unlikely to do what Sargent wanted but nevertheless pressed ahead in getting the Arboretum Road built. He urged engineers Thompson and Gall to complete its grading and carefully studied the alignment of the road. Olmsted’s firm prepared detailed plans for planting the trees, generally in the “natural order” established by George Bentham and Joseph Dalton Hooker, with specimens grouped with kindred species and following a progression established by pioneers of scientific botany. The plans also included looped paths or drives that departed from the Arboretum Road to include other varieties of specimens not normally present in an arboretum that Olmsted considered important in landscape composition.

The arboretum was, Olmsted conceded on several occasions, perhaps the most important and difficult work of landscape design he undertook over his long career. It was unique, he believed, as an attempt to combine botanical science and landscape art on an unprecedented scale. He frequently wrote to his partners that the arboretum required intense study on the ground, and as he refined his ideas draughtsmen at the Brookline office prepared additional plans that captured the intent of his design. The scale of planning for the arboretum was enormous: as he was preparing for his fall 1894 visit to the estate, Olmsted informed Vanderbilt that he would be bringing fifty-four maps, each five feet long, showing the position of several thousand trees he intended to plant along the road. He wanted Vanderbilt to have available a table large enough for the maps, which could be carried in a wagon, to enable Olmsted to study the plans “while overlooking the ground and with reference to various circumstances of the background, to distant prospects and to all circumstances of the topography which will affect the scenery as it will ultimately be presented to those passing on the road in a carriage.”

Perhaps because of his declining health, perhaps because of what he considered his inadequate knowledge of plants, Olmsted entrusted details of the Arboretum Road to Warren Manning, the firm’s superintendent of planting. As Olmsted, Jr., was working with Beadle cataloguing the [14]nursery, they discovered that Manning had placed orders for large numbers of horticultural varieties that were inconsistent with Olmsted’s vision for the arboretum. Three months after Olmsted, Jr., expressed this concern to his father, Gifford Pinchot and Beadle raised questions about how the resulting plans failed to conform to Olmsted’s December 30, 1893, explication of the arboretum. Pinchot wrote Olmsted that the maps he had studied included “a preponderance of abnormal forms over species on the main line of the Arboretum.” Moreover, many trees that would thrive at Biltmore were not included, and the plans left inadequate space for the addition of species not yet growing in the estate’s nurseries. Pinchot and Beadle noted, and Olmsted, Jr., concurred, that Manning had introduced much more nursery stock than was appropriate for an arboretum. Manning “has been left to work out the plans practically without supervision,” Olmsted, Jr., noted, and his “lack of ability to keep a general scheme and abstract principals clearly in mind has allowed his nurseryman’s instincts to run away with him.” In a letter to Charles Eliot, Olmsted, Jr., insisted that “someone with a clearer head than Father now has ought to keep affairs here well in hand for the credit of the firm and the success of the work.” Olmsted was appalled and feared that the elaborate plans drawn at Fairsted might be worthless and will have cost Vanderbilt several thousand dollars. At a March 1895 meeting Olmsted, Manning, Pinchot, Beadle, and Olmsted, Jr., reaffirmed the basic principles of Olmsted’s original conception of the arboretum, but the momentum for completing the arboretum appears to have been lost.

The Arboretum Road was essentially completed as Olmsted designed it, but the trees Olmsted intended to line the road were never planted. This is most likely the result of Olmsted’s declining health in the 1890s, when he found the travel by train to Biltmore more and more difficult, and his withdrawal from the firm in August 1895. Given Olmsted’s absence, Vanderbilt, who Olmsted worried never fully shared his belief in the importance of the arboretum to his overall conception of the estate, simply decided in 1901 not to undertake the additional expense of planting. The arboretum is the most significant part of the Biltmore landscape Olmsted envisioned that was not completed.

The fourth principal component of the Biltmore landscape was the forest. Vanderbilt was persuaded by Olmsted’s suggestion that he consider forestry rather than the creation of a park or gentleman’s farm and, in 1889, at Olmsted’s recommendation, had hired Robert Douglas to initiate forestry plantings there. Douglas visited Biltmore with Olmsted in 1889 and planted approximately 300 acres of white pine, though perhaps half of the trees died within the first year. The lack of complete success of the initial planting, and perhaps Douglas’s unwillingness to take a more active role in overseeing the plantations, led Olmsted to suggest obtaining a release from Douglas’s contract. When that was completed Vanderbilt expressed interest in hiring a forester for the estate. That person was Gifford Pinchot, who visited Olmsted [15]in Brookline, where the two men engaged in lengthy discussions about ways to integrate the arboretum and forestry operations. Olmsted and Pinchot developed a good working relationship over their time together at Biltmore, and Pinchot later described Olmsted as “a quiet-spoken little lame man with a most magnificent head and one of the best minds I have had the good luck to encounter.” Pinchot especially appreciated that Olmsted “took my profession seriously” and in his autobiography expressed enduring gratitude for what Olmsted had done to advance his career.

One of the tasks Pinchot assumed after his initial survey of the forest at Biltmore was to prepare an exhibition for the World’s Columbian Exposition. Olmsted proposed this as an opportunity to promote the cause of scientific forestry in the nation as well as to bring attention to the larger public importance of a private estate. Pinchot prepared the exhibit, as well as a pamphlet that demonstrated the methods and profitable results of the first year of forestry operations. After Pinchot departed from the estate and eventually headed the U.S. Forest Service, his successor, Carl Schenck, who arrived from Germany in 1895, established the Biltmore Forestry School in 1898, the first of its kind in the United States, which trained many of the first generation of Forest Service professionals.

Biltmore was not only a vast estate; it was a complex enterprise—farm, commercial nursery, herbarium, and real estate development. Olmsted initially advised Vanderbilt not to pursue agriculture, save for a herd of cattle that would graze on the bottomlands along the French Broad River, which he anticipated would be an essential source of manure to be used in planting. But Vanderbilt soon hired Edward Burnett as purchasing manager and director of farm operations, and Burnett enlisted Baron Eugene d’Alinges (or d’Allinges), a Prussian-born agriculturist, to manage the farm. Before long the estate was home of a large herd of Jersey cattle that became part of a profitable dairy operation, and later a thriving truck farm, but Olmsted feared that these operations competed for resources with other parts of the estate’s development he considered more essential.

The nursery, located at the north end of the estate, was established by Gall, but as the amount of work increased Olmsted advised Vanderbilt that it needed a full-time manager. Harry Codman interviewed Chauncey Beadle in New York, found him to be the best candidate for the job in spite of his youth, and upon the Olmsted firm’s recommendation Beadle began a career at Biltmore that lasted more than fifty years. He organized plant-collecting expeditions, developed seedlings that the Olmsted firm ordered from nurseries in the United States and abroad, and under his aegis the nursery provided the abundance of plant materials that were essential to Olmsted’s conception of the estate. Biltmore’s nursery quickly became a profitable commercial enterprise and provided plants for other Olmsted projects, including the Louisville, Kentucky, park system and the Arnold Arboretum.

The herbarium was also part of the scientific purpose that Olmsted [16]attributed to Biltmore, and he hoped that it would have permanent value. In addition to developing a comprehensive collection of representative plants, he instructed plant collecting expeditions especially to seek specimens that were “rare or liable to extinction.” Olmsted and his partners also supplied Beadle with standard botanical reference books and suggested others that would provide a scientific basis for collections and display.

Still another component of the estate was Biltmore Village, which included a train station, a post office, the estate office, retail stores, houses, a hospital, and All Souls Church. Olmsted initially suggested the idea of a village near the train station, as well as the construction of villas on nearby hills, and Hunt prepared the first plan and designed the principal structures. However, Olmsted objected to Hunt’s plan as too French in inspiration and revised it to conform to his ideal of a New England village. Olmsted organized the village around the train station, a triangular plaza, and All Souls Church, which was located on axis with the plaza and station. He conceived of the village not as housing for estate workers but as an independent community, “the members of which are engaged, independently of the owner of the estate, in various kinds of business, the pursuit of which requires that they should be in intimate intercourse, commercially and otherwise, with people at a distance from the village.” Olmsted believed that Biltmore Village would be “an object lesson of the greatest value to the South.” Vanderbilt also erected a series of cottages on Vernon Hill, west of the village, while others were planned for Brandon Hill, immediately south of the village. Olmsted Brothers prepared a plan for a subdivision on Brandon Hill in 1900, but that project was never built.

The development of the Biltmore landscape was a massive undertaking for Olmsted at a time when the firm had many other major commissions. He visited the estate on average three times a year, usually for two weeks or so but occasionally longer. With the exception of a European sojourn in 1892, while away from Biltmore on other firm business Olmsted was in frequent contact with McNamee, Gall, and Thompson. He occasionally complained that Vanderbilt made decisions without consulting him and without understanding how seemingly small changes could adversely affect the overall landscape. In letters to his partners Olmsted emphasized the importance of the work at Biltmore and how it required more of the firm’s attention: “I ought to give myself up to this & stay all winter,” a sentiment he expressed frequently.

Olmsted spent tremendous time and energy thinking about, traveling to, designing, and superintending the development of the Biltmore landscape. He thought of it as much more than a wealthy gentleman’s estate. It was, in his mind, a private work of profound public importance. Long before the house and landscape were complete the estate was attracting considerable numbers of visitors, and Olmsted anticipated that their impressions of the place would positively “affect our future business.” Because of its importance, Olmsted believed that Biltmore was a key to the future of the profession. “To you & [17]Harry [Codman],” he wrote John, “this work will, twenty years hence, be what Central Park has been to me. The first great private work of our profession in the country.” He later described Biltmore as “the most permanently important public work and the most critical with reference to the future of our profession of all that we have. The most critical & the most difficult.” To resident staff on the estate Olmsted sent instructions on plantings and described their collective effort at Biltmore as “a great work of Peace we are engaged in.” In the future, he assured his colleagues, “we shall all be proud of our parts in it.”

Olmsted’s insistence that Biltmore was a private work of great public importance was testament to how strongly he believed in its significance as a place that brought together science and landscape art. As early as June 1890 he proposed the systematic collection of records “representative of the Geology and Mineralogy of the Estate and its neighborhood, its vegetation, its animal life, and the condition of its ancient human inhabitants.” He anticipated that the arboretum would become one of the largest and most important in the world, and, indeed, by the mid-1890s the Biltmore nursery had a greater number of specimens ready for planting than were displayed at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. He also considered the Herbarium and its library essential to Biltmore’s public importance and hoped that forestry operations would demonstrate the important economic benefits of scientific management. Moreover, as a work of landscape art Olmsted considered Biltmore a school to which horticulturists and landscape architects would come to study. He also expected that the numerous visitors to the estate would learn important lessons in landscape design and come to share his belief that landscape art was the creation of scenery, not the design of exotic beds of flowering plants. As he explained to John, “My appreciation of the importance of the work—the critical importance of it—with reference to the future of our profession and of the chapter of civilization to which it relates, only increases as it advances. It will be monumental.”

Olmsted’s last visit to Biltmore extended from early March to early June 1895, but he remained passionately interested in its continuing development and feared that this last great work might not meet the high expectations he held for it.

World’s Columbian Exposition

On July 17, 1890, James W. Ellsworth visited Olmsted in Brookline. This must have been a bittersweet moment, as Ellsworth was a longtime member of Chicago’s South Park Commission, and Olmsted considered South Park one of his greatest professional disappointments. In 1871, he and Calvert Vaux had prepared an ambitious plan for a thousand-acre park for the fast-growing metropolis. South Park consisted of three parcels: an Upper Division of 372 acres, located between 51st and 60th streets and Cottage Grove and Kanakee avenues, later named Washington Park; a Lower Division of 593 acres [18]adjacent to Lake Michigan between 56th and 67th streets, later named Jackson Park; and the Midway Plaisance, a mile-long, narrow (600-foot-wide) strip that connected Washington and Jackson parks. At the time of Ellsworth’s visit, Washington Park had been constructed along the general outlines Olmsted and Vaux had recommended in 1871, but only the northern section of Jackson Park had been improved. Most of the site was a sandy, wind-swept, desolate landscape.

Ellsworth didn’t go to Brookline to talk about the South Park, however. As a director of the Chicago corporation organizing the World’s Columbian Exposition, he wanted Olmsted involved in its planning from the beginning. Based on their conversations on July 17 and July 19, and a formal telegram from the board of directors of the exposition, Olmsted and Harry Codman boarded a train for Chicago on August 8, 1890. There they met Daniel H. Burnham, a leading architect in the city who had been advising the directors, and examined seven prospective sites for the exposition. One, along the North Shore, was an elevated area of 400 acres extending from Sulzer Street to the city line at the village of Argyle Park; another, Lake Front Park, was closest to downtown but was too small for as ambitious an exposition as Chicago’s leaders envisioned. The other sites were each of Chicago’s three west parks and Washington and Jackson parks.

Given Chicago’s flat topography and the lack of forest cover, Olmsted recommended two locations along Lake Michigan, which he considered the outstanding scenic attribute of the region: what was called the North Shore site and Jackson Park. In an oral report to the Board of Directors on August 11 and 12, 1890, and in a letter to Lyman Gage, the president of the Chicago corporation organizing the exposition, Olmsted responded to a request to advise “what space could be made available for the buildings of a World’s Fair in Jackson Park.”

Olmsted’s support for the Jackson Park site was tentative. When the Chicago Tribune published the text of his letter to Gage under the title “Jackson Park Is Too Swampy,” and Gage asked him for a longer explication of the various potential sites, Olmsted strongly endorsed the North Shore property. He and Codman prepared a fuller written report to the directors on September 18, which Olmsted amplified in a letter to Gage while traveling east from Chicago. In these letters he explained the principles they believed essential in choosing the location and designing an international exposition. Olmsted also reviewed the various sites he and Codman visited with Burnham and emphasized the advantages of the North Shore site—a size adequate to house the entire exposition, a level surface, good soil and drainage, attractive stands of trees, and an abundant supply of water. Most important was the lake. “The view over the Lake is even finer than that to be had from the intended esplanade at Jackson Park,” they wrote, “in that nearly all the floating commerce of the port of Chicago, the largest in number of craft, and the second in tonnage of any port of this continent, passes in procession on a line parallel with the [19]beach, and generally at a distance most favorable for an imposing panoramic display.” Moreover, the North Shore site possessed distinct advantages for site planning, and Olmsted and Codman sketched in words a possible scheme for organizing the exhibition: the principal buildings would be located between the lake and the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad, which bisected the site on a north-south line, with the agricultural, horticultural, and other buildings west of the railroad. A wide viaduct that spanned the railroad tracks would become the axis of the exhibition, and from this east-west “alleé” wide walks would lead to small exhibit buildings to the north and south. Of the seven possible locations they examined, Olmsted and Codman concluded, “the North Lake Site stands by itself.” Codman reiterated how strongly he and Olmsted felt about the site in a subsequent letter to the vice president of the board of directors: “The more we think of it,” he wrote, “the more earnestly we hope that the Directors will find it practicable to take the North Lake Site. Our impression grows stronger daily of the advantages of a single site, and of the disadvantages of Jackson Park for this single site.”

Despite this advice, the directors refused to consider the North Shore site, stating that it simply did not have adequate rail access from the city. Olmsted then chose to emphasize the potential of Jackson Park for the exposition. At first Codman was less enthusiastic than his senior partner, but he came to share Olmsted’s preference for the site. Olmsted was cognizant of the challenges ahead: the site had been selected as a park not because of any particular qualities of scenery but because it could not economically be brought into the city’s grid street system. In 1890 he conceded that Jackson Park was “extremely bleak” and “forbidding.” Olmsted knew that reclaiming its swampy areas and dredging and improving the land would be expensive, but he also recognized Jackson Park’s potential for the exposition and the opportunity to redeem his and Vaux’s plan for the South Park.

Water was the central feature of the 1871 South Park plan. Olmsted and Vaux envisioned Lagoon scenery as the distinctive attribute of Jackson Park’s landscape, which they described as “intricate, sequestered, sylvan and rich in variety of color and play of light and shade.” In 1871, he and Vaux had proposed that water extend from the Lagoon through the Midway to the Mere or lake in Washington Park. To Olmsted, part of what made the Jackson Park site different from earlier international expositions was its water, especially the Lagoon and canal he envisioned. Water would be the distinctive element of planning the exposition grounds.

Negotiations with the South Park Commission over the use of Jackson Park for the exposition mandated the inclusion of the Lagoon. The commission required that the site be returned for park use in essentially the same condition as it was when turned over to the exposition directors. Because dredging the Lagoon had already begun, it and other features of Olmsted and Vaux’s 1871 plan were “fixed conditions” that had to be incorporated into the site plan for the exposition. But the Wooded Island, a fourteen-acre site that Olmsted [20]proposed as the centerpiece of the Lagoon district, was a new and novel introduction to the plan.

In November 1890, Burnham, his partner John Wellborn Root, Olmsted, and Codman submitted a preliminary plan for siting the principal buildings of the exposition. After a November 14 meeting with the National Commission, appointed to oversee the exhibitions, and the local Board of Directors, which was responsible for site planning and constructing the exhibition buildings, Olmsted was deeply concerned that disagreement between the two bodies was jeopardizing the firm’s strong recommendation of the Jackson Park site. Some members of the National Commission dismissed Jackson Park out of hand and petitioned, unsuccessfully, for the use of Washington Park instead. Some Chicago directors favored a plan in which three exhibition buildings—the fine arts building, the music hall, and the liberal arts building—would be located at Lake Front Park, adjacent to downtown, with others at Jackson Park. Although his firm had been appointed Consulting Landscape Architects for the exposition, Olmsted feared that differencess over the potential site would make his and his partners’ role in designing the grounds professionally unacceptable.

The initial plans Olmsted and his partners submitted in November 1890 sketched the outlines of the basin and Court of Honor, as well as the Lagoon and the Wooded Island. The local directors finally decided on Jackson Park and the Midway Plaisance in mid-November 1890, and against use of the Lake Front Park site, on February 20, 1891. As the plan was refined and other buildings located, the exposition ground essentially had five zones: the Court of Honor, the Lagoon area, the Stock Exhibit and several small exhibition halls at the southern end of the park, the area north of the Lagoon, where national and state buildings as well as the Art Gallery were located, and the Midway Plaisance for small exhibitors.

The great challenge Olmsted and Codman confronted in designing the grounds of the exposition was to reconcile the space for enormous exhibition buildings with the landscape. Under the direction of Burnham and his engineers, dredges scooped muck from low-lying areas to create the waterways and piled it on top of the sandy ridges to create sites for the exposition buildings. Large retaining walls were necessary to hold the soil in place and to support the terraces created for the buildings. The most prominent of these were sited at the Court of Honor. Burnham described this as an architectural court that would “serve as a suitably dignified and impressive entrance-hall to the Exposition.” Flanking the Basin on three sides were Richard Morris Hunt’s Administration Building, to the west, Manufacturers and Liberal Arts, designed by George B. Post, on the north side of the Basin, and Agriculture, designed by McKim, Mead, and White, south of the Basin. An enormous colonnade and the Arch of the Peristyle, designed by Charles B. Atwood, stood at the eastern end of the Court of Honor and served as a watergate connecting the Lagoon and Basin with Lake Michigan.

[21]

Olmsted realized, as early as the week-long meeting of the Board of Architects that began on January 12, 1891, which he and Codman attended, that the overall design of the Columbian Exposition would showcase Beaux Arts classicism in the principal exhibition halls. In their first meeting the architects unanimously and enthusiastically endorsed the Olmsted firm’s plan for the site. Olmsted later recounted the degree to which the architects and landscape architects collaborated and the key role that he and Codman played in planning the exposition, which he believed would elevate his profession in the public’s eye: “The general comradship and fervor of the artists was delightful to witness & was delightful to fall into,” he wrote.

If people generally get to understand that our contribution to the undertaking is that of the framing of the scheme, rather than the disposition of flower beds and other matters of gardening decoration—as to which those familiar with European exhibitions will be disappointed—it will be a great lift to the profession—will really give it a better standing than it has in Europe. I was exceedingly pleased to find how fully the architects recognized our service in this respect.

As important as the Court of Honor was to the exposition, to Olmsted the Lagoon and its shores and the Wooded Island were equally critical to its success. When he, Codman, and Burnham examined potential sites for the [22]

[23]exposition in August 1890, Olmsted recognized that one of the ridges on the Jackson Park site had a stand of trees, principally oaks. Given the sandy soil and frequent flooding, the largest of these were only forty feet in height and many were in poor condition. Nevertheless, those trees were the best material Olmsted had to work with, and with appropriate care, the application of manure, and significant additional planting, he believed that this could be the centerpiece of the Lagoon district. He made this sandbar the site of the Wooded Island, an expanse of fifteen acres surrounded by the Lagoon. In November 1890 he explained the importance of the Wooded Island to the overall design of the exposition:

In general the present northern inlet is to be further extended, and to become an interior Lagoon, that shall inclose the island shown upon the accompanying map. This island is now covered with an extensive body of native wood. It is an essential point of the general design that it shall be preserved and made the basis of a passage of natural landscape to supply an episode of scenery in refreshing relief to the grandeur of the buildings, and through its sylvan qualities, to the crowded and busy aspect that must be looked for almost everywhere else within the grounds. To this subject it is essential that neither within the limits of the island, nor in close association with it, should any structures be given a place, which, by their size, their architectural design or the purpose for which they are to be used will interfere with the motives thus proposed to be controlling in this locality.

The remaining stands of trees on the island would be supplemented with thousands of trees, shrubs, and other plants transplanted from the nurseries on the grounds.

Masses of plantings and great variety in height, color, and texture on the irregular shoreline in the Lagoon area were the keys to the aesthetic Olmsted hoped to create there, which he intended would convey a sense of mystery and also stand as an alternative to the formality of the rest of the exposition ground. Rudolph Ulrich, who Olmsted hired as Superintendent of Landscape, calculated that the shoreline of the Lagoon, the Wooded Island and islets, and the North Pond extended 29,459 lineal feet. Preparing the Wooded Island and nearby islets for planting required the handling of 12,000 cubic yards of sand and 29,000 cubic yards of black loam. Given anticipated fluctuations in water level, Olmsted chose “herbaceous, bog and water-side plants” collected by “parties organized and sent out for the purpose to various localities on the shores of lakes, rivers and swamps in Illinois and Wisconsin.” These plants were relocated to the eleven greenhouses erected along the Midway Plaisance or at the northern edge of the park, or to a nursery for hardy plants on the Wooded Island.

Planting the Wooded Island and the shore of the Lagoon was a challenge, especially given changes in the water level and harsh Chicago winters, which would cover the recently planted areas with thick ice. Olmsted explained his intent in a March 1891 memorandum on Lagoon planting he [24]prepared for Ulrich and in several letters to him. He intended that the Lagoon area have the character of a natural bayou, its shores having “a rich, affluent, picturesque aspect” that would contrast with the stone retaining walls lining the basin in the Court of Honor and the canals that extended north and south from it. The shores and the Wooded Island would provide the only relief from “the splendor and glory and noise and human multitudinousness of the great surrounding Babylon.” He hoped to achieve a “mysterious poetic effect” in the Lagoon area that would result from the massing of different kinds of plants along the shoreline.

Achieving mystery and poetry required artifice as well as landscape art. This meant treating different parts of the shoreline distinctively, using a variety of water-tolerant plants both to stabilize the shores and to provide a different landscape experience from the rest of the exposition grounds. Olmsted directed that reedy plants cover the shoreline, with aquatic plants in tubs set beneath the surface of the water. Behind these would be plants of varying sizes and colors that overhung the Lagoon, which required that trees and shrubs be “bent, trained, pegged and wired down to cover the aquatic plants.” He intended that parts of the Lagoon have the appearance of a marsh, with small bays or indentations of water that he hoped would increase the sense of mystery in the landscape. He also wanted a profusion of common creeping and climbing plants, especially morning glories, as well as grasses and brambles, to add to the profusion of the plantings.

Olmsted and Codman did not oversee the shaping and planting of the landscape: responsibility for superintendence fell to Ulrich, who sent the firm weekly reports on the progress of operations. Still, Olmsted’s frequent absences, and Codman’s need to attend to other firm projects, sometimes caused tension. In July 1891, Burnham wrote Codman and urged him to come to Chicago and stay “till snow flies,” as so many decisions were “being crowded into this short period.” Given how overextended the firm was, a permanent presence in Chicago was impossible, which resulted in Burnham having to make ad hoc decisions about changes in the plan without consulting the landscape architects. In the summer of 1891, for example, he decided to enlarge the space in front of the Horticulture Building, which necessitated narrowing the Lagoon at that point and reducing the size of the Wooded Island.

Nevertheless, the arrangement worked reasonably well. When Olmsted visited in mid-May 1891, he praised Ulrich’s work as well as the organization of Burnham’s staff. Ulrich was key to the successful implementation of the plan for the exposition grounds: following Olmsted’s instructions, he planted the shores of the Lagoon with one hundred thousand small willows of different varieties, seventy-five railroad carloads of herbaceous aquatic plants, “one hundred and forty thousand other aquatic plants, largely native and Japanese irises, and two hundred and eighty-five thousand ferns and other perennial herbaceous plants.” Altogether, Olmsted reported, more than a million plants were transplanted to the exposition grounds. Beginning in October 1891, a [25]large number of trees and a variety of willows were added to the stands of oaks on the Wooded Island to create the contrasts in height and color Olmsted considered essential to the scenery he intended for the Lagoon area.

To enliven the scene and provide recreational use of the Lagoon, approximately fifty electric launches with brightly colored awnings to shade passengers and twenty gondolas imported with their gondoliers from Venice plied the exposition waters. Their principal function was not transportation: Olmsted estimated that the boats would carry only about one percent of visitors on a normal day. Instead, they were “part of the scenic properties of the Exposition.” He explained to Burnham that their chief value would lie in the pleasure that visitors would derive from observing them. Four bridges linked the Wooded Island to the rest of the exposition ground, and two others spanned the arm of the Lagoon extending to the North Pond. These too were part of the scenic effect: Olmsted noted that the bridges created shadows and contrasts in color and pointed to “their effect in extending apparent perspectives and in connecting terraces and buildings, tying them together and thus increasing unity of composition.” Because the bridges made parts of the Lagoon accessible for close examination by pedestrians, Olmsted hoped to anchor small, highly ornamental boats from around the world near the piers of the bridges, and, indeed, a Japanese fishing boat floated near the bridge that extended from the Fisheries Building to the Wooded Island. Replicas of Columbus’s ships were also part of the nautical display.

Together with his daughter, Marion, son Frederick Law, Jr., and Philip Codman (Harry Codman’s younger brother, who was an apprentice in Olmsted’s office), Olmsted sailed to Europe on April 2, 1892, for what he expected would be a six-week visit. His intent was to study recent developments in landscape architecture in England and France, to continue his son’s and Codman’s education in landscape architecture, and to recover his health. During the trip Olmsted’s health deteriorated to the point that he was cared for in the home of a prominent British physician, Henry Rayner, whose wife, Rosa, was the daughter of Olmsted’s old friend and Staten Island neighbor, Alfred Field. The journey lasted five and a half months.

What Olmsted saw in Paris was worrisome. Walking through the grounds of the 1889 L’Exposition Universelle, where four of the buildings were still standing south of the Seine, including the Trocadero, originally built for the 1878 exposition, as well as the Eiffel Tower on the Champ de Mars, made him reconsider the architectural program of the Chicago exposition. In a lengthy report to his partners, written near the end of April 1892, Olmsted assessed the remaining structures from the Paris fair, which he judged to be more appropriate for their intended purpose. He then expressed his “doubting apprehension” that buildings then under construction in Jackson Park would “look too assuming of architectural stateliness and to be overloaded with sculptural and other efforts for grandeur and grandiloquent pomp.”

While he never admitted this concern publicly, he must have [26]conveyed it to his friend Édouard André, the most important French landscape architect of the time. Apparently during their conversation André told Olmsted that in his experience terraces around large buildings—one of the features of the Chicago exposition plan—would appear barren unless well furnished with palms and a variety of other plants. He also recommended the abundant use of plants in pots on the balustrades and parapets of the terraces. Shortly thereafter Olmsted urged Harry Codman to crowd the terraces and balustrades with plants in pots, which he considered an essential point of the design. André’s advice was probably the most useful Olmsted received during his European sojourn. As he, Rick, and Philip Codman traveled through the Loire Valley, Olmsted noted the “dreary effect of very large buildings, with large grounds, not generously garnished with foliage.” This was an important lesson he would apply in Chicago.

In England Olmsted tested various types of boats on the Thames. He particularly favored electric launches, which would be quieter and emit less pollution than steam-powered boats, and he strongly, and successfully, urged Burnham to choose these for use in the Lagoon. While boating on the river Olmsted was also struck with the plantings on the shore, which he judged a “most capital school” for the treatment of the Wooded Island and the Lagoon area. Dense plantings of willows along the Thames confirmed the initial decision he had made about the types of plants to be used in Chicago, especially flags, bull rushes, ferns, and broad-leaved plants. By varying color, texture, and the height of the plants, Olmsted believed he could achieve a landscape composition that would provide relief from the monumentality of the exposition.

He also learned how essential a high degree of maintenance would be to the overall success of the exposition. On April 20, 1892, Olmsted wrote Codman and commented that public and private grounds in England were better maintained than any in the United States. He urged Codman to impress upon Burnham the importance of adopting the highest standards of grounds keeping for the exposition.

What he saw in France and England reinforced Olmsted’s original thinking about the exposition and its landscape. The experience also confirmed in his mind the importance of the Wooded Island to the overall success of the plan. Thus he urged Codman to plant “dense massive piles of foliage on its borders; with abundant variety of small detail in abject subordination to general effect.” He hoped to achieve “all possible crowding and infinite small intricacy” on the shores of the Lagoon and islands.

Upon his return from Europe, Olmsted traveled to Chicago to oversee preparations for the October 21, 1892, dedication ceremonies, at which time he and the other artists involved were given medals by the Chicago Board of Directors recognizing their contributions to the exposition. In a report he prepared for the Chicago directors just prior to the dedication, Burnham testified to Olmsted and Codman’s singular role in conceptualizing the site plan and design of the exposition grounds: to “Messrs. F. L. Olmsted & Co. belongs the [27]credit in a broad sense for [t]he design of the whole work. Nearly all of it not pertaining to matters of building and to constructions mainly subterranean, has proceeded upon drawings [a]nd instructions prepared in their office at Brookline, Mass; while the operations have been almost constantly under the direct supervision of Mr. Codman of the firm.”

During Olmsted’s prolonged absences, Codman continued to be the firm’s principal in Chicago, but his health was not robust and his sudden death there on January 13, 1893, was, in Olmsted’s words, “our great calamity.” Codman’s death was especially difficult because Olmsted relied on him and the work that he did for the firm, and also because it left the firm short staffed at a critical time. Thus the seventy-year-old Olmsted had to shoulder more responsibilities even as his health was problematic. In the aftermath of Codman’s death he described himself “as one standing on a wreck and can hardly see when we shall get afloat again.”

Following Codman’s death, in early February Olmsted hurried to Chicago to oversee operations. In going through his partner’s papers he realized that Codman had not completed the planting plans, and this became Olmsted’s first priority. He also worried that Ulrich was distracted by too many responsibilities not central to his role as Superintendent of Landscape, and urged him to “clear yourself of all business that it is not indispensable that you should be saddled with.” Despite concerns for his health, Olmsted again traveled to Chicago around April 10 and spent a month overseeing final arrangements for the opening of the exposition, which took place on May 1. Charles Sprague Sargent came and studied the plantings, which, Olmsted reported, led him to “return under his advice to our first intentions.” But given a cold, rainy spring, problems in obtaining essential plants, and continuing finishing operations on the buildings, getting the grounds ready for the opening took all of Olmsted’s strength and skill. On opening day the grounds were far from having the appearance Olmsted intended. Heavy spring rains had slowed the planting, the condition of the walks was unacceptable, and preparations for the opening ceremonies all contributed to what Olmsted thought was a deplorable state of the landscape. Olmsted decided that recent events in Chicago had thrown “all our affairs into a condition from which great care will be needed for some time in order to extricate them decently.”

Olmsted returned to Chicago in the second week of June and subsequently wrote a lengthy letter to Burnham about conditions he found at the exposition six weeks after its opening. He had traveled to sixteen states since leaving Chicago in early May, and everywhere he went Olmsted heard complaints about the cost of food. Indeed, he noted that he had recently eaten lunch in Knoxville, Tennessee, that cost a tenth of what he had paid for a meal on the exposition grounds. Olmsted then launched into a fault-finding explanation of conditions that he believed should be addressed immediately, and foremost among them was maintenance, just as he feared and expressed to Codman fourteen months earlier. Olmsted found litter everywhere and urged [28]Burnham to double the size of the maintenance crew. The condition of the gravel walks was disgraceful; the screeching of steamboats near the pier east of the Court of Honor was particularly “abominable”; signage was poor; and accommodations for visitors were inadequate, especially the water closets, which he found poorly maintained. Olmsted then offered more constructive criticism: the installation of brightly colored awnings throughout the exposition grounds, and especially in areas around the basin in the Court of Honor, which would provide shaded seating areas for visitors and balance the monumentality and white color of the buildings, and also the addition of strolling musicians, singers, and other human attractions to add vitality to the scene. Visitors seemed, to him, to have a “melancholy air,” as if they were touring the exhibits as a sightseeing duty. He wanted the visitors’ experience to be memorable for what they encountered outside the exhibition buildings as well as in them.

Despite Olmsted’s concerns, the exposition proved to be a resounding success, and ultimately he was proud of what he and his partners had achieved, especially given the challenges of the site and the short time they had to design and construct the landscape. They collaborated closely with a talented group of architects to shape an exposition that, its promoters claimed, attracted some 27.5 million visitors. Numerous professional societies held their annual meetings in conjunction with the exposition, including the American Institute of Architects, which organized a World’s Congress of Architects that met for three days after the AIA convention. Olmsted, who had originally been invited to address the AIA meeting, was rescheduled for the second day of the World’s Congress. He was ill at home in Brookline that day, August 2, 1893, so his remarks were read by Alfred Stone, secretary of the American Institute of Architects. Olmsted used the paper to explain the difficult challenges the site presented and to indicate where he felt the design of the exposition fell short of his ideal. The first was the train station, which Olmsted and Burnham intended to be the center for visitor orientation and services. But the building was smaller than was needed, and as a result many services that they anticipated would be centralized in the place where most visitors arrived were scattered throughout the exposition grounds. He also noted that his vision for the Wooded Island had been compromised, though he conceded that the Ho-o-den Temple was at least unobtrusive to the general effect. Far worse would have been the construction of the Music Building on the island, which Olmsted learned was a possibility in October 1891 and protested against strenuously, as did Richard Morris Hunt as chair of the Board of Architects in a telegram to Burnham. Still another intrusion on the island was the use of a large space for horticultural displays, and although he did not mention it in his remarks he may have been thinking of the formal rose garden that occupied a large space on the island: “these introductions,” he wrote, “have much injured the island for the purpose which in our primary design it was intended to serve,” and he expressed regret that they compromised the integrity of the landscape. The third area of concern Olmsted cited was the construction of [29]numerous small buildings for concessionaires that were not part of the original plan and that were scattered, to much detriment, in his opinion, among the larger buildings. Olmsted’s written remarks were published in two architecture journals as well as in the proceedings of the American Institute of Architects convention a month after Stone read them to the World’s Congress. The editor of Inland Architect and News Record praised the article as “Perhaps the most important contribution to architectural literature that has appeared in recent years.”

In a letter to his friend William A. Stiles four days after the exposition closed, Olmsted reflected on what he and his partners had accomplished, and especially the public role that landscape architecture had assumed in being the key to the successful design of the exposition. He was especially proud of the landscape effect of the Wooded Island and the shores of the Lagoon, which he believed succeeded in creating an alternative to the formality of the rest of the grounds. And he took pleasure in reporting that the electric launches and the Venetian gondolas had been essential to the overall success of the fair and a source of great enjoyment for visitors who observed them from bridges and walks along the Lagoon shores.

The World’s Columbian Exposition brought Olmsted the greatest acclaim of his long career. One measure of this occurred on March 25, 1893, at a dinner in New York City’s Madison Square Concert Hall in Daniel Burnham’s honor. Olmsted, who was traveling on firm business in the southeast, could not attend, but he did send a letter conveying his esteem for Burnham. The New York architects and artists who played important roles in creating the exposition presented Burnham with a silver loving cup, with the capacity of a gallon, which he promptly filled with wine, drank from, and then passed around the head table. In his remarks accepting the gift and accolades from his compatriots, Burnham celebrated the cooperative spirit of the artists and the degree to which they strove to achieve the highest common good for the exposition. He then singled out Olmsted and praised his role in planning the exposition:

Each of you knows the name and genius of him who stands first in the heart and confidence of American artists, the creator of your own parks and many other city parks. (Applause.) He it is who has been our best adviser and our common mentor. In the highest sense he is the planner of the Exposition—Frederick Law Olmsted. (Applause.) No word of his has fallen to the ground among us since first he joined us some thirty months ago. An artist, he paints with lakes and wooded slopes; with lawns and banks and forest-covered hills; with mountain-sides and ocean views. He should stand where I do to-night, not for the deeds of later years alone, but for what his brain has wrought and his pen has taught for half a century.

Later that evening, Olmsted’s old friend, Harvard art historian Charles Eliot Norton, also spoke. Although his remarks were supposed to be devoted to the exposition’s accomplishments in architecture, sculpture, and painting, he too [30]singled out Olmsted for special praise. Olmsted would have been especially pleased with Norton’s assertion of the importance of landscape architecture to the success of the Chicago exposition:

The general design of the grounds and of the arrangement of the buildings was in every respect noble, original and satisfactory, a work of a fine art not generally included in the list of poetic arts, but one of the most important of them all to America—that of the landscape architect. Of all American artists, Frederick Law Olmsted, who gave the design for the laying out of the grounds of the World’s Fair, stands first in the production of great works which answer the needs and give expression to the life of our immense and miscellaneous democracy.

Recognition of what Olmsted had accomplished over his long career, as exemplified in the design of the Columbian exposition, also came in the form of honorary degrees from Harvard and Yale in June 1893.

In an article published in Century the following October, Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer praised the Chicago exposition grounds as the result of Olmsted’s design and noted “how singularly novel, how boldly imaginative,” his plan was. “Every one who honors a great and conscientious, a public-spirited and widely useful, artist must be glad that Mr. Olmsted had this conspicuous opportunity to win his fellow-countrymen’s praise; and every one who loves the art he practises must rejoice that, in distinguishing himself, he has lifted landscape-gardening to a higher place than it ever held before in the interest and respect of our public.”

Boston Park System

Olmsted’s work at Biltmore and the World’s Columbian Exposition occupied much of his time and energy in the final six years of his professional career. A third major project—really a series of projects—was the firm’s continuing work for the Boston park commission. Olmsted had been involved in planning the city’s many parks, parkways, and recreation areas since the mid-1870s. Although a significant portion of the firm’s major work in Boston had been completed by 1890, much remained to be done, and the park commissioners were generally remarkably supportive.

Although Olmsted traveled frequently, he kept apprised of the firm’s work in the city. In the fall of 1892 he urged John to give closer attention to Franklin Park, and especially the planting plans there and elsewhere in the system. When he was home in Brookline, Olmsted frequently attended park commission meetings, staying abreast of the latest developments and making recommendations on various issues as they arose. As the years progressed, Olmsted’s attention to the Boston parks waned slightly—when he returned from Europe in the fall of 1892, he focused most of his energies on the exposition and Biltmore, especially after Harry Codman’s death. Still, Olmsted maintained his involvement in Boston park affairs. In August 1893, he wrote one of [31]his last major reports for the Boston park commission, a lengthy summary of the status of trees in the city’s parks, parkways, and recreation grounds. Even in the last months of his career, Olmsted was helping plan the park commission’s new boating service, commenting on proposals to extend the Charles River embankment, and supervising construction and planting details at the Franklin Park Refectory.

The Muddy River Improvement was the largest new project in the Boston system and one that Olmsted believed to be especially important. Although the firm had prepared initial plans for the area in 1880, 1890 marked the publication of the firm’s most complete plan, and construction began in Brookline in 1890 and Boston in 1891. As was the case with the Back Bay Fens, the Muddy River work entailed more than ordinary park design. Brackish and sewage-filled, the Muddy River meandered on the border between Boston and Brookline, an eyesore and affront to the senses. The conventional solution to urban waterways in this era was to fill in a streambed and channel the waters through culverts. Throughout his career, Olmsted sought a better solution, one that would reconstruct the streamway and make it suitable for park purposes. Thus, Olmsted addressed Muddy River’s issues by changing the river’s course, creating Leverett Pond, and building a small park on the site. He also provided space for a series of natural history pools for aquatic waterfowl and other animals to be exhibited by the Boston Society of Natural History. In addition, he designed parkways on each side of the watercourse that linked the Muddy River with the Back Bay Fens to the east and Jamaica Park to the south. In this way, the Muddy River Improvement was a multifaceted approach to urban stream management—with wetlands preservation, sanitary engineering, pedestrian paths and drives, and scientific education all incorporated in the relatively compact space. For these reasons, Olmsted considered the project to be especially important to the firm’s reputation. Writing his partners in the fall of 1893, he predicted that in the future they would look back upon Muddy River much as he did to Central Park in launching his career and urged them to give their best effort to the project.

While the Muddy River Improvement was getting under way, work on Franklin Park, the largest park in the city’s system, continued. Olmsted had created the plan for the park in 1885, and while construction began the following year, it continued well into the 1890s. After the park’s opening in the late 1880s, public demand for a body of water in the park led Olmsted to revise the plan. The new plan, published in 1891, made use of underground water to create Scarboro Pond, a narrow, scenic body of water south of Scarboro Hill. Although Olmsted agreed to design the new pond, he worried that the park commissioners wanted the pond to be eight feet deep in summer for swimming and four feet deep in winter for ice skating and feared that maintaining a picturesque shoreline would be impossible in light of such fluctuations. Olmsted also designed a plaque at Schoolmaster Hill to commemorate the time when Ralph Waldo Emerson lived at the site and selected its text. The [32]lines he chose for the tablet, from Emerson’s poem “Good-Bye,” emphasized the value of pastoral scenery and the “sylvan home” where Emerson encountered God “under the pines.”

Olmsted also wrestled with architecture’s proper relationship to the landscape. After Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer criticized the use of rustic boulders in the design of bridges, fountains, and gates in an unsigned article in Garden and Forest, Olmsted responded, arguing that rustic architecture could accentuate the landscape effect, especially when covered with climbing foliage. Above all, he insisted that architecture had to be subordinate to its natural surroundings. Thus Olmsted argued for a thatched roof for two shelters in the park and lamented the city architect’s decision to use tile instead. When the architectural firm Hartwell & Richardson submitted a design for Franklin Park’s refectory that emphasized architecture over landscape, Olmsted insisted that buildings were merely “furniture” in parks and should blend into the landscape.

Franklin Park was also the locus for a number of debates regarding the proper use of park space. Olmsted fought various efforts to include activities in Franklin Park that he felt were antithetical to its purpose of providing “the highest degree of rural scenery” for residents. On numerous occasions, groups ranging from labor organizations to evangelical Christians petitioned the commissioners for the right to hold events in the park. Although the commissioners refused these requests, the clamor for alternative uses of the park prompted Olmsted to write a lengthy letter outlining the value of large rural parks and the need to restrict activities that would detract from the quiet contemplation of scenery. Similarly, Olmsted continued his efforts to prevent Alpheus Hyatt and the Boston Society of Natural History from claiming significant space in Franklin Park for a zoo.

Olmsted’s solution to the numerous requests for what he considered inappropriate activities in Franklin Park was to advocate, successfully, for the acquisition of a new body of land better fitted for military musters, public speaking engagements, and rigorous sporting activities. Indeed, Olmsted wrote Thomas Livermore in February 1892 that he considered the purchase of land for those purposes critically important to the park system. If the board failed to acquire additional land, Olmsted cautioned that people would continue to attempt to use Franklin Park in ways that would injure its rural character. As the Boston mayor sharply cut park appropriations, Olmsted found himself “pulling every string” he could to accomplish this. Although the park commissioners were unable to purchase their first choice for a “Muster Field,” approximately two miles south of downtown, they succeeded in acquiring the so-called Peat Meadow south of Franklin Park in 1892. Though its soil was moist, the land was flat and well-suited for athletic fields, and John prepared the design for Franklin Field with guidance from his father.

The other significant new park undertaken by the firm during these years was Jamaica Park. Centered on Jamaica Pond, the city’s largest freshwater [33]pond, the park presented a challenge because of its narrow borders. Olmsted pondered how best to design the limited green space surrounding the pond, the layout of the parkway that went along the pond’s eastern side, and the preservation of public beaches. He was guided by the consideration of how the park would contribute to the health and welfare of residents forty or fifty years hence. He and the commissioners also wrestled with the question of whether to create two roads along the park’s western side. One road would preserve more of the park’s green space; two would enable the separation of commercial traffic from pleasure driving. Olmsted promoted the latter alternative, pointing to the Arborway and the parkway on the Brookline side of the Muddy River as successful examples of separate roadways. A separate pleasure road would insure that visitors enjoyed “the full advantage to be derived from parks,” and the commissioners followed his advice.

Marine Park, the one significant recreation area prepared by the firm in South Boston, proved to be a slow-developing project. Its very name, given by park commissioners who did not recognize that Olmsted reserved the word “park” for large rural spaces, is an indication that the project had not gone as Olmsted had planned. Although Olmsted had prepared his plan for a “pleasure bay” in 1883, the city did not receive permission from the federal government to make use of Castle Island, a key component of Olmsted’s design, until 1890. In addition, the Boston Society of Natural History, with Olmsted’s approval, hoped to create an aquarium at the site, and a facility had to be designed and approved. The need for extensive dredging and filling also slowed progress. These delays meant that Marine Park was not completed by the time of Olmsted’s retirement.

Olmsted and his firm also oversaw the design and implementation of a number of parkways in Boston and Brookline in these years, including those attached to the Muddy River and Jamaica Park. Other parkways were in the preliminary stages of design and planning. The Dorchesterway and the Strandway, which extended from Edward Everett Square to Marine Park, were constructed largely according to Olmsted’s vision. The West Roxbury Parkway, meant to connect the Arnold Arboretum to the Blue Hills Reservation of the Metropolitan Park Commission, was a project led by Charles Eliot. In addition, there were two projects that were largely unrealized. One was to turn Columbia Road into a parkway to connect Franklin Park with the Dorchesterway, but acquiring the additional land proved difficult and expensive. Similarly, the firm’s efforts to create a parkway linking Boston’s South End to the Strandway went unrealized. Although park commissioners were excited by the prospect of “a shorter and more agreeable route from the centre of the city to the waterside,” and the firm prepared a plan for such a parkway in December 1890, the park commission was apparently unable to obtain the funds necessary to purchase the land.

Although Boston’s parks and parkways reflected Olmsted’s commitment to providing areas of rural scenery in order to alleviate the tensions and [34]strains of city life, Boston’s smaller recreation areas enabled him to design spaces to accommodate active sports. In his 1885 “Notes on the Plan of Franklin Park and Related Matters,” Olmsted had argued that certain small parcels of land held by the city were “well situated for playgrounds for school children” and “for open-air gymnasiums.” Especially important in this regard was the creation of scientifically designed public gymnasia to bolster the health of the working class. Olmsted was pleased that the gymnasium at Charlesbank, on which he collaborated with Harvard physical fitness expert Dudley Sargent, had proven popular with the city’s poorer residents. He urged that new gymnasia be created “expressly for the physical training of school children.” The opening of the women’s gymnasium at Charlesbank, complete with screening foliage to ensure privacy, prompted Olmsted to extoll the virtues of the facility’s childcare services and to emphasize the educational potential of the space: “The institution should have a good deal the character of an out-of-door kindergarten” and teach children how to play. By 1895, Charlesbank featured “kindergarten games and story telling” for young children. Olmsted lobbied for similar provisions at other sites in the city, and the firm eventually created facilities at East Boston’s Wood Island Park, South Boston’s Marine Park, and the Charlestown playground. Although Olmsted appeared to have little personal involvement in the design of these smaller spaces, and others such as Dorchester Park and Charlestown Heights and Copp’s Hill terraces (the latter two incorporating playgrounds for small children), he nonetheless stayed in touch with the work on all of them, defending the firm’s plans in some cases, suggesting names for others, and offering advice regarding their locations. The plan for Charlesbank established a template for providing gymnasia and facilities for active recreation in parks in other cities, including Genesee Valley Park in Rochester, the expanded Front in Buffalo, and the 1895 redesign of Jackson Park in Chicago.

Another element of the Boston park system that attracted a considerable amount of Olmsted’s attention was the creation of a boating service for the city’s parks and recreation areas. Leisure boating in parks had become an important interest for Olmsted in these years, especially after his experience on the Thames during his trip to England in 1892. It was also one of his primary areas of concern for the World’s Columbian Exposition. In Boston, Olmsted had long hoped to install a boating service, and he had chosen potential park and recreational sites based on their suitability for boating. In the spring of 1894, Olmsted began to plan the system’s first official boating service, and by February 1895, he and John had sketched a proposal for sixteen boat landings and launches at sites in the Back Bay Fens, Leverett Park, the Charlesbank, Jamaica Park, and Marine Park. In addition, the firm’s plan called for building several permanent structures, including five boathouses. When budgetary constraints reduced the scope of the boating service, Olmsted expressed concern over the “permanent demoralizing effect that may result from temporizing make-shift arrangements.” Because Olmsted believed that Boston’s parks [35]offered the best opportunity to create a successful boating service and expected that its success would be an example other park commissions would follow, he devoted a great deal of thought and energy to the plans. Although not as expansive as Olmsted hoped, the new boating service proved popular.

When Charles Eliot became a partner in February 1893 he brought new projects to the firm—most notably his efforts to dam the Charles River in order to regulate the tidal flow and improve sanitary conditions and his role with the Metropolitan Park Commission (MPC), an organization dedicated to the preservation of natural scenery in the greater Boston area. Olmsted had long been interested in scenic preservation, and he had encouraged Eliot and journalist Sylvester Baxter in their work in founding the MPC. Olmsted expressed great enthusiasm for Baxter’s January 1891 article, “Greater Boston,” which argued for the creation of a metropolitan commission that would link Boston’s parks to suburban reservations and thereby create “one of the grandest park systems in the world.” For Olmsted, “‘wild’ public grounds,” such as the Blue Hills south of Boston, the Middlesex Fells plateau north of Medford, and the Waverly Oaks west of Boston, represented “the opening of New Chapters of the Art” of landscape architecture. In late October 1893, Olmsted referred to the firm’s work for the MPC as “the most important of all our affairs.” Preserving the natural beauty of these varied places while providing public access, Olmsted argued, would be one of the major new directions in landscape design and park-making.

Olmsted’s work with the Boston park commission in the years 1890–1895 led him to take on a variety of challenging projects and to articulate his vision of the values and ideal qualities of public parks. As he guided his partners in the design of large parks and small recreation areas alike, and as he fought off unwanted intrusions into his parks, Olmsted created a celebrated system of interconnected parks and parkways in Boston that earned the city and his firm considerable acclaim.

Other Parks and Park Systems

Olmsted and his partners undertook important park projects in other cities as well. One of the challenges of editing this volume is the so-called “white out” period, which extended from the late summer of 1892 through mid-October 1893. Most of the pages in the outgoing letterpress copy books (the A series of the Olmsted Associates Records) for this time are too faint to read. Moreover, with the notable exceptions of Boston, Brooklyn, and the redesign of Jackson Park after the exposition, there are few strong letters by Olmsted about park planning after 1893. Most likely this was the result of his concentration on what he considered the most significant projects and his turning much of the work in other cities over to his younger partners.

Olmsted had a long relationship with the city of Buffalo, beginning when he and Calvert Vaux designed an extensive park system for the city in [36] 1868. In 1887, the park commissioners invited Olmsted back to design parks, parkways, and small squares for the fast-growing Thirteenth Ward in the city’s south side. Olmsted’s initial design for a lakefront South Park was rejected in 1888 as being too costly. After his preferred waterside site was rejected, the park commission turned to two smaller parcels along Cazenovia Creek. After viewing the proposed sites at the request of the commission, Olmsted expressed his distaste, finding them unsuitable for parks. Nevertheless, the commissioners proceeded to develop the sites, and the firm, apparently with little participation from Olmsted, prepared preliminary plans for Cazenovia and South parks in the spring of 1892. After a number of revisions in ensuing years, both parks were completed according to designs by the firm.

Olmsted also advised the commission on revisions to the city’s older parks. When the commissioners decided to add land adjacent to the Front on Lake Erie, Harry Codman visited the site in March 1891, and the Olmsted firm completed its plan for this extension of the park in December 1891, after Olmsted’s visit to the city. The plan called for a bridge to cross the Erie Canal, two playgrounds, a women’s gymnasium, bathing facilities, and a waterfront promenade. The park commission never implemented the plan and instead leased the land to the Buffalo Yacht Club. Olmsted also provided advice regarding the design of two small city squares, Lafayette Square and Masten Place.

The Parade, a site intended for large public gatherings and for militia demonstrations and drills, proved to be the most problematic of the older parks. Poorly maintained and not utilized by the local militia, the park had become an eyesore. Residents had ignored the walks laid out by Olmsted and Vaux, instead cutting across the lawn and wearing out the grass. Partly as a result, the park commissioners voted in January 1893 to add a zoological collection to the site, a decision Olmsted and his partners protested. Olmsted discouraged the park commission from establishing a zoo, arguing that a private society would be preferable. And he reminded the park commission that he and Vaux had always intended a section of the Park (later renamed Delaware Park) be opened to large grazing animals such as deer, buffalo, and elk, and that a section of the Parade be dedicated to exhibits of hardy North American mammals and birds. Olmsted believed that these animal collections would be more suited to Buffalo’s climate and more economical than a formal zoo.

To improve the condition of the Parade, Olmsted suggested that the park commission prevent the abuse of the grass by setting up “hurdles” to deter walkers from their harmful shortcuts. Olmsted was adamant that the grass be saved: “The turf is the heart of all the beauty of a park. Kill that and all other beauty dies.” Olmsted’s advice regarding the turf was apparently not taken, and by early February 1895, he suggested that the park be abandoned altogether since the site had never been used for its intended purpose. In early August 1895, just before Olmsted’s last day in the office, John began a new [37]design for the Parade (later renamed Humboldt Park and then Martin Luther King, Jr., Park) that focused on alternative uses for the site. Nonetheless, John defended his father’s design for the park, stating that it was as “good and as far-seeing as it was possible to make.”

The Olmsted firm began working for the nearby city of Rochester in the fall of 1888. Initially, the firm was hired to plan a system that included three parks, eventually named Genesee Valley, Seneca, and Highland parks, as well as the riverside Genesee Valley Parkway. Olmsted believed that this was the most ambitious park development program of any city of comparable size in the world. As time progressed, the firm was also engaged to plan smaller spaces in the city, including Franklin and Plymouth parks and Washington Square, although Olmsted’s involvement in these smaller projects seems to have been minimal. Indeed, by 1893 he appeared to give little attention to Rochester, as Biltmore and the firm’s work in Chicago and Boston occupied most of his time. But in the first three years of the decade, Olmsted was clearly an active participant, visiting the city’s parks in September 1890, April 1891, and March 1892, and he was involved in the preliminary plans for all three of the city’s major parks.

By April 1890, work was already under way on Genesee Valley Park and its associated parkway. The 500-acre park, located along the Genesee River south of the city, proved especially challenging because it incorporated areas dedicated to pastoral scenery with others for active recreation. Partly as a result, Olmsted and the firm had to fend off unwelcome changes to their plan that would intrude on the park’s scenic qualities. In August 1891, Olmsted criticized a proposed location for a boathouse as a violation of the primary motive of the plan. The design of Seneca Park, a long, narrow site located along the Genesee River north of downtown, also proved vexing. Writing to Superintendent of Parks C. C. Laney on March 25, 1891, Olmsted conceded that he was “perplexed at so many points in devising a satisfactory plan” and decided to visit the site again with John in the second week of April 1891. Shortly thereafter the firm completed its preliminary plan for the site and sent it to the commission. With tree-lined drives, wide concourses, and several boat landings, the park provided numerous scenic views of the Genesee River gorge.

Highland Park, though the smallest of the three major parks in the city, occupied much of Olmsted’s time in the spring of 1890. He paid special attention to a pavilion, proposed by an ailing park commissioner, George Elliott, who would die only one year later, that was being planned to take advantage of the views offered by the park’s elevation. Olmsted made the case for a circular shape with a central staircase, arguing that such a design would maximize floor space and provide more visitors with access to scenic outlooks and fresh air. The following year Olmsted outlined the firm’s clever plan for the planting of the park. Instead of a conventional arboretum, Olmsted suggested an arboretum of shrubs so as to not interfere with the scenic views and [38]predicted that it would “greatly advance … the planting art throughout the country.” The shrub arboretum proved to be a popular feature of the park.

Of the firm’s ongoing park work in the spring of 1890, that of Trenton, New Jersey, proved to be the smallest. First contacted by Trenton businessman and city council member Edmund Hill in 1889, Olmsted visited the site of Cadwalader Park on April 11, 1890. Although he liked the terrain of the 80-acre park site and approved the idea of a shore drive along the Delaware River, Olmsted hoped that the city would add land to its borders in order to create a more complete park. He also urged the city to create a more centrally located parkway to bring visitors from downtown. Although most of the land for these schemes was never added, Olmsted consulted on key features of the park, including planting plans and the design of its culverts and arches. The firm completed its preliminary plan for the park in September 1891, and construction began according to Olmsted’s design. However, a new park commission elected in 1892 made no attempt to contact or retain the services of the Olmsted firm after its first meeting on April 26, 1892.

Another park project began to take shape in New Jersey just as Olmsted’s career was coming to an end, the Essex County park system. Olmsted and Vaux had prepared a report for a park in Newark in 1867, approving land already selected by the Newark Park Commission and suggesting the acquisition of additional land. However, the park commission was unable to raise the funds for the park. In 1894, however, a new county park commission invited Olmsted to visit the park sites. He arrived in Newark on December 29, 1894, and took two drives to the sites. He liked what he saw, especially “the valley lying between the first and second mountains from the reservoir southward.” Two weeks after Olmsted’s visit, the firm prepared a lengthy report that appraised the virtues of the park sites and the possibility of creating a system with varied topography, waterways, and vegetation. Although signed by John in the firm’s name, Olmsted was in the office at the time, and the report surely received considerable input from him. By 1897, after Olmsted’s retirement, the firm was engaged by the park commission and designed numerous parks and reservations, including Newark’s Branch Brook Park, South Mountain Reserve, and Eagle Rock Reservation.

Among the new parks and park systems begun in the 1890s, that of Louisville was the most significant. Not only did the firm help select the land and design three significant parks, a parkway, and several smaller neighborhood squares; the partners also began a long relationship with the city’s park system and its social elite, which led to numerous park, public ground, and private estate commissions in ensuing decades. Aside from metropolitan Boston and New York, no urban area provided more sustained work for the Olmsted firm.

Asked by the park commissioners in early 1891 for help in selecting park lands and seeking advice on how to improve the city’s one existing site, a 300-acre park then known as Jacob Park (later renamed Iroquois Park), [39]Olmsted visited the city for the first time in the latter half of May. He was impressed by the potential of what he saw. The park commission had selected two additional tracts to provide a park for each of the three divisions of the city—west, east, and south. Although he and Codman suggested slight changes to the land taken for the eastern site, which became Cherokee Park, Olmsted nonetheless admired the variety of opportunities presented by the three sites. The southern site, Iroquois Park, with its “one great hill,” offered “a treasure of sylvan scenery.” The western site, Shawnee Park, provided “broad and tranquil meadow spaces, with, by and by, the shadows of great spreading trees slanting across them.” The eastern site, Cherokee Park, also offered the pastoral scenery Olmsted thought most appealing and necessary in public parks: “the contemplation of superb umbrageous trees, standing singly and in open groups, distributed naturally upon a gracefully undulating greensward,” could be obtained in Cherokee Park, he predicted, “in higher perfection than … in any public park in America.” So long as the park commission didn’t try to place the same visitor amenities in each park and respected the natural conditions of the respective sites, the park system could be an exemplary one.

Olmsted was deeply engaged in the Louisville work throughout his last five working years. Although Codman visited the city most frequently between 1891 and 1892, and Eliot did so from 1893 to 1895, Olmsted stayed abreast of the ongoing work in the city. Between May 1891 and June 1894, he visited the city seven times. He also provided advice on a number of matters related to the parks and counseled the commission on the appropriateness of statues and other monuments in the parks. By the time of Olmsted’s retirement in 1895, a general plan for Shawnee Park has been completed, and considerable work on the other two parks had advanced as well. Olmsted also helped prepare plans for Louisville’s smaller public recreation sites, including Boone Square, located in the heart of Louisville’s downtown, in June 1891. That November, he personally sent the plans for two other small squares: Kenton Place and Logan Place. The narrowness of the two sites limited potential uses, but Olmsted applied himself to their designs, creating for Logan Place a vine-covered trellis and water garden that made the most of the small space. Olmsted visited Louisville for the last time in the spring of 1894, when he reported that the parks were “in better shape than ever before.”

Although active work on the parks stopped in November 1894 because of budgetary woes and did not resume until after Olmsted’s retirement, his influence in Louisville was considerable. The three large parks evolved as he had hoped and became popular attractions. In subsequent years, the firm returned to Louisville on numerous occasions. The firm’s first private estate commission, for John E. Green, eventually led to more than eighty projects in the area over the course of the twentieth century. The firm also designed more than ten additional parks, including the larger Seneca and Chickasaw parks, more than ten subdivisions, and the grounds of school campuses, residential [40]institutions, and public buildings. The most successful of Olmsted’s attempts “to make the firm favorably known at the South,” Louisville’s parks opened the door to a wide range of commissions for the Olmsted firm.

The smallest new park system undertaken by the firm during these years was for Milwaukee. The park commission contacted Olmsted in August 1890, after it had acquired land for three new parks that totaled less than 300 acres, and he made his first visit in March 1892. Olmsted was most impressed by the site of Lake Park: located on 123 acres along the lake in the northern section of the city, the park featured a number of ravines, along with prominent bluffs that provided dramatic views of Lake Michigan. Olmsted was also impressed by the 124-acre West Park, which included a “rolling prairie with a back of old wood.” Located approximately five miles southwest of Lake Park, West Park (later renamed Washington Park) was set in a deep valley and offered open fields, hillsides, and hollows. The third park, River Park (later renamed Riverside Park), was the smallest site at 15 acres and was located in a wooded area along the Milwaukee River.

Although Olmsted corresponded infrequently with Milwaukee park officials once he and his partners began designing the parks, evidence suggests he played a direct role in the creation of the preliminary plan for Lake Park, as it was completed just before he departed for Europe. Similarly, the firm’s planting plan for West Park was completed in early August 1893, when Olmsted was in the Brookline office. Olmsted’s March 10, 1894, report, coauthored with Philip Codman, offered advice on park entrances, road grades, drainage, and planting in Lake Park, and recommended the acquisition of additional land before beginning construction on the lake in West Park. On March 30, 1894, after Olmsted had returned to the Brookline office, the firm completed a plan for the new 7-acre lake in West Park, a sign of his involvement in the park’s redesign.

Some of the most important park work for Olmsted in his final years involved returning to past projects, most notably in Brooklyn and Chicago. In the years since Olmsted and Calvert Vaux ended their relationship with the Brooklyn park commission in the early 1870s, and especially after 1882, when mayor Seth Low refused to reappoint longtime president James S. T. Stranahan to the commission, Prospect Park’s condition had deteriorated. On several occasions Olmsted had expressed frustration with changes to the park’s design. He was particularly concerned about the condition of its trees, and in 1891 the commissioners invited Charles Sprague Sargent to examine the trees. Sargent’s April 17 report confirmed Olmsted’s assessment: he concluded that there had been “a very marked deterioration in the condition of the plantations during the last five years.”

Despite disappointment with the condition of Prospect Park, Olmsted was drawn back to Brooklyn. In 1892 he was contacted by Elijah R. Kennedy, one of the five commissioners charged with acquiring land and developing a parkway along the shore in southwestern Brooklyn. The idea of a shore [41]drive apparently began with Stranahan, and Kennedy, a former member of the Brooklyn park commission, became its most public advocate. Bay Ridge Parkway (or Shore Road) extends from 66th Street south to Fort Hamilton, for most of its route running close to the shoreline of the bay. Olmsted and John visited the site on December 30, 1892, and advised on the width of the road and its northern beginning point, and Olmsted included the parkway in his enumeration of the firm’s most important work under way in 1893. Olmsted and John visited the site several more times, and on January 16, 1895, a day Olmsted was in the office, the firm submitted a general plan, but no construction would commence until after Olmsted’s death.

As planning for the parkway continued, Olmsted once again became involved with the design of Prospect Park. On January 28, 1894, he met with the new park commissioner, Frank Squier, who proposed employing Olmsted, Olmsted & Eliot as landscape architects advisory. One member of the firm would visit Brooklyn each month, examine work in progress, and meet with Squier and Rudolph Ulrich, who would become superintendent of parks on March 1, 1894. Olmsted was aware that Squier did not share his idea of what Prospect Park should be and anticipated that working with him would be difficult and might well draw the firm into “public squabbling.” Nevertheless, he wrote his partners that the opportunity to return Prospect Park to its original design was “our professional duty.” In order to do so, Olmsted knew he had to prevent Squier and architect Stanford White from filling the park with statuary and architectural features. He hoped to be able to address the poor state of the trees and shrubs in the park, return the Music Island to its intended use, improve conditions at the Children’s Playground and water, and defend his and Vaux’s original conception of the plaza. He tried to convince Squier not to undertake new works and instead spend available funds “for restorations, corrections and the carrying out of intentions which have been frustrated & thwarted.”

Olmsted was unable to achieve even these modest goals. Ulrich strove to improve the health of the plantings, but he informed Olmsted that Squier intended to add trees “which are new, interesting and of rare kinds, such as have heretofore not existed in Prospect Park.” Squier rebuffed Olmsted’s plea for using the Music Island as he and Vaux originally intended; Ulrich transformed the Children’s Playground into a formal rose garden; and Olmsted was upset that architect Stanford White had added a balustrade and other neoclassical elements to the playground water. White and Frederick MacMonnies added sculpture and architectural features at the park’s major gateways as well as within the park, and Vaux’s fountain at the oval entrance plaza was removed and became the site of John Duncan’s Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Arch. John wrote a letter, published over his father’s name in a newspaper article, that surely reflected Olmsted’s reaction to the changes Squier had introduced in the park. John protested what he considered “an unfortunate tendency to crowd Prospect park too much with statues, monuments and other [42]architectural structures which are introduced more because they are interesting or desirable in themselves than because they make the landscapes of the park more beautiful or more natural and refreshing.” He feared that “the time will come when the beautiful, quiet, rural landscape of the park will be, to a very great extent, marred, and the park made to resemble a confused and fussy-looking garden, or the best of our rural cemeteries.”

Although the firm’s appointment as landscape architects advisory for Prospect Park proved to be as difficult and unsatisfying as Olmsted anticipated, his work there brought a number of new opportunities to extend the park system he and Vaux had designed beginning in the 1860s. In 1891 the city acquired 45 acres of land surrounding the reservoir in Ridgewood, and three years later Squier hired the Olmsted firm to design the site, originally Ridge-wood Park but now known as Highland Park, which while yet unimproved had become a popular resort. Olmsted believed that the most distinctive attribute of the site was its view south toward the Atlantic Ocean. If properly developed, he predicted, “this public ground is to be distinguished far above any other in the United States by the grandeur of the view.” Other new parks in Brooklyn for which planning commenced during the final two years of Olmsted’s career include Sunset and Bushwick parks.

In nearby Manhattan, although Olmsted held no official appointment with the Department of Public Parks during the years of this volume, his past work in the city led to his consultation on a number of issues, especially regarding proposed changes to Central Park. In March 1890, Olmsted fought against the addition of a zoo to the park to replace the Central Park menagerie. That same month, he denounced a proposed new carriage entrance at Seventh Avenue and 59th Street, believing it would make “an additional break in the bordering mass of foliage of the park, and a disturbance of the circuit drive when it enters it.” Olmsted also resisted a proposal to create a pond near the East Drive at 74th Street for miniature yachts. Arguing that the basin would be out of place in the proposed location, Olmsted thought it represented the “absurd” notion that the park was meant “to provide means and accommodations for all-sorts of popular sports.” Nothing could be further from the truth: “The Park has been made for one particular purpose,” he wrote Paul Dana, and to change that purpose was “as improper as it would be to put a billiard table in a court room, or to turn the corridors of the city hall into bowling alleys.” Even in May 1895, as Olmsted’s career was coming to a close, he feared that Biltmore collaborator Richard Morris Hunt would finally be able to erect a monumental entrance at Fifth Avenue and 59th Street that he had designed in 1863, which was “a very sore subject” with Olmsted.

The most contentious assault on Central Park was a proposal to establish a “Speedway” for carriages on the west side of the park from 71st to 101st streets. The speedway would have necessitated the construction of numerous bridges to carry carriages, equestrians, and pedestrians over the drive and into [43]the interior of the park. First broached in 1888, the idea gained momentum in 1890, when a bill was introduced in the state legislature to create the speeding track. Although the bill failed, Olmsted worried that the continued interest in the carriage drive would destroy the park’s primary function as “a place of rural recreation.” The proposal very nearly came to fruition: in early 1892 the state legislature approved an act authorizing construction of the speedway, and on March 18, 1892, the park commissioners approved the act. Overworked and physically ill, Olmsted rushed to the park’s defense, writing a scathing indictment of the speedway the same day he returned from a lengthy trip that had taken him to Biltmore and Chicago. In it, he condemned the speedway as “unreasonable, unjust and immoral,” and his letter was read aloud at a spirited public meeting protesting the drive. A week later, the park commission rescinded the order to construct the speedway. In late 1894, Olmsted supported his former partner Calvert Vaux when the park commission attempted to employ an engineer in Vaux’s place to design the speedway on a site along the Harlem River and argued that the speedway was a matter of landscape design, not engineering.

The final years of Olmsted’s career also brought him new opportunities to revisit his old work in Chicago. At the close of the World’s Columbian Exposition, the exposition directors returned the site to the South Park Commission, along with $200,000 to pay for the removal of remaining buildings and to begin the development of the site as a public park. Olmsted and Philip Codman visited Chicago on March 6, 1894, and spent four days in negotiation with the commissioners, General Superintendent and Engineer J. Frank Foster, and gardener Fred Kanst. The commissioners then appointed Olmsted, Olmsted & Eliot landscape architects advisory.

Olmsted recognized that the exposition necessitated a “re-study of the old Olmsted-Vaux plan,” both to take advantage of the experience gained while planning and overseeing development of the ground and because of changes to the landscape that were necessary to accommodate the exposition buildings. During his March meetings with the commissioners and in subsequent letters Olmsted urged them to think of South Park as a single entity, the great park of the city, not three separate and local pieces. The best way to accomplish this, Olmsted believed, was a canal, first suggested in his and Vaux’s 1871 plan, that extended through the center of the Midway connecting the Mere in Washington Park with the Lagoon in Jackson Park. The three areas of South Park would, by this continuous waterway, be “dove-tailed into one.” With the canal and the recreational opportunities it presented, Olmsted explained, South Park “should be the finest domestic boating park in the world.” The canal could also be used for skating in winter, as the densely planted shoreline of the Lagoon made it unsuitable for that use. Essential to this was regulating the fluctuations in the water level of the Lagoon, which Olmsted suggested could best be accomplished by the construction of locks [44]at the northern and southern inlets of Jackson Park. Olmsted had learned from the exposition that fluctuations in the water level were “disastrous to vegetation and produced beaches in place of bodies of overhanging foliage.”

Olmsted knew that the commissioners were reluctant to adopt a plan for the Midway that included the canal, but he continued to emphasize its importance: when the commissioners requested a plan without the canal, on April 23 the firm sent one that had in the center a “carpet of greensward.” But Olmsted did not abandon the original idea: on May 10 the firm sent an alternative plan for the Midway with canal, which he hoped would prompt renewed consideration of this feature of the design, and the South Park Commission approved the canal plan on May 16, 1894. However, park engineer Foster opposed the lock plan because it would prevent free access to the lake from the park and because he feared that there would be significant seepage, and Olmsted believed that the engineer had persuaded a majority of the commissioners to reject the lock and canal plan. Nevertheless, Olmsted and his partners continued to urge construction of the canal.

Even as Olmsted and the commissioners discussed the feasibility of controlling the water level of the Lagoon, park commission president Joseph Donnersberger asked the firm to prepare plans for at least one section of the park so work could get under way that summer to give jobs to men in the wake of the Panic of 1893. Olmsted thought the most feasible area was the northern section of the park, the grounds adjacent to the Palace of Fine Arts, which was a permanent building and would be the home of the Field Columbian Museum (later renamed the Field Museum of Natural History). In consultation with architect Charles B. Atwood, Olmsted developed a plan that would create an appropriate setting for the museum and accommodate large numbers of visitors. From the north the view of the museum would be unobstructed; the area between the circuit drive and the park’s boundary would be heavily planted with trees to block the view of the city beyond; and the spaces between the circuit drive and the museum furnished with statues and other objects of art, as well as large vases or jardinières. Trees would frame the view south from the portico of the museum and also the view toward the building from different parts of the Lagoon area. A later plan for this area of the park also called for a conservatory—“a magnificent glass house and floral establishment”—but that structure was never built.

Olmsted worked hard on the redesign of Jackson Park in 1894. James G. Langdon, a draftsman in the Brookline office, later recalled that Olmsted asked him to prepare a reduced-scale topographical map of the park. Olmsted then “withdrew with it for 2 days to the library of house. When Mr. O. returned to [the] office he had a tracing paper study much battered and erased showing heavy pencil lines for main roads and arrangements which were substantially carried out.”

On June 14, Olmsted, John, and Edward Bolton visited Chicago and [45]

[46]presented the preliminary plan for Jackson Park, which the board adopted that day. Seven weeks later Olmsted sent Donnersberger a plan for the Midway with the 100-foot wide canal, placed well below the grade of adjacent streets and “bordered by a low stone wall and railing.” On either side of the canal was a broad walk, which would enable pedestrians to travel the length of the Midway without crossing another line of traffic at grade. Carriage drives were placed at a higher level to connect with the street system and the bridges crossing the Midway. Olmsted recommended that the area between the elevated drives and the walks next to the canal be planted with ground cover or low shrubbery. Construction of the canal began in 1894, but it was never completed.

Other Projects

In addition to their work at Biltmore, the World’s Fair, and with public parks, Olmsted and his partners undertook a variety of other commissions, including the design of residential subdivisions, private estates, and college campuses. In Washington, as Olmsted’s longstanding involvement with the U.S. Capitol was winding down, the firm took on two other projects, the design of the National Zoo and a street plan for the northwest part of the city. At the urging of Senator Justin S. Morrill and Charles Sprague Sargent, Smithsonian Secretary Samuel P. Langley hired Olmsted to prepare a plan for the new zoo. Beginning in May 1890, Olmsted and John visited Washington frequently to plan and oversee construction of the zoo, a 166-acre site that slopes down from ridges on either side to the valley of Rock Creek, a stream in northwest Washington. Olmsted was actively engaged in details of the zoo plans throughout 1890 and 1891, but after the summer of 1892 John was the partner most directly involved in planning the zoo.

In November 1891 Olmsted was approached by Francis G. Newlands, president of the Chevy Chase Land Company, for advice on the design of a subdivision in northwest Washington, D.C., and Chevy Chase, Maryland. Newlands wanted Olmsted to consider how best to lay out streets in parts of the district not included in Pierre Charles L’Enfant’s 1791 plan for the capital. Olmsted visited the city frequently, and in 1893 Congress passed the Highway Act authorizing the extension of the streets and boulevards of the 1791 plan into distant parts of the city. The following year Congress approved a measure to pay the Olmsted firm $3,000 annually for consultation on the extension of the street system. Although the firm prepared preliminary plans, opposition by property owners delayed the process, and no construction was undertaken during the years of this volume. Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., built on the firm’s preliminary plans for the northwestern part of the district in his work with the Senate Park Commission in 1901–2.

Olmsted and his partners were also involved in the design of eight subdivisions or suburban communities and two industrial communities during the years of this volume. These included: Cadwalader Heights, in Trenton, [47]N.J.; Sherwood Park in Richmond, Virginia; Druid Hills, northeast of Atlanta; Saint Cloud Hill in Nashville, Tennessee; the Log Cabin development near Detroit; Lake Wauconda, a resort and residential development near Denver; Alessandro, near Riverside, California; and plans for the Brookline Land Company, as well as industrial communities Depew, ten miles east of Buffalo, N.Y., and Vandergrift, near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The Panic of 1893 halted construction on most of these projects. Of the planned subdivisions, Sherwood Park, Druid Hills, and Cadwalader Heights were partially constructed before 1893 and then finished, with varying degrees of faithfulness to the firm’s plans, in later years. The Lake Wauconda resort community, which Olmsted saw as a possible model for how to design communities in the semiarid West, was never completed. Of the industrial communities, Olmsted wrote to John: “There are few things I had rather do, provided I could do it well.” However, because of Olmsted’s commitments at Biltmore and elsewhere, the other partners appear to have assumed the primary role in planning Depew, which was partially constructed according to firm plans. And although Olmsted participated in a discussion of Vandergrift on June 15, 1895, planning began in earnest only after he was incapacitated.

During these years the Olmsted firm designed the site plan for a number of colleges, school campuses, and grounds for individual school buildings. Two had commenced earlier, the Lawrenceville School, in Lawrenceville, N.J., in 1883 and Stanford University in 1886. Lawrenceville is the most successful campus Olmsted and his partners designed: the firm prepared 139 plans for Lawrenceville between 1883 and 1901. In 1891, years after the firm’s initial work in planning the campus, the school hired Peabody & Stearns to design a new dormitory, and although for unexplained reasons the school didn’t want Olmsted to consult on siting, the architects nevertheless sought his opinion on location and the relationship of the proposed building to existing campus structures. The following year Peabody & Stearns again asked Olmsted’s advice on the location of the chapel and the course of a road leading to it. At Stanford, Olmsted encountered numerous frustrations, as Leland Stanford and his subordinates proved unwilling to accept the firm’s supervision of construction of the grounds. As a result, in August 1890 Olmsted acknowledged the firm’s resignation from the commission.

Other schools and colleges the Olmsted firm designed in these years included American University, Columbia University’s new campus on Morningside Heights, revisions to the plan of Princeton University, and Bryn Mawr, Trinity, and Amherst colleges. The firm also designed three preparatory schools: Phillips Academy, the Groton School, and the Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore.

In addition to these projects, between 1890 and 1895 the Olmsted firm was actively engaged in the planning of almost 250 private estates and homesteads. Biltmore was the largest and most complex, but other projects, including Vanderbilt’s Point d’Acadie, Hamilton McKown Twombly’s [48]Florham, near Madison, N.J., Whitelaw Reid’s Ophir Farm, in Purchase, N.Y., William Rockefeller’s Rockwood, near Tarrytown, N.Y., Henry Holt’s Fairholt in Burlington, Vermont, and the grounds of J. J. Albright’s Buffalo mansion, all involved Olmsted’s creative talent in varying degrees. The projects ranged geographically from eastern Maine to suburban Boston, Newport, Rhode Island, and Lenox, Massachusetts, to Westchester County and Long Island, N.Y., to suburban Philadelphia, and Lake Forest, Illinois, and other Midwestern cities. They varied in size from vast estates to small suburban lots. In designing these properties Olmsted and his partners collaborated with some of the most important architectural firms of the time, including Richard Morris Hunt, McKim, Mead & White, Peabody & Stearns, Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge, and Henry Ives Cobb.

In designing private estates and homesteads, Olmsted was concerned with creating a livable environment. He strongly recommended the use of terraces, usually facing southwest, which would provide an outdoor living space for the family. The landscape near the terrace normally contained beds for flowers and a lawn, with tall trees and densely planted shrubs as well as a wall or fence to provide a sense of enclosure, and privacy, for residents. Only for the largest and most important properties was Olmsted directly involved over a period of years. For many of these estates and homesteads Olmsted made an initial visit and met with the client, then entrusted oversight of design, construction, and planting to his partners and associates.

Olmsted was frequently dissatisfied with the firm’s lack of success with private estates. In large part this resulted from owners who wanted the best results but were unwilling to pay what they thought was too expensive a price, while others had specific ideas of the kind of landscape they wanted and ignored key aspects of the firm’s plans. As Olmsted confessed to his partners in 1893, “We have been unfortunate with private places. We have had no great success, have gained no celebrity. Have made several failures—or what will be, by many, so regarded. We have been badly used, our reputation injured, by the folly of our clients.” This made the ongoing work at Biltmore all the more essential to the firm’s reputation and its future. But despite what Olmsted considered the lack of notable success in designing several important estates, the sheer number and diversity of residential landscape commissions was, and would remain, an important part of the firm’s business.

During these years, Olmsted and his partners worked on numerous other projects, including the grounds of the Leake & Watts Orphan Asylum in White Plains, N.Y., the Bloomingdale Asylum for the Insane in White Plains, N.Y. (now Cornell Westchester), St. Joseph’s Seminary in Dunwoodie, N.Y., and the U.S. Reservation at Hot Springs, Arkansas. The firm also prepared plans for a parkway in Wilmington, Delaware, and was engaged in park planning for Kansas City, Missouri, though in neither case were these plans brought to fruition. The same is true of Olmsted’s report to citizens of Marblehead, [49]Massachusetts, who sought his advice on the location of a new road to relieve congestion on the village’s older thoroughfares.

Retirement

Olmsted’s health had been deteriorating throughout the first half of the decade. Travel by train was debilitating, and even though he recognized his professional responsibilities to clients he dreaded the prospect of long journeys. As early as April 3, 1893, Olmsted conferred with his partners about the need to cut back on his travel in order to protect his health. Olmsted’s mental acuity also became suspect. He frequently expressed frustration because he couldn’t remember the names of park commissioners in cities he was about to visit or even the issues he needed to address. His memory lapses became more and more pronounced. In March 1895 Rick reported from Biltmore that “Father is showing his age terribly. He can no longer keep his ideas clearly before his mind from minute to minute, but as soon as he considers one aspect of a question he completely loses the one he had taken up before. In giving directions he contradicts himself from minute to minute, and forgets completely what he has said on the subject the day before.” Two months later Olmsted conceded that “my memory as to recent occurrences is no longer to be trusted,” and only Rick’s presence at Biltmore prevented his having “shown this fact in a flagrant way to Mr. Vanderbilt.” Olmsted realized that he “ought no longer … carry on important business of the firm alone.”

John traveled to Biltmore in late May and he and Olmsted returned to Brookline together, making stops in Washington, Philadelphia, New York, and Hartford along the way. Olmsted’s condition continued to deteriorate throughout the summer. After returning from Hartford, he attempted to write a lengthy report on a potential park system for the city but was unable to complete the project. Olmsted’s last day in the office was apparently August 6, 1895; according to one firm employee, on that day Olmsted dictated the same letter to Vanderbilt three times without any memory of having done so.

During the second week of August, Olmsted traveled to Deer Isle with Edward Bolton, the firm’s superintendent of construction. The plan, as Olmsted understood it, was that he and Bolton would leave the next day to visit projects on nearby Mount Desert Island. However, upon waking the next morning, Olmsted found that Bolton had left without him. Puzzled, he was prevented from leaving by his daughter Marion, apparently acting on John’s wishes to keep him away from the office. Olmsted gradually came to realize that he was being forced out of the firm, and protested that John and Eliot had “thought it best to throw me overboard” at the critical time when he should have been finalizing plans for the Biltmore Arboretum. At one point he threatened legal action. To Rick he confided his continuing interest in the estate even after his “expulsion” from the firm. John attempted to [50]appease Olmsted, writing in early September, “Your failing memory will in time necessitate some slight readjustment of firm matters but you need not give it further thought for some weeks to come.” Although Olmsted initially responded with indignation, by mid-September, after getting over the worst of his insomnia, he came to realize the circumstances, writing to John on approximately September 18 that he had “come to understand the situation and to accept it. I suppose that I am as nearly heart-broken as a man can be and live.” The next day, he sent John and Eliot a letter in which he indicated the terms of his will, which named John as “my elder son, partner and designed successor,” and acknowledged his retirement from the firm. Eliot graciously wrote Olmsted that he and John would “look to you for occasional advice and help in designing” and also suggested that “there is much writing which you might do to the great advantage of the profession & the country.” Olmsted’s reply was equally gracious. “If I can be treated in the spirit of your note, gently, and with consideration for a gradual decay of my faculties,” he wrote, “it seems, today, that I shall be able to reconcile myself to the facts of the situation.”

But even as Olmsted acknowledged that his health and failing memory prevented him from working, he desperately longed for a sense of usefulness. He worried about the fate of the Arboretum at Biltmore and wrote frequently to Rick asking for news and photographs of recent developments there. As Olmsted’s condition worsened, he sometimes became violent. In May 1896 Rick concluded that the “time has come to put him in a moral straight-jacket.” “All we can rightly do is to make him physically comfortable and care for his general health.” Although he had designed the grounds for several asylums, Olmsted dreaded the prospect of being confined in one. Despite this fear, Olmsted was indeed committed to McLean Asylum, in Belmont, Massachusetts, in September 1898, and spent the remaining days of his life in a cottage on grounds he had advised the trustees of Massachusetts General Hospital to acquire in 1872, and for whom he had prepared a rough plan for locating the buildings. He died there on August 28, 1903.

This volume presents the most important documents of these last triumphant yet tragic years of Olmsted’s professional career.