My opinion on the subject of your inquiry may be stated as follows:-

Park Commissioners may have various departments of duty. Among them, for example, may be the preparation of parade grounds, market places, gardens, and grounds suitable to encompass court houses, school houses, museums and other public buildings and monuments. But the chief characteristic, and all important, business of the Park Commission of any large town is to secure a retreat to which the towns people can resort as an escape from the artificial structures of the town. Within this retreat all outside structures, however beautiful in themselves, should be put out of sight by the planting of screens or otherwise. It is much more desirable that there should be no constructions within the retreat except such as are required for the comfort of those resorting to it, and that these should be made no more conspicuous than the suitability to their special purpose requires. This rule applies to roads, walks, bridges, resting places, houses of refreshment and all others. Nothing should be built in such a retreat that unnecessarily obscures or lessens the value of its natural scenery; nothing the use of which does not in some essential way add to the ease and comfort with which the towns people may enjoy the natural scenery.

This is the conclusion to which I have come after more than thirty years experience in the management of public parks, and if I were now asked to draw up a public park act I would incorporate in it a provision making it a criminal offense for a park commission to proceed inconsistently with this conclusion. To take property because of the beauty of its natural scenery; to take measures to develop and improve that natural scenery and to make it available for use by great numbers of people, and then to set up buildings or other structures in it for the purpose of making a display of beauty in architecture, sculpture or gardening is to build up with one hand and tear down with the other.

Sincerely Yours

I have just received your note of 15th inst.

I was born in Hartford, Conn, on the 27th April, 1822. If you have occasion for other dates try Appleton’s Cyclopedia article “Olmsted F. L.” As to my books I write tolerably only with exceeding labor. My best book was the Journey in Texas, because edited by my brother, but best also, for your purpose because it partly indicates a somewhat important part of my education. There is a labored article on “Landscape Gardening” in Johnson’s Cyclopedia, which I wrote. I should not write quite the same now but I guess it comes nearer than anything else I have written to showing such theory of the Art as I have had. There is an article on “Parks” in Appleton’s Cyclopedia, which I wrote while engaged with the Central Park work. Somewhat revised, I think, for the last edition. I have written many park reports. All labored and clumsy but mainly sound theoretically.

My grandfather Olmsted, when I first came to know him was over eighty. A retired ship-master, somewhat crippled with rheumatism, walking always with a long-shoulder-high Malacca “cane” which he had obtained himself on the “pepper coast.” He wore breeches and stockings, ruffled “bosoms” & waistbands; hair in a Q. (I can’t spell it) and a real beaver bill-crowned [651]hat. But the great cocked hat had not been long laid aside, for I found it in a closet, with old sea-charts, flags a quadrant &c. He was a private in one of the first companies going to Boston after Lexington fight, and was in the expedition going thro’ the Maine wilderness to besiege Quebec. I remember his hearty laugh when I asked him if he really did cut off his boot-tops and cook them for want of other food in that disastrous march. Once I lay under a great elm tree and he came hobbling out & stood leaning over me on his staff, and when I spoke of the tree he told me that he had dug it up in “the Swamp” dragged it home and planted where I found it, when he was a boy. That led me to plant a seed of a locust, and I saw it come up and grow, transplanted it and saw it become a large tree with birds nesting in it. It was cut down a few years ago. I could not have been over five years old. My grandmother Olmsted was a nice old lady the daughter of a minister who was a brother or near relation of the Colonial Governor Pitkin. Her name was Content Pitkin. I have a silver porringer bearing her initials & a book that belonged to the Governor. She told me that she danced with the French officers as they passed thro’ Hartford, moving from Newport to join Washington.

My mother’s name was Charlotte Hull, (some distant kin of Commodore Hull.) coming from Cheshire, Conn. Her father was a farmer and I more dimly remember him. Much more clearly I recall the great fireplace of a house of my aunt Brooks my mother’s sister, in which house and in the brooks flowing by it, I spent many happy months, often walking to it to pass a night as I grew older. I was but nine when I once walked sixteen miles over a strange country with my brother who was but six, to reach it. We were two days on the road, spent the night at a rural inn which I saw still standing a few years ago, and were so tired when we arrived that, after sitting before that great fireplace and being feasted, we found that our legs would not support us and we were carried off to bed. It was a beautiful region of rocky glens and trout brooks.

I am glad you are restricted as to space. I give you these personal matters because you asked me for them & because I think that you can generalize from them in respect to educational influences better than I can. It appears to me that I early had a rather remarkable lazy enjoyment of natural scenery but that I never was what is commonly meant when a man is called a lover of nature—but perhaps laziness prevented me from any such study of nature as this term implies. I regret it. Laziness? No; hardly; but a wandering, contemplative, day-dreaming, and in that respect self-indulgent habit—sympathetic with those moods of men which are best satisfied in listening to music and gazing upon scenery.

I don’t know whether you know it; I was asked not to mention it, so I do, to you; for yourself; Harvard is intending to make a doctor of laws! of me on the 28th. I mention to you because it seems to me the queerest thing. But I am to take it because it gives a standing to my profession which it needs. I mention it because I think the public will be amazed, as I am, and the vindication must be that there is more in the Art of L. A. than the public recognizes. Of [652]course I am not the man to deny that. I am to be coupled with Burnham as the organizing architect of the Exposition & it means much the same as having the queen lay a sword upon our shoulders, I suppose.

Sincerely Yours