Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. (1870–1957), named Henry Perkins Olmsted at birth, was the only son of Olmsted and Mary Perkins Olmsted to survive infancy. His parents may have decided upon his career at the time they changed his name to that of his father when Rick, as he was affectionately known, was still a child. Thereafter he would bear the acclaim earned by his father but also the burden of expectations, and responsibility, that accompanied his name.

Rick’s youth was defined by usual childhood pursuits but also by the family business, as the Olmsted residence was also his father’s place of work. Rick graduated from Roxbury Latin School and matriculated at Harvard with the expectation that he would follow his father and stepbrother John in “the profession of landscape architecture.” Olmsted advised Rick on courses he believed were essential to a liberally educated individual and was fully engaged in his son’s professional education. Indeed, Rick’s education was surely the last of the great projects Olmsted undertook in the years of this volume. He [76]sent Rick to Chicago in the summer of 1891, where he worked closely with Daniel H. Burnham and other principals, and was his father’s eyes and ears, reporting on the progress of constructing the World’s Columbian Exposition. At the end of the summer Rick accompanied his father to Milwaukee to oversee continuing construction of that city’s park system, and, briefly, to Biltmore before returning to Harvard.

Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr.

In 1892 Rick traveled to Europe with his father, sister, and Philip Codman. In France, they saw the classic landscapes in the vicinity of Paris, met with Olmsted’s old friend Édouard André, and then traveled down the Loire Valley. In England Rick bicycled throughout metropolitan London, taking photographs of places and details of the landscape Olmsted suggested. His stepbrother John was delighted that Rick had the “opportunity of seeing picturesque England and France under Father’s guidance.”

During the summer of 1893, Rick visited the World’s Columbian Exposition. Otherwise he apparently remained in Brookline, as his father was very ill, to help at the firm office. This would explain why there are no letters between father and son during those months. By the time Rick was entering his senior year at Harvard, Olmsted described him as robust, “going creditably thro’ college,” and a “good boy, healthy, of fair ability, thoughtful of his mother and sister, industrious.”

Rick graduated from Harvard magna cum laude in 1894. He then spent the summer working for the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey in Colorado. But what Olmsted considered Rick’s “period of post-graduate university education” took place at Biltmore beginning that fall: he spent a year studying botany and dendrology with nurseryman Chauncey D. Beadle and other experts at the estate. Olmsted considered his own lack of comprehensive knowledge of plants his greatest shortcoming as a landscape architect, and he was determined that his namesake would be better prepared professionally than he had been or than any other living landscape architect. Olmsted wanted Rick to become “the best Landscape Architect in the world.”

Biltmore was a challenge for Rick. He was not yet a member of the firm but was living on an allowance provided by his father. He was younger and less experienced than the other principals involved in implementing the landscape plan, yet he was more familiar with his father’s ideas and aesthetic than the older men, and Olmsted thought of Rick as an intermediary who [77]could suggest to the Biltmore staff what he would want done. Olmsted also expected him to learn what his son considered a vast amount of botanical knowledge. Father relentlessly peppered son with letters, at times admonishing, at times encouraging, but always insisting that the knowledge he expected Rick to acquire at Biltmore was essential to his professional development. Olmsted was demanding if well intentioned, and their correspondence often left both father and son frustrated, Rick so much so that he briefly considered a career in something other than landscape architecture.

The year Rick spent at Biltmore was the time when his father’s mental deterioration became increasingly apparent. Olmsted’s inability to focus on detail was most obvious in the planting plans for the arboretum. In December 1894, Rick warned his father that the planting lists prepared by Warren H. Manning seemed to be drawn from nursery catalogues and included far more horticultural “monstrosities” than the typical scientific arboretum. When his father protested that Rick did not understand the goals he had established for the arboretum, Rick wrote to John and presented his case. Their father had entrusted too many decisions to Manning; worse, Olmsted did not “keep track of details” and gave “little more than general consideration of the groups” designated for the arboretum.

Shortly after John and Charles Eliot relieved Olmsted of any professional responsibilities with the firm in August 1895, they hired Rick as their newest employee. When the family decided to take Olmsted to England in the fall of 1895, John called Rick back from Biltmore, where he had recently been designated the firm’s representative, to say goodbye to his father. Instead of returning to Biltmore, Rick accompanied his parents and sister to England, where he found a comfortable house for the family, Crossway, in Devonshire. He left his father trapped in a physically deteriorating body with only occasional moments of lucidity. As frustrating as their relationship must have been for Rick over the previous year and a half, seeing the father he admired and loved in such a condition must have been devastating. He continued to be a dutiful son until his father’s death in 1903 and his mother’s in 1921.

Rick became a partner in the firm following Charles Eliot’s death in 1897, and he quickly assumed leadership of the profession of landscape architecture, just as his father had hoped. He was a founding member of the American Society of Landscape Architects in 1899, and the following year he began teaching the first course devoted to the profession at Harvard. In 1901 he was named a member of the Senate Park Commission’s team of experts to propose improvements in the plan of the District of Columbia, in which capacity he joined his father’s former collaborators from the World’s Columbian Exposition, Daniel Burnham, Charles Follen McKim, and Augustus St. Gaudens. Later work included Rock Creek Park and the National Cathedral in Washington, as well as a number of important communities, including Forest Hills Gardens in Queens, N.Y., Palos Verdes Estates in California, and Lake Wales, Florida. He was also a leader in the emerging profession of city [78]and regional planning in the United States, planned a comprehensive state park system for California, and helped conceptualize and write the legislation establishing the National Park Service in 1916. Rick continued to practice landscape architecture and planning until his retirement in 1949. His death in 1957 occurred exactly one hundred years after his father’s appointment as superintendent of Central Park.

John Charles Olmsted (1852–1920), Charles at birth but renamed in memory of his late father, John Hull Olmsted, was Olmsted’s nephew and, after his marriage to Mary Perkins Olmsted in September 1859, his stepson. John’s earliest experiences were framed by his stepfather’s endeavors: he grew up on Olmsted’s Staten Island farm, lived in Mount Saint Vincent’s Convent while Olmsted was Architect-in-Chief and Superintendent of Central Park, and experienced the Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Big Tree Grove while his stepfather was superintendent of the Mariposa Estate. John was not a healthy child, and in 1893 Olmsted described his good health as an adult as “an almost unhoped for success.”

John matriculated at Yale and spent two summers working for Clarence King’s survey of the 40th Parallel. Upon graduating from the Sheffield Scientific School in 1875, he joined his stepfather in professional practice. John was, in certain ways, a perfect counterpoint to Olmsted: he was modest, highly organized, and efficient, characteristics that may have resulted in his [79]stepfather’s incomplete appreciation for his other talents. Yet his disposition also created difficulties. In 1876 his mother described his manner as “that of a driven school boy” and urged him to defer to his stepfather’s opinions. She pointed out differences in mental capacity, implicitly differentiating father and stepson, and urged him to accept a “life of sober devotion to a stronger nature.” After this criticism she expressed some satisfaction that John was “gaining steadily in subordination.”

As Olmsted’s assistant and, after 1884, his partner, John became a key member of the firm and the profession. He managed the growing staff at the Brookline office and developed the procedures that established the firm on a sound business basis. Arthur Shurcliff, who studied and worked in the Olmsted firm at the beginning of his career, described John as possessing “a broad grasp of large scale landscape planning” and the ability to complete “a vast amount of work quietly with remarkable efficiency.” He collaborated with his stepfather on a number of important projects, including the Boston park system and the U.S. Capitol grounds. To be sure, Olmsted’s name and reputation secured the most important commissions, which undoubtedly prevented John from developing a reputation independent of his stepfather in these years, but his role in the planning process was essential.

Perhaps the greatest psychological challenge John faced was his father’s relative lack of appreciation for all that he did for the firm. This probably reflected Olmsted’s sense that, despite John’s considerable abilities, his personality prevented him from becoming the public presence, the next leader of the profession, that Olmsted looked to in a successor. Olmsted clearly thought that Henry Sargent Codman was the young landscape architect who represented the future, and after Codman’s death in 1893, Olmsted expected that his son Rick would become that leader. John surely noticed the preferment his stepfather extended to Codman and Rick, but surviving correspondence does not reveal how he felt or indicate anything but warmest regard for Harry and love for Rick.

John Charles Olmsted, c. 1892

Despite his reticent personality, John had an inner strength founded on principle. In 1892, when Olmsted was away, Charles Sprague Sargent attempted to dramatically alter the planting plan for the Muddy River. Sargent wanted to limit the planting to native species, something that Olmsted strenuously opposed, by eliminating one [80]third of the trees and a quarter of the shrubs on the plan. John defended the plan, as Olmsted would have, claiming the “esthetic value” of the non-native species, and when Sargent stated that if he resisted the Brookline park commission could “do without you,” John refused to back down. “I am not much of a fighter for my opinions,” he wrote Harry Codman, who was Sargent’s nephew, “but at least I must decline to be a slave and give them up on demand.”

John’s role at the firm changed significantly during the years of this volume. At first he remained closely tied to the Brookline office while Olmsted and Codman traveled extensively. Following Codman’s death in January 1893, when Charles Eliot joined the firm, John traveled much more, as Eliot had small children and was tied to work on the metropolitan park system in Boston, and Olmsted, who increasingly found travel debilitating as his health declined, made fewer trips on the firm’s behalf. John was directly involved in planning the final stages of the Buffalo, N.Y., park system, and frequently visited Louisville, Rochester, Chicago, and other cities where the firm had projects under way. John designed Agassiz Bridge and other structures for the Boston parks and became the firm’s expert on architecture. Eliot informed Olmsted, then away for an extended visit to Biltmore in 1895, that when John returned from Louisville he would “find several architectural matters connected with the Boston Parks which 1 have held back for him.”

John witnessed his stepfather’s diminishing mental capacity during these years, and at least once chided him for refusing to accept his failing memory. Together with Mary Perkins Olmsted, he and Eliot did what they could to protect Olmsted’s, and the firm’s, reputation, by keeping him out of the public eye after forcing his retirement in August 1895. Despite obvious tensions, Olmsted and John shared a mutual affection and respect. After his departure from the firm, Olmsted wrote John that in his will he had named him his “elder son, partner and designed successor.”

The end of Olmsted’s active leadership of the firm and the profession must have been a cause of great sadness to his loyal stepson, but also a liberating moment. Thereafter John stepped more prominently into the public realm. He and Eliot continued the major projects the firm had undertaken, and after Eliot’s death in 1897 he welcomed his half-brother Rick as a full partner. Two years later the brothers were among the eleven founding members of the American Society of Landscape Architects, and John was chosen its first president. Over the course of the rest of his career John was the partner most directly involved in the design of new parks or park systems for Portland, Maine, Seattle, Washington, and Essex County, New Jersey, among many other works. He laid out the 1906 Lewis and Clark Exposition in Portland, Oregon, and the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in Seattle. The firm also designed numerous subdivisions, the grounds of residential institutions, university campuses, and hundreds of private homes throughout the United States. Despite his stepfather’s fears, John Charles Olmsted did indeed become a leader of his profession during his lifetime. He died of cancer in 1920.