BIOGRAPHICAL DIRECTORY

Daniel Hudson Burnham (1846–1912), architect and planner, was Director of Works for the World’s Columbian Exposition. A native of Henderson, New York, Burnham moved with his family to Chicago in 1855. There he eventually found a mentor in architect Peter Wight, and it was in Wight’s office that Burnham met John Wellborn Root. In 1873 Burnham and Root formed a partnership, and over the next seventeen years they were responsible for designing some of the most important skyscrapers erected in Chicago.

Olmsted and Burnham had met perhaps a decade before they began work planning the World’s Columbian Exposition, as they corresponded briefly in early 1881. When Chicago’s civic and commercial leaders began planning for the Columbian Exposition, Burnham became their unofficial adviser. Upon receipt of a telegram inviting Olmsted to advise on a site for the exposition, he and Henry Sargent Codman traveled there on August 8. Burnham escorted them to the seven sites then being considered for the world’s fair. The exposition was their first collaboration.

Burnham, who generally deferred to Olmsted’s greater experience in determining the site and plan for the exposition, strongly endorsed Olmsted’s recommendation of Jackson Park. As they were preparing the plan, Burnham recalled that Olmsted’s “familiarity with the site and his superior knowledge of landscape effects caused us to be guided by him in general features.” Olmsted and Codman, together with Burnham and Root, then sketched a preliminary plan that included the grand basin, the Lagoon and Wooded Island, and the sites for principal buildings. That initial plan would be refined in succeeding months, but it established the general outlines for the world’s fair.

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Olmsted, Codman, and Burnham developed a close working relationship. Olmsted considered boating on the Lagoon an important feature of the exposition, and Burnham ultimately supported his recommendation of electric launches and Venetian gondolas. Burnham defended the Wooded Island against incursions and gently persuaded Olmsted that locating the Ho-o-den Temple there would be the least objectionable addition to the island. He also endorsed other of Olmsted and Codman’s recommendations, including the use of gaily colored awnings for the launches and for seating areas throughout the grounds, as well as adequate resources for obtaining plants. The two men occasionally clashed, as the Columbian Exposition added another heavy workload to Olmsted’s already overextended firm, and Burnham frequently telegraphed or wrote pleading for him or Codman to come help resolve important issues of design. In 1893 Olmsted expressed frustration that Burnham frequently assigned other responsibilities to Rudolph Ulrich, superintendent of landscape, which Olmsted believed detracted from his responsibilities for directing the planting and other elements of constructing the landscape.

Daniel H. Burnham

During the second week of June 1893, Olmsted wrote a blistering letter to Burnham criticizing the shabby state of the gravel walks, inadequate maintenance of the grounds, poor signage, the screeching of the steamboats on Lake Michigan, and the need for brightly colored awnings and seating areas, especially around the basin in the Court of Honor. Burnham responded generously, agreeing with most of Olmsted’s complaints and explaining the steps he had taken to correct them. He also conceded that the Chicago directors had insisted on greater economy, which made accomplishing all of Olmsted’s suggestions difficult. Burnham added that while the exposition was complete, “the fight must go on till the gates close.”

Together, Burnham, Olmsted, Codman, and their collaborators created a magnificent setting for the exposition, one that combined the formality of the Court of Honor and the canals with the naturalistic design of the Lagoon waters and the Wooded Island, which Olmsted intended as a relief from the architectural formality of the rest of the fair. Burnham testified to the work of the Olmsted firm in a report to the Chicago directors just before the October 21, [67] 1892, dedication ceremonies, in which he gave the firm “the credit in a broad sense of [t]he design of the whole work.”

In his remarks at a March 1893 dinner hosted by the New York architects in his honor, Burnham singled out Olmsted for special praise as “the planner of the Exposition.” He described Olmsted as “our best adviser and our common mentor,” whose words of advice were cherished by all who collaborated in creating the fair. Burnham then stated that Olmsted should have been the honoree that evening, “not for his deeds of later years alone, but for what his brain has wrought and his pen has taught for half a century.”

Olmsted likewise paid tribute to Burnham’s leadership in the creation of the exposition. Although Olmsted was unable to attend the dinner, he wrote of the Director of Works: “I hardly think that any one man living has a better knowledge or a higher appreciation of the broadness of views or the singular ability with which he has met the great and complex responsibilities thrown upon him in connection with the Columbian Exposition. Nor can any one be more disposed to join in giving honor and expressing gratitude to him.” In his address to the World’s Congress of Architects in August 1893 Olmsted said of Burnham, “Too high an estimate cannot be placed on the industry, skill and tact with which this result was secured by the master of us all.”

Henry Sargent Codman (1864–1893) was Frederick Law Olmsted’s young partner and collaborator in choosing the site and planning the World’s Columbian Exposition. Known as Harry, Codman graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1884, and after additional study [68]at the Bussey Institution and Arnold Arboretum, began an apprenticeship with Olmsted. He traveled to England and the continent in 1887 with his uncle, Charles Sprague Sargent, director of the Arnold Arboretum at Harvard, and remained for a year studying and working in the Paris office of Olmsted’s friend Édouard André. Codman’s time abroad provided him the opportunity to study public parks and private landscapes in England, France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, and Spain, as well as North Africa. Olmsted particularly urged Codman to visit Italy and Spain, as he believed that he might find examples that would prove useful in developing a style of landscape architecture appropriate for the semiarid regions of the United States.

Henry Sargent Codman, c. 1892

Upon his return Codman contributed articles on the public squares of Paris, the gardens at the Petit Trianon, and the National Horticultural School at Versailles to Garden and Forest, C. S. Sargent’s influential weekly. Codman’s residence in Paris also enabled him to study the planning and development of the site of L’Exposition Universelle of 1889, which would prove invaluable when he and Olmsted were planning Chicago’s exposition.

When Codman returned from his European sojourn in 1889 he was welcomed as a partner in Olmsted’s firm, renamed F. L. Olmsted & Company. He accompanied Olmsted on their initial visit to Chicago in August 1890 and became the firm’s representative there, where he assumed “direct supervision of the work” and established a close relationship with Daniel H. Burnham. In addition to overseeing work at the World’s Fair, Codman was the firm’s primary representative for all of its western projects, including the park systems in Louisville and Milwaukee, and frequently corresponded with engineers at these sites regarding the implementation of the firm’s plans. He made the firm’s initial visit to Louisville, Kentucky, in February 1891 and sketched a preliminary plan for that city’s park system, and he visited and wrote the draft report for the Denver and Lookout Mountain development project. He also assumed primary responsibility for a number of private estates, most notably that of Ogden Goelet in Newport, Rhode Island. Goelet wanted an estate in the “modern French manner,” and Codman’s time living and working in Paris made him the ideal member of the firm to undertake the work.

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Surviving correspondence details Codman’s extensive travel on behalf of the firm and reveals that, despite his youth, he was highly respected by clients, private as well as public. When Olmsted visited Chicago in March 1892, he reported that Harry had Columbian Exposition matters “as well as possible in hand” and that he was “showing high ability on the diplomatic and social as well as the executive side.” During Olmsted’s five-and-a-half-month absence in Europe, when John Charles Olmsted continued to manage the office and thus was away from Brookline only infrequently, Codman spent significant amounts of time in Chicago, and from there traveled to other cities where park development was under way, including Milwaukee, Buffalo, and Rochester.

Codman had been ill in the summer of 1892, probably with acute appendicitis. The following January he experienced a recurrence and underwent an operation to remove the organ. Although he appeared to be recovering, on January 13, 1893, he took a turn for the worse and died of an internal abscess. He was twenty-eight. The board of directors of the World’s Columbian Exposition quickly passed a resolution praising Codman’s “exceptional genius” as a landscape architect and described his death as “a great public loss.” Burnham, who cherished their collaboration, was shocked by Codman’s sudden death. “We have lost one of the strongest men the World’s Fair has had,” he told a reporter for the Chicago Tribune. “It will be most difficult to fill the place he leaves vacant.” Later, as he was preparing his final report to the board of directors, Burnham reflected at greater length on Codman’s role in planning the Columbian Exposition: “Mr. Codman’s value to the Exposition can not be stated,” he wrote. “He had high qualities as an artist and as a man. He was not only well trained and equipped in his profession, but he was a good man in administration and the executive functions.” Just before his death, in an interview with Charles Moore, Burnham recalled that at a meeting of the architects in January 1891, it quickly became apparent that “Harry Codman’s knowledge of formal settings was greater than that of all the others put together.” “I loved the man,” Burnham concluded. “Nature spoke through him direct.”

Codman’s death was a severe blow to Olmsted, who was deeply attached to his partner personally and professionally. Olmsted considered him a leader—perhaps the leader—of the next generation of landscape architects in the United States. It also left the firm short-staffed at a critical time, when the final arrangements for the exposition needed attention and as work at George W. Vanderbilt’s estate, Biltmore, and other firm projects, required careful oversight. Codman, he noted, was “our pupil, attached friend and partner” whose death cast a “pathetic shadow.” Referring to his work at the Columbian Exposition, Olmsted added, “Such satisfaction as we have in it comes mainly from the cordiality of the alliances into which largely his personal character brought us, with so many superior men of the cooperative arts.” John Charles Olmsted wrote that with Codman’s death, “We lose a [70]most intimate and warm friend and our profession loses one of its mainstays at a time when it is just struggling for popular recognition and needs the help of such able and forceful young men.”

Charles Eliot (1859–1897), son of Harvard president Charles W. Eliot, joined Olmsted’s firm as a partner in February 1893. Eliot graduated from Harvard in 1882 and, after studying for a year at the Bussey Institution, Harvard’s department of agriculture and horticulture, entered Olmsted’s office as an apprentice. Over the next two years he traveled with Olmsted frequently. Upon completing his apprenticeship in April 1885, Eliot toured the eastern and southern parts of the United States and on November 5 departed for a year of study in Europe. With the invitation to design the campus of Leland Stanford’s new university looming, Olmsted invited Eliot, who had been studying landscapes in the Mediterranean region, to return and join the firm in that venture, but Eliot decided to continue his study tour and declined.

Upon his return Eliot decided to practice independently and opened an office in Boston in December 1886. In succeeding years he established a modest but growing business, concentrating principally on the grounds of suburban houses and smaller public places. He also began writing about landscape architecture, which Olmsted had urged him to do. Perhaps his most [71]important early essay was a call for the preservation of the Waverly Oaks, a majestic stand of trees in a steep moraine at Belmont and Waltham, Massachusetts. After calling for additional neighborhood parks throughout Boston and adjacent suburbs, Eliot then advocated the preservation of places “characteristic of the primitive wilderness of New England,” and suggested that a private corporation be organized and “empowered by the state to hold small and well distributed parcels of land free of taxes, just as the public library holds books and the art museum pictures—for the use and enjoyment of the public.” That suggestion became, with Eliot’s leadership, the Trustees of Public Reservations. Eliot then tackled the daunting problem of jurisdictional boundaries in the highly fragmented metropolitan region. Taking as its model the early success of the Metropolitan Sewerage Commission, he called for the creation of a park commission authorized to assemble and develop parks and reservations on a metropolitan scale. When state legislation established the Metropolitan Park Commission in 1892, Eliot was named its landscape architect. Eliot called for the commission to embrace five types of areas: beaches, the shores and islands of the bay, tidal rivers and estuaries, large expanses of forest, and smaller parks in densely inhabited areas of the metropolitan region. In important ways Eliot, like his mentor, had begun to envision city and suburb as interrelated parts of a metropolitan region.

Charles Eliot

Even as Eliot’s career was taking shape, he was often in Olmsted’s thoughts, not as a competitor but as a colleague. In 1891, when a potential client contacted Olmsted for a small job, the firm, already overcommitted, recommended Eliot. After reviewing Eliot’s preparation for a career in landscape architecture the letter stated, “we have full confidence in his ability,” and included one of his advertising circulars. With Biltmore and the World’s Columbian Exposition consuming most of Olmsted’s and Henry Sargent Codman’s time, and with John increasingly feeling the burden of work at Brookline, Olmsted wondered if the firm should “combine with Eliot.” While no surviving documents indicate that Olmsted and his partners pursued this idea, Codman’s death in January 1893 forced the issue. Olmsted and John Charles Olmsted each visited Eliot and invited him to join the firm as partner, and in February Eliot made the first trip on the firm’s behalf, with Olmsted, to Chicago to oversee improvements at the World’s Columbian Exposition [72]and park work in other Midwestern cities. According to his father, Eliot had decided to join the Olmsted firm prior to February 1, and the partnership, Olmsted, Olmsted & Eliot, was announced March 1, 1893. Seven months later, Olmsted wrote his friend Frederick Kingsbury and informed him that Eliot had joined the firm: “He is clever; has a fine cultivated taste and some special talents,” he wrote, but added, he “does not yet fill Codman’s place.”

Eliot brought important work to the firm. When Olmsted was thinking about the firm’s most important public work in November 1893, he included Eliot’s projects at the Blue Hills, the Middlesex Fells, the Waverly Oaks, the Charles River, and Revere Beach. These, along with the Muddy River Improvement, would “be points to date from in the history of American Landscape Architecture,” Olmsted predicted, “as much as Central Park.” He also brought energy, much needed as Olmsted’s health and mental acuity declined. As a partner Eliot became immersed in the firm’s ongoing projects but also continued his work with the Trustees of Public Reservations and the metropolitan park system. He also brought to the firm the commission to design the Cambridge, Massachusetts, park system. Other projects that are principally or solely the work of Eliot include the Copp’s Hill Terrace, in Boston, and the subdivision adjacent to Palmer Park in Detroit, as well as the Revere Beach Reservation, the first public oceanfront beach in the United States. Revere Beach is the only park in the metropolitan system for which Eliot developed complete plans prior to his untimely death from meningitis in 1897.

Richard Morris Hunt (1827–1895), the first American architect to complete the course of study at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, was Olmsted’s collaborator on two of the most important projects of their respective [73]careers, Biltmore and the World’s Columbian Exposition. They also worked together on the construction of the Vanderbilt family mausoleum in New Dorp, Staten Island, as well as the Ogden Goelet estate, Ochre Court, and the Joseph R. Busk estate, Indian Spring, both in Newport, Rhode Island.

Olmsted and Hunt had a long and complicated relationship. They were fellow artist members of the Century Association and had many mutual friends. In 1861 Olmsted described him as “our friend,” but two years later Hunt presented plans for monumental gateways for the southern entrances to Central Park. As Olmsted was then in California, Calvert Vaux led the opposition to the gateways, which he believed were inappropriate given the picturesque scenery of that part of the park. In 1866 Hunt prepared plans for a new building for the New-York Historical Society that the society hoped to build in the park, a proposition Olmsted also opposed.

Olmsted and Hunt clashed again a decade later, when Olmsted, Henry Hobson Richardson, and Leopold Eidlitz were appointed an advisory board to evaluate architect Thomas Fuller’s design for the New York State capitol in Albany. In its April 1876 report the advisory board proposed that the half-complete capitol be finished in a Romanesque style rather than Fuller’s Italian Renaissance design. Hunt, who was then president of the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects, issued a remonstrance denouncing the mixing of styles in the new plan. In March 1877 Hunt and four other architects testified before a joint legislative committee and condemned the advisory board’s revisions to the capitol. Olmsted also testified before the committee: he asserted that the architects’ public statement about the advisory board’s work was “hasty, inconsiderate {and} that it contained unconsciously & unintentionally, of course, errors of fact and allusions and insinuations for which there did not exist the slightest shadow of justification.”

Richard Morris Hunt, Portrait by John Singer Sargent, 1895

Despite these spirited public disagreements, [74]Olmsted and Hunt experienced a period of intense collaboration, characterized by mutual respect and the ready exchange of ideas, during the final seven years of their professional careers. As Hunt was beginning the design of Biltmore, Olmsted expressed admiration for his preliminary plan but offered two suggestions that proved crucial: the realignment of the house to a north-south orientation so that the views from principal rooms would be west, toward the Blue Ridge Mountains, the vista that initially attracted Vanderbilt to the site; and construction of the stable north of the house, where it would shelter the dwelling and adjacent landscape from harsh winter and early spring winds. Hunt chaired the board of architects of the World’s Columbian Exposition, which unanimously endorsed Olmsted’s site plan at a meeting during the week of January 12, 1891. The architects particularly praised the waterways in the plan as “a very original and beautiful feature of the general design” and added their voice to Olmsted’s in stating that the Wooded Island “should be free from all buildings used for Exposition purposes.” When a proposal to build the Music Hall on the Wooded Island was broached in October 1891, Hunt joined Olmsted in protest.

Their close and fruitful collaboration in these two great projects notwithstanding, Olmsted and Hunt differed in their respective plans for Biltmore Village, a small community of retail shops and modest houses at the north end of the estate. Their differences were both practical and philosophical. Hunt wanted to locate the Estate Office on Hendersonville Road, a public highway that passes through the village, but Olmsted thought that location inappropriate and successfully urged Vanderbilt to place it near the railroad station facing the plaza. More important, Olmsted considered Hunt’s plat for the village too French in character. “I don’t at all like Hunt’s view,” he wrote Charles Eliot; “I don’t like French villages. I do not think that they are suitable to American habits.” Olmsted feared that their disagreements over Biltmore Village would strain their close working relationship: “Hunt is accustomed to have his own way and is more than earnest—is tempestuous—in debate,” he wrote, but once again he persuaded Vanderbilt to adopt his plan for the village, which he described as “the New England ideal rather than the French.”

Another potential strain on their collaboration surfaced with a revival of interest in the Central Park entrances. On May 5, 1895, Olmsted reported to Charles Eliot that Hunt had written him and wanted to discuss “an old proposition of his as to building on the Central Park which has been a very sore subject and as to which I suppose that he must now have an opportunity and backing which he has not heretofore.” Once again Olmsted described Hunt’s “tempestuous, self-willed way of carrying on such discussion” and lamented that he wasn’t looking forward to engaging Hunt on the topic. Although Olmsted did not explain Hunt’s proposal for the park, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., who was then at Biltmore, reported that “Father did not answer Hunt’s letter about the Arch at 59th St. & V Ave—Hunt said nothing about it when he has here.” Apparently the project was stillborn.

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The World’s Columbian Exposition and Biltmore marked the culmination of Olmsted and Hunt’s careers, and they were widely recognized for what they had achieved. In June 1893, Hunt became the first American recipient of the Queen’s Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects.

Hunt died unexpectedly on July 31, 1895, only a month before Olmsted’s failing health and memory forced his retirement.

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.

George Washington Vanderbilt (1862–1914) was the most important private client of Olmsted’s career. Olmsted worked closely with Vanderbilt on three important projects, each of which began before April 1890 but which deeply involved him during the years of this volume: the family mausoleum on Staten Island; Point d’Acadie, his summer home at Bar Harbor, Maine; and Biltmore.

George Vanderbilt was the youngest child of William Henry Vanderbilt, who had been Olmsted’s Staten Island neighbor and fellow member of the Richmond County Agricultural Society. W. H. Vanderbilt commissioned Richard Morris Hunt to design a family mausoleum on land adjacent to the Moravian Cemetery at New Dorp, Staten Island, in 1884. After his father’s death in 1885, George took charge of the project and the following year hired Olmsted to design the grounds. Although Vanderbilt was probably unaware of it, there was longstanding tension between Olmsted and Hunt: Olmsted greatly disliked Hunt’s designs for monumental entrances to the southern end of Central Park and opposed his plan for a building for the New-York Historical Society in the park. Moreover, the two men had publicly clashed over the redesign of the New York State capitol in 1876. The Vanderbilt Mausoleum was their first collaboration. Olmsted and Hunt designed an arched entry to the mausoleum grounds, while Olmsted designed an approach road and terraces in front of Hunt’s building, which was modeled after the Church of St. Gilles near Arles, France. In succeeding years they worked effectively together on the design of the World’s Columbian Exposition and Biltmore. During the years of this volume Olmsted visited the mausoleum frequently to oversee construction and planting, and he hired engineer J. James R. Croes to design and install an irrigation system for the grounds.

Vanderbilt acquired Point d’Acadie in 1889. The estate was very different from the grand mansions of his relatives in Newport, Rhode Island. It included a comparatively modest shingle style house designed by Charles C. Haight in 1869 on a point extending into Frenchman Bay. Olmsted realigned the property boundaries, designed a new approach to the house, directed the planting, and hired a gardener to carry out his plans and an engineer to [82]construct a sea wall and an enormous salt water swimming pool. Progress at Point d’Acadie was slow because of the cold winters and the difficulty of hiring able assistants and workers in that remote location, but it was an important, challenging project.

George W. Vanderbilt

Together with Vanderbilt, Olmsted first visited the site that became Biltmore in late 1888. During that initial visit Olmsted admired the spectacular scenery and the reputed healthfulness of the region but suggested that Vanderbilt abandon his plans for a gentleman’s park or farm and instead devote the site to scientific forestry. When Vanderbilt agreed with this proposal, Olmsted threw himself into the work of designing a vast estate in the Appalachian foothills. One of his first suggestions was to realign Hunt’s building on more of a north-south axis to take better advantage of the view west toward the Blue Ridge Mountains. Between late 1888 and Olmsted’s retirement from the firm in August 1895, Biltmore consumed enormous amounts of his time, energy, and creativity. It was, he believed, not simply a wealthy gentleman’s estate but a project that united science and art in ways that had profound national significance. He frequently expressed the desire to spend more time at Biltmore, which was impossible given the firm’s many commitments, and considered it the last and most important private work of his career, a project that, he believed, marked a new beginning in the practice of landscape architecture. Vanderbilt’s money and commitment to Olmsted’s vision for Biltmore made it a work of transcendent importance to Olmsted.

Privately schooled, Vanderbilt mastered eight languages, collected art voraciously, and was a philanthropist who gave generously to art organizations and libraries, causes which reflected his passions in life. He also cherished the natural world, which surely drew him and Olmsted together. Olmsted described Vanderbilt as “a delicate, refined and bookish man, with considerable humor, but shrewd, sharp exacting and resolute in matters of business.” To estate engineer Wiliam A. Thompson, Olmsted explained that his ardor for the work at Biltmore was “increased by the obviously exacting yet frank, trustful, confiding and cordially friendly disposition toward all of us which Mr. Vanderbilt manifests.”

Vanderbilt was forty years younger than Olmsted, and his relationship with the older man was cordial, indeed almost filial. Although Olmsted occasionally expressed frustration that Vanderbilt had made decisions without [83]consulting him, Vanderbilt greatly admired Olmsted and proved to be the most supportive private client with whom he worked. Vanderbilt honored Olmsted (and Hunt) in two important ways. 1n 1895 he brought the artist John Singer Sargent to Biltmore to paint their portraits, which still hang facing each other at Biltmore. He also commissioned stained glass windows for All Souls Church in Biltmore Village. The Hunt window includes the imagery of Solomon and Hiram of Tyre examining plans for the unfinished temple at Jerusalem, which stands behind them; the Olmsted window depicts Jesus and the Doctors in the Temple, perhaps an indication that Vanderbilt cherished Olmsted’s wisdom. The two stained glass windows face each other across the transept in the church Hunt designed, the centerpiece of the village Olmsted planned.

The Olmsted firm continued to work at Biltmore into the early twentieth century, when Vanderbilt, who had not entered the family business and had depleted much of his inheritance, halted improvements to the estate. Upon learning of Olmsted’s death in 1903, Vanderbilt wrote that Olmsted “had & has a special place in his esteem and affections.” He consoled Olmsted’s surviving sons by writing that their father’s “truly big and loveable nature” had “just gone on to the other world.” Vanderbilt died of heart failure in Washington, D.C., on March 6, 1914, and was buried in the Staten Island mausoleum.