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.”