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.