OLMSTED, FREDERICK LAW I _ 2 2-1903 ), American landscape architect, was born in Hartford (Conn.), on April 27, 1822. He already had an adventurous career when he published his Journeys and Explorations in the Cotton Kingdom 0860, which gave a picture of the conditions surrounding American slavery that had great influence on British opinion, and was much quoted in the controversies at the time of the Civil War. During the war he was the untiring secretary of the U.S. sanitary commission.
When Central Park, New York city, was projected, he, in con junction with Vaux, proposed the plan which, in competition with more than 3o others, won first prize. Olmsted was made super intendent to carry out the plan. This was practically the first at tempt in the United States to apply art to the improvement or embellishment of nature in a public park ; it attracted great at tention, and the work was so satisfactorily done that he was en gaged thereafter in most of the important works of a similar nature in America—Prospect park, Brooklyn; Fairmount park, Philadel phia; South park, Chicago; Riverside and Morningside parks, New York; Mount Royal park, Montreal; the grounds surround ing the Capitol at Washington, and at Leland Stanford University at Palo Alto (Calif.), and many others. He developed the bare
stretch of lake front at Chicago into the World's Fair grounds, contributing much to the architectural beauty and the success of the exposition. He was greatly interested in the Niagara reserva tion, made the plans for the park there, and also did much to in fluence the State of New York to provide the Niagara park.
He was the first commissioner of the national park of the Yosemite and the Mariposa grove, directing the survey and tak ing charge of the property for the State of California. He also held directing appointments under the cities of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Wilmington and San Francisco, the joint committee on buildings and grounds of Congress, the Niagara Falls Reservation commission, the trustees of Harvard, Yale, Am herst and other colleges and public institutions. After 1886 he was largely occupied in laying out an extensive system of parks and parkways for the city of Boston and the town of Brookline, and on a scheme of landscape improvement of Boston harbour. He died on August 28, 1903.