Today Frederick Law Olmsted (1822–1903) enjoys a reputation rivaling some of the greatest landscape designers of the past: André Le Nôtre, Louis XIV’s eminent seventeenth-century gardener, and eighteenth-century England’s Lancelot “Capability” Brown—who, along with his successor, Humphry Repton, altered the appearance of that country’s landscape with the transformation of the estates of Whig aristocrats into pastoral and picturesque pleasure grounds. While Le Nôtre, Brown, and Repton’s names never fell into obscurity, it was not until the 1922 publication of Frederick Law Olmsted: Landscape Architect, 1822–1903, an abbreviated collection of Olmsted’s writings edited by his son Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. and Theodora Kimball, that the reputation of this nineteenth-century man of genius began to be recognized.
As great as he was as the founder of the profession of landscape architecture in America, Olmsted was equally eminent as an active force in driving public policy with humanitarian zeal . . . .
In the mid-1960s, a nascent interest in historic preservation provided a counterweight to doctrinaire architectural modernism, and Olmsted’s standing rose further as landscape began to claim its rightful place alongside buildings as a component of the urban fabric to be saved. Campaigns were launched to restore New York’s Central Park and Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, Olmsted’s badly deteriorated masterpieces of Romantic design. But as yet only a few antebellum and Civil War historians were familiar with the fact that he was an author who had published important books on the institution of slavery.
