Frederick Law Olmstead

Frederick Law Olmsted's career as a landscape architect was long and varied. The best-known fruits of that career were surely the great urban parks: Central Park in Manhattan, Prospect Park in Brooklyn, Franklin Park in Boston. But most of this took place after the Civil War. Prior to 1865, Olmsted had built a public reputation as an author and journalist (producing three historically important books on slavery and the antebellum South) and as General Secretary of the Sanitary Commission of the Union Forces, the committee in charge of organizing medical treatment for the military during the war. He had also previously been an apprentice merchant, a seaman, a farmer, and manager of a mining plantation in California. His life had been marked by innumerable illnesses and accidents. His personality was notable for its contentiousness and obsessiveness.