Papers of John Charles Olmsted

John Charles Olmsted (1852-1920), sequentially nephew, stepson and business partner of Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903). Trained at the Yale Scientific School, graduating in 1875, he apprenticed with the elder Olmsted in professional practice as a landscape architect. During the subsequent three decades, the Olmsted firm became securely established as the premier landscape design office in the United States; their hundreds of commissions and projects ranged from private gardens to large-scale institutional planning and municipal park systems. Throughout this period, John Charles Olmsted assumed responsibility for the administration of the office while traveling extensively on design work throughout the United States and Canada. By the time of his death in 1920, the office’s clients numbered more than 3500 since its founding; a figure due, in no small measure, to John Charles Olmsted’s skills as both a designer and a meticulous administrator. Joined in practice in the 1890s by Charles Eliot (1859-1897) and his stepbrother Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. (1870-1957), the volume and quality of John Charles Olmsted’s contribution to the firm’s projected designs, realized works and reputation is incalculable.

Among Olmsted’s most significant work are park systems developed for Portland, Maine and Portland, Oregon, Seattle, Spokane, and Charleston, as well as New Orleans’ Audubon Park. He continued park planning initiated by the senior Olmsted in Boston, Buffalo, Louisville, and Chicago, among numerous other sites. Active in a number of professional associations, Olmsted was also a founding member of the American Society of Landscape Architects.