Famed Landscape Architect Frederick Law Olmsted's Papers Now Online: The collection includes personal papers and correspondence from the architect best known for New York's Central Park, U.S. Capitol grounds, and other famous landscapes.

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Writings and personal records of the founder of American landscape architecture, Frederick Law Olmsted--known for his work on New York's Central Park; the U.S. Capitol grounds in Washington, D.C.; the Biltmore Estate in North Carolina; and many other venues--have been digitized and are available online from the Library of Congress. The archive was digitized to serve as a resource in advance of the bicentennial of Olmsted's birth, which will be celebrated with partner organizations in 2022. (He died in 1903.)

The collection includes about 24,000 items, mostly dating from 1838-1903. The papers document the private and professional life of Olmsted, whose career encompassed farming, journalism, conservation, landscape architecture, and urban and suburban planning. Olmsted also served as part of the U.S. Sanitary Commission during the Civil War to help modernize the agency and care for soldiers.

Olmsted was the most sought after landscape architect of his time. He and his firm, which continued under his sons into the 20th century, designed hundreds of sites. Among those designed or planned in his lifetime were New York's Riverside Park, Brooklyn's Prospect Park, Boston's Emerald Necklace park system, Chicago's South Park, Montreal's Mount Royal Park, the Niagara Falls reservation, Stanford University, and the National Zoological Park in Washington, DC. Olmsted also helped design the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, among other sites.

In New York, where Olmsted launched his career as a landscape architect, he served as superintendent of Central Park and partnered with Calvert Vaux on the design, with the goal of creating an open, accessible park for the people. Together they made a model park for the nation. Olmsted is credited with changing the way Americans think about public spaces with his urban parks and his advocacy for conserving natural spaces, including Yosemite, providing the guiding principles of what would become the National Park System.

The Olmsted Papers include his family letters and journals, drafts of his writings, correspondence with clients and colleagues, project proposals and reports, and other materials relating to his life and work. Separately, the Olmsted Associates Records at the Library contain documentation of the Olmsted successor firms from the late 19th century through the 1970s. Additional Olmsted...