In the late spring of 1850, Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1904), then a Connecticut Yankee farmer, traveled to England with his brother, John (1825-1861), and their friend Charles Loring Brace (1826-1890). Olmsted was intent upon writing a book about farming practices and ideas of agricultural improvement. The idea of improvement as a physical manifestation of social advancement provided a substantial ideological foundation in the thinking of all three of these young men. Brace would found the Children's Aid Society (1853). Since John and Charley Brace were, more or less, on holiday, their travels involved a number of side trips. All seemed interested in seeing the English countryside, especially estates and parks. This kind of traveling had been common in England since the mid-eighteenth century. In Olmsted's youth he had read Burke on the sublime and the beautiful, Uvedale Price's "Essay on the Picturesque" and various of William Gilpin's works. Under the guidance of his mother and his aunt, he had traveled widely in New England, New York, and Canada. In 1852 he gathered his comments from the trip in the two-volume work, Walks and Talks of An American Farmer in England. In 1858, teamed with the British architect, Calvert Vaux, he would design the country's first large public park in the naturalistic tradition established in England in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In 1859, Olmsted returned to Europe where he resumed his study of private and public parks, making such travel a cornerstone of the profession. Olmsted would become the pre-eminent American landscape architect of the late nineteenth century.
This paper will treat the relationship between the experiences of the travelers in certain park landscapes, (especially the Marquess of Westminster's estate, Eaton in Cheshire, and Birkenhead Park in the experimental industrial community outside Liverpool) and Olmsted's park designs. His later ideas about the creation of experiential landscapes of sublime, picturesque, and beautiful affect Central and Prospect Parks, and are directly related to his schooled travels, especially the trip to England with his brother and their chum. For the better part of a century and into our own time, the naturalistic landscape forms created by Olmsted and his contemporaries on the basis of these ideas have continued to underpin the design of public spaces, even if the ideas themselves have fallen away.
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