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Earliest Members of the Century Association

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Frederick Law Olmsted Jr.

Landscape Architect

Centurion, 1904–1957

Born 24 July 1870 in Hartford, Connecticut

Died 25 December 1957 in Belmont, Massachusetts

Buried Old North Cemetery, Hartford, Connecticut

Proposed by William A. Boring and Charles Follen McKim

Elected 2 April 1904 at age thirty-three

Archivist’s Note: Son of Frederick Law Olmsted; half-brother of John Charles Olmsted; nephew of A. H. Olmsted

Century Memorial

Frederick L. Olmsted prepared at Roxbury Latin School, and graduated from Harvard, magna cum laude, in 1894. His father [Frederick Law Olmsted] was a famous landscape architect (he laid out Central Park); and Frederick followed in his footsteps, and became even better known. His office and his house were both in Brookline, and he lived there all his active life.

In 1898 he was appointed landscape architect for the Metropolitan Park System of Boston, a post he retained till 1920; and a few years later—originally by appointment of President Theodore Roosevelt—he became involved with plans for the extension and elaboration of the original City of Washington laid out in 1790 by Major L’Enfant. He was on one commission after another in this connection, so that he has been characterized as “the longest continuing influence of any single individual on the growth of the Capital.”

He was one of the incorporators of the American Academy in Rome, and a member of its Council until 1949. He was persuaded by President Eliot to develop at Harvard the curriculum for the first course of study in landscape architecture offered at any American university; and for 15 years he taught a good deal of it himself.

He was an intense, nervous man with a restless spirit that drove him hard; but he was full of talent and always aware of the limits of the possibility of things. He was wonderfully inspiring to work with, but one needed some patience and perseverance. He was not a good speaker, and he knew it; but as a critic peering over the drafting boards he was marvellously quick to visualize a design and grasp the significance of the topographical features. He had an uncanny power of concentration, arrived at conclusions rapidly, expressed them laconically. He harbored within his frame the virtues and some of the limitations of the best Bostonians: the impatience with verbiage, irrelevancy, and delay; the skeptical approach to bruited discoveries of new truths; a stealthy pleasure in living frugally.

George W. Martin
1958 Century Association Yearbook