Frederick Law Olmsted

This mid-nineteeth-century photograph shows a young Frederick Law Olmsted wearing a brimmed cap and a striped overcoat with an attached cape. Olmsted became a world renowned landscape architect who co-designed Central Park and may other urban parks

Before taking up that profession, Olmsted worked as a journalist and traveled on assignments to England to report on their public gardens and to the American south to investigate the slave economy. From 1852 until 1857 Olmsted traveled throughout the south and Texas while writing dispatches for the New-York Daily Times (now the New York Times). This extensive reporting was eventually published in three volumes: A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States: With Remarks on Their Economy(1856), A Journey through Texas: or, A Saddle-trip on the Southwestern Frontier (1857), and A Journey in the Back Country in the Winter of 1853-4(1860).