Frederick Law Olmsted: Designing America, Designing Groton

“He works like a dog all day and sits up nearly all night, doesn't go home to his family for five days together, works with steady feverish intensity until four in the morning, sleeps on a sofa in his clothes, and breakfasts on strong coffee and pickles." 

Historian and filmmaker Laurence Cotton was describing famed landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted—the designer of Groton School’s campus—at the start of his Circle Talk on Tuesday, October 11. Cotton’s excitement at being at Groton was palpable, as was his unmatched enthusiasm for, and knowledge about, Olmsted and his remarkable achievements. 

Armed with dozens of photographic images, Cotton took a deep dive into the life and work of Frederick Law Olmsted, recognized as the United States’ most important and famous landscape architect. Cotton, the consulting producer on the 2014 PBS documentary Frederick Law Olmsted: Designing America, emphasized Olmsted’s curiosity, hard work, and dedication to creating landscapes that reflected and nourished the democratic nature of American society and preserved the beauty of the North American landscape. 

The filmmaker pointed out, for example, that Olmsted’s designs for New York City’s Central Park and Prospect Park were intended to give the city’s working class residents the opportunity to enjoy the benefits of fresh air and the natural world, which during the nineteenth century were increasingly in short supply as America’s urban centers industrialized and grew rapidly.

Cotton explained how such views—as well as Olmsted’s support for the abolitionist movement; his efforts to recruit African American men for the Union army during the Civil War; and his supervision of the U.S. government’s Sanitary Commission, the precursor to the American Red Cross—mark Olmsted as a contemporary, a friend, and an ally of other progressive thinkers who lived in New England and New York during the decades before and after the Civil War, including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.

Cotton, like the subject of his talk, is a bit of a Renaissance Man. He is a public historian, a conservationist, a writer, and a producer. Born and raised amid Boston’s own extensive Olmsted legacy, Cotton now lives in Portland, Oregon, where he has been deeply involved in major land conservation and beautification work. Cotton’s talk at Groton is one of dozens of talks about Olmsted that he has delivered across the United States this year in honor of the bicentennial of Olmsted’s birth.—Tommy Lamont