Frederick Law Olmsted shares the title "Father of American Landscape Architecture" with Andrew Jackson Downing and is responsible for a great many municipal parks, arboretums, and other such natural enclaves across the country, including Central Park in New York City. Olmsted was the designer of city parks in Boston, Brooklyn, and Buffalo, N.Y., and is often mistakenly credited with the creation of Washington Park in Albany as well. He was hired in 1869 to design such a park here, but did not in fact do so; his creative vision, however, was closely hewed to in its eventual execution, including the idea of damning the Beaver Kill in order to make a grand lake. (As a point of interest, Olmsted, who was an opponent of slavery, helped cofound The Nation magazine in 1865.) There were 238 hits on today's compound typo in the OhioLINK database, and too many to count in WorldCat. Some of them are sure to be false hits (i.e., references to two or more people who do not spell their names the same way), but most are most likely typos. Sorting through them all may not be a walk in the park, but it should certainly be worth your while.(Portrait of Frederick Law Olmsted by John Singer Sargent, 1895, courtesy of Wikipedia.)
Carol Reid
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