In August 1865, Frederick Law Olmsted gave a report on the character, management, and suitability of the Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Big Tree Grove, which had recently been granted by Congress to the State of California for public use “inalienable for all time.” Before the assembled Yosemite Committee, of which he was the nominal head, he read the report aloud, a fact that interested me as I imagined the group of men convened on the future park’s lands, listening closely, if not in agreement.
Olmsted’s work on the valley had begun a year earlier, on the heels of the Civil War, and the politics of that conflict helped to shape his arguments, which only sharpened over the next decades. Olmsted didn’t just write about the valley’s natural features and…
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Landscape Architecture (Digital) - 1 Issue, March 2025