Category Archives: Frederick Law Olmsted

The 1865 Colfax Expedition

09 Thursday Aug 2018

Posted by in Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Law Olmsted, Incorporating New York (book project), National Park Service, Schuyler Colfax, Ulysses S. Grant (General and President)

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In late June 1864, with the country still reeling from Ulysses S. Grant’s bloody Overland Campaign, President Lincoln signed legislation granting Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Big Tree Grove to the state of California. I speak in my manuscript about how forward-thinking many were even in the worst depths of the war about what might come afterward, hence the passage of the Pacific Railroad, Homestead, and Land-Grant College bills as early as 1862. The 1864 Yosemite Act was a part of that optimism. Eight years after this, President Grant put Yellowstone under federal control. In between, in the summer of 1865, Speaker of the House Schuyler Colfax led an expedition out west just after the Civil War to review the situation. Three years after all this Colfax became Grant’s running mate and then served four years as vice-president from 1869-73.

Frederick Law Olmsted (second from left front row) read his report on Yosemite and Mariposa Grove to House Speaker Schuyler Colfax and his entourage on 9 August 1865. Olmsted, his wife Mary (seated next to him), and the expedition then sat for this image. With the Civil War finally over, Americans were thinking of the possibilities for the future.

Frederick Law Olmsted left his position as secretary of the U.S. Sanitary Commission in mid-1863 and took a position in California managing the Mariposa mining estate. There he was horrified by the corruption and environmental depredations he saw. A bright spot was that he was eventually placed on a committee to examine how the state of California might preserve Yosemite and Mariposa. Back in Washington on 14 April 1865 Grant and Colfax both begged out of attending My American Cousin at Ford’s Theater with President and Mrs. Lincoln. That same day Lincoln spoke to Colfax excitedly about the Speaker’s upcoming trip out west. As Colfax remembered it, Lincoln told him, “Mr. Colfax, I want you to take a message from me to the miners whom you visit. I have very large ideas of the mineral wealth of our nation. I believe it practically inexhaustible. It abounds all over the Western country, from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific, and its development has scarcely commenced.” Later that evening Booth shot Lincoln and the president died the next morning.

Colfax and his entourage headed west shortly after the president”s assassination and traveled many thousands of miles by various means, taking in what they saw and thinking optimistically about the possibilities for the reunified country. By early August they reached Yosemite and toured that beautiful valley along with the sequoias at Mariposa Grove. On 9 August 1865 Speaker of the House Colfax and others listened to Frederick Law Olmsted read his “Yosemite and the Mariposa Grove: A Preliminary Report,” the study that Olmsted and his team had written for state officials outlining how California might best preserve these sites. The state eventually did nt pursue many of the commission’s recommendations, deeming them too expensive and impractical. It was not a total loss. The Colfax Expedition helped lay the groundwork for President Grant’s signing in March 1872 of the Yellowstone National Park Protection Act. It was the start of the environmental movement here in the United States. Yosemite and the great sequoias too eventually came under the management of the National Park Service.

(image by Carleton Watkins; Courtesy Yosemite National Park Research Library)

 

Prospect Park, 1966

04 Saturday Aug 2018

Posted by in Frederick Law Olmsted, New York City

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Prospect Park centennial invitation, June 1966

These past two Fridays I visited the Brooklyn Historical Society, last week the new satellite facility on the waterfront and yesterday the main site in the Heights. If you live in New York City I cannot recommend the BHS strongly enough. The DUMBO facility, situated in an old warehouse, is quite striking. Their inaugural exhibition is a long-running (four year) exhibit discussing the significance of the waterfront. I found the snippets of oral histories with Rosie the Riveters to be poignant. I ruefully texted a friend noting that the interviews were mostly from the 1980s and 1990s and that the subjects were probably deceased by this time. It saddens me to see the end of the World War 2 generation.

Yesterday at Pierrepont Street I took in a small exhibit about Prospect Park. Part of it dealt with the 1966 centennial observation of the Olmsted and Vaux masterpiece. The two won the commission for the Brooklyn park on May 29, 1866, about six months after Olmsted returned from California after the Civil War. I had never heard of the 1966 Prospect Park commemoration and so did a bit of digging. I noticed that May 29, 1966 fell on a Sunday and am therefore curious as to why they did not have the event on the anniversary itself. Perhaps Sunday blue laws were still stringent enough to move it to another day; or, maybe a weekday was better to accommodate school groups. I’ll never know.

There was an 8-10 minute film from the period produced by the Brooklyn Union Gas Company, today part of National Grid, with wonderful images. The signage next to the plasma screen noted that Brooklyn Union had placed the film in a time capsule to be opened for Prospect Park’s bicentennial in 2066. Apparently they made a few copies and gave one to the BHS. Civil War veterans were a frequent sight at events like this in Prospect Park well into the 1930s. That is why they changed the name of Prospect Park Plaza to Grand Army Plaza in 1926. By 1966 they were of course all gone. I was a little surprised however not to see any Great War veterans, who were still very much around in significant number, at this time.

To read the old New York Times articles about this event is to see a Brooklyn that is no more. The borough had not yet hit rock bottom but the post-industrial decline and white flight are there for the observant to notice. A May 30, 1966 headline reads “Centennial Celebration Will Open Thursday for City Oasis, Now in Decline Attendance Falling off.” Still, there were signs of hope. Mayor Lindsay and Robert Moses were both on hand and addressed the park’s issues. Federal and local funds had already been appropriated to renovate the boathouse and other venues. The park would fall much farther over the next three decades before turning around in the mid-1990s but is heartening to know that there were people, some prominent, others less so, studiously holding the line and doing what they could in what was a difficult situation.