The Origins of Louisville's Olmsted Parks & Parkways by Samuel W. Thomas

About the Book
The Origins of Louisville's Olmsted Parks & Parkways describes Louisville's early pleasure grounds that were provided by well-to-do landowners for the general public. It relates various attempts to create public parks and discusses in detail the works of Benjamin Grove, whose Southern park of 1860 rivals the contemporary concepts of Olmsted and his partner Calvert Vaux. Also detailed is the run-up to Olmsted's arrival in Louisville and the invaluable work of the interested civic leaders and local professionals who were an integral part of the parks' success. The undulating terrain selected for Cherokee Park by Commissioner Andrew Cowan so impressed Olmsted he wrote "all that is needed is the removal of fences and a little judicious use of the axe."
About the Author

Frederick Law Olmsted was the country's premier landscape architect when he agreed in 1891 to advise the Louisville Board of Park Commissioners about the parks they were beginning to develop. In a 4 September 2011 New York Times article, "Jewels of Olmsted's Unspoiled Midwest," Olmsted's latest biographer Justin Martin points out that Olmsted had "perfected the concept" of a park system, "having designed systems in Louisville, Rochester and Boston. Olmsted's execution was elegant: instead of a single park, he conceived a collection of them, each boasting different attractive landscape attributes." Although Louisville's park system is commonly thought to be the brainchild of Olmsted and highly touted as such, it is simply not the truth. When Olmsted was escorted around Louisville by the Commissioners in 1891, Jacob Park, which he is credited with designing, had been open to the public for two years. The various tracts comprising Eastern Park (later Cherokee Park) had already been purchased, and the Board had its sights o land soon acquired for Western Park (Shawnee Park). Southern Parkway had already been graded, and the rest of the parkway system would not be built until well after Olmsted's death and without any input from his firm.

The fact that neither Olmsted nor his firm played the role generally assigned to them is not a knock on their ability, but rather the result of the parks enterprise being grossly underfunded. By the time Olmsted began to work on the design of Cherokee and Shawnee parks, the Commissioners realized they were running out of money. The Panic of 1893 brought the work to a virtual standstill. When the first annual meeting of the National Association of park Commissioners convened in Louisville at the Galt House in 1897, John C. Olmsted, then the firm's primary partner, presented the initial paper on "The True Purpose of a Large Public Park," in which he chastised many of the assembled commissioners for allowing sporting activities in their parks. The younger Olmsted had recently discovered by chance that park of Cherokee Park was being set aside for a golf course. The Olmsteds' association with the Board of Park Commissioners was for the most part over. The idea of connecting the three major parks together by parkways would not be broached until much later, using local civil engineers.