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Frederick Law Olmsted was born in Hartford, CT, a member of the eighth generation of his family to live in that city. His mother died when he was four, and from the age of seven he received his schooling mostly from ministers in outlying towns, with whom he lived. As he was about to enter Yale College in , Olmsted suffered severe sumac poisoning, which weakened his eyes and kept him from the usual course of studies.

He spent the next 20 years gathering experiences and skills from a variety of endeavors that he eventually utilized in creating the profession of landscape architecture. He worked in a New York dry-goods store and took a year-long voyage in the China Trade. He studied surveying and engineering, chemistry, and scientific farming, and ran a farm on Staten Island from to In he and two friends took a six-month walking tour of Europe and the British Isles, during which he saw numerous parks and private estates, as well as scenic countryside.

That December he began the first of two journeys through the slaveholding south as a reporter for the New York Times. Between and he published three volumes of travel accounts and social analysis of the South. During this period, he used his literary activities to oppose the westward expansion of slavery and to argue for the abolition of slavery by the southern states.

He spent six months of this time living in London with considerable travel on the Continent, and in the process visited many public parks.

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Thus, it was that by the time he began work as a landscape architect, Olmsted had developed a set of social and political values that gave special purpose to his design work. From his New England heritage he drew a belief in community and the importance of public institutions of culture and education. His southern travels and friendship with exiled participants in the failed German revolutions of convinced him of the need for the United States to demonstrate the superiority of republican government and free labor.

A series of influences, beginning with his father and supplemented by reading such British writers on landscape art as Uvedale Price, Humphry Repton, William Gilpin, William Shenstone and John Ruskin convinced him of the importance of aesthetic sensibility as a means of moving American society away from frontier barbarism and toward what he considered a civilized condition.