Frederick Law Olmsted (April 25, 1822 – August 28, 1903) was an American landscape designer and father of American landscape architecture, famous for designing many well-known urban parks, including Central Park and Prospect Park in New York City. (Source: Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Law_Olmsted) This timeline is incomplete. Feel free to add to it based on the article at Wikipedia.
Created by chavan on Aug 17, 2008
Last updated: 03/12/10 at 02:24 AM
Buried in the Old North Cemetery, Hartford, Connecticut.
In 1898 he moved to Belmont, Massachusetts and took up residence as a resident patient at McLean Hospital, which he had landscaped several years before.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McLean_Hospital
In 1895, senility forced Olmsted to retire.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Capitol#The_Capitol_Grounds
Olmsted and Vaux continued their informal partnership to design Prospect Park in Brooklyn from 1865 to 1873,[2] and other projects.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prospect_Park,_Brooklyn,_New_York
On June 13, 1859, he married Mary Cleveland (Perkins) Olmsted, the widow of his brother John (who had died in 1857), and adopted her three sons, among them John Charles Olmsted. Frederick and Mary had two children who survived infancy: a daughter and a son, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr.
The design of Central Park embodies Olmsted's social consciousness and commitment to egalitarian Influenced by Downing and by his own observations regarding social in England, China and the American South, Olmsted believed that the common green space must always be equally accessible to all citizens. This principle is now so fundamental to the of a "public park" as to seem self-evident, but it was not so then. Olmsted's tenure as park commissioner can be described as one long struggle to preserve that idea.
Interested in the slave economy, he was commissioned by the New York Daily Times (now the New York Times) to embark on an extensive research journey through the American South and Texas
In 1850 he traveled to England to visit public gardens, where he was greatly impressed by Joseph Paxton's Birkenhead Park.
When he was almost ready to enter Yale College, as a graduate of the Roxbury Latin School in Boston, MA, in 1837, sumac poisoning weakened his eyes and he gave up college plans.
His father, John Olmsted, a prosperous merchant, took a lively interest in nature, people, and places, which was inherited by both Frederick Law and his younger brother, John Hull.

