Frederick Law Olmsted — considered the father of landscape architecture in the United States — along with his two sons and the Olmsted Brothers landscape architecture firm, designed numerous public parks, private estates and gardens, residential neighborhoods, entire communities, and institutional campuses in the late 1800s and first half of the 1900s. Olmsted was a pioneer in advocating for the protection of nature and natural beauty for the health and well-being of the people. His ideas for protecting Yosemite Valley are considered the start of the national parks movement. His son, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., carried on his work by helping to launch the National Park Service. The Olmsted vision remains a guiding force for our municipal parks and national parks today.
Laurence Cotton, historian and filmmaker, served as consulting producer for the film Stewart Udall and the Politics of Beauty (2022). He originated and co-produced the nationally broadcast PBS film Frederick Law Olmsted: Designing America (2014). He is a co-producer of the newly released film From Sea to Shining Sea: Katharine Lee Bates and the Story of America the Beautiful (2025). As a biographer of Frederick Law Olmsted, Mr. Cotton has traveled across the U.S., presenting his PBS film and delivering a popular PowerPoint presentation about the Olmsted legacy. Raised in eastern Massachusetts, he has hiked the mountains and paddled the rivers of New England, and he has lived in the Pacific Northwest for the past thirty years, hiking and exploring the old-growth forests, glaciated mountains, volcanoes, and interior prairies and deserts of the region. Laurence Cotton also serves as a guest lecturer on small ship cruise vessels that ply the waterways and coastlines of North America, focusing on cultural and natural history.
The speaker series is sponsored by RESTORE: The North Woods, in partnership with Trinity College of Hartford, Connecticut, Walden Woods Project, Wildlands Campaign of Climate Action Now Western Massachusetts, and Olmsted Network. Attendance is free of charge.
You can register for the event here.