ABSTRACT
If he had done nothing of note after the 1850s, if there had been no parks, if he had declined into worthy obscurity, Olmsted would still have a secure place in American memory. He would be Olmsted of The Cotton Kingdom, the man who traveled through the South before the Civil War and preserved in words a description of the region, made a judgment, and shaped descrip tion and judgment into a loose form. But Olmsted, the writer about the
South, went on to become Olmsted, the designer of parks. The earlier career, after the heat of the war years cooled, was dimmed. When Olmsted was remembered, it was as if later generations recalled two different men. The traveler was the lesser known. These pages are an attempt to make the point that it was the Southern experience that was the hinge between the Olmsted of the earlier, tentative years and the Olmsted of the later years of public accomplishment. In the Southern writings one may see elements of rational judgment and of artistic sensibility which he used in a larger way in his career as a landscape architect and urban planner.
