The Power of Scenery: Frederick Law Olmsted and the Origin of the National Parks by Dennis Drabelle (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Power of Scenery: Frederick Law Olmsted and the Origin of the National Parks by Dennis Drabelle John Sandlos Drabelle, Dennis–The Power of Scenery: Frederick Law Olmsted and the Origin of the National Parks. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2021. 272 p. Frederick Law Olmsted may not be a household name in North America, but thousands of people are exposed to the footprint of his ideas about landscape and environment in city parks throughout the continent. Most famous as the designer of New York’s Central Park, Olmsted established a blueprint for city parks that brought nature to the urban core, preserving remnant woodlands, establishing cultivated plots of vegetation that were appropriate to the surrounding landscape, and above all else, creating spaces that were open to an urban public craving a natural oasis from the surrounding built environment. Through the direct influence of Olmsted’s landscape architectural firm, or many of his acolytes who trained there, literally hundreds of urban parks in North America have incorporated his key design principles. Even my somewhat remote hometown of St. John’s, Newfoundland, hosts the very “Olmstedian” Bowering Park (designed in part by Canadian devotee Frederick Todd), which features lazy winding pathways, rustic pavilions, a curvy shoreline enclosing a bucolic duck pond, and a mix of gardens, fields, and forests that evoke a stroll through the countryside. If these city parks seem a far cry from big wild spaces, Dennis Drabelle’s The Power of Scenery makes a case for including Olmsted in the pantheon of conservation heroes—among them, Henry David Thoreau, George Catlin, and John Muir—who originally developed the idea of the national park. To make this argument, Drabelle focuses on Olmsted’s brief residency (1863–1965) in California as manager of the unsuccessful Mariposa gold mining venture. Here, he was appointed a commissioner of the Yosemite Valley land grant (which first designated the land a public reserve), penning a report on the Yosemite Valley that advocated managing the park along fairly strict preservationist lines, welcoming visitors to appreciate the natural beauty of the place but restricting the kind of commercial developments that had, according to Olmsted, defiled Niagara Falls. The report also called for an appropriation of funds from the state government to fund at least [End Page 209] some infrastructure for the newly envisioned Yosemite Park, but several other commissioners balked at the suggestion and urged the state governor to bury the report. Despite such suppression, Drabelle traces the dissemination of Olmsted’s ideas on the public preservation of natural reserves through the writer Samuel Bowles, who published sections of the Yosemite document in a popular book, Across the Continent, and advocated for the protection of Yosemite and Yellowstone region. According to Drabelle, then, one can follow a direct line from Olmsted’s visionary report to the creation of Yellowstone National Park in 1872, Yosemite’s eventual designation as a national park in 1890, and the general promulgation of the national park ideal throughout the United States, Canada, and eventually the globe. Drabelle’s book will certainly be of great interest to anybody interested in the origins of the national parks. With vivid and lively prose, he skillfully weaves a portrait of the intellectual milieu that generated the national park movement, including America’s inferiority complex with respect to the great cultural monuments and cities of Europe (and hence the desire to create monuments out of nature), the growing aesthetic veneration of the sublime mountainous landscapes of the West, and the desire to retain public ownership of natural wonders as a hedge against their commercialization. Across the Continent succeeds at capturing the passion of the early national park advocates, mobilizing from a wealth of sources the words, deeds, and passions of the early wilderness preservation movement. Drabelle is somewhat less successful at putting Olmsted at the centre of this narrative. Much of the book’s storyline focuses intently on other aspects of Olmsted’s career: the early days designing Central Park, and later projects such as the creation of park landscapes at Niagara Falls and the Biltmore Estate in North Carolina, all somewhat peripheral to his work on the national parks. Indeed, Olmsted...