Echoes of the Olmsted Elm Daniel Cavicchi Essay

Olmsted’s role as America’s pre-eminent park maker was the initial inspiration for the Witness Tree Project seminar. However, as we began the semester, we very quickly came to see Olmsted as far more than that. As he encouraged people to move through his landscapes, he seemed to be constantly moving himself, from one career path to the next, until one would open up like an emerging vista. He was a park maker, but he was also a gifted ethnographer and writer, social reformer and activist, public servant and scientist. He was an elite but not an elitist. He embraced the restorative effects of Nature but was not a Luddite. He was a sophisticated urbanite who thought like a farmer. The varied contours of his life story reveal a person restlessly searching for how to best shape a better world. It just so happens that, in his case, the shaping was sometimes literal.

The expansiveness of Olmsted’s career inspired our own work. We certainly read widely: Olmsted’s journalistic writings, theories of technology and nature in American literature, articles on the politics of street parades and commercial advertising, lengthy histories of Central Park and the 1893 Chicago’s World’s Fair. We also engage in discussion and debate about the relationship of “town” and “country,” for example, or about the use of landscape design as a means to social reform, or about the appeal of Central Park versus Coney Island. While reading and writing, we immersed ourselves in Olmsted’s designs: we toured Fairsted, Franklin Park, the Arnold Arboretum, and the Emerald Necklace, talked with experts at each site, and tried to experience what Olmsted intended. And, of course, all along, we worked directly with the historic wood of the Elm.

The circumstance of working with the actual material of an historic tree is a powerful means for evoking the past and also for exploring historical practice. Using the Olmsted Elm as an axis of study, students learned not only about the events radiating from its location but also about how a single tree might raise questions of historical interpretation. Students knew that the elm had been revered by Olmsted and had inspired generations of visitors; their careful handling of the wood was a testament to that. However, the objects they made also reflect their own questioning and thinking--about 19th century urban life, about work and leisure, about public space in a democracy. Just as Olmsted used design as a means to advocate for a better world, the students used the Olmsted Elm to articulate their own insights about the modern built environment and its meanings. I can hardly think of a better tribute to Olmsted’s legacy.

Daniel Cavicchi
Associate Professor of American Studies
Head of the Department of History
Rhode Island School of Design