Last updated: July 16, 2023
Person
Frederick Gage Todd
Quick Facts
Significance:
Apprentice at Olmsted Firm
Place of Birth:
Concord, NH
Date of Birth:
March 11, 1876
Place of Death:
Montreal, Canada
Date of Death:
February 15, 1948
Place of Burial:
Montreal, Canada
Cemetery Name:
Mount Royal Cemetery
Notable Projects while at the Olmsted Firm:
Mount Royal Park, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Charles River Reservation/Parkway
Frederick Gage Todd, born in Concord, New Hampshire, would eventually become “the first truly resident landscape architect in Canada.” He apprenticed with the Olmsted firm for four years (1896 to 1900), working on numerous estate projects and devoting considerable time to Mount Royal Park in Montreal, which Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr. had designed starting in 1875. This Mount Royal work likely led directly to Todd’s starting his own landscape architecture practice in Montreal in 1900. That practice was Canada’s first, and Todd would remain an active landscape designer and urban planner in Canada until his death in 1948.
Todd worked on projects throughout Canada, from the Shaughnessy Heights community in Vancouver, British Columbia in the west, to parks in Regina, Saskatchewan and Winnipeg, Manitoba in central Canada, to the Plains of Abraham (Quebec Battlefields Park) in Quebec City in the east. He designed urban parks, residential communities, private gardens, and at least one significant college campus, Trinity College in Toronto. In 1903 Todd wrote a comprehensive planning report for the Ottawa Improvement Commission, anticipating the future growth of Canada’s capital city. According to Peter Jacobs, Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Montreal, Todd’s philosophy expressed in the report “serves, even today, as a timely reminder that urban planning is essentially optimistic, future oriented, and concerned with human welfare.”