Unjustifiably Obscure Dead People

Some of you may have heard of Mr. Frederick Law Olmstead, but not enough of you. FLO, as his peeps called him, was one of the great forerunners of progressive America. He is most famous as the designer of Central Park in NYC, though he also designed the Buffalo park system, the campus of Stanford Univeresity and Chicago's Riverside neighborhood. It is in this capacity that I was reminded of him by a phone call from a friend in New York. But FLO wasn't just a landscpae architect, he was a journalist and an abolitionist and a publisher. He wrote an anti-slavery series from the South for the New York Daily Times (now the NYT) from 1852-1857, it was compiled as a book and published during the first months of the Civil War to arouse abolitionist sentiment in the North. He also founded the oldest surviving newsmagazine in America, The Nation. FLO was so absurdly accomplished and influential that it is strange that he is largely obscure today. But that's what I'm here for people: reinvigorating the memories of long dead people for the six of you out there that read this blog.