Frederick Erskine Olmsted, also known as Fritz Olmsted, (November 8, 1872 – February 19, 1925) was an American forester and one of the founders of American forestry. Through his work with the United States Forest Service, Olmsted helped establish the national forest system in the United States and helped train the next generation of Forest Service agents and college professors. He was instrumental in the creation of at least twenty national forests in California and Alaska including the Muir Woods National Monument and Tongass National Forest. He also wrote the Use of National Forest Resources (1905, 1907), a foundational Forest Service manual that laid the groundwork for the nation's enduring forest management system, elements of which remain in use today.
After leaving the Forest Service, Olmsted taught at Harvard University. He also worked as a consulting forester with practices in Boston and California. His most important consultations resulted in fire management plans for the Canadian railways and for Mount Tamalpais in California. Olmsted was a founder and president of the Society of American Foresters.
Fritz Olmsted was the nephew of Frederick Law Olmsted, the influential landscape designer, and first cousin to landscape designers Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. and John Charles Olmsted. He initially trained in forestry at the Biltmore Forest School, an educational outgrowth of his uncle's suggestions for Biltmore Estate. His son, Frederick Olmsted Jr. is noted as an artist with the Federal Art Project and the Public Works of Art Project.
Early life and education Olmsted was born in Hartford, Connecticut, on November 8, 1872. He was the son of Lucy Sawyer Hollister (born 1848) and Albert Harry Olmsted (1842–1929), a banker.Case, Lafayette Wallace. The Hollister family of America: Lieut John Hollister of Wethersfield, Connecticut and His Descends. Chicago: Fergus Print. Co., 1898, p. 516. via Internet Archive His father was a half-brother of acclaimed landscape designer Frederick Law Olmsted and uncle to Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. and John Charles Olmsted.
Olmsted went to Hartford Public High School, graduating in 1891. He then attended Yale University where he studied civil engineering, graduating from the Sheffield Scientific School with a Bachelor of Philosophy (Ph.B.) in 1894. While there, he was a member of the Fraternity of Delta Psi (St. Anthony Hall) and a member of the committee that selected the winner of the senior class cup.Yale Banner vol. 51.New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University, 1892. p. 159. via HathiTrust. He was also the coxswain of the Yale Bulldogs' varsity crew team in 1882, 1883 and 1884.Yale Banner vol. 51.New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University, 1892. p. 187. via HathiTrust.
After working for two years and receiving an introduction to forestry at the Biltmore Forest School, Olmsted returned to college, attending graduate school at Harvard University in 1897 and 1898. In the fall of 1897, he took courses at the University of Cambridge and Arnold Arboretum.
Starting in the spring of 1898, Olmsted spent a year working and studying with foresters in the Black Forest in Baden, Germany. He studied forestry under Dietrich Brandis at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, receiving a diploma in 1899. In November 1899, at the suggestion of Brandis, he studied practical forestry in the foothills of the Himalayas in India where most of the forests were under state control. He returned to the United States in 1900.
Career
Banking After graduating from Yale, Olmsted worked for a year at George P. Bissell & Company, his father's bank in Hartford, Connecticut. Although George P. Bissell & Company was the oldest private banking house in New England, the firm went into a receivership in 1896.
Geological survey and forestry In 1896, Olmsted joined the topographic mapping division of the United States Geological Survey (USGS) at the suggestion of his first cousin, Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. He spent eighteen months near Asheville, North Carolina, surveying and building trails and roads, as well as re-surveying the USGS Pisgah Quadrangle map. While there, he met Dr. Carl A. Schenck, forester of the Biltmore Estate, and learned about career opportunities of the new field of forestry. He left the USGS and worked for Schenck for a few months while attending the earliest incarnation of the Biltmore Forest School, which was founded by Schenck in 1896.Fifty Years of Forestry in the U.S.A. R. Kirby Winters, ed. Washington, D.C.: The Society of American Foresters, 1950. p. 303. via HathiTrust.
Division of Forestry On July 1, 1900, Olmsted was hired as an assistant forester by Gifford Pinchot, who headed the newly established Division of Forestry of the United States Department of Agriculture (now the United States Forest Service). Pinchot was also a Yale University graduate and had previously worked with the forests at Biltmore Estate, where he was hired at the suggestion of Olmsted's uncle Frederick Law Olmsted. Olmsted became a "boundary boy" for the Division of Forestry, locating the boundaries of the governmental forest reserves. He typically spent the winters in Washington, D.C., working in the field during the season.
Pinchot placed Olmsted in charge of the Subdivision of Forest Products in 1902 because, he said, Olmsted "was one of the most capable, experienced, and mature men of the office." From 1902 to 1905, Olmsted supervised fifteen "boundary boys" in the newly created Boundary Division of the Bureau of Forestry and was charged with locating any remaining western public timber lands for inclusion in a reservation for management.duBois, Coert. “Trail Blazers.” Forest History Newsletter 9, no. 3 (1965): 14. This process laid the foundation for the modern national forest system.
Pinchot also asked Olmsted to rewrite the unpopular Forest Reserve Manual prepared by the Forest Service's predecessor, the General Land Office Division of Forestry. Olmsted's assignment was to create a "policy blueprint" that defined the forest reserves and their use, described the role of forestry service officers, and detailed how to address public claims and permits. The Forest Service issued this new Use of National Forest Resources (commonly known as the Use Book) in July 1905 and a revision in June 1907. It was not only an instructional book, with goals and regulations for Forest Service employees, but also one of the first administrative manuals for the United States government. Olmsted changed the tone of the book, characterizing the Forest Service positively as an agency "willing to consider use under certain conditions".
Olmsted became the California chief inspector in 1905 and the first district forester of District 5 in late 1908, working out of an office in the Merchants Exchange Building in San Francisco. District 5 included the national forests in California and western Nevada. In a history of the U.S. Forest Service, Anthony Godfrey notes that during this era, "the district forester was likened to being an 'autonomous king' and overlord of a domain—controlled only by laws broadly interpreted and by general policy." Olmsted had a passion for his work and a gift for supervising his team, which included Coert DuBois (Olmsted's brother-in-law), R. L. Frome, John H. Hatton, William G. Hodge, G. M. Homans, E. A. Lane, George B. Lull, George W. Peavey, and C. S. Smith.
Although he had specific assignments such as surveying boundaries, tracking the size of timber sales, and submitting annual grazing statistics, Olmsted had total authority over staff and use of the district's money and supervised a team of around 140 district rangers and their supervisors. In this capacity, he developed a field inspection system that was implemented throughout the Forest Service. Godfrey notes that Olmsted's team also sought to save the "West from itself through public forestry and with the West's consent and support, to break the monopoly and favor the little man." They had to settle issues with the Homestead Forest Act which was passed by the United States Congress on June 11, 1906. This Act required the Forest Service to review all lands to determine if they were better suited for agriculture than forestry, opening those that were for homesteading. As a result, there was a land rush and the District 5 offices received some 12,000 applications for of homesteading land—processing the applications and overseeing the program took a significant amount of time away from their main focus of forestry. In addition to legal residents of the forest, Olmsted and his team also had to deal with illegal squatters within the national forests. However, the main job of District 5 was timber management.
In 1907, Olmsted presided over a meeting of forest supervisors in Yreka, Siskiyou County, California. That same year, businessman and congressman William Kent wrote a letter to Pinchot and Olmsted about his efforts to donate known as Muir Woods to the United States. He had been told there was not a way for the government to accept this gift. Olmsted visited the site and wrote a letter to the United States Secretary of the Interior requesting that Muir Woods become a national monument under the Antiquities Act. President Theodore Roosevelt declared it Muir Woods National Monument on January 9, 1908. Olmsted is credited as being vital to its establishment because of his creativity in interpreting United States laws and regulations. Other sites receiving National Forest status under Olmsted's oversight include Angeles National Forest, Calaveras Big Tree National Forest, Cleveland National Forest, Eldorado National Forest, Inyo National Forest, Kern National Forest, Klamath National Forest, Lassen National Forest, Modoc National Forest, Mono National Forest, Monterey National Forest, Plumas National Forest, Santa Barbara National Forest, Sequoia National Forest, Shasta National Forest, Sierra National Forest, Stanislaus National Forest, Tahoe National Forest, and Trinity National Forest.
In 1907, Olmsted was the first professional forester to conduct a detailed examination of Southeast Alaska's forests, resulting in his recommendation to create the Tongass National Forest.
In 1909, Olmsted served on a three-person committee to develop a plan for California's highway trees. However, in January 1910, President William Howard Taft fired and replaced Pinchot as head of the Forest Service following the Pinchot–Ballinger controversy. Olmsted was stunned by the loss of his mentor. That year was also the worst fire season in the United States since the creation of the Forest Service, burning of national forests, but only in the 278 forest fires in Olmsted's district. Olmsted noted, "If one-hundredth of the damage from fire this past summer had occurred in any German state, the whole forest force would have been promptly dismissed." In December 1910, Olmsted convened a five-day meeting of District 5's supervisors, where, though he never explicitly mentioned Pinchot by name, he began with a review of Pinchot's philosophy regarding the timber lands of the West. Olmsted's meeting covered all of District 5's programs, including fire protection, grazing, reforestation, timber sales, wildlife, and work plans, as well as his belief in a decentralized decision-making process. Because of this meeting, all forest supervisors were required to submit a forest protection plan and there were increases in the number of California's forest guards.
Fisher, Bryant and Olmsted