Did you know that Prospect Park has a piece of Gettysburg’s famed Little Round Top? And one of the oldest statues of Abraham Lincoln in America? While memorials to the Civil War are prominent features of the park, the war itself also shaped its design. Co-designer Frederick Law Olmsted spent the war directing the US Sanitary Commission, which provided medical care to the Union Army, and that experience influenced his ideas on public space and public health. On this virtual tour, we will explore the park’s many Civil War connections, from Grand Army Plaza to the Parade Ground.
- WATCH Exploring Staten Island’s Olmsted-Beil House
- WATCH Progressivism and Purified Air: Frederick Law Olmsted’s Living Machines
- Olmsted’s report on the Battle of Bull Run (NIH)
- Olmsted, Hospital Transports: a Memoir of the Embarkation of the Sick and Wounded from the Peninsula of Virginia in the summer of 1862
- “Frederick Law Olmsted’s War on Disease and Disunity” (The New Yorker)
- “In Brooklyn, Grand Army Plaza Gets an Intervention” (New York Times)
- “Anna Hyatt Huntington and Equestrian Lincoln” (Columbia University Libraries)
