Olmsted's Texas Journey ─ A Nineteenth-Century Survey of the Western Frontier

A reporter’s account of the people, culture, and terrain of Texas in the mid-1800s.

Frederick Olmsted was a journalist when he made his journey through Texas. Tasked with covering the state of slavery during the quiet years before the Civil War, he took copious notes about the people, places, and cultures of the Texas of his day. These notes, in the form of a journal, would become his seminal work, Olmsted’s Texas Journey.

In Olmsted’s Texas Journey, the reader gets to travel back in time and witness Texas as it once was, and see how today’s Texas, with its variety of peoples and traditions, still shares a deep connection to the richness of its past.

But his great Texas journey was in fact so much more. As he made his way to that great state, he took copious and wonderful notes of all the others he passed through. From Maryland to California, and Ohio to Louisiana, Olmsted’s great history chronicles every detail that he observed. This truly is a classic piece of American literature.

Frederick Law Olmsted (1822?1903) was an American landscape architect, social critic, and journalist. Before his rise as one of the preeminent architects of urban parks, he worked as a reporter covering slavery throughout the Union.