Frederick Law Olmsted at Bear Valley

About eleven miles north of Mariposa on California Highway Forty-Nine lies Bear Valley, a small community that carries a remarkable piece of American landscape history largely invisible to the travelers who pass through it. In eighteen sixty-three, when John C. Frémont sold the Las Mariposas land grant and its network of gold mines to a group of New York investors, the new owners needed someone to manage the estate.

The man they hired was Frederick Law Olmsted, who had already co-designed Central Park in New York City and would become the father of American landscape architecture. The Mariposa mining operation seemed like a chance to make his fortune. He moved to Bear Valley with his family and managed the estate through the difficult transition from Frémont's ownership to corporate control.

But the mines were nearly exhausted, the investors were disappointed, and the Mariposa Company went bankrupt in eighteen sixty-five. Olmsted left California without making his fortune from the mines. What he left instead was a document.

In eighteen sixty-five, while still in Mariposa County, Olmsted wrote a management plan for the newly created Yosemite Grant, arguing that public lands of exceptional beauty should be preserved in their natural state for public enjoyment and that the state had a responsibility to protect them from commercial development. The principles Olmsted articulated in that document, written in the hills above Bear Valley, would eventually shape the entire American national parks system. He left the gold behind and carried the idea.