Volunteer Park

Volunteer Park is a forty-eight-acre landscape park on Capitol Hill that you can identify by the tall, brick water tower rising at its center. The city acquired this land in eighteen seventy-six, and it briefly served as a cemetery before being converted into a public space. In nineteen hundred and three, the city commissioned the landscape architecture firm of the Olmsted Brothers to design the park. John Charles Olmsted envisioned the site as a retreat from urban life, intentionally incorporating the existing reservoir and sweeping lawns to frame views of the distant mountains and the city.