In January 1891, Olmsted went to visit Jackson park to attempt at planning a renovation. Jackson park was a more than six-hundred-acre, desolate swamp with an ugly and overgrown landscape. Most of the plant life was dead and roots of trees were badly damaged. “Test borings showed that the earth within the park consisted of a top layer of black soil about one foot thick, followed by two feet of sand, then eleven feet of sand so saturated with water, Burnham wrote, “it became almost like quicksand and was often given this name.” (Larson 95) As construction for the fair progressed, contractors from Chicago started to understand how bad the soil was. However, the men brought in from New York had underestimated the soil. Worst of all the shoreline