Genius of Place

by Justin Martin

  The Ronaldson’s oversized load of merchandise sold quickly. But there were delays in purchasing the tea that the ship would haul back to America to sell on the other end of the voyage. Still, there was plenty to keep Fred busy. He was put to work going over sales invoices and preparing the ship’s books. What a nightmare: It was as if Benkard and Hutton, the Manhattan desk job that Fred had so despised, had pursued him to the other side of the world.

  An entire month ticked by before Fred was allowed to set foot in China. Even then, he was able to make only three very brief visits. He made the most of them. He soaked up every sight, sound—and taste. He dined on fresh ham and eggs, tried such novel fare as ginger and loaf sugar. He visited various shops, where he purchased souvenirs to bring home such as a mandarin cap, a sword, and a pair of chopsticks. He even wandered into a schoolroom while class was in session and paused for a long while watching the children as they recited from their textbooks in an impenetrable language.

  Most of all, Fred appears to have been intrigued by the people he saw as he wandered around. The letters that he wrote for the benefit of his family are full of descriptions of merchants in their silk robes and blacksatin skullcaps and little boys, their black hair pulled into tight queues, their fingernails surprisingly long. When three Chinese ladies passed him on the street, he noted their footwear: “But I was glad enough to have an opportunity of seeing ’em hobbling (exactly as if with wooden legs) on their tiny peg tops—what would you call ’em—not feet certainly—about three inches long.”

  During these visits ashore, Fred proved a keen observer with an insatiable curiosity. He noticed vivid details, which he communicated in exuberant letters that were also characterized by curious syntax and curiouser spellings—the result, no doubt, of his idiosyncratic education. He also showed an unusual sensitivity to the culture of China. At one point, he visited a temple in the company of some of his fellow sailors.

  The sailors milled about, talking loudly. Fred stood quietly, even took off his hat. “What are you taking your hat off for in a heathen temple?” sneered one of his shipmates.

  Because Fred was behaving so differently from the others, an old man singled him out and, after bowing deeply, walked up to him. The man spoke only a few words of pigeon English, but he beckoned Fred to follow. He led the way into a little room where he opened up various religious texts and invited Fred to look at them. He pointed out the decorative banners on the walls and showed Fred various implements used in the temple’s services. Meanwhile, Fred’s shipmates wandered about, tugging on lanterns and mindlessly banging on a ceremonial gong.

  Fred spent Thanksgiving on the Ronaldson, still anchored at Whampoa Reach. He was ill once again, this time suffering from fever, chills, and exhaustion. Whatever the ailment was, Jim Goodwin had it even worse. Fred was able to return a favor, caring for the friend who had looked out for him during his earlier bout with seasickness.

  Fred wrote a plaintive letter, describing the Thanksgiving dinner he pictured in progress, 8,000 miles away in Hartford. “It’s just about the right time of day, & I am imagining you just about well to work on the turkeys & cranberry,” he scrawled. “I suppose Mother has the ‘boiled & oyster,’ as usual, while Father performs on the roast & criticizes the dressing.” Then he added, “Take care, Bertha,” a nod to his half-sister. “That’s a big drum stick, but I guess you’ll manage it with one hand.”

  Fred had been away for nearly seven months now. He was ready to head home. On Thanksgiving Day, his father wrote the following brief entry in his diary: “Fred’s company much wanted.”

  On December 30, 1843, the Ronaldson finally set sail for America, preposterously laden with a huge load of Chinese tea.

  Among sailors, convention holds that return voyages are easier: Spirits are buoyed by the promise of familiar shores; discipline grows laxer. Certainly, that’s what Fred expected.

  It didn’t happen. Thanks to market forces—the fresher the tea, the higher the price it would command—Captain Fox was hell-bent on making incredible time. Ordinarily, passage from China to the United States took about 120 days. He was aiming for 100 days. If anything, the crew would suffer greater privations during the trip home.

  Food was scarce, as always. That was a given on a Captain Fox-piloted ship. But the lack of fresh water became the bigger issue. The captain grew concerned that he didn’t have a sufficient supply onboard to last the entire voyage. At the same time, he didn’t want to lose so much as a minute by stopping at a port to take on fresh water. So Captain Fox simply cut the sailors’ ration of water severely, leaving them with minuscule amounts for drinking, making coffee, washing their clothes, and other needs.

  By midjourney, the Ronaldson’s crew was hungry, thirsty, tired, and enraged. An episode occurred that brought them to the brink of mutiny.

  Captain Fox ordered one of the young hands punished for that offense of offenses—cursing. The captain held the sailor while the first mate flogged him repeatedly. Fred looked on in horror, and one of his shipmates counted aloud: “Twenty-three, twenty-four . . . ”

  Another crewman yelled: “We are no men if we stand it longer!”

  Suddenly, all around him, sailors took up handspikes and knives. Fred fully expected the crew to kill Captain Fox and the first mate.

  Likely they would have, had one of the ship’s most experienced hands not begun yelling: “Avast! Avast! . . . what do you want to run your head into a halter for? Can’t you wait till we get home and let the law serve them out?”

  His argument was simple: Engaging in mutiny was a foolish and selfdestructive act that would surely result in the crew members being hung. Better to wait until the ship reached port and exact revenge on Captain Fox in a court of law. With his plea, the man managed to stop the uprising, and order was restored.

  On April 20, 1844, the Ronaldson arrived in New York. The voyage had taken 104 days.

  The crewman who had urged legal recourse over violence immediately set off for the Sailor’s Home. There, he requested a voluntary lockdown to prevent himself from going on one of the alcoholic benders that usually accompanied his shore leaves. He wanted to maintain a clear head so that he could testify at the trial of Captain Fox.

  The trial would happen surprisingly quickly. Fox would be convicted of using excessive force and ordered to pay $1,000 to the sailor that he had flogged.

  As for Fred, he arrived home just shy of his twenty-second birthday, looking yellow and skeletal, racked by scurvy. His head was shaved. At first, his father didn’t even recognize him.

  “Well, how do you like the sea?” Fred had asked rhetorically in one of his letters. Now, he had an answer: not very bloody much.

  He’d endured seasickness, illness, and a fall from a spar; he’d battled wind and water and snow; he’d been hungry, thirsty, and weary beyond imagining. Unlike some other notable Olmsteds, sailor was not a vocation for Fred. The sea didn’t call to him, and he’d never again consider a life aboard a ship.

  Yet, hard as it was, the voyage aboard the Ronaldson also changed something essential about Fred. He’d faced a formidable challenge and, for once, had stuck with something to completion. He may have appeared a gaunt and diminished figure on the wharf that April day. But he was larger somehow, too, having perhaps bulked up in terms of inner strength. He still had a long way to go; plenty of dead ends lay ahead, and settling into adulthood was going to be drastically more difficult for him than for most people. But Fred had taken the first steps toward filling out that grand name, Frederick Law Olmsted, and all the ambition that it implied.

  CHAPTER 3

  Uncommon Friends

  THE VERY FIRST PHOTOS of Olmsted date from 1846, during the period after he returned from his ocean voyage. There’s a pair of pictures from the same sitting. Both are group shots featuring the same cast of characters: Olmsted, his brother John, and three other young men.

  Photography was brand-new at this point, having been invented in France less than a decade ea
rlier. Getting one’s portrait taken was a fad then sweeping across America. In fact, this same year, 1846, marks the first time a photo was ever taken of a young congressman from Illinois—Abraham Lincoln. These earliest photographic images are known as daguerreotypes, and the process for creating them was painstaking. It required bulky camera equipment and tiresomely long sittings by subjects, spent coaxing an exposure to appear on a copper plate spread with a thin film of chemicals.

  In Olmsted’s case, the daguerreotypes were created in New Haven, where John was repeating his sophomore year at Yale after withdrawing for a time to recover from a mysterious respiratory ailment. Home from the sea, Olmsted had taken to hanging out on the college campus with his younger brother. The three other men in the picture were Yale students and friends of John who became Fred’s friends as well. Olmsted and his companions sat nearly an entire day in order to obtain a small array of images, a pair of which—both very similar—have survived.

  The daguerreotypes capture the five young men in dark suits, vests, and cravats. There’s a table in front of them on which an open book has been placed—a prop of sorts, intended to communicate that these are substantial persons committed to serious scholastic endeavors. The composition is extremely formal, yet these two images manage to capture key attributes of each of the subjects’ characters with uncanny accuracy.

  Brother John is dark-eyed and handsome. He’s the only one smiling, but it’s an enigmatic smile, ever so slight, and seems calculated to convey an air of nonchalance. Charles Loring Brace, by contrast, comes across as straightforward in the most literal sense. The photos find him staring directly ahead with a burning and thoughtful intensity. Meanwhile, Olmsted isn’t even looking at the camera. Instead, his head is turned to the side, and he’s peering off in a different direction from the others. Typical. His hair sweeps off his forehead in a wave, and his features are small and fine, lending him an almost ethereal quality.

  In one of these existing takes, while Olmsted gazes off into the mysterious middle distance, he also has an arm thrown around Charley Brace’s shoulders. This, too, is fitting. Growing up, Olmsted was passingly acquainted with Brace (no relation to his old teacher Joab Brace). When Brace became his brother’s roommate at Yale, Olmsted got to know him even better. And in the years ahead, Brace would become one of Olmsted’s own closest friends and would play a big role in his life.

  Like the Olmsted brothers, Brace came from a family that traced its Connecticut roots back for many generations. Brace also lost his mother at an early age, a circumstance that certainly helped forge a bond between him and the Olmsted brothers. There, the similarities ended. Where the senior Olmsted was a well-to-do merchant with only a smattering of education, Brace’s father was a Williams graduate, known for his erudition. He was a teacher by trade and had gained renown in Connecticut as a pioneering educator of women. Teaching was noble work, but it didn’t bring in much money. Brace grew up in a household that was both less financially secure and more formally intellectual than Olmsted’s. Where John Olmsted Sr. took his sons on hushed rides through the countryside, John Brace read to young Charles from the classics of literature or works about history. Then he would quiz his son on the passages. By the time he entered Yale, Charley Brace was proficient in five languages.

  Olmsted and Brace quickly fell into a rapport that would characterize their friendship forever onward. Something about their particular chemistry drew them into fevered intellectual argument. They were a kind of closed two-man debating society. The pair argued with one another endlessly on topics such as religion and politics, while the other members of the circle—brother John, particularly—looked on in bemusement.

  Olmsted and Brace came at subjects from very different angles. Olmsted tended to be idiosyncratic, drawing on the books he’d read in the course of a haphazard education, along with real-life experience such as his brief clerkship in New York. Brace, four years his junior, was far more doctrinaire. Brace could work his way up to a kind of moral mandate that was hard to refute. “Intense earnestness in whatever he undertook was the characteristic and, one might say, the keynote of his life,” Frederick Kingsbury, another of the five friends, would recall of Brace.

  Kingsbury, for his part, was the pragmatist of the group. In the years after the photo was taken, he would become first a lawyer and then a businessman. John Olmsted and Fred Kingsbury had a special wink-wink friendship, rooted partly in observing the excesses of the other two. John would frequently turn to Kingsbury for perspective when his brother’s idiosyncrasy or Brace’s idealism simply grew too ridiculous.

  Last and least, there was Charley Trask. Every odd-numbered group needs someone to fill Trask’s inglorious role: he was the fifth wheel. Even in the old daguerreotypes, he seems aware of his station, standing off to the side. Besides being credited with a genial manner, Trask appears to have made little impression on Olmsted and the others. Maybe he simply acted as a kind of social lightning rod, necessary to disperse the energy created by the other four. “We are a most uncommon set of common friends” is how Brace described this group.

  While Olmsted managed to fall in with a vibrant social circle, he did not yet have a profession, or even a fixed address. During visits to New Haven he stayed with his brother John or others in the group, all of whom were several years younger. Olmsted visited so often that they dubbed him an “honorary member of the Class of ’47.” He also served a couple of brief apprenticeships on nearby Connecticut farms, one run by an uncle, David Brooks, the other by Joseph Welton, a friend of the Kingsbury family. Otherwise, he continued to live at home in Hartford—downright bizarre for a man now in his mid-twenties. Olmsted’s lax father accepted the arrangement, reminding himself that at least his son was good-natured and full of enthusiasm. Mary Ann Olmsted gritted her teeth and prayed for her stepson to find his way in the world.

  For a brief spell, it looked like that might actually happen. Olmsted decided to enroll in Yale. Certainly, he was spending enough time on campus. Why not take some classes along the way? Despite his spotty academic record, Olmsted was admitted as a “special student.” He was allowed to sit in on classes on a kind of audit basis.

  Olmsted approached the opportunity in his own quirky fashion. For course work that captured his interest, he proved willing to go to extraordinary lengths. Olmsted was fascinated by a class in chemistry taught by Benjamin Silliman, one of nineteenth century America’s most distinguished science professors. The class was lecture only, with no lab work required. On his own initiative, Olmsted spent hours in the lab doing self-directed experiments, even recruited John and his friends into what he dubbed the “Infantile Chemistry Association.” Other subjects such as mineralogy and architecture, strangely enough, failed to capture his interest, and he didn’t even bother to do the required reading.

  The whole Yale experiment lasted just three months. Then Olmsted withdrew, citing as the reason a concern that he might be suffering from apoplexy. Apoplexy is an arcane medical term for heightened nervous excitement. No doubt, Olmsted was capable of achieving such a mental state, though as a reason for quitting something—yet again—it seems like a mere excuse.

  Olmsted wrote a letter to Kingsbury summing up his piecemeal schooling: “I have a smattering education—a little scum, from most everything useful to such a man as I—learned as I took a fancy to it. Of Arithmetic, I cipher slow and without accuracy. Grammar I know nothing of—nor the rules of Rhetoric or writing. Geography, I know where I have been. History, nothing but my own country, except what I have got incidentaly.” Referring to incidentaly, he added: “I can’t even spell such a word as that right.”

  During this time, Olmsted began to pursue various romantic possibilities, though his approach was similarly scattershot. He accompanied a variety of different young women to a variety of different events, such as lectures, book-club meetings, hymn sing-alongs, and Sunday sociables. In Puritan New England, for someone of Olmsted’s background, these were the kind of chast
e—and frequently chaperoned—activities that were available. But Olmsted made the most of it. Yale, one of his main stomping grounds, was an all-male university at this time. Between Hartford and New Haven proper, however, there seemed to be an endless stream of prospects to choose among.

  Olmsted mooned over Abby Clark, a student at the Hartford Female Seminary. He went to a dance with Sarah Cook. And in New Haven, he went on a group picnic with a young woman that he identified only as Anna. “’Twas a fine day and I believe we all, particularly the girls enjoyed very much,” he wrote to his brother. “Capital dinner on the rocks. Siesta (charming with Anna’s lap for a pillow). Smoke, reading, pomp, sentiment, and ride home by moonshine.”

  Of course, Olmsted wasn’t what one would call an eligible bachelor. His career prospects weren’t exactly sterling. Then again, he wasn’t really looking to get married at this point. Rather, he seemed thrilled by the opportunity to spend time with witty and cultivated young women. His various companions, in turn, seemed to appreciate that he already had some real-life experience, and his time at sea made for especially vivid stories. Maria Mounds had also been on an ocean voyage, and the pair had a “few yarns to spin,” as Olmsted termed it.

  Yet another object of Olmsted’s affections was Frances Condit. At one point, he arranged to meet up with her at a social gathering at a house in Hartford. He stayed way beyond the household’s calling hours. Mary Ann Olmsted, who had accompanied him, left early and fretted that her stepson had committed a faux pas. To John Sr., she confided that Fred appeared smitten in the wake of his overlong stay: “He has dreamed about her regularly every week since. I know not whether the admiration is mutual.”

  As he often would in the course of his life, Olmsted had gotten caught up in a kind of frenzy—a frenzy of courtship. He wrote to Brace: “I am desperately in love—now, and no mistake, only for the life of me I can’t tell who it’s with—the whole of ’em, I believe.”