Genius of Place

by Justin Martin

  Olmsted got to know Mary and found her a challenging companion. As he confided to friends, he thought her more intellectually gifted than even the vaunted Miss B. This was high praise. He wrote a poem to Mary, inspired by her sharp wit and the softer side that he perceived concealed behind it:Here are two close connected—yet contrasted knives

  One let there be—for each of your lives

  The first to be lookd at; and we can only say

  On acquaintance—it surely grows larger each day.

  The steel of the larger, as pure as thy mind

  Can be—just as cutting—can not be as kind.

  In conjunction with reading the poem to Mary, Olmsted planned to present her with a pair of knives, one sharp, the other blunt. But he doesn’t appear to have gone through with this strange little gesture. It seems to have struck him as overly passionate, especially in light of an earlier impression he’d formed of Mary. He’d never really seen her in that way. Shortly after their first meeting, he’d described her in a letter to Kingsbury as “just the thing for a rainy day—not to fall in love with, but to talk with.”

  Meantime, he was ping-ponging between various other romantic interests, confused, per usual. He was well into his twenties now, but in matters of the heart, he was more like a teenager. Olmsted’s friends and family wondered if he would ever settle down. Maybe he’d become an “old batch”—a probable fate, he’d recently confided to Brace. He was so flighty, so maddeningly inconstant. And he had impossible standards.

  In a letter to Kingsbury, John constructed a lengthy and fanciful list of requirements for Fred’s ideal bride. It’s a penetrating little passage in terms of its ability to capture some kind of essential truth about Frederick Law Olmsted. It reads like a crazy personal ad:A marriageable young lady would be an inducement for Fred. She must have a great deal of common sense, self-control, affection, earnestness, housekeeping-on-a-small-income abilities, capability of silence, capability of speech, comprehension of what is incomprehensible to others, sympathy, ... small visibility, docility, a broad pelvis, faith, quick antagonism, self-respect, infinite capabilities & longings, power of abstraction, some skepticism, power over appetite, power of seeing a certain distance into a millstone, charity, enthusiasm, self-annihilation, truth, Dr. Taylor’s vitus of night, no superior, fondness for sausages, clams, pork & old dressing gowns; all things must be under control of reason; beauty & wealth no object & no objection. If you have such a person mention the time of leaving of the early train.

  “Fred is finally rather hard up,” John concluded. “He won’t be content with less than infinity—while he himself is only finite and a farmer.” John was still talking about his brother’s love life, though this last comment carries hints about other possible sources of dissatisfaction.

  John didn’t have nearly such a lengthy list of romantic requirements. While visiting Tosomock Farm, he got to know Mary Perkins, and they began to court. They even went so far as to read Modern Painters by John Ruskin. Reading together constituted quite an act of intimacy during this era. And Modern Painters, with its fevered discourse on beauty and the passion of artists, was the kind of work that could really cause one’s heart to race and palms to sweat.

  While Olmsted remained romantically unsettled, he appeared to have finally found his way to a career. Olmsted really took to Tosomock Farm. He fell into the rhythm. Spring marched toward fall; planting gave way to harvest; 1848 flowed into 1849. A farmer’s life was full of rigor, but rewarding, too.

  He was forever tinkering with the mix of crops in response to changes in the market. When New York City was flooded with peaches, he made a decision to switch to pears. He began cultivating different varieties. Many of these pears, such as Anjou, were of Gallic origin. Olmsted spoke of them incessantly, and John grew irritated by the parade of foreign names. “We hear nothing but Hog-French continually,” noted John. “I hope we shall reap the benefit tho’ at some future time.”

  John got to eat pears, all right, and also plums, raspberries, and everything else his brother chose to grow. Olmsted launched a nursery business, too. He ordered thousands of fruit trees and planted the saplings. This made sense: He could sell fruit trees, and his customers could bear the risk of finding a market for the produce. The nursery served to diversify his business, making him less susceptible to the swings in the prices of crops.

  Olmsted labored hard. Where he’d been slothful at times during his teen years, he was developing a formidable work ethic—first aboard the Ronaldson, now on the farm—and he wasn’t averse to putting in long hours when necessary. He wasn’t responsible only for himself. Depending on the season, Olmsted supervised as many as eight hired men. He introduced systems and order to Tosomock Farm. Each morning, he presented the foreman of his crew with a list spelling out the exact time that various tasks should be performed. At the close of each day, the men were required to return all the farm implements to their appointed places.

  Olmsted had a genuine talent for this work. The neighboring farmers took note. In 1849, a new organization was formed on Staten Island called the Richmond County Agricultural Society. Olmsted was chosen to act as corresponding secretary. As one of his first acts, Olmsted wrote a lengthy document spelling out the benefits of the new organization and urging others to join. The document was titled “Appeal to the Citizens of Staten Island.” And here’s a sampling: “We ask you, then, Fellow Citizens, one and all, to associate in this Society. We entreat you to support it. We believe it will increase the profit of our labor—enhance the value of our lands—throw a garment of beauty around our homes, and above all, and before all, materially promote Moral and Intellectual Improvement—instructing us in the language of Nature, from whose preaching, while we pursue our grateful labors, we shall learn to receive her Fruits as the bounty, and her Beauty as the manifestation of her Creator.”

  In his capacity as recording secretary, Olmsted also pushed for a plank road on Staten Island—just like Geddes; he was doing his mentor proud. One thing that’s striking about Olmsted is the speed with which he could inhabit a new role. Blink and he was on the threshold of some bold new endeavor. Blink again and he was deep into it. It wasn’t so long ago that Olmsted had served the apprenticeship at Fairmount. Now he was a farmer in his own right. And as he’d once told Brace: “For the matter of happiness, there is no body of men that are half as well satisfied with their business as our farmers.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Two Pilgrimages

  BUT THE HALCYON stretch on Tosomock Farm—this, too, could not last. When Olmsted learned that his brother and Brace planned a walking tour of England, he could scarcely contain his envy.

  John was going partly in an effort to improve his health. Walking in the countryside would do him well, he hoped, and maybe help quell the lingering respiratory ailment that had been bothering him on and off for several years now. Brace was reeling from the recent death of his younger sister, Emma. Walking would be contemplative, a fitting way to mourn her passing. Brace also viewed the trip as an opportunity to learn about the conditions of the poor in another country.

  Olmsted dashed off a letter to his father about this walking tour. The letter starts by striking a note of sober assessment. Olmsted wanted to make it clear that he had his priorities straight. Sure, the idea of a walking tour was enticing. It sounded like a real lark. There was also so much work to be done on the farm. But a few paragraphs into the letter, he could restrain himself no longer: “I have a just barely controllable passion for just what John is thinking to undertake.” And he added, “I confess the idea, if I give it the rein of contemplation at all, is so exciting that I can not control it with impartial reason, and so, for the present I try to forget it.”

  Yet try as he might, he could not forget the matter, not even in that very letter. Olmsted proceeded to scrawl page after page to his father, enumerating all the various reasons that the trip made sense. Though he’d sailed to China, he had never been to England. It would be
better to visit now, while he was full of youthful vigor. Then, he could really buckle down to life as a farmer, contented that he’d seen England at least. For that matter, he would surely gain some useful information while visiting the British countryside that he could apply on his own farm. The trip would be good for his health, too, especially in light of a “bowel complaint” he’d been suffering from lately. He could look out for his younger brother. He could look after Charley Brace.

  In the letter, Olmsted never comes right out and asks permission from his father. John Sr. held the mortgage on Tosomock Farm, after all, and he was in a position to nix the idea. Instead, Olmsted put together a raft of rationalizations. He would be back in time for the fall harvest. The hired hands could look after the farm during his absence. A trip to England would be a kind of pilgrimage—to an important place, conferring all kinds of benefits—and he simply had to go. “I did not mean to argue the matter much,” Olmsted concluded his letter, though he’d certainly done exactly that. As a final touch, he added, “I hope you won’t consider my opinions as if they were those of a mere child, nor my desire as senseless romantic impulses only.”

  By now, John Sr. knew better. He simply gave his blessing. He even agreed to provide Fred with an amount of money sufficient to take a walking tour—a budget walking tour. (He’d earlier agreed to pay for John’s trip as well.)

  On April 27, 1850, the Olmsted brothers and Charley Brace were prepared to embark for England aboard the Henry Clay. But the ship failed to sail, despite this being the advertised day of departure. Upon examining their cabin, they discovered yet another problem. The room was half filled up with bales of cotton, bound for England to be sold.

  This was billed as a passenger ship, not a merchant ship, but it was shades of the overloaded Ronaldson. The Olmsteds and Brace were also informed that they would need to share their cabin with another passenger. They were joined by a young Irish surgeon headed home. Such were the conditions of budget travel. The Atlantic passage was costing them $12 apiece. Three days later the Henry Clay finally departed, and three weeks later it arrived in Liverpool.

  Fred, John, and Charley spent a little time kicking around Liverpool. On the morning they planned to depart, a baker who was preparing their breakfast rolls told them that, before leaving town, they simply had to see Birkenhead Park. It had opened only three years before and was the very first park in Britain built with public funds. The park was the pride of Liverpool. The designer was a man named Joseph Paxton. Olmsted had never heard of Paxton, knew nothing of this park, but he was taken by the place’s winding paths and broad meadows. He was especially impressed to note that people of all classes were mingling in a city park. But soon the three travelers were eager to get going. They took a train a little ways out of Liverpool, threw on their knapsacks, and set out walking.

  Olmsted’s first brush with the English countryside did not disappoint. From a winding lane, he could see over the tops of little thatched-roof houses to a church spire rising in the distance. It was spring, and the hawthorn hedges were all in bloom. Bees were buzzing, and he could hear a cow munching on grass. His overarching impression was one of greenness, incredible greenness. And everything was softened by a watery mist.

  Nothing was really unusual about this scene, Olmsted later noted, yet it had a quiet drama that he found enrapturing. He also experienced a feeling of déjà vu. Here he was at last in countryside he’d read about in the esoteric books of William Gilpin and Uvedale Price at the Hartford Library as a little boy. This was also the land of his forebears. As often happens to American travelers in England, he had the strange and distinct sensation of coming home.

  Because they were on a tight budget, Olmsted and his companions were forced to stay in the most modest accommodations imaginable. Theirs was a walking tour, not a grand tour. But this had an unintended benefit. The travelers came in contact with the regular people of England.

  This certainly served Brace’s purposes. He was deeply committed to the idea of leading a life of service to others. But he hadn’t yet figured out how best to accomplish his goal. He was as restless as Olmsted, in his own way. Brace visited a prison at one point in the journey and visited a school for poor children at another. His practice was to split off from Fred and John for these sidelines, planning to rejoin them up the road apiece.

  Olmsted also split off from the others frequently, but his stated purpose was to visit farms. Largely on account of England’s being an older country than America, at the time of Olmsted’s walking tour, it was well ahead of the United States in the critical area of agricultural technology. Back in 1701, Jethro Tull had invented a mechanized seed drill, becoming one of the first people to apply the rigor of science to agriculture. The invention launched a flurry of innovation. Olmsted was in the cradle of scientific farming now, and he intended to make the most of the opportunity.

  In fact, he’d set off on the tour carrying letters of introduction to the proprietors of various model farms. He examined livestock and watched cheese being made. He noted various implements used on British farms but not yet available in the United States, such as Crosskill’s Patent Clod-Crusher Roller. He even had a consultation with a noted British expert to discuss the latest and best techniques for draining farmland.

  During this, his first visit to Great Britain, Olmsted had one other noteworthy visit to a park. In Wales, he got the chance to walk over the manicured grounds of Chirk Castle. Olmsted was amazed: It was a real castle, dating to the late thirteenth century, surrounded by a real moat that was filled with water. It had been home to the Myddelton family for hundreds of years; each successive Myddelton held hereditary titles such as baron of Chirk Castle. Just to visit required some string pulling. Olmsted enjoyed touring the castle and walking over the surrounding parklands on a private tour. He fell into a daydream about what it would be like to live in such splendor. But he snapped out of his reverie just as suddenly. Was it really right for this beautiful place to be so cloistered, he began to wonder, set apart for the enjoyment of the privileged few?

  Olmsted was an American, through and through. Besides the sense of coming home, he was having another experience common to Americans visiting England. Having Brace at his elbow during the tour of Chirk Castle no doubt also helped trigger this sudden burst of egalitarianism.

  Fred, John, and Charley traveled at a good clip. In the course of about a month, they covered a generous swath of English countryside, mostly on foot, but occasionally by train or coach. And they weren’t finished; the companions intended to make the most of this rare opportunity for travel. They had stuck to a bare-bones budget, and money remained. They sailed to France and from there visited Belgium and Germany. They did a brief walking tour through the Rhine Valley. Brace decided to stay on in Germany. He was thinking about studying theology there. On his own, he would later make an ill-advised trip to post-revolution Hungary and wind up imprisoned for more than a month.

  Fred and John sailed home from Glasgow. Olmsted had witnessed the beauty of the English countryside, firsthand. He’d visited a public park. He’d visited a private park, too, and been put off by the air of aristocracy that surrounded it. But none of it exactly coalesced. Not yet. He was a farmer still, and these were just more thoughts and observations to churn about in his brain.

  The Olmsted brothers arrived in New York on October 24, 1850. According to Fred’s accounting, they had spent an average of 71¢ per day for food and accommodations. Throw in the price of ship’s passage and other transportation along with incidentals, and the whole trip cost the two of them—cost John Sr., rather—roughly $600.

  Olmsted was home for the harvest, and, in subsequent months, he threw himself back into work on Tosomock Farm. He ordered 5,000 fruit-tree saplings to plant in his nursery. As a bonus for placing such a large order, he also received a sampling of ornamental trees. He planted a pair of cedars of Lebanon in front of his farmhouse.

  In his capacity as secretary of the county agricultural so
ciety, he obtained an innovative British mechanism that he and his fellow farmers could use to make tile. The tile, in turn, could line pipes for drainage on farmland. It was one of the first of these devices ever imported into the United States.

  On the surface, Olmsted appeared consumed by the affairs of his farm and by those of his Staten Island neighbors. Yet he found himself oddly detached, less engaged by any of this than he would have expected. He’d gone on the walking tour hoping to quench a kind of wanderlust. See England as a young man, and it will be easier to buckle down to a farmer’s life—that had been one of the many arguments he’d summoned in that long letter to his father. But he’d found that he really loved traveling. Tosomock Farm seemed terribly drab now. Back on Staten Island, the memories of the walking tour seemed to cast a shadow across his life. Olmsted wrote a letter to Brace, who was still in Europe: “The fact is evident now that when we were traveling we were living a great deal more, getting a great deal more out of the world, loving oftener, hating oftener, reaching a great many more milestones.”

  In another letter to Brace, Olmsted complained about his stature in life. In the big picture—no, really big, cosmic terms—what was the point of being a farmer, he pondered. Was he helping people in any truly meaningful way? Olmsted confessed that he craved influence, longed to be involved in the grand affairs of the world. Yet he was so far away from that. Feeling petulant, Olmsted reflected on his fellow Americans’ response to his recent walking tour. “The mere fact of having been to Europe is worth nothing,” he groused.

  Olmsted had been a farmer—first as Geddes’s apprentice, then at Sachem’s Head, then on Staten Island—for four years. That was a lifetime in his scheme. Now, that familiar restlessness was starting to intrude. Over the next few years, he’d treat Tosomock Farm as a kind of home base. He would continue to live there, on and off, and farming would remain his primary business. (The hired hands could always pick up the slack if he was involved in something new.) But the walking tour stands as a kind of dividing line in Olmsted’s life. For the next few years, he’d be leaning, forever leaning—away from farming and toward other occupations, ones that might prove worthy of his growing but ill-defined sense of ambition.