Genius of Place

by Justin Martin

  Biltmore, however, promised the greatest glory. “This is a place and G. W. V. [Vanderbilt] is a man that we must do our best for,” Olmsted declared in a letter to his partners. “ . . . It is far and away the most distinguished private place, not only for America, but of the world, forming at this period. It will be critical and reviewed and referred to for its precedents and for its experience, years ahead, centuries ahead.”

  Olmsted put great effort into designing an approach road for the estate. In effect, this was a driveway for Vanderbilt’s house. But there are driveways and there are driveways: Like everything else in this project, outrageous scale was in order. He designed a three-mile approach that took its sweet time, curving and looping and winding up the hillside. He directed that the sides of the carriage road be thickly planted with native Blue Ridge flora such as rhododendron, mountain laurel, and white pine. The idea was to create a screen, albeit a visually arresting one. It was key that a visitor be deprived of all distant views, until he rounded a bend, and then the mansion “breaks suddenly and fully upon him,” as Olmsted put it.

  Olmsted’s design contrived to keep the huge house a surprise. But he planned another, still greater, surprise. Once inside the house—from windows, off balconies—visitors would get their first glimpse of where they truly were. Their view had been entertainingly diverted during the long journey up the approach road. Now it would become clear. They were on a hilltop surrounded by a forest that stretched endlessly, endlessly, into the distance. “Hasn’t Olmsted done wonders with the approach road,” commented Hunt. “It alone will give him lasting fame.” Apparently, the imperious Hunt had forgotten that Olmsted had secured lasting fame back in 1858. Lord knows Hunt had designed enough mansions overlooking Central Park.

  Olmsted also worked on his ambitious plan for the Biltmore arboretum, a tree museum to dwarf all others. Here, he faced a setback. Vanderbilt wasn’t particularly compelled by the idea. Then Charles Sargent withdrew his support. This was a critical blow. Sargent, Olmsted’s Brookline neighbor and his collaborator on the Arnold Arboretum, had his doubts about such an undertaking on a private estate. An arboretum not associated with an institution such as a university, Sargent felt, would be of dubious scientific value.

  Vanderbilt set December 25, 1895, as the deadline for completing the Biltmore. He planned to debut the estate on Christmas with a gala party for his many powerful and influential friends. Fortunately, this was not turning out to be a mad dash like Chicago. In fact, by the autumn of 1894, things were moving forward with unusual ease, at least by the standards of an undertaking this large and complex. True, Olmsted’s arboretum was stalled. But the other pieces of his plan—the forest, the approach road, the gardens—were taking spectacular shape.

  At the same time, Olmsted was feeling worse than ever. He had driven himself so hard in recent years; his ever-precarious health was now slipping fast.

  Rick had recently graduated Harvard, magna cum laude. He’d majored in zoology (landscape architecture didn’t yet exist as an academic discipline). Olmsted summoned his son to Asheville and installed him as an apprentice on the project. He figured Rick could get some needed training. Then Olmsted returned to Brookline for a period to attend to other firm business. But the moment he arrived home, his thoughts immediately turned to Rick and the Biltmore. Olmsted sent his son a long letter. “Write in a personal way to me personally giving me some account of what you are doing and thinking,” Olmsted demanded. “I want to know a great deal more about you than I do. How is your health—physically, mentally, morally? Do not be backward in telling me.” He continued: “Are you getting any practice shooting, fishing or hunting? . . . Have you shot a wild turkey? Are you going to any balls, or dances? Are you punctual and regular in your social—‘society’—duties?”

  Most of all, Olmsted wanted to make sure Rick took every advantage of the rare opportunity before him. He would be working in close proximity with some truly renowned experts. “But whatever you can get from others, Beadle and Pinchot are your principle [sic] mines,” Olmsted wrote. “You cannot work them too much.” He was particularly concerned that Rick acquire the botanical expertise that he himself lacked. Olmsted possessed vast knowledge of plants in a folk-wisdom kind of way. At conceiving foliage compositions, he was unrivaled. But he lacked a scientific grounding in botany and was certain this could be a professional drawback. He’d seen as much with Vaux and the recent rose-of-Sharon episode. “You must, with the aid of such inheritance as I can give you, make good my failings,” he continued. “That is one of the thoughts that dwell with me. Also, I recognize wherein John (& wherein Eliot) is imperfectly fitted, and I want you to be fitted to make good, years to come.”

  The letter carried on for twenty-one pages and countless exhortations: “Review! Review! And train yourself. ... If you don’t get it now you never will.” The italics are Olmsted’s, and, once again, he left his son a lot to ponder. Rick wrote his father from Biltmore: “I am compelled to answer, with pain and regret, after the most serious and thorough thought, that I believe I would better enter upon another career.”

  This only succeeded in triggering a flurry of letters. Olmsted wasn’t about to accept such an answer. He implored Rick not to follow the same course as him, bouncing from profession to profession. He pointed out that his own father had been “overmuch indulgent and easy going” toward him. That’s why Olmsted was being tough. Didn’t Rick see that there was a ready-made career just waiting for him? Olmsted declared himself “anxious to get you under training here before I die.”

  In the spring of 1895, Olmsted returned to Asheville. He was accompanied by Mary and Marion. This time, his visit was meant to serve a dual—though not entirely logical—purpose. Olmsted planned to oversee Rick’s development and attend to some final details on the project. He also hoped to reap some of the recuperative benefits of that legendary Asheville spa climate. Vanderbilt put the Olmsted family up at Rivercliff, a guest cottage on the estate grounds.

  The Olmsted who arrived was different from the Olmsted who had been there only months before. It was subtle, but his family could see it. Olmsted was growing forgetful, Rick noticed. For a while now, he’d been having trouble remembering names, but it had been chalked up to the fact that he juggled so many projects. More ominously, his blue eyes, always so alert, sometimes filled with a strange bewildered look.

  When Olmsted directed the planting of some tulip trees in front of the Biltmore mansion, he got the scheme confused. Fortunately, Rick caught the mistake. Olmsted was pleased that Rick was paying attention but was also deeply embarrassed. He worried about what would happen if Vanderbilt became aware of his condition. Abruptly, Olmsted announced that he wanted to return to Brookline.

  Vanderbilt talked him into staying on for a while longer. He had commissioned John Singer Sargent to do portraits of the two artists behind the Biltmore, Olmsted and Hunt.

  Sargent’s painting of Hunt captures the architect standing in the mansion’s grand entry hall, staring fiercely ahead. It’s a bold image but also a considerable illusion. Hunt was in terrible health himself. Apparently, Mrs. Hunt hovered throughout the sessions, begging Sargent, who was known for his realism, to be charitable in depicting her husband. Two months later, Hunt would be dead.

  For Olmsted’s portrait, Sargent selected a thickly planted spot on the side of the approach road, about a half mile from the mansion. Dogwoods and kalmia were in full blossom—a perfect setting for the great landscape architect. Alas, the sessions proved too demanding for the increasingly frail Olmsted. Before Sargent could finish, Olmsted headed home to Brookline.

  To complete the portrait, Rick stood in for his father. He even donned the same clothing that Olmsted had worn during the first few sessions with Sargent. It had happened far too quickly. Rick felt wholly unready. But in some fashion, this sad, strange little episode represented a changing of the guard.

  Back in Brookline, Olmsted plummeted. He was sometimes his old self but was ju
st as often confused and agitated. To compound matters, Fairsted was a home office, headquarters of an increasingly successful practice. From moment to moment, one never knew which Olmsted would appear. During this period, he did his very last pieces of actual work (as opposed to the obsessive thinking about work that would characterize the time ahead). He inspected some recently completed touches in the Boston system and wrote something about the parks in Hartford, the town where he’d grown up. But one day, in the summer of 1895, he also composed three letters to Vanderbilt. The letters were nearly identical.

  Clearly, Olmsted was suffering from Alzheimer’s or some other kind of senile dementia, though no such diagnosis existed in those days. His family made preparations to remove him from Fairsted.

  Mary secreted her husband away to the village of Sunset on Deer Isle, off the coast of Maine in Penobscot Bay. This was a spot that Mary and Marion had visited during recent summers. They were often joined there by John and Rick. Olmsted had rarely gone. He’d been too busy and had never liked the place, besides.

  From Deer Isle, Olmsted mailed a steady stream of letters—sometimes several a day—to the office in Brookline. He demanded action on matters large and small, real and imaginary. A particular source of anxiety for Olmsted was the Biltmore arboretum. In letter after letter, he asserted that John simply did not get it, was incapable of grasping the importance and complexity of this issue. “I can’t think that you recognize how serious a matter the Biltmore crisis is,” he wrote.

  Of course, there was no crisis. There wasn’t going to be an arboretum; that had been pretty much settled. Still, Olmsted managed almost endless varieties of this same conceit (you just don’t get it) in his correspondence with John. The repetitiveness was a symptom of his disease. But there was something unnerving about what he kept cycling over. It was shades of the harsh assessment (“you are not a man of genius”) that Olmsted had leveled against his stepson many years before.

  Faced with such an onslaught, ever-dutiful John tried to remain calm and businesslike toward his stepfather. That was hard. “It would help us very much if you would constantly bear in mind that your memory for current events is no longer a working basis for your thoughts,” he wrote. “Until you do so, realize you will give us no end of trouble and worry.” In the same letter, he couldn’t resist a jab, though it was ever so slight: “Your failing memory will in time necessitate some slight readjustment of firm matters but you need not give it further thought for some weeks to come.”

  In the village of Sunset, Olmsted was tossing and turning through almost every night. He paged blankly through yellowed periodicals he found in the cottage. He grew fixated on the idea that John was planning a coup designed to deny Rick his rightful place in the firm. There was a terrible logic to this thought. John was his stepson. Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. was his natural son, his namesake, the vehicle of his legacy.

  Even as his condition deteriorated, Olmsted had moments of lucidity. That’s the curse of such conditions: periodic insight into how far one has declined and a sense of what lies ahead. As a consequence, Olmsted’s Deer Isle correspondence has a schizoid quality. Hectoring letters alternate with contrite letters, where he acknowledges that he’s unwell and has been unkind. He wrote an especially poignant one to partner Eliot, who had not escaped rough treatment. “In my flurry I have done some things which I would not do now and for which I am sorry,” he wrote by way of apology. Then he added: “You cannot think how I have been dreading that it would be thought expedient that I should be sent to an ‘institution.’ Anything but that. My father was a director of an Insane Retreat, and first and last, having been professionally employed and behind the scenes in several, my dread of such places is intense.”

  The very next day, his mood had taken an entirely different turn. Mary wrote to John, complaining that Olmsted was “in a dreadful state—he makes me nervous he is so violent.” Apparently, Olmsted never attacked Mary physically. But as his conditioned worsened, he would throw a box at a caretaker and would also beat a horse. “Do not tell anyone that your father’s state is pitiful,” Mary continued. “Let us keep it to ourselves as long as we can—else his name will be useless to the business.”

  Mary had faced her share of life’s emergencies. She handled this latest with equanimity. Even the decision to bring her husband to Deer Isle was practical. The place was an island, after all. And Mary was a very small woman. Here, it was possible to let her increasingly troubled and belligerent husband move about freely, or at least be under the illusion that he had some control. But Mary assured John that he needn’t worry about Olmsted’s slipping back to the Brookline office: “We have adopted the policy of letting him do as he likes so long as he does not offer to go off the island.”

  Mostly, Olmsted passed his time inside his own fevered brain. While he sent a stream of letters to his partners, he sent a raging river to Rick. “I am lying awake nights in a perplexed state of mind about Biltmore affairs and your professional training, especially in matters of foliage. I am not sure that the object of your being at Biltmore is being accomplished.” In another, Olmsted wrote, “Observe, inquire, read, discuss all such matters, all you can. Don’t be content with off-hand statements and explanations. Read, compare, inquire, cross-examine. Keep at this sort of work in every department, until you have sucked every source of information dry.... Make the most of the special Biltmore opportunity.”

  Olmsted couldn’t stop thinking about Rick, and he couldn’t stop sending letters to him. “I write only in yielding to a constant impulse,” begins one missive, “vain tho’ I feel it to be, to be doing something for you.” And from another letter: “I am thinking more of you, these bitter days, than of anybody and all else.... It is not childishness. It is the assurance that you are taking up what I am dropping.”

  Whenever Rick responded, Olmsted was ecstatic. “You cannot think how much your long letter of 5th October interests and gratifies me,” Olmsted wrote. “I will confess to you that twice last night I lighted my bed lamp to read it over again. It has been the most satisfactory circumstance of my life here.”

  This particular letter to Rick is one of Olmsted’s last and one of his most heartrending. On those occasions when the fog of his disease cleared, the old Olmsted was visible—penetrating, aware, humane. Olmsted related how during his boyhood, away at some poor country parsonage, he had been forced to memorize a passage from the book of Ecclesiastes. The passage related to life’s fleetingness. As a young boy, he told Rick, it struck him as incredible that the years ahead might pass so quickly. But they had. Now, he found himself wonder struck once again to have reached life’s end. “And now, before I know it, before I am in the least prepared for it, I am there,” he wrote to Rick. Olmsted concluded the letter: “I love you and take joy in you with all my heart. Your father.”

  Olmsted continued to decline. Caring for him on Deer Isle finally proved too difficult, even for Mary. So she brought her husband back to Brookline, where a doctor examined him and made recommendations about the future course of his treatment. Incredibly, the doctor held out hope that a cure for Olmsted might still be possible—or at the very least, his condition might be mitigated. But he shouldn’t be treated anywhere in the Northeast. Proximity to his Brookline office would be agitating. Despite its therapeutic climate, the South was out, too. It would only make him pine for the Biltmore Estate. Instead, the doctor suggested that Olmsted be taken to England, where the treatment of nervous disorders (as this was termed) was supposedly more advanced than in the United States.

  Olmsted wrote Rick, begging to be sent photos of his beloved Biltmore. He feared, correctly, that he would never set foot in Asheville again.

  The Biltmore was his swan song. The winding three-mile approach road is one of his finest designs. And his call to create a model forest was quite simply prophetic. Within a few years, America’s first forestry school—an idea that Olmsted and Pinchot had dreamed up together—would be established on Vanderbilt’s land.
That’s why the Biltmore Estate is sometimes called the “cradle of U.S. forestry.” As for Pinchot, he would soon leave Vanderbilt’s employ to head up the forestry division of the Department of Interior. When Teddy Roosevelt transferred the division to the Agriculture Department, it was renamed the U.S. Forest Service, and Pinchot became its first chief. Years in the future, following Vanderbilt’s death, 83,398 acres of the estate would be sold to the government for safekeeping. That land would become the core of North Carolina’s Pisgah National Forest, one of the largest woodland preserves east of the Mississippi.

  On November 16, 1895, Olmsted departed Boston for Liverpool aboard the Cephalonia. Mary and Marion accompanied him. So did Rick, who planned to help get his father settled in England. Despite all the anxiety and ink expended on the Biltmore, there wasn’t really much work left to be done there.

  Rick rented a two-story house in Lympstone, a village in the county of Devon. Then he returned to the States. Mary arranged for Olmsted to be cared for by Dr. Rayner, the nervous-disorder specialist with whom Olmsted had stayed during his previous visit to England. His treatment wasn’t any more effective this time around. “I am going down hill rapidly,” Olmsted wrote to John back in Brookline.

  Unknown to Olmsted, there was tragic news of Vaux. Mary was aware of it, but she elected to shelter her husband from the details for as long as possible. On November 19—while Olmsted had been onboard the Cephalonia —Vaux had drowned. Apparently, he’d been taking a sunset walk on Brooklyn’s Gravesend Bay, when he’d slipped off a pier. When his body was found two days later, he was missing his hat, one shoe—and his spectacles.