A Clearing In The Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Cent

by Rybczynski, Witold

  Olmsted was certainly a curiosity hunter. He was bright. But his intellect was undisciplined and expressed itself in energetic but disordered enthusiasms heightened, no doubt, by the traumatic loss of his mother. His brother was the steady one, who excelled in his studies and seemed bound for a distinguished professional career. Olmsted wasn’t lazy, but his curiosity was great and his attention span lamentably short. He was also easygoing, and not too proud to bank on his father’s generosity and forbearance. As for his patient father, he was starting to realize that launching this mercurial son into “the great theatre of life” was not going to be easy.

  * * *

  1. Five years later, when John Hull went to Yale, he boarded with Dennison Olmsted, roughly the same time as one of Dennison’s sons, Lucius, came to Hartford to work in John Olmsted’s store as an apprentice.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  New York

  THE MODERN CULT of prolonged adolescence did not exist in mid-nineteenth-century America. An eighteen-year-old youth was not a “teenager” but a young adult. He was expected to begin thinking of starting a family and establishing himself in the community, and unless he was one of the small number who attended college, he was expected to earn a living. This posed a problem for Olmsted. He had lost interest in surveying. Although his vision problems appear to have cleared up, he showed no more enthusiasm for studying than earlier.

  In August 1840, Olmsted left Hartford for New York to work as an apprentice clerk with the house of Benkard and Hutton, an importer of French silks and dry goods. Benkard and Hutton supplied John Olmsted’s store, and he arranged the position. Poor Frederick! An outdoorsman forced into a counting house—the errant son disciplined by the exasperated father. That, at least, is the impression given by most of Olmsted’s biographers. It is based, chiefly, on Mariana Van Rensselaer’s biographical essay, which appeared in the October 1893 issue of Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine. “Placed at sixteen [sic] in a large importing-house in New York, he could not compel himself to commercial life,” she wrote. Rensselaer’s account has been widely accepted since it was based on conversations she had with Olmsted himself.

  But I’m not so sure that is the way it happened. One of Olmsted’s friends recalled that “perhaps being tired of routine, he [Olmsted] persuaded his father to prepare him for a business life.” Persuaded his father—that puts a different face on it. That John Olmsted had no intention of pushing his son into a business career is confirmed by a letter that he sent to Frederick while he was studying surveying. He wrote: “I have no recollection of ever saying I wishd you to go into a store.” The idea that it was Olmsted’s own decision to enter the world of commerce is not far-fetched. The offspring of successful businessmen often inherit some of their fathers’ talents. John Olmsted had four sons, one of whom—Owen—died as an infant. Of the other three—Frederick, John, and their half brother, Albert—John showed no particular business bent, but the other two did. Albert followed in his father’s footsteps and eventually became a partner in a Hartford mercantile firm; and Frederick himself was drawn to undertake commercial activities at various times in his life. His father’s comment doesn’t suggest that Olmsted was interested in going into the dry-goods business. But at Benkard and Hutton he was going to work in international trade, a career that promised travel to exotic places and appealed to his adventurous spirit.

  He also experienced New York. The city had suffered a serious decline following the British occupation during the Revolutionary War, but by 1840 it had grown to about three hundred thousand, outstripping Philadelphia and Boston as the metropolitan center of the Northeast. It must have been a revelation to someone raised in tiny Hartford. Not that New York was an elegant place. The results—as with most boomtowns—were mixed. “Bizarre and not very agreeable,” Alexis de Tocqueville had called it during his visit nine years earlier. The French aristocrat looked in vain for public architecture and found instead an individualistic, freewheeling city characterized by “commercial habits and money-conscious spirit.” There had been improvements since then—horse-drawn trolley cars were introduced on lower Fourth Avenue in 1832, and the grand buildings of New York University were completed three years later. But the city preserved its mercantile air and showed little interest in civic beautification. The chief expression of this pragmatism was the Commissioners’ Plan for platting the entire island of Manhattan as a repetitive grid of crisscrossing streets and avenues. The plan was adopted in 1811, but by the time that Olmsted arrived, it was still largely unrealized. Only about thirty-four-thousand people lived north of Fourteenth Street, and many of them were farmers. The area around City Hall, which included the luxurious Astor House hotel, was the focus of city life; the business district was still concentrated at the lower end of the island.

  The house of Benkard and Hutton was located in the First Ward, on Beaver Street. Although this was the oldest part of the city, there were many new buildings. The new Custom House, an impressive Greek Revival temple of white marble, was nearing completion. So was the palatial Merchants Exchange. At the head of Wall Street, work was about to begin on a replacement for the old Trinity Church. Only five years before, New York had been devastated by the biggest fire that any American city had ever experienced. Estimates of losses ranged from fifteen to twenty-six million dollars; more than six hundred buildings were totally destroyed.

  The new buildings were impressive, but they could not relieve the hemmed-in atmosphere in the bustling, narrow streets of lower Manhattan. The only relief was the view of the water from the wharves that girdled the tip of the island. Olmsted knew the harbor well since part of his job was to go aboard cargo vessels to prepare inventories of new shipments of silks. As in most American cities, the waterfront was dedicated to commerce. The one exception was the Battery, at ten acres the largest park in the city. Its tree-shaded walks along the seawall made it a popular promenade, although like City Hall Park to the north, it was poorly maintained and had a neglected air. Other attempts at creating civic open space—Tompkins Square or the Washington Parade Ground (now Washington Square)—were similarly untended. There were attractive parks such as Gramercy Park and St. John’s Park (no longer existing—near what is now the exit to the Holland Tunnel), but these were private and gated.

  Olmsted didn’t live in the city. He commuted to work by ferry across the East River from Brooklyn. Brooklyn had benefited from the growth of New York. While it was larger than Hartford, it still had some of the atmosphere of a small town. Perhaps that’s why John Olmsted, who had accompanied his son to New York to make sure he was well installed, chose it. Or maybe he just wanted to make sure that the lures of Manhattan lowlife were kept at a distance. Olmsted lived in Mrs. Howard’s boarding house on Henry Street in Brooklyn Heights. This part of Brooklyn would soon become a fashionable district favored by successful businessmen, but when Olmsted lived there, its character was still largely rural, with fields, trees, and individual houses. The city, whose dramatic vista across the river was visible from the Heights, was a world away.

  The idea of working in one place and living in another hardly strikes us as exceptional, but in 1840 it was unusual. Brooklyn’s position as one of the country’s first suburbs was relatively recent, dating from the inauguration of Robert Fulton’s steam ferry service in 1814. The contrast between the brick and stone city and leafy Brooklyn Heights could not have been lost on Olmsted. This introduction to suburban life is important. Suburbs would grow immensely in popularity during the second half of the nineteenth century, and Olmsted would play an important role in the process.

  Brooklyn was the site of another novelty: Greenwood Cemetery. Greenwood was a so-called rural cemetery. That is, it was a cemetery for city people in a rural setting. The first rural cemetery was Boston’s Mount Auburn, situated in Cambridge and consecrated in 1831. Five years later, Philadelphia followed with Laurel Hill. Greenwood was established in 1838. At two hundred acres it was the largest of the three, and its site on Gowanu
s Heights overlooking New York harbor (not far from Henry Street) was undoubtedly the most dramatic. These were public cemeteries (as opposed to churchyards or rural family plots), but they were more than burial places. Mount Auburn had set the pattern. Planned with the assistance of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, it incorporated curvilinear roads, hillocks, ponds, and plantings in the natural and picturesque manner of British landscape gardening. Mount Auburn and the other rural cemeteries became popular destinations for Sunday outings and picnics. The combination of recreation and death may seem odd, but this incongruity was less intensely felt than today. Death was no stranger to nineteenth-century families; at eighteen, Olmsted had already lost not only his mother and his half sister Charlotte, but also his two-year-old half brother, Owen.

  Rural cemeteries provided fresh air and greenery—and the illusion of beautiful countryside. Olmsted would have preferred the real thing. About a year after arriving in New York, he wrote to his stepmother:

  Oh, how I long to be where I was a year ago: midst two lofty mountains, pursuing the uneven course of the purling brook, gliding among the fair granite rocks, & lisping over the pebbles; meandering through the lowly valley, under the sweeping willows, & the waving elms, where nought is heard save the indistinct clank of anvils & the distant roaring of water as it passes gracefully over the half natural dam of the beautiful Farmington when the declining Phoebus gilds the snow capt hills & enlivens the venerable tower of Montevideo, then & there to be—“up to knees in mud & sand” chasing mush-squash! (Ahem!—I say; I did that, I did. That was I, & nobody else. It’s mine “par brevet de invention.” Entered according to the act of congress, &c.)

  This short arcadian passage is intended to be satirical, as the final lines make clear. But it thinly masks a genuine sentiment: he misses the countryside. And—surprise—he can write. Not many high school graduates today know Phoebus, the Greek Apollo, god of the sun, or use words like purling, lisping, and meandering. Evidently, despite his miseducation—and thanks to his wide reading—he has developed a reasonable command of the English language as well as a strong visual sense. He just doesn’t yet know quite what to do with these talents.

  The rest of the letter deals with family affairs. He thanks his mother for some nut cakes, inquires about his two half sisters, Mary and Bertha (to whom he has written separately), and asks to be sent a pair of suspenders and gloves. The writer sounds cheerful. There is mention neither of his work nor of his life in the city. That is likely because he had little free time to play the tourist. This was no casual apprenticeship, as had been the case with Barton; Benkard and Hutton expected its clerks to work hard and long. The typical working day was ten to twelve hours; only Sundays were free. “The business is such that I am engaged from morning to night without ceasing,” Olmsted wrote his brother shortly after arriving in New York. For someone who had never even held a summer job, it must have been a rude awakening.

  Olmsted performed his work satisfactorily, for he was put in charge of handling the petty cash, an early recognition of one of his lifelong traits—scrupulous honesty. His clerical apprenticeship taught him skills that would eventually prove valuable: bookkeeping, accounting, and office organization. Because Benkard and Hutton’s business was so intimately connected with France, French was spoken in the office, and Olmsted learned the language, which would be useful to him later. But that was in the future. Right now he wasn’t satisfied. The routine of office work did not appeal to Olmsted; nor did its discipline. As an apprentice he was at everyone’s beck and call, and at eighteen, he was rather old to be an office boy. In March 1842 he decided that the business life was not for him and returned to Hartford.

  Olmsted spent the spring and the following summer doing all those things he had missed in New York. He went riding, fishing, and shooting. He also socialized, going to parties and developing an interest in young women. He took music and dancing lessons. He went boating. In July he and his brother sailed down the Connecticut River to the sea in a new sailboat that their father had bought them (their previous boat had been stolen). In September John Hull began his studies at Yale. That fall, the Natural History Society, to which Cousin Charles had introduced Olmsted, had a visit from John James Audubon, who was setting out on a journey to Yellowstone and the Rocky Mountains. “Might I be there to see [them],” mused a wistful Olmsted. In October he did make a trip, but only as far as New Haven, to visit John. His brother’s roommate was an affable young man named Charles Loring Brace (no relation to Rev. Joab Brace). Brace, from Hartford, was already known to Olmsted and would, in time, become one of his closest friends.

  Fall turned to winter. Olmsted seemed content with his life of leisure. John Olmsted seems to have felt that he should allow his feckless son to find his own way. It was turning out, however, to be an ineffective child-rearing strategy. More than twenty years later, Olmsted’s younger, half brother Albert found himself in a similar situation: he was working in his father’s dry-goods store, but he was unhappy with the prospect of a life in business and wanted a change. He was considering whether he should study civil engineering, learn to be a watchmaker, or join the diplomatic service (he had been offered a post in Bordeaux). He turned to his older, half brother Frederick, who strongly advised him to stay put. In a touching and revealing letter to his father, Olmsted described Albert’s condition in a way that clearly echoed his own, earlier predicament:

  Ally has the difficulty which seems to me to belong to all your descendants—of an unusual slowness or feebleness in the development of his natural propensities & faculties. He does not know his own mind, and grows irregularly. He needs a mental and moral tonic, and to be freed from whatever is weakening to manly sedateness or steady vigor of character. He should on this account not allow himself to associate with persons younger than himself, but make himself the companion if possible, and if not the companion, then the apprentice or attendant of men older than himself—older in habits, as well as years. I don’t mean that he should not play, of course, for all men of every age should, but that he should look upward & not backward in the associations of his amusements as well as his work. It is better for him now, to be a confidential servant of men, than a leader of boys. I should not say this to most boys at his age [Albert was twenty-two!], but I know the family weakness at his age.

  CHAPTER SIX

  A Year Before the Mast

  OLMSTED WAS IDLE but not unoccupied. He was concocting a plan. He would go to sea. The idea was not as outlandish as it sounds. His cousin Francis had just returned from a South Seas voyage on a whaling ship. A Hartford friend, Oliver Ellsworth, was planning a trip to the Orient. “Ol will go to China anyhow,” he informed his brother, John, “even if he has to go before the mast.” The last phrase referred to Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast, recently published to great acclaim. Olmsted had read this personal narrative of a young man’s introduction to seafaring. It struck a chord. Dana was a New Englander; he had a problem with his eyes, which caused him to withdraw from Harvard. The sea voyage was to improve his health. The nineteen-year-old Dana signed on as an ordinary seaman and sailed from Boston around the Horn to San Francisco and back. Two Years Before the Mast was not an ordinary travel book—it was a cri de coeur, calculated to appeal to a young man’s idealism. “We must come down from our heights and leave our straight paths,” Dana wrote, “for the byways and low places of life, if we would learn truths by strong contrasts; and in hovels, in forecastles, and among our own outcasts in foreign lands, see what has been wrought upon our fellow-creatures by accident, hardship, or vice.” It is possible that Olmsted thought his own voyage might also provide material for a book. After all, Cousin Francis was writing a travel book—Incidents of a Whaling Trip would be published the following year. So why not him?

  His goal was to sail to the Orient—a natural choice. From his mentor, Cousin Charles, he heard how his great-uncle Aaron Olmsted had made his fortune in the China trade. As a young boy, he had lis
tened to the yarns of another mariner, his grandfather Benjamin Olmsted, a colorful character who wore his hair in a pigtail and carried a silver-headed malacca cane. Benjamin made a strong impression on the young boy. (Olmsted later inherited the cane and kept it with him the rest of his life.) Though Benjamin died when Olmsted was ten, his great-uncle Gideon, the naval hero, was a living reminder of the family’s seagoing tradition.

  Olmsted was lured by thoughts of adventure and the promise of seeing far-off places, but he had another incentive. He was aware that his uncomplaining parents were worried about his future. Perhaps he was even beginning to be a little ashamed of his indolence—it was almost a year since he had returned from New York. Although he definitely didn’t want to be a businessman or a surveyor, he was unable to decide which occupation to follow. Going to sea at least gave the appearance of pursuing a career, and he was half-serious. This was not a pleasure cruise. He had no intention of going as a gentleman “with his gloves on,” as Dana put it—he would sail “before the mast,” as a common seaman. Or, at least, an apprentice seaman. Merchant ships regularly took on two or three “green boys,” in addition to their regular complement. Olmsted was no longer a boy (he was almost twenty-one), but he was certainly green in seafaring.