• • • •
While Olmsted was resting in Hartford, his brother, John, was back at Yale, repeating his sophomore year because a persistent respiratory ailment had forced him to skip classes the previous fall. That winter, his father had sent John on a three-month trip to the warm West Indies; he returned to Hartford two weeks after the Ronaldson berthed. Olmsted scolded his brother about studying too hard and not allowing himself more time for relaxation: “It’s no wonder you got Consumption. Lord bless—’twould give a cat ‘fits’ to be mewed up in the style you propose.” Olmsted went on to parody his brother’s pedantic schedule: “After breakfast study and read (your selection’l do) ten or fifteen minutes, or from that to a couple of hours. Then make your calls—till twelve. Take an observation, square the yards, & write up your log. Bear a hand with it, so as to have time to write a few pages (of postscript) to Fred. Then go to soup—(‘Soup’s ready sir!’ Steward) with a clear conscience.”
Olmsted’s letters to his brother and his friends were larded with nautical language. It’s obvious that he relished his romantic and adventurous seafaring image, and he was dining out on his year before the mast. But playing at being a retired sailor was hardly an occupation. He still didn’t know what he was going to do with himself. Here is a self-portrait of the period—characteristically disparaging, but also characteristically unsentimental.
In study I am wonderfully lazy or weak and very soon get tired out. I am romantic—fanciful—jump at conclusions and yet always find headaches or convenient excuses when I want them. I have a smattering education—a little sum, from most everything useful to such a man as I—learned as I took a fancy to it. Of Arithmetic, I cypher 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 of my own country—except what I have got incidently [sic]. I can’t even spell such a word as that right.
He wasn’t cut out to be a scholar, that seemed clear. He didn’t like taking orders and he valued his independence. Working under others, whether in a trading house or aboard ship, didn’t appeal to him. He did like the outdoors and he was not averse to manual work. But what, exactly, was he suited for?
His next career choice was less dramatic than going to sea, and less ambitious than making his way in the hurly-burly of New York. He thought he might try farming. This time, he proceeded cautiously. Was he really wiser, or was he encouraged to be prudent? I can imagine his father advising him: “I’ll help you, Frederick, but this time don’t rush into it. Spend a few months on a farm. See how you like it. Then decide.” There was no shortage of relatives who were farmers. His mother’s sister Linda had married David Brooks, whose farm, in nearby Cheshire, Frederick and John had walked to as children. He decided to start by working on his uncle’s farm.
He spent the fall and winter of 1844—almost five months—in Cheshire. Once the harvest was in, he had plenty of free time and resumed his social life. Undoubtedly, the Cheshire girls were even more susceptible to the charms of the young “sailor.” There was gossip—unfounded, he assured his father—of an engagement to one of Judge Basset’s daughters. I’m not sure how seriously Olmsted took his apprenticeship. Probably not very seriously. “I like Cheshire pretty well,” he wrote Abby Clark, but he made no mention of his farming activities. Instead, he recounted local news—an upcoming Valentine’s Day tea party—and maudlin gossip. The letter comes alive in one beautiful descriptive passage.
The effect of the ice on the evergreens is peculiarly rich. There are half a dozen young hemlocks, which I set out by the window here in the fall, and they do appear magnificent. Two of them (as I address you) have bowed their beautiful heads crown’d with fleecy light to the very ground. But where they stretch up out of the shade of the house, how splendidly their dark green feathery spray, waving and trembling with its load of twinkling brilliants, shivers and glistens in the clear bright moonlight—like the green tresses of a mermaid toss’d in the foam of a breaking wave.
This is the earliest writing I have come across in which Olmsted describes not merely a landscape, but a landscape that he has had a hand in creating.
In March he was back in Hartford. Apparently, he didn’t feel that there was much more to learn from his uncle, though he was still interested in farming. Frederick Kingsbury, a classmate of John’s, had a suggestion. One of his father’s neighbors, Joseph Welton, was a young farmer of whom Kingsbury thought highly. Why didn’t Frederick spend a few months with the Weltons? Olmsted agreed—he liked Kingsbury and valued his opinion.
Olmsted spent only three months on the Welton farm. Though not a long time, it convinced him that this was indeed the life for him. Farm-work agreed with him. He felt fit. He found he could keep up with “the boss,” working all day hoeing potatoes. (He was not a hired hand; John Olmsted paid for his son’s apprenticeships.) He boasted to his brother of regularly boxing with one of Welton’s men. It was a cheerful household. Joseph and his wife, Mary, were good people, active in community affairs, happy in their marriage. Olmsted confessed to his brother that he would put off his own marriage for another two or three years, until he had a farm of his own. He thought it would be a good idea to be engaged sooner, however, since once he was settled down he would have “no good opportunity of selection.” In any event, he hoped to be married before he was twenty-eight. This was a new side of Frederick Olmsted: enthusiasm tempered by planning.
His time on the Welton farm exposed him to a different approach to agriculture. He discovered that there was more to farming than merely outdoor work. Joseph Welton was an educated man—he had taught school before becoming a farmer. Running his farm and nursery business according to the latest principles, many of which he read about in the monthly magazine The Cultivator, he was, in the language of the times, a “scientific farmer.”
According to the 1840 census, almost 90 percent of Americans lived in rural areas. The majority of these people were farmers. But between 1810 and 1840 agriculture in the northeast United States underwent a major change. As cities and towns provided new markets for foodstuffs, subsistence farming was being replaced by commercial agriculture. At the same time, the traditional farms of the Northeast faced new competition from the more productive farms of the Midwest. Midwestern farmers could ship their grains and livestock to Eastern cities by railroad and canal. Perishable products, however, could not be shipped such distances. So, farmers in New York and New England began to specialize in milk, butter, cheese, vegetables, and fruits, establishing dairy herds and planting orchards. Commercialization and specialization required new knowledge of fertilizers, plant nutrition, and field drainage, a knowledge based not on traditional practice but on science. Scientific farming was pioneered in Britain, but thanks to horticultural societies—and to magazines like The Cultivator—it spread rapidly in the United States. This type of farming, based on learning and investment capital, required a different kind of farmer: part businessman, part applied scientist.
Olmsted understood business, and applied science suited him to a tee. He became an avid reader of The Cultivator. Although he didn’t see himself as a scholar, in fact his active intellect demanded to be engaged. Scientific farming provided the right blend of theory and practice. He confessed to Charles Brace:
For myself, I have every reason to be satisfied with my prospects. I grow more contented—or more fond of my business every day. Really, for a man that has any inclination for Agriculture the occupation is very interesting. And if you look closely, you will be surprised to see how much honorable attention and investigation is being connected with it.
If he wanted to be a scientific farmer, he would need some formal training. In the fall of 1845 he left Welton’s farm and, after a brief sojourn in Hartford, traveled to New Haven. He intended to sit in on classes at Yale, although since he was not a regular student there is no record of which lectures he attended. Yale offered a chance to spend some time with his brother and his circle o
f friends. The latter included, in particular, Charles Loring Brace, Frederick Kingsbury, and Charles Trask. In a contemporary studio photograph of the whole group, Brace, a rawboned youth, stares intently at the camera. Trask and Kingsbury have noncommittal looks. John Olmsted leans on Kingsbury, with his arm cocked on his hip and a coy half-smile on his face. He is strikingly handsome, with dark hair and large eyes. Frederick sits next to Brace, with his hand around his shoulder and his head turned away from the camera as he looks toward his friend. Unaccountably, Frederick alone is wearing leather gloves. Like the others, his hair is fashionably long. The photographer has placed an open book and a newspaper in the foreground. The five are dressed alike, in dark suits. But their patterned vests and floppy cravats give them a romantic air.
“A most uncommon set of common friends,” Brace called them. Their similar costumes masked different backgrounds, and different futures. Trask, whose father was a sea captain, was intending to be a minister. Brace, four years younger than Olmsted, was a formidable athlete. His father was a teacher who became head of the Hartford Female Seminary and later edited the Courant. His aunt was married to Lyman Beecher, a well-known clergyman. Brace’s family was poorer than that of the Olmsted brothers, but his intellectual background was more sophisticated. He was intensely religious and would eventually go on to Yale Divinity School and Union Theological Seminary. Kingsbury was more easygoing. Like Olmsted, he had received little formal education, but he made up for it with his quick and lively intelligence. He eventually became a local politician and a banker. If Brace was an idealist, Kingsbury was a pragmatist. It is easy to see how both would become Olmsted’s close friends—they reflected his own dual propensities.
New Haven provided a more stimulating social atmosphere than Hartford. There were literary soirées, for example, to which Yale students were sometimes invited. At one of these evenings, at the home of the governor of Connecticut, Olmsted met Elizabeth Baldwin, the governor’s daughter. He was impressed by her social graces, and by her prettiness. She was better educated than most young women of his acquaintance, and that, too, attracted him. They saw each other several times, but he was unable to pursue their friendship. That fall, he suffered a series of fainting spells. His father, with John Hull’s ill health already weighing heavily on his mind, was concerned. Finally, in January, he ordered his son home.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Farming
OLMSTED FOLLOWED A REGIMEN of cold baths and physical exercise—chiefly horseback riding—to build up his strength. One day, outside his father’s store on Main Street, Olmsted met Lizzie Baldwin, who was in Hartford visiting friends. Olmsted offered to accompany her. “I walked down in earnest & close conversation with her, westside Broadway time, twelve meridian, all white kid-dom creaking in their new boots,” he excitedly wrote Brace. “Governor’s daughter. Excellent princess. She’s a dove. Whew! I shall fill up my letter with her.” They saw each other several more times. At the end of the week, she left word that she was returning to New Haven and hoped to see him before departing. Emboldened, he asked her to go for a carriage ride. She agreed. They drove to West Hartford. “Had a good time, but no sentiment or confidential stuff at least—but a few sentences. Concert that night, fine.” He was smitten. But the dearth of “confidential stuff” did not bode well. It seemed that he had misinterpreted her interest, for when he wrote to her to ask if she would correspond with him, he was rebuffed. He soon had a chance to press his suit in person. During the spring of 1846, the young people of Connecticut were in the throes of a religious revival. When Mary Ann Olmsted, who herself had been “awakened” twenty years earlier, learned that John Hull, together with Brace and Kingsbury, was actively engaged in the revival, she urged her stepson Frederick to join him in New Haven. He didn’t need much persuading.
He saw Lizzie often during two subsequent visits to New Haven. She gave him a book for Christmas but was reluctant to move beyond friendship. Of course, without prospects or position, Olmsted was hardly a prize. But Lizzie was no snob. Later, she would turn down an eminently eligible suitor—a rich Boston businessman—and, ignoring her parents’ wishes, marry a graduate student five years her junior. She was as strong-willed as Olmsted, which surely was part of what brought them together. But she did not fall in love with him. He was “right smack & square on dead in love with her—beached & broken backed,” he confessed to his brother. At this time, he was falling in and out of love at the drop of a hat. In the same letter he also declared himself half in love with a dancing partner, Sarah Cook, and sang the praises of Olivia Day, the daughter of the president of Yale College. Still, Elizabeth Baldwin was more than a youthful infatuation. Years later he reminded her: “You lifted me a good deal out of my constitutional shyness and helped more than you can think to rouse a sort of scatter-brained pride and to make me realize that my secluded life, country breeding, and miseducation were not such bars to an ‘intellectual life’ as I was in the habit of supposing.”
His ardor cooled. He was deeply involved in the religious revival. The essence of Congregationalist revivals was the rite of personal conversion. This intense process, which could take weeks, subjected the individual to the prayers and exhortations of his friends and ultimately produced what was described as the acute experience of God’s grace, the awakening. Despite his childhood experiences with clergymen, Olmsted was earnestly interested in religion. In long conversations with Lizzie, she urged him on. But he remained indecisive. When Brace assured him that he, too, had doubts, Olmsted responded with a maritime metaphor: “Why, bless you, I’m in a real old bank fog and becalmed without steering way, at that, almost. But the sun does shine through occasionally.” Both Brace and Kingsbury succumbed to Elizabeth Baldwin’s fervor and were converted; so was John Hull, the least religious of the group. Eventually, Olmsted, too, proclaimed himself saved. It’s not easy to judge the authenticity of his awakening. It must have been a confused moment, what with the emotional encouragement of his close friends, his desire to please his parents, and his feelings for Lizzie. In any case, his conversion—if conversion it was—was incomplete. After making a public profession of faith, converts were expected to formally join a particular church. Olmsted never did.
• • • •
He remained preoccupied with farming. He was looking for a large farm where he could continue his apprenticeship and learn more of scientific agriculture. He had corresponded with George Geddes, whose three-hundred-acre farm, Fairmount, had just been awarded first prize by the New York State Agricultural Society. Olmsted wanted to meet Geddes, who lived in Camillus, New York—near Syracuse—before he finally made up his mind. In April he traveled to New York, where he could catch a steamer up the Hudson River to Newburgh, Albany, and then on to Camillus. In New York, he dropped in to see his old friends at Benkard and Hutton. James Benkard volunteered a letter of introduction to his father-in-law, who owned a farm in Newburgh. Olmsted stopped at the Sailor’s Home for news of old shipmates. He played tourist, visiting the new Trinity Church and browsing in bookstores. He treated himself to a breakfast at the Astor House, a fancy haircut, and a new plaid summer cap. In the evening, the dapper gentleman-farmer-to-be boarded a steamboat, the Santa Claus, for the first leg of his journey.
The editorial offices of The Cultivator were in Newburgh, and Olmsted had an appointment to meet its publisher, Luther Tucker, from whom he hoped to get advice about model farms. By coincidence, Olmsted arrived as Tucker was conversing with an intense young man he had recently hired to edit a new magazine, to be called The Horticulturist. That man was Andrew Jackson Downing, remembered today chiefly by historians, but in the 1840s a celebrated figure. His role as a prominent arbiter of public taste can be likened to that of Terence Conran in Britain, or Martha Stewart in the United States. In 1841, when Downing was only twenty-six, he published A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, Adapted to North America. It was the first American book on landscape gardening that combined philosophy
with practicality—both the why and the how. It also introduced its middle-class readers to the picturesque British approach to gardening. Downing was an articulate writer, and his Treatise, reprinted numerous times, was a great popular success. Although he was trained as a horticulturist—his family ran a nursery in Newburgh—his second book, Cottage Residences, was a collection of house plans designed by himself and others. He stressed an informal approach to architecture. The practical and attractive house plans were widely imitated, and in no small part thanks to Downing, Carpenter Gothic and the Hudson River Bracketed Style became staples of many Victorian private and commercial builders. Downing’s celebrity attracted many commissions for private gardens and estates. At thirty-one he was considered the national authority on gardening and domestic architecture.
Olmsted was excited to meet the famous man, although landscape gardening was not uppermost on his mind. The chief subject of conversation must have been scientific farming—Downing had just published his encyclopedic Fruits and Fruit Trees of America. Olmsted’s knowledge of agriculture evidently made a good impression. Downing asked him to keep in touch—The Horticulturist would be the first to publish Olmsted’s writing and encourage the young farmer’s literary endeavors. Tucker confirmed that Fairmount was indeed a leading example of scientific farming and provided a personal letter to George Geddes.
A Clearing In The Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Cent Page 6