Olmsted spent only six months at Fairmount, but it was an important part of his education. Geddes’s interests were as broad as Olmsted’s; he enjoyed conversation and debate. He was relatively young—thirty-seven. His father had been a prominent engineer who had surveyed the course of the Erie Canal. Although George had studied law, he, too, had been engaged in civil engineering: railroad construction, coal mining, and land drainage. Olmsted had never met anyone like him. David Brooks and Joseph Welton had been accomplished farmers, but Geddes was a true gentleman farmer. That is, he combined scientific farming with a gentlemanly way of life. The latter involved maintaining genteel standards at home—tea was served each afternoon, and “silver forks every day,” Olmsted boasted to his father. Being a gentleman also meant a responsibility to the common good. While Olmsted was with him, Geddes was overseeing the construction of the first plank road (a wooden precursor of paving) in the United States. He was active in the local agricultural society and was also a prominent lay leader in the local Methodist church.
George Geddes became another in a long line of older men who befriended Olmsted. He was his mentor—and a model. Olmsted undertook an irrigation project for the farm’s vegetable garden. He accompanied Geddes to local fairs and wrote a report for the agricultural society on farming utensils. He taught a Sunday-school class at two different neighborhood churches and assembled a library for one of them. “I think my taste for study and reading has rather increased,” he wrote Brace. He read many farm journals and, of course, Downing’s Horticulturist. An abolitionist, a pacifist, and an advocate of world peace, Geddes introduced Olmsted to the peace-reform journal Christian Citizen and the antislavery newspaper True American.
“This has been a good place for me. I have looked on and talked more than I’ve worked, but I’ve considerable faith that I shall make a good farmer,” Olmsted informed Brace. His conversations with Geddes had reinforced his confidence in his choice of a career. Being away from Hartford and New Haven also gave him some perspective. He still cast wistful glances in the direction of Lizzie Baldwin. “Does Miss (you know) feel any way delicate about me?” he inquired of Kingsbury. There was some talk of her visiting Camillus, but nothing came of it. By then he was distracted by Sarah Porter, the pretty eighteen-year-old niece of Geddes’s wife, Maria. “You ask who Sara [sic] Porter is,” he wrote his father. “She’s a plaguy fine girl I calculate. And my business over there is probably to fall in love with her.” Nothing came of that, either.
Although he corresponded regularly with all his friends at Yale, the relative isolation of Camillus allowed him to develop more independent religious views. He found Geddes’s Methodism too narrow. He did come close to formally joining the Presbyterian congregation where he taught Sunday school, but changed his mind at the last minute. He thought he might became an Episcopalian because that faith appeared to him less doctrinaire. He was attracted by Unitarianism. Finally, he confessed to Fred Kingsbury, it was unlikely that he would join any church. He went on to make this rather priggish affirmation of his beliefs.
I will think and act right, I will find Truth and be governed by it, so far as I can, with the light God is pleased to give me. I will be accountable to none but God for my opinions and actions. Trusting in Him for light I will not fear for nor care for what man thinks of, or does towards me. I am liable to mistake myself—but so far as I do judge myself, this is my paramount governing principle. I hope so anyway, and except from the consciousness of yielding to temptation, and thinking and acting contrary to my own more solemn, more rational, and better intentions—as I often do most wickedly—what can I be sorry for?
Olmsted’s skepticism about the value of religion was influenced by the author he had been reading that summer—Thomas Carlyle. The great writer had come to the public’s attention in 1837 with his history of the French Revolution, and at the time that Olmsted read him he had just established his literary reputation with the publication of the Life and Letters of Oliver Cromwell. Olmsted chose to read an earlier work, Sartor Resartus. Perhaps only someone with an educational background as irregular as Olmsted’s could be drawn to this strangely complex book. Combining philosophy, thinly veiled autobiography, and romance, Sartor Resartus (“The Tailor Re-Tailored”) defies classification. It purports to be Carlyle’s abridgment of a much longer book, Clothes, their Origin and Influence, the life’s work of Professor Diogenes Teufelsdröckh of the University of Weissnichtwo. “So have we endeavored, from the enormous, amorphous Plum-pudding, more like a Scottish Haggis, which Herr Teufelsdröckh had kneaded for his fellow mortals, to pick-out the choicest Plums, and present them separately on a cover of our own,” explained Carlyle. To complicate matters still further, Sartor Resartus contained additional biographical material and “interviews” with the elusive Teufelsdröckh himself. A haggis, indeed.
The German professor was an obvious fabrication—Teufelsdröckh is “devil’s dung”; Weissnichtwo is “nobody-knows-where.” But Sartor Resartus, despite its sometimes harsh humor, was not intended to be a parody. Carlyle described the material world as clothing, covering the invisible spiritual world that lay beneath. The material world was shabby and worn and needed to be replaced. This, according to Carlyle, accounted for the pessimism and confusion of his time. The answer was for the individual to rediscover his ethical and moral center through a transcendent experience, something akin to religious conversion. This would occur not by subscribing to religious dogma, however, but through simple, everyday work. “Produce! Produce!” Teufelsdröckh/Carlyle railed in characteristic pulpit-thumping style. “Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it, in God’s name! T’is the utmost thou hast in thee; out with it, then. Up, up! Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole might. Work while it is called Today; for the Night cometh, wherein no man can work.”
Sartor Resartus had been neither a critical nor a popular success. It first appeared as a series of magazine articles, and when Carlyle finally found someone to publish the book, it was received with “unqualified dissatisfaction.” The British public didn’t know what to make of the author’s alternating comic and solemn tone, nor of his idiosyncratic, mannered prose. The book did better in America. It certainly appealed to Olmsted, who described Carlyle as “the greatest genius in the world. . . . I perfectly wonder and stand awe-struck as I would at a Hurricane.”
Carlyle presents a view of the world that is romantic and idealistic—such books have always appealed to the young. I remember reading Herman Hesse’s Magister Ludi and J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye when I was in my twenties and thinking them extraordinarily profound. I suspect I would not find them so today. Still, such books do mark us. This was the case with Olmsted. Sartor Resartus dealt with questions that he was asking himself. (Curiously, Teufelsdröckh even suffered a rebuff from a highborn lady, just as Olmsted had from Lizzie Baldwin.) The hardheaded Scottish Puritanism at the core of Carlyle’s thinking would have been familiar to a New Englander. So would the notion of personal conversion. The critique of organized religion mirrored Olmsted’s own thinking and provided a way out of his religious dilemma. He embraced the idea that work and obligation to others could lead to redemption, a philosophy that would guide him for the rest of his life.1
Olmsted’s summer at Camillus was interrupted by a two-week vacation trip that he took with his father and brother to Niagara Falls, Montreal, Quebec City, and Lake Champlain. He returned to Fairmount for one more month while considering whether to work on another farm or to start out on his own. Geddes encouraged him to establish himself nearby, but Olmsted wanted to return to Connecticut. He had his eye on a farm that had come up for sale on the shore of Long Island Sound, at Sachem’s Head, about ten miles east of New Haven. The seaside location undoubtedly attracted him, as did the proximity to New Haven and Hartford. Sachem’s Head, only a few miles from the village of North Guilford, was familiar territory, the site of family summer holidays and in an area that he knew well from boyhoo
d rambles while he had boarded with the kindly Reverend Mr. Whitmore.
His father gave him the money to buy the farm. In March 1847 he moved from Hartford to Sachem’s Head. His brother, John, spiritedly described the scene:
Fred went off in great style yesterday. He had loaded a horse-cart with tools and ‘fixins’ and bought a big New-found-land dog, which was chained to the cart drawn by the pony (a wee bit of a Canadian animal)—a yoke of big oxen tied behind and Pepper, the white terrier, seeing to everything and taking an interest generally. I overhauled him at Wetherfield on Jerry, and, adding him behind the cart and driving the cart while Fred gave his undivided attention to hurrying up the cattle—“Whoa, gee up, get along, stock.” Didn’t people look—and stop and ask—“been buying?” Neptune, the dog, got into the cart at Middletown and we were followed by a regular crowd who thought it was a bear show. I saw him safely through Middletown, and left him at 3 o’clock, going towards Guilford at 2 miles the hour.
Fred is quite excited about farming and is going into it like a trooper—a retired trooper, I mean.
Author’s note: I have not taken liberties with Olmsted’s biography; his words are his own, his opinions are those that he expressed to others, usually in letters. Yet I also want to see the world through his eyes. The vignette that follows—and there will be others—is based on material evidence; Olmsted was writing a letter on that night and it was stormy. His thoughts and feelings are, of course, imagined.
Great Point, Sachem’s Head, Connecticut
Tuesday, October 12, 1847
It is late at night. The wind is howling. A storm blows from the south, across the Sound, and slams into the Connecticut coast. Near the shore stands a lone farmhouse. There is no moon, and the building would be barely discernible in the darkness were it not for the faint glow visible of a ground-floor window. Inside, Olmsted sits at a table, alone, writing a letter. There is a temporary lull, and it’s suddenly quiet enough so that he can hear the scratching of his pen and the restless movements of Neptune. Minna, the cat, and her kittens are asleep in a box in the corner. The wind resumes. A great gust rattles the windows and dislodges pieces of mortar that fall down the chimney. The house creaks and groans. Surely it can’t be blown over, he thinks.
He dislikes this house. It is more than eighty years old and in disrepair. Worse, it’s downright forlorn. The man who built it was a disgraced Guilford Congregational minister, driven out of the village by a charge of “grossly licentious & scandalous conduct.” His poverty—and despair—are evident in the house. It has none of the picturesque qualities described in Downing’s books. Never mind. He has been sketching a new house. It’s part of his plan to make this into a model farm. In his mind’s eye he sees the land remade. In front of the house there’s a large lawn sloping down to the water’s edge. Its green expanse is broken up by clumps of trees. A line of low, thick shrubbery curves from the house toward the shore. There’s also a new barn and an orchard. Next week he intends to go buy fruit trees from Downing’s nursery in Newburgh. Perhaps Downing will be able to recommend an architect who can look over his house sketches. But first he has to get the farm in working order. The previous owner has let things go, but all that’s needed is a little work. Actually, it’s more than a little. Since moving here in March, he and his hired man have spent the entire spring hauling up seaweed from the beach and fertilizing the fields. They have pruned the gnarled old apple trees and planted corn, wheat, barley, and potatoes. He hopes they will fetch a good price in New York.
He goes back to his letter. He is writing to Brace, who is back in New Haven. Charley graduated, taught in country schools for a year, and is now at the Yale Divinity School. As for Kingsbury, he, too, has continued at Yale—ever the more practical of the two, Fred has chosen the law. He wonders what they’re doing tonight. Probably studying. He remembers his months at Yale. He was never good at studying, but he did enjoy the conversations and debates. There hasn’t been much of that in his life recently. He wryly recalls last year asking Fred, “Do you think I shall be contented on a farm—fifteen miles from New Haven, and three miles from neighbors? I mean civilized ones, gentlemen, doctors, lawyers, and ministers.” Actually, about a dozen houses stand on Sachem’s Head, enough families to support the small schoolhouse. But as he guessed, his immediate neighbors are sturdy, simple farmers. He knows that they find his beautification efforts foolish. “Setting out bushes,” one calls it, and he can hear the barely hidden scorn in their voices. Nor has he met any civilized gentlemen in the village. He has introduced himself to the Congregational minister—he attends the church on the town green every Sunday—but the pastor has not turned out to be a kindred spirit. On the whole he is disappointed in Guilford. It lacks the kind of social and intellectual life to which he has become accustomed.
Thank goodness he has been able to find entertaining company elsewhere. His social life centers on nearby Sachem’s Head House. The two-hundred-and-fifty-room hotel is the largest summer resort on the Connecticut coast. He remembers staying here with his family as a boy. It is a favorite of proper people from Hartford, who come down by stagecoach on the new turnpike; visitors from New York and New Haven arrive by steamboat. He often runs into friends and acquaintances. What a time he had there last summer. He’d met his old Hartford neighbor, the Reverend Horace Bushnell, and taken him out sailing for two hours. It had been a chance to talk theology with the eminent clergyman. Later, the two had played ninepins against George Geddes, also staying at the hotel, and Judge Bronson, the impressive chief justice of the New York State Supreme Court. Olmsted and Bushnell trounced the distinguished pair. Geddes, who scored lowest, was quite put out by Bushnell’s victory.
The Head House is a short walk from his farm. He goes there frequently, especially on those evenings when there is dancing. His main partner all summer has been eighteen-year-old Ellen Day of Hartford. People were even starting to talk about them as a possible couple. He likes Ellen well enough, but it is really her older sister Mary who has his heart. He has known Mary for some years but fell in love with her only the year before, after Lizzie Baldwin had turned him down.
His father, too, came down to Sachem’s Head House, in July, bringing all his children with him. They were accompanied by his cousin Fanny and Uncle Owen, with whom he had stayed in upstate New York as a six-year-old. It had been fun to see them all, especially his brother. John was happy to be in the hotel. He had visited earlier and stayed at the farm, but didn’t seem to like it much. Well, John was hardly in the best of spirits, what with his recent eye problems, but it was a pity that he couldn’t be more enthusiastic about his brother’s plans for the farm.
His father is likewise unimpressed with his agricultural efforts. His father seems to be skeptical that the cost of the improvements, not to mention the additional expense of building a new house, can ever be recovered. The amount of productive land is simply too small, he points out, and the cost of shipping produce to New York cuts into profits. It is true that most of the promontory that makes up Great Point is granite, making less than forty of his seventy-five acres arable. This is a lot smaller than the other farms he and his father visited. But Sachem’s Head could be such a beautiful farm! George Geddes thought so when he came to inspect it prior to the sale last year; so did everyone else whom he had asked for advice. Now his father—who, after all, is paying for everything—is having second thoughts. He’s even hinting that rather than throw good money after bad, it might be a better idea to buy a larger, more productive farm.
Sometimes he thinks his father may be right. Perhaps he did make a mistake moving here. It’s not the farm—he is still sure he can make a go of it. He’s not afraid of the work. Nor of the weather. He is willing to put up with occasional storms in return for the pleasure of sailing, swimming, and the views of the sea. But he’s lonely. Since the end of August the hotel has been closed. No more evening dances, no more teas, no more conversation. His everyday life has become cramped and narrow.
He works, eats, and sleeps. The hired man, Henry Davis, is a nice enough sort, but not someone he can talk with about anything other than farm business. The field hand and the maidservant, who live on the second floor, are even less loquacious. Alas, Davis’s wife is not a good cook. The couple have the room next door. He can hear their baby crying.
A gust of wind rattles the shutters and drives the rain hard against the windowpanes. He goes outside, partly to check on the barn, and partly just to enjoy the blustery weather. He looks back to the rocky promontory, west of the house. He shudders to remember that this is said to be the site of the oak tree where a Pequot sachem’s severed head had once been exposed to serve as a warning to his fellow tribesmen with whom the English settlers were battling. Probably just a story, and two hundred years old now, although he has found a weathered old oak stump on the bluff. He walks toward the shore. Across the water he can see the dark hulk of the hotel. He can also see the white foam of the surf. There is a low booming sound, far away. The locals say it is the roar of the breakers on the exposed Atlantic shore of Long Island. The storm reminds him of his time at sea. God have mercy on sailors on a night like this, he thinks. He goes back inside, turns down the lamp, and goes to bed. Nep snores contentedly.
* * *
1. Two years later, Olmsted jokingly referred to his farm on Staten Island as Entepfuhl. Entepfuhl (“duck pond”) was the name Carlyle gave to Teufelsdröckh’s childhood village.
CHAPTER NINE
More Farming
DURING THE SUMMER that John Olmsted and his children stayed at Sachem’s Head House, one of the other guests was Samuel Bowne of New York, whose wife had inherited a farm on the death of her father, Dr. Samuel Akerly. The Akerly farm was on the so-called South Side of Staten Island, in the vicinity of Eltingville. John Olmsted already knew about the farm, which had been on the market for two years. He expressed an interest to Bowne, who had extended an invitation to visit the farm, although nothing further was decided at that point.
A Clearing In The Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Cent Page 7