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

by Rybczynski, Witold

  Meanwhile, Frederick Olmsted the was busy improving his farm. In August The Horticulturist printed his letter (his first formally published writing) that asked about growing fruit trees in exposed, coastal locations. “I intend to set an orchard, next autumn,” he explained. Downing’s printed response advised liberal manuring and cultivation and recommended several apple varieties particularly suited to the seashore. That fall Olmsted harvested his potatoes. “Shall have a better crop than my neighbors,” he informed Fred Kingsbury. “I shall send a parcel of them to New York at 371/2 cents.” In October he traveled to Newburgh and purchased seventy-five apple trees and sixty quinces from Downing’s nursery. On the way back, he stopped in New York. He met the well-known architect Alexander Jackson Davis, to discuss plans for a new house.1 Davis did not think much of Olmsted’s sketches, but presumably as a favor to his friend Downing, he agreed to prepare a design. By early November, Olmsted had planted the fruit trees. As part of his beautification efforts, he also put in a dozen ornamental trees near the shore. They “make quite a pretty show,” he proudly wrote his brother, although he worried that he might lose many of them on such an exposed site.

  Just after settling in at Sachem’s Head, Olmsted had written to his brother: “The farm generally pleases me well. There is a good deal more beautiful and valuable wood on it than I had supposed. But then—again—there’s more rocks, and there are not so many apple-trees, and the barn and house are in worse condition than I had thought them to be.” It is a realistic assessment; he did not underestimate what needed to be done. Olmsted was a novice, but knowledgeable about farming and not unprepared. George Geddes, a sound judge of both character and agriculture, recognized Olmsted’s abilities and treated him as a protégé. Luther Tucker, the publisher of The Cultivator, took him seriously, as did Andrew Jackson Downing. It is possible—although improbable—that Olmsted would have made such a serious error of judgment as to establish himself on a farm that was commercially unproductive.2 But George Geddes, a sober individual and a seasoned farmer, was unlikely to have encouraged his young friend in any rash course. Nevertheless, the rocky point was hardly an ideal or easy site. As his brother sardonically put it, “There had been some vague doubt whether Fred could ever make out to live off the Sachem’s Head farm, suggested perhaps by the fact that some $1000. had been expended on it to enable the total crops to be worth $200.”

  When I visited Sachem’s Head, I understood why Olmsted had fallen in love with the place. The farms—of which there were several—are long gone. But the irregular, boulder-lined shore, the tidal creeks and saltwater marshes, and the gentle hillocks are all still there. It is not merely pretty, it is heart-stoppingly beautiful. I tried to find Olmsted’s house. Unfortunately, about seven years ago it was so extensively altered that, for all practical purposes, it has disappeared. The view from what would have been Olmsted’s porch looks across a sheltered cove to another peninsula, Long Point. On the high ground between the two stood Sachem’s Head House (it burned down in 1865). The promontory of Great Point is gone, too, quarried level for its granite, which proved to be the most profitable product of this land. By the 1880s, though, the same beautiful scenery that had drawn the young Olmsted here had helped to turn Sachem’s Head into a successful summer colony, complete with its own yacht club. Today it is a community of understated but obviously expensive year-round houses, scattered picturesquely across the landscape.

  The scenic qualities of the farm did not impress Olmsted’s father. He thought that the cost of improvements, such as a new house or more attractive landscaping, would have little effect on the financial value of the farm. He had occasionally invested in land, and as a businessman he expected his investments to be productive. For example, after he bought a ten-acre woodlot for his two sons, he had Frederick, who was apprenticing on the Brooks farm in nearby Cheshire, spend a week there cutting trees. The trees were to be sold, and he expected—and received—a detailed accounting. So, too, with the Sachem’s Head farm. It belonged to Frederick, but on the unspoken condition that he manage it to his father’s satisfaction. In this case, parental largess came with strings attached.

  John Olmsted was interested in scientific farming—he subscribed to several agricultural journals—but he did not have confidence in his son’s abilities to turn Sachem’s Head into a model farm. When Olmsted described his plans for the future, his father remembered the enthusiastic youth who had wanted to be a surveyor one year and a merchant the next. It is not uncommon for parents—especially loving parents—to fail to realize that their adult children are children no longer, and to treat them accordingly. For most of us, receiving unsolicited critiques of our driving—or of our housekeeping—is a temporary inconvenience, nothing more. But when we are financially dependent on our parents, as Olmsted was, the inconvenience may have graver implications.

  In mid-December 1847 Olmsted dutifully accompanied his brother to Staten Island to look over the Akerly farm. They returned to Hartford on Christmas Eve. A few days after the holiday, Olmsted and his father returned to New York and finalized the purchase. Three weeks later, Olmsted signed over the Sachem’s Head farm to his father, “for the consideration of four thousand dollars,” which was the price he had originally paid.3 It is unclear why Olmsted sold the farm to his father. One possible explanation is that to encourage his son to move, John Olmsted may have agreed to buy the Sachem’s Head farm, thus providing his son with funds to purchase the Akerly farm. But the new farm was larger—125 acres—and more expensive, $13,000 (almost $400,000 in modern dollars). Where did the rest of the money come from? “Father bought it,” was how John Hull described it to Kingsbury. That makes it sound like an outright gift; in fact, there was a mortgage. A decade later, in a letter to his father, Olmsted would mention leasing the farm to a tenant, “for the interest on mortgage & taxes and 1/4 fruit.” Another letter makes it clear that the mortgage was held by John Olmsted himself. That would explain his son’s regular and detailed reports of his farming activities over the years.

  • • • •

  The Akerly farm was also by the sea, which appealed to Olmsted, and Staten Island was less remote than Sachem’s Head. With New York so close there was the promise of a more active social life. In March Olmsted boarded a sloop from the Sachem’s Head dock. He took what he could—tools, furniture, the remaining potato crop, and, of course, Nep and Minna—with him.

  He settled down to a more comfortable life on Tosomock Farm, as he eventually called it.4 The Davises were not invited to accompany him. Instead, his favorite aunt, Maria (a spinster), moved in to act as housekeeper and to oversee the servants: two maids and a boy. In addition, there were six regular field hands and occasionally one or two harvest hands. The large house was two stories high, with an attic where the help slept. There was a kitchen wing and a veranda on two sides. The lower floor, of thick stone walls, dated back two hundred years to the original Huguenot settlers; the upper stories, of wood, had been added later.

  The nine bedrooms were put to good use. John Olmsted and his entire family came for most of the first summer, as they would do regularly for the next seven years. Olmsted’s father, fifty-seven, intended to retire soon; using the Staten Island farm as a summer retreat must have figured in his decision to encourage his son to buy the farm. Olmsted’s brother, who moved to New York in the fall and began studying at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, came on Sundays and holidays. He was often accompanied by Charles Brace, who was in New York completing his theological studies and teaching part-time at Rutger’s Institute. Charles Trask, also studying theology, was a visitor, too. A less frequent guest was Fred Kingsbury, who had moved to Waterbury, Connecticut, to care for his ailing mother. Brace (in a letter to Kingsbury) has left a description of those happy summer visits.

  Just wear your feet out, Fred, in tramping over the hot pavements of New York, for a day, and become thoroughly stunned by the unceasing din; then let a kind hobgoblin transplant you to a cool piazz
a into a comfortable armchair and slippers, with a quiet country scene before you of meadows and cattle and grain-fields, and beyond, the blue waves and the white sails, and, “some more peaches in that basket yet, Charley,” and you will get a faint idea of my feelings.

  Olmsted found life more convivial, and not only because his house was large enough to accommodate visiting family and friends. Staten Island was beginning to attract permanent as well as summer residents from Manhattan, particularly after the outbreaks of yellow fever and cholera in 1832, and the Great Fire of 1835. Most of the development on Staten Island was on the north and east shore. The so-called South Side, where Olmsted lived, consisted chiefly of farms, many of them belonging to wealthy New Yorkers. His neighbors included William Henry Vanderbilt, the wealthy eldest son of the famous “Commodore”; the prominent civic leader and poet William Cullen Bryant, who was also owner and editor of the Evening Post; the book publisher George Palmer Putnam; and Judge William Emerson, brother of the famous writer. Olmsted was at home with these people, who represented the kind of society he was used to in Hartford and New Haven. They, in turn, recognized him as one of their own.

  Another of his nearby neighbors was Dr. Cyrus Perkins, a prosperous retired New York surgeon whom Olmsted met soon after arriving on Staten Island. Perkins’s household at Holly Hill Farm consisted of his wife and an orphaned granddaughter with whom Olmsted became friendly. “Just the thing for a rainy day” is how he described her to Kingsbury. “Not to fall in love with, but to talk to. A real earnest thinker and only 19.” Actually she was barely eighteen, but Mary Cleveland Bryant Perkins was exceptionally bright. She had grown up in celebrated literary company: Daniel Webster was a relative, William Cullen Bryant’s wife was her godmother. Orphaned at the age of eight, she had grown up with her well-to-do grandparents, whose household had provided her with a grounding in both art and culture. Pretty, petite, and lively, she soon became an intimate of the Olmsted family, so much so that she was invited to spend that Christmas in Hartford. She has left us with this sketch of Olmsted at Tosomock Farm:

  Frederick was at this time 26 years of age full of life and fun. He threw himself into farming with enthusiasm, introduced system and order to his men, expecting for one thing that at knocking off time every tool used should be returned to its appointed place and that every “chore” should be done at the hour fixed, the foreman to report progress before going in to supper. He engaged in planting and dealing in fruit-trees, pears principally, which he imported from France. All was done in a simple inexpensive way, using the old buildings on the place and practicing rigid economy.

  There was much to do, for the land was in a poor state. The house, on a slight rise, overlooked Raritan Bay. The fields in front of the house sloped down about a quarter of a mile to the water’s edge. Across the bay one could see the lighthouse of Sandy Hook, and the Navesink Hills of New Jersey. The farm stretched about a mile from the shore to the Main Road (now called Amboy Road). The back part of the farm, near the road, was heavily wooded. Olmsted created some scenic effects. He moved the barns and outbuildings away from the house to a more discreet location behind a knoll and rerouted the approach road to the house so that it followed a graceful curve. He sodded the area around a utilitarian barnyard pond at the rear of the house and added water plants to further enhance the scenic effect. “Thus, with a few strokes and at a small expense he transformed the place from a very dirty, disagreeable farmyard to a gentleman’s house,” wrote Kingsbury.

  Tosomock Farm is long gone. It was productive until the 1880s, although no longer owned by Olmsted. Then, since Staten Island had grown popular with vacationing New Yorkers, the farm was turned into a summer resort known as the Woods of Arden. The grounds had facilities for picnicking, boating, swimming; the farmhouse was converted into an inn. Twenty years later, the land was subdivided into residential lots and developed as Seaside Estates. I wanted to see the place where Olmsted would spend—on and off—more than seven years of his life. I parked my car on Hylan Boulevard, a road that did not exist in Olmsted’s time and now runs across what would have been the front of the property. Despite its name it is really a mundane commercial strip, densely lined with suburban bungalows, garages, and drive-in restaurants. The street number that I was looking for was indicated on a faded sign. A grass-covered track led into a dense forest, presumably what has survived of the Arden woods. I walked up the track with a growing sense of anticipation, for I could see the outline of a white building among the dense trees. It was a house. The porch had long since rotted away, and the roof had been altered at one end, but I had no doubt that this was the Olmsted farmhouse, a sketch of which has survived. A large, old cedar of Lebanon grew in front of the house, most likely one of a number that Olmsted had imported from France and planted in the winter of 1850 as part of his early landscaping improvements. That the building exterior was almost intact and had not been self-consciously preserved or restored made seeing it all the more moving.

  The changes at Tosomock Farm must have impressed his neighbors. Olmsted was consulted by several of them, including William Vanderbilt, about landscaping improvements to their properties. Friendly, literate, energetic, the young bachelor farmer made himself useful in the South Side community. He championed a plank road for the island; drawing on his experience with Geddes, he wrote about the subject for the local newspaper, the Staten Isler. He became a trustee of the local school board and a founding member of the county agricultural society. In his capacity as the society’s corresponding secretary, he penned an “Appeal to the Citizens of Staten Island,” encouraging them to support the society. It concluded:

  We believe [the society] 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.

  Ostensibly about farming, the statement is representative of the broad, encompassing vision that Olmsted is beginning to develop. It reflects his reading of Carlyle, Emerson, Ruskin, and Downing. He is trying to combine economics, aesthetics, landscaping, nature, moral and intellectual improvement, and salvation. It is a bewildering mix of ideas, but he is persevering. He is making his own way.

  * * *

  1. Davis, Downing’s friend and frequent collaborator, had contributed to the Treatise. He was a prolific residential architect and one of the earliest champions of the early Gothic Revival.

  2. The farm was certainly productive when Olmsted bought it. The deed specifically reserves from sale “all the Rye now standing on Sd. land.”

  3. Six years after buying the farm from his son, John Olmsted sold it to Dan L. Benton Jr., a local farmer, for $4,000, the same amount it had cost to buy.

  4. I have been unable to identify the source of Tosomock. Perhaps it is a combination of “toss” and “amock,” which would mean “flinging oneself headlong,” a good characterization of Olmsted’s frame of mind.

  CHAPTER TEN

  A Walking Tour in the Old Country

  FOR THE NEXT TWO YEARS Olmsted devoted himself to farming. He is sometimes described as a gentleman farmer. He was certainly a gentleman and his landscaping improvements did have a purely aesthetic purpose, but Tosomock was hardly a hobby farm. He grew corn, hay, cabbages, turnips, and potatoes. After one season he concluded that he could not make a living growing ordinary crops. It cost him more to improve the fields than he could earn from selling the produce. He calculated that fruit trees, on the other hand, would pay for themselves in four years. He decided on pears. He also intended to establish a nursery business. This was a shrewd plan. Olmsted, who thus far had relied on his father’s continued generosity to make ends meet, intended to make his farm profitable. But he understood the risks involved in simple farming. Although proximity to New
York solved the problem of transportation, without effective means for long-term storage, perishables such as pears had to be sold immediately to avoid spoilage. Competition was fierce and prices were low. Moreover, urban markets had their own peculiar problems. Summer outbreaks of cholera in New York interrupted demand, leaving farmers in the lurch. A nursery business, on the other hand, was less susceptible to market and price fluctuations—trees could stay in the ground and could be shipped easily over longer distances, increasing the potential number of customers. It was a good moment to embark on a nursery business. Thanks to the publications of Downing and others, it had become fashionable to beautify the surroundings of houses, especially in places like Staten Island and the environs of New York where suburban and summer residences were proliferating. So-called landscape gardeners provided this service; they required nurseries that could supply them with ornamental and shade trees.

  Olmsted ordered a number of saplings—dwarf pears—from Flushing, while an English neighbor and fellow member of the agricultural society suggested importing trees from Europe. Olmsted investigated shipping costs and calculated that he could make a profit of up to 100 percent. He was enthusiastic about the prospects. “In five years I shall expect to be in receipt of some hundred or two dollars from them . . . and thereafter it will be continually increasing,” he wrote Kingsbury. He felt himself well qualified to be a nurseryman; he understood landscape gardening, and he had experience in trade, especially international trade, which he hoped would give him an advantage. He also had sufficient business acumen. Cultivating trees on a commercial scale both appealed to his interest in scientific farming and satisfied his sense of planning and organization.