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

by Rybczynski, Witold

  Only one thing was still missing in Olmsted’s life. “He is in the direct want of a wife,” his brother observed, “and would marry almost any body that would let him.” That was an exaggeration. Olmsted was a romantic. “I want somebody that I can much love and respect,” he confessed to Kingsbury, “whose tastes and feelings I shall be tender and regardful of. Don’t I. How in this world am I ever going to find her?” Mary and Ellen Day had proved to be brief romances; he had gotten over Lizzie Baldwin. He liked his neighbor’s granddaughter Mary Perkins, but no romantic attachment developed. In any case, she seemed more interested in his brother, John, who was a frequent visitor at the farm. Olmsted was not without prospects. “Fred is reading Macaulay loud to Emily Perkins & ‘Modern Painters’ to Miss Stevens—and is somewhat intoxicated between the two,” observed his brother. Emily Perkins (no relation to Mary Perkins) was a pretty Hartford girl of twenty-three whose family Olmsted had known since childhood. Sophia Stevens was a Vermonter who had come to Hartford two years earlier to teach in the high school. She boarded with the Olmsteds and had become a family friend. Her literary tastes were inherited from her father, an innkeeper and mill owner who was also a book collector and antiquarian. Sophia was an art lover, and she introduced Olmsted to John Ruskin’s Modern Painters. “The Modern Painters improves on acquaintance and Miss Stevens forms an amalgam with it in my heart. She is just the thing to read it or have it read to one by. She is very sensitive to beauty—thoughtful, penetrating, enthusiastic,” rhapsodized Olmsted. Sophia was twenty-three, and a serious, independent young woman. She was also a beauty, judging from a later portrait. Perhaps he found this combination intimidating, for he was drawn to Emily. “I have got very intimate with her and gallantry and joking aside, really think her a very fine girl,” he wrote his brother.

  There is a photograph of Olmsted in 1850. He cuts quite a dashing figure. He is elegantly attired in a high-buttoned jacket made out of what looks like serge; a white shirt-collar protrudes above the stock that is wound about his neck. Locks of hair fall over his broad brow. The self-confident pose, with the head slightly tilted and the lips pursed, is thoughtful—neither happy nor sad. The unlined, open countenance belies his twenty-eight years. The severity that Katharine Wormeley saw in his face a decade later is only hinted at, although the expressive delicacy she commented on is evident. Altogether he is a most presentable young gentleman.

  He accompanied Miss Perkins and Miss Stevens to literary evenings and book clubs during his regular visits to Hartford. (The “reading loud” that his brother commented on was a form of courtship, like going to the movies today.) Olmsted’s love of books was genuine. He started to build a library at Tosomock Farm, going to bookshops on his trips to New York, and buying books at auction. “There are a lot of books that are essential to even a common library—or a country tavern parlor—that I have not got,” he wrote his brother. “Such buy if you can, without fail.” He read on a wide variety of subjects: everything he could find on scientific farming, horticulture, and the cultivation of pear trees; books on landscape scenery such as William Marshall’s Planting and Rural Ornament; Thomas Babington Macaulay’s History of England; philosophical and religious tracts, including Bushnell’s God in Christ; a translation of Schiller’s William Tell.

  He also read travel books. One of his favorites was Benjamin Silliman’s A Journal of Travels in England, Holland and Scotland, which he had first read as a boy, and which had particular meaning for him ever since he attended Silliman’s classes (in geology) at Yale. Travel was much on his mind. Charles Brace and Olmsted’s brother, John, had decided to take a trip together to Europe. Brace, who was in mourning for his dear sister Emma, who had died of tuberculosis during the winter of 1850, wanted to get away. He had completed his theological training in New York and would travel and study. John, whose respiratory problems had worsened, was going for his health as much as anything else.

  It had been all of six years since Olmsted’s return from China, during which time he had stayed put and diligently applied himself to farming. Not surprisingly, he developed a powerful urge to accompany his brother and best friend on this adventurous undertaking. The problem was that he didn’t have sufficient funds, so he found himself, once more, asking his father for money. But it was not just a question of money. Olmsted was aware that in abandoning Tosomock for six months he risked being accused of irresponsibility and of a reversion to the instability that had marked his earlier attempts at finding himself. Although he was twenty-eight, he really wanted parental permission.

  He wrote his father a long, impassioned letter that would be almost comical were it not also touching. He starts by confessing, “I exceedingly fear my dangerous liability to enthusiasm,” sternly adding, “and I mean to guard against it with all my mind in the future.” In fact, the letter is one long burst of untrammeled enthusiasm. Olmsted offers his father argument upon argument, pleading, cajoling, excusing, and rationalizing by turns. Anticipating the criticism that he is absenting himself from the farm, he reasons that he will be away only during the summer, after the planting, which will be early, since he has had the foresight to plow and manure the fields already. He promises to return for the harvest. In any case, he adds, there is no cause for concern since “I have found that my men are all ambitious to do their best when I am absent.” He admits that someone will have to be hired to take care of the newly planted trees, but that will only cost ten dollars, and that man will undoubtedly do a better job of it than Frederick himself. He presents his planned tour in an educational light. Think of how much he will learn from English farmers that he can apply to the farm—why, that alone will be worth the cost of the trip! For good measure, he throws in some technical information on English drainage systems. He points out that he has already in hand numerous letters of reference to British nurserymen and farmers. He has thought of practical matters: how much cheaper for him to visit England now, he points out sagely, than when he will be married and with a family. He claims that he is better than John at managing money matters, and he is sure that he can keep his expenses down to less than $140 or $160 (in fact, he would spend about $300). The trip is to be mainly an inexpensive walking tour since Brace’s family has little money, and Olmsted reminds his father that he has had much more practice in roughing it than either of the other two. “In case of his [John’s] sickness, I have experience among hardships, and boldness and confidence that he has not to obtain assistance and comfort.” Which is all true, as his father knows. Olmsted adds that a sea voyage and hiking will also be good for his own health—he has had recurring bouts of dyspepsia all summer. Wouldn’t it be a good idea, in any case, to be away from Staten Island during the New York summer cholera season? Having marshaled every single argument he can think of, he closes the letter on a note of filial obedience.

  I did not mean to argue the matter much, but I hope you won’t consider my opinions as if they were those of a mere child, nor my desires as senseless romantic impulses only. I acknowledge so much, that if you can give my position candid and earnest consideration, you are in a position to judge more correctly than I, and I will make myself contented.

  It is an irresistible plea, and John Olmsted does not resist. On April 30, 1850, Frederick, John, and Charley sailed from New York on the Henry Clay, bound for England.

  • • • •

  The trio landed in Liverpool. They spent the next month traveling to Portsmouth on the English Channel and back to London, a journey of about 350 miles. They traveled largely on foot, occasionally taking trains and twice steamboats. They visited Bath, Tintern Abbey, and Salisbury Cathedral. Along the way they experienced some of the most beautiful rural scenery in England, working their way down the valley of the Wye and walking across the Salisbury Plain. After three weeks in London, they went to Paris, where Olmsted was to visit nurseries. They spent another month hiking in France, Belgium, Holland, and Germany. Returning to London, the three friends continued their English tour, visiting
(now Northern) Ireland for a week, returning to Edinburgh, and ending in Glasgow.1 There they parted company. Brace took a steamer to Hamburg, for he was planning to stay on in Germany and study for at least another year. Frederick and John boarded a ship bound for New York. They arrived on October 24—exactly six months since their departure.

  Six months is not a long time, in the usual course of events, but for Olmsted the trip was an important experience. Nothing enriches travel as much as conversation, and he was in the company of John and Charley—who he called “two of the very greatest and best men in the world.” Moreover, it was a kind of pilgrimage; he was not visiting an exotic country like China but Britain, his ancestral home.2 It was also the land of his heroes, Carlyle and Macaulay, as well as the birthplace of scientific farming. True to his word, Olmsted visited many farms, often letting his two companions continue ahead while he pursued his research into the mysteries of fertilizers and orchard management. Armed with his letters of reference, he met agriculturists and nurserymen, including the engineer Josiah Parkes, inventor of a tile system for draining soils. Olmsted was seeking Parkes’s advice regarding a novel drainage-tile-making machine that he was purchasing on behalf of the county agricultural society. Since Brace was interested in social reform, they also visited jails, debtors’ prisons, almshouses, and village schools.

  Now Olmsted could see for himself the landscapes that he had read about in the books of William Gilpin and Uvedale Price. He was overwhelmed. His first encounter with the English countryside occurred three days after arriving in Liverpool. The three companions left the city by train and, after a few miles, got off at a small station, strapped on their knapsacks, and set off.

  There we were right in the midst of it! The country—and such a country!—green, dripping, glistening, gorgeous! We stood dumb-stricken by its loveliness, as, from the bleak April and bare boughs we had left at home, broke upon us that English May—sunny, leafy, blooming May—in an English lane; with hedges, English hedges, hawthorn hedges, all in blossom; homely old farm-houses, quaint stables, and hay-stacks; the old church spire over the distant trees; the mild sun beaming through the watery atmosphere, and all so quiet—the only sounds the hum of bees, and the crisp grass-tearing of a silken-skinned, real (unimported) Hereford cow, over the hedge.

  For any American the first experience of the English countryside is a revelation. It is greener. The light, thanks to the “watery atmosphere”—a beautiful phrase—is different. The temperate climate lacks the scorching summers and freezing winters that annually batter the American landscape. The land is not only gentler, it appears more tended. English woods and meadows are the result of millennia of cultivation. American fields and forests, even in a relatively long-settled region such as Connecticut, are rude and unkempt by comparison. When neglected, they quickly revert to wilderness. In England, the wilderness disappeared a long time ago—much of the country is a garden.

  England became the touchstone for Olmsted’s ideas about rural scenery. He swallowed the English countryside whole, but he did more than merely succumb to its visual delights. His own modest efforts at landscaping Tosomock Farm had evidently awakened in him a desire to understand exactly how natural elements could be manipulated to create an effect of picturesqueness or sublimity. Here is what he wrote after a visit to the park of Eaton Hall, a large estate in Cheshire:

  A gentle undulating surface of close-cropped pasture land, reaching way off illimitably; very old, but not very large trees scattered singly and in groups—so far apart as to throw long unbroken shadows across broad openings of light, and leave the view in several directions unobstructed for a long distance. Herds of fallow-deer, fawns, cattle, sheep and lambs quietly feeding near us, and moving slowly in masses at a distance; a warm atmosphere, descending sun, and sublime shadows from fleecy clouds transiently darkening in succession, sunny surface, cool wood-side, flocks and herds, and foliage.

  The passage is striking for being as much an analysis as a description. It is as if he were compiling a checklist for future reference.

  * * *

  1. The trip from Liverpool to London is extensively documented. However, since only two of Olmsted’s letters from that period have survived, little is known about his travels in Europe and the second portion of his British tour.

  2. Olmsted sought out and visited Olmsted Hall, near Cambridge, which had been the home of the de Olmstede family until the early fifteenth century. That the Hall was really a large farmhouse appealed to him “quite as much as to have found the arms of some murdering Baron over a dungeon door.”

  JOSTLING AND BEING JOSTLED

  Frederick Law Olmsted, c. 1860.

  No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world . . .

  —THOMAS CARLYLE

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Mr. Downing’s Magazine

  LEWIS MUMFORD CALLED Olmsted’s combination of travel, shrewd observation, and intelligent reading “American education at its best.” He suggested that Olmsted could be considered representative of a mid-nineteenth-century American type: the self-invented man. Mumford compared Olmsted to Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and the economist Henry George, whose Progress and Poverty was one of the best-selling economic books of that time. Mumford could have added Mark Twain and Thomas Edison. All these men came to their calling circuitously. All had little formal schooling and a youth marked by a succession of careers, usually unrelated to their later vocations. Nevertheless, the originality of their ideas was due in no small part to the unconventional course of their early lives.

  Olmsted, too, had left school early. Like Melville and George, he had been to sea; like Melville, he had been a clerk and a farmhand; and like Whitman, he was a great reader. But Olmsted differed from his contemporaries in one important respect. He was not forced out into the world by strained family circumstances. Many avenues were open to him. He could have gone into the family business like his half brother Albert. He was a valued employee at Benkard and Hutton and could easily have stayed on. He could have pursued surveying. Despite his later disclaimers, he could have attended Yale. Instead he subjected himself to a variety of experiences. There was nothing planned about it. He simply wasn’t satisfied with the hand that he had been dealt—comfortable though it was. It was as if he had decided to reshuffle the cards—more than once.

  A self-invented life need not be without a certain measure of stability, however. Twain, for example, spent about eight years working on Mississippi steamboats. By the time Olmsted was twenty-eight, he had devoted seven years, fully a quarter of his life, to farming. After his return from England in October 1850, he appeared to settle down to his agricultural pursuits. He continued to enlarge his reference library. He wrote to Brace, who was still in Germany, to ask him to send books and pamphlets on corn, soils, and drainage. He was gaining expertise; at the end of the year his produce won several prizes at the County Agricultural Fair. He was involved with the agricultural society and setting up the newly arrived English drainage-tile-making machine, one of the earliest applications in the United States of this technology. He corresponded with Downing and knowledgeably discussed pear cultivation. He was immersed in his burgeoning nursery business and was awaiting the delivery of five thousand pear trees from France. Olmsted took farming seriously, and many years later, looking back on this period, he wrote: “I began life as a farmer, and although for forty years I have had no time to give to agricultural affairs, I still feel myself to belong to the farming community, and that all else that I am has grown from the agricultural trunk.”

  But the man who returned from Europe was not the same young farmer who had left. The purpose of the trip had been—as he had proposed to his father—education, not recreation. In that regard the experience turned out to be, if anything, too successful. Travel extended his horizons. Life on Tosomock Farm now appeared tame and inconsequential. “Everybody at home seems to be superficial, frivolous, absorbed in a tide
of foam, gas and bubbles,” he wrote to Brace in Germany. “Stay where you are as long as you can.” Travel also awakened in Olmsted a new appreciation of his abilities. Not that he had ever lacked confidence. But he had come to think of himself chiefly as a farmer and nurseryman. Now that was no longer enough. “I am disappointed in the increased power I have over others, as yet,” he confessed to Brace in another letter. “The mere fact of having been to Europe is worth nothing. To me, in looking at another, it always was an expectation of an increased value to the man—rightly so. But I have now this impression that here people do not respect anyone sincerely. Representative only it seems to me they bow to—as clergymen of religion, &c.” Respect, a place in the world, influence over others, even power—this is a new Olmsted!

  Politics beckoned. He was invited to stand as the Whig candidate for town clerk and justice of the peace. Olmsted sympathized with the Whig party and its policies of economic nationalism and a strong Union, but he declined the invitation. He had a new avocation: writing. Downing had asked him to write an article for The Horticulturist about his impressions of rural Germany. Olmsted considered himself unqualified for the task; he had not spent long enough in the country, and in any case, he did not speak the language. Instead, he wrote an article about a place he knew well—England—and a subject close to his heart—landscape. Or, more accurately, landscape design, for his subject was a recently built public park in Birkenhead, a suburb of Liverpool.

  Birkenhead Park had been laid out in June 1844 by Joseph Paxton.1 The park covered 120 acres. It was bisected by a gently curving city street and circled by a carriageway. There were no formal vistas, no straight lines at all. The picturesque ponds, random clumps of trees, rolling meadows, overgrown hillocks, and meandering footpaths reminded Olmsted of the English countryside, “very simple, and apparently rather overlooked by the gardener.” What impressed Olmsted the most was that the romantic pastoral scenery was wholly man-made—the site had originally been “a flat, sterile, clay farm.” In his article, which appeared in May 1851, he described how a system of underground drains fed water to the ponds, and how earth from the excavations was used to create hills. He included technical details about the construction of the footpaths: six inches of fine broken stone, three inches of cinders, and six inches of fine rolled gravel.