Chapter 1
yeoman olmsted
"An Enthusiast by Nature"
Olmsted's letter from Texas about the romance of nomadism was tailored to its recipient: Anne Charlotte Lynch, a New York poet, globe-trotting traveler, and eminent convener of literary salons.
"I like her much and shall try to be intimate with her," Olmsted confided in an earlier letter to his father. "She is acquainted with all the distinguished people and her taste is highly cultivated."
Olmsted enclosed samples of prairie flowers in his letter to Lynch and observed of his Texas wanderings that he'd always been "much of a vagabond."
This Bohemian self-styling bore fruit; upon his return north, Olmsted became a regular at Lynch's salons. But the letter also held an element of truth: from an early age, Olmsted had been nomadic, drifting between homes, continents, and a bewildering array of courtships, callings, and beliefs.
This vagrancy ran counter to Olmsted's deeply rooted lineage in Connecticut. His forebears were among its first colonists and spawned generations of model Yankees: farmers, deacons, seafarers, Revolutionary War soldiers. Olmsted's father, John, prospered as a dry-goods merchant on Main Street in Hartford, the city his ancestors had helped found almost two centuries before.
Frederick's mother, Charlotte, also came from old Connecticut stock and was raised in a household with a love of Latin poetry. Little else is known about her. She gave birth to Frederick in 1822 and a second son in 1825. Five months later, she died from an overdose of laudanum. The family said she'd been ill and mistaken the potent opiate for a milder painkiller.
"I was so young that I have but a tradition of memory rather than the faintest recollection of her," Olmsted wrote many decades later, in an autobiographical fragment. As a boy, when asked about his mother, he would say, "I remember playing on the grass and looking up at her while she sat sewing under a tree."
Such pastoral imagery infused almost all his childhood memories. Olmsted grew up at the cusp of New England's Industrial Revolution, when Hartford had only seven thousand residents and a few dozen streets within walking distance of the surrounding countryside. As "a half grown lad," he was free to wander, visiting family friends and relations whose farmhouses "had near them interesting rivers, brooks, meadows, rocks, woods or mountains." Sometimes he got lost and stayed the night with strangers, "encouraged by my father rather than checked in the adventurousness that led me to do so."
The elder Olmsted gave his son latitude that he himself had lacked. Schooled in the puritan virtues of humility, hard work, and self-sacrifice, John Olmsted kept a dry, detailed log of his doings and contributed generously to Hartford's civic institutions. Frederick described his father as an unassuming figure who sought to heed "the authority of Society, Religion and Commerce."
But this convention-bound merchant also possessed a deep "sensitiveness to the beauty of nature" that strongly influenced his son. "The happiest recollections of my early life are the walks and rides I had with my father," while perched with him in the saddle or cradled in his parent's arms as they gazed up at the stars.
Soon after Frederick's fifth birthday, John Olmsted married a close friend of his deceased wife. Mary Ann Bull was a pious and orderly woman who shared her husband's "silent habits" and love of nature. The family expanded and so did their rural outings, which included stagecoach and boat trips across New England.
These journeys were "really tours in search of the picturesque," Frederick wrote, though his taciturn parents "did not analyze, compare and criticize" the elements of scenery that gave them so much pleasure. Their "unconscious" absorption of nature would later guide Frederick as he designed landscapes for city dwellers.
His parents' expansiveness, however, did not extend to formal education. John Olmsted had been raised with "a superstitious faith in the value of preaching and didactic instruction," Frederick wrote, and John's second wife reinforced this. Soon after their marriage, Frederick was sent to board with a rural pastor, the first of six clergymen who would oversee his peripatetic education.
In Frederick's telling, these tutors valued child labor and puritan dogma more than academic instruction. He recalled farm chores, a teacher who lifted him by his ears until he bled, and a parson who eavesdropped as Frederick spun tales to fellow boarders-before bursting in, shouting, "Oh! the depravity of human nature!" and beating the youths with a broom handle.
At the age of fourteen, Frederick temporarily lost his vision, an affliction his family later blamed on a poison sumac rash. His father took him to a doctor who prescribed saltwater rinses and a cessation of hard study. So Frederick became "nominally the pupil of a topographical engineer but really for the most part given over to a decently restrained vagabond life," he wrote, spending his teenaged years hiking in the mountains, copying maps, and sketching "ideal towns."
This Huck Finn-ish remembrance wasn't the sum of his schooling. Though never a diligent pupil, Olmsted read widely, borrowing books from libraries and relations who nurtured his omnivorous intellect. His early letters include references to "French Periodicals," Dickens novels, and works of natural history.
Frederick nonetheless entered young adulthood as an outlier among his privileged male peers, many of them bound for college and careers in law, medicine, or the ministry. His merchant father arranged for him to work as a clerk in a Manhattan importing house, but this didn't suit him, either. He found commerce stultifying, "writing at a desk all day & half the night, or practicing assumed politeness or eulogizing a piece of silk or barrel of lamp oil."
This work also took him aboard ships in New York Harbor, stirring what he called his "truant disposition." Just before turning twenty-one, he found a berth as a poorly paid ship's "boy" on a merchant vessel to China. This proved such a nightmarish passage that the crew almost mutinied and the captain was later prosecuted for excessive flogging-brutality that became the yardstick by which the adult Olmsted measured human degradation, including slave labor.
After his year at sea, Olmsted embraced the land and a new passion: agriculture. Moving to a small property his father purchased for him in Connecticut, Frederick became "so full of farming," his brother John wrote, that he talked of nothing except cattle prices, pig litters, and crop rotation. "I hope the present object of his affections, i.e. his farm, will not be as ephemeral as most of them have been."
The brothers were extremely close despite having been separated during most of their childhood. John was sickly from an early age, educated close to home while Frederick boarded, and then enrolled at Yale, en route to training as a doctor. By the time he entered college, John had grown into a handsome and popular young man with a gentle spirit and social ease his older brother lacked.
Their father hoped Fred (as he was called by friends and family) would belatedly follow his brother's example. In his early twenties, Fred frequently visited John at Yale and, though unenrolled, began studying chemistry, mineralogy, and architecture. This informal education ended after just three months due to ill health, a pattern that would afflict Olmsted throughout his life. Hard study and writing brought on headaches, eyestrain, and, at Yale, fainting spells, prompting his father to speculate, "Is it from Mental Causes that he is subject to this tendency of blood to the head?"
Fred's visits and stay at Yale were nonetheless formative, drawing him into an extraordinary circle of bright scholars and young women from New Haven's parlor society. One lasting influence on him was Charles Loring Brace, a polymath with a passion for boxing and debate who would go on to a prominent career as a social reformer. He became a close friend and intellectual sparring partner of Fred's, and the two continued their disputations by letter after Olmsted returned to farming.
"Every time you run your pen against me, you scrape me a little brighter," Fred wrote. When Brace visited Fred's farm, the "torrent of fierce argument" lasted all night and through the next day. Impressed by Fred's growing "keenness" and analytic power, Brace wrote a classmate, "I shouldn't be surprised if he turned out something rather remarkable among men."
Fred's brother wasn't so sure. He feared his sibling's "fine capabilities" would never develop due to his irregular education, lack of "stability," and obsession with "harrowing & planting & getting out manure." But the Yalie to whom he confided these doubts saw strength and promise in Fred's unconventional character.
"He is an enthusiast by nature," Frederick Kingsbury wrote John, "and all the Greek and Latin in the world wouldn't have driven that out of him. Well, the world needs such men-and one thing is curious-disappointments never seem to trouble them." He then presciently forecast: "Many of his favorite schemes will go to naught-but he'll throw it aside and try another and spoil that and forget them both while you or I might have been blubbering over the ruins of the first."
Reading this correspondence, preparatory to my travels with Fred, I felt as though I was listening in on long-ago college bull sessions. The young Olmsted also seemed a rather modern and familiar figure: black sheep in his privileged flock, a drifter and dreamer, a gifted underachiever whose youth was extended with the support of an anxious but loving and indulgent family.
During one of Fred's visits to New Haven, in 1846 or 1847, he posed with his Yale friends for a studio portrait. A daguerreotype shows them clad in formal attire, jauntily leaning into one another, a thick book open on the table before them. John Olmsted, dark haired and fine featured, smiles puckishly while resting his elbow on the shoulder of Kingsbury, a lighthearted future lawyer. Also pictured are the long-faced Charles Brace and Charles Trask, a well-groomed sea captain's son.
The four Yalies face the camera while Fred sits in profile, turned toward the others as if an onlooker in this group of polished young scholars. A solo portrait of him taken a few years later shows a sensitive countenance with wide-set eyes, a broad nose, a small soft mouth, and an untamed wave of brown hair. He was slight in stature, about five feet six inches and 120 pounds. One female admirer thought his face had "the expressive delicacy of a woman's."
Fred's intense personality made a stronger and not always favorable impression. Mary Perkins, who met him when she was nineteen, and would become intimately tied to both Fred and his brother, described Olmsted in his mid-twenties as "full of life and fun," with a keen talent for caricature. But Fred was less inclined to humor than to earnest and heated debate. "He was perhaps over fond of arguments to be pleasing to women," Mary recalled. "Whimsies had no charm for him."
Fred's dislike of chitchat and what he called "flippery" weren't the only impediment to his youthful courting. In romance, as in all his endeavors, he was fervid yet fickle.
"He is dead in love, but with all of his acquaintances," his brother wrote Kingsbury, listing a comically long menu of traits Fred sought in a mate. These included "infinite capabilities and longings," "comprehension of what is incomprehensible to others," and "fondness for landscapes, clams, pork and old dressing gowns." John concluded, "He won't be content with less than infinity-while he himself is only finite & a farmer."
Fred, by then, had moved to a different farm, on Staten Island in New York-purchased like the previous one by his father. For the first time Fred showed signs of constancy and achievement. He won prizes at agricultural fairs for his turnips and pears, installed an innovative drainage system, and impressed his neighbors with a tasteful redesign of his property, which he landscaped to create an attractive gentleman's farm.
Fred also found a guiding philosophy in the works of Thomas Carlyle, whom he considered "the greatest genius in the world." Two of the Scottish thinker's precepts had particular influence on him. Carlyle wrote that conviction "is worthless till it convert itself into Conduct," and in choosing a life of service to others, "do the Duty which lies nearest thee."
Olmsted began to cast himself as a secular missionary and apostle of rural reform. "There's a great work wants doing in this our generation, Charley, let us off our jackets and go about it," he wrote Brace. While his friend ministered to the urban poor, Fred imagined becoming a model farmer and "Country Squire," paternalistically educating "the ignobile vulgus" to appreciate "charity, taste &c.-independence of thought, of voting and of acting."
This aspiring squire, however, still lacked a bride and dreaded becoming an "old bach" on the farm. During a winter visit to Hartford, he seemed to finally find a match in Emily Perkins, "the most lovely and loveable girl," he wrote, with "the most incomparably fine face I ever saw." She went with him on sleigh rides, listened as he read Macaulay's History of England aloud, and tolerated his quarrelsome views.
The two kept up a "very vigorous and noble correspondence," Fred's brother wrote, and after an on-and-off courtship over more than two years, they became engaged in 1851.
Then, just weeks later, Fred received a letter from Emily's mother, declaring that her daughter was breaking the engagement due to a "revulsion of feeling." His brother judged the affair "very strange" and described Fred as stunned. But their father was perplexed by something else.
"Pray tell me what it is makes Fred so happy since his disappointment, as it is call'd," he wrote. "He seems like a man who has thrown off a tremendous weight." The elder Olmsted wondered if his son had brought about the break "purposely."
Fred, in his search for "infinity," may have judged Emily limited and said or done something to arouse her unexplained "revulsion." But he also exhibited signs of being unprepared to settle down, domestically or otherwise.
A year prior to his engagement, Fred abruptly abandoned farming and courting to join his brother and Charles Brace on a six-month tramp in Europe. He took careful notes on the trip and was particularly struck by Birkenhead Park in Liverpool. He called it a "People's Garden," enjoyed "about equally by all classes," a new and rare phenomenon in Europe and absent in American cities.
Upon returning to his farm, Fred was glum and restless. "Everybody at home seems to be superficial, frivolous, absorbed in a tide of foam, gas and bubbles," he wrote Brace, who was still abroad. He advised Brace to look for a wife in Europe. "I don't believe there are any left here to suit us."
His brother disagreed. Later that year John wed the Staten Island neighbor of Fred's who had found him argumentative. Meanwhile, Fred's former fiancŽe, Emily Perkins, quickly fell for a tall, magnetic minister. On the day of their marriage in Hartford, Fred wrote a letter to his good friend Kingsbury, disclosing a new enthusiasm.
Copyright © 2020 by Tony Horwitz. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
