Still, there was one particular woman who stood apart, as a special object of his affections, dispersed as they were. Elizabeth Baldwin was beautiful, refined, and deeply religious, and she came from one of the most distinguished families in Connecticut—in the whole United States, for that matter. Olmsted’s circle of friends called her “Miss B.” as a token of their awe and respect. Her great-grandfather was Roger Sherman, the only person to sign America’s four seminal documents: the Continental Association, the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution. “Mr. Sherman, of Connecticut, a man who never said a foolish thing in his life,” is how Thomas Jefferson described him. Her father had until recently served as the governor of the state.
Olmsted met Elizabeth Baldwin at a literary evening held at her home in New Haven. From the outset, he recognized that he was utterly overmatched. Still, he was deeply flattered that she took him seriously. She recommended some books to him by Emerson and Lowell. Years later, Olmsted would credit her with helping to “rouse a sort of scatter-brained pride and to make me realize that my secluded life, country breeding and mis-education was not such a bar to an ‘intellectual life’ as I was in the habit of supposing.”
At one point, Olmsted happened to run into Elizabeth Baldwin in Hartford, on the street right outside his father’s store. She had traveled from New Haven to visit some friends. Olmsted went on a walk with her, which left him downright giddy. “Governor’s daughter. Excellent princess,” he wrote to Brace. “She’s a dove. Whew! I shall fill up my letter with her.”
Later in her visit, they took a long carriage ride together, under a heavy blanket, and engaged in a “thick talk,” as he put it. The experience emboldened Olmsted. He wrote a letter to John that begins by requesting that his brother mention to Miss B. that another such “private opportunity” would be possible, when next he visited New Haven. But Olmsted recognized that he needed to be careful. In the very next sentence, thinking as he wrote, he scrawled his concern that Baldwin might take this the wrong way. He then retracted his request in the same letter. Under no circumstances was John to tell Miss B. about a private opportunity. Olmsted was all over the place. He just couldn’t help it. He was “right smack & square on dead in love with her,” he confessed to his brother, “beached & broken backed.”
As for why Olmsted included these various sentiments in letters, well, that has everything to do with the times. Olmsted, his brother, and the other friends had ample opportunity to see one another. It certainly was possible to discuss these matters in person, and they did. But letters provided a formal means of composing one’s thoughts and feelings, as well as a way to demonstrate verbal dexterity and wit. Consequently, letters were constantly exchanged among Olmsted and the other members of the “uncommon set.”
Meanwhile, Connecticut was swept up in one of the frequent paroxysms of faith that rolled across the nation in the first half of the nineteenth century. By this time, America was at the tail end of the so-called Second Great Awakening. The first awakening began in the 1730s and launched into prominence such firebrand preachers as Jonathan Edwards, famed for his “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” sermon. These awakenings were rooted in the notion that America provided an opportunity to cleanse Christianity, thanks to its unique circumstances. In Europe, the religion was weighted down by centuries of tradition and corruption. But America—it was a new nation. Why, even the landscape itself was pristine, Edenic. In New England, the push for a newer, purer faith also helped spur such movements as abolitionism, temperance, and calls for rights for the mentally ill.
Responses to the Second Great Awakening varied from region to region across the United States. In the South, for example, a tradition grew up of camp meetings, woolly, free-form events full of proselytizing and mass baptisms. New Englanders, by contrast, favored a more dour approach. Among Connecticut Congregationalists (an offshoot of the original Puritans), the practice was to listen silently to sermons, all the while scouring one’s soul for a sign of being “under conviction.” Had a person legitimately and authentically accepted Christ?—that was the question. These could be agonizing events for participants.
As mentioned earlier, Charlotte Olmsted, Fred’s mother, had participated in a revival in New Haven in 1826, just three weeks before her death from an overdose of laudanum. That same revival was attended by Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose son later characterized the event as an instance where “self-examination was carried to an extreme that was calculated to drive a nervous and sensitive mind well-nigh distracted.” The bar for genuine faith was set punishingly high, he added, because “there might be something wrong in the case of a lamb that had come into the fold without being first chased all over the lot by the shepherd.”
As a fresh New Haven revival got under way, during the spring of 1846, Mary Ann Olmsted’s fondest hope was that her stepsons would take full advantage. Here, at last, was an opportunity for the young men to achieve the pure faith that their father had never managed. She dashed off a letter to Olmsted’s brother: “I think there is nothing he [John Sr.] so much desires for Frederick and yourself as to see you firmly established in religious principles. I do not doubt he regrets exceedingly that he did not take a decided stand when young, and knowing from his own experience the difficulties to be encountered at a later period of life, he is the more anxious you should improve the present most favourable opportunity for securing your present and eternal happiness.” Mary Ann Olmsted signed the letter: “The prayer of your still anxious, Mother.”
In keeping with her wishes, Olmsted attended the revival in New Haven. He sat through marathon sermons. Dutifully, he spent hours praying for the salvation of his soul, as well as for the souls of his brother and friends. They, in turn, spent hours praying for him. Elizabeth Baldwin was present at the New Haven revival. To his great pleasure, she focused her prayers intensely on him, his brother, and the others in their set—well, everyone save for Charley Brace. His faith was already confirmed as true and pure, so he joined forces with the virtuous Miss. B.
Mary Ann Olmsted noted “how highly bless’d has Miss Baldwin been in her efforts for the good of others.”
“Thank God for Miss Baldwin,” exalted Olmsted. “What an angel she will make! How glad I am!”
For Olmsted, the prim flirtation he shared with Miss B. along with his very soul hanging in the balance must have made for a heady—and bewildering—mix. He prayed all the more fervently. He uttered religious phrases that had never before and would never again pass through his lips. To his brother, he wrote, “I feel, John, that God’s fever attended me in New Haven.... I am much happier than ever before. My faith is much increased; it is surety.”
Mostly, he sounds like a man trying to convince himself. At one point during the revival, he felt a terrible throbbing in his temple. Was this, he wondered, that divine signal at last? In the weeks afterward, he concluded that it was simply a headache. Like his father, Olmsted appeared constitutionally unable to fall “under conviction.” Maybe he’d experienced too much cruelty at the hands of country parsons, not to mention the hypocrisy of Captain Fox, never uttering a curse word while beating the holy hell out of his sailors.
Even so, Olmsted’s New Haven experience didn’t cause him to reject religion outright. Rather, he found himself unable to meet a strict standard of faith in a highly organized setting. The revival didn’t stick. His romantic life wasn’t exactly progressing, either. When Olmsted requested that Miss B. enter into a formal correspondence with him, she demurred, deeming such an intimacy “neither right nor best.”
Fresh from this pair of personal setbacks, Olmsted dusted himself off, looked around, and, in what was becoming a clear pattern for him, simply lit out in a new direction. He decided to become a farmer, a choice that made great sense. As of 1846, America was an agricultural nation, and farming was the profession, occupying nearly 70 percent of the labor force. Along with surveyor, clerk, and sailor—all jobs he’d tried—this
was another line open to someone with Olmsted’s “smattering education.” What’s more, he’d recently served two brief agricultural internships.
Olmsted didn’t want to become just any kind of farmer, though. Inspired, in part, by his brief stint at Yale and the Infantile Chemistry Association, he decided to become a scientific farmer. He intended to make use of the latest farming technology and innovations in horticulture and animal husbandry. “Really, for a man that has any inclination for Agriculture the occupation is very interesting,” he’d once written Brace. “And if you look closely, you will be surprised to see how much honorable attention and investigation is being connected with it.... Scientific men of the highest distinction are there devoting their undivided attention to its advance.” He added: “For the matter of happiness, there is no body of men that are half as well satisfied with their business as our farmers.”
Olmsted saw an article in a newspaper about a man named George Geddes, who had received a first-place commendation for the bestcultivated farm from the New York State Agricultural Society. He wrote to Geddes and arranged to work for him through the end of the fall harvest.
Geddes ran a farm called Fairmount, located in the Finger Lakes region of New York, near the town of Camillus. He lived in a large stone manor just a few hundred feet from the spot where the house in which he’d been born had once stood. He’d inherited the farm from James Geddes, his father. The elder Geddes had helped survey the route for the Erie Canal and had done some engineering work on the project. During its earliest days, some of the locals referred to the waterway as the “Geddes Canal.” The Geddes name loomed large in this stretch of western New York state.
Olmsted arrived at the farm late in the spring of 1846. It was a sprawling enterprise, covering 300 acres. Geddes grew a huge variety of different foodstuffs: corn, oats, wheat, lettuce, beets, cherries, apples, and quinces. He raised cattle, sheep, and pigs. The farm was a model of efficiency. Geddes owned a Pitt’s Corn and Cob-Cutter, a newfangled portable tool that could “grind a bushel of long clean ears in four minutes!” as Olmsted breathlessly informed his father. He was the inventor of the Geddes’ Harrow and the Geddes’ Swinging Gate. He was thirty-seven years old, thirteen years Olmsted’s senior. Olmsted intended to learn everything he possibly could from him.
Work began each morning at the crack of dawn. Yet Olmsted stayed up to all hours reading. He pored over issues of the Cultivator, a recently launched journal that was part of a wave of new publications aimed at scientific farmers who could read (unlike many traditional farmers) and were anxious to stay abreast of the latest agricultural advances. He was cramming, trying to get up to speed in his chosen field.
Still, there was a limit to how regimented Olmsted was capable of being, at least at this point in his life. During his nighttime reading sessions, he also fell utterly under the spell of a novel called Sartor Resartus by Thomas Carlyle. This was an experimental work by the acclaimed Scottish author, blending fact and fiction, with a kind of meta device thrown in as well, designed to make readers aware that fact and fiction were being mixed and to force them to question which was which, and to contemplate whether such distinctions really even exist. Nearly a decade earlier, upon initial publication, Sartor Resartus had been met with critical puzzlement, and sales had been slow. Over time, the book had found its audience: Ralph Waldo Emerson became a serious devotee of the book, and Sartor Resartus is often credited with helping shape the transcendentalist philosophy.
Sartor Resartus was just the kind of work that Olmsted, with his peculiar self-directed approach to reading, was likely to find his way to. As often happens with favorite books, it seemed to Olmsted to clarify, to an almost eerie degree, some of the issues he was grappling with in his own life. “I do think Carlyle is the greatest genius in the world,” he wrote to his father from Fairmount. “ . . . I perfectly wonder and stand awe-struck as I would at a Hurricane.”
The main character of Sartor Resartus is a German philosopher named Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, which translates roughly to “God-born devildung.” Unable to find a proper course in life, Teufelsdröckh leads a dissolute youth, something that certainly resonated with Olmsted. The character also finds himself unable to achieve blind religious faith—check. He even woos a beautiful woman from a prominent family only to be rebuffed, an episode that reminded Olmsted of his own courtship of Miss B.
Teufelsdröckh’s ultimate conclusion: All is chaos, and one’s only option is to construct meaning, as best as possible. He chooses to do so through work. And not just any kind of work, but rather work that has helping others as its stated goal. For Olmsted, this peculiar piece of British metafiction was like a grand theory of everything. In two separate letters written from Fairmount that summer, Olmsted referred to himself as having “faith” in being a farmer. The word choice is no accident. He’d failed to confirm his faith during the recent New Haven revival. But to Olmsted, Sartor Resartus suggested another route to salvation. He could throw himself into work, meaningful work, as a farmer.
“Up, up! Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole might,” writes Carlyle. “Work while it is called To-day, for the Night cometh wherein no man can work.” Olmsted was so taken with this passage that he copied it into a letter to his brother.
Of course, late nights might be devoted to reading about farming and the spiritual benefits of labor, but by day, there was actual work to be done. Geddes was a demanding boss. He had strong views about the best and most efficient means of doing any given task. Olmsted learned how to prepare soil and plant seed and tend crops. He learned how to use various implements such as tills and hoes and harrows and how to do so the right way.
A special challenge was washing and shearing sheep. Olmsted wrestled for the better part of a morning with Maggie, a large and unruly prize Merino. He grew exhausted, was soon covered in dirt, but he didn’t give up. Finally, he emerged victorious with exactly four pounds and seven ounces of fleece.
The long hours of farmwork were followed by a ritual that Olmsted found immensely appealing. Geddes ended each day by scrubbing up and sitting down to a large and sumptuous meal. It was often lamb or veal, fresh milk flowed freely, and there might be a currant pie for dessert. Sometimes there were even pineapples, an exotic delicacy grown in hothouses on neighboring farms. The table was set with “silver forks every day,” Olmsted noted with wonder. Subsistence farming, this was not.
At dinner, Geddes invariably held forth on a variety of topics. He was a man of broad interests who made a point of staying informed about issues of the larger world, far beyond the realm of farming. In 1846, war had just broken out between the United States and Mexico. Geddes believed that both armies (all the world’s armies, for that matter) should be disbanded. He was an avid follower of Elihu Burritt, a blacksmith who was one of the founders of the pacifist movement. Just as the food at Fairmount wasn’t typical, Olmsted noted, neither was the conversational fare.
Like his father, Geddes was also involved in the community. During Olmsted’s stay at Fairmount, Geddes was overseeing the construction of a plank road connecting several nearby small towns with Syracuse, New York, a major center. This was one of the first plank roads in the United States. It was a critical piece of economic development; without this modern road, the region was in danger of becoming isolated. Geddes was taking the lead in making sure his fellow farmers had a modern trade route to transport their goods to market. The plank road was the younger Geddes’s Erie Canal.
Olmsted took measure of all to which he was exposed during that summer at Fairmount. Of this he grew increasingly certain: He wanted to be like Geddes. He wanted to be a farmer making a difference.
CHAPTER 4
A Farmer and Finite
WHEN THE HARVEST was over, Olmsted decided he was ready to embark on his career as a scientific farmer. George Geddes was impressed with Olmsted’s commitment, and he tried to convince him to settle on some acreage near Fairmount. That way, Geddes could provide
guidance as an older and more experienced farmer. But Olmsted was set on returning to Connecticut. Farming was about a passionate attachment to land, after all. Geddes had enjoyed the luxury of spending his entire life on the same 300 acres. But Olmsted had no ties to the Finger Lakes region of New York State. Rather, the land of Connecticut was in his blood.
Olmsted could picture various places throughout the state—the sites of his boyhood wanderings—and had formed a very clear idea of the kind of farm he wanted. As he spelled out in a letter written from Fairmount, the fields should be situated right on the ocean. A seaside farm in Connecticut—it was a picturesque notion and also very specific.
What he lacked was money. But his father agreed to buy him such a farm, even to stake him to the funds necessary to purchase tools, seed, and other necessities. John Senior’s dry goods store continued to be highly profitable, and he could afford to help out. Olmsted had tried out so many different lines of work. Buying a farm was a worthwhile expenditure, if only it would help get his son settled, at last.
The farm Olmsted chose was on Sachem’s Head, a little spit of land that juts out into Long Island Sound. It was only about fifteen miles from New Haven, where John was finishing up his final year at Yale. Charley Brace had just started Yale Divinity School, and Fred Kingsbury had just entered the law school. His home in Hartford was just a couple hours away on horseback. Olmsted would be in easy range of his “uncommon set” of friends and his family as well.
But the farm itself was a less attractive proposition. It cost $4,000, hardly cheap, and only a fraction of the 60 acres was even usable, with much of it given over to rocky coastline. Where actual farming was possible, Ebenezer Bartlett, the previous owner, had been completely unimaginative, alternating corn and potatoes year after year. By the time Olmsted took over, the soil was much abused and depleted of nutrients.
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