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

by Rybczynski, Witold

  To call John Olmsted a successful storekeeper gives only a partial description of his position in Hartford society. His roots were deep. A modern commemorative pylon in the old burying ground on Main Street lists the town founders, among them three Olmsteds. These Puritans arrived in New England from Essex in 1632. The seven generations that followed were farmers, merchants, traders, shipowners—and patriots. John Olmsted’s father, Benjamin, took part in Benedict Arnold’s grueling march on Quebec City; one of John’s uncles served under George Washington during the 1775 siege of Boston; another, Gideon, was a naval hero who commanded several privateers during the Revolutionary War. John Olmsted served in the Hartford militia, was a director of the Hartford Retreat for the Insane and the Hartford Female Seminary, and became a trustee of the local athenaeum. Like Jonathan Law, who was a lawyer and the town’s postmaster, he was a local eminence in an age when local eminence mattered. During the early nineteenth century, status and influence in the United States were not yet concentrated among the wealthy few. Nor had the metropolis gained ascendancy. This was still chiefly a nation of towns, and of local, rather than national, institutions. Men of John Olmsted’s class—lawyers, clergymen, merchants—were pillars of these small communities.

  Naturally, such an individual would want to ensure that his sons received a good education. To that end, John Hull was sent to the Hartford Grammar School. Frederick’s education took a different turn. Two months after his mother’s death he was sent to a “dame’s school” in Hartford; he was shifted around and would attend three in all. When he was seven years old, he boarded with Zolva Whitmore, a Congregational minister who lived in the hamlet of North Guilford, thirty-five miles away. From this kindly country parson he received religious instruction, attending the local one-room school with twelve other pupils. He was a good-hearted boy. Once after the death of a little girl, when her family was still grieving at the parsonage, Frederick went to the fresh grave and “prayed to God for Christ’s sake to raise the girl, intending to lead her over to our house that she might be sent home to her mother.” Nothing happened. “My attention was probably called off by a whippoorwill, and by night-hawks and fireflies. . . . I seldom hear the swoop of a night-hawk without thinking of it.”

  By his own later account the boy ran wild in the rustic surroundings, which must have been reflected in his letters home, for less than a year later he was returned to Hartford and was enrolled at a nearby grammar school. Six months passed and he was sent off again, this time to a boarding school run by a clergyman in the village of Ellington. He attended what was still a relatively newfangled institution: a high school (the first high school in the United States had been started in Boston only ten years earlier). This lasted only half a year—his father took him out of the school after the boy was cruelly punished by a teacher. From there he was sent to Newington, five miles from Hartford, to board with Rev. Joab Brace, who took in a small number of boys whom he personally tutored. Young Frederick would spend the next five and a half years with him. He was finally sent home after contracting a severe case of sumac poisoning. The following summer he studied with an Episcopalian clergyman in the village of Saybrook, on Long Island Sound. His schooling ended with Mr. Perkins’s academy in East Hartford.

  Here, then, is a second remarkable biographical note: between the ages of seven and fifteen, Olmsted spent only two extended periods at home, other than vacations. His stepmother was probably responsible for banishing the boy from her household: Olmsted’s first extended absence from home—the spring and summer of 1828—occurred only a year after his father’s remarriage. The six-year-old was sent to stay with an uncle in upstate New York for four months. Nine months after the birth of his half sister Charlotte, he was sent away to North Guilford. Having the youngster out of the house undoubtedly made it easier for Mary Ann to look after little John Hull, who was not a healthy child, and to take care of baby Charlotte, who was also sickly and would not live beyond infancy. After that, there were babies in the house for several years—Mary Ann would bear three more children while Frederick was in school. Deeply devout, she was probably the one who suggested that Frederick be sent to board with the Reverend Mr. Brace, who was reputed to be particularly effective in fostering religious conversions in young boys.

  One biographer has suggested that John Olmsted’s own lack of education made him especially eager to find the perfect tutor for his son. But the merchant’s practical nature would surely have alerted him to the drawbacks of such haphazard schooling. Nor was John Olmsted heartless. He was careful and shrewd in business, and upright in his public dealings, but with his family—and especially the sons of his first marriage—he was exceptionally loving and indulgent. He frequently took his children on extended trips, for example. He generously and uncomplainingly supported both sons financially for many years.

  Children of prosperous families were often sent away from home to further their educations. The sixteen-year-old John Hull, for example, boarded with Joab Brace for two terms and was later dispatched to Paris with a tutor for six months to improve his French. But he received almost his entire formal schooling in Hartford; his elder brother did not. He had already started dame’s school in Hartford when he was sent to upstate New York. On his return, he was reenrolled in Miss Rockwell’s school before being sent away to North Guilford. A year later he was back home attending Hartford Grammar School for six months before being sent to the Reverend Mr. Brace. One more period at home follows his recuperative summer in Saybrook. He returned to Hartford to the Hopkins Grammar School, which his brother was also attending, but after only four months he was moved again. This time it was only across the Connecticut River to East Hartford, where he attended a local academy and lived with his grandmother.

  Some of the boy’s perambulating may be explained by simple mischance—the cruel teacher, the sumac poisoning. But I see a pattern. It is of a difficult child whose parents have trouble dealing with him, and who is sent away, as such children often are, “for his own good.” First one school is tried, and then another. It is no coincidence that the school in Ellington was known for its strong discipline. So was the Reverend Mr. Brace. Olmsted himself would write of his childhood: “I was active, imaginative, impulsive, enterprising, trustful and heedless. This made me what is generally called a troublesome and mischievous boy.” That was hardly surprising. Olmsted had lost his mother at an impressionable age and, instead of being provided with maternal love, had been sent away, first to his uncle, then to a series of rural boarding schools. The sense of abandonment and guilt—his brother, after all, was allowed to stay home—manifested themselves as intransigence. His unsympathetic stepmother was more interested in her own family than in this unruly lad. His father was loving, but did not know what to do—except to commit him to the care of distant clergymen. Frederick’s childhood was one of leaving home and being left with strangers. It was not an auspicious start.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Hartford

  “SOAP AND EDUCATION are not as sudden as a massacre,” observed Mark Twain, who left school at the age of twelve, “but they are more deadly in the long run.” Still, I find it difficult to judge the deadliness of Olmsted’s education.1 Its religious objective was not realized. Not only did he not experience a conversion, he developed what would eventually harden into an aversion for all organized religion. The disciplinary results were equally unimpressive. His high spirits remained unaffected, and he continued to be, as we will see, an energetic and intemperate enthusiast. Yet the years away from home did not sour him or spoil his relations with his father—he remained a loving and dutiful son his entire life. His haphazard education did leave him with a lingering sense of inadequacy. Many years later, in a letter to his friend and early sweetheart Elizabeth Baldwin Whitney, he admitted ruefully, “I was strangely uneducated,—miseducated . . . when at school, mostly as a private pupil in families of country parsons of small, poor parishes, it seems to me that I was chiefly taught how not to stu
dy,—how not to think for myself.”

  Like most people, Olmsted shaded his adult memories of childhood. In fact, he did learn to think for himself, as his various later intellectual pursuits would show. The Reverend Zolva Whitmore, with whom he spent his first year away from home, was not a demanding teacher, but the committed abolitionist planted the seeds of what were his student’s later antislavery views. He also passed on his love of flowers and gardening. Olmsted, who recalled Whitmore with affection, looked back less fondly on his five years with Brace. But to call that clergyman a country parson was misleading. He was a learned man, a Yale graduate who knew Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and who later received a doctor of divinity degree from Williams College—hardly an unqualified tutor.

  Nineteenth-century education consisted chiefly of book learning. One thing that Olmsted did receive during his early schooling was an exposure to books. His father’s diary noted that when his son attended Miss Rockwell’s school at the age of six, he read the Testament, Noah Webster’s Spelling Book, a primer called Juvenile Instructor, and Peter Parley’s Tales. The habit of reading is rarely the result of the classroom alone—it is usually nurtured in the home. Frederick Olmsted grew up surrounded by books; his father’s obituary would describe him as “a cultivated gentleman, of large and varied reading.” The young Olmsted read voraciously and widely. He found a copy of On Solitude, by the Swiss doctor Johann Georg ritter von Zimmerman, in his grandmother’s garret. He read fiction, too: Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield and Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey.

  The public library provided other opportunities. It was there, he recalled, that he had his first introduction to the art of landscape gardening in the Reverend William Gilpin’s Remarks on Forest Scenery and Sir Uvedale Price’s Essay on the Picturesque. Both British authors were important figures in the evolution of the cult of the scenic and picturesque landscape that developed during the eighteenth century and continued to flourish during the early nineteenth century. In later life, Olmsted considered Essay on the Picturesque one of the most important books in the history of landscape architecture. That the boy read these relatively specialized books so early attests to both his intellectual curiosity and to the excellence of the Hartford Public Library.

  In fact, the casual supervision afforded by the “country parsons” stimulated his curiosity, as well as his sense of independence. Not everyone finds his own way in an atmosphere of freedom—Olmsted did. Always the “new boy” at school, he spent much time alone, usually out-of-doors. His solitary rambles gave him a lifelong love of the countryside and of outdoor activities. Years later, in a letter to his close friend Frederick Newman Knapp, who was principal of Eagleswood Military Academy in New Jersey, where Olmsted’s stepsons were both enrolled, he wrote: “I see certain advantages which I enjoyed that your boys do not. These latter came to me chiefly not by systematic arrangement or deliberate and intelligent forethought on the part of my educational superintendents but through opportunities incidentally or accidentally presented to me & which I used with good will.” Olmsted was on Knapp’s advisory board, and his letter characteristically listed in great detail a variety of nonacademic skills that he felt young boys should acquire. Among them were bridling a horse, handling a boat, shooting, and woodcraft—all skills that he had learned early. He also stressed the importance of physical exercise. Not organized sports and gymnastics, however, but daily outdoor hikes. “A boy . . . who would not in any weather & under all ordinary circumstances, rather take a walk of ten to twelve miles some time in the course of every day than stay quietly about a house all day, must be suffering from disease or a defective education” was his slightly pompous advice to Knapp.2

  When he was boarding at village schools, Olmsted hiked in the fields and forests of rural Connecticut; when he was home, he walked about Hartford. Hartford, midway between New York and Boston, had grown into a manufacturing and commercial center during the eighteenth century. The town continued to prosper during the early nineteenth century, but it remained compact enough so that everything was within easy walking distance. One of Hartford’s attractions to a boy was its busy port. The Connecticut River accommodated oceangoing vessels, and international maritime trade had always been an aspect of Hartford commerce (it had occupied several of Olmsted’s shipowning forebears). The variety of goods that the Connecticut Courant recorded as arriving in Hartford’s harbor is impressive: hides from Buenos Aires, India-rubber overshoes, almonds from the south of France and nuts from Brazil, and bales of wool from Bilbao. In the Hartford Times, under the rubric “New And Rich Goods,” are listed German and English woolens, Parisian embroidery, and Italian cravats—all available from John Olmsted, who invited “the attention of his friends and customers to his Stock of Dry Goods. now opening. being the best assortment of GOOD goods he has ever offered.”

  There is an advertisement in the Hartford Times for a “Writing School,” which was conducted in Union Hall by a Mr. Strong. It must have been popular, for Strong was announcing a second term, “his present classes being full.” These classes were for adults, not children. They were intended to improve the penmanship of aspiring ladies and gentlemen, elegant handwriting then being considered a requirement for the genteel correspondent. Olmsted’s childhood coincided with the beginning of the second phase of what one historian has called the “refinement of America.” During the nineteenth century gentility spread from the upper to the middle class. Gentility meant self-improvement. People collected books. They formed scientific societies. They attended reading clubs, literary circles, and musical evenings. They hired dancing masters, fencing instructors, and French tutors for their children. They built more elaborate houses, new civic buildings, and beautiful churches. They established libraries, teaching academies, and athenaeums. “They” meant the families of the prosperous merchants and professionals. In the case of Hartford, this burgeoning elite, to which John Olmsted belonged, was exceptionally active and influential. As a result, the city, whose population in 1820 was less than seven thousand, was no provincial backwater but a place of some intellectual consequence.

  There were three daily newspapers: not only the Connecticut Courant and the Times, but also the Connecticut Mirror. There were two religious periodicals: the Congregationalist and the Churchman. The Bouquet was a literary journal with the charming masthead “Flowers of Polite Literature.” While many of the stories, essays, and poems in the Bouquet were reprinted from elsewhere, there was also original work by local writers. An early issue contained an endorsement from one of the most popular and prolific authors of her day, Lydia Hunt Sigourney, who was a Hartford resident. So was Noah Webster, whose first dictionary was published here. Another local literary figure was the bookseller and publisher Samuel Goodrich, author of the phenomenally successful Peter Parley series of schoolbooks. Hartford society was enriched by prominent public figures such as Catharine E. Beecher, educational reformer and principal of the Hartford Female Seminary, the Reverend Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, founder of the American Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb, the country’s first free public school of this kind, as well as Horace Bushnell, theologian and celebrated divine.3 The town’s literary tradition was an old one. During the late eighteenth century, Hartford had been the home of a group of Federalist poets who came to be widely known as the Hartford Wits.

  Of course, Hartford was not Boston or New York. By 1830, Boston had a population of more than one hundred thousand, and New York twice that. Urbanization was a mixed blessing. Cities were dangerously unhealthy, with no effective trash removal. New York was notorious for the pigs that freely wandered the streets in search of slops. A lack of clean water and poor sanitation brought on regular outbreaks of yellow fever. The first American case of cholera was reported in New York in June 1832, and the disease quickly assumed epidemic proportions, ravaging the country as far south as New Orleans. Even Hartford was affected. There were advantages to being small, however. By September, although people were still dying
in New York, Baltimore, and Washington, the Connecticut Courant was proud to report, “It is highly gratifying to be able to state that no case of cholera has occurred here during the past week, the city is now as healthy as usual at this session of the year.” Large cities were also less peaceable. They were often the sites of civil disturbances, usually centered on slavery and abolition. In October of 1834, for example, proslavery riots swept Philadelphia; the following year a Boston mob almost lynched the abolitionist editor William Lloyd Garrison. There was no police to enforce order.4