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

by Rybczynski, Witold

  Olmsted left Rick at Biltmore in November 1894. Two days before Christmas, Olmsted sat down in his Fairstead office to write him a letter. The twenty-one dense pages took him three days to complete. Part of the letter contained touching personal advice, revealing as much about the father as about the son.

  Are you gaining any in the art of putting yourself to sleep when you will—the art of which Napoleon and Grant were equally masters? Are you going regularly to church—to what; and are you training yourself to avoid a critical view of it & cultivating devoutness & the childlike religion which Christ advanced in spite of the theological wrangling of the clergy? Do you succeed in avoiding theological disputes with Mr. McNamee [Vanderbilt’s agent]? Are you helping Mr. Pinchot in his negro Sunday School? . . . Are you getting any practice in shooting, fishing or hunting . . . Have you shot a wild turkey?

  Are you going to any balls, or dances? Are you punctual and regular in your social—“society”—dates? Are you making acquaintances at the Hotels? . . . There are several nice people living within a few miles of you and you must not neglect social duties or opportunities. Recognize yourself & be sure that you are recognized as a gentleman of Society. Be punctilious & exacting with yourself in all those rites and forms and manners by which gentlemen and ladies recognize a gentleman.

  The chief purpose of the letter, like the “instructions” that Olmsted had furnished John on his European trip, was to lay out a program of self-study. “Keep it all the time well in mind that you are now in a school of which you are yourself the headmaster,” he wrote. “Do not neglect to think . . . how this ward of yours (F.L.O. Jr.) is to be educated.” While emphasizing that Rick should take the opportunity to learn as much as possible about all aspects of the work that was being carried out at Biltmore, Olmsted was adamant on one point. “Your school for nearly all wisdom in trees and plants and planting is Biltmore.” Chauncey D. Beadle, the estate’s nurseryman, was to be Rick’s tutor. “I am as ready to give Beadle a tuition fee of a thousand dollars as I was to give it to Harvard College,” he assured his son. (Rick was not yet an employee of the firm; he received an allowance from his father.) “If you don’t get it now you never will,” he cautioned. “Book knowledge can not be made to answer this purpose. Knowledge that you can pick up in the office will not suffice.”

  Olmsted considered his own lack of botanical knowledge a severe limitation, one that he insisted should not afflict Rick. “I want you not merely to be better fitted in this respect than I have been,” he wrote, “but enough better to make good to the world what of the art of my profession I have been unable to supply.” He signed the letter “Frederick Law Olmsted, Senior,” to further emphasize his point. It was to Frederick Junior—to him alone—that he was passing the baton.

  Rick had studied zoology at Harvard, but he found memorizing plant names tedious. Nor was he able to establish a rapport with Beadle, who did not have the time—or the inclination—to take the neophyte under his wing. Altogether, Rick was discouraged. Olmsted was unmoved. “I shall not take you into this office until you are much better grounded in trees and shrubs than any one here now. . . . If you think it impracticable, the sooner you give up the profession the better.” He immediately added: “But I know it is not impracticable, and I insist on your making yourself an expert nursery man.” Olmsted apologized for being so blunt. He recalled that his own career had suffered from his father’s indulgence. That made him frank, he explained. Rick, too, was candid. He turned obstinate. The prospect of years of botanical study did not attract him, he wrote. If a knowledge of plants was really essential to being a landscape architect, “then I am compelled to answer, with pain and regret, after the most serious and thorough thought, that I believe I would better enter upon another career.” He mentioned teaching, engineering, and architecture.

  “You seem to me to have very much of my character,” Olmsted wrote his son, “you are weak where I am weak; you are strong where I am strong.” That was partly true. Rick had Olmsted’s ease with people; he was athletic; he had been publisher and editor of his school’s newspaper. All the month of January the letters flew back and forth between Brookline and Biltmore. “Stick to it. Get the better of your difficulties. Conquer them as a man.” “It is too late to turn back,” Olmsted admonished. In one respect Rick was not his father’s son: he was not headstrong. In the end, he agreed to persist with the “botanical and horticultural drudgery.” Olmsted was pleased but remained firm: “I should be disposed to keep you at Biltmore five years, rather than have you fail.” But he reassured him that he was “anxious to get you under training here before I die.”

  In February Olmsted returned to Biltmore, accompanied by Mary. They planned to be there until early May, but Vanderbilt asked them to stay longer. He had commissioned John Singer Sargent to paint portraits of Hunt and Olmsted. Sargent depicted Hunt standing on the front terrace with the house in the background. He placed Olmsted in the forest, surrounded by dogwood, laurel, and rhododendron. The life-size, full-length portraits, which today hang in the second-floor living hall of Biltmore House, are poignant. Hunt looks self-assured, but his gaunt features show the stress of the disease that would kill him only two months later. Olmsted, leaning heavily on his stick, appears in ruddy good health and at ease. In fact, he was troubled. He had been unusually cantankerous the previous week; his treasured arboretum was not going well.

  Olmsted loved trees. “If man is not to live by bread alone, what is better worth doing well than the planting of trees,” he had once written. He had an elaborate arboretum in mind for Biltmore, “a finer, more beautiful, more distinguished and more useful museum of living trees than any now existing in the world.” The mild climate of Biltmore would allow the collection to include both Southern and Northern indigenous varieties, of which he had already purchased four thousand seedlings. It took him four years to elaborate this plan. Finally, in December 1893, he submitted a report to the impatient Vanderbilt. Olmsted’s intention was to lay out the arboretum on two sides of a long road. The trees would be displayed like pictures in an art gallery: “Water-side trees by the lake; Ash, on the fertile well-drained meadow; Magnolias in the dingles opening southward; Oaks on the higher upland, and so on.” Two specimens would be planted near the road; behind these would be a small group of the species; farther back still, a full acre of growth would exhibit the species under forest conditions. He wanted the nine-mile-long arboretum road to serve several purposes at once: as a tree museum, a catalog of forestry resources, and a pleasure drive.

  Olmsted was no tree expert. He counted on Charles Sprague Sargent of the Arnold Arboretum to help him identify and organize the specimen trees. Sargent agreed, then backed out—he considered it inadvisable to put a scientific collection under private ownership. Pinchot the forester, Beadle the nurseryman, and Manning the horticulturist were not much help—each had his parochial interest; only Olmsted had the vision of the whole. “I must yet for a time keep the plan before me as a sculptor keeps his work under damp cloths, in a plastic form,” he told Vanderbilt. The design was mostly in his head, and his powers were flagging. “Father does not keep track of the details of this affair,” Rick wrote to John. “When he went over the road ‘in detail’ with Manning there was little more than general consideration of the groups. . . . I hope the firm as represented by you and Eliot knows a great deal more about the Arboretum than Father does.”

  In truth, Olmsted had been having trouble with his memory. In one embarrassing incident, he had confused the planting layout of the tulip trees along the two sides of the entrance court. “If Rick had not been with me and had not privately set me right I should have shown the fact in a flagrant way to Mr. Vanderbilt,” he admitted to John. This slip—not the first—confirmed his suspicion that he could no longer rely on his memory. “I think it my duty to tell you this at once in order that you may take measures to guard the business from possible consequences. . . . I see that I ought no longer to be entrusted to carry on i
mportant business for the firm alone.” This time John was alarmed and hurried to Biltmore to accompany his parents home. They left before the portrait was complete. Sargent asked Rick, who was Olmsted’s size, to put on his father’s suit and coat and stand in while he finished the portrait.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  Sunset

  OLMSTED SPENT THE REST of the spring at Fairstead. He still went downstairs to the office. He was lucid, but continued to be forgetful. One day he wrote three separate but identical letters to Vanderbilt, “each without slightest memory of previous letter,” an employee recalled. When Eliot found this out, he wondered if similar things had been getting out before. He and John decided that it was necessary to get their partner away from the office, at least for a time.

  For several years Mary and Marion had been spending summers in a rented cottage in the village of Sunset on Deer Isle, Maine. They were often joined by Rick and John but rarely by Olmsted, who did not like the makeshift living arrangements in what he called the “little shebang.” In August Mary asked him to accompany her to Sunset. He agreed, expecting a short stay, yet after two weeks there was no talk of returning home. “I am still here because Mother and Marion seem to have arranged that I should be,” he wrote Rick, “but I can’t say that I am enjoying myself or that it does not continue to be hugger-mugger.” August turned to September and Mary insisted that they stay longer. She and John feared that if Olmsted returned to Brookline, he would want to be involved in the office. To satisfy him, John regularly kept him informed of the firm’s activities. Olmsted, with time on his hands, sent long advisory letters, causing John to testily demand that he read the reports more carefully “before you write your daily [!] letter to us.” He also warned his stepfather that “your failing memory will in time necessitate some slight readjustment of firm matters but you need not give it further thought for some weeks to come.”

  Olmsted suspected that he was the victim of a ruse, but he was resigned. “A queer situation it seems to me,” he wrote Eliot, “but for the present I accept it and am trying to make the poor best of it.” Rick was still in Biltmore and wrote frequently. Olmsted cherished these letters. “Nothing goes as far to lift me out of the feeling of desolation,” he wrote. “It is the assurance that you are taking up what I am dropping.” He was coming to terms with his situation. His forgetfulness was not improving—it was getting worse. It seemed likely that he would not recover. Characteristically, he did not delude himself. All his life he had faced reality; he did so now. “Keep me here as long as you can,” he told Mary. In a moving letter to Eliot he confessed his anguish. All he asked was not to be entirely cut off from the firm.

  I am grateful for your letter of 23d. I hardly need say that I have been passing the bitterest week of my life, resentment gradually giving way to a realization of the truth. In my flurry I have done some things which I would not do now and for which I am sorry. If I can be treated in the spirit suggested by your letter: if I can continue to live at home, and, especially, if I can, in any humble and limited way, be useful to you for a short time longer, it will be a great comfort to me. You cannot think how I have been dreading that it would be thought expedient that I should be sent to an “institution.” Anything but that. My father was a director of an Insane Retreat, and first and last, having been professionally employed and behind the scenes in several, my dread of such places is intense. . . . It was perhaps right to deceive me as I was deceived when brought here, but further dealings with me in that spirit—with any deception—will greatly aggravate my misfortune. Dealt with frankly and kindly I hope to be able to cultivate a spirit of Christian withdrawal.

  The next day his meekness disappeared. Mary found him in a dreadful state. “He makes us very nervous he is so violent,” she wrote John. “Do not tell any one that your father’s state is pitiful,” she ordered him. “Let us keep it to ourselves as long as we can. Else his name will be useless to the business.” She was not hard-hearted. Her husband’s name was his chief legacy, as he himself had pointed out. It had to be protected. He would have approved.

  Mary did her best. Yet as her husband’s behavior became increasingly erratic, it was difficult to carry on in remote Sunset. Marion, already high-strung and further upset by her father’s behavior, was not much help. Two weeks after the violent outburst they all returned to Brookline. The local doctor diagnosed premature old age brought on by overwork, complicated with “melancholia.” He directed that Olmsted should stay away from the office and recommended a sojourn in England, whose damp weather would do him good, he assured Mary. She and Marion would accompany him. Olmsted wrote a final letter to Rick. “My doctors wish me to think that I am to be cured,” he observed wryly. He continued to worry about Biltmore: “As I am drawn away from it and realize more and more the finality of this withdrawal, the intenser grows my urgency to be sure that what I have designed is to be realized.” He was overjoyed when Rick returned to say good-bye, and they prevailed upon him to accompany them. The party left in mid-November.

  As the Olmsteds sailed, a cruel accident befell Calvert Vaux. Seventy-one, now employed as a landscape architect by the New York Parks Department, he was living in Bensonhurst. On November 19, 1895, he disappeared during a dense fog while on his morning walk beside Gravesend Bay. It was feared that he might have fallen into the water, and his drowned body was found three days later. When Mary received the news in England, she burned the letter, afraid of its effect on Olmsted (she told him later).

  Rick rented a house in Lymstone, Devonshire, and engaged a nurse. At his father’s request Rick paid a visit to Kew Gardens and later briefly stopped in Paris before returning home in late December. Olmsted wrote John a long letter describing Rick’s activities in England, instructing him about Rick’s education, and giving advice about Biltmore and the firm’s future. He commented only briefly on his own state of mind: “I am going down hill rapidly. I am much depressed but try not to show it.” His condition was worsening, the confused and sometimes violent spells recurring with greater frequency. The doctor’s prognosis was bleak. “He gives up all hope of improvement for your father,” Mary informed Rick bluntly, “and says that all we can do is to stave off the more active form of inflammation and hope for simple imbecility.”

  Olmsted was probably a victim of some form of dementia. The progress of this disease is gradual, often measured in years. In its early stages it manifests itself as mere forgetfulness, which is why it is difficult to diagnose. As the disease advances, abnormal deposits of protein destroy the nerve cells in the brain and memory fades further, causing a gradual descent into bewilderment and confusion. Typically, the patient has good days and bad. Belligerence and paranoia can develop in extreme cases. Olmsted, who once wrote to Rick from Sunset complaining that John was plotting a coup to take over the firm, exhibited all these symptoms.

  A few months later, when Olmsted became unmanageable, Mary was obliged to consign him to a sanitarium. She and Marion, exhausted by the ordeal, were now free to travel. They toured southern England and went to London. Mary eventually sent Marion, who was increasingly distraught, home.1 Without consulting her sons, she took power of attorney over her husband’s affairs. She ordered John and Rick to oversee the construction of a house on forty-six acres of land that she had earlier purchased on Deer Isle. John wondered what his mother would do with herself in such a remote place. “If she had some good-natured talkative darky servants it might be some relief but a solitary white woman servant won’t be gay.” Knowing that she would not be swayed, John hired an architect—the talented William Ralph Emerson—and put Rick, who was now an employee of the firm, in charge of the project.

  When Mary and Olmsted returned from England in July, accompanied by a housekeeper and a male nurse, they went straight to Maine. The house, a large affair with eight bedrooms, was not yet finished. They lived in tents, which reminded Mary of Yosemite. They moved in before the winter. The comfortable house (which Mary named Felsted), the invigor
ating climate, the view of Penobscot Bay, and the calm surroundings did not have the desired effect. Olmsted continued his downward spiral. In March 1897 Felsted received tragic news from Brookline. Charles Eliot had died suddenly of meningitis. At first, Olmsted was agitated and wanted to return. He could not sleep for three days. Then, just as quickly, he forgot the whole business.

  Only Olmsted’s close friends were aware of his plight; as far as everyone else was concerned, he had merely withdrawn from public life. In time the clients of the firm had become used to dealing with John Olmsted and Charles Eliot. When Eliot died, John invited Rick to become his partner. By then there was no need to continue the pretense and they renamed the firm Olmsted Brothers. Their business did not decrease; far from it, they found themselves more in demand than ever. The seeds that their father had sown across the country sprouted and bore fruit. In time the Fairstead office expanded and became the largest landscape architecture practice in the country, probably in the world.

  Olmsted was to live at Felsted less than two years. Rick, who visited regularly, finally concluded that nothing more could be done. The very thing that his father feared most could not be postponed. In September 1898 the family moved Olmsted to McLean Asylum in Waverly, about four miles from Brookline. There, the great landscape architect lived in a cottage surrounded by grounds that he himself had designed.

  In one of his last letters to Rick, Olmsted had directed his son personally to take charge of the Biltmore arboretum. Rick had not become skilled in trees and plants, and the complicated work confounded him. Vanderbilt lost interest in the project, and the arboretum’s fate was sealed in 1900 when, financially squeezed, he stopped all new work on the estate.2 Rick was only twenty-seven when he became a partner in the firm—the period of apprenticeship that his father had anticipated was relatively brief. Nevertheless, he soon eclipsed his older half brother. “John is John & must be taken as he is made,” Mary once wrote, “most excellent but clumsy.” Rick, on the other hand, was outgoing and convivial. And he had the famous name. In short order he blossomed. In 1898 he was appointed landscape architect to the Boston Metropolitan Park Commission, a regional organization that Eliot had helped to found. Rick followed his father’s admonition to “make L.A. respected as an Art and a liberal profession.” In 1899 he helped to establish the American Society of Landscape Architects. In 1900 Charles W. Eliot invited him to Harvard to create the country’s first curriculum in landscape architecture; two years later he was appointed the Charles Eliot Professor of Landscape Architecture. The following year Rick achieved national prominence when President Theodore Roosevelt appointed him with Daniel Burnham to the Senate Park Commission. The Commission, which eventually included McKim and Saint-Gaudens, was charged with replanning the center of Washington, D.C.3 In a few short years Rick truly had become the “leader of the van.” Sadly, by then Olmsted was no longer able to appreciate that the last great project of his life had come to fruition just as he had hoped—and planned.