OLMSTED WAS AN ORGANIZER when organization was considered a symptom of “monomania,” and a long-range planner in a period that thought of planning as “mysterious.” He was a landscape architect before that profession was founded, designed the first large suburban community in the United States, foresaw the need for national parks, and devised one of the country’s first regional plans. Above all, he was an artist who chose to work in a medium that then—even more than now—lacked public recognition. He was an innovator and a pioneer largely by chance. But, as Louis Pasteur, an exact contemporary of Olmsted, once observed, “Chance favors only the mind that is prepared.” Olmsted’s preparation was not based on formal training or education. What laid the groundwork for his later achievements was an amalgam of sensibility and temperament, coupled with an unusual set of formative experiences.
He was born in Hartford, Connecticut, on April 26, 1822. His family circumstances were comfortable. His father, John Olmsted, a local dry-goods merchant, and his mother, Charlotte Hull, a farmer’s daughter, had married the year before. John was thirty-one, she was twenty-two. They christened their first child Frederick, in memory of John’s older brother who had died a few years earlier. Following the new fashion among genteel Americans in the early nineteenth century, the infant was given a middle name—Law—after Jonathan Law, who was married to Charlotte’s older sister, Stella.
Three years later, Charlotte bore a second son, named John Hull. The Olmsteds lived in a rented house on College Street, not the best part of town, but conveniently close to the store. The household help consisted of a cook, a handyman, and two maids. The little family seemed well on its way, but fate—which was to play a big role in Olmsted’s life—had it otherwise. “When I was three years old I chanced to stray into a room at the crisis of a tragedy therein occurring,” Olmsted later recalled, “and turned and fled from it screaming in a manner adding to the horror of the household. It was long before I could be soothed and those nearby said to one another that I would never forget what I had seen.” Even as an adult, he could not bring himself to specify the nature of the tragedy he had witnessed. When Frederick was three, Charlotte accidentally took an overdose of laudanum while suffering from a toothache and died. It would be hard to pick a worse age to lose one’s mother. One can only imagine the feelings that roiled in the boy’s head: loss, pain, fear, guilt, anxiety. It was the pivotal event of his childhood.
John Olmsted grieved, but with his business to attend to and two young children to rear, he needed a spouse. Fourteen months later he married Mary Ann Bull, the daughter of a prominent Hartford druggist, and a close friend of Charlotte’s. The union turned out to be solid, lasting forty-seven years until John’s death. They would have six children together. Many years later, reminiscing about his father, Olmsted recalled a loving parent but a reserved and even taciturn man. “He was at bottom a rarely meek, modest, affectionate and amiable man. He had also a strong sense of justice. He was very nervous, impulsive and in a way ambitious but was crippled by . . . a very meager & unsuitable education, and mainly by excessive shyness.” Frederick’s tall, broad-shouldered father was a self-made man without formal education, which probably contributed to his closemouthedness. But one thing was certain: he had a good head for business. He was one of seven children, raised on a farm in East Hartford—his father had been a ship’s captain. At sixteen he was apprenticed to a relative who was a merchant in Hartford. After only eight years with H. B. Olmsted & Company, he opened his own store. The prominent location on Main Street was opposite the State House and near the Congregational church and Hartford’s old burying ground. The store carried a wide variety of dry goods: woolens, cottons, silks, so-called fancy goods, and carpeting. (Dry-goods stores were the immediate ancestors of the large “departmentalized” stores that opened in the 1860s.) Despite formidable competition (in 1825 Hartford had more than twenty dry-goods emporia) he prospered.
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.