“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 study,—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
Today Hartford is not a beautiful city. The interstate highway separates the city from the river, and although the state capitol is handsome, the downtown is an ill-assorted collection of undistinguished modern office buildings. But in the midnineteenth century, Hartford was widely recognized as an attractive town. It was surrounded by rolling countryside and preserved many of the charms of the New England village it had once been. “The town is beautifully situated in a basin of green hills . . . it is a lovely place,” observed Charles Dickens, who spent three days there during his 1842 tour of the United States. People lived in neat, white-painted wooden houses with gardens surrounded by picket fences. Main Street was a broad, unpaved thoroughfare, lined by wooden sidewalks and three- and four-story brick buildings with stores below and offices and rented rooms above. Like all the streets, it was shaded by large trees. The leafy canopy spread over the town like a green blanket, pierced at regular intervals by the steeples of devout Hartford’s many churches. “Of all the beautiful towns it has been my fortune to see, this is the chief,” wrote Mark Twain upon his first visit in 1868. “Everywhere the eye turns it is blessed with visions of refreshing green. You do not know what beauty is if you have not been here.” Twain liked Hartford so much he moved there shortly after.
Olmsted’s rambles took him to one or another of his scores of uncles and cousins, as well as to his grandmother Content Olmsted, whose husband, Benjamin, had died when Frederick was ten. Benjamin Olmsted had been a strong influence on the boy and had left him with a valuable memory. One day the normally closemouthed old man noticed that his grandson had climbed a tall elm that grew near the house. He told Frederick that as a boy he had planted this very tree, some seventy years earlier. “It came to me after a time as he went on talking about it,” Olmsted recalled, “that there had been nothing in all his long life of which he was so frankly proud and in which he took such complete pleasure as the planting and the beautiful growth of this tree.”
Olmsted’s favorite relation seems to have been his namesake, Uncle Law, whom he singled out as having had “a notable influence in my education.” Jonathan Law, a friend of the poet John Greenleaf Whittier, was a scholarly man, whom Olmsted recalled as reciting Latin poetry (Frederick evidently had a good grasp of Latin thanks, probably, to Brace’s teaching). Charlotte Olmsted had grown up with her older sister, Stella, and Jonathan Law, so they had particularly warm feelings for their nephew. Moreover, they had no children of their own. Olmsted visited the Laws during his summer holidays. The couple encouraged his interest in plants, and he was given his own garden beds to cultivate. He also frequented the house of his bachelor first cousin Charles Hyde Olmsted, whose shipowner father had left him with a modest fortune. Charles, then about thirty years old, was a Yale graduate, but had been “brought up to no regular calling,” in Olmsted’s words. Charles shared his interest in nature with the boy, whom he later introduced into the Hartford Natural History Society. Like Jonathan Law, Charles was a retiring, bookish man, and he allowed his young cousin the run of his “notable library.” His relations with the Laws and with his cousin underline an attractive trait of Olmsted’s character, here described by a boyhood friend. “He was very fond of society, not only of young people both boys and girls but of elderly people of whom there was anything to learn—and there were few from whom he could not learn something.” It was kindly elderly people such as the Laws and Charles Hyde Olmsted who helped the boy through his sometimes difficult childhood.
The landscape of Connecticut consists chiefly of gently undulating hills. The main feature is the valley of the Connecticut River, but there are many smaller rivers, and thousands of ponds and lakes. The relatively temperate climate lacks the extremes of neighboring states. The mild winters and humid summers allow the cultivation of a wide variety of trees and shrubs. This was, and is, a countryside of undramatic but exceptional beauty. Olmsted took his surroundings for granted, but they undoubtedly had an important influence on his sensibilities. The landscape of Connecticut is unusual in another way. It is, by North American standards, modestly scaled. There are no great lakes, vast prairies, thundering rivers, or craggy mountains. Even the shoreline, protected by Long Island Sound, has a benign air. Settled early, it has a tamed look that would have been apparent even in the nineteenth century, perhaps even more so then since the state was more rural, and more agricultural, than it is today. Of all New England, it is this picturesque countryside that most closely recalls that of old England. No wonder that the writing of the British landscape gardeners immediately appealed to the young Olmsted. The countryside they described was not exotic—it was familiar.
Living away from home, being moved from one school to another, gave Frederick the opportunity to experience the variety of the Connecticut landscape. But it also limited his circle of friends. Though he was warm and outgoing, not until later did he make friends—often lifelong friends—easily. During his childhood, his closest companion was his younger brother, John. As the size of the Olmsted household increased through the arrival of new half sisters and half brothers, Frederick and John, separated by only three years, naturally became fast friends. The bond was strengthened by the two terms that the boys spent together in Newington under the sober eye of the Reverend Mr. Brace.
Years later, Olmsted recalled a hike with his brother to his aunt’s house in Cheshire. “I was but nine when I once walked sixteen miles over a strange country with my brother who was but six, to reach it. We were two days on the road, spent the night at a rural inn which I saw still standing a few years ago, and were so tired when we arrived that, after sitting before that great fireplace and being feasted, we found that our legs would not support us and were carried off to bed. It was a beautiful region of rocky glens and trout brooks.”5 I imagine their adventure. It is a sunny day. The dusty road outside Hartford winds its way through rolling meadows. Olmsted is in the lead, probably talking, pointing out birds and trees in the hedgerows along the verge. He is excited about the prospect of adventure. He holds his younger brother by the hand. John is less sure about the outing. He is thinking that perhaps they should go home before it gets too late. But he goes along, trusting that Frederick will find the way, as he always seems to do.
1. One should certainly not judge it by modern standards. Formal education was neither commonplace nor a prerequisite for future accomplishments. Abraham Lincoln, born thirteen years earlier than Olmsted (in much poorer circumstances), learned to read and write at home and attended school less than a year. Nevertheless, he was able to study law on his own and obtain a license.
2. Evidently Olmsted did not look back on his extended absences from home with bad feelings since he sent his own boys to a boarding school.
3. Bushnell was the Olmsteds’ next-door neighbor. He was considered radical, however, and the Olmsted family did not attend his church.
4. In 1829, Sir Robert Peel organized the first regular police force in London. Philadelphia followed suit five years later, but most American cities lacked regular policing until the 1840s.
5. It does not say much for Mary Ann Olmsted’s mothering that she allowed the two young boys to make such an excursion alone.