I have just received your note of 15th inst.

I was born in Hartford, Conn, on the 27th April, 1822. If you have occasion for other dates try Appleton’s Cyclopedia article “Olmsted F. L.” As to my books I write tolerably only with exceeding labor. My best book was the Journey in Texas, because edited by my brother, but best also, for your purpose because it partly indicates a somewhat important part of my education. There is a labored article on “Landscape Gardening” in Johnson’s Cyclopedia, which I wrote. I should not write quite the same now but I guess it comes nearer than anything else I have written to showing such theory of the Art as I have had. There is an article on “Parks” in Appleton’s Cyclopedia, which I wrote while engaged with the Central Park work. Somewhat revised, I think, for the last edition. I have written many park reports. All labored and clumsy but mainly sound theoretically.

My grandfather Olmsted, when I first came to know him was over eighty. A retired ship-master, somewhat crippled with rheumatism, walking always with a long-shoulder-high Malacca “cane” which he had obtained himself on the “pepper coast.” He wore breeches and stockings, ruffled “bosoms” & waistbands; hair in a Q. (I can’t spell it) and a real beaver bill-crowned [651]hat. But the great cocked hat had not been long laid aside, for I found it in a closet, with old sea-charts, flags a quadrant &c. He was a private in one of the first companies going to Boston after Lexington fight, and was in the expedition going thro’ the Maine wilderness to besiege Quebec. I remember his hearty laugh when I asked him if he really did cut off his boot-tops and cook them for want of other food in that disastrous march. Once I lay under a great elm tree and he came hobbling out & stood leaning over me on his staff, and when I spoke of the tree he told me that he had dug it up in “the Swamp” dragged it home and planted where I found it, when he was a boy. That led me to plant a seed of a locust, and I saw it come up and grow, transplanted it and saw it become a large tree with birds nesting in it. It was cut down a few years ago. I could not have been over five years old. My grandmother Olmsted was a nice old lady the daughter of a minister who was a brother or near relation of the Colonial Governor Pitkin. Her name was Content Pitkin. I have a silver porringer bearing her initials & a book that belonged to the Governor. She told me that she danced with the French officers as they passed thro’ Hartford, moving from Newport to join Washington.

My mother’s name was Charlotte Hull, (some distant kin of Commodore Hull.) coming from Cheshire, Conn. Her father was a farmer and I more dimly remember him. Much more clearly I recall the great fireplace of a house of my aunt Brooks my mother’s sister, in which house and in the brooks flowing by it, I spent many happy months, often walking to it to pass a night as I grew older. 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 we were carried off to bed. It was a beautiful region of rocky glens and trout brooks.

I am glad you are restricted as to space. I give you these personal matters because you asked me for them & because I think that you can generalize from them in respect to educational influences better than I can. It appears to me that I early had a rather remarkable lazy enjoyment of natural scenery but that I never was what is commonly meant when a man is called a lover of nature—but perhaps laziness prevented me from any such study of nature as this term implies. I regret it. Laziness? No; hardly; but a wandering, contemplative, day-dreaming, and in that respect self-indulgent habit—sympathetic with those moods of men which are best satisfied in listening to music and gazing upon scenery.

I don’t know whether you know it; I was asked not to mention it, so I do, to you; for yourself; Harvard is intending to make a doctor of laws! of me on the 28th. I mention to you because it seems to me the queerest thing. But I am to take it because it gives a standing to my profession which it needs. I mention it because I think the public will be amazed, as I am, and the vindication must be that there is more in the Art of L. A. than the public recognizes. Of [652]course I am not the man to deny that. I am to be coupled with Burnham as the organizing architect of the Exposition & it means much the same as having the queen lay a sword upon our shoulders, I suppose.

Sincerely Yours

I write in this way because I am in bed. Excuse me. I always have to spend at least a day or two in bed when I come here. It seems to be a matter of acclimation to the rarified air of the mountain region. The trouble this time is mild but enforces caution if I am to reach Cambridge on the 28th. It is a notable circumstance {that} at the same time that Burnham and I go to Harvard to receive honors for our professions, Hunt goes to England to receive his medal.

The most interesting general fact of my life seems to me to be that it was not as a gardener, a florist, a botanist or as one in any way specially interested in plants and flowers as such or specially susceptible to the beauty of flowers and plants that I was drawn to the work which is to give me the Harvard distinction. (I am ignorant and unwise and inept in that field and largely dependent on others) The root of all my good work is an early respect for, regard and enjoyment of scenery (the word tells much better of the fact than landscape) and extraordinary opportunities of cultivating susceptibility to the power of scenery. Not so much grand or sensational scenery as scenery [654]of a more domestic order. Scenery to be looked upon contemplatively and which is provocative of musing moods. I think that I was largely educated for my profession by the enjoyment which my father and mother (step-mother) took in loitering journeys; in afternoon drives on the Connecticut meadows. This at first, helping to give me a bent, which, when book study was restricted by the trouble of my eyes, and when I had chanced to get some reading of Price and Gilpin, led me, in long and leisurely tramps and visits to friends on farms, to take a more intelligent, discriminating, analytical and cultivated interest in such scenery. So the habit thus begun to be formed led me, when I came to visit parks & promenades abroad to {view} them, for a time, less from the point of view of a member of society, than as an amateur of scenery and so to look upon trees and plants and weeds less from regard to their beauty as such, than from regard to their value as elements of compositions of scenery. To look upon roads and walks in parks, correspondingly, as {…} according to their {…} through the use of which scenery was to be enjoyed. I believe that I have before said something about this. I am inclined to urge it because so rarely do people discriminate between a love of nature, such as be shown in admiration of flowers in a vase, or even in admiration for a hortus siccus or a botanic garden, and a love of nature such as used to lead my father and mother to take quiet drives upon meadow and wood land roads, for the most part regarding the scenery silently and never in a way to lead to exclamations—My mother, by the way, used to have a very unusual number of wild plants in her garden, both bushes and herbs, gathered with her own hands, sometimes with my help, when I was a very small boy. She regularly carried a basket and a trowel for gathering plants, in our journeyings.

I have often thought there was less regard for {scenery} and consequently for landscape architecture now than then, and been inclined to trace the loss to modern methods of travel. A man in a hurry; a man moving fast, cannot enjoy scenery contemplatively. Scenery is enjoyed not because it is in itself beautiful but because contemplating it quietly the mind is led into a musing mood—a poetic mood, perhaps. Modern means of travel are most unfavorable to the enjoyment of scenery. The longer one lives in a place, the more he becomes accustomed to its scenery & to enjoy it without thinking or talking about it, the more influence it has upon him.

I am not disposed to under-value the scientific or the “practical” side of the profession. But in seeking for a reason why Harvard and why the Century should do what is proposed, it seems to me that it must be found in the fact of a cultivated sensitiveness to the sentiment of scenery, and that the value of any biography of F.L.O. must turn on the manner and degree in which it draws attention to the class of circumstances by which in early life he was led to look for his pleasure largely to leisurely quiet, unsystematic familiar intercourse with natural scenery. I do not express my idea quite correctly. I cannot. That is where I fail. That, if you get the idea by review of the facts in which it lies, is what you can do so much better. But I may suggest it again in this way. I have [655]not been a man of leisure, have not been a contemplative man (in the way of Isaac Walton) with regard to matters of art and literature, but I was so placed and circumstanced that with reference to scenery I was a man of leisure and was indolently contemplative at a period of life when most men are held very closely to the study of books or scientific observation.

I don’t like to be talking so much of myself. I do so only that you may better see how in the guise of a biographical statement, you can educate the public to a better understanding of what the art in its essence is, that I profess; a love for and intelligent cultivated regard for scenery—commonly called with danger of a confusion of ideas—landscape. I purposely do not say “natural scenery,” because the association of farm houses and barns, of smoke and roads, and the planted elms of village streets and door yards with natural elements of scenery was an essential element of that of which my early life was an unconscious study. Herein lies the lesson that I would have you teach, that study and industry are not all that are wanted for education.

But of course the more important end is to increase the respect of the Amn public for the art—to show that it is an Art, and that appreciation of and power to work in it is not an accident of birth; that evy man does not possess it, and that those qualities & habits by means of which success in the accumulation of wealth & social & political strength—those of the practical man, whether banker or alderman, are not the qualities that shd give them the confidence so many are disposed to use, in overruling & superceding those of an artist.

The main question is: Should L. Architecture be regarded as an art and a profession, or as a matter of common sense in wh. one man’s ideas are of equal weight with another’s? The less you make of me, except as a text, the more of the essence of the art, and the need of the profession in American Society & civilization the better—

Sincerely Yours