BIOGRAPHICAL DIRECTORY

Elizabeth Wooster Baldwin (1824–1912) made the strongest impression on Olmsted of any of the girls he knew in his youth. Her social qualifications alone were impressive. She was a great-granddaughter of Roger Sherman, and her father, Roger Sherman Baldwin, was governor of Connecticut during the period of 1845–46 when Olmsted met and fell in love with her. Frederick Kingsbury later judged that she “had perhaps more social power or at all events more practical social initiative than any other young lady in New Haven.” Her parents gave her a good education, including attendance at the classes held in New Haven by the innovative educator and eccentric Shakespearean scholar Delia Bacon. Moreover, the Baldwin family was at the center of the intellectual and social life of New Haven.

In addition to her impressive social position, “Miss B.,” as Olmsted and his friends respectfully called her, enjoyed a high reputation among them as a serious thinker. She combined her obvious intelligence with a prettiness and warmth that made Olmsted most responsive to the attention she showed him.

During his brief stay in New Haven in the fall of 1845, Olmsted met her and attended several literary evenings at her family’s house. Then, while he was recuperating in Hartford in early 1846, she visited there and gave him an opportunity to continue their friendship. He saw her at several social functions and had a long carriage ride and a “thick talk” with her, during which he found to his delight that she had a “strong inclination for rural pleasures.” During the month after her visit he became increasingly sure that he was in love with her, but she dashed his hopes by saying that it was “neither right nor best” that she grant him the favor of a correspondence. This left him “right smack & square on dead in love with her, beached & broken backed.”

[66]

Her influence on him was not at an end, however. During the early months of 1846, Miss B. played an important part in a revival of religious concern among Olmsted’s young friends in New Haven. In early April he hurried there to partake of the revival spirit and felt that he benefited greatly by talking with his friends, especially with her. He still had hopes of winning her affection and eagerly anticipated a visit from her when he was at George Geddes’s farm in the summer of 1846. But the visit did not occur, and he saw her seldom thereafter.

Although their active friendship was over by mid-1846, Olmsted occasionally confessed his lingering admiration for her. Five years later, for instance, in the spring of 1851, Emily Perkins learned of his feelings just as she and Olmsted were about to become engaged. “. . . I was surprised to see how much he really loved you,” Emily wrote her. “I don’t think you ever felt any gratitude for his faithful regard for you. At least not half as much as it was deserved. I doubt if you have more than one or two friends in the world who have so much real attachment to you.”

Elizabeth Baldwin might well have seemed heartless to her cousin Emily. Not only had she neglected Olmsted, but in 1848 she had refused the marriage offer of a rich Boston merchant named Howe. Before the end of 1851, though, she had fallen in love with Clinton Camp, a promising Yale graduate student five years her junior. Much against her parents’ wishes, she became engaged to him before he left for graduate study in Germany. Two years later he died of tuberculosis while still abroad. In 1856 she married a young scholar, William Dwight Whitney, a philologist and professor of Sanskrit at Yale who had been a friend of Camp’s when they were fellow students in Germany. Whitney became an eminent lexicographer and Orientalist.

Despite Elizabeth’s marriage and his own and the passage of many years, Olmsted’s feeling for her persisted. It surfaced again in 1890 when he scribbled a letter to her on a piece of wrapping paper while under the influence of a heroic dose of whiskey, opium, calomel, and quinine that a local doctor gave him when he fell sick at the Biltmore Estate in North Carolina. After he recovered from the illness— and the medicine— Olmsted was relieved and flattered to receive a friendly reply from her.

He then wrote a letter of explanation and reminiscence in which he gave her much of the credit for what he had become. He recalled how he had first met her in New Haven soon after his return from China: “You lifted me a good deal out of my constitutional shyness,” he wrote, “and helped more than you can think to rouse a sort of scatter-brained pride and to make me realize that my secluded life, country breeding and mis-education were not such bars to an ’intellectual life’ as I was in the habit of supposing.” He told her that partly through her influence he acquired his lifelong enthusiasm for Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Russell Lowell, John Ruskin, and “other real [67]prophets.” “And these,” he declared, “gave me the needed respect for my own constitutional tastes and an inclination to poetical refinement in the cultivation of them that afterwards determined my profession.”

While this assessment, so many years after the fact, may have been exaggerated, it was an accurate reflection of the persistence of her image in his mind and of the role that young women had played in his intellectual development. They were for him the arbiters of the spheres of music, literature, and art. And in those readings and discussions, Elizabeth Baldwin, Emily Perkins, and Sophie Stevens did the most to encourage his interests in literature and the arts.

Charles Loring Brace (1826–1890) was one of Olmsted’s closest friends and a lifelong correspondent. Like Olmsted, he was descended from Puritan ancestors who settled Hartford in the seventeenth century and was a member of the seventh generation of the family in Connecticut. His grandfather James was the writing-master at the school of his wife’s sister, Miss Sarah Pierce, in Litchfield, Connecticut, one of the first in the state to provide education for young women beyond that offered by the common schools.

Brace’s father, John Pierce Brace, followed James’s choice of a career. Educated by his aunts, Sarah and Mary Pierce, he became the head teacher in their school, adding scientific courses to the curriculum. With an encyclopedic knowledge of many subjects and a passion for passing it on to others, he made the school a leader in women’s education and gained a considerable reputation for his learning and culture. One of his students, Harriet Beecher Stowe, described him as “one of the most stimulating and inspiring instructors I ever knew.” In 1832, when Charles was six, the family moved to Hartford, where John Pierce Brace became head of the Hartford [68]Female Seminary. In 1849 he became editor of the Hartford Daily Courant, a post he held until 1863.

Charles Brace’s mother, Lucy Porter Brace, came from an important Maine family and was a descendant of Rufus King, the powerful Federalist politician. Her sister was the first wife of Lyman Beecher, and the two families lived near each other in Litchfield for six years. She died when Charles was fourteen and played little part in his upbringing, devoting her attention instead to his sickly younger brother.

It was Charles’s father who played the crucial role in his development. John Brace eagerly supplied his son from his vast store of learning, and by the time the young man entered Yale College in 1842 he was well-read in the classics and European literature and had some knowledge of five languages. Olmsted and his friends recognized that Charles was unusually fortunate in the guidance and fellowship he had from his father.

Brace had come to know the Olmsted brothers sometime in the decade between his family’s move to Hartford and the beginning of his college years, and John Hull Olmsted was his roommate during his freshman year at Yale. Living in such close quarters, Brace became more aware of the difference in their backgrounds than he had been before. Coming from a well-to-do family, John Hull Olmsted willingly shared the small luxuries he had always enjoyed, while Brace, accustomed to the frugal life of a teacher’s family, felt uneasy at such generosity. He was reluctant to use John’s fencing foils and boxing gloves and accept his special treats of food from home until he realized that they were an expression of friendship, not an attempt to make him subservient. When Olmsted visited Yale in the fall of 1842 and again in 1845, he too made Brace one of his closest friends.

The special contribution that Brace made to the group at Yale was energy and enthusiasm. He pitched into all activities with vigor: that quality, Olmsted later recalled, was his strong point. Likewise, Frederick Kingsbury later wrote that he first saw Brace in the midst of a boxing match with John Hull Olmsted and perceived “something . . . in the intense earnestness with which he went into the boxing that impressed me at once, and it was a true index of his character.” The Olmsted brothers relished his company in outdoor hikes and games, and their mutual enjoyment of vigorous debate about everything from aesthetics and religion to politics cemented a friendship that lasted the rest of their lives.

Like their contemporaries, Brace and Olmsted sought a strong religious faith and some assurance of their salvation. Brace helped introduce the Olmsted brothers to Horace Bushnell’s doctrines, which they often read and discussed. The height of their religious concerns came during the religious revival at Yale in the spring of 1846, during which both Olmsteds and Brace experienced conversion to what they thought was a saving faith.

After graduating from Yale in 1846, Brace studied for the ministry. [69]He spent a year at the Yale Divinity School and then studied further at Union Theological Seminary in New York. This training led him to emphasize the importance of reaching decisions on points of doctrine, while Olmsted began to stress good works. “Throw your light on the path in Politics and Social Improvement and encourage me to put my foot down and forwards,” Olmsted urged his friend. “There’s a great work wants doing in this our generation, Charley, let us off jacket and go about it.”

Brace in effect took Olmsted’s advice, swallowed his repugnance for the world of misery and sin, and in 1848 began ministering to New York’s social derelicts on Blackwell’s Island. In the meantime he completed his theological training and in the spring of 1850 left New York for two years of travel and study abroad.

He spent the first six months with Olmsted and his brother John, on a walking tour of the British Isles and the Continent, during which he learned how philanthropists there tried to help the poor. He also met his future wife, Letitia Neill, in Belfast when he and the Olmsteds were visiting her father, Robert Neill, a reformer and friend of American antislavery leaders. Because Brace could not afford the trip unless he traveled cheaply, the Olmsteds agreed to take second-class accommodations for the crossing and do much of their traveling on foot. Although Olmsted later regretted some of the penny-pinching, it meant that they saw more of the common life of the countries they visited than they would otherwise have done.

Brace supported himself during his remaining months abroad by writing travel letters for American newspapers. His time went smoothly until the spring of 1851, when, despite warnings, he insisted on visiting Hungary, where the Austrian government was still searching out those involved in the unsuccessful revolution of 1848. While the sympathetic Brace was enjoying Hungarian hospitality, an Austrian gendarme arrested him as an emissary from the Hungarian revolutionaries who had escaped to England. He spent five weeks in a miserable prison before the American ambassador could arrange for his release. The episode outraged Brace and alarmed his American friends. When he returned to New York he published an account of the Hungarian adventure, Hungary in 1851: with an Experience of the Austrian Police.

The following year he wrote a description of his six-month visit to Germany, entitled Home-Life in Germany. The book gave an enthusiastic picture of German family life, “whose affection and cheerfulness make the outside world as nothing in comparison.” He came to the conclusion, as had Horace Bushnell, that a revival of home life in silent and stern New England households would do more for Christianity than the traditional revivals. His views outraged some of his readers in Connecticut, one of whom concluded that the author would be at his happiest drinking himself under the table with boon companions.

[70]

Having published his first books, Brace turned his attention to the poor children of New York who had no home life at all. He became head of the newly formed Children’s Aid Society, a post he held for the rest of his life. Under his direction the society fed, housed, and gave religious instruction to homeless children of the streets and sent over 90,000 of them out to grow up with farm families in upstate New York and the Midwest, far away from city temptations and poverty. Despite the heavy demands that directing the Children’s Aid Society put on him, Brace found time to write seven books during the thirty-seven years he spent with that organization. They included works on philanthropy, travel accounts of Scandinavia and California, and studies of race and religion, with such varied titles as The Races of the Old World: A Manual of Ethnology, The Dangerous Classes of New York, and Twenty Years’ Work Among Them, and Gesta Christi: Or, A History of Humane Progress Under Christianity.

From the beginning of their friendship, Brace gave Olmsted the benefit of his growing circle of acquaintances in the world of letters and philanthropy. He arranged for Olmsted to meet Henry Raymond, the editor of the New-York Daily Times, with the result that Olmsted undertook to travel through the South as a correspondent. In 1855 Brace’s friend Joshua A. Dix enabled Olmsted to enter further into the “literary republic” of New York by offering him a partnership in the publishing firm of Dix & Edwards. In that capacity he worked with George W. Curtis and Parke Godwin editing Putnam’s Monthly Magazine and made the acquaintance of many American writers. When Dix & Edwards went bankrupt in 1857, Olmsted received important advice from another of Brace’s friends, Charles W. Elliott. He was a commissioner of Central Park in New York and urged Olmsted to apply to be superintendent of the park’s construction. Among the prominent men whose letters of recommendation helped Olmsted to secure the post was Brace’s uncle, the botanist Asa Gray.

Olmsted and Brace were close friends throughout their lives and carried on a remarkable correspondence. While Brace continued to argue theology with others, his exchanges with Olmsted in later years centered on the great social and political issues of the times. Throughout their lives they maintained a fondness and deep respect for one another. Six years before Brace died, Olmsted wrote him: “You decidedly have had the best & most worthily successful life of all whom I have known.” The Children’s Aid Society, he assured his friend, was “the most satisfactory of all the benevolent works of our time.”

Emma Brace (1828–1850), the youngest sister of Charles Loring Brace, showed a special affection for Olmsted as they were growing up in Hartford. This chagrined Olmsted’s brother, John, who complained in 1845 that he had been trying since he was five years old to make her smile on him, “but never got anything more than ’respects’ or ’compliments’ for all my bouquets and walking home from parties and meetings with her.” Olmsted confessed to John at that time that “I really love her, love her dearly, but I’ve no intention of marrying her, and she knows it, and moreover I know that she’s no intention of marrying me, whatever I may wish.”

In 1845 she graduated from the Hartford Female Seminary and went South the next spring to start a school in Garrettsburg, Kentucky. With this show of independence— and, perhaps, of ambition— she made herself no longer a burden on her father’s slender means.

During her absence from Connecticut, Olmsted continued to feel his old affection for her. Others must have perceived this, since when she returned to Hartford for a vacation in 1847 she heard that they were “certainly engaged.” “Do you believe it?” she asked his brother; “Please congratulate Fred and tell him he ought to tell me his secrets.” Her sojourn in Kentucky, followed by a period of teaching in Georgia, kept Emma and Olmsted apart, and when she returned to New England in 1849 she was fatally ill with tuberculosis. In February 1850, she died at the home of her uncle Asa Gray in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Horace Bushnell (1802–1876), the Congregational theologian, was an important figure in the Hartford of Olmsted’s youth. Several of his social and religious views strongly influenced Olmsted and appeared—sometimes acknowledged and sometimes not— in his writing.

The Olmsted and Bushnell families were next-door neighbors on Ann Street from 1836 to 1841, when Bushnell moved and John Olmsted bought his house. Although the Olmsted family attended the church of Bushnell’s rival and frequent antagonist Joel Hawes until 1849, Olmsted had ample opportunity to learn about Bushnell’s ideas. He frequently heard Bushnell preach in Hartford, both in his youth and during visits there in later years.

After 1845 he often discussed Bushnell’s doctrines with Charles Loring Brace, who later said that a sermon Bushnell gave in 1842 on “unconscious influence” had affected his whole life. Olmsted had at least one occasion to talk over his religious doubts with Bushnell, following a sail they had together in the late summer of 1847 from New Haven to Sachem’s Head. Soon after, Bushnell sent him a copy of his newly published work, Views of Christian Nurture.

At this time Bushnell was turning toward a Christ-centered theology after experiencing a mystical vision of the gospel. His book God in Christ, published in 1848, seemed too close to Unitarianism for many orthodox Congregationalists, including the Olmsteds’ minister, Joel Hawes. With other ministers in the Hartford area, Hawes tried to have Bushnell condemned for heresy.

One reason Bushnell quarreled with his more conservative fellow Congregationalists was that he thought they laid too much stress on adult conversion and neglected the child’s early development. He taught that the parents should provide a domestic setting where children would grow up as Christians without ever thinking of themselves otherwise. “Christian nurture,” as he called it, would enable others to forgo the years of anguish that he endured before experiencing, at the age of forty-six, an intense mystical experience.

Too strong an emphasis on adult conversion, he argued, had made American Christianity hard and rude and lacking in domesticity of character, showing “a want of sensibility to things that do not lie in action.” This thought was related to his earlier concept of “unconscious influence.” Bushnell taught that the most constant and potent influence people exerted on each other was not verbal, but rather an unconscious emanation of their real character that showed in their habitual conduct.

These ideas were easily transferred to the secular world. They became the basis of Bushnell’s critique of slavery and his view that the frontier produced barbarism. To reform the evils of slavery and the frontier, one had to strengthen the three institutions basic to civilized society: the family, the [73]

Horace Bushnell

In his writings on the South, Olmsted echoed the minister’s observation that the slave grew up and worked under conditions that failed to prepare him for productive life as a free man. Like Bushnell, he concluded that the southern planter must be convinced that it was in his own interest and his Christian duty to protect the family life of his slaves, encourage Christian worship, and teach them to read and write.

From his own observation of the California mining frontier in 1863 Olmsted confirmed Bushnell’s prediction that the individual on the frontier [74]would lapse into barbarism when deprived, like the slave, of a good domestic life and the institutions of a civilized community. His writings on the subject echo Bushnell’s 1847 sermon “Barbarism the First Danger.”

Bushnell’s influence, while obvious in Olmsted’s younger days, may have also formed a part of the social and aesthetic rationale of Olmsted’s landscape design in later years. Bushnell’s distinction between “taste” and “fashion,” expressed in an 1843 sermon, anticipated some of Olmsted’s aesthetic views. Olmsted not only incorporated Bushnell’s idea of “unconscious influence” into his thoughts on social reform but also made it the basis for his theory of the effect of landscape design. In addition, he used it in his autobiographical writings to show why his youthful wanderings through rural scenery had prepared him to be a landscape architect. Bushnell’s concern for the civilizing value of domesticity appeared in Olmsted’s landscape designs for private clients and in his plans and reports for suburban communities.

As a prominent theologian and commentator on his time, Bushnell expressed nineteenth-century Connecticut religious and social values that combined the old Puritan emphasis on religion and community with more recent concerns for sensibility and taste. Although he later abandoned the intense religious speculation of his youth, Olmsted continued for the rest of his life to promote many of the aesthetic and social values so well expressed by Bushnell.

Andrew Jackson Downing (1815–1852), the horticulturist and landscape gardener, did more than any other man to shape Olmsted’s concept of taste and of the role that landscape gardening could play in transforming and civilizing American society. Downing grew up in Newburgh, New York, finished school at age sixteen, and joined his brother Charles in managing the family nursery business. In 1841, after a decade of study and writing, he published A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, Adapted to North America, a work that established Downing as the leading [75]American authority in that field. The next year he published Cottage Residences, a series of designs for picturesque houses and their grounds, and in 1845 completed the encyclopedic Fruits and Fruit Trees of America.

In 1846 Downing had become editor of The Horticulturist and Journal of Rural Art and Rural Taste. Olmsted first met Downing at this time, when he visited Luther Tucker, proprietor of the Horticulturist and the Albany Cultivator. During the next six years the two men frequently exchanged information on horticultural subjects, and Downing published several pieces by Olmsted in his magazine. When Olmsted went to England in 1850, Downing provided him with letters of introduction. When he returned, he wrote Downing about his experiences and contributed an essay on the suburban town of Birkenhead, near Liverpool, to the Horticulturist. In the fall of 1851, Downing favorably reviewed the first volume of Olmsted’s Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England, declaring it “extremely fresh and honest.” Downing died in a steamboat disaster in 1852, and Olmsted dedicated the second volume of Walks and Talks to his memory, giving him credit for “whatever of good, true, and pleasant thought” it contained. Indeed, the book echoed many of Downing’s views on scientific farming, landscape design, and domestic architecture. This was also true of the “Appeal to the Citizens of Staten Island,” which Olmsted wrote to promote the agricultural society there. The society would not only help to increase crop productivity, he assured the citizens, but would contribute to the improvement of taste and domestic surroundings.

One essay of Downing’s that particularly impressed Olmsted was “The New-York Park,” which appeared in the Horticulturist three months after his own enthusiastic description of the “People’s Park” at Birkenhead. In this piece Downing advocated the creation of a large public park in New York as one of a series of public institutions that would meet the needs of people of all classes and ages “in the higher realms of art, letters, science, social recreation, and enjoyments.” These institutions, he hoped, would break down social barriers as they spread taste and enlightenment. Olmsted adopted this program of popular education and social reform and urged it on his friends. When he and Calvert Vaux were seeking funds to erect a bust of Downing in Central Park, they proposed to inscribe the pedestal with a passage from “The New-York Park” that read in part:

The higher social and artistic elements of every man’s nature lie dormant within him, and every laborer is a possible gentleman, not by the possession of money or fine clothes, but through the refining influence of intellectual and moral culture. Open wide, therefore, the doors of your libraries and picture galleries, all ye true republicans! Build halls where knowledge shall be freely diffused among men, and not shut up within the narrow walls of narrower institutions. Plant spacious parks in your cities, and unloose their gates as wide as the gates of morning to the whole people. . . .

[76]

Andrew Jackson Downing

In his own writings on landscape architecture, Olmsted made few references to Downing’s work. He did, however, praise the 1851 plan for the grounds of the Smithsonian Institution, Downing’s only important public work, as “the only essay, strictly speaking, yet made by our government in landscape gardening.” Using terms that characterize his own work as well, Olmsted praised the tendency he saw in all Downing’s works, “namely to educate men to consult each his own wants, his own special taste, his own peculiar habits, and to be able to form or reform a homestead in a manner suitable thereto, and expressive thereof.” But Olmsted had strong reservations about many of the plans for buildings and grounds that Downing offered in his books. He found them “far less excellent with reference to their ostensible [77]ends, than they were with reference to the purpose of stimulating the exercise of judgment and taste in the audience addressed.” These latter views Olmsted presented in a draft introduction to a new edition of Cottage Residences, written at the request of Downing’s widow, but never published.

Downing was important to Olmsted not only for the aesthetic taste and ideas he espoused during his brief lifetime but for the opportunities he left behind at his death. There was no one to replace him as the national authority on landscape gardening, and when in 1857 the city of New York needed a plan for Central Park, the park commissioners sponsored a general competition. Olmsted was co-author of the winning design with Calvert Vaux, the English architect Downing had brought to this country in 1850 as his partner. Vaux carried on Downing’s practice after 1852 and brought to the Central Park plan all he had learned during their two years of close association. For the next fifteen years Olmsted and Vaux continued as partners in landscape design. They evolved a style that differed from Downing’s, but they owed a substantial debt to his ideas.

Their final gesture to Downing’s memory came in 1887, when Olmsted and Vaux collaborated, after fifteen years of independent work, on a plan for the Andrew Jackson Downing Memorial Park in Newburgh.

George Geddes (1809–1883) was a gentleman farmer, agricultural reformer, civil engineer, and politician at whose farm, “Fairmount,” in Camillus, New York, Olmsted stayed during the summer of 1846. Olmsted found that in many ways the versatile and successful Geddes was a model of the man he himself wished to be. He respected Geddes’s judgment, and their friendship lasted for many years.

[78]

Geddes had inherited “Fairmount” from his father James Geddes, who surveyed the routes of several major canals, including the Erie Canal, and served as construction engineer of the western section of the Erie. Although he first studied law, George Geddes became an engineer and turned his attention to railroad construction, the opening of coal mines, and the drainage of marshes in the Syracuse area. While Olmsted stayed with him, he was supervising the construction near Syracuse of one of the first plank roads in the United States.

After inheriting “Fairmount,” Geddes devoted much effort to improving it. In 1845, at the age of thirty-six, he won the New York State Agricultural Society’s prize for the best-cultivated farm in the state. Olmsted found that Geddes practiced a style of farming seldom seen in Connecticut. The soil was fertile and free of rocks, so that only ten of the three hundred acres were not fit for cultivation. Geddes carried on agricultural experiments, employed irrigation, and was building up a large flock of Merino sheep. In addition to helping run the farm, Olmsted assisted Geddes in his public role as an agricultural reformer. At the Onondaga County Fair in the fall, Geddes made him a member of the committee for judging farming utensils, and Olmsted wrote the committee’s report.

Olmsted also enjoyed the civilized luxuries that Geddes could afford. The farm produced a variety of excellent fruits and vegetables for the table, and the Geddes tradition of afternoon tea and the use of “silver forks every day” were amenities rare among farmers. The conversational fare was similarly unusual and pleasing. Frederick Kingsbury recalled years later that Geddes was “an intelligent man, a good talker, positive, somewhat opinionated but withal breezy and interesting.”

A leading layman in the Methodist church, Geddes gave Olmsted an opportunity to discuss the religious questions that beset him. He and Olmsted also debated whether it was right for a Christian to go to war, particularly the war with Mexico going on that summer. Geddes had become a pacifist, perhaps in reaction to attending a military academy in his youth, and favored the disbanding of all armies and navies. As an advocate of world peace, he probably introduced Olmsted to Elihu Burritt’s peace-reform journal, which Olmsted found to be a “capital good paper” with “striking and original” articles “worth a whole mail car of common namby pamby editorials.” Perhaps through Geddes’s influence, too, Olmsted came to admire the Kentuckian Cassius Clay’s antislavery newspaper, True American.

Although Geddes urged Olmsted to buy a farm near him, Olmsted was sure he would never feel at home outside Connecticut. He wanted a seaside farm and set out in the fall of 1846 to find one on the Connecticut coast. Geddes helped him to decide on a place at Sachem’s Head near Guilford. In the years thereafter he saw Geddes only occasionally, but continued to value his advice and friendship.

[79]

George Geddes

Like Geddes, Olmsted became actively involved in the affairs of his local agricultural society, and when he moved to a Staten Island farm he emulated Geddes by agitating for a plank road. In 1852 he dedicated to Geddes the first volume of his first book, Walks and Talks of an American Fanner in England. Many years later their paths crossed again. In 1879 the seventy-year-old Geddes, a member of the New York State Survey Commission, approved the report by Olmsted and James Gardiner calling for protection of Niagara Falls from commercial exploitation and its preservation for public use.

Frederick John Kingsbury (1823–1910) was a classmate and friend of John Hull Olmsted’s at Yale and through him became one of Olmsted’s closest friends. While Olmsted turned to Charles Loring Brace to discuss religious questions, he debated his political theories with Kingsbury, whose skepticism provided him, he said, with much-needed discipline of mind. After Kingsbury graduated from Yale, Olmsted was eager to continue their relationship. “You are just the right sort of man to arrive at correct conclusions,” he wrote his friend, “& you ought, it seems to me, to be using a little more of your influence on the populace. At any rate with me.”

Like Olmsted and Brace, Kingsbury traced his ancestry in New England back to the early days of Puritan settlement. The original immigrant, Henry Kingsbury, came to the Massachusetts Bay Colony with John Winthrop in 1630, and his grandson removed to Connecticut in 1708. Kingsbury’s grandfather John Kingsbury studied law at Tapping Reeve’s law school in Litchfield, Connecticut, and then settled in Waterbury. There he became perennial judge of the County Court, held other judicial posts, and frequently represented the town in the state legislature. He passed on large landholdings near Waterbury to his son, Charles Denison Kingsbury, who was Frederick’s father. After engaging for several years in trade and manufacturing, Charles Kingsbury retired at the age of forty-three and spent the next fifty-three years farming, looking after his lands, and holding offices in local governmental, educational, and charitable organizations.

Young Frederick received intermittent schooling during his youth, spent much of his time with his grandfathers, and learned various skills from local artisans. From 1837 to 1840 he lived with his uncle Abner Leavenworth in Virginia, and then decided to go to college. He quickly prepared himself to enter Yale and made up for his inadequate background by hard study as a freshman. Although he worked only moderately hard thereafter, he gained enough social and academic standing for his classmates to elect him to deliver the valedictory oration in their senior year. Olmsted was impressed by his intelligence and expected him to have a notable career in politics and the law.

[81]

After graduating from Yale, Kingsbury studied for a year at the Yale Law School and then went to Boston to prepare for the Massachusetts bar. He worked in the office of Charles Greely Loring, a prominent lawyer and uncle of Charles Loring Brace. Loring found Kingsbury so useful that he did not charge him the usual study fee. After passing the bar examination in 1848, Kingsbury seemed ready for a distinguished legal career in Boston. He gave it up, however, to return to Waterbury and care for his ailing mother and seventeen-year-old sister.

This sacrifice is hard to explain. Although his mother was to die of her illness four years later, there was no apparent need for Kingsbury to give up his career to come home to support her. His father, prosperous enough to be retired from business, was in vigorous health and lived until 1890. Kingsbury had decided to narrow his opportunities at a time when his friends Brace and Olmsted were moving away from home and widening their experience of the world.

They still remained close to Kingsbury, however, and kept up their correspondence. John Hull Olmsted, in particular, faced many poignant decisions when he learned he was dying of tuberculosis, and sought Kingsbury’s advice as to whether he should marry and pursue his medical career in the short time left to him. When Olmsted traveled South as a correspondent for the New York Times in 1852, Kingsbury gave him a useful introduction to his uncle, Abner Leavenworth, a school principal in Virginia.

In 1848 Kingsbury prepared himself for a Waterbury law practice with a few months at the office of the Hartford lawyer Thomas Clap Perkins, father of Olmsted’s friend and future fiancée, Emily Perkins. Once he opened an office in Waterbury, though, Kingsbury found that he disliked the combative role successful attorneys had to assume. In 1850 he was elected for the first of several terms to the state legislature and while there secured a charter for a savings bank in Waterbury. When he became secretary of the bank he began a business career that would eventually free him from the uncongenial practice of law.

Kingsbury had always shown managerial abilities. He had helped to run a newspaper in Petersburg, Virginia, before he entered college, and he took over a local business in Waterbury to settle an estate in his early years as a lawyer. Still, Olmsted was puzzled by his gradual immersion in the business and civic life of Waterbury, then a town of only five thousand. Olmsted sensed that Kingsbury was drawing apart from his old friends and slowing down— doing a great deal for others good but not much for himself. Olmsted’s first impressions of Kingsbury’s future wife, Alathea Scovill, were disappointing. She was, he reported to Brace, “nothing but an old fashioned sub half man. . . . Good enough for a wife or a servant— no equal friend.”

Almost as if he had known his friend’s doubts in 1851, Kingsbury wrote forty years later that Alathea Scovill excelled the much-admired Hartford [82]and New Haven girls both in refinement and cultivation. To be sure, her wealthy father, William H. Scovill, had been able to give her a good education. Perhaps Olmsted’s reaction was prompted by the regret he felt that he and Kingsbury could no longer be on such close terms as they had once been.

There were practical advantages to the marriage. Kingsbury’s father-in-law, William H. Scovill, was a partner in the Scovill Manufacturing Company, a brass manufacturing firm, and was one of the richest men in Waterbury. His wealth and connections must have been useful to Kingsbury when he and Abram Ives, a broker, raised $100,000 in capital to start the Citizen’s Savings Bank in 1853. After opening the bank, Kingsbury gave up his law practice. In 1857 he was elected director of the Scovill Manufacturing Company. By this time his father-in-law and J.M.L. Scovill, a partner, had died. In 1868 Kingsbury became president of the company, a post he held for the next thirty-two years.

After his marriage, Kingsbury entered the Scovills’ social and religious world, and joined the local Episcopal church that his wife’s grandfather had founded. The Scovills were so closely identified with this church that it was known as “St. Scovill’s.” Kingsbury took pride in the fact that his children were the descendants of all the ministers in Waterbury during its first century of existence. He rose in the lay circles of the church, becoming treasurer of the diocese of Connecticut. Like his public-spirited father before him, he took an interest in local charities and schools, sometimes taking on their financial problems as treasurer. He also involved himself in the affairs of Yale College. From 1881 to 1899 he was an alumni member of the Yale Corporation.

In later years Charles Loring Brace upbraided Kingsbury for not being a literary man. He had shown definite promise both as a writer and a speaker while at Yale and had been tempted to embark on a literary career. Kingsbury’s business commitments did, however, allow him time to indulge a taste for genealogy and local history. In the 1860s, like Olmsted and Brace, he joined the newly founded American Social Science Association, dedicated to the investigation of American social and economic problems. He tried his hand at articles on contemporary issues for the association’s Journal of Social Science. These and his other writings reflected his conservative, skeptical approach and his taste for homely illustrations and turns of phrase.

He showed some capacity for historical perspective and synthesis and transcended his earlier provincial and antiquarian interests, particularly in one of the addresses he delivered as president of the American Social Science Association in the 1890s. It was entitled “The Tendency of Men to Live in Cities.” Perhaps, though, his more characteristic contribution to the association was his serving successively as the organization’s treasurer, director, president, and vice president from 1880 until its dissolution in 1908.

[83]

Kingsbury’s life diverged sharply from that of his closest friends of the 1840s. Unlike them, he became heavily involved in business interests and rooted to small town life in Connecticut. A decade after they had first known each other, Olmsted and he had less and less opportunity to see one another and exchange views. Occasionally their correspondence revived the fire of their college debates, but Olmsted found that he had moved far from Kingsbury’s conservative religious and political opinions, which remained much as he had first known them.

Kingsbury, from first to last, remained a considerate and admiring friend. He kept up a correspondence with all his early friends, including Emily Perkins and Elizabeth Baldwin, after both had married. He saved his lengthy correspondence with Olmsted, which included thoughtful letters in the later years. Using his collection of Olmsted’s letters, he wrote a perceptive memoir of his friend after Olmsted’s death.

John Olmsted (1791–1873), Olmsted’s father, was a prosperous dry-goods merchant in Hartford, Connecticut. His successful business enabled him to provide many small luxuries for his children, give them a good education, finance the farming and publishing ventures of his eldest son, and still leave his heirs an estate of over $130,000.

John Olmsted’s strong aesthetic sense directed much of his use of leisure and wealth. He took great care, for instance, in furnishing the Ann Street house where the family lived during Olmsted’s childhood. The house impressed Frederick Kingsbury when he saw it in the mid-1840s as “better, in its way, than anything I had then seen, and, if I mistake not, better than anything then in Hartford.” He thought that in taste and mental culture John Olmsted was “much in advance of the men of that time.”

Although John Olmsted inherited no wealth from his father and had [84]

John Olmsted

His first wife, Charlotte Hull (1800–1826), was the daughter of a farmer in nearby Cheshire, Connecticut. While still a girl she went to live with an older sister whose husband, Jonathan Law, was the postmaster of Hartford. She married John Olmsted in 1821 and in the next four years gave birth to Olmsted and his brother John. In 1826 she died, allegedly from an overdose of laudanum that she mistook for other pain-killing medicine while suffering from a toothache. In 1827 the widower married his late wife’s friend, Mary Ann Bull (1801–1894). In the next fifteen years she bore him six children, of whom three lived to maturity. She was an earnest woman, [85]anxious for the spiritual welfare of her children and sure of the correctness of her views. One acquaintance described her as “a Puritan, a model of order and system, most efficient as an organizer and full of interest in Nature and Man.” She shared her husband’s love of scenic beauty and tried to foster it in their children.

John Olmsted may have been unaware of the extent of his own influence in this regard on his eldest son. Although he seldom expressed’ his pleasure in words, he imparted to the boy his unusual sensitivity to the beauty of nature. One of the most poignant of these moments came when Olmsted was still a young child. One evening he and his father were riding together across a meadow: “I soon noticed that he was inattentive to my prattle,” Olmsted later recalled, “and looking in his face saw in it something unusual. Following the direction of his eyes, I said : ’Oh! there’s a star.’ Then he said something of Infinite Love with a tone and manner which really moved me, chick that I was, so much that it has ever since remained in my heart.”

As Olmsted grew older he took part in the family’s annual “tours in search of the picturesque” through New England, New York, and the St. Lawrence valley. He believed that his father “gave more time and thought to the pursuit of this means of enjoyment than to all other luxuries, and more than any man I have known who could not and would not talk about it or in any way make a market of it.”

While taciturn John Olmsted succeeded in giving his children his love of natural scenery, he did not feel that he could transmit to them the active Christian faith that he craved for himself but could not attain. He therefore sent his son to live with various ministers in small Connecticut towns so that he might receive religious instruction with his schooling. The scheme failed, since the ministers left that instruction to incompetent Sunday school teachers.

John Olmsted bowed to the authority of his wife in religion, but was always a most generous and indulgent father to all his children. His letters do show an affectionate streak of sarcasm, but he did little else to keep his independent children in line. His journals are full of details about the weather, his finances, and activities of his children, but they display no personal emotions, except, perhaps, in his faithful recording of the first appearance of bluebirds every spring.

John Hull Olmsted (1825–1857) was Olmsted’s younger brother, the second child of John Olmsted and Charlotte Law Hull Olmsted. From boyhood on, the dark-eyed and handsome John, with his ready sympathy and easy manner, was an ideal confidant for his intense older brother. After their mother’s death they drew closer together, as their strong-willed stepmother, increasingly occupied with her own children, took charge of running the Olmsted household. The bond between the two brothers was strong, although they seldom lived under the same roof, or even in the same town. Olmsted went away to school in the fall of 1829, when his brother was only four, and they spent only two school years together after that. Still, there were short holidays and summer vacations when they saw each other, and these opportunities increased as they grew older. The longest period they lived together was from June 1853 to April 1855, when John and his wife Mary lived with Olmsted on his Staten Island farm.

The earliest descriptions of John come from his friends at Yale, which he entered in 1842. Frederick Kingsbury remembered him as somewhat shy, but with an attractive personality, a delicate sense of humor, and well-formed aesthetic tastes. Charles Loring Brace found him very generous, treating his friends to food and the use of his sporting equipment. He was also impressionable, likely to be influenced in his conduct by that of his friends. John made warm friendships at Yale, and during his short stay there in the fall of 1845 Olmsted made his brother’s circle of friends his own.

John worked hard and conscientiously at college but neglected exercise and fresh air. As a result, he was forced to leave Yale halfway through his sophomore year with weak eyes and infected lungs. In early 1843 he went to Jamaica for his health. He returned to Yale by summer, but had to enter the class below his, that of 1847.

Although his health was still frail, John determined to become a doctor, and in the fall of 1848 he went to study at the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City. He now saw more of his brother, visiting his Staten Island farm frequently on weekends and holidays. During those visits he met Olmsted’s neighbors, the Perkins family, and their orphaned granddaughter, Mary Cleveland Bryant Perkins. She was attractive and witty, and Olmsted had found her “superior as a thinker” to Elizabeth Baldwin—high praise indeed. John read Ruskin’s Modern Painters with her, and they fell in love. They became engaged early in 1850, shortly before John left for Europe with Olmsted and Brace on a trip that was supposed to improve his health. Any improvement he experienced was short-lived, and by the summer of 1851 his condition had deteriorated dramatically. In August he began to bleed from his lungs, making it evident that he had tuberculosis and could not hope to live many more years.

That summer, John faced his situation and decided to continue his personal and professional life. He went on with his medical studies, and in [87]

John Hull Olmsted

Aware of how little time was left to them, the two brothers shared many experiences during the next two years. They traveled South together in December 1853, on Olmsted’s second journey there, and spent four months on a saddle trip across Texas to Mexico and back to New Orleans. John hoped to find a healthful climate and was tempted to settle among the Germans near San Antonio, but the return trip along the coast in the oppressive heat of late spring weakened him and forced him to abandon such plans.

Instead, he continued to live at the Staten Island farm and assist his brother in the activities that stemmed from their trip. He helped Olmsted raise money to support Adolph Douai and his antislavery San Antonio Zeitung, and while Olmsted was in England in 1856 he wrote most of A Journey Through Texas from his brother’s notes. His style was freer and [88]lighter than Olmsted’s, although he remained faithful to the ideas they both shared.

In the meantime John’s health deteriorated as his family and financial cares increased. When Olmsted moved to New York in April 1855, to become a partner in the publishing firm of Dix & Edwards, he left responsibility for the farm on John’s shoulders. John’s second child, Charlotte, had been born a month before, and he felt deserted. As he complained to his father, “I regret being left in the lurch.” Whatever his feelings, he took title to the farm at the end of April, borrowed money from his father, and dipped into his wife’s small income in an effort to make it support his family.

John’s attempt to run the farm lasted less than two years. His tuberculosis was so far advanced that he had once again to seek a more favorable climate. In January 1857, he took leave of his brother for what was to prove the last time. After a brief stay in Cuba he and his family went on to Europe. His third child, Owen Frederick, was born in August 1857 at Geneva, Switzerland, and soon afterward the family moved to Nice for the winter.

John’s strength failed rapidly and on November 24 he died. In his last letter to his brother, John said a painful farewell. “I never have known a better friendship than ours has been & there can’t be a greater happiness than to think of that,” he wrote. “How dear we have been & how long we have held out such tenderness.” In the last sentence of the letter he said, “Don’t let Mary suffer while you are alive.”

John’s death was a heavy blow to Olmsted. As his father said, “In his death I have lost not only a son, but a very dear friend. You almost your only friend.” Olmsted was just beginning his work as superintendent of Central Park and he immersed himself in the work. When Mary and her children returned to Staten Island he helped look after their needs, and in 1859 he married his brother’s widow and took upon himself the care of his brother’s children.

Emily Baldwin Perkins (1829–1914) was the granddaughter of Lyman Beecher and the niece of his equally famous children, Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Her father was Thomas Clap Perkins, a Hartford lawyer and politician, with whom Frederick Kingsbury studied law. Olmsted became particularly attracted to Emily during a visit to Hartford in the winter of 1849, when he joined a literary group of which she was a member. The petite and pretty Emily let him walk her home from the meetings and accepted his invitations to go sleigh-riding.

Olmsted already knew others of her family. He enjoyed talking to her mother, Mary Foote Beecher Perkins, whom he considered “a very intelligent woman.” Three years earlier he had taught her brother Frederick to ride over jumps on horseback. He had known some of Emily’s other relatives as well, including her first cousin, Elizabeth Baldwin, and her young clergyman uncle, Thomas Kinnicut Beecher.

Although Olmsted’s romance with Emily began in early 1849, he saw her only occasionally during the next two years. His duties on the Staten Island farm and his trip to Europe with his brother and Charles Loring Brace kept him away from Hartford. They had to resort to letters, and as John Hull Olmsted remarked, “they kept at work at one another for near three years, off & on, with a very vigorous & noble correspondence, (wh. I can’t refrain from hoping may one day be given to the world for its benefit!).” When the two finally did have some time together in the spring of 1851, Olmsted discovered that what he had thought of as an important religious difference could be resolved. To his surprise, Emily readily agreed with his views on the inspiration of the Bible. The response delighted him, since he had been moving toward a more and more rationalistic view of the Scriptures. Although he was not quite ready to admit that he was in love with Emily, he could characterize her as a “union of Faith and Courage, Religion & Freedom,” and the noblest and most sensible woman he had ever known. By mid-summer they were engaged.

Olmsted was cautious about setting a wedding date, however. He wrote Charles Brace that the marriage could not take place until after Thanksgiving, when he would have marketed his 60,000 cabbages. Emily, for her part, complained about the bother of receiving congratulations and worrying about furniture and carpets. After making a public announcement of the engagement in August, she suddenly changed her mind, and her mother wrote Olmsted saying that Emily wished to break it off. The stunned Olmsted released her. Some months later his father was puzzled that Olmsted seemed relieved, as if a great weight had been lifted from him. Perhaps he was putting up a brave front, because not until he married his brother’s widow in 1859 was he willing to take a wife.

After breaking off the engagement, Emily left Hartford with Elizabeth Baldwin to visit relatives in Connecticut and Massachusetts until the [90]

Emily Baldwin Perkins

After 1881, the Olmsteds and Hales lived only a few miles apart in the Boston suburbs, but they never exchanged visits. Apparently Emily Hale hesitated to call on the family because she feared Mary Olmsted would be jealous of the woman who had once been engaged to her husband. In 1899, [91]when Olmsted was hopelessly senile, she wrote Frederick Kingsbury, saying, “I have always been sorry to see nothing of them, since they have lived in Brookline, but you know what Mary is, and I felt afraid of giving her an opportunity of being rude to me.”

Sophia Candace Stevens (1826–1892) became a warm friend of the Olmsteds when she lived with them in Hartford from 1848 to 1851, while teaching at the Hartford High School. She was born in Barnet, Vermont, where her father was a farmer, postmaster, innkeeper and mill-owner. He was also a book collector and antiquarian, and founded the Vermont Historical Society. Two of her brothers, Benjamin Franklin and Henry, continued their father’s interest in books and became important book collectors and bibliographers.

Sophia was one of the young women who served Olmsted as a guide and companion in his exploration of art and literature, and was one of the few people with whom he could “talk esthetically.” During a visit to Hartford in 1849 he took great satisfaction in their reading John Ruskin’s Modern Painters together. “The Modern Painters improves on acquaintance,” he wrote his brother, John, “and Miss Stevens forms an amalgam with it in my heart. She is just the thing to read it or to have it read to one by. She is very sensitive to beauty, thoughtful, penetrating, enthusiastic.”

Olmsted lost her companionship in 1851 when Sophia married Stephen W. Hitchcock (1827?–1852), a teacher at the Female Seminary in Burlington, Vermont. Her husband died of tuberculosis the next year and the Olmsteds came to her aid. They helped her start a new life in Paris and in 1854 sent Bertha Olmsted to stay with her there and study French and music. She supported herself in part by writing a series of letters for the New York Daily Tribune entitled “An American Woman in Paris.” Olmsted liked her work and offered to place her material in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine and Harper’s Monthly. Instead of continuing her literary career, however, the [92]

Sophia Candace Stevens

Although he had gained a reputation during the 1850s for striking portraiture, Page soon faded into obscurity because he preferred to create large and unsalable allegorical paintings instead of accepting the lucrative [93]portrait commissions his wife secured for him. After the Pages returned to the United States in 1860, Sophia tried to retrieve their fortunes by writing articles on aesthetic theory that she gleaned from her husband’s notes and published under his name. She made little progress in face of Page’s deteriorating health and the needs of their four children. Furthermore, most of his paintings turned black within fifty years because of the dark toning he gave them. Fortunately, two of his works survived with their colors intact: one a self-portrait and the other a portrait of Sophia. This last, cleaned and restored in 1936, provides the best surviving image of her. It also brought the recognition of Page’s considerable talent that she had struggled so long to secure.