CHAPTER IV
CONNECTICUT INTERLUDE

1844–1845

When the Ronaldson docked in New York in April 1844, Olmsted was thin and worn. His first task was to restore his health, and the remedy was near at hand. As he had written his brother from China, “I think I shall be calculated to appreciate rural comforts, if no other, when I return.” He was soon out in the countryside collecting specimens and reporting back to his friends at the Hartford Natural History Society. By summer he was taking camping trips and enjoying picnics with his friends and Hartford girls.

The fall of 1844 found him casting about for something more substantial to do. Farming, the occupation of many of his Connecticut forebears for two hundred years, attracted him, and he decided to live for a few months with his uncle David Brooks in Cheshire, near Hartford. During the winter of 1844–1845, Olmsted found time to re-read Johann Zimmermann’s book Solitude Considered with Respect to Its Influence on the Mind and the Heart, and was pleased with its reaffirmation of his conviction that the rural pursuits he enjoyed were healthier for the body and the mind than any occupation he could pursue in the city.

Olmsted was ready to put Zimmermann’s views into practice, and in the spring of 1845 he went to live on Joseph Welton’s farm near Waterbury, Connecticut. He enjoyed his stay there and felt in retrospect that Welton was the most conscientious, healthy, and moral of all his teachers. To a reader of Zimmermann, Welton’s virtues would have been no surprise.

Olmsted settled into his new life in May 1845, well pleased with his choice. To be sure, the darker side of rural life intruded in such forms as the ignorance of farm hands, the sterility of the Connecticut soil, and the macabre life at the town’s poor house; but Olmsted referred to these in his letters as if they were but comic relief or picturesque interludes in an otherwise [192]benign rural world. The satisfaction he felt was due in part to his freedom to come and go at the Weltons’ almost without restraint—a welcome change from the iron discipline of the Ronaldson. He worked intermittently at the farm until the end of the haying season in August, and then, well before harvest time, returned to Hartford. There he spent much of his time boating and picnicking with his family and friends.

As a result of his stay at Welton’s, Olmsted became increasingly convinced of the value of country life. The traditional “professions” were not the only honorable pursuits, he declared: farming combined the proudest aims of science and fostered the development of man’s aesthetic sensibilities. No other way of life, he was sure, was so beneficial.

In the fall of 1845 Olmsted further sought to legitimize his chosen profession by studying subjects related to scientific agriculture at Yale. He attended the lectures of Benjamin Silliman and participated in laboratory experiments with his brother and friends. His friends at Yale traveled in the highest circles of New Haven society, and Olmsted felt shy and ill at ease because of his own haphazard education. He was deeply flattered, therefore, when the bright and pretty young Elizabeth Baldwin took him seriously and encouraged his intellectual interests. This New Haven interlude, during which he cemented his lifelong friendship with Charles Loring Brace and Frederick Kingsbury, and tasted the rarefied atmosphere of the Baldwin family’s intellectual soirées, lasted only three months. Late in the fall he had a series of fainting spells, resembling apoplexy, which moved his father to bring him home to Hartford to recover. Brief though it was, his time at Yale broadened his horizons and strengthened his self-confidence while he pursued his dream of becoming a gentleman farmer during the next half-dozen years.