CHAPTER VI
THE GENTLEMAN FARMER

1847–1849

Bolstered by Carlyle’s Message that work and sacrifice would lead to salvation, Olmsted flung all his energy into his farming at Sachem’s Head in 1847. His brother, skeptical from past experience, hoped this new love would prove less ephemeral than some that had preceded it.

Olmsted quickly found the farm a formidable challenge: the soil was rocky and worn out, and most of the land had been left as unplowed pasture or hay field for at least ten years. The “central feature” was a swamp, and the house was set in the middle of it. To transform the place into a model farm, Olmsted plowed up the fields and fertilized them, consulted with the famous New York architect Alexander Jackson Davis about a design for a new farmhouse, and planned improvements with an eye to their landscape effect.

Sadly enough, the nearby community of Guilford also needed improving. The contentious local churches showed little Christian charity toward one another: instead they reflected divisions in the town that were political (and medical) as well as religious.

The spectacle of faction-ridden Guilford sharpened Olmsted’s growing distaste for intolerant sectarianism and party spirit. In his letters he upbraided Charles Loring Brace for wanting to be settled and firm in his religious beliefs. Once he became so, Olmsted warned, he would no longer be able to appreciate the merits of reasonable beliefs that differed from his own. He also warned Brace not to be so sure of the rightness of his abolitionist views that he condemned proslavery advocates as un-Christian. Olmsted’s sense of the limits of reason strengthened his plea for charity and forbearance between the adherents of rival doctrines. At the same time, he greeted some of the reforms of the day with enthusiasm, welcoming a free public high school in Hartford and the prospect of universal manhood suffrage in Connecticut.

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As the year progressed, Olmsted tired of Sachem’s Head and prevailed on his father to buy him a more promising farm, with better access to market, on Staten Island. He moved there in early March 1848, and the letter he wrote describing the voyage brought out the best of his nautical prose.

On Staten Island, Olmsted had a better farm and less cantankerous neighbors. Besides being skilled farmers, they carried on a much more genteel social life than had his neighbors at Sachem’s Head. Some of them were distinguished men, like publisher George Palmer Putnam and newspaper editor and poet William Cullen Bryant. In the fall of 1848, Olmsted was further cheered by the arrival in New York of his brother, John, who had come to study medicine, and Charles Loring Brace, who planned to teach school and study for the ministry. They often came out to Olmsted’s farm for weekends and continued the wide-ranging discussions of religion and politics they had begun at Yale.

The farm needed a great deal of work, and in the process of making improvements, Olmsted showed increasing talents for administration and landscape design. In the midst of farming, he kept attuned to the progress of civilization. He greeted the republican revolutions of 1848 in Europe with enthusiasm and eagerly read John Ruskin’s newly published Modern Painters. In all of this he was preparing himself for a larger career than that of a gentleman farmer.