Genius of Place (3 page)

John Olmsted also felt an intense patriotism for his native Hartford. This he expressed through generous charitable contributions to such Hartford institutions as the nation's first public art museum and third insane asylum. Such was his duty, as a seventh-generation descendant of one of the city's founders, James Olmsted.

In 1632, this original Olmsted set out from Essex, England, aboard the ship
Lyon
, bound for America. He had buried his wife and lost four of his seven children. Anxious for a fresh start in the New World, he settled first in the colony of Massachusetts. But in 1636, he joined an expedition led by the Reverend Thomas Hooker that headed south on foot to found a new community. The group wound up in the Connecticut Valley and settled in a place they named Hertford, after a town in England. (It was later Americanized to “Hartford.”) As part of a land distribution, James Olmsted was given 70 acres along a road that became Front Street.

When Fred was a baby, James Olmsted's colonial-era house was still standing. Generation upon generation of Olmsteds were inextricably tied up with the history of Hartford. Joseph Olmsted was the city's first deacon. Captain Aaron Olmsted was the first in the community to own a piano. Voting records show that even into the 1800s, Olmsted remained the second most common name in Hartford after Hill. Olmsteds were everywhere: Ashbel Olmsted served a term as town clerk; George Olmsted was secretary of the local Temperance Society.

 

The Olmsted line on his father's side may have dominated the civic life of Hartford, but Fred's very first memory involved his mother. He was about three years old. His mother was sitting under a tree sewing while he played at her feet. It's a hazy little reminiscence, but poignant when one considers what happened soon after.

On February 28, 1826, Charlotte Olmsted died of an overdose of laudanum. Laudanum is a tincture consisting of opiates dissolved in alcohol. It was a common patent medicine, a mainstay in many nineteenth-century American households, used to aid sleep, suppress coughs, relieve menstrual cramps, and myriad other things. Laudanum was also highly addictive and frequently lethal. Charlotte's death happened just six
months after the birth of a new baby, John Hull Olmsted. This was her second child—Fred's baby brother.

Supposedly, Charlotte overdosed accidentally, while battling the flu. One wonders whether she took her own life. Maybe she was suffering from postpartum depression, a syndrome entirely unrecognized in that time. Or perhaps she was reeling from the religious revival, which she had attended only a few weeks before her death. Such revivals were part of a fevered effort to stiffen religious conviction that swept across America during the first half of the 1800s. They were highly public events, in which participants were called upon to demonstrate the purity of their faith to the satisfaction of the community. Participating in a revival was known to pitch people into terrible bouts of self-doubt and recrimination.

Olmsted's second memory is clearly from his mother's deathbed. “I chanced to stray into a room at the crisis of a tragedy then occurring and turned and fled from it screaming in a manner adding to the horror of the household,” he later recalled. “It was long before I could be soothed and those nearby said to one another that I would never forget what I had seen.”

Even as a small boy, Fred began working to blot out the memory. For the rest of his life, his mother's death was something he refused to discuss in any detail. Charlotte Olmsted took an accidental overdose of laudanum. That was that.

Following his wife's death, John Olmsted briefly stopped writing in his diary, a silence that spoke volumes. Then he picked back up with: “No a/c kept of expenses from Feb 24 to March 12.” And he added the following brief notation: “Tues Feb 28 at ½ past 5 p.m. my dr wife died & was buried Sunday following.”

 

A grieving John Olmsted left the care of his two young sons to a live-in nurse. After a few months, four-year-old Fred was enrolled in a “dame school.” Dame schools offered instruction—often, very casual instruction—at the homes of women in a community. They served as a kind of nineteenth-century version of nursery school. In some cases, the schooling extended through what today would be the first few primary
grades. Fred attended Mrs. Jeffry's dame school. There, his days consisted mostly of playing in a nearby brook, chasing frogs, and building dams to trap small fish.

John Olmsted would be a widower for a little more than a year before wedding Mary Ann Bull. His new wife—Fred's stepmother—was twenty-six and came from a prominent Hartford family. Her father was a druggist. A contemporary account calls her a “celebrated beauty of the day” and goes on to describe her as “the leading singer in the Centre Church choir,” with a “rich soprano voice.” For John, this second marriage appears to have been more of a practical arrangement, hardly a love match. He was raising two small boys. He needed help.

Mary Ann Olmsted was organized, focused, intense. She was extremely devout, to the point of being puritanical. In fact, she and Charlotte had been friends, and together they had attended the religious revival. Apparently, John hoped that his new wife would provide a hard line, realizing all too well that he was inclined to be soft toward his two sons. Furthermore, while John Olmsted was a regular churchgoer, he had failed to experience a genuine conversion—that mysterious but undeniable signal held by Connecticut Congregationalists as proof of true faith. He seems to have hoped that Mary Ann would set an example for his boys, where he was lacking.

Two weeks after the wedding, both Fred and his brother, John, were baptized. Not long after that, Fred was moved to a school run by Naomi Rockwell, considered a more disciplined dame school. He was six now and small compared to his schoolmates. There was a shut-off quality about him that was heartrending, making others want to reach out to him. An older girl named Anne Charlotte Lynch used to pick Fred up at his house and walk him to Miss Rockwell's. She later remembered him as having blue eyes, thick blond curls, and chubby dimpled arms, invariably dressed in a short-sleeved frock.

At Miss Rockwell's, Fred was introduced to a curriculum that drew largely on pedagogical works by residents of Hartford. This was remarkable and rooted in Connecticut's Puritan origins. The first Puritan settlers had been fervent about education on the theory that if they taught their children to read and reason, their principles might be passed along to
subsequent generations. As the capital and as an economic and cultural center, Hartford had a long, distinguished history of producing schoolbooks. The homegrown works that Fred studied also happened to be the standard texts adopted by teachers throughout the young nation.

To learn grammar, Fred used
The American Spelling Book
by Noah Webster, the trailblazing lexicographer and Hartford native. Webster's “blue-back speller” was
the
text for generations of American school kids. It is arranged according to syllables, starting out with entire passages written in single-syllable words and working its way to five-syllable doozies. Webster was a very pious man, and the “blue-back speller” includes ample religious instruction, even in monosyllabic form:

To learn what was where, Fred used
A Geography and Atlas
, a brand-new book by Hartford resident Jesse Olney. By introducing children first to observable details such as lakes and hills and then moving to the more abstract, such as countries and continents, Olney revolutionized the way that geography was taught. His book quickly became a mainstay in virtually every school in the United States—dame, public, private, or otherwise.

According to notations in John Olmsted's diary, Fred also read various books featuring “Jack Halyard, the Sailor Boy” at Miss Rockwell's school. These fictional tales packed with moral instruction were the work of Hartford's own Samuel Goodrich, who wrote under the name Peter Parley. He was the J. K. Rowling of nineteenth-century America. Parley was mobbed by children during his frequent reading tours, and he sold millions of Jack Halyard tales.

While Miss Rockwell's specialized in one kind of instruction, Fred was receiving equally valuable lessons from his parents. If there's one area where John and Mary Ann Olmsted connected emotionally, it was in their shared appreciation for nature. The couple frequently took their
two young boys on horseback rambles through the Connecticut countryside. Even though the Olmsteds were city dwellers, natural splendor was very close at hand. Hartford—bustling civic center that it was—consisted of a mere thirty streets. It was possible, within a matter of minutes, to leave the town utterly behind and travel across broad meadows and over rolling hills, soaking in the beauty of the hinterlands.

Fred rode with his father, sitting on a pillow placed on the saddle. There was little conversation. John and Mary Ann preferred to take in the scenery with a kind of hushed reverence. These quiet family expeditions, devoted to appreciating the landscape and its beauty, made quite an impression on young Fred. Often, the family would stop near a stream so that Fred and his brother could bathe. Or they might have a picnic. The boys would gather wild berries while their stepmother arranged a spread beneath the shade of a tree.

One time, Fred and his father were walking across a meadow as evening was falling, after a long day's ramble. Fred was tired, so his father scooped him up. Fred made a few comments about their surroundings, but his father didn't respond, carrying him in silence. Suddenly, Fred pointed to a star up in the sky. His father hugged him close and mumbled something about the “infinite love” he felt for his son.

That moment stuck with Fred, too. He'd remember it—cling to it even—for the rest of his days. It was a solid marker in a life that would be filled with so much change.

 

John Olmsted's diary entry for February 8, 1829, was ostensibly a brief note on the weather: “Sunday rain.” Then, almost as an afterthought, he scrawled: “Miss Naomi Rockwell buried. Died Friday Eve from burns by clothes taking fire.”

Fred's dame-school days were over, just like that. His parents packed him off to North Guilford, Connecticut, to study with the Reverend Zolva Whitmore. For nearly the next decade, from the age of seven to the age of sixteen, Fred would have a series of boarding arrangements, living with ministers who ran schools, with relatives while attending schools, serving a vocational apprenticeship. There was nothing unusual about this. It was a common practice in this era for parents of comfortable
means to send their children away for schooling. What's more, as of 1829, John and Mary Ann had just had a new baby. In the years ahead, they would have five more. The household would grow increasingly crowded and hectic, filled with young children. It made sense to send Fred away.

Where to send him was more of an issue. Apparently, John and Mary Ann disagreed about how young Fred should be educated. She was troubled that her husband's paltry formal schooling had been deficient on matters of faith. She didn't wish to repeat the same mistake with Fred. Much of his schooling in the years ahead would emphasize religious training.

As for the sheer number of different schools that Fred tried out—now, that was unusual. He would prove a tough placement. As he grew, he developed a restless intelligence—hard for his teachers to channel—and became increasingly difficult to discipline. Consequently, Fred would recall: “I was strangely uneducated—miseducated. . . . I was left at the most important age to ‘run wild.'”

Off in North Guilford, Fred quickly discovered that although Whitmore was a religious man, he was far from strict. He was just a poor country parson running a one-room school for twelve boys in an effort to make a few extra dollars. Frequently, the reverend delegated the task of teaching to one of the older boys, while he attended to his parson duties. Fred soon discovered there was a lot of latitude. In fact, the boys were allowed to go barefoot at all times except for Sunday services.

Fred headed out on a series of solitary rambles throughout the countryside. He chased after rabbits and crafted figure-four traps out of sticks and string, hoping to catch quail. He paused before an open meadow to watch as a decrepit old militia regiment from the War of 1812 drilled in their faded uniforms. He peered through a window as some people who had traded pelts for rum drank themselves into a stupor.

One evening, he slipped out of the parsonage and walked to the grave of a little girl who had recently died. The death had consumed the parsonage throughout the previous days. Fred had been present when a man arrived, announcing that his little daughter was dead. The man banged three times on an iron triangle that hung by a strip of cowhide from the
belfry beams of the meetinghouse, thereby alerting the community of the sad event. Next day, lessons were canceled, and Fred tagged along with his schoolfellows to watch as the coffin was made. It was tiny, crafted from pine boards, and stained red—the smell of the varnish was overpowering. Whitmore enlisted his pupils to help with funeral preparations. He delivered the eulogy, and the boys walked in the procession.

It was during the wake that Fred had slipped out to visit the little girl's grave. He knelt before it and prayed to God to bring her back to life. He planned to lead her to the parsonage and reunite her with her devastated parents. The night grew still, and Fred could hear whippoorwill cries. He chased fireflies for a while. Then he returned to the parsonage and went to bed—no one even asking any questions.

Free to come and go as he pleased, Fred often went to the country store, where he would sit quietly and listen as his elders talked. Sometimes, he'd pay an impromptu visit to one of the many Olmsteds who lived in the countryside surrounding Hartford. “I was under no more constraint than a man,” Fred would recall. “Every house, every room, every barn and stable, every shop, every road and byway, every field, orchard and garden was not only open to me but I was every where welcome. With all their hard working habits no one seemed to begrudge a little time to make life happy to such a bothering little chappie as I must have been.”