Genius of Place (62 page)

The very next day, his mood had taken an entirely different turn. Mary wrote to John, complaining that Olmsted was “in a dreadful state—he makes me nervous he is so violent.” Apparently, Olmsted never attacked Mary physically. But as his conditioned worsened, he would throw a box at a caretaker and would also beat a horse. “Do not tell anyone that your father's state is pitiful,” Mary continued. “Let us keep it to ourselves as long as we can—else his name will be useless to the business.”

Mary had faced her share of life's emergencies. She handled this latest with equanimity. Even the decision to bring her husband to Deer Isle was practical. The place was an island, after all. And Mary was a very small woman. Here, it was possible to let her increasingly troubled and belligerent husband move about freely, or at least be under the illusion that he had some control. But Mary assured John that he needn't worry about Olmsted's slipping back to the Brookline office: “We have adopted the policy of letting him do as he likes so long as he does not offer to go off the island.”

Mostly, Olmsted passed his time inside his own fevered brain. While he sent a stream of letters to his partners, he sent a raging river to Rick. “I am lying awake nights in a perplexed state of mind about Biltmore affairs and your professional training, especially in matters of foliage. I am not sure that the object of your being at Biltmore is being accomplished.” In another, Olmsted wrote, “Observe, inquire, read, discuss all such matters, all you can. Don't be content with off-hand statements and explanations. Read, compare, inquire, cross-examine. Keep at this sort of work in
every
department, until you have sucked every source of information dry.... Make the most of the
special
Biltmore opportunity.”

Olmsted couldn't stop thinking about Rick, and he couldn't stop sending letters to him. “I write only in yielding to a constant impulse,” begins one missive, “vain tho' I feel it to be, to be doing something for you.” And from another letter: “I am thinking more of you, these bitter days, than of anybody and all else.... It is not childishness. It is the assurance that you are taking up what I am dropping.”

Whenever Rick responded, Olmsted was ecstatic. “You cannot think how much your long letter of 5th October interests and gratifies me,” Olmsted wrote. “I will confess to you that twice last night I lighted my bed lamp to read it over
again
. It has been the most satisfactory circumstance of my life here.”

This particular letter to Rick is one of Olmsted's last and one of his most heartrending. On those occasions when the fog of his disease cleared, the old Olmsted was visible—penetrating, aware, humane. Olmsted related how during his boyhood, away at some poor country parsonage, he had been forced to memorize a passage from the book of Ecclesiastes. The passage related to life's fleetingness. As a young boy, he told Rick, it struck him as incredible that the years ahead might pass so quickly. But they had. Now, he found himself wonder struck once again to have reached life's end. “And now, before I know it, before I am in the least prepared for it, I am there,” he wrote to Rick. Olmsted concluded the letter: “I love you and take joy in you with all my heart. Your father.”

 

Olmsted continued to decline. Caring for him on Deer Isle finally proved too difficult, even for Mary. So she brought her husband back to Brookline, where a doctor examined him and made recommendations about the future course of his treatment. Incredibly, the doctor held out hope that a cure for Olmsted might still be possible—or at the very least, his condition might be mitigated. But he shouldn't be treated anywhere in the Northeast. Proximity to his Brookline office would be agitating. Despite its therapeutic climate, the South was out, too. It would only make him pine for the Biltmore Estate. Instead, the doctor suggested that Olmsted be taken to England, where the treatment of nervous disorders (as this was termed) was supposedly more advanced than in the United States.

Olmsted wrote Rick, begging to be sent photos of his beloved Biltmore. He feared, correctly, that he would never set foot in Asheville again.

The Biltmore was his swan song. The winding three-mile approach road is one of his finest designs. And his call to create a model forest was quite simply prophetic. Within a few years, America's first forestry school—an idea that Olmsted and Pinchot had dreamed up together—would be established on Vanderbilt's land. That's why the Biltmore Estate
is sometimes called the “cradle of U.S. forestry.” As for Pinchot, he would soon leave Vanderbilt's employ to head up the forestry division of the Department of Interior. When Teddy Roosevelt transferred the division to the Agriculture Department, it was renamed the U.S. Forest Service, and Pinchot became its first chief. Years in the future, following Vanderbilt's death, 83,398 acres of the estate would be sold to the government for safekeeping. That land would become the core of North Carolina's Pisgah National Forest, one of the largest woodland preserves east of the Mississippi.

 

On November 16, 1895, Olmsted departed Boston for Liverpool aboard the
Cephalonia
. Mary and Marion accompanied him. So did Rick, who planned to help get his father settled in England. Despite all the anxiety and ink expended on the Biltmore, there wasn't really much work left to be done there.

Rick rented a two-story house in Lympstone, a village in the county of Devon. Then he returned to the States. Mary arranged for Olmsted to be cared for by Dr. Rayner, the nervous-disorder specialist with whom Olmsted had stayed during his previous visit to England. His treatment wasn't any more effective this time around. “I am going down hill rapidly,” Olmsted wrote to John back in Brookline.

Unknown to Olmsted, there was tragic news of Vaux. Mary was aware of it, but she elected to shelter her husband from the details for as long as possible. On November 19—while Olmsted had been onboard the
Cephalonia
—Vaux had drowned. Apparently, he'd been taking a sunset walk on Brooklyn's Gravesend Bay, when he'd slipped off a pier. When his body was found two days later, he was missing his hat, one shoe—and his spectacles.

Vaux was seventy-one, and his health, along with his architectural practice, had been failing for some time now. He was also deeply lonely: His wife had died a few years earlier in a carriage accident. Such details led to natural speculation that Vaux's death was a suicide. In fact, a man told the
Brooklyn Eagle
that he'd encountered Vaux on the pier and found his demeanor curious. The point is moot. Slip or jump, the water had pulled tiny Vaux down then deeper all the same, just as it had Andrew Jackson Downing, his beloved mentor, all those years earlier.

Mary could keep the news from Olmsted for only so long. She felt honor bound to inform him about Vaux's death. When she finally did, to her surprise, Olmsted appeared weirdly energized. It gave him something to do: Olmsted announced that he planned to write a fitting tribute to his old friend and partner. But in the next moment, the matter slipped from his mind.

About the only sustained pleasure that Olmsted managed was sitting by the side of a pond, watching ducks splash. His condition was so upsetting to sensitive Marion that Mary worried her daughter would “go off” like Charlotte. Mary rarely mentioned her other daughter, away in an institution. No one in the family did; it was easier that way.

One thing was becoming clear: This English experiment wasn't working. Earlier, Mary had purchased 46 acres of land on Deer Isle. Now, she wrote to John asking him to arrange for a house to be built there. She planned to move back to Maine and to care for Olmsted. Of course, she planned to have help this time, such as a live-in housekeeper and a nurse. “I am quite equal to looking after him three hours a day and that is all,” Mary wrote in a letter to Brookline, addressed to her “dear boys”—John and Rick. She added: “I
really can not
sketch out a scheme of life—I feel too old.” Mary was sixty-six, nearly a decade younger than her husband. She had always been tough. But this was taking its toll.

In a separate letter to John and Rick, Marion drew a plan for the house and the surrounding grounds. It includes a small body of water, marked
pond
, with a tiny sketch of a duck. Marion was showing an interest in the family line of work.

Before returning to America, there was a matter that Mary wanted to attend to—alone. She placed Marion on a ship and sent her back to the States. She parked Olmsted with a caretaker. Then Mary traveled to the Continent. In Geneva, she visited the house where her sons John and Owen had been born. She arranged to have a photo taken of the place. And she went to Nice, where she visited the grave of John Hull Olmsted, her first husband, Fred's brother. Mary was distressed to find the grave site in a neglected state. She arranged to have some repairs done. Then Mary returned to England, gathered up Olmsted, and sailed for America.

By early 1897, Mary and Olmsted were moved into the new house in Maine. It featured a little pond, just as Marion had prescribed. Mary dubbed the place Felsted. She sorely wanted to abide by her husband's wish to be cared for in a home setting. But Deer Isle didn't work the second time around, either. Olmsted's condition was just too far advanced. Sometimes he sat for hours watching the ducks, his blue eyes glazed and empty. Those were his good days. On bad days, his eyes filled up with uncomprehending rage.

In September 1898, the family made the painful decision to commit Olmsted to the McLean Asylum. This was the very institution for which he had designed the grounds years earlier. On becoming a patient, he reputedly said, “They didn't carry out my plan, confound them!”

By this point, John and Rick were business partners. The new firm was called Olmsted Brothers. John was forty-six and had been a landscape architect for years. Rick was twenty-eight and had no formal training. Then again, neither did his father, nor anybody else in this era. Luckily, Rick turned out to share his father's awesome ability for conceptualizing landscapes. Surely, parts of this talent were inherited. In the years ahead, he would create a whole other set of incredible spaces and places, scattered all over the United States. Of course, he would collaborate with John and others in the growing practice. But Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. was the driving force.

As for John, he had taken Rick into the partnership without any outward fuss. In his letter to Rick announcing the decision, he was coolly composed as always: “I said you could come in January 1st. I meant in name only because our fiscal year is February 1st.”

What choice did John have anyway? He wasn't about to go against the wishes of his father, even if his father was in no condition to object. Furthermore, John recognized that Rick would be an asset. And John certainly knew the value of working with someone who was a visionary. He'd done so his entire adult life.

CHAPTER 32

LATE SUMMER OF 1903, a call was received at Fairsted from McLean. Olmsted was unconscious, his breathing terribly labored. He was not expected to live very much longer. Mary, John, and Rick raced to the institution in nearby Belmont, Massachusetts. They began a bedside vigil, but when Olmsted continued to hang on, John and Mary went home. Rick remained by his father's bedside. At two o'clock in the morning on August 28, 1903, Olmsted died. He was eighty-one.

Three days later a funeral service was held at Fairsted. It was a small affair, attended only by immediate family. Olmsted's body was cremated, and his ashes were placed in the family vault in Hartford's Old North Cemetery.

Olmsted's final years were isolated and apparently empty. Time was, he'd crafted landscapes, written books, blanketed the country in travel, generated more letters than seems humanly possible. But five long years at McLean had been passed by Olmsted in a kind of hush. During this time, a new century had dawned, with new promise and new problems. There were dazzling new inventions. The call that had summoned his family to McLean came via a telephone, an innovation just beginning to appear in American homes. Perhaps Olmsted was dimly aware of all this change, more likely not.

For those final years, Frederick Law Olmsted—a man capable of such epic drive, full of passion and moral fervor and creativity and unquenchable energy, so central to his times—had been slowly fading from this world.

EPILOGUE

YET HE'S STILL with us. In the course of his career, Olmsted designed more than thirty major city parks, the U.S. Capitol grounds, and such planned communities as Riverside, Illinois, and Druid Hills in Atlanta. His work on campuses included Stanford, Amherst, and American University in Washington, D.C., and assorted other places such as the grounds of Moraine Farm in Beverly, Massachusetts.

He died uncertain whether any of his creations would survive into the future. His proposition—maintain valuable center-city land as green space—was tenuous and vulnerable to the developers of housing tracts and racetracks and shopping districts. But Olmsted's worst fears haven't been realized. Instead, his creations have become centerpieces, points of pride for scores of communities across the country. Far from receding, Olmsted's influence has only increased in the century since his death, growing and spreading like the Ramble, his beloved wild garden.

Olmsted Brothers turned out to be a smashing success, far beyond anything he could reasonably have expected. Just as Olmsted was the foremost landscape architect of the nineteenth century, the firm run by John and Rick became the preeminent practice for a new age. Much of its business involved circling back around to Olmsted's original creations to do maintenance or to add modern touches such as swimming pools. Olmsted Brothers did such work on their father's parks in Chicago, Louisville, and Rochester as well as Mountain View Cemetery. In 1908, the firm revised a plan for Bryn Mawr College that Olmsted had done some work on in the spring of 1895—one of his very last projects.