Genius of Place (11 page)

Yet try as he might, he could not forget the matter, not even in that very letter. Olmsted proceeded to scrawl page after page to his father, enumerating all the various reasons that the trip made sense. Though he'd sailed to China, he had never been to England. It would be better to visit now, while he was full of youthful vigor. Then, he could really buckle
down to life as a farmer, contented that he'd seen England at least. For that matter, he would surely gain some useful information while visiting the British countryside that he could apply on his own farm. The trip would be good for his health, too, especially in light of a “bowel complaint” he'd been suffering from lately. He could look out for his younger brother. He could look after Charley Brace.

In the letter, Olmsted never comes right out and asks permission from his father. John Sr. held the mortgage on Tosomock Farm, after all, and he was in a position to nix the idea. Instead, Olmsted put together a raft of rationalizations. He would be back in time for the fall harvest. The hired hands could look after the farm during his absence. A trip to England would be a kind of pilgrimage—to an important place, conferring all kinds of benefits—and he simply had to go. “I did not mean to argue the matter much,” Olmsted concluded his letter, though he'd certainly done exactly that. As a final touch, he added, “I hope you won't consider my opinions as if they were those of a mere child, nor my desire as senseless romantic impulses only.”

By now, John Sr. knew better. He simply gave his blessing. He even agreed to provide Fred with an amount of money sufficient to take a walking tour—a
budget
walking tour. (He'd earlier agreed to pay for John's trip as well.)

On April 27, 1850, the Olmsted brothers and Charley Brace were prepared to embark for England aboard the
Henry Clay
. But the ship failed to sail, despite this being the advertised day of departure. Upon examining their cabin, they discovered yet another problem. The room was half filled up with bales of cotton, bound for England to be sold.

This was billed as a passenger ship, not a merchant ship, but it was shades of the overloaded
Ronaldson
. The Olmsteds and Brace were also informed that they would need to share their cabin with another passenger. They were joined by a young Irish surgeon headed home. Such were the conditions of budget travel. The Atlantic passage was costing them $12 apiece. Three days later the
Henry Clay
finally departed, and three weeks later it arrived in Liverpool.

Fred, John, and Charley spent a little time kicking around Liverpool. On the morning they planned to depart, a baker who was preparing their
breakfast rolls told them that, before leaving town, they simply had to see Birkenhead Park. It had opened only three years before and was the very first park in Britain built with public funds. The park was the pride of Liverpool. The designer was a man named Joseph Paxton. Olmsted had never heard of Paxton, knew nothing of this park, but he was taken by the place's winding paths and broad meadows. He was especially impressed to note that people of all classes were mingling in a city park. But soon the three travelers were eager to get going. They took a train a little ways out of Liverpool, threw on their knapsacks, and set out walking.

Olmsted's first brush with the English countryside did not disappoint. From a winding lane, he could see over the tops of little thatched-roof houses to a church spire rising in the distance. It was spring, and the hawthorn hedges were all in bloom. Bees were buzzing, and he could hear a cow munching on grass. His overarching impression was one of greenness, incredible greenness. And everything was softened by a watery mist.

Nothing was really unusual about this scene, Olmsted later noted, yet it had a quiet drama that he found enrapturing. He also experienced a feeling of déjà vu. Here he was at last in countryside he'd read about in the esoteric books of William Gilpin and Uvedale Price at the Hartford Library as a little boy. This was also the land of his forebears. As often happens to American travelers in England, he had the strange and distinct sensation of coming home.

Because they were on a tight budget, Olmsted and his companions were forced to stay in the most modest accommodations imaginable. Theirs was a walking tour, not a grand tour. But this had an unintended benefit. The travelers came in contact with the regular people of England.

This certainly served Brace's purposes. He was deeply committed to the idea of leading a life of service to others. But he hadn't yet figured out how best to accomplish his goal. He was as restless as Olmsted, in his own way. Brace visited a prison at one point in the journey and visited a school for poor children at another. His practice was to split off from Fred and John for these sidelines, planning to rejoin them up the road apiece.

Olmsted also split off from the others frequently, but his stated purpose was to visit farms. Largely on account of England's being an older country than America, at the time of Olmsted's walking tour, it was well
ahead of the United States in the critical area of agricultural technology. Back in 1701, Jethro Tull had invented a mechanized seed drill, becoming one of the first people to apply the rigor of science to agriculture. The invention launched a flurry of innovation. Olmsted was in the cradle of scientific farming now, and he intended to make the most of the opportunity.

In fact, he'd set off on the tour carrying letters of introduction to the proprietors of various model farms. He examined livestock and watched cheese being made. He noted various implements used on British farms but not yet available in the United States, such as Crosskill's Patent Clod-Crusher Roller. He even had a consultation with a noted British expert to discuss the latest and best techniques for draining farmland.

During this, his first visit to Great Britain, Olmsted had one other noteworthy visit to a park. In Wales, he got the chance to walk over the manicured grounds of Chirk Castle. Olmsted was amazed: It was a real castle, dating to the late thirteenth century, surrounded by a real moat that was filled with water. It had been home to the Myddelton family for hundreds of years; each successive Myddelton held hereditary titles such as baron of Chirk Castle. Just to visit required some string pulling. Olmsted enjoyed touring the castle and walking over the surrounding parklands on a private tour. He fell into a daydream about what it would be like to live in such splendor. But he snapped out of his reverie just as suddenly. Was it really right for this beautiful place to be so cloistered, he began to wonder, set apart for the enjoyment of the privileged few?

Olmsted was an American, through and through. Besides the sense of coming home, he was having another experience common to Americans visiting England. Having Brace at his elbow during the tour of Chirk Castle no doubt also helped trigger this sudden burst of egalitarianism.

Fred, John, and Charley traveled at a good clip. In the course of about a month, they covered a generous swath of English countryside, mostly on foot, but occasionally by train or coach. And they weren't finished; the companions intended to make the most of this rare opportunity for travel. They had stuck to a bare-bones budget, and money remained. They sailed to France and from there visited Belgium and Germany. They did a brief walking tour through the Rhine Valley. Brace decided to stay
on in Germany. He was thinking about studying theology there. On his own, he would later make an ill-advised trip to post-revolution Hungary and wind up imprisoned for more than a month.

Fred and John sailed home from Glasgow. Olmsted had witnessed the beauty of the English countryside, firsthand. He'd visited a public park. He'd visited a private park, too, and been put off by the air of aristocracy that surrounded it. But none of it exactly coalesced. Not yet. He was a farmer still, and these were just more thoughts and observations to churn about in his brain.

The Olmsted brothers arrived in New York on October 24, 1850. According to Fred's accounting, they had spent an average of 71¢ per day for food and accommodations. Throw in the price of ship's passage and other transportation along with incidentals, and the whole trip cost the two of them—cost John Sr., rather—roughly $600.

 

Olmsted was home for the harvest, and, in subsequent months, he threw himself back into work on Tosomock Farm. He ordered 5,000 fruit-tree saplings to plant in his nursery. As a bonus for placing such a large order, he also received a sampling of ornamental trees. He planted a pair of cedars of Lebanon in front of his farmhouse.

In his capacity as secretary of the county agricultural society, he obtained an innovative British mechanism that he and his fellow farmers could use to make tile. The tile, in turn, could line pipes for drainage on farmland. It was one of the first of these devices ever imported into the United States.

On the surface, Olmsted appeared consumed by the affairs of his farm and by those of his Staten Island neighbors. Yet he found himself oddly detached, less engaged by any of this than he would have expected. He'd gone on the walking tour hoping to quench a kind of wanderlust.
See England as a young man, and it will be easier to buckle down to a farmer's life
—that had been one of the many arguments he'd summoned in that long letter to his father. But he'd found that he really loved traveling. Tosomock Farm seemed terribly drab now. Back on Staten Island, the memories of the walking tour seemed to cast a shadow across his life. Olmsted wrote a letter to Brace, who was still in Europe: “The fact is evident
now that when we were traveling we were living a great deal more, getting a great deal more out of the world, loving oftener, hating oftener, reaching a great many more milestones.”

In another letter to Brace, Olmsted complained about his stature in life. In the big picture—no, really
big
, cosmic terms—what was the point of being a farmer, he pondered. Was he helping people in any truly meaningful way? Olmsted confessed that he craved influence, longed to be involved in the grand affairs of the world. Yet he was so far away from that. Feeling petulant, Olmsted reflected on his fellow Americans' response to his recent walking tour. “The mere fact of having been to Europe is worth nothing,” he groused.

Olmsted had been a farmer—first as Geddes's apprentice, then at Sachem's Head, then on Staten Island—for four years. That was a lifetime in his scheme. Now, that familiar restlessness was starting to intrude. Over the next few years, he'd treat Tosomock Farm as a kind of home base. He would continue to live there, on and off, and farming would remain his primary business. (The hired hands could always pick up the slack if he was involved in something new.) But the walking tour stands as a kind of dividing line in Olmsted's life. For the next few years, he'd be leaning, forever leaning—away from farming and toward other occupations, ones that might prove worthy of his growing but ill-defined sense of ambition.

 

As it happened, the “mere fact of having been to Europe” was worth something. George Putnam, his Staten Island neighbor and distant relative, was in the process of launching a new line of books. Rather than issuing the standard hardcover, Putnam was eager to try out a recent publishing innovation—the paperback. He planned to publish a variety of different kinds of books in this format: biographies, poetry collections, philosophical treatises, and travelogues. He intended to sell the books for 25¢ apiece.

Putnam approached Olmsted about writing an account of his recent walking tour. Putnam thought it best to focus just on the main leg, across the English countryside. Olmsted accepted immediately. Of course, he had never attempted to write a book. As a first step, he contacted various
friends and family members to gather up all the letters he'd sent during his walking tour. In fact, he asked Kingsbury, a friend who had not gone on the walking tour, to send along “every scrap” of correspondence he'd received from him, his brother, or Brace. He knew he'd need these various letters to refresh his memory about where he'd gone, what he'd done, and when. Fortunately, while in England, he'd also taken some “pocketbook notes” that formed a kind of diary, though it was a pretty spare document. But at least this provided another source to draw upon. Olmsted got down to work.

Emboldened by Putnam's book offer, Olmsted also decided to make a pilgrimage to Newburgh, New York, to meet with Andrew Jackson Downing. Downing is not to be confused with Alexander Jackson Davis, the architect whom Olmsted contacted about designing a farmhouse at Sachem's Head. As mentioned, Andrew Jackson Downing was editor of the
Horticulturist and Journal of Rural Art and Rural Taste
, the magazine that had earlier published some letters Olmsted had written seeking farming advice. Now Olmsted was hoping to get some additional writing assignments from Downing's publication.

Downing was a formidable figure. The fact that America was predominantly a rural society coupled with the fact that farming was the leading profession had helped make him one of the most powerful and influential tastemakers in the country during the mid-nineteenth century. His dictates were followed by literate gentleman farmers. Downing was also the source consulted by wealthy city dwellers who owned second homes in the country.

Downing wore his hair in a flowing black mane and had intense dark eyes. He cultivated an air of romantic brooding and made it a practice to rarely smile, and as for breaking into laughter—never. His pronouncements, delivered in the pages of the
Horticulturist
, were taken as gospel:
Houses shouldn't be square boxes. Asymmetry is preferable, as it puts your home in harmony with nature. Don't paint your house white! Don't clear-cut the trees on your property. That's the way subsistence-grubbing pioneers behave. If you're going to lead a virtuous rural life, leave some ornamental trees to beautify your property. But keep it simple. Lavish rural houses are soul distorting, reminiscent of the way landed gentry in the old country live.