Genius of Place (4 page)

After a year, Fred was yanked out of Whitmore's overlax parsonage and parked in the home of Benjamin and Content Olmsted, his paternal grandparents. The plan was for him to live with them and attend Hartford Grammar School. Benjamin Olmsted, age seventy-nine, was one of Fred's favorite relatives. For church, the man's Sunday best consisted of a ruffled shirt, knee breeches and stockings, and shoes with silver buckles. He'd tie back his gray hair in a pigtail. He had fought in the Revolutionary War and was like the living embodiment of history itself. About the only thing missing from the ensemble was a three-corner hat. Even that Fred discovered in the attic, gathering dust.

Fred enjoyed the society of older people, much more than a typical child. Benjamin was happy to oblige his grandson, spinning out reminiscences about marching through the Maine woods under Benedict
Arnold to lay siege to Quebec, one of the earliest and bloodiest battles of the Revolution. Fred asked whether he had ever been forced to cook and eat his own boots. His grandfather laughed and laughed.

On a warm spring day, Benjamin led Fred outside and pointed to an elm. He had helped his own father plant the tree, he explained, and it had once been a mere sapling. But just look at it: It was a tall tree. The old man stood there, leaning on his silver-topped Malacca cane, shaking his head in wonderment.

Fred was nine years old now. His blond hair had turned brown; the curls had loosed into waves. His baby fat was all gone; his chubby, dimpled arms had grown lean and sinewy. But he remained a small boy, with dark eyes and a tight-coiled nervousness about him. A report from Hartford Grammar School assessed Fred as very bright but unwilling or unable to focus on his studies.

He found other, more informal, ways to supplement his schoolwork. Fred explored his grandmother's book collection and at a tender age waded into such dense fare as
The Vicar of Wakefield
by Oliver Goldsmith and Laurence Sterne's
Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy
. During this time, he also made frequent visits to the Hartford Young Men's Institute library, which his father helped fund with charitable contributions. Here, he discovered works such as William Gilpin's
Remarks on Forest Scenery
and Sir Uvedale Price's
Essay on the Picturesque, as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful
. These were rarefied texts on landscape aesthetics—highly precocious subject matter—but young Fred found himself drawn to them nonetheless.

He also felt the pull of
Solitude
by Johann Georg Zimmermann, a favorite book he'd return to throughout his life, but one that he read for the first time while living with his grandparents. Zimmermann, a Swiss physician, argued that it was necessary to periodically retreat from humanity into nature for the sake of spiritual replenishment.

Then, all too soon, it was good-bye Grandfather Benjamin, good-bye Grandmother Content. Fred was off to Ellington, a brand-new school that promised “strong discipline” in its ad in the
Hartford Courant
. Perhaps Fred simply needed a firm hand to rein him in. “I was very active, imaginative, inventive, impulsive, enterprising, trustful and heedless,”
Fred would recall. “This made what is generally called a troublesome and mischievous boy.”

At Ellington, what he got instead was a cruel hand. Shortly into his first term, a minister grabbed Fred by both ears and pulled until they bled. The event was sufficiently brutal to prompt one of the older students to write a letter describing the event to Fred's father. Time to move yet again, this time to a school run by the Reverend Joab Brace in Newington, Connecticut.

 

Brace was a tall, severe man with coal-black eyes and an intimidating demeanor. He held a degree in divinity from Williams and spoke Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. He had a reputation for preparing his charges for both Christian conversion and college education. Despite his erudition, he was yet another poor preacher who ran a school and worked a farm, both as ways to supplement his small income. The reverend wasn't averse to mixing his two sidelines by requiring his pupils to help out on the farm.

Fred lived with three other boys in a rickety little building that sat beside Brace's parsonage. The building's cellar was piled high with cabbages and roots. On the ground floor, there was a workshop for the farm, full of harnesses and other equipment. The boys' desks for study and beds were crowded into the upper story. Winds whipped through the warped clapboards and swirled about their meager quarters.

Fred's days were mostly given over to chores. During cold weather, for example, he would be up before dawn chopping logs. He'd haul wood into the parsonage and the school building and have to maintain fires in the heating stoves throughout the day. Fred did this every fourth day, rotating with the other three pupils. On the other days, there were other chores; there was always endless work to be done.

Nighttime was set aside for actual course work, often on the heels of a full day of farm labor. Brace's students were required to pore over books such as
Adam's Latin Grammar
and the
Young Men's Book
, which offered moral instruction. Fred found that he simply couldn't abide this regimen, especially after enjoying such freedom at Rev. Zolva Whitmore's school and his grandparents' home. Sometimes at night, he
would entertain his fellow pupils with made-up adventure stories. He'd spin these tales in the barest whisper because Brace was in the habit of sneaking into the little building where his pupils lived. The reverend would slip off his shoes, creep up the stairs, and stand at the threshold, silently listening. If he detected discussion of anything save for lessons, he'd burst through the door and whack the boys about the shoulders with a broom handle. Invariably, he'd shout, “Oh, the depravity of human nature!”

Hot water was provided on Saturday nights only. The boys were expected to wash their ears, necks, and feet. Twice a day, for prayers, the boys kneeled on the cold, bare floor of the parsonage kitchen.

Fred was soon joined at Brace's country school by John, his younger brother. John was growing into an attractive boy—also small for his age—with tousled hair and a winningly casual demeanor. He was very smart, but he didn't scuff against the world like Fred. Nor did he share Fred's lack of focus. At Brace's school, John would continue on an academic course that would take him to Yale, where he'd study medicine. In the years ahead, the bond between the two brothers was destined to grow tighter. The two of them were set apart, after all, as the only children born to Charlotte Olmsted before she died.

As for Fred's half-siblings back home in Hartford, he knew them only fleetingly. They were more like cousins. Three of the six children born to John and Mary Ann Olmsted would die before reaching maturity. These departed half-siblings would be little more than dimly recalled shadows for Fred, whose young life was already a study in inconstancy.

 

Another big blow soon followed. At age fourteen, Fred developed a severe rash from coming in contact with the plant poison sumac. The infection spread to his eyes, and soon his vision was seriously impaired. He feared that he was going blind. Naturally, he had no choice but to withdraw from Brace's school.

Fred was urged to pursue a course of “hydrotherapy”—then all the rage. In Fred's case, a regimen of ocean bathing—exposing his eyes to saltwater—seemed the best approach. Off went Fred to the seaside town of Saybrook, Connecticut, where he boarded with the Reverend George
Clinton Van Vechten Eastman, who was to oversee his cure and also act as his tutor.

The better Fred's eyesight became, the more he was required to study with Eastman. Not surprisingly, his improvement was slow. So Fred's father took him to New York City to consult with a doctor. The doctor suggested that Fred continue with the hydrotherapy. Apparently, the man also recommended that, given Fred's delicate eyesight, he should scrap any plans of going to college. During the 1800s, kids frequently went off to college in their midteens—at fourteen or fifteen. By now, Fred had fallen desperately behind in his studies anyhow.

Gradually, Fred regained his eyesight, thanks to the wonder of his hydrotherapy sessions in Saybrook. Or perhaps the healing was achieved by the simple passage of time, accompanied by very little stress, on a beach. Either way, Fred was done with formal schooling. He had a doctor's orders to prove it. But if he wasn't going to college, he needed to learn a trade. Fred selected surveying. Of course, surveying requires eaglesharp eyesight in order to spot topographical details and render precise maps. There wasn't much logic in any of this. But his father was willing to entertain anything, anything at all, to get Fred moving again.

Fred entered into an apprenticeship with F. A. Barton, a surveyor who also happened to be studying to become a minister. This seemed an ideal combination. Fred could learn a profession under the tutelage of someone who could also look out for his spiritual development. Neither of Barton's qualifications seems to have made an impact on Fred. John Olmsted wrote Fred a letter, gently suggesting that his son had reached an age where “we begin to feel that the time is come for us to throw off boyish notions and habits.” His father added hopefully, “Even surveying begins to have some interest in your mind.”

Fred learned the basics from Barton. But he was more interested in laying out imaginary cities. Even this activity lost out to one of the biggest draws of surveying—it was outdoor work. Under the guise of learning a useful trade, Fred engaged in the things he truly loved—hiking and swimming and hunting and fishing.

Then Fred simply returned home to live. It was an unfathomable move, the kind of thing that able-bodied young men simply did not do in
the 1840s. He was a boomerang child when the concept simply did not exist. His father was exhausted and confounded but welcomed him back. What other option was there? His stepmother was tolerant, but barely.

Fred had become a source of puzzlement to those who knew him. He was a person of such obvious intelligence, yet he was entirely adrift. He was a wastrel, yet he wasn't a difficult person or mean-spirited. More than anything, he just seemed to lack any real sense of urgency. It was as if he was following his own private calendar, and he behaved as though he had all the time in the world. “I hear Fred'k coming (whistling),” wrote John Olmsted in a letter. “He works in the garden (with great moderation) in the morning and this P.M. has been breaking the laws of our town, shooting poor blackbirds.”

To some degree, at least, Fred's maddening indolence appears to have been a front. During this time, his brother John was off studying in Paris, an opportunity furnished by a family friend. This seems to have secretly eaten at Fred. Here, after all, was his younger brother, leaving him behind, quite literally. “Dear brother,” begins a letter from Fred to John in Paris. “I have nothing particular to write to you about.” In another letter, Fred first offered a piece of national news. (There had been a big flood in Natchez, Mississippi.) He followed this with a piece of Connecticut news (the legislature was about to adjourn) and closed with local news from Hartford (gutter work in progress). And that was all. Signed, Fred.

In his own strange way, Fred seemed to be communicating embarrassment in this letter by not bothering to include a solitary detail about himself or his current life. Or maybe it was an act of emotional withholding:
You think you're better, away in Paris—well, I'm not even going to bother to tell you about myself, living at home, in Hartford.
Certainly, there's something off-kilter about writing such an impersonal letter to one's brother.

 

Ultimately, John's Paris trip may have goaded Fred back into the world. While his brother was away, Fred got a job at Benkard and Hutton, an importer of high-quality French silk located at 53 Beaver Street in Manhattan. Benkard and Hutton was a supplier to his father's store. Fred's father, in turn, used his connections to land the job for his son.

At age eighteen, Fred moved to Brooklyn, New York, where he took a room in Mrs. Howard's boardinghouse on Henry Street. It was his first time living on his own. Rent, breakfast, and laundry service cost $3.50 per week. Fred was desperately lonely. After work, he'd sit by himself, slowly picking his way through dinners taken at Pine's Coffee Rooms. Back in Brooklyn, he spent his time on the roof of his boardinghouse, looking after a pair of doves that he adopted.

He hated the job at Benkard and Hutton. He hated the twelve-hour workdays. He hated the six-day workweeks. He hated sitting at a desk. He hated the rules and regimentation. But Fred's job required him to go onboard ships anchored in New York's harbor to inventory their cargoes of silk, and it was while visiting these ships that he began to form an idea of something else he might do with his life.

CHAPTER 2

FRED RESOLVED TO become a sailor. If he had to choose a trade, this made far more sense than the other professions in which he'd briefly dabbled. It was outdoor work, unlike clerking, and it promised a great deal more adventure than surveying. Besides, going to sea was in his blood. Trace his father's line back over those many generations, and it was sailors, sailors everywhere.

Among the most notable was Aaron Olmsted, Fred's great-uncle. As captain of the
Huntress
and one of the first Americans involved in the China trade, he established a shipping route to Canton, amassing a fortune along the way. Captain Gideon Olmsted was another great-uncle. As a boy, Fred sat on the captain's knee and listened to his yarns about various ocean adventures, one of which was particularly dramatic and noteworthy. In 1777, Olmsted was one of several prisoners who staged a revolt on a British warship, where they were being held captive. Olmsted seized control, diverted the ship to the New Jersey coast, and turned it and its British crew over to American authorities. The brave feat made him a Revolutionary War hero. Years back, he'd even published a book about the episode,
The Journal of Gideon Olmsted: Adventures of a Sea Captain During the American Revolution
. More recently, Fred's nautically inclined cousin Francis had written
Incidents of a Whaling Voyage
.