Frederick Law Olmsted

CHAPTER I. Autobiographical Passages

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL PASSAGES

Of the early influences and experiences which contributed to Mr. Olmsted’s unconscious preparation for his later professional practice, we have fortunately a considerable record. Towards the close of the seventies, when he was harried beyond measure by the New York politicians, he set down some fragmentary autobiographical notes as the first part of an intended book reviewing American social and political conditions.

In a little prefatory note, he says:

... I offer a small contribution of individual experience towards the history of the latter half of the first century of the American republic,--the period in which the work of the railroad, the electric telegraph, the ocean steamship, the Darwinian hypothesis, and of Universal suffrage began; in which what is called the temperance reformation and the abolition of slavery have occurred; in which millions of people have been concentrating at New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Chicago, St. Louis, and San Francisco, while rural neighborhoods in New England, Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia have been rapidly losing population and still more rapidly losing various forms of wealth and worth.

The book was never written, but he preserved such pages of manuscript as he found time to scribble off,--often at night when the strain of his bitter fight for the right development of the Central Park left him sleepless and when he turned with relief to the recollections of a simple and harmonious social group.

PASSAGES IN THE LIFE OF AN UNPRACTICAL MAN

His teachers are the people, books, animals, plants, stones and earth round about him.--PHILIP GILBERT HAMERTON.

My father was well fitted to live only in a highly organized community in which man’s stint is measured out to him according to his strength. As the world is going he was perhaps as fortunately placed in this respect as he well could be. Yet the world was driving along so fast that he lived in perplexity between his self-distrust and disposition to acquit himself fully in his proper part, and the supposed demands of Society, Religion and Commerce.

The affectations by which he aimed to hide his unreadiness were so transparent and his real qualities had so little of brilliancy that he passed with others, even with many of his friends, for a man of much less worth, ability and attainments than he was.

If one had said to my father that he was highly sensitive to beauty he would have straightened himself, coughed and bridled like a girl, in the desire to accept flattery with becoming deprecation and admission. And he would probably soon after try to justify the compliment by referring admiringly to something which he thought had the world’s stamp of beauty upon it, quite possibly something which, but for the stamp, would be odious to him.

He rarely talked even in his family on matters at all out of the range of direct and material domestic interests, and in a company where lively conversation was going on, would sit silent and even answer questions unfrankly and with evident discomfort. Yet though his communion with others was never wordy, a decided companionship was always necessary to his comfort, and his silence was never churlish.

His sensitiveness to the beauty of nature was indeed extraordinary, judging from the degree in which his habits were affected by it; for he gave more time and thought to the pursuit of this means of enjoyment than to all other luxuries, and more than any man I have known who could not and would not talk about it or in any way make a market of it.

My mother died while I was so young that I have but a tradition of memory rather than the faintest recollection of her. While I was a small schoolboy if I was asked if I remembered her I could say “Yes; I remember playing on the grass and looking up at her while she sat sewing under a tree.” I now only remember that I did so remember her, but it has always been a delight to me to see a woman sitting under a tree, sewing and minding a child.

My [step-]mother’s character was simpler than my father’s, but she also had a strong love of nature and her taste was more cultivated and had more of her own respect.

My father when a young man was fond of riding and before I could be trusted alone on a horse was in the habit of taking me sitting on a pillow before him. While still very young I rode by his side.

The happiest recollections of my early life are the walks and rides I had with my father and the drives with my father and [step-]mother in the woods and fields. Sometimes these were quite extended, and really tours in search of the picturesque. Thus before I was twelve years old I had been driven over the most charming roads of the Connecticut Valley and its confluents, through the White Hills and along most of the New England coast from the Kennebeck to the Naugatuck. We were our own servants, my father seldom fully trusting strangers in these journeys with the feeding, cleaning or harnessing of his horses. We rested long in pleasant places; and when at noon we took the nags out and fed them by the roadside, my father, brother and I would often wander far looking for a bathing place and an addition of fresh wild berries for the picnic dinner which my mother would have set out in some well-selected shady place.

I had also before I was twelve traveled much with my father and mother by stage coach, canal and steamboat, visiting West Point, Trenton Falls, Niagara, Quebec, Lake George.

I recollect less of any enjoyment I may then have had than of my impression of the enjoyment my father and mother constantly found in scenery. Yet they could have talked little of it, both being of silent habits; and I am sure that they did not analyze, compare and criticise.

These reflections rise naturally when I review the conditions of my education, for although I was much separated from my father and few men have less aptness, inclination or ability than he had to give oral instruction, I see that the unpremeditated and insensible influence which came to me from him was probably the strongest element in my training. I see also that my father may have unwittingly disclosed to me more of his nature than to any one else. One of two or three incidents that remain in my mind will show what I mean. On a Sunday evening we were crossing the meadows alone. I was tired and he had taken me in his arms. I soon noticed that he was inattentive to my prattle and looking in his face saw in it something unusual. Following the direction of his eyes, I said: “Oh! there’s a star.” Then he said something of Infinite Love with a tone and manner which really moved me, chick that I was, so much that it has ever since remained in my heart.

Brought up in a superstitious faith in preaching and didactic instruction, and knowing how little he could by deliberate purpose do for me in that way, my father’s affection and desire to “do right by the boy” made him always eager to devolve as much as practicable of the responsibility of my education upon ministers.

I was placed successively in charge of six ministers. That this was not a choice of schoolmasters appears from the fact that while living with three of them I was, with my father’s knowledge, sent out by them to day schools--twice to the common school--and that only one himself gave me regular instruction. In every case, too, I was for the most part turned over for what is commonly called religious instruction to Sunday school teachers,--that is to say, vain, ignorant and conceited big boys and girls,--parrots or quacks at the business.

The first of these ministers, who became my father by deputy when I was but six years old, was the pastor of a thoroughly rural parish. The surface of the country was rugged, the soil, except in small patches, poor; the farms consequently large and the settlement scattered; there was one little general store at which the weekly mail was distributed; there was no public house, but near the meetinghouse some cabins had been built with fireplaces made of field stone in which families who came from far could get warm and eat their snack between the Sunday services. (I think Sunday was then called Sunday and that the fashion of calling it Sabbath came in afterwards or had not yet reached this place.)

The accumulation of results of labor in several generations was chiefly conspicuous in the stone walls which divided the fields.

I suppose that the large family in which I lived, enjoyed more luxury than any other, but I doubt if, one year with another, four hundred dollars in money passed its hands. Every household, however, was self-supporting and none so needy that it would not resent an offer of gratuitous assistance unless it were in such neighborly kindness as the poorest might offer the richest. There was a single family of vagabond habits who sometimes came to the store and bartered small peltry chiefly for tobacco and rum, and once when they had done so betook themselves to a Sunday house and shut themselves up in it for a deliberate drunk. But even this family which was distinguished and prayed for as “the poor” kept up at least a profession of supporting themselves honestly. They probably owned the cabin they lived in and a small piece of mountain land about it. If not, I think they were the only family that did not own some land and till it.

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