Frederick Law Olmsted

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.

Every one made long days’ work; the parson was diligent and traveled far every week on his pastoral duties. He worked with his own hands a little farm from which the family living was helped out. He kept a horse and cow. He entertained a good deal of company,—agents of benevolent societies and traveling preachers as well as family friends, parishioners and the families of neighboring ministers; but he had no hired man servant and the only maid was a young girl, probably a relative of his wife’s who often sat at the table with us and before I left was married, perhaps to another minister. There was another pupil, a big boy who was reading Greek with the parson and who paid for his tutorship by helping in the farm work. On the parson’s little farm we had cows and swine and sheep, turkeys, geese, fowls and bees. Besides the commoner farm crops, we raised flax and spun it. We had an orchard and sent apples to a neighboring cider mill. I remember seeing the parson grafting scions into the trees. I remember also the beating a pan when the bees swarmed, helping to pick the geese, helping to wash the sheep, setting up the martin box, going with yarn to the weavers, helping to make soap and to dip candles.

It seems to me that while I was here, though only six years old, I was under no more constraint than a man; that I went where I liked, did what I liked and, especially, that I had a hand in everything that was going on in the neighborhood. When I saw other boys going barefoot, I threw away my shoes and was no more required to wear them except on Sundays. Every house, every room, every barn and stable, every shop, every road and highway, every field, orchard and garden was not only open to me but I was everywhere welcome. With all their hard-working habits no one seemed to begrudge a little time to make life happy to such a bothering little chap as I must have been. Such a thing as my running into danger even from bad company would seem not to have been thought of.

I remember very distinctly wandering off by myself in the evening to the store and sitting there listening to such talk as happened; going to look in at the window of the Sunday house to see the drunken poor folks; going with boys to smoke out woodchucks from their burrows, to get rabbits in winter out of stone walls, to trap mink in steel traps and quail in figure-four traps. I remember going with rye to the grist mill, riding on the sacks behind some man or bigger boy; going at night to see a charcoal burning and then eating potatoes baked in ashes. I am often reminded of the odor that filled the air. Spending a day and night at a distant sugar camp and then sleeping in a wigwam of bark. Making pastoral visits to sick people with uncle,—so I called him though he was no family relation. I remember when a man came to say that a sick child was dead, and to get the key of the meetinghouse. I went with him and saw him strike three strokes on the iron triangle which hung suspended by strips of cowhide from the beams of the belfry by which the tidings were sent to all within hearing; and immediately women began to come from all directions to show their sympathy to the stricken parents. The loss of a single little child stirred every heart in every household. We were dismissed early from school next day and went to see the coffin made.

I remember seeing the boards stained with a red wash and varnished. We saw the grave dug and helped to take out the bier and dingy pall from the little house in the graveyard where they were kept. We walked in the funeral procession. I remember the parson’s reading the usual notice in meeting the next Sunday. “It having pleased God to remove by death the infant child of Reuben and Rebecca Wilson, the afflicted parents, with the aged grandmother, the surviving children and other relatives ask the prayers of the congregation that this bereavement may be blessed to their spiritual and eternal good.” As each class of the mourners was designated, they stood up in their pew, and many of the women looking on had tears in their eyes. I remember that I wondered why uncle did not pray that the child should be raised at once and brought back to her parents, and I tried it myself when I went to bed.

I remember being taken up by a sleighing party and driven far by moonlight to a large house where I saw flip made by the kitchen fire; saw the parson’s girl drink it and be merry; saw romping games played around the great chimney and when finally I fell asleep, I was put to bed to be taken home in the midst of a furious snowstorm in the bitter morning by one of the boys who treated me to an upset in a snow-drift.

I don’t quite see how the people old and young—even the drunkard—could be on such good terms with the parson as it seems to me they were. I certainly have seen nothing like it since. I think that the temperance reformation was just beginning and my uncle preached and prayed in the meeting, in the school and in the family against intemperance, but total abstinence was not yet insisted on. The Anti-slavery agitation had not arisen. Divisions on these two questions I understand were afterwards so bitter that half the congregation refused to come to meeting or to contribute to the support of the minister, who finally was obliged to ask for a dismissal on account of the extreme privations to which his family became reduced.

I learned to read in a little brown schoolhouse on the bank of a brook in the midst of the woods. I remember chestnut, hemlock, birch and alder trees about it and near by thickets of mountain laurel. The brook must have been a small one for we made a pool by damming it, into which we put little trout and frogs that we caught with our hands, and from which we filled the drink-water pail of the school. The ground was strewn with rocks and the brook made a crooked way among them with much babbling. I remember beds of fragrant mint along its banks and of pennyroyal on the drier roadside. Here too, by an old stone fence we drew out sassafras roots and in a marshy place at the foot of the hill we pulled the sweetflag root from the black mire.

The narrow road passed on the other side of the schoolhouse and sometimes, when wheels were heard approaching, our mistress would stop short and cry: “Your elders are coming. Make your manners! Make your manners!” and we hastened to stand in line at the roadside, the boys to bow, the girls to courtesy. Even when at play and out of sight of the schoolhouse the boys would stop and take off their hats if any much older person came near. We were eager to do it, which perhaps is to be accounted for by the fact that we saw so few people, and that no man would be in such haste or so absorbed in other duties that he could not acknowledge the courtesy and smile or say a pleasant word to us.

I was a favorite with the mistress. When she was married and was starting for the Western Reserve in a chaise with a horse-hide trunk, studded with brass nails, hung on behind, she stopped at our house to see me. She cried a little when she kissed me. Did I cry also? I think not.

I dimly recall much more that was quaint, and that it is harder to believe in, of the habits and customs of the parish, but I recall nothing that was not kindly or that I do not thoroughly respect.

One of the most incredible of my recollections is that of the serious and respectful interest taken by all classes of the people in the annual spring parade of the militia, and first that the drummer should have come to the parson for advice as he did weeks beforehand in regard to the drum head. Its renewal and the manner of it being determined, I went with a squad to a distant currier’s where a sheep skin was selected, bargained and paid for in seed potatoes. After it had been prepared and mounted, the drummer and fifer practiced at the store every night, Sundays excepted, until the day of the muster.

On the Sunday before, some of the officers appeared at meeting in partial uniform. It was questioned at dinner whether this was a good custom; whether it did not minister more to personal vanity than to any good. The parson, however, regarded it as a suitable mark of respect to the house of God and remarked that the military arm of the republic had no strength except in its dependence on the Almighty. The approaching occasion was remembered in his prayers.

When the day came and the long roll was beaten in front of the meetinghouse, about fifty true yeomen[3] fell in and answered to their names. Nearly all wore parts of what had once been uniforms. Very few were without a black and red plume bound on the left side of their hats. The privates all had muskets, but I have an impression that the non-commissioned officers or some of them carried lances or halberds. The commissioned officers were in full military suits, not that these had been made to fit them, for I think that they had been obtained for a consideration from their predecessors and dated back to the last war. They had swords and enormous chapeau bras with plumes and also wore leather stocks and silk sashes. The company was drilled, marched, counter-marched, dismissed for dinner, reassembled and, at length, late in the day, a sergeant with a guard of honor was sent to the parsonage and the minister escorted to the ground. On his arrival he was duly saluted by the Company which then formed in hollow square, the minister, commissioned officers, “music” and the Company flag in the centre. The minister delivered a short discourse, made a long prayer and, after being thanked by the Captain, was re-escorted to the parsonage. There were few inhabitants of the parish, old or young, who were not present at this ceremony, as many as possible standing, men and boys with their hats removed, on the long wooden steps of the meetinghouse at the foot of which the square had been formed.

The Company being again brought into line the Captain said a few words of compliment, closing nearly as follows:

“You are now about to be dismissed for the day and I hope that nothing will occur after the dismissal which will lessen the respect which your exemplary conduct, while under military discipline, has been calculated to inspire in the hearts of the ladies. I will only add that after the dismissal I shall give a treat at the north Sunday house which you are all heartily invited to partake of.” Here a private stepped out and called for three cheers for Captain Fowler, which were given, the drum rolling and the flag waving.

In the Sunday house, pitchers, glasses, and plates of crackers, cheese and gingerbread were set out and under their influence, the earnestness which had so far characterized the proceedings gave way to a certain temperate degree of hilarity, forced and creaking.

After supper a drum and fife concert concluded the solemn patriotic festival, the last piece performed being Old Hundred.

I do not know whether it was before or after this that I spent several months with my uncle at Geneseo, where I remember being taken to see Indians making baskets, to visit at a house in the dooryard of which there was a fawn and at which a beautiful woman gave me sweetmeats, and that I was sometimes driven rapidly and silently over the turf of the bottom lands among great trees.

I was for months again the smallest boy among sixty at a boarding school, where I was placed under the special care of another clergyman, of whom I remember nothing after my father and mother drove away. Here I suffered in many cruel ways, and I still carry the scars of more than one kind of the wounds I received. I was taken away suddenly when one of the big boys wrote to his father, who sent the letter to mine, that a teacher had lifted me up by my ears and had so pinched one of them that it bled. My father had not thought of taking me away when I wrote—I think it must have been in my first letter to him—that there had been a revival in the school; that I had experienced religion, that I had had a prayer party in my bedroom to pray for his conversion and that I wished him to read a certain tract, the title of which I forget.

After this I lived for six months or more at home. But home with me had many branches, for there were no less than ten households of grandparents, granduncles and uncles in which, for all that I recollect, I was as welcome and intimate and as much at home as if I had been born to them. My father’s grandfather had five sons, all of whom had, I think, been seafaring men before the revolution. One had sailed in a letter of marque, was taken prisoner and died in the hulk at the Wallabout; another who was more successful than the rest in acquiring wealth and honors was carried to a peaceful grave before my day. Another was over ninety years old when I was born. I dimly recollect him, living in a large, rambling old farm house, of which he was the only occupant except his housekeeper. The fourth was also over ninety when I rode his knee. He had served the young republic both on sea and land and was the hero of a very daring and shrewd exploit, having, with three American seamen and two negroes whom he compelled to assist him, recaptured a valuable prize vessel on the high seas and brought her safely in. They were all infirm from wounds and rheumatism and I remember my grandfather out of his arm chair but once. He then walked a little way with me in a warm spring day, supporting himself with a long Malacca cane, which I now own, held with both hands. Leaning against a fence he pointed out a hang-bird’s nest in one of a row of elms near us and then told me that he had helped his father to plant the trees, describing how small they were at the time. I wanted my father to let me help him plant trees and he did, but they were not placed with sufficient forecast and have since all been cut down. But great-grandfather’s trees stand yet and the hang-birds yet have their home in them.

Then I lived for a few months chiefly with my grandmother, going irregularly to a village school, but being educated more I think through some old novels, plays and books of travels that I found in a sea chest in her garret. I actually read at this time much of Zimmerman on Solitude, Sterne’s Sentimental Journey and the Vicar of Wakefield. I have the same volumes now, and I never have such a puzzling sense of double life as when I see some of Coleman’s plays on the stage.

I suppose these readings developed the talent which I must have temporarily possessed two or three years later, when I could hire other boys to do my chores by telling them stories,—no doubt but partially of my own invention.

Then I spent nearly five years, vacations excepted, in the home of a minister who undertook, with God’s help, to bring up four select pupils in the fear of the Lord, making no distinction between them and his own children. For their accommodation he had bought and moved a small, old country store alongside the parsonage proper, in the cellar of which he stowed cabbages and roots, on the ground floor had a work-shop and harness room, and in the second story the boys’ beds, desks and benches.

The clapboards were warped and shackling and the winter pressed us hard. The heating apparatus was a sheet-iron stove, if I am not mistaken made by the parson himself. The parson’s salary was nominally $500 a year but the people being poor and money scarce he took much of it in “produce”—firewood, for instance, which was invariably delivered when the sledding was good and mostly in logs. As soon as winter came, the duty was put on me to keep up the fire one day in four, and to provide wood I had to cut and split these logs, using a beetle and wedges for the larger ones; then carry the wood to the school and up stairs—all in play-time—make the fire before day and keep it up till bedtime. I was eight years old and small of my age.

The parsonage had a small back kitchen in which there was a wooden sink; outside the door stood an open water butt with a spigot at the bottom. After we had dressed by lamplight in the morning and perhaps broken a path through the snow to “the other house,” we opened the back kitchen door and in turn drew water in a cast-iron skillet about six inches in diameter out of which with the aid of home-made soft soap, held at a corner of the sink in a gourd, we washed our hands and faces. A roller towel hung upon the wall for the use of all the family. On Saturday night, hot water was furnished us and we were expected to wash our ears, neck and feet. Our meals were eaten in the kitchen and here, on the bare floor, we twice a day kneeled in prayers.

The parson’s son, a weakly boy who afterwards died of consumption, lived in the house with the family. The four boarder boys had the “store” all to themselves except in school hours.

They were kept in order in this way: At irregular intervals, when they were expected to be studying their lessons, the parson came to the foot of the stairs, took off his shoes, crept softly up and stood with his ear at the latch. If there was no disorder, he slipped down again and we perhaps knew nothing of his visit. If I was telling a story—my stories were generally of “run-aways”—the parson waited until I reached a situation of interest, when he would break in shouting “Oh! the depravity of human nature!” and seizing a ruler, a stick of firewood or a broom handle, go at us all pellmell over the head and shoulders.

A later biographical fragment, probably written in the nineties, carries on the story of Mr. Olmsted’s education.