PART II. EARLY EXPERIENCES
THEIR CONTRIBUTION TO HIS LATER CAREER
PART II. EARLY EXPERIENCES
THEIR CONTRIBUTION TO HIS LATER CAREER
CHAPTER I
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.