CHAPTER IX
REPUTATION IN 1857
Although in his _Walks and Talks_ the public had ample evidence of Mr. Olmsted’s taste in scenery, he was known principally as a literary man, a writer on agriculture, and a student of our social and economic conditions. His reasoned observations had been widely circulated through his letters in the New York _Times_ and the books subsequently made up from these,[19] which are still considered to give the truest picture of the South before the war. Mr. Raymond of the _Times_ is quoted in 1854 as thinking “highly of his powers of observation and detailed reporting, giving just the facts that people want.”
Among his intimates he was known as an enthusiast and keen analyst in debate. It is pleasant to quote two references to these qualities in letters, which were prophetic, in spirit if not in exact detail:
BOSTON, May 8, 1847.
(From F. J. KINGSBURY to J. H. OLMSTED.)
“It is pretty much all true what you say about Fred. But living and growing and experience will have to answer for him instead of college discipline. He is an enthusiast by nature though, and all the Greek and Latin in the world wouldn’t have driven that out of him. Well the world needs such men, and one thing is curious, disappointments never seem to trouble them. They must in the nature of things meet with them often and yet they go right on in the same old way just as if it had not happened. They never get disheartened. I think Fred will be one of that sort. Many of his favorite schemes will go to naught but he’ll throw it aside and try another and spoil that and forget them both while you or I might have been blubbering over the ruins of the first.”
And in the _Life and Letters of Charles Loring Brace_,[20] there is a letter probably late in 1848:
“I must say Fred is getting to argue with the utmost keenness,--a regular Dr. Taylor mind in its analytic power! But what is queerest, never able to exercise that power except in discussion! He is another Taylorite in his virtue theory. I shouldn’t be surprised if he turned out something rather remarkable among men yet....”
Although he had not had a chance to prove his executive ability in any public capacity, he was known as a capable manager in the handling of farm labor. Very early in his agricultural career, there is an evidence of this in a letter (1848) to his brother:
I finally got things fixed so I could leave without much anxiety. Robert returned, pretty well recovered; and work cut out, with written directions, for every man of such sort that they will be profitably and seasonably employed ’til I return, without much need of judgment.
His democratic ideals in general were well understood from his writings. There are some passages from letters written early in his career as a landscape architect which further interpret these with special regard to his chosen profession.
The letter of 1860, addressed to a subordinate who had referred to the difference in their “stations in life,” contains the following:
The phrase “stations in life” is ordinarily used with a meaning the propriety of which I am not accustomed to recognize. That I have enjoyed greater advantages of education in some respects than most of the keepers is true, but so far as this means book-education, there is no man among you who has it not in his power to obtain a better education than mine, during the ordinary period of reserve duty, within a very few years. As for my education in other respects, I mean in those respects which if anything entitle me to my present position, I have obtained it by reason of no advantages which many of you might not have had. The best of my travelling has been done on foot at a cost of 70 cents a day, or working my passage as a common seaman. My practical horticultural education, I mean that not gained by reading, was in part acquired while engaged as a laborer, looking to working men as my masters and teachers. It is then impossible for me to have any hearty or habitual respect for the superiority of one man over another in station in life except as superiority of station means higher responsibility and larger duty.
In 1863, when the political situation on the Central Park made it difficult for Mr. Olmsted to entertain the idea of returning to his work there, he wrote to Mr. Vaux from California:
But you know that the advantages offered in the office of the Superintendent for spending a good deal of my life in the park, being with the people in it, watching over it and cherishing it in every way,--living in it and being a part of it (whatever else there was),--were valued by me at a valuation which you thought nonsensical, childish and unworthy of me; but it was my valuation of them and not yours which was concerned. And that this was something deeper than a whim you know, for you know that it existed essentially years before it attached itself to the Central Park as was shown by the fact that while others gravitated to pictures, architecture, Alps, libraries, high life and low life when travelling, I had gravitated to parks,--spent all my spare time in them, when living in London for instance, and this with no purpose whatever except a gratification which came from sources which the Superintendence of the Park would have made easy and cheap to me, to say the least, every day of my life. What I wanted in London and in Paris and in Brussels and everywhere I went in Europe--what I wanted in New York in 1857, I want now _and this from no regard for Art or fame or money_.
Mr. Olmsted’s own summary of his fitness for the opportunity which presented itself in 1857, he gave in _Spoils of the Park_, written in 1882, to be reprinted in full in Volume Two of this work.
It is worth while also, perhaps, to give in conclusion two of the endorsements submitted with his Central Park application in 1857. (See facsimile opposite.)
Similar petitions bear the signatures of Russell Sturgis, Horace Greeley, George H. Putnam, Henry Holt, Whitelaw Reid, William Cullen Bryant, Bayard Taylor, Alexander Hamilton, Philip Schuyler, John M. Scribner, August Belmont, Morris K. Jesup, Henry Havemeyer, E. D. Morgan, Roosevelt & Co., and many others.
Pleasantest of all was the letter from Professor Asa Gray:
“HARVARD UNIVERSITY “BOTANIC GARDEN, August 24, 1857.
“TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS OF THE NEW YORK PARK
“DEAR SIR
“I have just learned that _F. Law Olmsted, Esq._, is about to offer himself as a candidate for the superintendency of the Central Park, New York.
“I desire very simply and sincerely to say that I know Mr. Olmsted well, and that I regard him as _eminently fitted_ for that position. I do not know another person so well fitted for it in all respects, both on practical and general scientific grounds and I have no doubt that if the choice falls upon him, he will do great honor to the situation and to his own already high and honorable reputation.
“I have the honor to be
with great respect Your obedient faithful servant “(sgd.) ASA GRAY. “Professor of Botany &c. “Harvard University.”
[Illustration: Facsimile of Petition to Secure Appointment of Mr. Olmsted as Superintendent of Central Park, 1857]
FOOTNOTES:
[19] _Seaboard Slave States_, _Journey in Texas_, and _Back Country_.
[20] Published 1894, p. 61-62.
## PART III. AMERICAN LANDSCAPE GARDENING IN 1857
## PART III
AMERICAN LANDSCAPE GARDENING IN 1857
In September, 1857, when Frederick Law Olmsted was appointed Superintendent of the Central Park in New York, there was no well-established profession of landscape gardening in the United States and the term landscape architect[21] was unknown. The untimely death of Andrew Jackson Downing had come five years earlier. It was not until the very end of 1857 that Downing’s architectural associate and successor, Calvert Vaux, invited the new Superintendent of the Central Park to participate with him in the competition for the design, thus beginning a partnership which brought about public recognition of a new professional field. It is worth mentioning that the New York newspapers of the day regarded only a few of the thirty-three[22] plans submitted in the competition as worth attention, and characterized many as puerile and entirely unsuitable. Of the four premiated plans, the second was submitted by Mr. Samuel I. Gustin, the superintendent of planting at the Park, the third by Messrs. Miller and McIntosh, two employees in the office of the Superintendent (Mr. Olmsted), and the fourth by an architect, Mr. Howard Daniels,--none of these gentlemen apparently enjoying any distinction in the public eye. The competition plan of Colonel Viele, Chief Engineer, whose original design for the Park had been rejected before the institution of the competition, found no favor with the commissioners. Mr. Ignaz A. Pilat, an Austrian, said to have designed the grounds of Prince Metternich, and who had been engaged since 1856 on a botanical survey of the ground of the Central Park, submitted a design, although not in competition. It would appear that no distinguished foreign designer participated, although the Central Park Commissioners had hoped for this, and had gone so far as to appropriate money for the traveling expenses of the “engineers or other persons in chief” by whom the Bois de Boulogne and Birkenhead Park had been laid out and constructed, could they be induced to visit New York for the purpose of giving the Board “aid and information.”
At this time in Boston the firm of Copeland and Cleveland (R. Morris Copeland and H. W. S. Cleveland) was engaged in the professional practice of landscape gardening, mainly the laying-out of suburban and country estates. In 1856 these gentlemen had published a very sensible pamphlet modestly entitled _A Few Words on the Central Park_, in which they urged on the City of New York the ultimate economy of a comprehensive plan. Mr. Charles Follen, also of Boston, was in practice at the time, styling himself “architect and landscape gardener,” in his pamphlet, _Suggestions_, intended for estate owners, issued in 1859. Both Mr. Copeland and Mr. Follen submitted plans in the Central Park competition.
In a book published at Cincinnati early in 1855, called _Practical Landscape Gardening_, the author, G. M. Kern, refers to a flourishing state of the art of laying out grounds in the Mississippi region and mentions especially Adolph Strauch, of Cincinnati, now remembered as the designer of Spring Grove Cemetery, which he undertook in that same year, 1855. But the field in the West as in the East was mainly restricted to private grounds, and the “many representatives” mentioned by Mr. Kern remained obscure, most of them perhaps _landschaftsgärtner_ emigrated from Europe with the influx of German settlers to the Middle West at this period.
Outside of Downing’s writings, which were widely known, there were few books on landscape gardening by American writers, and few English books had gone into American editions. Even in 1860, Mr. C. A. Dana, as editor of Appleton’s _New American Cyclopedia_, wrote to Mr. Olmsted, from whom Mr. Dana was soliciting an article on the title _Park_: “It is curious that no Cyclopedia has an article on _Parks_ or _Landscape Gardening_;” remarking also: “We have no article, nor is there in any part of the work, as yet, anything bearing on that subject. Under Downing we give a simple biography of the man and a list of his principal works.”
Mr. Olmsted frequently commented, in contrast, on the advancement of the profession of landscape gardening in Europe. In his article for Appleton’s Cyclopedia, we find several passages, quite as true in 1857 as in 1861 when they were published, bearing on this point:
Almost every large town in the civilized world now has public pleasure grounds in some form....
Birkenhead park [which Mr. Olmsted had visited in 1850][23] is a piece of ground of 185 acres in a suburb of Liverpool, and is surrounded by villas the grounds of which connect with it. Though small, it is by its admirable plan the most complete, and for its age the most agreeable park in Europe. It was designed and its construction superintended by Sir Joseph Paxton and Mr. Kemp....
In the United States there is, as yet, scarcely a finished park or promenade ground deserving mention. In the few small fields of rank hay grasses and spindle-trunked trees, to which the name is sometimes applied, the custom of the promenade has never been established. Yet there is scarcely a town or thriving village in which there is not found some sort of inconvenient and questionable social exchange of this nature. Sometimes it is a graveyard, sometimes a beach or wharf, sometimes a certain part of a certain street; sometimes interest in a literary or a charitable, a military, or even a mercantile enterprise, is the ostensible object which brings people together. But in its European signification the promenade exists only in the limited grounds attached to the capitol and to the “white house” at Washington, and in the yet half-made park of New York....
Landscape gardening in the United States[24] has hitherto been chiefly directed to the improvement of naturally wooded scenery, and that on a small scale, yet in many instances, of which the best are on the banks of the Hudson, with admirable results. Publicly the art has been chiefly directed, also, to the improvement of naturally wooded picturesque scenery in the formation of rural cemeteries.
Turning from an analysis of the actual condition of the landscape art, Mr. Olmsted mentions certain sources of inspiration:
In the various _Picturesque Tours_ of Gilpin, and the voluminous _Essays on the Picturesque_ by Sir Uvedale Price, the true principles of art applicable to the creation of scenery were laboriously studied and carefully defined. Shenstone, Mason and Knight, by their poems, materially aided the revivification of the art. In more recent times the good service of Repton, Loudon, Paxton, Kemp, our own Downing, and other artists and writers on the subject during the present century merits warm acknowledgment. Downing’s works especially should be in every village school library.
A horticultural atmosphere pervaded the landscape work of 1857. Downing’s _Horticulturist_, as its name implies, had up to his death served not only as his own mouthpiece but also a medium of communication for the many cultivated gentlemen who were apt to prefer interesting specimen plants to picturesque compositions. Downing himself ran a nursery and reflected to a less degree the taste of the period for a horticultural style. That conditions in the United States were in general scarcely different thirty years later shows against what odds the new profession had to make headway. Writing in 1888 to one of a board of park commissioners in Rochester, Mr. Olmsted might almost equally have been addressing a commissioner of 1858, had there been park boards at that time outside of New York City.
With reference to your undertaking there is less room for choice than may be supposed among the landscape gardeners or landscape architects of the country. (I have come to prefer the latter term, tho’ I much objected to it when it was first given me. I prefer it because it helps to establish the important idea of the distinction of my profession from that of gardening, as that of architecture from building--the distinction of an art of _design_.)
Of those who have given themselves the title of landscape gardeners not one of many more than a hundred have the smallest right to it. As a rule they are further from it than the average citizen of fair general education. This because the most of them have passed the best educational years of their lives in close and toilsome confinement to matters horticultural, botanical and on a small scale decorative, pursuing a course in this and other respects in which faculties of close observation and handicraft skill are cultivated. A course in fact such as you might prescribe for a patient whom you wished to wean from too great susceptibility to and interest in grasses, bushes and trees _as components of natural scenery_. The gardening to which they apply the term landscape is just that, in its essence, which the term _landscape_ gardening was first used as a means to rule out of view.
Hamerton in his treatise of Landscape says that “scape” in this word was from the same root and properly has the same significance with ship, e. g. in friendship--meaning, that is to say, the comprehensive state, to the eye, of the land or region to which it is applied. (I should rather say the character, broadly considered, of the scenery of a region.) Of late the training of gardeners has been not at all to landscape in this sense but to elements, incidents and features of the materials of landscape considered by themselves; to make them artists possibly in a certain way, as an ordinary house furnisher may be trained to something of art in respect to articles of furniture, pictures, books and bric-à-brac, but not artists in respect to scenery, as scenery acts in the emotional nature of some of us. That a training which is innocently assumed to be a training in landscape gardening is a training in fact away from it, I have often seen evidences. For example, a man came to me with a letter of introduction in which it was stated that he was a landscape gardener. As the best feast that I could offer a visitor of this description fresh from the old world, I dropped my business for a day to take him up the Hudson. It was soon apparent that he took less than ordinary interest in its natural scenery. When we came near to the best of it I had to urge him to move to a position on the boat where he could see it. Having done so, in a minute or two he left it, and when near West Point, I found him below sitting at a table with a bottle of porter. Yet when I took him to the grounds of a friend’s country-seat he proved to be really an enthusiast in particular matters of gardening.
I have seen much of two of the most accomplished gardeners in the United States but I never saw either of them look at anything a stone’s throw away or show the slightest interest in or understanding of landscape. There is nothing to prevent them from presenting themselves in good faith as landscape gardeners. In conversing with one previously called a florist but who had offered himself and been appointed landscape gardener of an important work, I found that he applied the term ‘harmony,’ with reference to the grouping of trees, on the supposition that it meant botanical kinship. In the gap between two masses of fine indigenous foliage he had planted some Chinese curios not only in complete discord with them but where, if they lived long, they would screen off his finest distant view.
Even of landscape gardening rightly so called, the practice of most has been at best upon small grounds or upon grounds in which the convenience and probable wants of but a single family and its selected guests were to be considered, a good design for which is a very different thing from good design for grounds in which the movements of many thousands are to be provided for and precautions taken not only against careless and erratic movements but against occasional malevolent torrents of a disorderly rabble.
Of the thirty-four plans of so many assumed landscape gardeners offered to Commissioners of the Central Park in 1857, but one made the slightest provision for requirements which everyone now sees it was absolutely necessary should be provided for. If any one of the others had been adopted an almost complete reconstruction of the Park would before this time have been necessary. Among the plans offered, that which, from the opportunities and well-earned reputation of the planner, I had expected to be the best, aimed at nothing more than a connected and diversified _series_ of effects appropriate to confined private suburban pleasure grounds.
Of twenty-two plans obtained ten years ago by the Boston Park Commissioners--several of which had cost the planners over a thousand dollars each, and were most painstakingly studied--even that which they adjudged to be the best was after a few months entirely abandoned. (They finally came to me for a plan which when published was bitterly denounced, declared publicly, by an alleged landscape gardener of large experience, wholly impracticable and so held up to scorn that an association of citizens--large property holders--privately employed a civil engineer to professionally examine and report upon it. It has been carried out with no essential variation and all objections have fallen to the ground.)
I have written all the foregoing to justify the opinion I now give you that in all Europe and America, among all the men who with no dishonest intention take the name of landscape gardeners (or architects) there are very few who have shown or are likely to possess any respectable power of dealing with problems of the class that properly come before the Park Commissioners of a large and growing city.
Of those among them likely to be available to you the man of highest proved ability is my old partner Calvert Vaux of New York. There are respects of design in which he is probably the superior of any living man.... There are in the country to my knowledge but two other (properly speaking) landscape designers who have had any experience that would specially qualify them to advise you.
One of them is H. W. S. Cleveland. He is a cultivated Boston born and bred man, has been employed in responsible positions on the public parks of Brooklyn, Chicago and Minneapolis. He is the oldest landscape gardener in the country....
The other is J. Weidenmann, the author of a book published by the Appletons[25] on landscape gardening; a Swiss by birth. He laid out and superintended for years, the public park at Hartford, Conn....
No doubt there are other promising men whom I don’t know or think of, for the profession is not organized and every man fights on his own hook.
There are three or four men who tell fine stories of themselves as landscape gardeners, even in some cases showing what appear to be reputable testimonials, whom I should like to caution you against but I do not feel quite justified in mentioning them by names. One, an Englishman, I have good reason to believe a knave. Another, a clever young fiddler, comes from the north of Europe originally, later from Paris. Another has published a pamphlet on Landscape Gardening in which he aims to appear a man of Science and shows himself a hopeless ignoramus.
* * * * *
If there were fewer pretenders to the landscape art in 1857, there was also an even less developed public taste, and Mr. Olmsted could scarcely have been precipitated into a field where his already recognized talent of literary expression could have joined to greater advantage with his appreciation of scenery, his latent genius as an artist, and his knowledge as a practical farmer.
FOOTNOTES:
[21] The term “Landscape Architecture” in a restricted sense (of Architecture in Landscape) was used in England by Laing Meason in 1828 as the title of a work which contained a discussion of Italian villas: _The Landscape Architecture of the Great Painters of Italy_. This work was referred to in a Review of Downing’s _Cottage Residences_ and two other books on landscape gardening, which appeared in the _North American Review_, Oct., 1844, p. 308.
[22] Two more designs were submitted, but not in competition. The editors discovered in the New York Public Library a printed copy of “Catalogue of Plans for the Improvement of the Central Park” annotated by one of the Park Commissioners with the names of the supposed authors of the thirty-five sets of drawings.
[23] See p. 95.
[24] Mr. Olmsted does not mention the work of M. André Parmentier, of Brooklyn, whom Downing considered of great importance (see Downing’s _Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening_, 1841), and several other earlier amateur and professional landscape gardeners, especially in Virginia and Pennsylvania.
[25] Mr. Olmsted must have meant _Beautifying Country Homes_, published by the Orange Judd Company.
A Journey in the Back Country in the Year 1854
By Frederick Law Olmsted
Author of “A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States,” etc.
(_Originally issued in 1860._) _2 Volumes._ _8vo._
Readers for entertainment will be fascinated by this vivid portrayal of the picturesque ideas, customs, and manners of Southerners before the Civil War. Students of history will find no more reliable or more abundant record of observations on Southern social conditions, especially negro slavery.
G. P. Putnam’s Sons New York London
_A Work of Distinction_
A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States
1853-1854
With Remarks on Their Economy
By
Frederick Law Olmsted
Author of “Walks and Talks with an American Farmer in New England”
With a Biographical Sketch by Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. and an Introduction by W. P. Trent
_Second Edition. 2 Vols., with Portrait. Octavo_
Although published nearly fifty years ago, the work today is not only valuable, but is intensely interesting reading. It depicts the horrors of slavery, and this is done in calm judicial manner. It is in no degree sensational, but presents the facts as seen or heard from credible witnesses, and is invaluable to students of the causes of the Civil War.
“The reader who cares to understand the Civil War should read the narrative by Frederick Law Olmsted entitled ‘A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States.’ Mr. Olmsted’s volumes present as interesting a picture of the South before its great catastrophe as is given by Arthur Young of France on the eve of its revolution.”
--Morley’s _Life of Gladstone_.
G. P. Putnam’s Sons New York London