Genius of Place Read Free Page B

colonial-era house was still standing. Generation upon generation of Olmsteds were inextricably tied up with the history of Hartford. Joseph Olmsted was the city’s first deacon. Captain Aaron Olmsted was the first in the community to own a piano. Voting records show that even into the 1800s, Olmsted remained the second most common name in Hartford after Hill. Olmsteds were everywhere: Ashbel Olmsted served a term as town clerk; George Olmsted was secretary of the local Temperance Society.
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    The Olmsted line on his father’s side may have dominated the civic life of Hartford, but Fred’s very first memory involved his mother. He was about three years old. His mother was sitting under a tree sewing while he played at her feet. It’s a hazy little reminiscence, but poignant when one considers what happened soon after.
    On February 28, 1826, Charlotte Olmsted died of an overdose of laudanum. Laudanum is a tincture consisting of opiates dissolved in alcohol. It was a common patent medicine, a mainstay in many nineteenth-century American households, used to aid sleep, suppress coughs, relieve menstrual cramps, and myriad other things. Laudanum was also highly addictive and frequently lethal. Charlotte’s death happened just six
months after the birth of a new baby, John Hull Olmsted. This was her second child—Fred’s baby brother.
    Supposedly, Charlotte overdosed accidentally, while battling the flu. One wonders whether she took her own life. Maybe she was suffering from postpartum depression, a syndrome entirely unrecognized in that time. Or perhaps she was reeling from the religious revival, which she had attended only a few weeks before her death. Such revivals were part of a fevered effort to stiffen religious conviction that swept across America during the first half of the 1800s. They were highly public events, in which participants were called upon to demonstrate the purity of their faith to the satisfaction of the community. Participating in a revival was known to pitch people into terrible bouts of self-doubt and recrimination.
    Olmsted’s second memory is clearly from his mother’s deathbed. “I chanced to stray into a room at the crisis of a tragedy then occurring and turned and fled from it screaming in a manner adding to the horror of the household,” he later recalled. “It was long before I could be soothed and those nearby said to one another that I would never forget what I had seen.”
    Even as a small boy, Fred began working to blot out the memory. For the rest of his life, his mother’s death was something he refused to discuss in any detail. Charlotte Olmsted took an accidental overdose of laudanum. That was that.
    Following his wife’s death, John Olmsted briefly stopped writing in his diary, a silence that spoke volumes. Then he picked back up with: “No a/c kept of expenses from Feb 24 to March 12.” And he added the following brief notation: “Tues Feb 28 at ½ past 5 p.m. my dr wife died & was buried Sunday following.”
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    A grieving John Olmsted left the care of his two young sons to a live-in nurse. After a few months, four-year-old Fred was enrolled in a “dame school.” Dame schools offered instruction—often, very casual instruction—at the homes of women in a community. They served as a kind of nineteenth-century version of nursery school. In some cases, the schooling extended through what today would be the first few primary
grades. Fred attended Mrs. Jeffry’s dame school. There, his days consisted mostly of playing in a nearby brook, chasing frogs, and building dams to trap small fish.
    John Olmsted would be a widower for a little more than a year before wedding Mary Ann Bull. His new wife—Fred’s stepmother—was twenty-six and came from a prominent Hartford family. Her father was a druggist. A contemporary account calls her a “celebrated beauty of the day” and goes on