Free Genius of Place by Justin Martin Page A

make use of the latest farming technology and innovations in horticulture and
animal husbandry. “Really, for a man that has any inclination for Agriculture the occupation is very interesting,” he’d once written Brace. “And if you look closely, you will be surprised to see how much honorable attention and investigation is being connected with it.... Scientific men of the highest distinction are there devoting their undivided attention to its advance.” He added: “For the matter of happiness, there is no body of men that are half as well satisfied with their business as our farmers.”
    Olmsted saw an article in a newspaper about a man named George Geddes, who had received a first-place commendation for the bestcultivated farm from the New York State Agricultural Society. He wrote to Geddes and arranged to work for him through the end of the fall harvest.
    Geddes ran a farm called Fairmount, located in the Finger Lakes region of New York, near the town of Camillus. He lived in a large stone manor just a few hundred feet from the spot where the house in which he’d been born had once stood. He’d inherited the farm from James Geddes, his father. The elder Geddes had helped survey the route for the Erie Canal and had done some engineering work on the project. During its earliest days, some of the locals referred to the waterway as the “Geddes Canal.” The Geddes name loomed large in this stretch of western New York state.
    Olmsted arrived at the farm late in the spring of 1846. It was a sprawling enterprise, covering 300 acres. Geddes grew a huge variety of different foodstuffs: corn, oats, wheat, lettuce, beets, cherries, apples, and quinces. He raised cattle, sheep, and pigs. The farm was a model of efficiency. Geddes owned a Pitt’s Corn and Cob-Cutter, a newfangled portable tool that could “grind a bushel of long clean ears in four minutes!” as Olmsted breathlessly informed his father. He was the inventor of the Geddes’ Harrow and the Geddes’ Swinging Gate. He was thirty-seven years old, thirteen years Olmsted’s senior. Olmsted intended to learn everything he possibly could from him.
    Work began each morning at the crack of dawn. Yet Olmsted stayed up to all hours reading. He pored over issues of the Cultivator , a recently launched journal that was part of a wave of new publications aimed at scientific farmers who could read (unlike many traditional farmers) and
were anxious to stay abreast of the latest agricultural advances. He was cramming, trying to get up to speed in his chosen field.
    Still, there was a limit to how regimented Olmsted was capable of being, at least at this point in his life. During his nighttime reading sessions, he also fell utterly under the spell of a novel called Sartor Resartus by Thomas Carlyle. This was an experimental work by the acclaimed Scottish author, blending fact and fiction, with a kind of meta device thrown in as well, designed to make readers aware that fact and fiction were being mixed and to force them to question which was which, and to contemplate whether such distinctions really even exist. Nearly a decade earlier, upon initial publication, Sartor Resartus had been met with critical puzzlement, and sales had been slow. Over time, the book had found its audience: Ralph Waldo Emerson became a serious devotee of the book, and Sartor Resartus is often credited with helping shape the transcendentalist philosophy.
    Sartor Resartus was just the kind of work that Olmsted, with his peculiar self-directed approach to reading, was likely to find his way to. As often happens with favorite books, it seemed to Olmsted to clarify, to an almost eerie degree, some of the issues he was grappling with in his own life. “I do think Carlyle is the greatest genius in the world,” he wrote to his father from Fairmount. “ . . . I perfectly wonder and stand awe-struck as I would at a Hurricane.”
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