Genius of Place Read Online Free PDF Page A

studies.
    He found other, more informal, ways to supplement his schoolwork. Fred explored his grandmother’s book collection and at a tender age waded into such dense fare as The Vicar of Wakefield by Oliver Goldsmith and Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy . During this time, he also made frequent visits to the Hartford Young Men’s Institute library, which his father helped fund with charitable contributions. Here, he discovered works such as William Gilpin’s Remarks on Forest Scenery and Sir Uvedale Price’s Essay on the Picturesque, as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful . These were rarefied texts on landscape aesthetics—highly precocious subject matter—but young Fred found himself drawn to them nonetheless.
    He also felt the pull of Solitude by Johann Georg Zimmermann, a favorite book he’d return to throughout his life, but one that he read for the first time while living with his grandparents. Zimmermann, a Swiss physician, argued that it was necessary to periodically retreat from humanity into nature for the sake of spiritual replenishment.
    Then, all too soon, it was good-bye Grandfather Benjamin, good-bye Grandmother Content. Fred was off to Ellington, a brand-new school that promised “strong discipline” in its ad in the Hartford Courant . Perhaps Fred simply needed a firm hand to rein him in. “I was very active, imaginative, inventive, impulsive, enterprising, trustful and heedless,”
Fred would recall. “This made what is generally called a troublesome and mischievous boy.”
    At Ellington, what he got instead was a cruel hand. Shortly into his first term, a minister grabbed Fred by both ears and pulled until they bled. The event was sufficiently brutal to prompt one of the older students to write a letter describing the event to Fred’s father. Time to move yet again, this time to a school run by the Reverend Joab Brace in Newington, Connecticut.
    Â 
    Brace was a tall, severe man with coal-black eyes and an intimidating demeanor. He held a degree in divinity from Williams and spoke Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. He had a reputation for preparing his charges for both Christian conversion and college education. Despite his erudition, he was yet another poor preacher who ran a school and worked a farm, both as ways to supplement his small income. The reverend wasn’t averse to mixing his two sidelines by requiring his pupils to help out on the farm.
    Fred lived with three other boys in a rickety little building that sat beside Brace’s parsonage. The building’s cellar was piled high with cabbages and roots. On the ground floor, there was a workshop for the farm, full of harnesses and other equipment. The boys’ desks for study and beds were crowded into the upper story. Winds whipped through the warped clapboards and swirled about their meager quarters.
    Fred’s days were mostly given over to chores. During cold weather, for example, he would be up before dawn chopping logs. He’d haul wood into the parsonage and the school building and have to maintain fires in the heating stoves throughout the day. Fred did this every fourth day, rotating with the other three pupils. On the other days, there were other chores; there was always endless work to be done.
    Nighttime was set aside for actual course work, often on the heels of a full day of farm labor. Brace’s students were required to pore over books such as Adam’s Latin Grammar and the Young Men’s Book , which offered moral instruction. Fred found that he simply couldn’t abide this regimen, especially after enjoying such freedom at Rev. Zolva Whitmore’s school and his grandparents’ home. Sometimes at night, he
would entertain his fellow pupils with made-up adventure stories. He’d spin these tales in the barest whisper because Brace was in the habit of sneaking into the little building where his pupils lived. The