Genius of Place by Justin Martin Page B

exposure to appear on a copper plate spread with a thin film of chemicals.
    In Olmsted’s case, the daguerreotypes were created in New Haven, where John was repeating his sophomore year at Yale after withdrawing for a time to recover from a mysterious respiratory ailment. Home from the sea, Olmsted had taken to hanging out on the college campus with his younger brother. The three other men in the picture were Yale students and friends of John who became Fred’s friends as well. Olmsted and his companions sat nearly an entire day in order to obtain a small array of images, a pair of which—both very similar—have survived.
    The daguerreotypes capture the five young men in dark suits, vests, and cravats. There’s a table in front of them on which an open book has
been placed—a prop of sorts, intended to communicate that these are substantial persons committed to serious scholastic endeavors. The composition is extremely formal, yet these two images manage to capture key attributes of each of the subjects’ characters with uncanny accuracy.
    Brother John is dark-eyed and handsome. He’s the only one smiling, but it’s an enigmatic smile, ever so slight, and seems calculated to convey an air of nonchalance. Charles Loring Brace, by contrast, comes across as straightforward in the most literal sense. The photos find him staring directly ahead with a burning and thoughtful intensity. Meanwhile, Olmsted isn’t even looking at the camera. Instead, his head is turned to the side, and he’s peering off in a different direction from the others. Typical. His hair sweeps off his forehead in a wave, and his features are small and fine, lending him an almost ethereal quality.
    In one of these existing takes, while Olmsted gazes off into the mysterious middle distance, he also has an arm thrown around Charley Brace’s shoulders. This, too, is fitting. Growing up, Olmsted was passingly acquainted with Brace (no relation to his old teacher Joab Brace). When Brace became his brother’s roommate at Yale, Olmsted got to know him even better. And in the years ahead, Brace would become one of Olmsted’s own closest friends and would play a big role in his life.
    Like the Olmsted brothers, Brace came from a family that traced its Connecticut roots back for many generations. Brace also lost his mother at an early age, a circumstance that certainly helped forge a bond between him and the Olmsted brothers. There, the similarities ended. Where the senior Olmsted was a well-to-do merchant with only a smattering of education, Brace’s father was a Williams graduate, known for his erudition. He was a teacher by trade and had gained renown in Connecticut as a pioneering educator of women. Teaching was noble work, but it didn’t bring in much money. Brace grew up in a household that was both less financially secure and more formally intellectual than Olmsted’s. Where John Olmsted Sr. took his sons on hushed rides through the countryside, John Brace read to young Charles from the classics of literature or works about history. Then he would quiz his son on the passages. By the time he entered Yale, Charley Brace was proficient in five languages.

    Olmsted and Brace quickly fell into a rapport that would characterize their friendship forever onward. Something about their particular chemistry drew them into fevered intellectual argument. They were a kind of closed two-man debating society. The pair argued with one another endlessly on topics such as religion and politics, while the other members of the circle—brother John, particularly—looked on in bemusement.
    Olmsted and Brace came at subjects from very different angles. Olmsted tended to be idiosyncratic, drawing on the books he’d read in the course of a haphazard education, along with real-life experience such as his brief clerkship in New York. Brace, four years his junior, was far more doctrinaire. Brace could work his way