Even the notion of giving a child a middle name, as in Frederick Law Olmsted, was new in this era. Records show that virtually no one born during colonial times had received one. John Quincy Adams, America’s sixth president, was the first to have a middle name. Over time, American parents began latching onto this long-standing practice of the European gentry, whiff of pretension and all. The year 1822 produced a bumper crop of middle-named babies; Fred-Law’s exact contemporaries include Rutherford Birchard Hayes (the nineteenth president), noted explorer Edward Fitzgerald Beale, and Henry
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