Second Nature: an Environmental History of New England

ichard W. Judd explores the mix of ecological process and human activity Judd Rthat has shaped New England over the past 12,000 years. He traces a succession of cultures through New England’s changing postglacial environment to the 1600s, when the arrival of Europeans interrupted this coevolution of nature and culture. He shows how Frontier expansion culminated in a unique Second Nature landscape of forest, farm, and village that has become the embodiment of what Second Judd calls “second nature”—culturally modified landscapes that supersede a more pristine “first nature.” An Environmental History of New England Judd considers how in the 1800s, despite industrialization and urbanization, the dominant cultural expression of Romanticism provided new ways to appreciate nature and sustained a long tradition of local resource management.

He demonstrates how in the 1970s environmentalists moved quickly from N

battling pollution and preserving wild lands to sheltering farms, villages, and at woodlands from intrusive development. These campaigns, uniquely suited to

the region’s land-use history, ecology, and culture, were a fitting capstone to the ure environmental history of New England.

“Beautifully written, Second Nature manages to be both scholarly and accessible, deeply rooted in a very broad array of both primary and secondary sources.” —Dona Brown, author of Back to the Land: The Enduring Dream of Self-Sufficiency in Modern America

Richard W. Judd is the Col. James C. McBride Professor of History at the University of Maine and author, most recently, of The Untilled Garden: Natural History and the Origins of Modern Conservation, 1730–1850.

A volume in the series Environmental History of the Northeast

Cover design by Sally Nichols Cover painting by Willard LeRoy Metcalf, American (1858–1925), Gloucester Harbor, oil on canvas, 1895; canvas: 26 1/8 x 29 1/4 in; frame: 35 3/8 x 38 1/2 x 2 1/4 in. Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, Gift of George D. Pratt (Class of 1893). Acc. No: AC P.1932.16 University of Massachusetts Press ma ss Amherst & Boston www.umass.edu/umpress ac h u s ett Richard W. Judd

JUDD_cover_final.indd 1 3/24/14 10:26 AM “This page intentionally left blank” Second Nature A volume in the series Environmental History of the Northeast Edited by Anthony N. Penna Richard W. Judd Second Nature An Environmental History of New England

Richard W. Judd

ISBN 978-1-62534-066-5 (paper); 101-3 (hardcover)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is on file at the Library of Congress.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. For Pat and Jamie  “This page intentionally left blank” Contents

Preface ix Introduction: People and the Land in New England 1 Part I The New World Transformed:New England to 1800 17 1. New England’s Natives 21 2. Contact, Colonization, and War 39 3. The Ecologies of Frontier Farming 69 Part II Reconstructing Nature in the Industrial Age, 1800 to 1900 95 4. Industrializing the Margins 99 5. Farm and Factory 122 6. A Transcendental Place 143 Part III Synthetic Technologies, Organic Needs: Conservation in New England, 1850 to 2000 175 7. Science, Conservation, and the Commons 179 8. Conserving Urban Ecologies 210 9. Saving Second Nature 240 Notes 273 Index 325 “This page intentionally left blank” preface

his book began as an experiment. The decades since the T1980s have seen a remarkable outpouring of New England environmental history, building on the work of an earlier generation of historians and geographers who likewise compiled a surprisingly full record of scholarship on the environment and human habitation of the region. It remained to be seen whether this interesting but disparate body of research could be knit together into a history of New England dating from the first human arrivals there. Blending the old and the new would mean reconciling two different approaches to history: the environmental determinism that characterized most of the early work on people and land, and the modern environmental-era understanding of culture as antagonistic to and dominant over nature. I resolved to combine these approaches by describing nature and culture not as antagonistic or even as dialectical, but essentially as an ecological whole: a bioregion. This approach was influenced by my own childhood experience with the partly wild, partly domestic landscapes of northern Michigan where, along with my brother, sister, and cousins, I ranged a world shaped largely by small woods operators, hardscrabble farmers, and an annual flood of tourists hailing from downstate Michigan, Ohio, and Illinois. It was a heavily humanized world, under construction at least since the 1870s, yet in many respects it was natural, at least from the perspective of the summers we spent on a lake ringed

| ix x | preface with cottages and backed by woods, swamps, and pastures stretching off to the horizon. Later I lived for nearly two decades in the relentlessly artificial landscapes of suburban southern California before leaving for Maine with my wife, Pat. In New England, the endlessly fascinating landscapes of cities, pastures, woods, villages, and harbors once again drove home the porousness of the boundary between natural and artificial. Here the dialectic of nature and culture dissolved into an organic whole. The title of the book,Second Nature, emerged out of this life experience. The termsecond nature is undeniably nebulous. All landscapes, including the wildest ones, are cultural constructs, and all built landscapes are in some respects natural—even southern California, as the occasional brush fire, mud slide, or earthquake reminds us. But somewhere along this continuum, a balance is struck between nature and artifice that assumes a certain salience: a confluence of land use, collective memory, and natural process that is widely accepted as distinctive to the region. These landscapes become second nature in the regional way of life. Like all landscapes, they are dynamic and historically specific, but their logic, integrity, and continuity suggest a certain rightness in a people’s relation to the land. This book is a general survey of environmental history, but my special interest lies is the way economic, cultural, and ecological forces converged to create New England’s second-nature landscapes. Weaving this history around the idea of second nature is also an experiment. It sets aside the two standard narratives that define environmental history as a discipline: on one hand, the idea that environment determines the culture and society of a region, and on the other, the idea that culture dominates and undermines a region’s natural ecosystems. This book takes nature as part of the region’s history, but not the history. It embeds nature in social development and argues that the blended landscape that grows out of this development is as important to the historian as is the original nature. This approach makes sense in New England. The region’s long postpioneer settlement experience provides a panorama of shaped environments in which the layers of interaction between people and the land are so interwoven that culture and nature cannot be isolated and analyzed according to the classic dualistic methodologies. Nature becomes undeniably artificial over the course of New England’s long human history, and in a region where ecological process is endowed with such powerful regenerative properties, cultural landscapes become natural almost as quickly as they materialize. This interweaving encourages a venture into areas that were considered, at one time, beyond the ken of the environmental preface | xi historian. New England’s farms, cities, mills, and factories are products of nature as well as constructions of culture. The most radical aspect of this experiment is casting aside the assumption that environmental history must be a narrative of declension and destruction. It fronts the idea that the emergence of second nature is as important to this narrative as is the eclipse of first nature. In addition, it takes as a measure of historical judgment not the degree to which culture impoverishes the original ecology, but the degree to which the new humanized ecology is sustainable and affords the diversity and richness that all societies—and all natural ecosystems—require. I do not propose this approach as a model for all environmental history, nor do I propose a simple celebration of second-nature landscapes. The declension narrative was and is still a significant tool for drawing attention to the consequences of abusing nature, and in a complacent society, the need for these cautionary tales is ongoing. Nor is New England second nature above criticism. But too often the lesson drawn from the classic declensionist approach is that the nature we live with today is irrevocably degraded. If that is true, then we will be unlikely to accept responsibility for it. Tracing the historical construction of second nature, in short, encourages a more fluid and adaptable understanding of the nature we need to protect. There is a place for both approaches, and this book, I hope, will add one more dimension to a diverse discipline that continues to respond in creative ways to the challenges of the world around it. “This page intentionally left blank” Second Nature  “This page intentionally left blank” Introduction People and the Land in New England 

egions are not usually the stuff of history. More than states Rand less than nations, they seldom fit comfortably into the standard historical narrative of politics, war, and economic change. Yet those who view the past as an interaction between people and nature find the region a useful construct. Environmental history begins with the understanding that the elements of an ecological system, including its people, should be considered en total: that society and nature are part of a unified historical process. Since regions are generally defined according to social and natural features— their physiographic and cultural distinctiveness—they provide a convenient starting point for understanding this totality. Like so many all-inclusive historical constructs, however, “the region” often dissolves under close scrutiny. Even New England, perhaps the most cohesive of all American regions, is something of an “optical illusion,” as George Wil- son Pierson wrote in 1955. Belying its archetypical rural imagery, it hosts one of the most industrialized economies in the nation, and despite its seemingly ageless white-steeple churches and village greens, it has weathered a long succession of dramatic and profound landscape transformations. As John R. Stil- goe pointed out, the face of New England is so varied and so evanescent as to bring into question the very idea of a cohesive cultural identity. Nevertheless,

| 1 2 | introduction most writers, including Stilgoe, are content in describing these six states as a distinct geographical unit. Part of a giant peninsula bounded by the St. Law- rence River valley, Lake Champlain, and the Gulf of Maine, New England is knit together by a common topography of mountain spine, valley floor, and coastal plain. It features a regionwide hub-and-satellite metropolitan system, a shared extractive and industrial economy, and a unified literary and artistic tradition. Above all, as Myles McDougal put it in a 1947 essay, New England is a region “because its people think it is.” Numerous writers, from Puritans onward, have commented on this New England consciousness, and together their descriptions provide the longest and richest written record of regional introspection in American history.1 Even at the regional level, environmental history presents difficult challenges. Historians have been debating the principles of causation for ages, and environmental historians, with their passion for integrating nature and history, have supercharged the discussion over the ways in which the past has been shaped and molded. Environmental history has two somewhat contradictory mandates. On the one hand, it embraces environmental determinism as its signature principle, highlighting the importance of natural features in shaping human society. On the other hand, it takes as its cardinal moral imperative the task of documenting society’s power to alter, and even destroy, nature. These two narratives—environmental determinism and cultural imperialism—are seldom successfully blended into a single, unified story. In part, this inade- quacy reflects the complexity of the people–land connection. Even more fun- damentally, it grows from an underlying inclination in all intellectual endeavor to dichotomize the past into human history and natural history. In short, environmental historians study nature’s influence over culture, or they document culture’s destruction of natural ecosystems, but rarely do they do both at the same time. Regional history can help weave these two causal trains together.

Nature Shapes Culture Regional history was pioneered by Victorian-era gentle- man-scholars who were mainly interested in celebrating their Anglo-Saxon heritage and the triumph of that culture over the wilderness. In the 1920s, this genteel approach to the past was overshadowed by the so-called new history. Epitomized by Charles and Mary Beard and their epic two-volume work The Rise of American Civilization (1927), the new history dismissed the narrative people and the land in new england | 3 of pioneer and wilderness and lofted history above its natural foundations by defining social change in terms of national institutions. At the same time, geographers were reclaiming the region and defining it in environmental terms. America, they found, was a mosaic of geophysical provinces—the Atlantic plain, Piedmont, Appalachian ranges, Ozark highlands, and Great Plains, among others—and in the act of describing these areas, they found it almost axiomatic that regional culture, food, clothing, shelter, and ideas grew out of the provinces’ natural distinctions. In their exploration of geophysical provinces, geographers reversed the antiquarian emphasis on cultural influences in regional history. Where the earlier tradition accented Anglo-Saxon America’s triumph over nature, turn- of-the-twentieth-century geographers saw nature as the dominant force in shaping regional history. New England’s glaciers, according to Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, created a mosaic of boulder field, clay lens, and outwash plain that determined the relative success of any farm district. Frustration with these glaciated soils drove New Englanders to the sea and to manufacturing, where those same agents favored them with excellent seaports and convenient waterpowers. This Spartan environment also forced farmers to pursue several callings at once, which nurtured their mechanical inventiveness and prepared them to exploit the region’s abundant hydromechanical opportunities.2 Thin soils, deep harbors, thick woods, and forceful rivers anticipated the human history of New England. Geographers like Ellen Churchill Semple at Clark University, Albert Perry Brigham at Colgate, and Ellsworth Huntington at Yale elaborated this environmental determinism. Semple’s American History and Its Geographic Con- ditions, published in 1903, began with a quote from Carl Ritter: “so much is certain: history lies not near, but in nature.” With this idea in mind, she explained New England’s history by referring to its indented coastline, temperate climate, glaciated surface, and mountain spine. Brigham, a founder of the field of human geography, grounded New England history in the region’s cold winters, ancient crystalline rock formations, sunken coastline, thin soils, and north-to-south-flowing rivers. Environmental determinism was part of the professional geographer’s search for a scientific method, but it was also, like the antiquarian’s quest, a form of cultural self-justification. In Hunting- ton’s thinking, climate was the variable that explained why one civilization advanced and another remained primitive, why one was imperialistic and the other passive. Semple and Brigham were criticized for overemphasizing the 4 | introduction environment even as they were writing, but they were immensely important in moving the study of regions beyond its antiquarian beginnings.3 In 1931, a year before he died, the frontier historian Frederick Jackson Turner published a seminal study of New England. Some forty years earlier, in 1893, Turner had published “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” a classic summary of environmental influences in which he famously argued that frontier experience stripped off the veneer of civilization and forged a new nation of individualistic, pragmatic, and democratic people. In New England, Turner focused on those who settled the land, farmed it for a generation, and then headed west in the van of this nation-shaping migration. What was it, he wondered, that lured colonial settlers to the stony soils of New England and then drove them out? Where in that environment were the “subtle forces” that explained America’s restless and aggressive pioneers? There was something in the confrontation with the nature there that liberated and energized the American spirit, and Turner hoped to find it in the New England pioneering sequence. Geographers had qualified their use of environmental determinism by this time, but Turner remained deeply sensitive to the pull of the land, and it is still possible to feel the power of conviction in his untroubled explanation of New England character. The thin highland soils between the coast and the Con- necticut Valley fostered the agrarian discontents that led to Shays’ Rebellion, and the land west of the Connecticut River set the scene for the next step in the frontier epic. “Impelled by the pressure of large pioneer families in a land cramped for agricultural expansion,” Berkshire settlers “struggled bravely with the inhospitable hills and rigorous climate, grew strong in this experience, increased in numbers beyond the capacity of the arable lands to sustain them, and spread political leadership and Yankee ideas across the West.” The more ambitious left for the Ohio River valley, leaped the Mississippi, and pushed west into Oregon Territory, while the more conservative stayed behind to nurse the “sectional psychology” that became a hallmark of New England character. Their calculating thrift was honed in the stony soils of the upland farm, and their appreciation for exact justice born in the “rigorous struggle for existence under harsh conditions.”4 Two years after Turner wrote his essay on New England, Harlan H. Bar- rows followed with a more detailed explanation of these environmental determinants. True to the scientific method, Barrows identified the geographic features that would predict settlement patterns in New England. Puritans chose people and the land in new england | 5

Boston, he explained, because the Shawmut Peninsula offered specific geographical advantages: fresh water, meadows, woodlands, sandy loams easily worked with primitive tools, and a location that could be defended against predators and Indians. Moving westward, pioneers likewise followed the logic of the land. They gravitated to the glacial outwash plains and ancient lake beds, where fine sands and clays offered purchase for their plows, or to the river terraces, remnants of a valley floor left dry as the waterway deepened its cut to the sea. Those along the great waterways produced commercial crops if they were below the highest point of ocean navigation, and subsistence crops if they were above. Steep-gradient streams falling over transverse ledges became sites for gristmills, sawmills, and thriving industrial villages, while the falls on the larger rivers made this region the cradle of American industry.5 New England culture was but a fine mantle spread over the contours of the land. This form of environmental determinism was too extreme to last, and in 1929 the historical geographer Carl Sauer challenged Turner’s 1893 thesis, arguing that pioneers responded to frontier conditions in different ways; each group brought a characteristic style of farming, building, and living. Where Turner saw only blank land and adaptive settlers, Sauer recognized a dynamic interaction between cultures and environments, adding endless variety to the transition from natural landscape to cultural landscape. Sauer posited a theory of “possibilism”: natural conditions established a range of potentialities, but people chose among them according to their own cultural makeup. Technol- ogy broadened this range of cultural choices over time, and in this more fluid and triumphal understanding, people learned progressively to master, and in a sense distance themselves from, nature. Under Sauer’s influence, historical geographers began to concentrate less on how environment molded society and more on how society shaped the environment.6 Among the geographers drawn to this new balance of cultural and environmental forces was John K. Wright, whose 1929 journal article “New England” began with a panoramic view from atop New Hampshire’s Mount Monad- nock. To the east loomed the marine threshold that exerted such a commanding influence on New England’s seafaring people, and in the opposite direction, Mount Greylock marked the rugged border that separated New England from the rest of the nation. In the varied terrain between these two frontiers, he observed a patchwork of woodlands, towns, and fields shaped to the varied surficial deposits laid down by glaciers thirteen millennia earlier. Wright acknowledged the power of the land in shaping a culture for each of these 6 | introduction sections, but he was struck by how land use and material culture in each was related to the whole. It was this cultural integrity, rather than New England’s environmental diversity, that drew his attention. To those who lived there, New England was “more than a mere geographical expression”; it was “a group of traditions, institutions, and ways of living and of thinking,” an adjective as well as a place.7 Wright’s vision of New England as a unified cultural construction marked a subtle turning point in understanding New England history. In 1943 the prominent historian James Truslow Adams published The American: The Making of a New Man, which once again represented New England as a product of its physical geography. And with this last brilliant tribute to environmental determinism, historians shifted their gaze to the cultural compo- nents of historical change.8 Environmental determinism persisted in some quarters, however, most notably in the studies of premodern Europe compiled by French historians of the Annales School. Fernand Braudel, for instance, began his 1949 study of Mediterranean civilization with an histoire immobile: a survey of the immutable geophysical conditions that underlay all European cultural development. Like Sauer, Braudel understood that different societies reacted to natural determinants in different ways, but over thelongue durée, he maintained, history was captive to its environmental circumstances. The great works of the Annales School were translated into English in the 1970s and proved enormously influential in demonstrating the value of interdisciplinary methods in crafting a holistic view of the past. In New England, this influence was evident in a rash of colonial town studies that reconstructed everyday life based on a variety of social science methodologies. These studies, perhaps two dozen books and countless articles published in the 1970s and 1980s, adopted the school’s emphasis on total history. Curiously, however, few addressed the importance of nature; rather, they delved into matters of town layout, demography, mobility, family life, land tenure, and piety—cultural, as opposed to natural, developments.9 The Annalistes’ insights into the relation between people and land were lost, for the most part, on colonial New England historians in these years.

Culture Shapes Nature As the New England town studies suggest, postwar Amer- ica was not fertile ground for environmental determinism. These years saw people and the land in new england | 7

breathtaking advances in living standards based on new synthetic plastics, metal alloys, petrochemicals, electronics, and nuclear physics—all demonstrating the power of science to transcend and, indeed, almost ignore nature. In this milieu, historians were less likely to dwell on the significance of nature in America’s past. And in a world increasingly alarmed by water pollution, forest destruction, and soil erosion, the force of nature seemed somewhat beside the point. In 1952 Edward Higbee, still seeking the illusive relation between people and land, wrote an article entitled “The Three Earths of New England,” in which he argued that the region’s natural systems had “performed their functions well” through successive stages of social development. As a hunting ground for Indians, a medium for colonial farmers’ crops, or a resource for the industrialist, New England’s complex natural environment provided a fresh set of resources for each new society. Because their numbers were few and their resources abundant, native peoples lived without radically changing nature. Colonists were more aggressive; they cleared the land, fenced the meadows, dammed the rivers, and converted the forests into houses and ships. Far from an environmental determinist, Higbee saw nature as a foundation for unbounded cultural choice: a presence without causal force. In midcentury New England, Higbee observed a growing commitment to protecting this land from threats posed by highways, billboards, and suburbs. Modern cultural choices would be more environmentally sensitive, but they would continue to determine the nature of New England.10 In 1971, nineteen years after Higbee published “Three Earths,” the New Hampshire historian Charles Clark announced what he called an “environmental approach” to the history of New England, anticipating, as he put it, “what I expect will be some serious work to come.” Clark was drawn to Fred- erick Jackson Turner’s conviction that the human experience was “affected profoundly . . . by the place in which it happens,” but Turner’s insistence that people were molded by frontier conditions seemed to obscure the regional cultural textures that made New England such a distinctive place. Turner had written his frontier thesis in a period of post–Civil War reconciliation, hoping to define a single, unifying national character based on a generalized experience with frontier land. Clark, who wrote in an era of grave concern over the homogenizing influences of mass media and mass consumption, emphasized the distinctive patterns of humor, dialect, architecture, and foodways that made up regional identity. Like Sauer, he saw the frontier as a mosaic 8 | introduction of distinctive cultures. Writing at the dawn of the environmental era, Clark too understood that culture could be environmentally constructive as well as destructive. New Englanders’ growing satisfaction with the land was inscribed in the paintings of Frederic Edwin Church, the stories of Sarah Orne Jewett, and the poetry of Robert Frost. In these expressions of “intense approval,” Clark noted a shift from an “exploitive view of nature to one which emphasizes man’s partnership with nature.” This, he thought, marked a significant change in the relation between people and the land.11 By 1983, when William Cronon published his brilliant summary of nature and culture in colonial New England, historians and geographers had already asked the key questions that would define the environmental history of the region. Cronon began Changes in the Land by describing a natural landscape only lightly altered by Native Americans. Inserting the colonial farmer and logger into the scene, he provided a before-and-after analysis of the environment, ending about 1840 with the land fenced, farmed, fished out, and shorn of trees. From their first arrival, colonial settlers treated nature “as isolated and extractable units,” and the commercial exploitation of these units set the New England environment on a downward spiral.12 Carolyn Merchant followed in 1989 with Ecological Revolutions, and together these two scholars advanced the study of New England history in several ways. First, they added a cross-cultural dimension notably absent in the town studies of the period. Second, they interjected nature into the mainstream narrative at a time when historians on the whole were preoccupied with the Puritan-to-Yankee dynamic and the political formulations that led to the American Revolution. Lastly, the two authors fashioned a history that reflected the contemporary concerns of an ecologically sensitive and savvy readership: they touched a nerve. Critics made much of the tendency of Cronon and Merchant to reduce people to abstractions and to overemphasize the role of the environment, but these criticisms miss a fundamental point. Despite their discussion of ecological dynamics, both authors cast nature as passive victim rather than historical force. Nature’s agency—the environmental determinism that so richly embroidered earlier historical geographies—is curiously absent. “Nowhere,” as one scholar points out, “does Cronon go on to argue that . . . towns . . . differed from each other in fundamental ways because of the variations imposed by nature.” In this sense, Cronon and Merchant reflected the ongoing scholarly migration away from environmental determinants in regional history.13 The contrast was dramatic. Braudel and Adams saw natural landscapes people and the land in new england | 9

as foundational—the “vast uncontrollables,” as Braudel described them, in human history. Cronon and Merchant gave near-absolute agency to commercial capitalist culture. Challenged by Turner’s unwavering faith in progress, they constructed a declensionist counterpoint to the frontier story, explain- ing, at last, why Turner’s New Englanders were so mobile. In the name of profits and progress, loggers destroyed the woodlands, millwrights dammed the rivers, towns consumed the forests, and livestock changed the composition of the grasslands. Left with exhausted soils, silted rivers, weedy meadows, less game, fewer fish, and more erratic weather and stream flow, New Englanders cast their eyes westward. Like Higbee before them, Cronon and Merchant emphasized cultural dominion over nature, although they described this dominion in far more negative terms.14

Nature Unraveled The eclipse of environmental determinism became more pronounced in the 1980s, when cultural historians abandoned their traditional emphasis on arts and letters to explore the historical agency of aesthetics, values, and knowledge. Borrowing tools from anthropology and the so-called new literary criticism, they sifted through cultural rituals, texts, and habits of thought to find the symbolic resources that underlay everything from material culture to archetypical consciousness. Cultural historians applied hermeneu- tics and other devices to the cultural constructs that informed everyday life, on one hand, and provided the means to control knowledge and understanding, on the other. The power of this analysis caught the imagination of environmental historians, who, by contrast, viewed environmental determinism as crude and mechanical.15 The trend in cultural deconstruction appeared in environmental history in the 1990s and was capped by Cronon’s provocative anthology Uncommon Ground, published in 1995. The general understanding held that nature in any given period was a construct unknowable to the historian except through its cultural context. New England’s islands, to give an example, shared certain ecological features, and although these physical forms were available to research, successive cultures saw their “natures” differently. Early settlers viewed islands as part of a wilderness zone made up of uncharted shoals, unpredictable currents, and violent weather. Later cultures valued the same islands in different ways, using these places for fishing stages, livestock enclosures, 10 | introduction military refuges, and Indian concentration camps. Nature was later devalued as islands became dumping grounds for the poor, the diseased, and the criminal or were used for garbage disposal and water treatment plants. Finally, their natures were revalued as recreational spaces, laboratories of ecological evolution, or fragile and precious targets of preservation. Although many environmental historians rejected postmodernism as trivializing nature, it nevertheless widened the distance between environmental and cultural determinants by ceding immense power to the latter, not only in shaping nature but in dic- tating our basic understanding of it.16 Another development that lent force to the cultural interpretation of environmental history was a reevaluation of key ecological concepts used by scientists to explain natural dynamics. The classic definition of a “natural” landscape was set out at the turn of the century by the University of Nebraska botanist Frederic Clements as a climax species assemblage delineated in any geographical area by climate, hydrology, slope aspect, and soil condition. Fol- lowing any disturbance, Clements believed, revegetation would pass through a succession of predictable stages to reproduce this climax assemblage. In the absence of disturbance, this ecology would remain in stasis: a delicate “balance of nature” perfectly adapted to the land. Because regions returned to an equilibrium after any disturbance, ecologists felt they could safely ignore cultural interference as a temporary aberration. But as the science of ecology became more quantitative, climax communities became surprisingly difficult to find, and by the 1920s ecologists were traversing vast ecological provinces with no discernible “climax.” Rather, they discovered a constant mixing of species under the influence of climate changes, migrations, microevolution- ary trends, and disturbances such as fire, wind, insect infestation, and human intervention. Over the next few decades ecologists replaced the idea of succession to climax with a vision of shifting ecological mosaics and patch dynamics, in which ecologies varied endlessly along temporal and spatial gradients, and no two plant associations were ever exactly alike. Under these circumstances, they accepted human influences in their models, discovering that the ecological “wounds” they ignored earlier took decades and even centuries to heal. Culture, they realized, was very much a part of “nature.”17 This new understanding affected environmental history in three ways. First, as nature became more artificial, historians broadened their definition ofenvi - ronment, venturing into areas previously considered beyond nature’s realm, such as the farm, the city, the suburb, or the industrial workplace. Second, people and the land in new england | 11

ecological relativism challenged the grounds for environmental determinism. Without the powerful image of a unified primeval climax community, nature seemed less than overwhelming as a driving force in history. Third, the new ecological understanding affected environmental history’s classic declension narrative. As long as the balance of nature had a certain fixity, historians could use it as a yardstick in judging a given culture’s environmental legacy. But if nature was by definition chaotic, where was the measure of ecological degradation? There were still grounds for critical assessment, but the declension model—the idea that culture almost by definition disrupts nature—lost much of its critical edge.18 Given these confusing changes, it is not surprising that environmental historians have so far failed to develop a generalized formula for integrating the history of nature into the history of humanity. Although some studies continue to view nature as a passive victim of cultural forces, others see it as a primary determinant of cultural history. Environmental history has neither defined its own historical benchmarks nor established a model of causal relations widely accepted by historians outside the field.19 The question is, then, can regional history—the unified history of a single, environmentally defined place—restore the dialectic of culture and nature in the historical narrative?

Redefining Environmental History Environmental history emerged in the 1970s as a category of western American history, and for the next few decades it remained linked to the West by its preoccupation with national forests, national parks, and wilderness areas. Despite the path-breaking works by Cronon and Merchant, New England arrived late on the environmental history scene, with Theo- dore Steinberg’s Nature Incorporated: Industrialization and the Waters of New England appearing in 1991, my own Common Lands, Common People: The Ori- gins of Conservation in Northern New England in 1997, Diana Muir’s Reflections in Bullough’s Pond: Economy and Ecosystem in New England in 2000, and John Cumbler’s Reasonable Use: The People, the Environment, and the State, New England in 2001. Reviewing common themes in this literature provides perspective on New England’s role in understanding culture and nature in environmental history. In contrast to the American West, the distinguishing feature of New England environmental history is the length, continuity, and intensity of 12 | introduction

Euro-American settlement. New England’s frontier saga began more than two centuries before pioneers appeared in force on the western scene, and this lengthy postfrontier history provides a different perspective on the nature– culture dialectic. On one hand, this extended settlement period reveals an agency in the natural environment not evident in the pioneering moment. The behavior of the pioneers—the shock troops of the American frontier— emphasizes the intensity of Euro-American cultural imperialism and its vic- timization of nature. New England’s postfrontier history brings to light a series of oscillations: deforestation and reforestation, depletion and renewal, settlement and abandonment, pollution and recovery. At the end of this lengthy nonlinear history, forests covered 90 percent of Maine, 87 percent of New Hampshire, and more than 75 percent of Vermont, a recovery as remarkable as the destruction of the original forest. New England history, in short, affirms nature’s role in the ongoing dialectical exchange that makes up environmental history. Culture disrupts, nature rebounds, and in the “slow decay of the ages,” as William Robinson puts it, the natural forces that remodulate the landscape are once more in evidence.20 Moreover, this longue durée offers a better understanding of the cultural side of the dialectic. Pioneers, out of fear or necessity, were desperately exploitive, and historians have been quick to generalize on the basis of their behavior. In his classic work on wilderness and the American mind, Roderick Nash pointed out that those who made a living from the land were “too close to nature to appreciate it for other than its economic value,” and John Opie’s more recent environmental history textbook concluded that pioneers were “belligerently at war with nature.” Influenced by Turner’s vision of frontier individualism, western environmental historians characterized pioneers as a placeless people engaged in a kind of atomistic free-for-all, with the profit motive their single common denominator. Perhaps this assessment accurately reflects conditions at the pioneering moment, but as the agricultural historian Hal Barron points out, pioneering was but a “short-lived phase in America’s rural history.” As the frontier stabilized, settlers and farmers developed a different relation to the land, and this, as Barron implies, is a better gauge of the culture–nature dynamic than the pioneers’ initial thrust into the wilderness. Recent historians and geographers have uncovered persistent Old World cultural characteristics on the New England frontier, suggesting a land-use ethic far more complex than the profit-driven western model. Acting on this complicated mix of Old World memory and New World adaptation, colonial New people and the land in new england | 13

Englanders compiled a surprising record of land stewardship as they settled in and gained a measure of economic security. New England’s long human history—native, colonial, preindustrial, industrial, postindustrial—opens a broad panorama of land-use practices and drives home the point that general- izations based on a single pioneering moment do little to explain the relation between people and land over the long haul.21 The legacy of this long settlement history was a heavily domesticated landscape with multiple layers of meaning, and this too provides a different perspective on the classic dualism of cultural imperialism and environmental determinism. Although New England was ecologically altered and even impoverished, its landscapes nonetheless generated a vibrant regional sense of place, and evaluating this heavily humanized ecology in the post-Clemensian age requires a new yardstick. Measured by a people’s attachment to the land, New England environmental history is a qualified success story: an unfolding dialectic of culture and nature that produced an environment by no means wild or pristine, but no less compelling to those who inhabited it. As Charles Clark said, this attachment was buttressed by a rich literary tradition that is not evident in the pioneering moment—or in most western environmental history. Donald Worster, for instance, explained the history of the Dust Bowl by focusing on profit-maximizing Plains farmers who lacked a sense of place and failed to take into account the need for grass in the region’s grasslands ecology. Their short-sightedness, he explains, was at least partly a product of their classic pioneering orientation; they were “newcomers” on the last frontier of American agriculture. The long postfrontier history of New England suggests different possibilities, perhaps even a “partnership with nature,” as Clark put it, that softened the edge of exploitation in the postfrontier era.22 This humanized postfrontier landscape had enormous importance in defining New England as a region. Culturally modified landscapes such as those in postfrontier New England constitute a “second nature,” as opposed to the more pristine “first nature” landscapes that served as the beginning point for most early environmental histories. A synthesis of human will and natural regeneration, these half-domestic, half-wild places carried powerful symbolic associations. At base, they were imaginative constructions. No ecology is entirely natural, just as no built environment is completely artificial, but over time some segment of this broad continuum assumes a presence so embedded in time and so familiar in shape as to become second nature in the minds of those who live there. New Englanders exploited this land—sometimes 14 | introduction harshly—but eventually they learned to accept the results of this exploitation as a proper balance of nature and culture, whether a working forest, a village green, a centuries-old farm, or even a city neighborhood. These landscapes were, as John Wright characterized them, the physical embodiment of New England’s unified culture: second nature both in their familiar form and in their echoes of the original ecology. The New England agricultural landscape is a classic second-nature construct, but in more subtle ways the region’s industrialization yielded second-nature landscapes as well. In the West, industrialism was ushered in virtually overnight with huge capital outlays and advanced technology, and the environmental changes it brought were sudden and unilateral. New England’s industrialization was more deeply rooted. It began with almost impercepti- ble changes in traditional rural practices stretching back into the late colonial period: domestic crafts becoming commercialized, farms and village mills shifting year by year to producing export commodities, and land-use growing more intense. This long evolutionary history accents the role of nature in creating the urban-industrial landscape.23 The continuing presence of nature complicates the general understanding that commercial capitalism separates people spiritually and physically from the land. Profit-driven surplus extraction, rapid transportation, urbanization, and machine-based production did in fact alienate New Englanders, and the industrialization of such activities as logging and fishing demonstrates the disastrous ecological consequences. Although this estrangement is a central theme in New England environmental history, the process was not linear. The eclipse of nature in cities and suburbs, on farms, at sea, and in the forest was, ironically, accompanied by the emergence of a Romantic rediscovery of nature, by creation of urban parks, by conservation campaigns, and by environmentalist action aimed at reevaluating nature in both the city and the countryside. Environmental history is a study in alienation, but it is also a story of rediscovering nature in an increasingly artificial world. Understanding how people used and valued this well-trodden regional landscape is a matter of immense importance. By adopting a metanarrative based on the destruction of first nature, environmental history too often con- veys a suppressed but significant corollary: we live in a postfrontier landscape irreparably damaged by a pioneering encounter. This perception, unfortu- nately, frees us from responsibility for protecting the tainted world we inherited from our forebears. New England’s past suggests a different narrative, one people and the land in new england | 15 in which second nature is as important as the original landscape. Its history, in short, helps us understand nature’s persistence—and its importance—in a landscape of cities, factories, farms, and suburbs. It forces us to define both nature and culture in more complex ways. More important, it tasks us with identifying unsustainable practices that threaten a world where nature is more subtle but just as precious as in the western wilderness that environmentalists struggled to protect in the 1960s and 1970s. New England’s environment— its unique blend of human and nonhuman elements—has vital lessons for all Americans. “This page intentionally left blank” Part I The New World Transformed New England to 1800 

ew England has hosted a succession of cultures since Nhumans first occupied this region some 12,000 years ago, and each fashioned the land to its own needs. The culmination of this long process was an archetype landscape universally accepted today as the embodiment of the Northeastern United States. To observers, this distinctive pattern of forest, farm, and village has become second nature: a construct so seemingly stable and integrated that it transcends the nature–culture divide as an artful equilibrium of cultural aspiration and natural ecology. These three chapters, which survey the early human history of the region to the end of the pioneering era, explore the blending of ecological process and human history that shaped the landscapes of rural New England. Following glacial retreat, the New England environment began evolving from a sparse tundralike landscape into a lush forest-and-river habitation offering an abundant menu of resources across a broad spectrum of ecological zones. Humans arrived early in this evolution, and over the centuries, they adapted their mix of hunting, fishing, and gathering according to the flux and

| 17 18 | part i flow of resources in the postglacial world. Such ecological changes altered their cultures as well, as they responded not only to new environmental opportunities but also to innovations introduced from neighboring societies. The earliest inhabitants based their subsistence on big-game hunting and opportunistic exploitation of plants, seeds, fish, and small game when these appeared in the evolving landscape. As the environment stabilized and diversified, later cultures enlarged their tool inventories and grew increasingly sedentary and systematic in their seasonal round of hunting, fishing, and foraging. New England’s first peoples altered their environment to create more useful surroundings. The impact of these changes was softened by low population density, seasonally dispersed hunting and foraging activities, shifting forms of agriculture, and spiritual practices that emphasized reciprocity with the rest of nature. The alterations were nonetheless significant, resulting in a humanized environment shaped primarily by fire—the most important land-management tool of the time. When Europeans landed in the 1600s, the world they encountered was already a synthesis of human and natural forces: a second-nature landscape. Colonists first settled in tiny fishing and fur-trading posts along the Gulf of Maine and then appeared in greater numbers at Plymouth and Massachu- setts Bay. For New England natives, this migration brought a century of chaos, war, and dispossession. Those along the coast initially interacted on favorable terms with their English cohabitants, and for a generation or two, the New England environment accommodated both societies. Eventually the multiple strains on land and resources resulted in a series of wars that devastated the region’s aboriginal culture. In the century that followed these epic conflicts, New England natives sustained their identity in part through continued contact with the environment. Despite the ravages of war and the loss of their homeland, they maintained a cultural presence as part of the mosaic of races and nationalities. For the the new world transformed | 19

Europeans, the end of the wars meant expanded colonization. English settlers carried their own identities into the interior wilderness. In a complex articu- lation of Old World memory and New World adaptation, they laid out towns in ways that took into account their postfeudal family and community values and the dispersed resources of the alluvial meadows and forested uplands. From these cultural and environmental imperatives, they created a Puritan second nature in the Connecticut and Merrimack River valleys and along the coast of Maine, replacing the indigenous environment with a new ecology that exchanged nutrients and energies across the several discrete compo- nents of a mixed-farming base: garden, tilled field, pasture, orchard, meadow, stream, and woodland. At the end of the 1700s, this pioneering stage was drawing to close. In the lowlands, a tapestry of field, meadow, orchard, and woodland, sized to the contours of the land and the local culture of cultivation, spread across the valley floors. To the north this settlement frontier pressed up against the rugged foothills of the Appalachians, and here the transformation of nature halted. In the lowlands—the valley floors and coastal plain—the cultures of town and farm remained relatively stable. But as New England’s earlier human history demonstrated, cultural stability depended on a reliable supply of the natural resources needed to sustain it. In this case, the agricultural stability of postpioneer New England was predicated on new sources of arable land and meadows that would absorb the surplus of a rapidly growing population. After 1800, pressures on a limited land base impelled New England onto a new economic frontier. Just as the native world was transformed by the onset of the colonial wars, the postpioneer society of rural New England was altered by forces unleashed during the American Revolution. The frontiers of commercial and industrial capitalism spread to the interior, bringing a new phase in the environmental history of the region. “This page intentionally left blank” Chapter 1 New England’s Natives 

ew England is part of a larger landform known as the Mar- Nitime Peninsula, which stretches northward from Long Island Sound to the Gaspe Peninsula. The two features that define its boundaries, the St. Lawrence River valley and the Atlantic coastal plain, served as great highways connecting the region to cultures to the west and the south and bringing periodic infusions of new ideas and new people. Since the arrival of the first humans some 12,000 years ago, New England has been a crossroads of culture and a seat of innovation. In the 1600s, that cultural evolution was dramatically disrupted by European colonization. This was indeed a century of chaos for native peoples, but they met these trying circumstances fortified by a history of cultural adaptation and innovation extending back thousands of years. Within decades of the first contacts, New England natives were crossing the Gulf of Maine in small European sailing vessels, playing one European trading party against another. Early historians described all natives as conservative and tradition bound: a people, in effect, with no history and no future. Nothing could be further from the truth. Only a few centuries before Europeans arrived, they had transformed their world by adopting ceramics, new storage techniques, horticulture, palisaded villages, and birch-bark canoes.1 They were all but overwhelmed by European technology, diseases, and aggressiveness, but they fit these developments into a long history of adaptive response to changing environmental conditions.

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When humans first arrived in North America, the land was rebounding from the last glacier, and that event, which still resonates through the region, compelled the cultural shifts that gave rise to the Woodland peoples who greeted Europeans to their shores. Students of New England prehistory are only now beginning to piece together this complicated evolution and its relation to the changing environment. In the 1920s, archaeology shifted from an amateur sport to a professional discipline with exact methodologies and well-defined hypotheses. Early professional studies, including Warren Moore- head’s Archaeology of Maine (1922) and Charles Willoughby’s Antiquities of the New England Indians (1935), were largely descriptive. By the 1960s, however, professionals were ready to take up more theoretical problems, such as tracing cultural sequences, understanding migration and diffusion mechanisms, and correlating subsistence strategies with environmental variables.2 Because of the development of precise methods for the excavation and typing of artifacts, and with help from the related disciplines of paleobotany and ethnohistory, archaeologists were able to extract increasingly detailed and suggestive hypotheses from each newly discovered archaeological site. These interdisciplinary tools showed New England’s natural landscape to be surprisingly dynamic, and scholars debated the impact of environmental changes on the region’s cultures. Just as early geographers had done, at first they traced all cultural attributes to the influence of the physical landscape. Such environmental determinism gave way in the 1920s to a theory of diffusion: cultural groups either adopted attributes from adjacent areas or were displaced by outside cultures. Modern archaeologists are inclined to accept a mix of influences, but whether environmental or cultural in emphasis, current anthropological theory highlights the dynamism of landscape and people in New England. This interaction dispels the idea that Indian society had no past and no future and places the native New Englander firmly within the greater pageant of human progress.3

Human Arrivals The retreat of the last glacier set the stage for the arrival of New England’s first humans. Late in the Pleistocene—the ice age—around 40,000 years before the present (BP), Eurasian hunter-gatherers mastered the ability to survive in cold climates. Moving north out of the temperate forests, they reached northeastern Asia about 30,000 to 20,000 BP. Because a large share new england’s natives | 23

of the world’s water was sequestered in glacial ice, the oceans were lower than they are today, allowing these traveling groups to continue across a wide land bridge between northern Asia and Alaska, kept clear of ice by dry climate conditions. Perhaps around 15,000 to 12,000 BP, these migrants, called Paleoindi- ans, followed a corridor between the Laurentian and Cordilleran ice sheets down the eastern Rocky Mountain front or perhaps along a narrow exposed shelf bordering the coast. The land before them was sparse: lakes were still barren, and plants were inedible or low in nutrition. Yet traveling the same route were large mammals, including woolly mammoths, mastodons, muskox, camels, horses, short-horned bison, caribou, elk, and Dall’s sheep. This resource mix preadapted America’s first humans to hunting big game. Moving south and east under the Laurentide ice mass, Paleoindians encountered similarly protein-rich environments in the tundralike northern plains and temperate forest refugia along the Gulf Coast. Adrift in this land of plenty, they crossed the continent to Nova Scotia and drove southward to the tip of South America in just a few thousand years—an astounding feat of colonization. Their signature tools, appearing about 11,500 BP, were the Clovis and Folsom points, each several inches long and of considerable weight. Delicately chipped along both faces to achieve a sharp cutting edge and channeled or “fluted” from the base up the face, these points were wedged into the split end of a wooden throwing spear. The short shaft was launched with a spear-thrower, or atlatl, a device that allowed the hunter to whip the weapon forward, giving it amazing velocity. The Clovis and Folsom designs are common to Paleoindian sites across the continent, another indication of rapid colonization.4 The heft of the Clovis and Folsom points suggests an economy based on big-game hunting. Indeed, the rapid spread of humans across the Americas was facilitated by the incredible variety and abundance of large mammals, collectively known as megafauna, living in lush forest, tundra, and grasslands environments that offered nourishment sufficient to fuel their tremen- dous bulk. Paleoindians also preyed on small animals, reptiles, and fish, but the megafauna kill sites are the most spectacular archaeological discoveries related to their culture, and these finds have attracted a great deal of attention. The rapid Paleoindian diffusion from 11,000 to 10,000 BP coincided with the disappearance of most of these megafauna, and the fact that these cold- adapted creatures had survived earlier glaciation cycles suggests that human predation—the new element in their environment—caused their extinction. 24 | chapter i

Some years ago, Paul S. Martin proposed a scenario in which human hunters advanced outward in a broad arc from northwestern Canada, and along the leading edge of this human shock wave they exterminated two-thirds of the larger species they encountered. While this hypothesis has dramatic appeal, some point out that it does not account for the extinction of smaller bird and animal species less vulnerable to overkill. Moreover, no hunter-gatherer society today targets big-game species, since this practice is both risky and inefficient. Unless the hunting bands are large—rarely the case—much of the flesh would spoil before being eaten. Most archaeologists see human predation as only one of several pressures on North American mammal populations at the end of the Pleistocene. Climate and environment changes between 14,000 and 9000 BP were more dramatic than those in earlier interglacial periods, and evolution responds slowly to such stimulus. Gestation periods, for instance, may have failed to adjust to postglacial seasonal changes.5 Still, the Clovis and Folsom designs, combined with a few kill-site exca- vations, suggest heavy human predation of megafauna, and the extinctions coincide more directly with human expansion than with climate change. Paleoindians lived in a world different from today’s hunter-gatherers: cooler temperatures would have preserved flesh longer, and megafauna were not adapted to defense against human predators, as are present-day large animals. Perhaps the disappearance of a few keystone species—mastodons and mammoths—launched a cascade sequence in which woody and shrub species invaded the grasslands and glades, reducing the carrying capacity for other grazers and hastening their disappearance. One study of the Bering Land Bridge, for instance, concluded that megafauna extinction encouraged a shift in vegetation “from highly productive, grass-dominated steppe to poorly productive moss-tundra.”6 Flora and fauna were no doubt interdependent in other parts of the Americas.

The End of the Pleistocene in New England The Wisconsin glacier, the last in the Pleistocene sequence, reached southward to the tip of Long Island around 15,300 BP and began melting. By 14,000 BP, New England’s highest elevations were exposed, and by 13,000 BP most of central New England lay bare. The region was left with a classic glaciated landscape of rounded mountains, U-shaped valleys, gravel drumlins, ridgelike gravel kames and eskers, and shallow kettle ponds, formed new england’s natives | 25

where mounds of ice lay buried under glacial till. The immense weight of the retreating glacier bowed the earth’s crust, and marine waters flooded across the seaboard and into the lower river valleys, leaving behind layers of clay and silt. As the huge midcontinent glacial lakes dried up, powerful westerly winds carried silt and sediments eastward, and lichens appeared in this loess soil, preparing the way for herbaceous plants.7 Between 14,000 and 10,000 BP, wind-blown seeds and spores blanketed New England with a tundralike assemblage of grasses, sedges, herbs, heath, sage, ferns, mosses, and lichens. This sparse biome moved north behind the glacial front, and after 1,000 to 4,000 years, depending on the location, it gave way to stands of pioneer trees in an open, grassy parkland. First to appear in sheltered deposits of sand and clay were willows, alders, dwarf birch, poplar, and juniper—invaders that could withstand cold, dry, windy weather and soils low in nitrogen. Spruces arrived between 13,000 and 12,000 BP and spread rapidly across the coastal plain as the land emerged from under the sea. Con- tinued climatic warming speeded the arrival of oaks, maples, white pine, and hemlock, and these and other species concentrated in specific niches, forming discretely discernable ecosystems ranging from parklands and woodlands to glades, marshes, bogs, swamps, and barrens—ideal environments for large grazing and browsing mammals. Between 12,000 and 9000 BP, a forest canopy closed over all but the northernmost parts of New England, creating the mixed forest that, with continuing species fluctuations, dominated the landscape from that point on.8

Paleoindians in New England, 12,000–10,000 BP Paleoindians entered the region around 12,500 BP, probably from the Ohio Valley. Adapting to a spare and shifting environment, they inhabited the area over the next fifteen hundred years as a collection of small, highly mobile bands that occasionally came together for trading, ceremony, gift exchange, and marriage. Paleoindians moved between three ecological zones: an upland heath of herbs, grasses, and stunted shrubs; a midelevation landscape of open grassland and tundra, with spruce, birch, jack pine, and red pine in sheltered areas; and a marshy coastal plain just surfacing from the marine incursion. This diverse environment hosted a variety of large mammals: woolly mammoths wandering in solitude across the boggy land feeding on grasses and willow, herds of mastodons browsing the coniferous trees, and 26 | chapter i caribou grazing the open country in summer and taking refuge in coniferous forests in winter. Reforestation posed hardships for some animals and offered new opportunities for others, and the Paleoindians, traveling light and shifting from one environment to another, excelled in opportunistic hunting, gathering, and scavenging.9 Archaeologists have discovered mammoth and mastodon bones in Paleoindian sites farther west, and although none of the New England sites contain megafauna remains, traditional Algonquian stories recall mountain- ous animals roaming the land in ancient times, which suggests that Indians and megafauna occupied the same ecological niches. Evidence indicates, however, that Paleoindians in New England depended principally on the caribou herds that flourished in this expansive tundra environment. These animals migrated annually for breeding and calving and to avoid biting insects, and although their movements shifted with fluctuating climatic conditions, they were a predictable source of food. Their seasonal concentrations probably brought together several bands of Paleoindians at certain times of the year.10 Mobility and opportunism were the Paleoindians’ most important adaptation to this changing landscape. Their all-purpose spears and skin-covered shelters were easily portable, and they ate just about anything they came across, including small mammals, birds, amphibians, shellfish, eggs, berries, nuts, and seeds. Caribou aside, these resources were not particularly dependable. Huge southward shifts in the jet stream brought arctic air masses, heavy snows, and periods of drought that kept the landscape in flux and plant and animal species on the move. An economy based on gathering depends on accurate and reliable information about the location and seasonality of these low-yield resources, and with the landscape so unstable, this intimate understanding hardly seems possible. For these reasons, Paleoindians were disposed to hunting big game, which required only generalized knowledge of the environment. They traveled widely across the vast Maritime Peninsula, where sharing knowledge and resources with other bands no doubt improved their chances. But the continued focus on big game was perhaps too conservative in a time of dramatic postglacial landscape shifts. In time, Paleoindians would need to settle in, broaden their base of subsistence, and adapt to the changing rhythms of the land.11 As the climate stabilized, plants and animals became more allopatric, or concentrated in specific niches. Accordingly, Paleoindians developed permanent territories and a more varied diet. But even while they were adapting, the new england’s natives | 27

environment itself was changing, most dramatically in the return of the forest cover. Isolated stands of trees expanded into a closed-canopy forest, and a cooling trend after 10,800 BP transformed this cover into a thick canopy dominated by spruces. In Connecticut the boreal forest lasted until about 9500 BP, and in Maine it persisted for considerably longer, resulting in a reduced carrying capacity with fewer large herbivores—the animals that had sustained Paleoindian populations. These changes triggered a clear cultural discontinu- ity that archaeologists call the Archaic Readjustment.12 Early theories posited a hiatus in the human population in northern, if not all of, New England, a result of the diminished carrying capacity of the changing landscape. The Ritchie-Fitting hypothesis, developed in the 1960s, related the lack of artifacts from this period to the arrival of the boreal forest, which “moved over the Northeast like a dark cloud between the more resource-productive tundra and deciduous forest stages.” The animals were fewer, smaller, and quicker than caribou; the landscape offered them more places to hide, and the effort in hunting them yielded a smaller return. Plant foods were available, but gathering and processing required a specialized knowledge that Paleoin- dians may not have possessed, and with sea levels rising, coastal ecosystems were all but useless for forage and fish. The archaeological record remains sparse until about 7500 BP, suggesting a relatively intermittent occupation by small hunting-fishing-foraging bands living in scattered microniches.13 There are some problems with this explanation, however. First, the theory was developed at a time when little archaeological activity was occurring in New England; discovery of richer sites may qualify the hypothesis. Second, low artifact densities may simply reflect a difficulty in researching this particular period. Artifacts are poorly preserved in New England’s thin, acidic soils, and Paleoindian camps along the coast would have been drowned by the sea- level rise. Moreover, fossil pollen analyses indicate that the early Holocene was more productive than researchers originally thought. Pine, spruce, and birch dominated the region, but oaks were also present, and certain niches were rich in resources. Current environmental evidence, in short, points to the possibility that people were present throughout this period.14 About 7500 BP a new, mixed deciduous-coniferous forest advanced from the south, bringing a wider variety of large and small mammals. Fluted spear points gave way to points similar to a broad class of lithics found to the west. Some archaeologists think these tool makers were newcomers from the upper Hudson and St. Lawrence River valleys, whereas others see Paleoindians 28 | chapter i rising to the environmental challenge. Sharp discontinuities exist between the Paleoindian and the subsequent Archaic cultures, but there are continuities as well. Perhaps the Paleoindians, who were never present in great numbers, followed the retreating spruce parkland and its tundra caribou into northern Canada; perhaps they intermingled with new people moving in from the west; or perhaps they simply developed ways of exploiting the small mammals, vegetable foods, moose, and fish that reappeared as the spruce pine forest shifted northward. Evidence suggests not so much withdrawal and replacement as continuity and adaptation and, possibly, a mixing with cultures to the south.15

The Archaic Period, 9000–3700 BP Each new era in the prehistory of New England reveals a more diverse environment and a more systematic means of getting a living. By the time the Early Archaic culture emerged around 9000 BP, the pine–oak forest was moving northward, driving before it the caribou herds with their preference for a tundra–spruce landscape. From their semipermanent villages, Early Archaic hunters sallied out in a seasonal round of subsistence activity that was more scheduled and purposeful than the strategies used by the Paleoindians. Researchers have not yet sorted out the confusing tableau of arrivals, depar- tures, and shifts in subsistence behavior, but clearly the Archaic culture was more complex that its predecessor. The Archaic people retained the adventur- ing spirit that drove Paleoindians across the continent in the wake of the glaciers, but, being more sedentary, they also cultivated a greater intimacy with their increasingly complex environment.16 Whether locals or new arrivals, Early Archaic people (9000–8000 BP) were impressive innovators. They exploited the changing forest environment by inventing such woodworking tools as adzes, drills, axes, and chisels, and to take advantage of emerging riverine and marine resources, they fabricated bone fish hooks and lines, slate harpoons, nets of plant fiber, and stone sink- ers. They used needles and awls to make clothes from hides; fashioned grass, reeds, and bark into cordage, baskets, traps, and snares; used a variety of new stone points to hunt a wider assortment of prey; and crafted milling stones to process nuts and seeds. Their villages appeared in almost every ecological niche a human could exploit.17 Although the Early Archaic is still somewhat overshadowed by the human-hiatus theory, the Middle Archaic period, which lasted from 8000 new england’s natives | 29

to 6000 BP, is better known. Continued climate warming encouraged the northward expansion of oaks, beech, hickory, and chestnut, and rising ocean temperatures brought more dependable runs of spawning fish inshore and up the rivers. Middle Archaic people responded once again by diversifying their subsistence strategies. In huge dugout canoes they traveled upriver to caribou grounds and into the Gulf of Maine to hunt marine mammals and swordfish. In fall they processed a variety of plants by grinding, milling, boiling, and roasting; in winter they trapped small game and in spring set nets for anadromous fish. At the coast they gathered shellfish, hunted seals and seabirds, and caught flounder and cod. Because hunting caribou, marine mammals, and swordfish required coordinated efforts, they probably settled in relatively large communities.18 The Late Archaic fluorescence (6000–3700 BP) brought not only a transfu- sion of western cultural elements but also a response to the continued incursion of the deciduous-coniferous forest. A worldwide warming trend raised temperatures a few degrees from those at present, making New England a “highly propitious biome” characterized by an abundance of small game, fish, and deer. These lush resources account for a dramatic expansion in hunter-fisher-gatherer groups lasting to 3700 BP. Late Archaic people, sometimes called the Red Paint People, occupied a wide variety of ecological zones from the interior to the coast. The archaeological discovery of Archaic-age burial vaults containing red ochre and ritual furnishings, including slate points, lance tips, charms, and amulets, touched off a surge of speculation in the 1920s about the mysterious origins of New England natives; however, later evidence suggested a maritime elaboration of the Laurentian tradition moving from the St. Lawrence Valley into New England. The Late Archaic consists of three major cultural complexes not yet well distinguished: the Lake Forest, Mast Forest, and Maritime Archaic traditions. The Lake Forest, seated in the lowland belt between the mountains and seacoast, was part of a culture stretching as far west as the Great Lakes and predicated on deer, elk, moose, beaver, bear, and small animals and freshwater fish. Arriving somewhat later from the south was a Mast Forest culture, with its signature small-stemmed hunting points and tools, such as mortars and pes- tles, adapted to the new mast-producing trees. The Maritime Archaic complex appeared somewhat earlier than the Late Archaic, about 7000 BP. The turn to the sea was prompted by new environmental conditions. When the glaciers retreated, the sea intruded over the isostatically depressed land and remained 30 | chapter i there as long as sea levels rose faster than the land rebounded. But by 11,000 BP, sea-level rise had slowed; the Georges Bank emerged as a huge peninsula stretching toward Nova Scotia, and the Gulf of Maine became the shallow and nearly tideless DeGeer Sea. As late as 8000 BP, this fluctuating shoreline offered little in the way of subsistence, but after that date the narrow channel to the Atlantic became a broad gulf, allowing a circulation of currents, greater tidal amplitude, and more vertical mixing. Now relatively stable, the coast provided a rich habitat for intertidal and subtidal species, and its increased carrying capacity gave rise to a Maritime Archaic culture based on caribou, deer, seals, dolphins, walruses, porpoises, sea birds, whales, and marine and migratory fish. Maritime Archaic people were formidable sea hunters, as evi- denced by killer whale effigies, and as gatherers they left hundreds of “shell heaps” along the Maine coast, again signaling their maritime orientation.19 About 3700 BP, the Late Archaic culture gave way to a Terminal Archaic or Susquehanna tradition, characterized by broad-point spear tips and an emphasis on migratory fish. The Susquehanna people sifted into New England from the south as anadromous fish, mast-bearing forests, and deer spread northward along the Atlantic slope. Their tools were markedly different from those of the resident narrow-point tradition, and there is no evidence of assim- ilation, but again this abrupt cultural shift raises questions. Were these a local people responding to ecological changes or new arrivals moving northward as their familiar environment expanded? In either case, the new culture was a response to changing environmental circumstances. Between 3800 and 3000 BP, northern New England’s forest composition again shifted, this time in response to a worldwide cooling trend that brought a steady expansion of conifers and bogs with declines in white-tailed deer. The Susquehanna tradition disappeared from the northern forests around 3500 BP and several centuries later in southern New England, leaving no trace in the cultures that came after.20 With the demise of the Susquehanna tradition, New England entered another poorly understood period.

Early Woodland People, 2700–2000 BP The Woodland culture appeared between 3000 and 2000 BP in southern New England. Despite a clear division between the Late Archaic and Early Woodland peoples, the continuities suggest that Woodland characteristics were overlays to the Late Archaic foundation of hunting, fishing, and new england’s natives | 31

gathering. Distinctive differences began somewhat later, with improved cooking technology based on steatite (soap rock) vessels, followed by ceramics. Innovations such as plant cultivation, wider exchange networks, bark canoes, a shift from spears to bows and arrows, and grass storage sacks encouraged a rapid population expansion and larger villages.21 Early Woodland people drew heavily on shellfish. Southern New Englanders had been gathering such aquatic animals for millennia, but two ecological changes seem to have enhanced the importance of this resource. First, the intrusion of the conifer-dominated forests in the interior forced the Woodland culture seaward. Second was an explosion of life along the coastal plain. Large, grass-fringed lagoons, or estuaries, began forming at the river mouths about 3000 BP as the postglacial rise in sea levels slowed and silt from the rivers accumulated along the shore. Barrier beaches formed, salt marshes covered the coastal fringes, and eel grass spread through the protected shallow-water coves. With their mix of fresh and salt water, estuaries were some of the most abundant environments in North America, comprising several ecological zones that put a remarkable biotic diversity at human disposal. Ecotones, the transition areas between these zones, offered a wide variety of resources, including land and marine mammals, shellfish, eels, birds, and several varieties of fish and vegetation. Locating their central villages on these ecotones, Woodland Indians wandered to the coast to fish, to the interior for winter hunting, to the upriver waterfalls for spring fishing, and to the islands to gather eggs and shellfish in summer. The Woodland period began with low population densities, but villages grew rapidly late in the precontact period, particularly in southern New England.22 Woodland people replaced their stone, wood, bark, and woven bowls with fired-clay ceramics about 2700 BP, probably through contact with the Great Lakes Algonquians. Pottery allowed them to process a wider range of plants and store food in pits, making the returns from hunting, fishing, and gathering more dependable. A second innovation involved river and coastal transportation. Dugouts remained in use in southern New England, but Indians in the northern birch-conifer forests began using bark to build light-draft vessels easily carried between stream systems or out to sea over the broadening mud flats and salt-grass prairies. This change again made available a wider range of resources, from mountain tributary to coastal estuary. Bark canoes also expanded exchange networks. The Mi’kmaq in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, perhaps the most formidable mariners of the Late Woodland period, 32 | chapter i constructed bark vessels some twenty-eight feet long with hogged gunwales to keep them steady in the ocean swells.23

Agriculture Arrives in New England The most dramatic innovation in the Woodland period was cultivation of maize, beans, and squash in southern New England. Between 10,000 and 7000 BP, agriculture appeared independently in several regions of the world, and this near-simultaneous development suggests a response to global environmental changes at the end of the Pleistocene, such as river valley sta- bilization, floral enrichment, the extinction of animal species used as food, and a warmer, drier, more predictable, and more seasonally distinct climate that encouraged seed-bearing annual plants over woody perennials. Another hypothesis is that population densities were rising globally, forcing hunter-foragers to adopt agriculture as wild resources become relatively scarce. Or perhaps agriculture was simply part of the process of human cultural evolution— an opportunity for greater rewards from the land, a way of validating social status and generating family wealth, or a means to stay put in a particularly agreeable place. Whatever the reason, between 4000 and 3000 BP, Hopewell Indians in the Midwest shifted from encouraging certain wild plants to actively cultivating them, and by 2000 BP this relatively simple intervention in the life cycle of a plant had thoroughly altered the demographic and settlement patterns of the region. Maize arrived in the Hopewell sites from Mesoamerica around 1800 BP, and in southern New England only about 500 years before European contact. Why New Englanders adopted maize is a matter of speculation. Their ability to cultivate is unquestionable, for over the centuries they had developed a sophisticated understanding of edible and medicinal plants; but to suppose that they would axiomatically move from simply encouraging certain species to cultivating plants is to assume that agriculture is an inevitable stage in all human progress. Recent studies worldwide suggest that hunter-gatherers were healthier and better nourished than farmers, and they spent less time working for their livelihood. Several possible reasons explain why New Englanders chose this more difficult path.24 About this time, the region experienced a population boom, suggesting either that the new food source gave rise to larger villages or that rising populations forced Indians to adopt supplemental horticultural routines. Another new england’s natives | 33

hypothesis suggests a shellfish decline in southern New England between ad 1000 and 1300, possibly a result of overexploitation. A third explanation involves an intrusion of newcomers from the south, bringing agriculture with them. Most likely, agriculture resulted from a combination of demographic pressures, closer contact with adjacent cultures, and a more intense interaction with the environment. The Saco River in southern Maine seems to have been the northern limit for maize cultivation in precontact times, a demarca- tion that conforms to the broader division between the southern oak–chestnut–hickory forest and the cooler conifer-dominated woods to the north and west. Yet climate, agricultural techniques, and populations were in flux in this period, and so the limits of the farming frontier remain elusive.25 For men, cultivation meant only clearing fields and fashioning tools, but for women, it added hoeing, planting, weeding, harvesting, drying, parching, and grinding to their older tasks of foraging, collecting firewood, tending children, fabricating clothing, and manufacturing pots, baskets, and tools. In some areas these horticultural skills made women the major contributors to the family diet. The fields they tended were irregular, unfenced, and multicropped, and they were burned frequently, first to clear away trees and underbrush and later to reduce weeds. Using shells, horseshoe crab carapaces, and deer horns as tools, women planted maize in small hills, and after it sprouted they added beans and squash to the same mounds. Over the centuries, multicropping resulted in “intricate, highly successful interdependencies,” as Carolyn Mer- chant points out. Mimicking the mixed assemblages of the surrounding environment, it also prevented insect infestation and preserved soil nutrients. The squash, with its large leaves, shaded the ground below the corn stocks, discouraged weeds, and helped retain soil moisture, while beans climbed the stocks and fixed nitrogen in the soils. Along with multicropping, natives used forest fallowing to ensure soil fertility, moving entire villages up or down a watershed as soils were depleted. Since land clearing with stone tools was troublesome, they probably lingered in one place as long as possible. But there were other reasons for moving a village, such as depletion of firewood and game, accumulation of trash, and military necessity.26 Did agriculture change native life? In many places around the world, it clearly did. Cultivation, with its predictable routine of tending crops, encouraged a sedentary existence. It permitted larger settlements, even cities, and gave rise to organized politics and warfare where competition for arable lands was keen. Sustained surpluses meant class stratification and institutionalized 34 | chapter i leadership. In addition, plant domestication established a new relation to nature. Since cultivated plants could not survive in the wild, farmers came to see themselves as producing their own existence, as opposed to accepting the bounties of nature. Gardens had to be defended against weeds and animals, which added a degree of tension in a society’s consciousness of the natural world. Although some of this reality no doubt applied to New England, agriculture was less important there than in many places. Cultigens were relatively new to the area, and Indians continued to rely on a broad spectrum of purely natural resources. Much of New England was only marginally arable, and without steel axes, plows, domesticated animals, or manures, the ratio of yield to labor in agriculture remained low. Maize, beans, and squash seem to have been supplements rather than staples, adding to but not dominating substance strategies. Still, agriculture brought subtle changes in native social structure. Larger communities and long-fallow migrations required a considerable land base, and as anthropologist Dena Dincauze points out, competition for arable lands increased intergroup tensions and gave rise to palisaded villages. This tension probably crystallized village leadership and emphasized the arts of warfare, diplomacy, and ceremony; relations with other peoples became more important than relations with the natural world.27 This assessment remains speculative, however, because precontact social and spatial patterns are difficult to sort out. For instance, the model of summer occupation on the coast and winters spent inland has recently been challenged by evidence that, in some cases, families stayed on the coast year-round. In fact, some archaeologists suggest three somewhat distinct settlement types associated with the three basic ecosystems found in any New England river drainage. The largest villages were located on the coast or estuaries. The richness of this ecological complex, along with the adoption of ceramics, which were too cumbersome to move seasonally, suggests year-round or at least three-season occupancy. Interestingly, these coastal sites reveal no evidence of maize. That seems at odds with early European observations, but it takes into account the poor soils, the weather-related risks during the Little Ice Age, and the variety of alternative food sources along the coast. Perhaps agriculture was more widely practiced after European contact, since the fur trade allowed natives to purchase corn in lean years, thereby reducing the risk of devoting spring months to field preparation and planting. When Samuel de Champlain explored the Maine coast in 1604–5, he saw little sign of cornfields beyond the lower Kennebec. A half century later, however, Indians were growing the plant new england’s natives | 35

as far eastward as New Brunswick and as far north on the Connecticut River as Vermont and New Hampshire.28 In the second settlement zone, farther inland, river-based villages were probably more dependent on agriculture. After the fall harvest, small bands of hunters or single families left for hunting lodges at some distance from the main village, and there they remained until late December, when they returned to the village. Finally, a third culture, again possibly independent of the lower river societies, may have existed in the upper watersheds. These Indians, far fewer in number, exploited headwater streams and lakes, the oak–hickory ridges, and the interior swamps, which together provided the biotic diversity necessary for year-round existence. Here resources were more seasonal, and the inhabitants perhaps more mobile. Archaeologists believe that differentiation between coastal, riverine, and upland Indians was increasing in the Late Woodland period, although the exact relation among the three groups is unclear. Dugout canoes confined travelers to a single river system, but the new bark canoes allowed them to form contacts across watersheds, breaking down older upriver migration patterns and giving villagers more in common with those in similar ecological zones on adjacent watersheds. The tripartite model remains speculative because the record is confused by postcontact plagues and trading patterns, and perhaps these cultures are too diverse and too transitory to generalize. Indians on Cape Cod, for instance, seem to have been adopting individual farmsteads clustered near shellfish beds and migratory fish sources, a dispersed pattern that made sense where arable soil lay in scattered pockets. The extent of this innovation is difficult to determine, but it is certainly consistent with a tradition of environmental adaption dating from the earliest human arrivals in the region.29

Indians Modify the Landscape Postglacial changes in New England highlight the importance of the environment in shaping New England’s first cultures. Just how much these cultures changed the environment is less clear. Rising environmental consciousness in the 1970s predisposed scholars to a romantic view of Native Americans as living in harmony with a pristine and unchanging natural world. These characterizations have been challenged, but the debate over Indians and the environment is far from exhausted. There are good reasons to assume that Indian use of their resources was sustainable. Hunting, gathering, and even 36 | chapter i farming were dispersed over wide areas and never so concentrated as to produce a significant imprint. As Thomas Morton noted, Indians did not “winter and summer in one place, for that would be a reason to make fuell scarse . . . but, remove for their pleasures; some times to their hunting places . . . and sometimes to their fishing places, where they abide for that season likewise.” Seasonally varied activities reduced pressures on any single source, keeping exploitation within the carrying capacity of the land. Native cosmology reinforced this pattern of light land use, for it located the hunter, gatherer, traveler, or farmer in a fully spiritualized world in which every activity involved interaction with sentient and sacred things. In the native spiritual geography, no clear distinction was made between home and away, human and animal, culture and nature. Humans descended from animal ancestors; animals acted on moral convictions; and hunter and prey stood on the same spiritual plane. This complex spiritual dialogue tied native use of nature to a broad range of moral considerations.30 Yet any subsistence practice requires some manipulation of nature, and Woodland people had the means to alter the landscape as necessary. They prepared fields by girdling and burning trees, and although the technique was laborious, they used it extensively. Croplands ran for miles along the lower rivers, and since there were hundreds of villages, each moving on a fallow cycle of ten to twenty years, these alterations were extensive. In the Connecticut Valley, according to Peter Thomas, villages required as much as 2,300 acres of cleared land over a half century. With rising populations, sources of fertile soil may have been scarce in the Late Woodland period.31 Natives also altered the landscape by burning the forests. Woodland fires cleared away undergrowth, improved travel for hunting, and encouraged early succession species useful as medicine, food, construction materials, and game forage. Fires also reduced leaf litter, which made stalking easier, and on some occasions Indians used fire to drive game or discourage human enemies. It would be hard to generalize about the impact of these fires, but most were only surface burns running through an understory of grass, dead leaves, and bushes. Such fires prevented larger conflagrations by eliminating dead plant material and underbrush, but they also reduced diversity by destroying thin- barked trees such as hemlock, pine, maple, and beech and leaving fire-tolerant and sprouting species like oak and hickory. The historian Francis Parkman and the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow visualized precontact New England as a “vast, impenetrable wilderness,” but period observers stressed its open, new england’s natives | 37

parklike appearance, leading one modern historian to characterize southern coastal New England as a “countryside of small fields, berry patches, and managed forests.” Current paleobotanical data support the idea of a coastal plain largely dominated by widely spaced, fire-tolerant, mature trees; only the swamps resembled Parkman’s tangled wilderness or Longfellow’s “forest primeval.” North of the agricultural frontier, Indians may have burned forests to drive deer, but fire was less common.32 Even in southern New England, the evidence for regular, deliberate fires is inconclusive. Gordon Day, who conducted an exhaustive survey of contemporary accounts, found ample discussion of a fire-managed forest ecology, and pollen records show an increase in bracken fern, indicating that the southern New England forest was indeed becoming more open. The pollen record may simply reflect the cooling and drying effects of the Little Ice Age, however, and Emily Russell, who scrutinized Day’s sources three decades after he compiled them, remains skeptical. Many contemporary observers mentioned Indian fires, but much of what they reported was hearsay. The ethnohistorian Calvin Martin points out that Indians everywhere refused to accept blame for the fires, and in many ways fire would have disadvantaged them, eliminating fuel wood and material for housing, canoes, baskets, and tools. Colonists may have exaggerated the incidence of fires; they typically settled near Indian villages and traveled along well-established Indian paths, where campfires had been kindled for centuries. And because they arrived expecting to see an impenetrable, primeval forest, they were likely to overemphasize the surprising open- ness of the woods they encountered. In short, the parklike forest may have been at least partly a product of the European imagination.33 Still, an intriguing 1831 survey of the Hatchet Lake Reservation on the Mas- sachusetts–Connecticut border, some of the last inland forest under native control, described an open woodland of oak, chestnut, and hickory on the slopes and occasional brushy plains and blueberry barrens on the ridges and hilltops. This description seems consistent with modern reconstructions of a fire-dominated forest ecology, and it may have been typical of upland New England in the precontact era. But even if native New Englanders did not burn deliberately or systematically, they used large amounts of wood for heating their homes, cooking their food, firing their ceramics, smoking their meat, and manufacturing their structures, weapons, and canoes. Villagers were con- stantly on the hunt for fuel, and when it grew scarce, they moved. Despite the debate on fire frequency, it remains clear that Woodland peoples transformed 38 | chapter i their environment into a mosaic of forests, meadows, brushlands, and broad vistas—the landscape that captured the imagination of the early explorers and settlers.34 New England evolved over the last 12,000 years from a sparse and undifferentiated postglacial world to a lush forest-and-river ecology offering abundant resources across a broad spectrum of ecological zones. Native inhabitants responded to these changes by developing a diversified pattern of hunting, fishing, and gathering, eventually supplemented with agriculture. In turn, they altered this natural system to create a more useful set of surroundings. The impact of this transformation was softened by their seasonally diversified hunting, their shifting forms of agriculture, and their spiritual observances emphasizing reciprocity, generosity, obligation, and stewardship. Nonethe- less, native peoples did modify their environment, and as their populations rose, these modifications became more dramatic. History offers few clues about what might have happened had European colonists and traders not arrived on the New England shore in the late 1500s, but two things are clear. First, in the centuries before European contact, New England’s environment was already a managed system: a second-nature construct where human and nonhuman forces had achieved a relatively stable equilibrium. Second, native New Englanders, who had adjusted time and again to changing environmental circumstances, would have risen to the challenge of resource scarcity. And like the cultures before and after them, they would have found new ways of drawing sustenance and spiritual confirmation from New England’s rich and diverse environment. Chapter 2 Contact, Colonization, and War 

uring the dozen millennia after glacial retreat, several new Dcultures settled into New England and just as many disappeared. The arrival of yet another group in the seventeenth century was not unprecedented, but these newcomers, Europeans, turned to the soils, forests, rivers, and seas with a unique set of expectations. For a time the New England environment accommodated the added pressures, but eventually the strain resulted in a series of wars that reshaped the region culturally and ecologically. Put simply, the conflicts that arose only a decade or so after European settlement were caused by two divergent cultures occupying a single environmental base that, at best, offered a limited means of subsistence. The differences emerged from a thousand years of evolution in which the two cultures—one primarily hunter-gatherer, the other primarily agricultural—acquired distinct social structures and patterns of land use. Agriculture developed much earlier in Europe because of favorable environmental conditions. Eurasia is a large, latitudinally elongated landmass, with mountain systems oriented in an east– west direction. This vast expanse, free of natural barriers, allowed plants and animals to migrate along isothermal lines. Many species from both kingdoms were suitable for domestication, and farmers experimented with genetic selection, deep plowing, manuring, and bulk transport. These conditions encouraged a much more sophisticated form of agriculture than that practiced by

| 39 40 | chapter 2

Indians in North America, which in turn led to higher rates of urbanization and social stratification. With these elements in place, Europeans began the slow transition to commercial capitalism and arrived in the New World with resource needs far different from those of the native inhabitants.1 In this contest of cultures, Europeans gained the upper hand not because they possessed superior technology—indeed, much of what they brought to North America proved inappropriate for that environment—but because they were far more aggressive and acquisitive than North American peoples. European colonization grew out of late feudal-era changes that resulted in new trading networks and militaristic nation-states. These forces accelerated a centuries-old drive to conquer nature along the medieval borderlands—the moors, coastal and river marshes, forests, and floodplains that, in the mind, stood for darkness and waste—and were sharpened by a heightened religious fanaticism generated during the Crusades. Europe’s culture of colonization was framed by dispossession of indigenous peoples in Moorish Iberia and Celtic Ireland, by looting of the Inca and Aztec empires, by piracy along the Spanish Main, by racist convictions applied to Africa, and by an almost insa- tiable appetite for territorial conquest. For these and other reasons, European contact brought drastic changes for New England’s Indian cultures. It introduced deadly epidemic pathogens, changed the ecology in ways that undermined the established economic base, and set in motion a series of debilitating imperial conflicts that involved all native inhabitants in the region. In this maelstrom of economic and cultural disruption, indigenous groups declined precipitously even as European populations grew at a phenomenal rate. Nevertheless, native peoples were able to persevere through a combination of heroic resistance, robust adaptation, and selective accommodation.2

The New England Environment in the Age of Exploration The European exploration of New England proceeded from two momentous developments in the century or so before Columbus’s voyage of 1492. The first was the consolidation of Europe’s feudal domains and princi- palities into powerful nation-states capable of sustaining a national program of conquest. The second was an accelerating movement of goods across a trading area that stretched from the Iberian Peninsula to the Baltic Sea and eastward to India. State-building and commercial expansion provided the impulses contact, colonialization, and war | 41

behind transatlantic exploration: a race for empire, a thirst for precious metals to build reserves and serve as a medium of exchange, a desire for exotic trade items, and a search for water-based routes to Asia, particularly after the Otto- man conquest of Constantinople in 1453. Portuguese sailors opened a water route to the Indian Ocean in 1488, and in the next decade Spanish monarchs consolidated their power over the Moorish and Arab populations in Iberia and sent Columbus across the western ocean with a letter of introduction to their royal brother, the Great Khan of Tartary. The natural world Columbus discovered in North America differed from anything in the European experience, and the prospects for colonization over the next two centuries hinged entirely on the newcomers’ capacity to comprehend this alien land. Five centuries before the fateful voyage of 1492, Norse explorers had colonized Greenland and Newfoundland, and by the time Columbus arrived in the Caribbean, fleets of Basque, Breton, and West Anglican vessels were fishing the North Atlantic Ocean almost within reach of the continent. These activities inspired a series of legends about Fortunate Isles, Elysian Fields, Ultima Thule, and Isles of the Blessed, igniting hopes for windfall profits and easy living in a land of plenty. This mix of apocryphal descriptions and factual understanding lured explorers to an environment far less forgiving than they imagined.3 Europeans gained their first concrete impressions of the northern coast in 1497 when Henry VII sent the Italian explorer John Cabot on a northerly voyage across the Atlantic. Cabot claimed possession of present-day Nova Sco- tia for England and returned with news of incredibly plentiful schools of cod broiling over the Grand Banks. In 1501 the Portuguese explorer Gaspar Corte- Real, making landfall perhaps in Newfoundland, recorded an “abundance of most luscious and varied fruits, and trees and pines of such measureless height and girth, that they would be too big as a mast for the largest ship that sails the sea.” At a time when Europe was poised between medieval fears of uncharted lands and the Enlightenment quest for knowledge, these discoveries produced a conflicting conceptual geography of astute commercial assessment, naive paradisiac expectations, and xenophobic foreboding. America was a land of copious foodstuffs and carefree people, but it was also a repository for all the dread of wild places that lurked in the premodern mind. In practical terms, however, the reports by early explorers highlighted the fishing possibilities on the Grand Banks, and by 1517, Breton, Norman, Basque, Spanish, and Portu- guese vessels were plying these productive waters.4 42 | chapter 2

The first clearly documented European visit to the region that would become known as New England occurred in 1524, when the Florentine noble- man Giovanni da Verrazano claimed the area for King Francis I of France. Verrazano had sailed west hoping to find a sea route to the Pacific above the Spanish Caribbean; he arrived on the coast of present-day North Carolina and cruised northward, stopping to barter and confer with coastal Indians. At Narragansett Bay he found the natives friendly and generous, “very like the manner of the ancients,” and landscapes “so beautiful that they defy description,” but in Maine the inhabitants were “barbarous” and the land crowded by a “very thick woods.”5 Poor terrain and inhospitable inhabitants aside, Verrazano did find something of value in these northern regions. At a time when Spanish ships were returning from Mexico with cargoes of looted treasure, Verrazano saw no evidence of gold and silver in Maine, but he provided an intriguing reference to the Penobscot Bay area, which his brother Girolamo marked as “Oranbega” on a map drawn in 1529. On subsequent maps the fabled settlement, now spelled Norumbega, grew into a fabulous city of gold and precious stones, akin to New Spain’s El Dorado. Although the origin of the name is obscure, it may have derived from the Latin spelling of Nuremberg, then a wealthy German city on the commercial route between Italy and central Europe. In a universe governed by laws of perfect equilibrium, such a correlation was not unusual: scholars believed that parts of the world sharing similar climates would advance along parallel lines. For example, Hernán Cortés regarded Tenochtit- lan as a primitive Venice, with its Mediterranean climate and canals, and perhaps northern mapmakers saw Norumbega as a New World Nuremberg, with its analogous conifer forests and rocky terrain. Whatever the source, Norum- bega was a story well worth further investigation. Inspired by such fantasies, mapmakers embellished their cartography with exotic and commercially useful plants, animals, and fabled northwest passages, leaving a record of high expectations for New World ventures.6 Despite the promise of riches, European interest in New England dimmed after Verrazano’s voyage. France established a colonial beachhead in 1534 when Jacques Cartier sailed up the St. Lawrence River and founded Montreal and Quebec, but the country’s thirst for empire was quenched in a series of desperate religious wars beginning in 1556. Although French fishermen persisted in the North Atlantic, the exploratory impulse passed to the English, lured westward by the prospect of pillaging Spanish treasure ships. Toward the end contact, colonialization, and war | 43

of the century, Spain’s naval strength was reduced by a series of wars and the destruction of its armada in 1588. Elizabeth I died in London in 1603, and her successor, James I, sought peace with Spain, bringing an end to the period of plunder on the Spanish Main. Forced to seek new channels of enterprise, English and French merchant-speculators launched an aggressive series of colonizing attempts focused on the Atlantic coast north of New Spain.7 Armed with a royal grant to the territory between the Delaware and St. Lawrence Rivers, the French merchant-explorer Sieur de Monts and the royal cartographer Samuel de Champlain arrived in the Bay of Fundy in 1604 and established a colony on a small island in a river they named St. Croix, on the present-day border between Maine and New Brunswick. Leaving most of the crew behind, the two men set out along the coast on a voyage that yielded Europe’s first reasonably accurate view of the people and resources of the region. The party was involved in an altercation with Indians in Massachu- setts, and although the incident ended peacefully, it confirmed the choice of an island location for the colony: “better the snows of bleak St. Croix than the arrows of a thousand painted savages.” Despite its military advantages, the location proved a disaster. By December, flowing ice had isolated the island from sources of fuel wood and game, and of the seventy-nine settlers, thirty-five died mostly of scurvy. In spring the party sailed across the Bay of Fundy and reestablished the colony at Port Royal, on the southern tip of Nova Scotia.8 While Champlain and de Monts were exploring the coast, English investors were preparing three expeditions to southern New England. The first was captained by Bartholomew Gosnold, who sailed in 1602 to Cape Cod, established a base in Buzzard’s Bay, and explored the Gulf of Maine. The account of the voyage, written by John Bereton, exemplifies the shift from chasing Euro- pean fantasies to assessing commercial prospects and colonizing possibilities. The crew, Bereton insisted, “pestered our ship so with Cod fish that we threw numbers of them overboard againe,” and from the Indians they obtained pelts of “very large and deep fur.” Sensing profits, Richard Hakluyt, the great pro- moter of English colonization, sent Martin Pring to Cape Cod in 1603. As with Gosnold, Pring’s initial encounter with Indians was friendly, but a subsequent “thievish” incident provoked a series of attacks and reprisals. Having determined that the natives were “given to treacherie,” he recommended against settlement on the more populated southern New England coast.9 The image of New England as a merchant’s paradise was driven home by George Weymouth, third in this series of English protocolonizing efforts. An 44 | chapter 2 experienced Devonshire seafarer, Weymouth made landfall in Maine in 1605 and began testing the prospects for colonization. With him was James Ros- ier, whose account of the voyage, published in 1605 as A True Relation of the voyage made this present year by Captaine George Waymouth . . . , emphasized once again the Eden-like qualities of the environment: abundant pasturelike land, islands carpeted with strawberries and roses, and fir trees flowing with turpentine. Weymouth found the Indians eager to trade and insisted that the expedition “us[ed] . . . them with as much kindness as we could,” but while away on a river exploration he grew suspicious. Anticipating betrayal, he kid- napped five Indians and took them back in England, where they could impress upon potential merchant backers the benefits of colonizing their homeland.10

Colonizing Visions European understanding of this remote and unfamiliar environment crystallized in the late 1500s when Richard Hakluyt the Elder, working with his cousin Richard Hakluyt the Younger, began systematically consulting the accumulated miscellanea of New World reports. The Hakluyts dismissed the idea of extorting gold from Indians and instead emphasized permanent working communities producing exotic commodities to exchange for English manufactured goods. Populating these colonies, the Hakluyts argued, would resolve England’s unemployment problem and challenge Catholic hegemony in the New World. They targeted the southern coast because these latitudes promised crops and goods not produced in England—silk, grapes, wine, and citrus, for example. This plan left the northern regions somewhat superfluous, but others, encouraged by Gosnold’s cargoes of furs, fish, and sassafras, remained focused on the North Atlantic shore.11 These expectations were based on an increasingly precise appraisal of commercial prospects, along with a certain naiveté about the challenges this harsh location presented to potential settlers. In 1606 James I gave the newly chartered Virginia Company monopoly rights to the Atlantic coast between the French settlements on the St. Law- rence River and the Spanish territory in New Spain. The subsidiary London Company gained control of the southern section, and the Plymouth Com- pany, headed by Lords Ferdinando Gorges and John Popham, was given land from the Delaware River to the Bay of Fundy. In May 1606 the Plymouth Company sent two ships across the Atlantic just four months after the London contact, colonialization, and war | 45

Company crews left for Jamestown. With Popham’s brother George and his nephew Raleigh Gilbert installed as president and lieutenant, the company sailed for the Sagadahoc, as the Kennebec region was known, and in mid-Au- gust members began building a fort. Winter arrived early, and the small band, starving and quarreling in their cold and dreary cabins, came to the conclusion that “all the other wynters would prove like the first.” George Popham and three others died, and when the supply ship returned in spring, Gilbert found that he had fallen heir to family lands in England. When he abandoned the colony, the rest followed, carrying with them an unreservedly negative impression of prospects for settling New England.12 In addition to Popham’s death and Gilbert’s withdrawal, there were other reasons for failure and disappointment. Gilbert, who conspired to wrest the territory from Gorges through a patent given to his father, Sir Humphrey Gil- bert, was less than able as a leader, and the colonists were selected with equal indifference to their character. They made no plans for subsistence beyond the supply ships, and Gorges had neither the wealth nor the inclination to support the project indefinitely. Above all, the Popham colony fell victim to Europe’s unrealistic understanding of the northern environment and its indigenous peoples. Since New England was in the same latitude as the Mediterranean, colonists expected a much balmier winter, and visions of Elysian Fields still lingered in their minds. Even worse, they remained naive and xenophobic about their prospective trading partners, considering the Indians “outcasts of creation” and potential slaves. In a spectacular example of failed diplomacy, a group of exasperated natives burned the storehouse and drove the English from the fort.13 A better understanding of the land awaited arrival of the intrepid John Smith, who returned to England from Virginia in 1609 and convinced Gorges, chief proprietor of North Virginia after John Popham’s death, to subsidize a whaling and trading voyage. Sailing to New England in March 1614, Smith found both the whales and the Indians uncooperative. Leaving a crew on the island of Monhegan to fish, he explored south to Cape Cod, sketching the region “from point to point, isle to isle, and harbor to harbor” and naming each prominent landform. His voyage yielded one of the most accurate maps of New England compiled in the Age of Exploration. On his return, Gorges gathered backing for another expedition, but problems with storms and pirates kept Smith from returning to America. While prisoner on a French man-of-war, he wrote a report he later published as Description of 46 | chapter 2

New-England (1616). As an experienced colonist, Smith realized the importance of New England’s resources, but he also understood the need to attract laborers to the area. Thus he made his case for colonization on two counts: creating a commercial empire and enticing a force of colonists to populate it. Smith’s plan epitomized the increasingly sophisticated understanding of New England’s environment at the end of the Age of Exploration. First, Smith rejected the dream of gold and focused instead on fish as the basis of empire—“however it may seem a mean and base commodity.” Second, he recommended permanent villages to replace the seasonal fishing trips out of West Country ports. It would appeal to colonists, he thought, to fish before their own doors and “every night sleep quietly ashore with good cheer and what fires you will.” The great obstacle to overseas empire in the sixteenth century was finding a source of labor. Thus, he advanced a third principle of northern colonization: distributing land to planters who would build an agricultural base for the new colony. This approach flew in the face of the Hakluyts’ idea that the New World would grow crops unavailable in old England, but Smith saw farming only as a means to a greater imperial end. Land had great appeal in the crowded island nation, and this resource the New World had in abundance. The promise of “sweet fruites of their owne labours” would provide the discipline that had been so absent in Virginia. A further incentive was the prospect of shifting at whim from occupation to occupation: there were plenty of fish in the gulf, close by lay great forests of valuable timber and game, the soils were productive, and the meadows lush. No single source of wealth beckoned, but this combination would enrich nation and individual alike. The lure of the possessive pronoun was the defining attraction to the New World: “What pleasure can be more than being tired with any occasion ashore, in . . . contriving their own grounds to the pleasure of their own minds, their fields, gardens, orchards, buildings, ships and other works, etc. to recreate themselves before their own doors in their own boats upon the sea, where man, woman and child, with a small hook and line, by angling may take divers sorts of excellent fish at their pleasures. And is it not pretty sport to pull up two pence, six pence, and twelve pence, as fast as you can haul . . . a line.” Colonists would pass their days moving from one job to the next, making sport of their many tasks while supporting family as well as empire. Smith thus came full circle to the idea of wealth without work, redefining the idea of a New England Eden. His contribution to settlement—the map, the vision, and the indomitable enthusiasm—was enormous.14 contact, colonialization, and war | 47

While Smith remained in England, West Country fishing parties established a foothold in the Gulf of Maine. As Gorges put it, “the coast doth abound with most convenient havens”—safety for the several hundred small Spanish, Portuguese, English, French, Basque, and Jamestown vessels that made up the bulk of the early New England fishing fleet.15 At first the crews landed temporarily to take on fresh water and careen their ships before carrying their catch across the Atlantic in barrels of brine. But by the early 1600s, merchants were experimenting with sun drying salted cod on racks at shore installations. Dry curing used less salt and yielded a more compact and dura- ble cargo, and the land-based fishermen found it convenient to overwinter in Maine rather than endure the month-long back trip to Europe. In late winter, when cod moved inshore to spawn, they could prepare a cargo that would arrive in Catholic Europe in time for Lent. In 1620 Gorges and other Plymouth noblemen-merchants organized the Council for New England, and under these auspices, dozens of proprietors, planters, fishermen, and traders made their home on the Maine coast. These inhabitants were not the improvement-minded pioneers John Smith envisioned but mostly boisterous young West Anglican seamen, fishermen, artisans, and yeomen, with a few female servants among them. Gorges reported them “running amok among New England’s shores behaving worse than the very savages,” and a Royal Commission sent to America in the early 1660s concluded that “some here are of the opinion that as many men share a woman as they do a boat.” The work contracts were difficult to enforce, and the abundance of free land and fish gave servants license to default and flee their obligations. In addition, fish populations fluctuated unpredictably, and by the 1640s fishermen from the Massachusetts Bay Colony were encroaching on the Maine fishing stations. Since the stations were built on contested land, workers routinely destroyed them at the end of each season and rebuilt them the following spring, a practice that quickly deforested the islands and peninsulas. When timber or bait fish were exhausted or other environmental problems disrupted operations, merchants simply cut off the flow of supplies, and the stations blinked out of existence. By the mid-1630s, fish were already growing scarce on some banks, forcing crews on extended sea journeys that brought great danger from squalls or cold snaps. Severe winters, isolation, wolves, and pirates kept the Maine coast on the margins of settlement through the 1620s and 1630s, clouding the vision John Smith set out for the New England coast.16 48 | chapter 2

Death and Repopulation on the New England Coast For Indians, the sporadic trade contacts with Europeans were not deeply troubling, yet the shadow of disaster hung over them in the form of unfamiliar pathogens. Native peoples lacked exposure to the infections that Europeans had weathered over the centuries in crowded urban conditions and the company of livestock, and they were unprepared for the fast-spreading diseases introduced from the eastern side of the Atlantic in the early seventeenth century. Europe had lost one-third of its population to the Black Death, an import from Asia in the mid-1300s, but this pandemic paled by comparison to the plagues that Europeans carried to the New World. In 1616–17, coastal New England suffered an outbreak of smallpox or bubonic or pneumonic plague, and a similar disease struck the Connecticut Valley in 1633. These epidemics occurred in cycles, reappearing as quickly as a new disease-free generation came of age, and traditional native remedies— sweat lodges, fasting, and emetic herbals—only worsened the effects of these virulent fevers. Estimates suggest that between 75 and 90 percent of coastal inhabitants died, and deaths among starving and abandoned survivors, or from secondary infections, added to the toll. Not only was the mortality rate high, but the suffering was terrible. William Bradford reported that “they fall into a lamentable condition, as they lie on their hard mats, the pox breaking and . . . and running one into another, their skin cleaving (by reason thereof) to the mats they lie on. When they turn them[selves] a whole side will flea off at once, as it were, and they will be all one gore of blood, and then being very sore, what with cold and other distempers, they die like rotten sheep.”17 The plagues were a defining moment in the new biracial society taking shape in New England. The loss of nearly an entire generation wiped out the memory of hunting skills, crafts, and culture, and the lack of these traditional practices deepened the natives’ dependence on European goods even as the outbreaks heightened their fear of the English. With indigenous populations declining precipitously, many colonizers assumed rights to thousands of acres of cleared land; had it not been for the diseases, New England’s native cultures might have defended themselves against this encroachment or reached a more favorable accommodation with their new neighbors. Debilitated, and with their belief structures and political systems in ruins, most were more or less forced to make the best of whatever terms the Europeans offered. Amid this undercurrent of interracial resentment, the years after John contact, colonialization, and war | 49

Smith’s voyage brought colonization along three separate beachheads: the first in the English fishing and fur-trading centers on the Gulf of Maine; the second, far more evanescent, growing out of French Acadia, centered on the lower Penobscot River and Bay of Fundy; and the third at Plymouth, with the arrival of the Pilgrims in 1620. TheMayflower left England in September that year bound for the southern coast of North America, but a combination of storms, bad navigation, and perhaps a desire to separate themselves from Jamestown took the Pilgrims and their cotravelers to Cape Cod. Worried that the inhabitants might be “readier to fill their sides full of arrows than otherwise,” they cast about for a defensible harbor, a goal that took them on a six- week search up and down the Cape, battling against headwinds and caught in the teeth of “cruel and fierce storms.” They chanced upon several caches of Indian seed corn and tools, and these they “brought away, proposing to give [the owners] . . . full satisfaction when they should meet with any of them.”18 Having rifled the local Indians’ maize supplies, they found encounters with the natives not altogether pleasant, a fact that boded ill for the coming winter. In mid-December, with supplies running low and sickness rampant, the Pilgrims chose a location that John Smith had earlier named Plymouth. Lack- ing good housing or proper diet, fifty-one of the company died during the winter, leaving only fifty alive and fewer than a dozen capable of caring for them. In March, Samoset, a member of the Abenaki from the Gulf of Maine who was visiting the Wampanoag sachem Massasoit, came “boldly amongst them and spoke to them in broken English” asking for beer. Samoset helped negotiate a trade treaty with Massasoit that became an important source of support during that first discouraging year. Other religious dissidents settled Cape Ann and Salem in 1624–29, and after confirming a patent to Massachu- setts Bay, John Winthrop and a thousand settlers arrived in 1630. Grouping their huts and dugouts into nine or ten villages around Boston Harbor, the Puritans prepared the way for the “Great Migration,” the arrival of 20,000 colonists from southern England during the next decade.19 In Acadia, French colonists followed up on de Monts’s claims by reestablishing a fur-trading post at Port Royal in 1610. Champlain’s subsequent voyages up the St. Lawrence shifted French interest northward, and in 1613 the first Jesuit missionaries, Pierre Biard and Ennemond Massé, sailed south from Port Royal to the Kennebec River, surveying the prospects for a “counterfort” to close off English access to the Gulf of Maine. They settled on Mount Desert Island, but within a few weeks Captain Samuel Argall arrived from Jamestown 50 | chapter 2 with guns blazing and scattered the French colonists. The 1632 Treaty of Saint- Germain-en-Laye transferred the eastern portion of the Gulf of Maine to France, and the French merchant Charles d’Aulnay built a small stone fort at Pentagoet, near the mouth of the Penobscot River. In 1654 the territory again fell under English control, and the fort at Pentagoet was destroyed in 1674, after which the trading concession fell to Jean Vincent de St.-Castin, a military officer, who moved to a nearby Indian village and married the sachem’s daughter. For nearly a century, control over the Penobscot region remained in dispute while Abenaki trappers negotiated these rivalries to their advantage.20

The Fur-Trading Frontier As Francis Jennings pointed out several decades ago, European colonists had “neither the technology nor the social organization . . . to maintain . . . outpost colonies thousands of miles from home.” Thus their survival depended on those who prepared the land for them. They found thousands of prime growing acreage cleared of forests, and they compensated for their unfamiliarity with the surroundings by learning from their indigenous neighbors how to grow crops, hunt, and make canoes, snowshoes, traps, and shelters, use trails and rivers to reach the interior, and prepare herbal cures. The most important of these gifts was the fur trade. Pilgrims and Puritans came to the New World hoping to renew their covenant with God, but they well understood that achieving this lofty aim depended on finding a marketable commodity that would allow them to pay off their debts to English backers. Friendly contacts with the Wampanoags and Narragansetts provided access to the fur trade, and in 1625 the hard-pressed Plymouth Colony secured a monopoly on land and trade along the Kennebec River, in Abenaki territory, and established a post at present-day Augusta. By 1631 they operated at least five truck houses from Narragansett Bay to the Machias River in eastern Maine.21 The fur trade began in the 1500s as a casual byproduct of North Atlantic fishing and whaling, and by the early 1600s it was an important part of the colonial economy. Where French merchants focused narrowly by extending deep into the St. Lawrence and Great Lakes drainages, their New England counterparts, situated on much smaller watersheds, were forced to exploit other facets of the environment. Operating out of Boston or England, merchants hired settlers to clear fields, build sawmills, cut marsh hay, and split white oak into pipe staves contact, colonialization, and war | 51

and ships’ timbers; by midcentury, fur-trading companies were overseeing a diversified frontier economy that exported furs, lumber, grains, meal, flour, fish, livestock, and small ships. While France’s empire stretched into the limitless expanses of forest north of Montreal and west to the Mississippi, English merchants developed a more geographically focused but economically diverse trading base in New England. French colonists, dependent on good trading relations, established lasting friendships with native people, but the English had less need for the fur trade. Indians in New England found themselves in an opposite situation, as plagues, cultural disruption, territorial encroachment, and spiritual reorientation robbed them of their traditional technologies.22 For the Indians, trading was an essential part of life, and as Roger Wil- liams noted, they were “marvailous subtle in their bargaines.” For a time, they enjoyed an enviable position in negotiating between the Dutch on Long Island, the French in the Penobscot region, and the English in Massachusetts, and as long as these settlers remained below the head of tide, the Indians were free to pursue their activities upriver. Trading was not without tensions, however. With limited cultural understanding of European commercial ethics, Indians had no way of assessing traders’ motives. William Leavett for example, exchanged with native groups in Casco Bay on friendly terms in 1623–24 and left amid expressions of regret from the sachems. He was replaced by the unprincipled Walter Bagnall, who so poisoned this relationship that Indians murdered him in 1631. Erratic behavior confused native peoples, and instances of swindling, cheating, kidnapping, and killing eroded trade relations.23 These tensions grew sharper over time. To make the most of their limited trading area, English traders moved deeper into Indian trapping territory, leap-frogging competitors and native middlemen to intercept the trade canoes coming downriver. In 1636 William Pynchon founded Springfield, on the Connecticut River, at Enfield Falls. Secure as the river’s northernmost trader, Pynchon bought land from native villagers and used clever business tactics to monopolize the trade, which made him one of wealthiest men in New England. Although Pynchon remained on good terms with his clients, others were less principled. And because colonial administrators exerted little influence along this rapidly moving frontier, traders were free to cheat, sell contra- band liquor and arms, trade with the French in Acadia, and incite one native group against another. To make matters worse, New England Indians found themselves subject to a series of raids from the traditional middleman-traders they displaced: first the Mi’kmaq from the Bay of Fundy and, later, the 52 | chapter 2

Mohawk from the upper Hudson Valley. Rumors of war spread through the tiny frontier settlements.24

The Pequot War A major turning point in colonial history, the Pequot War nearly exterminated one of the most powerful Indian groups in New England and created a vacuum that led to a second conflict, known as King Philip’s War, in 1675. Before the first conflict, the Pequot inhabited fifteen villages centered on the Mystic River in Connecticut. The Pilgrims who settled nearby in 1620 were acutely aware of Spanish colonizers’ barbarous abuse of native peoples in the Caribbean and Central America and were determined to chart a new course in Euro-Indian relations. The area had recently been ravaged by the plague, reducing competition for arable land; in the political flux that followed, local Indian leaders eagerly sought English allies.25 Yet despite these promising beginnings, the lower Connecticut Valley quickly became a contested region, with Pequot, Mohegan, Narragansett, Niantic, Dutch, Pilgrim, and Puritan jousting for land and furs. A round of confrontations and reprisals resulted in the death of the Englishman John Stone at the hands of the Pequot, who then sought an English alliance in fighting off Dutch traders. Puritans, who had their own ambitions in the valley, called for the delivery of Stone’s killers and a tribute in wampum that suggested subjugation more than alliance. The Pequot rejected the demand but allowed migrants from Boston to settle on the river. About the same time, the merchant-preacher Roger Williams, expelled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony, purchased land from the Narragansett sachems and relocated to the head of Narragansett Bay. His Providence colony became a haven for religious dissidents, much to the despair of Puritan leaders, and the four-way quarrel between Massachusetts, Plymouth, Connecticut, and Providence exerted enormous pressure on local Indians. In 1633 a severe smallpox epidemic struck the region, and in 1636, with the tribes still in disarray, Plymouth migrants built Fort Saybrook, at the mouth of the Connecticut, and Massachusetts Bay migrants settled upriver. At this juncture, settlers received word from a group of Mohegans headed by the sachem Uncas that his rivals the Pequot were preparing for war. Uncas may have fabricated the rumor, but colonists were in a frame of mind to take him seriously: the Pequot had made no move to surrender Stone’s killers, and an uprising by a different Algonquian group in Virginia in 1622 had exacted a heavy toll among English settlers.26 In contact, colonialization, and war | 53

August 1636, the former Massachusetts Bay Colony governor John Endicott organized a punitive raid, looting Pequot villages and once again demanding Stone’s killers along with a huge tribute in wampum. Endicott’s senseless tac- tic left the Connecticut River settlers, mostly from Plymouth, vulnerable to Pequot reprisal. On April 23, 1637, a group of their warriors raided the settlements, providing the English with an excuse to launch a full-scale war. On May 26 a Puritan militia and its Mohegan allies surrounded the palisaded Pequot village on the Mystic River and set it afire, shooting or burning 300 to 600 inhabitants, mostly women, children, and older men. Historians have debated the motives behind the massacre, attributing them to fear of Pequot forces camped only five miles away or the inexperience of the colonial troops. Regardless, the slaughter seems by all accounts unequal to the threat at hand. It shocked the Puritans’ native allies, whose own rules of war prescribed low-casualty conflicts, hit-and-run tactics, and the taking of live captives. Some historians see the act as a form of genocide: Pequot survivors were parceled out as slaves among the victors, and for all practical purposes the tribe was exterminated. Bay magistrates attributed the war to the deaths of Stone and fellow trader John Odham, but in reality, it was fought over land and furs. Dutch and Pilgrim traders had purchased land from the Pequots, and Massachusetts leaders hoped to prevent further concessions in order to secure the Connecticut River as their exclusive possession. In broader terms, the war marked the end of an opportunity for two peoples to live together in peace. In time, coercion and subordination replaced ties of economic interdependence as Indian land and labor were subsumed into the colonial economy.27 For the span of a generation, however, New England’s two dissimilar societies continued to share the land, living in distinct communities and under separate governments. Where an older generation of historians considered the wars inevitable, a consequence of differences in the way settlers and Indians used their surroundings, recent historians have qualified the idea that these or any such armed conflicts derive from vast unstoppable forces. Individuals, they maintain, must be held accountable for the choices that lead to fighting. In fact, subsequent Anglo-Indian hostilities resulted from a combination of irreconcilable differences and individual choices. War was not inevitable, but diverging views of nature and incompatible ways of using it made bad decision-making all the more portentous. Cultural attitudes left the English poorly prepared to avert these wars. Puri- tan leaders sometimes agonized over the moral implications of the plagues 54 | chapter 2 and the encroachments that destroyed native society, but they justified these developments by pointing to the Indians’ “savage” nature, making little distinction between the people and the wilderness they inhabited. Thus colonists were seldom willing to accord Indians the legal considerations and property rights that they were demanding from the English crown or to accept the sincerity of their native diplomatic counterparts. Only a few decades earlier, English adventurers had invaded Ireland, burning crops and villages, slaugh- tering families, and inflicting a horrendous death toll. They justified these atrocities by arguing that terror was necessary to reform a barbarous and pagan people. When English colonizers arrived in America, they drew similar conclusions to justify occupation of the New World. Paranoia, a providen- tial worldview, assumptions of racial superiority, and an inability to see native grievances as legitimate lay at the root of the Indian-Anglo conflicts.28 These attitudes were steeped in Puritans’ unfamiliarity with the natural environment. While they settled in, Puritan leaders tried desperately to comprehend the New World landscape and their place in it, and the results were conflicted. An abundance of trees, fish, animals, and grass suggested divine benediction, but the seemingly endless forests to the west bewildered them. Beyond the “sea-border,” the landscape dissolved into a “strange labyrinth of unbeaten bushy wayes,” as William Wood described it.29 As the practice of forest burning declined, brush and trees closed in on the Puritan settlements, and wolves and bears took advantage of a feast of sheep, swine, and cattle. Wilderness also threatened their identity as Christians. English experience with the highlanders of the British Isles—Welsh, Scots, and Irish—had taught them to think of those living on marginal lands as barbarous, and the idea that colonizers could succumb similarly to a primitive environment was reinforced by their Calvinist faith in original sin as well as their Enlightenment belief in environmental determinism. Prior colonial occupations in Ireland, New Spain, Bermuda, and Jamestown demonstrated just how vulnerable Europeans were to what William Bradford called the “seductive liberty” of the frontier. When the English trader Thomas Morton established a post at Merry Mount in 1624 and enjoyed an unseemly affinity with native inhabitants, Puritan reaction was quick and severe, as it was to a series of buggery incidents in the 1630s. It was this understanding that made the frontier seem, in Michael Wigglesworth’s well-known verse, “A waste and howling wilderness, / Where none inhabited / But hellish fiends, and brutish men.” Puritans’ fear of spiritual declension was inseparable from their fear of the environment, contact, colonialization, and war | 55

and Indians were often the victims of this self-loathing.30 As settlers moved up the Connecticut River valley in the 1640s, Massachusetts, Plymouth, Con- necticut, and New Haven formed the New England Confederation, partly to wrest more land from the Indians but also to control their own increasingly dispersed settler society.

An Interlude of Peace Native groups living along the coast—the Mohegan, Narragan- sett, Eastern Niantic, and Wampanoag—stayed in close contact with their English cohabitants, trading fish, wild game, pork, corn, and furs with the white settlements, mediating with tribes further inland, and hiring themselves out as farmhands, guides, haulers, cattle drovers, or servants. Although proximity to the aggressive Puritan settlements was unsettling, they profited from these new forms of employment and from sales of land-use rights and quit claims. There was, James Drake claims, “no rigid frontier separating the sixty thousand English from the eighteen thousand Indians living in New England.” This accommodation unraveled because of the choices individuals made, but the choices reflect an underlying competition over two critical features of the New England environment: arable land and furs.31 Despite their growing frustration with the fur trade, native trappers found themselves increasingly entangled in a transatlantic commercial system that altered their traditional interaction with nature. This difficulty was most -evi dent in the market for beaver skins.32 Beavers helped sustain the network of ponds and bogs that lay along New England’s innumerable streams and rivers, building dozens of dams on a single watercourse. Where the dams appeared, wetlands spread out behind them and sprang to life. Frogs and fish fed on insect larvae and became prey for mink and raccoon, moose grazed on the water lilies, and rabbits and other small mammals took advantage of the brush that regrew when beavers cut trees on the banks. The wetlands clarified the water downstream, enhancing fish spawning areas, while bacteria nurtured in the warm and quiet waters provided a foundation for the food chain. When beaver ponds drained, they left behind lush meadows that attracted a variety of mammals and birds. After virtually exterminating the beaver in New England, native trappers confronted not only a shortage of commodities but a diminished ecosystem as well.33 Why these astute game managers carried the hunting of this commodity to 56 | chapter 2 such extremes has perplexed historians for decades. The fur trade was driven by an urban, profit-based culture that patently ignored the environmental consequences of its economic activity. By contrast, the traditional Indian ethic of reciprocity and restraint, formulated over hundreds if not thousands of years of interaction with nature, accorded animals a great deal of respect. Critical building blocks in the Indian spiritual edifice, animals were thought to form deities, assume human shape, and serve as family guardians. Why were some native people so ready to dismiss this bond in order to acquire European goods? Some historians argue that basic acquisitive instincts blinded hunters to the destructive potential in their activity. Indians saw European technology as superior to their own and coveted the status muskets, steel tools, and other Euro- pean commodities brought in village society; with a seemingly inexhaustible market at hand, they scoured the countryside of fur-bearing animals. However, this claim assumes a classic capitalist impulse that in the seventeenth century was far from universal, even in Europe. Another explanation, offered by Calvin Martin in the early 1980s, centers on religious motives. Native peoples, Martin claims, attributed the devastating plagues of 1616–17 to spiteful animal spirits who forsook the covenant of mutual respect with their human brothers and sis- ters, and they retaliated through the fur trade. This so-called holy war theory is hotly disputed, but it does suggest a connection between religion, the fur trade, and the plagues.34 The plagues did indeed challenge the spiritual basis of Indian society. Missionaries and Catholic priests entered villages in the midst of sickness and ministered to the afflicted, performed last rites on the dying, and easily converted the survivors. Proselytes retained many of their original beliefs, but the experience would certainly have left them more receptive to exploiting animals. The epidemics also spread social and political havoc, diminishing village leadership and encouraging politically ambitious survivors to reformulate local leadership structures on the basis of status won by the acquisition of trade goods or by brokering trade with other tribes. In the wake of the devastation, as Carolyn Merchant notes, Indians fetishized trade goods rather than animals. The plagues also disrupted oral transmission of established hunting and gathering techniques. With intertribal alliances in disarray and competition for middleman status growing fierce, those groups equipped with European weapons prevailed over their more traditional neighbors, making the trade in muskets, powder, and shot a matter of military necessity. Cultural devastation also left Indians vulnerable to alcoholism, which further increased their dependency on fur trading.35 Lastly, the exchange of wampum—strings of worked shell beads contact, colonialization, and war | 57

produced by Indian communities on Long Island Sound—injected a layer of compulsion into the fur trade. Given the shortage of coin in the colonies, in 1637 wampum was declared legal tender, and Puritan magistrates, driven by an acute imbalance of payments to England, began demanding massive amounts of the currency as payment for reparations or fines. The Narragansett, the stron- gest native group in southern New England after the Pequot War, became the focus of this extortion.36 Along with furs, land was a crucial factor in Indian–Anglo relations. Indians formed compact communities spaced approximately twenty-five miles apart along the rivers, with each containing between 150 and 500 villagers. Colonial towns were similar in size and required comparable amounts of farmland, but English settlements were growing rapidly, and every town that fissured into two required another cycle of purchase or dispossession. Each society viewed this land in profoundly different ways. Indians saw it as a spiritual as well as physical place, an inheritance from ancestors held in trust for those who followed. Conveyance of use rights to the resources was a traditional diplomatic device, an act of friendship that allowed others to share this sacred commu- nion. English settlers saw land in purely instrumental terms, and although they negotiated with Indians before taking it, they justified their incursions based on natural rights to any part of the earth that others had not “possessed” or “improved.” These words had specific meaning in the language of seventeenth-century colonialism. Indians had no permanent farms, no deeds, no fences to bound their fields, and no visible enhancements to mark their progress. In addition, males, the primary property owners in English society, were not key players in Indian agriculture. New England, as John Winthrop famously argued, was a vacuum domicilium, legally empty because it had not been made productive by methods recognized under English law. Indians could possess “only a natural right to so much land as they had or could improve,” and the rest, he insisted, “lay open to any that could and would improve it.” In William Cronon’s memorable phrase, a “people who loved property little had been overwhelmed by a people who loved it much.”37 These differences were not immediately apparent. Indians received little compensation in their land conveyances but retained rights to hunt, fish, and gather, and they saw these transactions in symbolic as much as economic terms. The epidemics had reduced their need for land, and as middlemen in the fur trade with Indians farther north and west, they had become powerful players in the colonial economy. For a time, this situation left Puritans 58 | chapter 2 sensitive to injustices in their expansion up the Connecticut Valley, but pressures on the land were increasing. The stresses first became evident in the buffers between Indian and English villages. The survival of both societies depended on the unclaimed forests and marshlands, but over time the changes wrought by colonists undermined the usefulness of these natural features to Indians. Mill dams blocked fish migrations, foraging livestock became ensnared in traps intended for wild creatures, hogs dug into buried caches, and cattle ate the marsh grasses, willow shoots, and reeds that women needed for mats, baskets, and housing. As long as the fur trade remained mutually beneficial, colonial courts were willing to look after Indian interests; they taxed settlers to build fences, compensated Indians for crop destruction, and abrogated the more abusive land sales. But by the 1650s, local beaver and otter were nearly extinct, and European demand for furs was declining. When trade began to deteriorate, Puritan leaders’ desire for land eclipsed their need for good relations. In addition, native populations were rebounding after the smallpox ravages of 1633–34, and Mohawk raids into northern New England produced a steady flow of refugees into the Connecti- cut Valley. Competition for land was intensifying.38 After 1650 the fur-trapping frontier moved northward into the St. Lawrence River valley. The Iroquois Confederacy, its trapping territories exhausted, launched a series of brutal raids on the Huron and Neutral Indians along the eastern Great Lakes. The Mohawk, although also members of the confederacy, were on good terms with New England Algonquians, but as the trade that bound them together dissolved, old Iroquois–Algonquian animosities resurfaced. The Mohawks suffered greatly during the 1633 plagues and began engag- ing in raids along the upper Connecticut River and in Maine, seeking captives to replenish their population. The result was a series of violent clashes—perhaps the most brutal in North American history—known as the Beaver Wars, which drew in native groups from Cape Breton Island to the Chesapeake and as far west as the Great Lakes. In response to the Mohawk raids, the Wampa- noag and Narragansett formed closer alliances not only with the English but also with the Abenaki to the north, who were by this time firmly allied to the French in that nation’s war against the Iroquois.39 The Mohawk raids left hunters even more dependent on English traders at a time when the declining value of furs and the rising value of land made Indians seem to the English more like competitors than allies. Between 1650 and 1675, towns were appearing in New England at the rate of one a year, and contact, colonialization, and war | 59

when Indians offered their remaining lands as collateral for credit and supplies, town leaders or merchants were quick to seize them. The Narragansett and Wampanoag tolerated English incursions as a matter of political realism, but Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island conspired against one or another of the Indians to gain parcels. Intrigue, as Francis Jennings summarized, “was everywhere.”40

King Philip’s War During the 1660s the struggle over land in the Connecticut–Nar- ragansett Bay region reached new levels of intensity. The Wampanoag leader Massasoit promised to convey no land without Plymouth’s consent, but after his death in 1661 his son Wamsutta sold parcels to Rhode Island settlers. Plym- outh magistrates sent a militia to harass Wamsutta, who died shortly after, but his brother Metacom, also called Philip, sold additional land to Rhode Island, as did the Narragansett sachem Miantonomo. To secure a claim to the territory, in 1667 Plymouth established the town of Swansea in Philip’s homeland. In January 1675 a native informer was killed under mysterious conditions, and the colonial court convicted and hanged three Indians for this crime, despite protestations of innocence. Two weeks later, on June 24, King Philip’s Wampa- noags attacked Swansea, and the Narragansetts, Nipmucs, and a number of Praying Indians and Connecticut River Indians were drawn into the vortex.41 Lacking coordination, Philip’s forces missed an opportunity to strike the vulnerable English settlements and instead withdrew to a stockade deep in a seemingly impassible swamp to wait out the storm. From there, Philip’s soldiers employed a raid-and-retreat strategy, destroying houses and crops while English residents huddled in their fortified town centers. Colonial troops were decidedly ill at ease in the closed-in woods, which the Puritan historian Wil- liam Hubbard likened to “fighting with a wild Beast in his own Den.” Still, they were better coordinated and, with the coastal communities secure, were able to outlast their enemies. Their success was due less to strength of arms than to the support of Indian allies and a sustained willingness to fight. Disease and food shortages sapped Metacom’s strength, and within a year colonists had brought the hostilities to a bloody conclusion.42 When King Philip’s War broke out in southern New England in summer 1675, the northern frontier in Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire, home to some 5,000 settlers, quickly became involved. Here native hunter-gatherers 60 | chapter 2 were more mobile and less vulnerable, and the environment was more foreign to English militia. Given the centrifugal forces generated by the fish, fur, and timber economies, northern villages and farms were scattered and harder to defend. Proximity to French Acadia and the St. Lawrence settlements added to these difficulties, as did the fact that native allies of the English were unavailable in the north. Perhaps 20,000 strong before contact, the Abenaki who inhabited this frontier region were caught between two belligerent European nations. English aggressiveness forced them in the direction of an alliance with the French, but villages often split into pro-English and pro-French factions in the search for a middle ground between the colonial powers. The Abenaki were drawn into the war by Philip’s emissaries and English diplomatic arrogance, but in this area, too, local tensions over land and furs fueled the firestorm. Suspecting conspiracies, Massachusetts leaders demanded that northern Indians submit their weapons as a show of friendship; those who refused inflamed English suspicions, while those who complied found themselves in dire straits during the winter hunting season. French traders gladly stepped in with guns and ammunition. In spring the General Court offered a reward for Indian scalps—those of men, women, and children—south of the Piscataqua River, and no doubt bounty collectors were less than discriminating. War became a self-fulfilling prophecy.43 In the course of five weeks in summer 1676, native raiders destroyed the English settlements east of Casco Bay, and similar raids drove back settlement on the Connecticut River. The Abenaki staged their military movements in northern Vermont out of a large fortified village on the Missisquoi River; however, the Pequot War had taught them that palisaded villages could be death- traps, and they resolved to stay mobile and use the land to their advantage. The forest environment gave them almost unlimited cover, and as a result they retained a hold on northern New England long after Indian power had been broken elsewhere. In September, Major Richard Waldron invited 400 Indians to a conference at Dover, New Hampshire, and used the occasion to enslave about 200 of them; in February he killed eight more peace-seeking Indians at Pemaquid. During the tense negotiations that followed, English officials demanded that Indians accept full blame for the war and join the English in driving out remaining combatants. These one-sided terms ensured repudia- tion, and Massachusetts further undercut reconciliation efforts by mistreat- ing Indian prisoners. In 1678 Governor Joseph Dudley of Massachusetts sent representatives to negotiate the Treaty of Casco, finally bringing peace to the contact, colonialization, and war | 61

region. According to the terms, the Abenaki recognized English property rights, but Massachusetts acquiesced to Indian sovereignty over Maine, sym- bolized by an annual quit-rent levied for every English family.44 Although the war lasted only two years in Massachusetts and three in Maine, its impact was significant. Deerfield lost nearly half its adult males during a September 1675 raid, and settlers across New England abandoned about a third of the towns. The war was even more disastrous for the Indians. Some 60 to 80 percent of Philip’s supporters were killed, enslaved, or forced to flee to sanctuary missions along the St. Lawrence River. Puritan leaders removed about half the remaining Indians in southern New England and seized their lands. Refugees formed new multitribal communities in the upper Connecticut, Kennebec, and Penobscot River valleys. King Philip’s War further clouded the Puritan view of nature in New England. Swamps and thickets provided hiding places for Indian troops, and underbrush near colonial villages facilitated the raid-and-retreat tactics that native peoples used so effectively. According to Increase Mather, when English militia “went in that hideoous place, if they did but see a Brush stir, would fire presently, whereby it is verily feared they did sometimes unhappily shoot Men instead of Indians.” Puritan writers demonized both the Indians and the wilderness, and fear that frontier living corrupted English settlers resurfaced. In short, the war gave “a frenzied urgency,” as Alan Heimart states, “to conquering the wilderness” as a fulfillment of Puritan religious destiny.45

Later Wars In the century that followed, a series of five more conflicts, four of them the result of European rivalries, ripped the fabric of English, French, and Indian societies. Native fighters operated on familiar terrain and inflicted great injury on the English, but as William Leavenworth points out, they “lost the battle on the demographic front”: English settlement simply engulfed the native populations. King William’s War, begun in 1689, was the first of four European wars between France and England that spread across the Atlantic. The Comte de Frontenac, the aggressive governor general of New France, launched a campaign to conquer all of North America and sent large forces of French and Algonquian Indians into New York, New Hampshire, and Maine. France and England ended the war in 1697, and in 1699 the Wabanaki sachems agreed to 62 | chapter 2 a treaty that left the territory east of the Kennebec under Abenaki and French control. In 1698 Fr. Sebastien Rale, a Jesuit missionary, built a mission at Nor- ridgewock, on the upper Kennebec, along a principal water route linking New France and coastal New England; to the east, the French trader Baron de St.-Castin lived with his family in an Indian village near the mouth of the Penobscot. These two outposts defined the boundary of New France. In southern New England, settlers returned to the frontier and took up a quasimilitary life near garrison houses, but farther east, forests reclaimed the English fields, houses and mills rotted into the ground, and beaver returned to the streams and fish to the rivers.46 By 1701 France and England were engaged in what came to be known in America as Queen Anne’s War, and in August 1703 an expedition of 500 French and Mi’kmaq Indians devastated the remaining towns along the southern Maine coast. In winter 1703–4, Deerfield lost between 40 and 50 settlers, and another 109 were carried off as captives. In 1713 France signed the Treaty of Utrecht, surrendering Hudson Bay, Newfoundland, and Acadia to the English, and with the cessation of hostilities in Europe, peace came quickly to New England. Again, Indian military successes were significant, and native groups remained in control of the headwaters of the new England rivers.47 Dummer’s War, fought between 1721 and 1727, was an undeclared conflict named after William Dummer, acting governor of Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Alternatively known as Gray Lock’s War, after a powerful Mis- sisquoi leader, it was unconnected with events in Europe. With Gray Lock’s Abenaki warriors centered at Missisquoi and the English militia at the opposite end of the upper Connecticut Valley, the war spread eastward to Maine, where the Muscongus Company was pushing English settlement beyond the Ken- nebec to the St. Georges River. In August 1725, Colonel Thomas Westbrook and his Indian allies destroyed the village at Norridgewock, killing as many as 100 natives along with Father Rale. This victory shifted the focus of Indian resistance eastward to the Penobscot and demonstrated once again what the English could accomplish if they succeeded in trapping Indians in their villages. Despite these dramatic events, the most effective strategy left to the English was a systematic campaign of ecological warfare. Settlers extended nets across the rivers to block fish migrations, drove off game, and allowed cattle to tram- ple Indian maize. “Willful disregard for Indian complaints [about cattle] may be seen less as evidence of negligence than as a deliberate strategy for land acquisition,” writes Virginia DeJohn Anderson in Creatures of Empire. contact, colonialization, and war | 63

Controlling the lower river valleys, militia were able to disrupt Wabanaki hunting, gathering, and fishing activities at will, forcing the Indians to disperse in family bands into the interior, move eastward, or leave for the Jesuit missions on the St. Lawrence.48 Abenaki leaders ratified a treaty with Massachusetts in summer 1727, agree- ing to the existing settlements on the St. Georges River with assurance that the English would settle no farther upriver or eastward. Militia searched the woods for Gray Lock, but the Abenaki warrior slipped away, bringing an end to the conflict in Vermont. English concessions in the face of the Muscongus Company’s powerful general Samuel Waldo cost Governor Jonathan Belcher his post, but the latter achieved a generation of calm after Dummer’s War, despite ongoing tensions. Hostilities resumed in the colonies in 1744 during the War of the Austrian Succession (King George’s War) but centered on theaters north and west of New England, culminating in the successful Yankee siege of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island in 1745. Vermont remained largely under Abenaki control during the war, as did the interior regions of Maine. The European war ended in 1748, and the Treaty of Falmouth concluded the local war in October 1749.49 England and France once again went to war in 1754, precipitating the sixth and final Anglo-Abenaki war, known locally as the Seven Years’ or French and Indian War. New England governor William Shirley demanded that the Abenaki take up arms against the French, and Governor Duquesne demanded the same be done against the English. Caught in an untenable situation, the Indians withdrew to the upper watersheds or to the villages on the St. John and St. Croix Rivers, powerless as colonial governments constructed a series of forts on the lower rivers to control military movements between Canada and the coast. Robert Rogers, leading a band of rangers and Indian allies, kept the Western Abenaki on the defensive, although he failed to reach the stronghold at Missisquoi. With the tide turning against the French in Europe, English forces focused on the French fortifications along the St. Lawrence and Ohio Rivers and the Great Lakes, and in May 1759 Massachusetts governor Thomas Pownall led a force of 400 up the Penobscot River to lay claim to that region. His troops built Fort Pownall, near the mouth of the river, signaling the beginning of a substantial English migration into eastern Maine; later that year, English forces defeated the French at Quebec, ending the long struggle for control of North America. Over the next few years, Abenaki cautiously reoccupied their tribal grounds on the upper Connecticut, Saco, Kennebec, 64 | chapter 2 and Penobscot Rivers, returning as much as possible to a traditional existence among their English neighbors.50

Cultural Persistence For New England natives, a people whose very existence depended on an intimate connection with nature, dispossession brought difficult times. By the end of the eighteenth century, those in southern New England had been confined to reservations, subject to intense pressures to cede even these small relics of a once-vast homeland. Some postwar land grabs were egregious in scale—the Indian agent Samuel Gookin’s theft of 1,700 acres in Massachusetts and the loss of entire townships in Maine, for example—but most took place acre by acre. White farmers simply plowed and fenced across Indian fields or pulled down natives’ houses and built their own. Timber cutters trespassed on Indian lands, and mill owners blocked runs of migratory fish. The outright destruction of nature was, as Colon Calloway notes, “another weapon in the invaders’ arsenal of forces destructive of Indian life in the region.” This dispossession, massive in the aggregate, fed an assumption among white observers that native people were a dying race. But as Neil Salisbury points out, “eras- ing Indians from history at the moment they ceased to exist as a formidable military force” simply indulged the stereotype that these were a savage people unable to survive in civilized society. Despite remorseless social, economic, and cultural pressures, Indians maintained a presence even in the most densely populated sections of New England. Moreover, archaeological and documen- tary evidence suggests that they continued many of their traditional lifeways, making seasonal fishing and foraging migrations to the coast, growing maize, and hunting and trapping in the interior, even while they invested time in their farms, orchards, and livestock.51 The Pequots, vanquished in the 1637 war, were sent into slavery among the Narragansetts, Mohegans, and Niantics. Connecticut leaders quickly realized, however, that dispersal among neighboring peoples strengthened these tribes as potential foes, and in the 1650s they relocated the Pequots to four Indian towns supervised by native governors. These reservations became home to 1,500–2,000 tribal members, many of whom allied with the colonials in King Philip’s War. By 1761 only 176 Pequots remained on the reservations, the result of migration, disease, and low fertility; in response to their dwindling numbers, the Connecticut General Assembly reduced the size of their lands. By the early contact, colonialization, and war | 65

1800s the population had further declined to between 30 and 40, and in 1855–56 the legislature sold all but 180 acres of the reservation without tribal consent.52 The Nipmuc lands between the Charles and Connecticut Rivers were likewise reduced to a patchwork of towns and reservations, and in 1709 Rhode Island confined the Narragansetts to a 64-square-mile reservation. In Massa- chusetts, the most visible Indian presence was in the fourteen “praying towns” established with over 2,000 inhabitants in 1651–74. In each of these cases, Indi- ans faced a difficult set of choices: they could remain on their relic native claim and adopt English agriculture, move off-reservation to find work, leave for the Oneida community in New York, the French missions on the St. Lawrence, or the Illinois country, or retire to an out-of-the-way neighborhood apart from white society. Some joined tribes as far away as James Bay or the Pacific North- west. Those who remained conducted tribal affairs in the traditional manner, but they were subject to harassment and intimidation. Under the pretense of debt, whites forced native children into domestic or workshop servitude, con- scripted adults on whaling voyages, and confiscated land.53 In Maine, the provincial government closed off the upper Penobscot River to white settlement in 1764, but poaching and timber theft burgeoned in the decades that followed, with no official effort to stop it. In 1775 the Penobscot chiefs Joseph Orono and John Neptune visited the Continental Congress in Watertown to declare their support for the colonial cause, and in return they asked for title to land six miles on either side of the Penobscot River, above the head of tide. The Abenakis fulfilled their pledge by defending Machias against British naval invasion in 1777—a move that helped keep eastern Maine loyal to the American cause—but after the war Massachusetts refused to honor the Watertown Resolves. In 1794 the Passamaquoddies in eastern Maine ceded their lands to Massachusetts except for a township near the St. Croix River and scattered parcels elsewhere. White negotiators pointed to the dwindling fish and game resources on these lands, convincing some that farming was the only recourse, but differences over strategies created lasting political divisions with the tribe. In 1818 the Penobscots lost all their lands except the islands in the Penobscot River and four adjacent townships in return for $400, and in 1829 the Maine legislature declared the tribe wards of the state and began coercing leaders to sell the remaining townships. In 1833–35, after negotiations marked by outright duplicity, the state—or, more correctly, a few well-positioned lumber barons— took possession of the “Indian townships,” with the proceeds placed in a trust 66 | chapter 2 fund for Indian support. Here, too, the treaty split the community into two parties, a schism that continued into the twentieth century. The Penobscots, Passa- maquoddies, and their northern neighbors, the Maliseets and Mi’kmaqs, found themselves cut off from traditional resources. Weirs destroyed the upriver fishing grounds, sawdust smothered the spawning areas, mill dams flooded traditional fishing sites, roaming cattle destroyed their crops, and farmers blocked their access to seacoast camping grounds. Some tribal members took justice into their own hands by demolishing dams or burning mills, but the trend was clear: natives were losing their connection to nature.54 Separated from the land, southern New England Indian communities were “detribalized” and politically incorporated into surrounding English communities. Traditional values such as communal sharing and reciprocity faded when families began producing commercial crops, and poverty, preju- dice, alcoholism, and intermarriage steadily reduced native populations. Since traditional ways of farming, fishing, hunting, and gathering “looked too little like labor,” courts and legislatures dispossessed them. In some cases Indians allowed governments to privatize their land, because whites found it more difficult to steal than common land, but such a change was risky. In the 1870s the Wampanoags at Mashpee were goaded into becoming U.S. citizens; the state then privatized their land, and those unable to pay taxes lost their parcels to white speculators.55 Despite pressures, Indians in New England retained their sense of aboriginal identity. Like other New Englanders, they became farmers, plumbers, washerwomen, mariners, carpenters, domestic servants, and day laborers, but even in these nontraditional occupations they maintained an Indian consciousness. Indians preserved their identity by persisting in four traditional practices, the first being to settle in cohesive groups in towns and on reservations. Although these settlements took on some English aspects, they remained Indian places, each hosting a few hundred people from several kinship lineages united under native leadership. This group identity provided a buffer against prevailing Anglo values, even for those living away from the towns or reservations.56 Family connections were likewise important to Indian identity. Although many families turned to producing commercial crops, native women continued to “own” the fields they worked and to gain power by producing corn; the matrilineal kinship bonds this practice sustained helped insulate family members as they moved in and out of white society. On the Maine–Vermont contact, colonialization, and war | 67

border, Abenakis reconstituted their society as a network of family bands, living in small settlements of kin-related groups and moving seasonally across the headwaters of the Saco, Androscoggin, and Connecticut Rivers. Because the villages were semipermanent, the 700 or so Pigwacket and Androscoggin Indians were presumed to have disappeared, but in reality they remained a presence in the area well into the nineteenth century. This attachment to family, as the Catholic missionary Eugene Vetromile remarked in 1866, was “such as we do not read of in other tribes.”57 Family bands and kinship ties facilitated a third cultural underpinning of postwar native identity. For centuries native New Englanders had moved seasonally to take advantage of changing loci of opportunity, and this practice persisted into the nineteenth century. As a river-oriented people, the Abenakis moved downstream in spring to trap alewives, shad, salmon, and sturgeon, then returned to plant corn, beans, and potatoes on the river islands. In mid- summer, they again traveled downstream to the coast to hunt seal and por- poise and gather eggs, clams, and lobster. While there, they sold crafts in resort towns like Bar Harbor. In September they harvested their crops and moved upriver to prepare trap lines and hunt for moose in territory still relatively remote from white hunters. To these traditional sojourns, men and women added guiding, river driving, and moving from resort to resort and city to city to sell craft products, including canoes, paddles, snowshoes, moccasins, birch-bark containers, ash baskets, and porcupine quillwork. Men crossed the region by rail, following the logging camps and river drives, working in sawmills, picking potatoes, apples, and blueberries, and taking odd jobs. Among scattered kin they found a “home” wherever they went, as they had for millennia. The “Indian ways of belonging on the land held mobility and fixity in tension,” one scholar explains: “Indians moved between resource sites, visited relatives in other villages, and sometimes entirely relocated their village affili- ation based on kin relations.”58 A fourth foundation for native identity was closeness to the land, maintained not only through such traditional activities as hunting, trapping, gathering, and fishing but also through logging, river driving, guiding, tending fields and gardens, and crafting natural materials into commodities. Indians fished at the same waterfalls that had seen the campfires of their Archaic ancestors two thousand years earlier or harvested shellfish at coastal sites that had supported these activities for millennia. When white settlers depleted natural resources near the settlements, native hunters moved hundreds of miles 68 | chapter 2 inland for moose and other game. Pigs fit nicely into this natural subsistence activity. They made the surrounding woods useful when it no longer harbored wild game and could be hunted in the traditional fashion, their meat easily preserved for marketing in nearby settlements.59 New England native cultures maintained a coherent identity through the difficult century following the colonial wars. Despite changes in work, language, religion, and political organization, they remained connected to one another and to the environment. Selective adaptation “by no means signaled their cultural ‘disappearance,’ ” Neil Salisbury writes; “indeed, it signaled precisely the opposite: the vitality and continued ability to change and adapt that is the sign of any healthy culture.” Attachment to the land strengthened their rituals and confirmed their legends, even while state legislators and speculators stole the land from under them. At midcentury the Romantic fascination with the “vanishing Indian” encouraged a stronger sense of cultural identity among native people, and the expanding tourist industry boosted the trade in Indian crafts and revitalized cultural awareness. Using grass and split ash as they had for hundreds of years, women made baskets and packs in the traditional fashion, then embellished these patterns with techniques borrowed from European folk arts. This sense of self was later strengthened by ethnolo- gists such as James Mooney and Frank Speck and by Indian elders like Joseph Nicolar, who not only remembered and recorded traditional ways but encouraged Indians to respect them.60 For Europeans in New England, the end of the colonial wars brought visions of a more prosperous future. Over this long and bloody century, the theater of conflict had moved steadily eastward, leaving the core cities, towns, and settlements in relative peace. As early as the 1630s Thomas Morton expressed a conviction that New England was indeed a place to call home. “The more I looked, the more I liked it,” he wrote, “and when I had more seriously considered of the bewty of the place, with all her faire indowments, I did not thinke that in all the knowne world it could be parallel’d, for so many goodly groves of trees, dainty fine round rising hillucks, delicate faire large plaines, sweete cristall fountaines, and cleare running streames.”61 While his contemporaries were less certain of this assessment, the idea of New England as home became more appealing as their tenure on the land grew more secure. Over time, the exaggerated promotional rhetoric of colonization developed a ring of sincerity, and this well-trodden land became second nature to these second-generation European transplants. Chapter 3 The Ecologies of Frontier Farming 

uring a century of war and dispossession, native New DEnglanders sustained a connection to the land that had been hundreds if not thousands of years in the making. In this same century, English settlers established a similar connection, equally intimate although with a different social and religious rationale. This process began in the mid- 1630s when a band of disaffected Puritan families let go of their lifeline to the sea, marched overland to the Connecticut Valley, and settled New England’s first inland frontier. Over time, they fit themselves to the land, but in the beginning the environment they faced seemed depressingly intractable: a dark and unthinkably vast forest blanketed with snow five months of the year and infested during the short summer with hordes of insects that plagued their livestock and consumed their crops.1 They carried with them powerful memories of their English homeland, although in this harsh new environment they abandoned thoughts of reproducing the world they left behind. Their experience raises questions for the environmental historian. How did this severe yet productive frontier environment shape their lives, and how did members of a primitive pioneering society wrench the land into something they could call home? In 1930 the Vermont-born agricultural geographer Archer Hulbert, a student of Frederick Jackson Turner, published a path-breaking reinterpretation of the American frontier entitled Soil: Its Influence on the History of the United

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States. Hulbert proposed a “new scientific basis for examining the colonization movement” that linked the Puritan diaspora to such natural influences as soil structure, forest and grassland distribution, and river flowage. As Hulbert pointed out, the varied presence of granitic subsurface, limestone strata, and alluvial soil explained a great deal about the patterns of New England town development. One would be ill-advised to ignore these natural influences, he admonished, but to this advice he added a curious disclaimer: the degree to which environmental conditions accounted for the history of the region “admits of much debate.”2 Hulbert’s cautious environmental determinism seems appropriate to the interplay of culture and nature in frontier New England. In moving up the Connecticut Valley, settlers might have rejected their Puritan communal culture and scattered themselves across this vast land base, taking advantage of favorable niches where they found them. Instead, they did their best to re-create the close-knit associational life of the older bay towns and the postfeudal, family-based world they left behind. They never fully succeeded in this aspiration, but their adaptations were something more than wholesale capitulation to nature. Some traits they abandoned, and others they worked into the soil; over time, their quest for independence, their fear of wildness, their family attachments, and their religious aspirations shaped the alluvial meadows and forested uplands into a complex mix of traditional landscapes and innovative environmental adaptations. Carl Bridenbaugh saw this accommodation as a “harmonious adjustment” between the natural world and the cultural hearth, the “only successfully blended . . . natural and man-made environment that America has ever known.” Recent historians argue that abuse rather than harmony characterized this relationship with nature. Environmental degradation is indeed part of the frontier story, but we need not dismiss Bridenbaugh’s vision entirely. On the New England frontier, two creative forces—nature and culture—interacted to shape a world of fields and forests in which seasonal cycles become the rhythms of work and life: a Puritan second nature.3

Environment and the New England Frontier New England’s first English inhabitants settled along the seaboard, drawn to the protected harbors, vast salt-marsh prairies, and fire-dominated woodlands that made up this hospitable landscape. Settlers spread quickly along the coastal lowlands from Narragansett Bay to southern Maine the ecologies of frontier farming | 71

and upriver to the head of tide. Despite the sparse settlement in this coastal corridor, resources soon proved insufficient. In England, a rising class of bour- geois landowners was grafting an aggressive entrepreneurial spirit onto an old aristocratic land system and edging out the poorer classes of rural inhabitants; put simply, those who owned land became prosperous, and those who did not grew impoverished. New England’s migrants carried this lesson to the New World, and along the coast they once again felt the old pressures closing in. As the soils, meadows, and upland grasses of the middle Connecticut Valley drew their attention, New England’s first frontier migration gained momentum.4 The resources that drew Puritans away from the seaboard were a product of the region’s geological past. Its major drainage features and ridgelines were established before the arrival of the glaciers, but the repeated advances of these massive ice sheets rounded the peaks, scooped out the valleys, and scoured the soil from the high, rocky outcrops. The more resistant crystalline strata constricted the waterways into gorgelike valleys with fast-flowing currents, and in the weaker rock formations between these ridges, rivers meandered across broad, glacially sculpted valleys, depositing alluvium in a series of terraces left dry as the rivers deepened their cut. In the Connecticut Valley, glacial lakes Hitchcock and Upham formed behind huge debris dams, and for around four thousand years the lakes trapped sediments flowing down from the upland marshes. Streams intersecting the valley brought down sandy, stone-free sediment, while bulrushes, sedges, cattails, and pickerel weed colonized the margins, making the soils along the rim more organic than those in the center. When waters breached the debris dams, they left behind a flat valley floor as much as twelve miles wide, filled with light, porous soils and clays sometimes a hundred feet thick, ideal for drought-resistant crops and pasture. The Con- necticut intervales, the finest grasslands in New England, provided expansive, open views reminiscent of the seacoast and deep, rich soils that appealed to those who had grubbed stones out of the coarse clays along the coastal plain. This process shaped New England into four basic topographical features, each inviting its own human history: a broad, relatively flat coastal plain; a series of bottom lands and floodplains along the major rivers; a range of unconsolidated upland hills and ridges back from the valleys; and the steep and inhospitable mountains and plateaus fringing the upper watersheds. Despite the region’s reputation for bad soils, each of these features offered at least some arable land, and in certain places the soils were amazingly fertile.5 The most important feature in all four zones was the meadowland. 72 | chapter 3

Frequent flooding on the flats along the rivers and streams encouraged several species of grasses, while upland meadows formed along the narrow postglacial lake beds and in the deep organic muck behind breached beaver dams. These grasslands—a dominant aspect of New England ecology—were key considerations in the difficult choice to abandon the coast. Meadows underlay the entire colonial agricultural system: the cattle they supported hauled wagons, sleighs, and logs to market, pulled the plows that made intensive agriculture possible, and provided dairy, beef, and leather for subsistence and export. More important, they produced the manure necessary to improve the light, sandy soils of the valley floors and terraces.6 An early Massachusetts historian described Dorchester’s many and valuable grassland resources: “Plymouth Meadow . . . contained about 100 acres; the Great Meadow, north of the Plym- outh Meadow, and separated therefrom by the Tunxis river, holds about 600 acres; Sequestered Meadow, lying still further north, and about three miles from Plymouth Meadow, has some seventy-five acres; andPine Meadow . . . , about five miles north of Plymouth Meadow, has sixty to seventy acres; one hundred acres at Podunck, and two or three small meadows on the Tunxis.” Meadows were so central to town location that each was given a specific toponym. Those in Easton, for instance, were named Hockomock Meadow, the Great Swamp Meadow, Evin’s Meadow, Cold-Spring Meadow, Granny Meadow, Nick’s Meadow, Little-Cranberry Meadow, Lathrop’s Plain, Rocky Plain, Crookhorn Plain, High Plain, Meeting Plain, Ragged Plain, and Babcock’s Plain. Frontier towns were not simply carved out of the wilderness; they were carefully fitted to resources such as these. The location, size, and agricultural prospects of each town, as Charles Hogan summarizes, “depended greatly on the pre-existing landscape.”7

“Strangers in the Country” Massachusetts, as Cotton Mather said, was “like a hive over- stocked with bees, and many thought of swarming into new plantations.” In the Boston Basin, this “hiving” was systematic and predictable. Early planters lived in relatively compact villages and traveled to fields, meadows, and pastures in the back lots. But as the population grew and the distance to new meadows and fields increased, they built seasonal and, later, permanent accommoda- tions in these remote places. Gristmills, sawmills, iron forges, and furnaces, located on waterpower sites in the hilly parts of town, became new nodes of the ecologies of frontier farming | 73

settlement that eventually sought separation from the original town. Founding new towns was sometimes contentious, but it relieved land pressures among successive generations and helped preserve the neighborly, cooperative spirit cherished by the founders. It occurred at fairly low population levels, given the difficulties of travel, the scattered arable land, and the neighborhood-based form of early local governance, which proved to work best in the colonies. Too much geography made politics unwieldy and divisive.8 This hiving sequence continued through the first few tiers of townships at a time when fear of Indians and adherence to Puritan communal concepts kept settlers close to the Boston hearth. Within a generation, however, settlement had reached the inland edge of the coastal plain, and the Bay Col- ony’s settled places were running out of room—not for people, as Virginia DeJohn Anderson aptly notes, but for cattle. Latecomers were allotted only small tracts of poor-quality land, and having moved once, they had few reservations about migrating to a more distant frontier. In 1633 Plymouth’s Edward Winslow established a trading post near the mouth of the Connecticut River, aware that “ye Massachusetts men” had their eyes set on the upriver meadows. Geology favored the Boston settlers over their Plymouth rivals. Below Middletown, the Connecticut River makes its way through erosion-resistant formations that constrict the valley. This quick-water section, coupled with the dangerous shoals at the mouth of the river and the Dutch presence on Long Island Sound, discouraged a normal pioneer progression upriver from the coast; overland travel from the Boston Basin was safer. With titles from the river Indians, families from four towns west of Boston set out in 1633–35 for the valley, citing a “want of accommodation for their cattle.” They traveled ten days over the Wilderness Path, and in the wide valley of the middle river they established the towns of Springfield, Windsor, Hartford, and Wethersfield.9 The largest of these groups was led by Thomas Hooker, who had arrived in Boston along with Joseph Cotton in 1632. Cotton became pastor at Boston, and Hooker in the outlying village of Newtown (Cambridge). Cotton easily adjusted to the autocratic government of John Winthrop, who limited suffrage to members of the former’s church, but Hooker chafed under his rivalry with Cotton, differences with Winthrop, and the limitations of the land in New- town. In June 1636, Hooker, along with the main body of his congregation and 160 cattle, settled among the Plymouth and Dutch traders at Hartford, drawn by the wealth of the meadows as much as by the productivity of the soils. Their interest in husbandry, as David Grayson Allen noted, reflected the 74 | chapter 3

“woodland-pasture” economy of their mid-Essex hearth in England. Others arrived from different English backgrounds, and the resulting mix loosened their attachment to old ways, creating a highly adaptive frontier people able to choose among a variety of cultural precedents, depending on meadow and soil conditions. On the terraces above the river bottomlands, safe from the spring floods and the cold air that spilled into the valley, settlers found land cleared by Indians and set out a combination of native and European crops. The mix was something of an experiment; as the early Connecticut historian Benjamin Trumbull put it, they were “strangers in the country, and knew not what kinds of grain would be most congenial with the soil.”10

Environment and the Town-Founding Process Because they were hard-pressed to settle in and produce crops as quickly as possible, New England town founders divided the land according to established precedents. They sited house lots near a favorable topographic feature—a river confluence, break-in-bulk point, or large meadow—and laid out garden plots, paddocks, and stables nearby. These clusters—villages within the towns—exerted a certain gravitational pull, for those who lived there gained social status. Clustered house lots also facilitated the dense web of borrowing and sharing that was so necessary to frontier life. Still, centrifugal forces exerted a pull within the community, such as the need to accommodate agricultural activity to scattered patches of arable soil and to locate mills on remote waterpowers. The founding of towns was a compromise between the communal nature of Puritan society and the scattered resources of the New England environment.11 When terrain allowed, surveyors extended the primary field lots in parallel strips back from the river, sometimes as much as three miles. The strips were narrow enough to keep residents close together and long enough to provide each with a mix of river frontage, alluvial meadow, dry terrace, and upland woods and pasture. Elongated lots also enabled farmers to plow for a considerable distance before turning their teams, and they facilitated cooperation in field preparation. Initially, the remaining land was left in common ownership, open to all proprietors for wood pasturing, logging, hunting, haying, quarrying, thatch cutting, peat digging, and foraging, all performed under the watchful eye of town wardens. The riverside marshes, or “great meadows” as the larger among them were called, were set aside as “common in perpetuity.” the ecologies of frontier farming | 75

They were managed collectively because of the heavy work of ditching, draining, damming, and clearing that turned these marshes into meadows, “ines- capably a collective enterprise,” according to Brian Donahue.12 Towns carefully guarded these fragile resources, for perennial grasses were destroyed by close grazing and annuals died back if they were grazed off before seeding. Community management ensured their continued productivity, facilitated the work of keeping them fresh, and synchronized the town’s most important agricultural function—animal husbandry. Common management ensured that town resources would be neither wasted by all nor hoarded by a few, and as the historian Robert McCullough points out, it expressed an embryonic conservation impulse that went beyond purely economic concerns.13 Over time, most of the remaining land was divided among town founders or their heirs. Because the environment was so varied, these periodic divisions were incredibly complex. In addition to a house lot, each family needed parcels of swampland and woodland for timber and forage, several acres of tillable bottomland, a portion of upland meadow, access to a quarry site, a marsh allot- ment near the stream for natural grasses and thatch, and rights to pasture in the common meadow. Families could own up to a dozen noncontiguous strips throughout the township, providing a complex medley of natural resources: oak and chestnut stands for mast, an acre of ash swamp for basket making or cedar swamp for fencing and shingles, upland acreage with dry soils, and various other resource-specific plots, some as small as a quarter acre. These land holdings, shaped to topographic features such as rivers, meadows, and arable soils, presented a bewildering array of angles and shapes—a “baffling jigsaw puzzle of irregular pieces,” as Donahue describes them. Although some environmental historians view property lines as a means of abstracting nature, these early boundaries were in fact remarkably “natural.” They might be drawn to encompass a mowing field between two creeks, for example, or to the length of a tether used to pasture cattle. Adjacent properties conformed to these original demarcations, further extending the asymmetry. In some cases, boundaries changed as cattle grazed back the edge of a meadow or as streams migrated away from the original line. Compass and chain brought little precision; land was measured in acres, but the term meant different things in different places, and surveying in rough and broken ground was, at best, guesswork.14 Achieving equity in access to these resources was difficult given the varied ecologies in each town, and here again culture and nature commingled in the process of town founding. The amount given to each proprietor was based on 76 | chapter 3 family size, number of cattle, wealth, and leadership potential, on the principle that land should be distributed to those who would make best use of it. In Hartford, the average holding in the first distribution was 27 acres, but the largest was 160 acres. Inequities like these were exaggerated over time because newcomers were seldom accorded the same rights as the original proprietors, and those with good land acquired means to purchase more. Milford’s historian noted that by 1713, “whatever of democracy had existed in the original control of land had . . . disappeared. An aristocracy of land-ownership, diluted but none the less real, had arisen in its place.” Thus the colonial system of wealth and status was imprinted on the town’s topography, and over time these lines were hardened by roads, fences, and stone walls. This was the means, David Jaffee wrote, by which the settlers “willed themselves onto the landscape.”15 Nevertheless, environmental and cultural influences conspired to enforce a rough equality in proprietorship. Profits from any amount of frontier land were limited by high labor costs, and using slaves or indentured servants was impractical because they would have to be supported during the long and unprofitable winters. These labor constraints, coupled with limited markets for agricultural products, discouraged land aggrandizement, just as land abundance discouraged speculation. In addition, townsfolk prized equity in land distribution because it ensured harmony in community relations, and harmony was essential to the interdependencies that made frontier life possible. Nor did landownership convey political power. Men of quality were accorded deference, but town governments were notoriously weak. Political elites, Michael Zukerman explains, ruled by inclusion because they had little recourse to coercion; they had to bargain for authority. Much has been said about the church as the seedbed of American democracy, but Puritan leaders were anything but inclusive in provincial or church governance. Democracy emerged out of a century of town meetings where voters of roughly equal landed status gathered to elect their neighbors to office, vote their own taxes and obligations, and regulate their own behavior.16

The Northern Frontier In the late 1630s, Massachusetts assumed jurisdiction over the fledgling New Hampshire towns, and to secure their sphere of influence, Puritans founded Exeter, Hampden, Strawbery Banke (Portsmouth), and Dover. The ascendancy of the English Puritan Parliament in the late 1640s the ecologies of frontier farming | 77

emboldened Massachusetts, and in 1652 the Bay Colony moved its boundary from the mouth of the Merrimack to its source in Lake Winnipesaukee and absorbed the Maine settlements directly to the east.17 As the frontier spread eastward along the Maine coast and into the northern highlands, the practice of town founding changed. Here the frontier thrust was driven less by communal commitments than by a rising demand for fish and timber. John Mason erected New England’s first sawmill on the Piscataqua River drainage in 1634, and within thirty years almost every stream east to the Kennebec powered at least one of these “late inventions, so useful for the destruction of wood and timber.” Depletion of bait fish in the rivers and estuaries near Boston forced fishermen eastward, and farmers followed in smaller numbers, attracted to the hundreds of miles of salt marsh fringing the Gulf of Maine. By 1630 Pemaquid, the eastern outpost of English America, hosted some eighty-four families, along with a seasonal population of fur traders, loggers, and fishermen.18 Settlers had different reasons for moving to this frontier, but most were interested in its greatest natural asset: cheap land. New Englanders placed immense value on landownership as a form of economic security, political status, and personal independence, and in an age-stratified (as opposed to class-stratified) society, inheriting land was the common path of upward mobility. Yet families were large in colonial times, and property was quickly fragmented among generations of heirs. This, as James Henretta noted, threatened the “intergenerational exchange of youthful labor for an eventual inheritance.” Where land was scarce, sons were less content to labor patiently on the farm awaiting this patrimony, and daughters were less willing to marry within their station. Rural poverty was on the rise at the end of the seventeenth century, and communities with declining resources fell to squabbling over boundaries, taxes, roads, errant livestock, and pasture rights. There existed, Robert Gross concludes, a “fundamental imbalance between numbers [of people] and resources. Something would have to give.”19 For many, the frontier was the solution. As Patricia Tracy found, the idea of obtaining land on the frontier—sometimes five to ten times the original estate—was not necessarily driven by profit. The frontier was remote from markets and vulnerable to military attack, and migrants faced the back-breaking task of clearing lands that were often no better than those they left behind. “To put it quite bluntly,” Tracy concluded, “the migrants . . . do not seem to do any better in net capital or the comforts of consumer goods than they would have done if they had stayed at home.” Rather, their land hunger reflected the 78 | chapter 3 value they placed on yeoman status and community and family stability. Land secured parental authority, kept the extended family in one place, provided security in old age, and buttressed the community by relieving pressures that strained neighborly relations.20 For these reasons, the vision of near-universal landownership was compelling, and this idea, more than anything else, drove the New England frontier outward.

Land Surveys on the Northeastern Frontier Settlement was less orderly and less equitable on the northeastern frontier. These remote lands were initially granted to royal favorites, including John Mason and Ferdinando Gorges; during and after the Indian wars, speculators purchased the ancient charters and attempted to settle them. The General Court’s guidelines for land distribution were vague, and proprietors were free to determine their own methods of conveyance. In some cases they personally oversaw the settlement. John and William Pynchon, for instance, received large grants in the Connecticut Valley and methodically built up the town of Deerfield by dividing the grants and selling parcels to settlers. In general, northern settlement was less evenly coordinated.21 In the Connecticut Valley, towns were surveyed according to known topographical features, or “metes and bounds,” and although the lines were irregular, they took into account the lay of the land. Later, on the northeastern frontier, grantees laid out straight-line “ranges” determined by compass alone, producing a grid pattern that ignored natural features but rendered an area easier to map, purchase, and convey. The system’s origin is somewhat unclear, but it probably began in 1719 when Massachusetts legislators granted a tract of land in New Hampshire to proprietors of an ironworks, and surveyors divided the lots into uniform parallelograms. Over the next two decades, New Hampshire became a “virtual laboratory in which a variety of town planning concepts were tried and refined.” The 1725 Penacook patent, near present-day Concord, was laid out in a uniform grid based along a straight road. And in the 1730s, the Massachusetts “soldier townships” in the western part of the state and New Hampshire were patterned in the same way. These grants abandoned any pretense of clustering settlement and scattered settlers’ lots in tier after tier of uniform squares. The grandest innovator in this system was the merchant-speculator Benning Wentworth. Largely at Wentworth’s urging, New Hampshire was the ecologies of frontier farming | 79

separated from Massachusetts in 1741, and after a long battle over the boundary, the colony gained an unexpected wealth of land. As the province’s first royal governor, Wentworth distributed to his friends some 129 townships west of the Connecticut River in what later became Vermont. Little concerned about the layout of the villages, he simply divided the land into units of equal size. In 1746 Wentworth’s relatives purchased a vast tract in the center of the province from the heirs of John Mason and perfected the plan subsequently known as the range and township system. This rigid geometric pattern spread through western Massachusetts, the upper Connecticut Valley, and Maine extending back from the coast, anticipating the federal cadastral surveys west of the Appalachians in the 1780s.22 The geometric survey had important social and environmental implications. By ignoring natural topography and environmental meaning, it reduced land to a simple cash value. It also removed the settlement process from its natural context and separated the settlers from those who owned the land— the speculators. The latter were under some obligation to provide credit, land for schools and churches, and sometimes a sawmill or gristmill, but the ease of conveyance in the range and township system left them free from personal responsibility not only for land development but for land stewardship as well. Founded on the principle of profits, these frontier towns were usually less communal in spirit. Religious differences fragmented the communities, and weak civil and judicial legitimacy gave wide latitude to individualistic exploitation of local resources. Each town dealt with unappropriated natural assets in its own way. Some permitted unrestricted use of timber and grass, whereas others banned the export of timber or offered monopolies as an incentive to attract millwrights. Despite the strong commercial and individualistic over- tones, chain migration and community cooperation remained important as a basis of frontier survival, and the ancient law of the commons remained, in some form, a guide to using the land.23 By 1800 this pioneering stage was drawing to close. In the lower river valleys, the forest had been pushed back into the uplands, stumps and boulders removed, wetlands ditched and drained, streams diverted, fields set off by fences, and marshes converted into dry meadows. A tapestry of field and forest, sized to the land, to the local culture of cultivation, and to each family’s capacity for work, spread across the valley floors, and rangy, hardy livestock ran half wild in the upland woods. Settlers pressed up against the base of the Appalachians, searching out patches of good growing land among the steep 80 | chapter 3 slopes, bogs, and swamps. Along this rugged upland frontier, the transformation of nature came to a halt. Here pioneers met their match against the rugged northeastern environment, and they would be the first to move on at midcentury when the westward diaspora began in earnest.24

Farm Ecologies As families consolidated the dispersed holdings of the first or second divisions, their farms became somewhat uniform in appearance, and collectively they took on the signature features of New England second nature: an integrated landscape of fields and woodlands closely contoured to the lay of the land. The success of the farm depended on finding a use for every natural feature on the site: flat land for fields, hillsides for meadows, stony land for orchards and wood lots, clay deposits for bricks, exposed ledges for quarry stone, ponds for ice, marshes for hay, and lowlands for muck. During flood season, streams and brooks ran heavy with organic sediments from the upland swamps, and careful ditching and damming could coax these materials out of the water and onto the meadows. Before leaving the farm, these waters might irrigate a field, fill a pond, power a grist- or cider mill, or conduct a run of migratory fish into a trap. The productive potential of every available resource was exploited. Farms were humanized ecologies in which food, energy, building material, and fiber were extracted and byproducts were recycled to ensure a new round of harvests. Cattle and sheep converted grass into energy and mass and carried the residue, manure, downslope to the barnyard or fold. To this cycle of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium transfer, farmers added straw from the stalls, muck from the swamps, and ashes from the hearth. If the flow of nutrients was carefully managed, the farm could remain productive for generations. From the bedrock, its soils took up silicate, oxides, gypsum, and calcium, and from the surface, it composted manure and leaves. Mellowed and loosened by spring and fall frosts, these soils were dense with life—roots, worms, insects, molds, bacteria, amoebas, ants, millipedes, and nematodes, all working to enrich the fields by transforming plant and animal material into humus. Colonial farmers comprehended these ecological processes in allegorical terms. As Carolyn Merchant points out, they saw the circulation of energy and nutrients in terms of mysterious balances, counterbalances, and astrological rotations, all understood through bodily analogy, signs of the zodiac, and ancient assumptions the ecologies of frontier farming | 81

about the interaction of earth, fire, air, and water. The land, Merchant writes, “was a living thing that had to be nursed and humored”; keeping it fertile was as much a moral obligation as an economic imperative.25 Given these important ecological and allegorical considerations, prospective farmers studied their land carefully before laying out fields and pastures. Typically, they cleared a few acres each year, planted two or three crops in rotation until the yield declined, and then turned most of the land into meadow and pasture. Their fields, unlike the right-angle regularity of those in the South and Mid-Atlantic, were shaped to natural contours and varied soil types. Observers often criticized this seemingly haphazard arrangement, but it was well adapted to the ecologically diverse landscape. Farmers located their houses and barns on level ground near a road. On a side yard women planted vegetables and flowers in a way that suggested neatness, frugality, and convenience, and men used the back dooryard for heavy, messy work such as chopping, shearing, butchering, and woodworking. The barn was set on well- drained but level ground so as not to strain the oxen hauling hay and manure. Barnyards and hogpens collected animal dung and thus were located on the south side of the barn, where direct sunlight in spring would speed fermenta- tion and composting. Ideally the homestead was sufficiently elevated to provide a view of the farm, yet not so high to preclude digging a well near the house. Proper arrangement according to terrain and soil type determined the success of the farm’s ecological interactions.26 The best plowing land was deep loam over a dense substratum that would hold moisture near the surface. Because these fields required constant attention—plowing, harrowing, planting, hoeing, harvesting, manuring—they were usually close to the barn and house. Proximity was critical because farmers might spread as much as fifteen cartloads of dung in a single day in spring. Mowing fields and meadows, less dependent on human intervention, were farther back from the barn, and orchards—sources of vinegar, cider, brandy, apple butter, fresh and dried fruit, and stock feed—required even less attention. Farthest from the house, on the fringes of this humanized ecology, were the woodlands: sources of building material, fencing, fuel, and pasture. Here farmers harvested a crop arranged almost entirely by nature.27 Close to the barn, farmers grew a variety of vegetables, and in the richer bottomlands, where periodic silt deposition kept up fertility, they planted corn. Although low in market value, corn was an ideal subsistence crop—easy to plant and harvest with primitive tools, simple to grind into meal, and useful 82 | chapter 3 in a variety of ways in soups, porridge, stews, puddings, cakes, and breads. It was also a good source of fodder. Still, corn exhausted soils quickly and was best done in rotation with wheat, rye, or flax or in lengthy fallows reminiscent of Indian agriculture. Grains, also planted in rotation, did best in the lighter, drier, less fertile soils of the oak–hickory uplands, especially on a south slope. The Connecticut Valley, New England’s finest wheatlands, grew commercial grains early on, until the blast arrived in 1664; by 1700 the crop had become so uncertain that it was sown only intermittently. For reasons such as these most farmers preferred a broad mix of crops and livestock that reduced the risk of bad harvest in any one yield. Mixed husbandry also spread the workload more evenly through the season, so that large families could keep farms running with only occasional help from neighbors or hired hands.28 The family labor system was the engine of the farm ecology. Chores were divided loosely according to age and gender, with men and boys working the fields and woodlots and women and girls in the kitchen, garden, and barnyard. Women foraged for herbs, mushrooms, and berries, made clothing, and at times worked with their husbands in the fields. They slaughtered fowl, and to make the fall harvest last through winter, they dried and preserved vegetables and fruits and minced, salted, pickled, smoked, and dried meat. They processed milk into butter and cheese so that the family could have dairy products when cows went dry in winter, brewed barley into beer to extend its usefulness, hardened apple juice into cider, produced candles, yarn, and lin- ens, gathered eggs, made butter, and harvested garden crops, either for family use or to sell or barter with neighbors—all this in addition to maintaining the hearth, the meals, and the children.29 In this uncertain environment, cattle, oxen, swine, sheep, goats, and poultry were the surest sources of sustenance and income, and sending livestock to pasture in the uplands, swamps, and marshes added value to these marginal lands. Farm animals were crucial to the grass-to-crop nitrogen cycle, although manure was seldom sufficient to sustainably fuel the farm ecology, particularly where cattle and sheep ranged freely in the woods and on the marshes. The failure to confine livestock seemed to outsiders a proverbial waste of dung, but to keep animals in the barnyard or stall meant abandoning the great expanse of uncleared land beyond the fields and meadows. These forests, in fact, were by far the largest component of the farm ecology. In 1779, for instance, yeomen in Brookfield and Amherst, Massachusetts, tilled on average only 5 percent and 9 percent of their total acreage; the rest remained in rough pasture and woods. the ecologies of frontier farming | 83

Because the woods were kept open by burning, logging, and pasturing, these areas grew grasses enough to support livestock. The woods also served as buffers in a frontier practice known as long-fallow farming. When their fields were exhausted by light manuring, farmers abandoned them progressively, first to pasture, then to weed fallow, and finally to forest. The root systems of the returning trees worked down into the ledge and transformed its minerals into plant nutrients. After a decade or so, the soils were restored by foraging livestock, leaf litter, and the rapid cycles of growth and decay characteristic of early succession. The scrubland harbored a crop of birds that ate destructive insects in the nearby fields, and in time, it was again cleared and mowed, pastured, or cultivated. Long-fallow farming required an extensive land base and placed severe limits on farm productivity, but it sustained farmlands over several generations if crops were rotated and expectations kept modest.30 Forests were also important places for foraging. Vegetation was “remarkably similar on both sides of the Atlantic,” Carl Sauer noted, and settlers were at least vaguely familiar with the wild fruits, roots, herbs, and nuts sheltered in the towns’ extensive forest ecosystem. In the wetter lowlands they harvested wild cherries, currants, plums, grapes, and a variety of berries for preserves and garnishes, and in the uplands they found sumach, cedar berries, walnut hulls, and bark for dyes, along with material for brooms, buckets, tubs, and other household items. Maple sap sweetened their drinks; wild leeks, garlics, and radishes garnished their soups and stews; and wild herbs augmented their medicines. The woods and wetlands also sheltered game and birds. Families often learned to take full advantage of these resources from local Indians, who imparted knowledge of special uses for local plants, roots, berries, and herbs—essential ingredients in the farm ecology during the lean years before field crops provided a secure harvest.31

Making the Land Pay By the late colonial period, the geographer Stephen Hornsby writes, rural New England had developed its own distinctive pattern of settlement: “in a physical and commercial setting that provided little basis for a highly specialized staple trade, an agricultural economy had emerged that supported one of the largest concentrations of people on the eastern seaboard, as well as a society that was more egalitarian than any found in Britain or in the staple regions elsewhere on the continent.” Hornsby’s characterization raises 84 | chapter 3 an important question: how did a society so disadvantaged in the marketplace sustain such a large population at such a high level of prosperity? In part, the answer lies in the complex interaction between New England’s environment and its cooperative community culture. In most parts of the region, farmers used a strategy called mixed husbandry; they were generalists, producing a wide range of field, orchard, and livestock products consumed mostly on the farm or in the surrounding community. The result of this localized economy was a modest but widely shared prosperity and, as Hornsby indicates, a remarkable degree of equality underscoring rural New England society.32 The neighborhood exchanges that sustained this economy were, as Max Schumacher writes, “important to an extent scarcely suggested by the pet- tiness of the individual transactions involved.” They are evident only in the diaries kept by farmers, and this informality leads some to question their importance in a rural economy on the edge of a bustling transatlantic commercial arena. These two impressions of the farm economy—one localist and the other transnational—are difficult to reconcile. In other sections of British North America, the shift to full-blown commercial production was clear. In the South, slavery, elastic demand, and rich soils encouraged commercial rice and tobacco production; in the Chesapeake, Scottish trading factors mediated market relations for tidewater farmers; in the middle colonies, the huge demand for wheat in seaboard cities and the West Indies made commercial production attractive; and along the Hudson River, tenant farmers were forced to produce market goods to meet rent payments. New England’s commercial orientation is more obscure. The Champlain and Connecticut Valleys produced huge surpluses of cheese, livestock, vegetables, fruits, and grains; but more typically, New England families were immersed in a multilayered livelihood made up of commercial exchange, subsistence production, neighborhood barter, domestic crafts, and seasonal nonfarm labor, all proportioned to the soils and resources at hand.33 Environmental conditions predisposed New Englanders to this complicated mix of income strategies. The region’s soils were thin, fragmented, and irregular, and its fields loaded with rocks and boulders. Dramatic shifts in seasonal temperatures punctuated the late colonial period, the nadir of the Lit- tle Ice Age, bringing cold, wet summers, unexpected frosts, and long, severe winters, all of which wreaked havoc with planting and harvesting routines. Although farmers everywhere faced unpredictable natural forces, crop fail- ures in New England were more serious because families were large and cold the ecologies of frontier farming | 85

seasons long. Rather than devote their year to producing a single commercial commodity—a risky proposition in any climate—farmers grew a broad mix of crops for family subsistence and supplemented this activity with nonfarm income and local exchange.34 In an environment riddled with uncertainty, multiple sources of revenue offered a modicum of security. Farmers engaged the transnational economy when opportunities arose, but markets were notoriously weak. Late colonial-era roads were passable only by ox cart and not likely to “bind . . . city and countryside into a single economy,” as William Cronon states. Almost all small-town residents, including professionals, merchants, and tradespeople, grew at least some of their own food, and only three New England cities—Boston, Providence, and New Haven— hosted more than 10,000 residents. Rivers connected farms to the sea lanes, but coasting vessels servicing all but the largest seaports were small and made only one or two voyages each year. They carried dairy, beef, and grains to plantations in the South and the West Indies, but planters also purchased these supplies from farmers in the Piedmont or in New York and Pennsylvania. The plantation economy could, in hard times, produce its own food, which added an element of volatility to the coasting trade, with prices fluctuating as much as 20 percent from year to year. This challenging commercial environment predisposed farmers to mixed cropping and local exchange and barter.35 Culturally, New England farmers were poorly prepared for the leap to commercial farming. Profits and surplus production were important, but the farm family was likely to define its life goals as a “competency”: land enough to absorb its labors; cash enough for subsistence, taxes, and store purchases; and savings enough to see the parents through their old age. In short, most colonial farmers limited their expectations to economic independence and household security. Neighborly exchange fit nicely into this system of expectations. And it was, as Alan Kulikoff notes, a matter of “great cultural significance,” embedded as it was in a larger cooperative culture enforced by chain migration, kinship, religious connections, and the necessities of frontier survival. A relatively low level of in-migration left towns insular and inward-looking, places of “deep inertia,” as the geographer Cole Harris put it.36 The American Revolution brought a dramatic disruption in these old ways, unleashing complex social forces that helped shift New England farming into commercial production. In the early months of the war, the Continental Army was stationed in eastern Massachusetts and required a constant stream of beef, pork, mutton, dairy, grains, vegetables, salt fish, hay, wood, and draft animals 86 | chapter 3 at a time when military recruitment diverted young males from farm work. Prices rose to fantastic heights. British troops received supplies from Nova Scotia and the West Indies, but they also confiscated or purchased local products during the siege of Boston. On the verge of starvation by spring 1776, British soldiers moved to New York, where superior port facilities, a richer hinterland, and more accommodating farmers better met their needs. Thus the struggle for provisions from the agriculturally sparse New England backcountry helped shift the theater of war southward. In addition to encouraging farm production, the conflict brought a rapid increase in domestic manufacturing. The so-called household factory had been a fact of life since early colonial times, but the Stamp Act crisis, followed by the Boston Port Bill and nonimportation agreements, crystallized a deter- mination to avoid British imports. During the war, the states were asked to outfit each enlistee with clothes, blankets, hats, hose, and shoes, and women met this need through domestic industry, particularly after the British blockade cut off the flow of manufactured goods from Europe. Throughout the colonies, gristmills, sawmills, fulling mills, smelters, foundries, distilleries, breweries, tanneries, and other small industries appeared in greater numbers, and despite the flood of foreign items after the Peace of Paris in 1783, domestic and small-town production survived to become part of the new national economy.37 However, these encouragements to commerce were offset by enormous wartime problems. The naval blockade halted the region’s export economy, and British troops burned fields, dismantled barns and fences for firewood, and confiscated crops and livestock. Smallpox spread westward out of Boston in fall 1775, disrupting trade and travel. Scarcity, rationing, inflation, loneliness, and panic combined to create an environment that discouraged familiar economic transactions. To provision the troops, farmers overworked and under- fed their livestock, neglected their fencing, ravished their woodlots, abandoned their fallow cycles and crop rotations, and skimped on manure. Weeds and brush encroached on pastures, and prize livestock were sacrificed to the war effort. Men returned from battle with little or no money, sold the remaining timber in their woodlots, and hunted, fished, and trapped for income, further depleting regional resources. Jobless and land-hungry young men left for the frontier, creating a desperately aggressive and environmentally destructive society along the New England borderlands.38 Although the overall impact of the Revolution is difficult to assess, it did the ecologies of frontier farming | 87

loosen community constraints on market production. “People were on the move,” Lee Newcomer writes, “and their constant coming and going injected another element of flux into the changing economic and social milieu.” The general social reshuffling encouraged revised standards, new attitudes, and anonymous market exchanges. A fresh set of leaders replaced those driven from office because of their British loyalties, and as class distinctions broke down, ordinary people learned to emulate the clothing style, housewares, and furniture of the elites. Farmers who once took pride in their self-sufficiency became more willing to go into debt for store-bought items. States levied heavy taxes to fund the war, and these new burdens further undermined the relaxed, informal local exchange system that characterized the backcountry. In Vermont, dissatisfaction with New York proprietary claims resulted in state- hood in 1791, and along the eastern and western frontier, rising debts and taxes, coupled with new egalitarian ideologies, fueled widespread protest against proprietors, lawyers, bankers, merchants, and state and county officials.39 Shays’ Rebellion, the most dramatic of these frontier protests, reflected the strains inherent in this pronounced shift to market production. The Mas- sachusetts General Court, heavily influenced by wealthy merchant groups, shifted the burden of new taxes to inland towns and set the commonwealth on a radical hard-currency course that forced farmers to pay back loans in ever-scarcer specie. To meet their own obligations, port-city wholesalers initiated court actions against inland shopkeepers, who in turn demanded cash from their customers. Farmers were forced into market production, and those without the means to pay debts or taxes had their property auctioned. David Szatsmary characterized Shays’ Rebellion as a contest between two cultures, one localist and mutualist and the other transnational and individualist. “The increasing crisis of debt and court action strained and eventually broke the flexible yet fragile bonds that had connected rural merchants and many of their neighbors,” and western Massachusetts erupted in violent protest.40 Daniel Shays’s defeat did little to alter the balance between these two systems. Wartime and postwar conditions shifted New England farms into market production, and the export economy grew steadily, supplied by a growing network of lumber mills, gristmills, potash works, butcheries, woolen mills, flaxseed oil mills, tanneries, and distilleries. Farmers met these new challenges without dramatic changes in their way of life. They cleared more land, improved rotations, conserved manure, drained lowlands, leveled fields, removed stones, straightened fences, and experimented with new crops, in 88 | chapter 3 this way extending the size and improving the efficiency of their farms. Rely- ing on trial and error, practical experimentation, and what Kent Ryden calls a “daily, full-body immersion” in the natural dynamics of the environment, they adjusted farm ecologies to the lay of the land. As a result, the traditional farm increased in productivity. Historians tend to view the shift to market production in absolute terms: farmers applying capital and science to push the farm ecology often beyond its long-term productive capability. Yet this assessment oversimplifies the evolution of New England agriculture, which over the next century operated in a middle ground between limited family expectations and rampant commercialism—at peace and yet at war with nature.41

Nature and the New England Frontier To what degree did the environment direct the evolution of the New England frontier? Charles Grant, in Democracy in the Connecticut Frontier Town of Kent, stresses the importance of land and environmental influences in shaping a culture of aggressive frontier individualism. Others emphasize the Old World cultural determinants that reinforced the importance of community. As early as the 1930s, geographers noted the variation in architectural form and agrarian practice across New England and traced these differences to subregions in England. More recently the geographer Martin Bowden identified at least thirteen well-defined cultural “beachheads” in colonial New England, all derived from one of five or six distinct old-country subregions. Old World placenames, crop mixes, and land-distribution policies suggest the importance of culture, as opposed to nature, in shaping the New England frontier.42 The strands of environmental and cultural influence are not easily unraveled. Virginia DeJohn Anderson, for instance, argues that the local cultures of East Anglia and the Midlands were not so distinct as to be traceable across the Atlantic, and that demographic mixing on the frontier further obscured these origins. The cultural persistence model, she points out, denies settlers a creative role in responding to environmental challenges. In view of the vast differences between the New World and the Old, Anderson’s arguments make sense; a broad range of environmental constraints and opportunities must be factored into early town formation and economic development. But as the geographer Joseph Wood points out, cultural agency and environmental causation are not mutually exclusive. Settlers carried to the frontier several the ecologies of frontier farming | 89

variants on basic Old World themes: a postfeudal sense of hierarchy and com- munalism, a nascent capitalist mentality, a sense of spiritual mission, and a family-based system of decision making. “Preadaptive” values, those most useful on the frontier, were superimposed on the natural landscape, creating “a new geography” that responded to both cultural and environmental imperatives. According to Stephen Hornsby, fragments of English culture were “selectively pruned and recombined to produce a unique New England rural culture” and, hence, a second-nature landscape “much different from . . . those found elsewhere on the eastern seaboard.”43 If individualism was not as prominent in frontier society as Charles Grant thought, what exactly was the role of the environment in shaping the New England town? Since the late nineteenth century, geographers and historians have been exploring the environmental basis for frontier expansion, and it is instructive to revisit these early analyses. New England, as they made clear, contained not one but three settlement zones: coastal plain, valley floor, and upland. Each had its own characteristic topography, soil type, climate, and vegetation, and each displayed its own pattern of land use, social structure, and settlement chronology.44 Settlers carried with them the seeds of their old- world cultural hearths, but how these seeds grew depended on the ecological zones in which they were planted. On the coastal plain, memories of the English countryside remained strong, and communities were linked to the old country by nearby seaports. Here farms conformed to Old World customs, but they were also limited in size and shape by the rock outcrops and thin soils so characteristic of the coastal region. Between Lynn and Salem, a visitor found “patches of soil here and there . . . cultivated every foot of them and the fences . . . extended even over the bare rocks.” Since neither fishing nor farming was profitable across all four seasons, families typically moved from one trade to another as dictated by fish migrations, sailing weather, and planting and harvesting. Coastal New Englanders were a “race of amphibians,” as described by Harland Barrows, living on land or at sea, depending on local circumstances. Within these limits, farmers responded to rising crop prices in nearby urban markets by shifting to commercial production of beef, dairy, poultry, garden vegetables, and fruits. On islands and peninsulas, safe from wolves and dogs, they pastured cattle, horses, sheep, and goats, and on the mainland they planted clover, timothy, and herd’s grass to increase the yield of cattle and manure. Coastal Rhode Island’s commercial bent was particularly pronounced. The Narragansett shore 90 | chapter 3 contained some of coastal New England’s best farmland. The mild climate and vast meadows fostered a thriving livestock industry, and the indented coast provided natural enclosures that encouraged experiments in breeding, including the famous Narragansett pacer. Because livestock required steady work in all four seasons, farmers circumvented the New England labor bottleneck by purchasing enslaved Africans and Indians and indentured whites to work their great estates, fueling the slave trade out of Rhode Island ports. The profits gave rise to the powerful “Narragansett planters,” an aristocracy altogether rare in the rest of New England.45 Here as elsewhere along the coastal plain, environment and commercial opportunity combined to shape frontier society. Toward the end of the colonial period, coastal agriculture ran up against the constraints of the environment. Lured by a steady growth in market opportunities, farmers demanded more from the soils, and within a generation or two, much of the land was exhausted to the point where, to quote the agriculturalist Jared Eliot, it produced turnips no “bigger than buttons.” Limited meadows and pastures meant limited manure for the fields, and to sustain grain production, farmers cleared more upland forest and introduced more domestic grasses. The nonnative clovers and grasses demanded more nutrients than the thin coastal soils could provide, and they lost their fertility; farmers found it difficult to fight the weeds, coarse grasses, woody brush, hardhack, juniper, red cedar, and white pine that invaded their pastures and mowing fields. Cultural factors impinged as well. Original grants had covered 200 to 300 acres, but because of the practice of partible inheritance, by 1750 divisions among heirs dropped below the 50- to 60-acre threshold necessary to practice effective crop rotation and fallowing. Out-migration provided opportunities for con- solidating these farmlands, and those with better resources began importing fertilizers and cattle feed, trending toward the intensive agricultural practices characteristic of the commercial age. Farmers survived, but agriculture was no longer the near-universal path to middle-class status it had been in early colonial times.46 A second frontier spread up the region’s larger rivers, where good growing conditions encouraged an early shift to commercial production. The Con- necticut Valley, exceeding every other region in the production of beef, hogs, horses, onions, flax, rye, and oats, became the focus of New England’s export economy. Encouraged by an expansive market, valley farmers improved their livestock breeds, planted English grasses, experimented with root crops for fodder, kept cattle close to the barn to collect manure, and added lime to the the ecologies of frontier farming | 91

soil. Viewing New England from the perspective of the Connecticut Valley farm, Stephen Innes concluded that “many, if not most, seventeenth-century New Englanders lived in acquisitive, market-oriented societies.” As in Rhode Island, a landed gentry consolidated vast estates, rented acreage to tenants, and marketed the surplus. Class identity—gentry, yeoman, tenant, laborer— overshadowed the religious homogeneity of the early towns. The well-honed culture of consumption among this social elite gave rise to a strong craft tradition that blended influences from the four states along the river, and these artisans in turn laid the foundation for industrialization in western Connecti- cut and Massachusetts.47 The New England uplands made up a third frontier zone, comprising the Appalachian foothills, the upper ends of the great river valleys, and the discon- tinuous hills and ridges behind the valley towns: a land of rocky terrain and thin acidic soils, shorter growing seasons, and widely varied fertility. Many settlers preferred this high ground to the valley bottoms, which were subject to floods, channel changes, and malarial fevers. Good growing land was scattered on the uplands, but it was lighter than the valley clays, and the bedrock just below the surface kept the water table high enough to prevent drought. The growing season was shorter, but each summer day was longer thanks to a sunnier aspect above the valleys; upland soils drained quickly in the spring, and there were fewer late-spring frosts. The farms exported relatively little, so bad roads and lack of river access were not serious impediments, and uneven terrain and irregular fields were no inconvenience to labor done with sickle, scythe, and ox-drawn plow. Since land was abundant and markets limited, the strategy of low-risk, diversified, subsistence-based production prevailed. Upland farms sold dairy products, raised cattle and sheep, and grew corn, rye, and potatoes, but cash income was more likely to come from nonfarm work such as shingle making, trapping, lumbering, or finishing work on clothes, hats, and shoes. Upland families moved in and out of the market economy according to season and lifecycle, pursuing modest goals oriented around a competency. Shallow plowing and light planting coupled with long-fallow rotations, conserved fertility, reduced soil compaction, and minimized erosion. Still, hill farming was risky and the soil was easily exhausted. Families operated closer to the margin and were ready to move when conditions tipped toward disaster.48 92 | chapter 3

Legacies The diversity of landforms across three frontiers also complicates an environmental assessment of frontier expansion. Early-twentieth-century geographers saw this pioneering push as a melding of people and nature that resulted in villages and fields patterned after the soft logic of the land rather than the hard geometry of the compass. Relatively aloof from market forces and steeped in a long tradition of community responsibility, New Englanders husbanded their resources and worked the land according to the dictates of nature. As the conservationist Paul Brooks describes it, they were “living with [the] . . . land, not simply living off it.” From his home on the outskirts of Bos- ton, Brooks observed the relic stone walls, meadows, and drainage canals that reminded him of the gentle hands at work on the land over the ages. Wise use created a classic regional pastoral—a second nature not unlike the old English Midlands, the hillside vineyards and orchards of Italy, or the terraced rice pad- dies of Japan.49 Recent environmental historians reached a harsher conclusion, drawing attention to eroded fields, choked rivers, degraded forests, impoverished fauna, and abandoned farms. Balancing these two viewpoints, as Brian Donahue points out, would require not only a town-by-town appraisal across a varied landscape of mountains, foothills, valley bottoms, and coastal lowlands but also an appraisal of New England’s extraordinary potential for environmental recovery. Today, for instance, the Appalachian Trail passes through “wilderness” areas that were once thriving agricultural centers.50 An assessment of the pioneers’ ecological footprint must be carefully qualified. New England pioneers were desperate forest destroyers, as were pioneers everywhere, because they were racing against time to clear land and grow food and fodder before winter. Cash strapped and labor poor, they used wood extravagantly in housing, fencing, heating, and capital formation. When sawmills appeared on the frontier in the mid-1700s, they stepped up their assault on the forest by working for the mill owners. How much of the overall forest remained when the frontier closed is difficult to say, for conditions varied along the three zones. In Petersham, in north-central Massachusetts, around 77 percent of the town’s forest had been cleared away by 1830 and perhaps 90 percent by 1850; Concord had lost a similar amount by Thoreau’s time. Forest- ers estimate that, at midcentury, New England in general—including the more sparsely settled upland townships—was about 50 percent forested. In 1654 Edward Johnson had described Concord as an open woodland plain with an the ecologies of frontier farming | 93

understory of bush and sweet fern, a characterization typical of much of eastern Massachusetts. By Thoreau’s time, this empire of trees had been reduced to a patchwork of thin, high-canopy pastured woodlands, brush-filled sprout lands, young even-aged stands of pioneer tree species, and, in more remote sections, mixed old-growth woodlands. As early as the 1770s New England’s southern port cities were importing firewood from the Kennebec Valley, a costly dependency made necessary by the practice of ravaging the woods to make pasture in the old settlements.51 Forests, as the pioneer conservationist George Perkins Marsh said, were “Agents of Moderation.” Farm clearing increased the extremes of surface-air temperature, changed the moisture content of the soils, accelerated erosion, and reduced fish populations. On bare ground, the earth froze harder and snows melted more quickly, exaggerating the spring runoff and reducing summer flows. Driving rains washed sediment into nearby bays, mill ponds, and lake borders; they buried floodplains and changed river channels. Fires set to clear underbrush sometimes spread into the accumulations of slash left by loggers and erupted into gigantic conflagrations. These fierce blazes volatilized the biomass above- and belowground, changed the composition of the soil, and sucked up vast amounts of ash that returned to pollute rivers, kill fish, and smother birds. After such devastating fires, a dense tangle of fireweed, golden- rod, herbaceous shrubs, alder, birch, black cherry, sugar maple, and white pine spread across the backcountry. Plant diversity increased for a decade or so, but when the pioneer growth was shaded out, it was often replaced by an even-age, single-species forest poorly suited for wildlife.52 The shift from forest to farm required broader changes in the New England environment. The original forest hosted many predator–prey relationships that kept plants, insects, and small mammals under control. But the new farm ecology, segmented into fields of undifferentiated crops, lacked these natural inhibitors. Single-plant densities, impossible under natural circumstances, encouraged an invasion of opportunistic species quick to take advantage of the new vegetation. Farmers faced periodic scourges of midges, caterpillars, cutworms, grasshoppers, cinch bugs, and flies, along with intrusive weeds like daisies, dandelions, Queen Anne’s lace, ragweed, barberry, mustard, hardhack, stinkweed, burdock, thistle, nettle, field mallow, and St. John’s wort. Crows, ravens, squirrels, skunks, raccoons, rabbits, bears, and groundhogs were likewise attracted to these sources of food.53 Farmers reacted by waging war on anything that threatened their crops. 94 | chapter 3

Living off the land in the early stages of clearing, they were voracious consumers of wildlife and fish, and as markets developed for furs, hides, and meat, they scoured the woods for saleable animals, often leaving behind the stripped carcasses. Principal game species—deer, moose, pigeons, and wild turkey— disappeared from the settled regions by the 1840s, and the remaining small mammals led a precarious life. Towns stopped appointing deer reeves in the late eighteenth century, which suggests that the office no longer served a purpose. With these species on the wane, predators turned to domestic animals, and states responded with bounties on wolves, wildcats, bears, cougars, lynx, foxes, blackbirds, jays, woodpeckers, crows, owls, and hawks.54 Bent on eradicating threatening species, farmers altered not only the acreage they tilled but the entire region, disrupting ecological interactions that had stabilized the area for thousands of years. Despite the devastation, nature remained an active force in this evolving landscape. When cut, hardwoods sent out vigorous shoots, and these saplings, nourished by the roots of the original tree, matured in about two decades. Unchecked in the upland pastures, oaks grew rapidly and spread their limbs outward to capture the abundant sunlight. White pines, with their wind- blown quick-sprouting seeds, kept the lowland landscape in flux as forest and farmer competed for space. This dynamic interface gave the land a bedraggled look, but forests nonetheless remained the dominant feature in the ecosystem. New Englanders accommodated to this half-wild, half-domestic world. They discovered no crop as profitable as the South’s tobacco or rice, but as they grew acquainted with the land, they found ways to extract profit from the particular assemblage of soil type, slope aspect, microclimate, and hydrology. A site that was ill-suited to one type of grain “may agree well with another,” Jared Eliot explained, noting that “when one fails another hits.” Through trial and error, by borrowing techniques from the people they dispossessed, and in selecting among the broad spectrum of English hearths, New Englanders transformed their forest environment into a world of fields, pastures, and orchards, offsetting the drain on fertility by rotating crops, manuring, and forest fallowing.55 As Carl Bridenbaugh notes, they came to know “instinctively the odors of the field and forest, the songs of birds, the habits of animals.” In time, this second nature achieved a new equilibrium, a tapestry of village, field, and forest as fitted to the land as the fabled forest primeval. And like the forest primeval, it became the subject of a vibrant literary and artistic celebration that accompanied the flowering of the New England Romantic tradition.56 Part II Reconstructing Nature in the Industrial Age, 1800 to 1900 

his section focuses on the nineteenth century, a time of Tprofound transition in New England that was spurred by expanding commercial markets and industrial technologies. For the environmental historian, this is also a time of confusing eddies and cross-currents. Although industrialization severed New England’s economic connection to the organic world, the dominant cultural expression of the age, Romanticism, introduced new ways of appreciating natural surroundings. By the end of the century, New Englanders were more alienated from nature and, at the same time, more attuned to the natural elements in the landscapes around them. At the geographical edges of the region—the forest rim and sea frontier—burgeoning markets ushered in an era of rapid expansion in fishing and logging. These two activities were enmeshed in a wider web of shipbuilding, farming, quarrying, and other rural pursuits, which left the fate of the communities on the margins dependent on their two keystone resources, cod and white pine, and on the volatile markets that gave these resources value. The upland and coastal economies reached their apogee at midcentury, a

| 95 96 | part ii time when New England’s natural bounty supplied not only the basic materials that built the great cities of the East, but also the fish that fed them. By 1880 the focus of lumber production had shifted westward out of the region, and fishing activity in maritime Canada, the Gulf states, and the Pacific coast intruded on markets long dominated by New England. As woodworking and fish-processing facilities concentrated in the larger mill towns and seaports, smaller communities saw prosperity slip from their grasp. Nevertheless, those who remained on the limits of New England continued a way of life consonant with the coastal and upland environments. Shut out of the industrializing economy, they invested in small, multiple-purpose woodworking mills and fishing vessels, spread their activities across a broad range of forest and sea products, and took advantage of their familiarity with the local environment to stay competitive in the age of giant industry. In the industrial and commercial heartland, new technologies offered unprecedented power over nature, but they also distanced people from the traditional organic world so prevalent in the postpioneer economy. Beginning with small mill complexes along the rivers of Rhode Island and central Mas- sachusetts, manufacturing spread northward to the Connecticut and Merri- mack River valleys, where capitalists built the gigantic mills that epitomized the Industrial Revolution in New England. Owners reengineered the rivers, introduced unfamiliar patterns of work, altered the relation between city and country, and intensified the exploitation of regional resources. This transformation was both contentious and disorienting, and it was out of these tensions that the Romantic movement emerged at midcentury. Writers and artists grappled with the alienation from nature that came with the new industrial order. Romantics explored the wild scenery of the White Mountains and Maine woods and were transfixed by the vast energies and broad vistas of this first-nature sublime. But they discovered these same organic affinities in the villages and rolling farmlands of central New England. reconstructing nature in the industrial age, 1800 to 1900 | 97

Having articulated this rediscovery of nature, they struggled to reconcile the sublime and the pastoral with recent synthetic technologies appearing everywhere on the landscape. They participated in the American enthusiasm for progress, but they also worried that clearing the mountain forest or improving the domestic landscape would dissipate the psychic energies that gave Amer- ica its special destiny. Artists explored this dilemma on canvas, and writers searched for the sources of America’s vigor in the evolving rural landscape. These tensions put Romantics in the forefront of the conservation movement. Transcendentalism, a subset of Romantic thought, expressed these uncertainties in religious and philosophic terms. Ralph Waldo Emerson pondered the various meanings of nature’s divinity while walking the fields and forests of Concord, and his neighbor Henry David Thoreau made three sojourns into the Maine woods, where he reveled in the overwhelming chaotic energies that animated the natural world. Thoreau’s account of these trips, published in 1864, set the stage for America’s love affair with wilderness, but his lasting contribution to New England’s Romantic legacy was finding the same latent energies just below the surface of Concord’s second-nature landscape. Inspired by Thoreau’s passion for nature in the domestic world, New England’s twentieth-century preservationists and environmentalists fought to protect not only the remote corners of the region—the geographic margins—but also the second-nature landscapes at the core of regional identity. These multifaceted conservation and preservation efforts are the subject of Part III. “This page intentionally left blank” Chapter 4 Industrializing the Margins 

he transition from natural ecology to farm ecology shaped Tthe classic second-nature landscapes of central New England. On the borders of this settled area, at sea and in the interior forest, another far less permanent and more destructive transition was taking place. Profits were paramount in the logging and fishing industries, but land and sea were nevertheless shaped by the same negotiation between nature and culture that fashioned the second-nature landscapes of central New England. The two industries were dependent not only on nature’s bounty but also on nature itself in the extraction of that bounty. Forest type, terrain, and seasonal temperatures and precipitation supplied the advantages that made New England the nation’s premier lumber producing region in the first half of the nineteenth century, and fishermen in their wind-powered craft were likewise dependent on natural forces. “The weather, last refuge of the striving conversationalist ashore, is here a matter of genuine concern,” a geographer wrote in 1916, adding, “it conditions the future at sea.”1 Barely perceptible changes in seawater temperature, salinity, currents, and nutrient flows instructed fish in their seasonal migrations and were the basic index of well-being for those living along- shore. In the eotechnic age—the period of hand tools and horsepower—work in the woods and at sea was bound to the rhythms of the natural world. Cheap wood for building and heating and cheap fish for food were the underpinnings of New England’s high standard of living, and exports of both

| 99 100 | chapter 4 drove the expansion of the region’s industrial economy. But this prosperity took its toll. As early as 1700, central New England had a barren look, and by the beginning of the next century the forest was in full retreat. In 1880 only 40 percent of Massachusetts was forested, along with 27 percent of Connecti- cut and 34 percent of Rhode Island. By this time, several commercial fisheries were at the point of collapse, and the river fisheries had all but disappeared. New species filled niches once teeming with cod, forcing fishermen to harvest a catch of increasingly lesser value. A similar process was at work in the forests. Although total wooded area increased after 1880, the trees were younger, thinner, and less valuable commercially. Tracing the history of these environmental changes explains a longstanding feature of New England social geography: two belts of economic distress and out-migration running through the region, one along the coast and the other along the base of the Appalachian plateau.2 Here, the connections between environment and society—between fish, forests, and people—become clear, indeed.

Natural Bounties The New England forest is a complicated zone of transition, an interweaving of largely softwood stands to the north and temperate hardwoods to the south. In the far north, as well as on the cold tablelands and ridges of the Taconic, Green, and White mountain ranges, grows a sub-boreal, or Acadian, forest of spruce, balsam fir, cedar, pine, and hemlock; these are joined by northern hardwoods like birch, beech, and maple and a scattering of ash, basswood, elm, butternut, cherry, and hornbeam. In the deeper soils of the southern lowlands and reaching northward up the warmer, sheltered river valleys is a temperate forest of oak, beech, chestnut, and hemlock. A belt of pine, spruce, and hemlock separates these two zones, extending across the lowlands of southern New Hampshire and central Maine and narrowing along the mountain ridges of western Massachusetts and Connecticut. A picture of this forest in presettlement times emerges from a variety of sources, including explorers’ accounts, natural histories, travel journals, and local records. Early travelers left firsthand impressions, although these were biased by what the writers thought useful or striking in the mix of trees they encountered. Timber surveyors were more systematic, but they mainly listed merchantable species. Land surveyors used “witness trees” to mark property boundaries, and these notations can be aggregated into a generalized image of industrializing the margins | 101

representative species. In 1935 the forester Stanley Bromley used this combined information to determine the boundary between the temperate and sub-boreal forest ecosystems in New England. Later, C. G. Lorimer and Charles V. Cogbill, working independently, retraced Bromley’s boundaries using witness trees from throughout the region. Although these forest types were once relatively distinct, centuries of human interaction blurred their edges; even in presettlement times, species assemblages were complicated by topography, disturbance history, and soil structure. North-facing slopes, where the sun strikes at a low angle, grew trees similar to those hundreds of miles farther north, while south-facing slopes hosted near subtropical species. Ice storms, hurricanes, fire, and insects opened gaps in the canopy and made way for a succession of different species. Where intense fires destroyed organic content in the soils, pitch pine or spruce grew abundantly. In areas with lighter fires and longer fire cycles, white pine predominated, with its winged seeds, tolerance for mineral soils, and rapid growth through canopy gaps. This shifting ecological tapestry, made up of overlapping communities and conditioned by a host of local historical circumstances, gave New England, as William Wood wrote, an “infinite store” of diverse and useful woods.3 Sea fishing thrived on a similar natural abundance. Ancient tectonic clashes and Pleistocene ice movements sculpted New England’s continental shelf into islands, shoals, banks, and ledges and molded the coast into innumerable sheltered harbors and bays. Glacial movement capped the banks and sea mounts with muds and gravels attractive to a variety of fish species, and extensive salt marshes, a function of high tides and huge river-borne sediment loads, further enriched the marine system. Each acre of salt marsh captured enough solar energy to produce about ten tons of organic matter per year, and juvenile fish transmitted this wealth of nutrients to groundfish migrating inshore to feed. The salt marsh coast and continental shelf brought together a uniquely productive environment that guaranteed success in New England’s early fisheries. A confluence of sea currents explains much of this productivity. Near Georges Bank, the heavy saline waters of the Gulf Stream sink to the sea bottom; the cold nutrient-rich Labrador Current slides across this warm layer, moving counterclockwise around the gulf. Some of the most powerful tides in the world mix these two layers, resulting in a rich soup of nutrients for the gulf’s piscine inhabitants. Smaller gyres from the Gulf Stream spin across the bank, carrying microscopic plant and animal life into the coastal estuaries, while branches of the Labrador Current trigger upwellings of inorganic 102 | chapter 4 materials that mix with the Gulf Stream’s plankton. With the return of a stronger sun in late February, light penetrates the nutrient-rich waters brought to the surface during winter, causing enormous phytoplankton blooms that feed clouds of copepods, larvae, and other primary consumers. Kelp and seaweed bloom along the coast and on the ledges—an annual production three times the mean for continental shelves. Estuaries face south and are flooded with sunlight in spring, providing ideal spawning areas. Although New England seas are relatively low in diversity, the biomass production is nothing short of phenomenal.4

Early Forest Use Early settlers’ most abundant assets were trees, and their scarc- est were labor and capital, so they used these resources accordingly. The first immigrants built lumber-saving half-timbered frame houses resembling those in England, but later arrivals shifted to full-timber, log, or squared-timber techniques borrowed from the forested regions of central and northern Europe. These structures were more convenient to build but prodigal in the use of wood; to heat them, settlers burned twenty to thirty-five cords of firewood annually in cavernous fireplaces that sent most of the heat directly up the chimney. As with their homes and fireplaces, the zigzag rail fences they built saved on labor and imported materials but consumed enormous amounts of local lumber. Late-colonial travelers noted the bleak, bare ground in the farm districts and the scorched stumps and logs that gave fields an unfinished look.5 House lots barren of trees hinted at the fate that awaited the woods beyond. Noting the surge of forest destruction in early America, William Cronon constructed a model in which the transformation of nature into commodities explained all aspects of colonial land use. In his view, European settlers saw the forest simply as an instrument of profit, and their drive to extract value resulted in a severely degraded environment. This model accounts for much of the decreased and denuded woods, but it leaves some questions unanswered. More recently, Frances Malamy has argued that market-based motives were only one facet of the land-use tradition that New Englanders inherited from the old country. English courts had regulated forest use since the Norman Conquest, and these legal understandings crossed the Atlantic with the early migrants, who immediately took on the burden of managing the use of forest resources locally. As early as 1626, Plymouth restricted the export of boards, planks, and industrializing the margins | 103

staves, and a few years later the town passed the first forest-fire prevention legislation in America. Boston leaders regulated tree cutting along the Muddy River, and Billerica banned cedar exports. Ipswich issued licenses to cut white oak and placed restraints on other forms of timber. Ordinances like these reflect a tension in the colonial towns, which depended on staple exports but were also made cautious by a collective memory imprinted by centuries of wood scarcity in England. Townspeople mediated this tension by allowing local access for subsistence and some form of commercial exchange while shutting out nonresident merchant-exploiters. The penalties, confiscations, and fines were sometimes ineffective, but this complicated dialectic of conservation and commodification runs through the history of forestry and fishing.6

Forests and Ships New England’s maritime economy was a confluence of logging, farming, shipbuilding, and fishing. Beginning in Salem in the 1630s, shipbuild- ers put to good use the region’s mixed forest: its pliable white pine for masts, bowsprits, and spars; strong, rot-resistant oak for keels and ribbing; light spruce for planking and decking; and iron-hard tamarack for braces. Well- cured and neatly adapted timbers were key to the success of the fishing fleet. During fierce Atlantic storms, the early fishing expert Lorenzo Sabine related, the “staunchest vessels” stayed at sea under “storm-trimmed foresails” while others ran to the nearest sheltered port. Those with the soundest timber and stoutest rigging filled their holds with fish and returned home with full fare.7 New England also supplied pine masts and spars for the British Navy. English shipwrights traditionally relied on firs and pines from northern Europe, but when a series of wars with Sweden and the Netherlands cut off these Baltic supplies in the 1600s, naval procurers turned to the white pine growing in New England and Nova Scotia. Selecting, felling, and transporting these giant old-growth trees required large investments and careful coordination, and the Admiralty grew concerned about the lack of organization in the colonies, compared to the rigorous procurement system out of Dantzig or Riga in the Baltic. Settlers, who dismissed these concerns, were convinced that forest resources were inexhaustible. In fact, pines suitable for masts—centuries old yet free of heart rot—were relatively rare, and to slice these forest monarchs into boards in frontier sawmills seemed to the Admiralty, painfully aware of Britain’s dependency on this remote supply, indeed criminal.8 104 | chapter 4

To protect the pine, the Board of Trade gave monopoly rights and bounties to favored agents and tightened restrictions on all others. In 1685 the crown appointed a Surveyor of Pines and Timber to settle disputes and confiscate wood that was illegally cut, and in 1691 it inserted a “mast preservation clause” in the charter of Massachusetts Bay protecting all large specimens on public land. These trees were marked with a “broad arrow”—three slashes of an ax— to indicate imperial ownership. In 1743 this lucrative business passed to the Wentworth family, virtual rulers of New Hampshire, and the resulting heavy- handed enforcement and corruption resulted in the Pine Tree Riot in Weare in 1772, during which scores of men with blackened faces attacked a mast agent’s deputy. As the Admiralty and its colonial agents tightened the mast policy, the backcountry erupted in a “woodland rebellion,” as Joe Malone called it, that lasted until the Revolutionary War.9 In the 1740s, Portsmouth was the busiest lumber port in New England, but relatively few mast trees remained standing in the surrounding area. Slash buildup had fueled forest fires that burned through the remaining pine stands, and with the Piscataqua watershed largely depleted, the masting industry shifted to Falmouth (present-day Portland), Maine, in Casco Bay. In 1761 and 1762, huge fires swept out of New Hampshire to the coast in Maine, driving settlers and loggers eastward as far as Mount Desert and Machias. The diaspora spread masting operations over a vast territory where the advance and retreat of settlement during the Indian wars left property ownerships in a state of confusion. Illicit cutting was so extensive that the Surveyor General could intervene only in random cases, hoping to make examples of the offenders.10 The Broad Arrow acts became a focus of discontent in northern New England. In 1774 the First Continental Congress called for a boycott of Brit- ish goods, and the resulting nonimportation agreements also banned exports intended for the British Navy. This restriction led to an altercation between Maine militia and a British naval detachment in Falmouth in April 1775. The colony, then under the jurisdiction of Massachusetts, paid for its show of rebelliousness with the destruction of its largest port, a bombardment that helped galvanize support for independence throughout America. Pines were important to the outcome of the Revolution as well. Despite Britain’s superior ship strength, its navy was handicapped by disruptions in the supply of masts from the colonies. English dockyards continued to receive timber from Riga, but boatyards in the West Indies, used in the American industrializing the margins | 105

operations, went without. Sprung masts and leaky ships prevented the Brit- ish from blockading the French squadrons under Count d’Estaing as they left France to aid the American cause. Later, while crossing the Atlantic in pursuit of d’Estaing, the British Navy weathered a series of fierce gales that damaged the ships’ rigging. The siege of Yorktown, the event that ended the war, was to some degree determined by the deterioration of the British fleet, a fact that weighed in Commander Samuel Graves’s indecision about relieving Cornwal- lis’s troops at Yorktown. The defeat of the British squadron by French naval forces on September 5, 1781, brought Cornwallis’s surrender and signaled the end of conflict in 1783.11 In the aftermath of the Revolution, shipbuilding spread rapidly along the New England coast. During the great age of the sail, from 1840 to 1860, these shipyards built and maintained the American merchant marine, including the sleek, superbly designed clippers constructed in the 1840s for the China Trade and the California gold rush. New England shipwrights perfected the art of bringing together scores of different woods, each with its own unique strengths, grains, and bearing qualities, to create a sailing craft perfectly suited to the cargo it carried, the seas it traversed, and the ports it served.

New England Fishing The evolution of shipbuilding demonstrates the interplay of fish, forests, and people in the integrated economy of coastal New England. As the history of Cape Cod shows, the consequences of exploiting these resources were similarly interrelated. For thousands of years, the Cape’s trees, soils, and fish remained in a state of dynamic equilibrium as part of a shifting panorama of woods, marshes, and dunes, all kept in motion by shore erosion, stream meander, and fire. Arriving in the 1630s, English migrants added another element to this volatility. Their use of the land was sustainable as long as forests and meadows remained intact, but it was the prospect of exploiting these very resources that drew settlers to the headlands in the first place.12 Towns were the seat of conservation innovation everywhere in New England, and this was especially true on Cape Cod, where fish runs, soil fertility, and forest resources could easily deteriorate with little mishandling. Even on private lands, ownership came with an understanding that trees would be removed judiciously to prevent shifting sands from ruining adjacent farmlands. Such stewardship was hardly a matter of choice: townspeople preserved 106 | chapter 4

“their own best interests,” as Ruth Friedman summarizes, through the “combined effort of the community at large.” To prevent erosion along the shores, they regulated cutting timber, harvesting hay, gathering thatch, and grazing livestock on or near the delicate dunes. These rules were not uniformly effective, but along with other local conservation codes, they were a significant beginning to New England’s conservation legacy.13 A series of ecological crises at the beginning of the nineteenth century made these restrictions more contentious. Without sufficient inland pasture to keep fields manured, farmers found their yields declining. At the same time, the grass in their pastures grew coarser, to which they responded by moving livestock onto the marshes and beaches. Towns prohibited this practice, but the decline in community consensus in the post-Revolutionary period made orders difficult to enforce. The damage had been done. Loosened sand swept into the salt marshes, fields, harbors, and streams; worms and grasshoppers devoured stressed crops; fish populations plummeted; livestock grew gaunt; and the whaling fleet was forced to migrate. At this crossroads, residents realized that local solutions were ineffective and appealed to the General Court for statewide conservation laws.14 The Cape’s history brings into relief the land-use dynamics in play throughout New England. Early on, towns responded to depletion of timber, fish, and game with various approaches to community stewardship, but these ordinances succumbed to pressures created by population increases, postrevolutionary individualism, and broader commercial exchange. When local solutions failed, citizens appealed to state legislatures to enforce their conservation traditions, which culminated in the country’s first state-level fish, game, and forest commissions. Massachusetts and Maine, with their enormous advantage in sheltered harbors, ready supply of timber, and proximity to the Georges and Grand Banks, led the nation in fish landings in the early nineteenth century. The former’s ports supplied mackerel, and the latter’s somewhat smaller fleet provided the choicest cod. Sometimes up to twelve feet long and weighing four hundred pounds, cod was the fish that fed the Atlantic world through much of its history. It was also sedentary and could be caught from a wide range of ships, both near shore and on the banks. Along with schooners on the banks, thousands of smaller vessels from both states fished for mackerel and cod in the Gulf of Maine and Bay of Fundy, staying in sight of land as a hedge against bad weather. These small-vessel fishermen typically followed two or industrializing the margins | 107

more livelihoods in this integrated economy. That farmers fished and fishermen farmed was an “environmental imperative,” as Wayne O’Leary notes, of coastal New England’s limited arable land and its cold, damp climate. The fisherman, as Lorenzo Sabine summarized, was “neither a landsman nor a seaman . . . but . . . he could appear to advantage in either of these characters. He is neither a merchant nor a mechanic, and yet he can buy and sell, mend and make. . . . He holds nautical instruments in high derision; for the state of the moon and the weather predictions of the almanac, the peculiar sound of the sea when it ‘moans,’ and the particular size or shape of a ‘cat’s paw’ or ‘glin’ in the sky, lead him to far surer results.” At sea and on land, survival depended on synchronizing weather, growing season, fish migration, and the whims of the market. The fisherman’s life was not a simple one.15 Nor was it secure. Shifting gear on a wet and heaving deck could knock a crewman overboard or take off an arm, and ice accumulation in the rigging could overturn a vessel in an instant. On Georges Bank, the ocean floor rises to within a hundred feet of the surface, impelling the heavy North Atlantic swells to seemingly impossible heights, and the fog-enshrouded Grand Banks were located on one of the world’s busiest sea lanes, making collisions an ever-present danger. Death at sea hundreds of miles from home was a grim prospect for the fisherman, and a destructive storm could wipe out an entire fleet, meaning heavy losses to a community and even a single family. Left as widows, women sought work for themselves and their children, took charity from relatives, and found succor among sympathetic storekeepers. These were the considerations that made fishing an occupation of last resort and that depopulated the coast when western farming districts and factories offered more secure alternatives.16 The industry’s most active period was between 1800 and 1866, an era that coincided with a generous federal bounty that helped support small-scale fishing. Enacted in 1789, the subsidy was designed to compensate for high duties on imported salt and, as Thomas Jefferson stated, to “foster . . . our fisheries as nurseries of navigation.” By this logic, fishermen would lend their seafaring skills to the naval effort in time of war. The bounties, which remained in place until 1866, not only encouraged the industry but also nurtured a uniquely democratic system of fishing by subsidizing small-boat ownership and stipulating a fair division of the season’s proceeds among crew, captain, and vessel owners.17 The largest markets were in the plantation economies of the West Indies and the American South, among settlers and farmers in the West, and with 108 | chapter 4

European immigrants in northeastern cities. Salt cod was well suited to these markets because of its low cost and durability in hot climates. Mackerel, unlike the more sedentary cod, ranged widely, arriving from the Gulf of Maine in late March. The schools were huge—sometimes miles across—but finding them was always a matter of luck, and, once found, the catch could spoil quickly. As a result, mackerel schooners were pricey and fast. The demand for speed and windward ability put a premium on hull design, making these boats the grey- hounds of the fishing fleet. Such vessels required significant capital outlays, and accordingly fleets were concentrated in larger seaports, including Scituate, Cohasset, Hingham, Boston, Newburyport, Gloucester, and Portland.18

From Eotechnic to Paleotechnic: Industrializing the Woods As with cod in the era when fish fed the nation, white pine stood above all other tree species in the age of wood—a time when forest resources contributed to every aspect of material life. Pine yielded light, strong, dura- ble lumber with a smooth grain that was useful for everything from boxes to buildings. New England’s abundant snowfall provided a friction-free surface to sled logs to landings along rivers, which in turn proved ideal for moving bulky but buoyant raw materials hundreds of miles from the interior to the mills at tidewater. Snowmelt and spring rains resulted in a forceful freshet that flushed the logs downstream and powered the mills that sawed them into boards. In each sheltered seaport, a fleet of lumber schooners awaited to carry this product to cities along the eastern and southern coasts.19 At the conclusion of Dummer’s War in 1727, loggers formed companies to cut and drive white pine logs down the Connecticut River to Enfield, which became the first of many New England lumber boomtowns. As the industry gained momentum, its leading edge moved eastward to the Penobscot, which for a half century after 1830 remained the center of New England lumber production. The river’s 185 lakes and ponds supplied a steady flow of water to float logs and power the mills in Old Town, Orono, Stillwater, and Great Works, and Bangor’s deep-water harbor, some thirty miles inland, sheltered the lumber schooners that carried this enormous cut to cities along the eastern seaboard. Bangor sent up to 200 million board feet to market yearly, making it America’s ninth busiest port in terms of ship clearings. In 1833 a local newspaper reported that the Penobscot supplied three-quarters of all the white pine exported from the United States.20 Pine logging flourished in the eotechnic age. industrializing the margins | 109

Relying on only a few simple hand tools—ax, cross-cut saw, cant dog or peavey—logging and river driving were exceptionally labor intensive, but because the industry was so closely adapted to New England’s natural advantages, it resisted technological improvement. Cutting and moving logs, as Michael Williams notes, remained an eotechnic activity through most of the nineteenth century. As river use intensified, however, companies developed a complicated legal framework for keeping the drives running smoothly, including registered log marks, fines for log theft, and sorting booms to collect logs near the mills. To coordinate the efforts of hundreds of companies on each river, mutual-benefit associations took charge of the entire drive.21 If logging remained an eotechnic activity, milling moved rapidly into the paleotechnic era. Early mills used water-powered up-and-down saws, so called because of their slow, cumbersome reciprocal motion. Set in heavy timber sashes that kept them in tension, the saws, often in “gangs” of five to ten, processed a few large pines a day. In the 1820s, larger export-oriented mills were fitted with steam-powered circular saws, which ran faster and wasted less wood, and in the 1870s mill owners experimented with band saws, again reducing the width and increasing the speed of the cut.22 As late as 1870, a cen- sus counted some 16,562 water wheels and only 11,204 steam engines power- ing Maine’s mills, a reflection of the industry’s chronic undercapitalization, slow technological march, and adaptation to the abundant water supply. Yet by this time, large corporations were in control of the forest margin and ran their woods operations on an industrial scale. Such activities grew as powerful “lumber barons” bought up entire townships, hired crews large enough to log them, and built their own sawmills and lumber schooners. This era of industrialization saw intense struggles over forest and water resources, but more often companies cooperated to build dams, dig canals, clear river channels, and lay narrow-gauge railroads into the steep-sided valleys. Improved technologies left the industry less vulnerable in its dependency on nature.23

Social Legacies Logging and fishing left a mixed legacy. They produced much of the wealth the region used to build its cities and factories, but the towns directly engaged in these extractive industries seldom shared in the prosperity. Along the base of the Appalachian Plateau, logging and farming were joined in a complicated economic coevolution sometimes called agroforestry. Farmers 110 | chapter 4 worked in the woods in winter and in sawmills and woodworking shops in spring, a practice that produced as much as 20 percent of the annual income in some farm districts. Occupational pluralism was a fact of life in upland New England, but these various pursuits were not always compatible. Logging and river-driving, for instance, interfered with critical phases in the agricultural routine, and the understanding that men working in the mills and quarries could live off their own crops kept wages low in rural areas. Needing little overhead or continued investment, these industries seldom resulted in new towns or the construction of roads, bridges, or other forms of infrastructure that spurred economic growth.24 By 1880 New England’s old-growth stands of white pine had been largely depleted and the focus of lumber production in America had shifted to New York, Pennsylvania, and the Lake states. New England loggers resorted to lower-grade spruce saw-timber, but the costs of transporting these logs rose exponentially as operations moved farther into the highlands between the river systems. The opening of the Panama Canal in 1914 flooded eastern markets with West Coast lumber, cut and milled on a scale no New England firm could match; by the early twentieth century, lumber products in general were competing with new building and packing materials, like steel, reinforced concrete, cardboard, cellophane, and, later, plastic. In the upland communities, commentators worried that the “dependent state of our people on a single branch of business” would precipitate more farm abandonment.25 These declines were offset by a spectacular rise in pulp and paper production that accelerated the pace of industrialization in the woods. In 1806 Brit- ish stationery merchants Henry and Sealey Fourdrinier perfected a machine that changed paper production from a handicraft to a continuous-flow operation. The machine spread a slurry of pulped rags over screens, then passed the fibers through rollers and felts to wick off moisture. The Berkshires, close to rag supplies in Boston and tool and die shops in Worcester, benefited from this industrial advance, gaining ten new mills between 1819 and 1829. When low- cost book and newspaper printing boosted demand for paper, manufacturers began experimenting with a variety of substitutes for rags: old sails, straw, cattails, vegetables, peat, corn husks, asbestos, and, according to some sources, linen wrappings from mummies brought over from Egypt by the shipload. In 1867 a mill in Curtisville, Massachusetts, turned to ground wood, and within a decade that had become the basic raw material for the industry.26 When the supply of pulpwood from Berkshire County’s forests was industrializing the margins | 111

depleted, manufacturers turned to lands along the upper Connecticut River and, later, in New Hampshire and Maine. Between 1880 and 1900, some forty pulp and paper mills were built in Maine, sustaining one of the most dramatic periods of industrial expansion in the state’s history. This growth was all the more spectacular because paper production moved to the sources of waterpower and timber in some of the most remote settings in the region. Towns favored with paper mills industrialized at a breathtaking pace, but with manufacturing concentrated in a few large centers, the industry was less reliant on rural families for logs, woods labor, and mill work. Industri- alization simply continued a legacy of large companies shaping landownership, employment, and infrastructure in ways that limited opportunities for rural growth.27 Towns without the good fortune of hosting a paper mill saw prosperity slip from their grasp. Whitefield, New Hampshire, reached its zenith at midcentury, before the pulp and paper boom, by supporting a dairy industry, several lumber and woodworking mills, a potato starch factory, and a small textile mill. Men farmed in summer and cut wood in winter for lumber, shingles, and spool stock. The town’s sawmills disappeared when the timber was depleted, and the dairy industry declined as transport costs rose. A new shoe factory and tannery improved the economy, but these too proved ephemeral, and townspeople fell back on summer hotels, a summer stock theater, a nearby ski resort, and pulpwood operations. Other towns fared worse. One by one, downtown businesses succumbed to fires or retirements, and families grew increasingly isolated. As commercial and industrial activity migrated to the paper mill towns, nature reasserted itself in the more remote communities: “the lines of the cellar holes are blurred, the grass grows over, the forest moves in. . . . Deer poke daintily among the fallen apples.”28 Small fishing ports shared a similar fate. The Civil War brought a sharp rise in vessel outfitting costs, and to help finance the effort, Congress increased tariffs on sail duck, cordage, tar, hemp, and salt. In addition, the threat of seizure by Confederate raiders sent marine insurance rates soaring, and the Union blockade of southern ports closed off a key market for New England fish. After the war, rival fishing fleets appeared in the Gulf of- Mex ico and Great Lakes, and Canadian Confederation, which was completed in July 1867, provided federal funds to modernize that country’s fishing fleets, which sent their catch to the West Indies. The rise of the Chicago meat-packing industry in the 1870s, along with refrigerated railcars and home iceboxes, 112 | chapter 4 shifted American diets away from salt cod and salt pork to fresh and canned beef and poultry.29 As in lumbering, industrialization compounded these hardships. Mackerel fishers traded jigging by hand for purse seines that could capture thousands of fish in a single haul, and hand-lining for cod gave way to trawling with a single line holding thousands of hooks. Just as paper production concentrated the forest economy in a few towns, these expensive technologies clustered the cod and mackerel fleets in New England’s largest seaports. At the turn of the twentieth century, Boston modernized its T Wharf to capture much of the large-vessel fishing trade, and in 1923 Charles Birdseye moved to Gloucester and developed a technique for quick-freezing fish. Larger seaports with capital reserves, refrigerator plants, and rail connections gained the upper hand, and by 1900 New England’s smaller harbors had assumed a look that tourist pro- moters optimistically described as rustic or quaint, with old vessels lying on their beams at the tideline, wharfs sagging over rotted pilings, upland pastures growing back to bramble, and barns and fish-houses tilting precariously. Here, too, nature reclaimed a landscape that had been carefully sculpted to human needs over the previous two centuries.30 Developments in the fishing industry had broader economic consequences. During its heyday, coastal New England produced the basic raw materials that built the great cities of the East Coast: lumber, timber, granite, slate and cedar shingles, paving stones, plaster, cement, and lime, not to mention the ships that transported these products. Mixed forests of pine and oak supplied hundreds of small shipyards that employed carpenters, sailmak- ers, and other part-time fishermen-farmers in season. Granite quarries on the islands and peninsulas shipped paving stone, monuments, foundations, and polished building facing to cities down the eastern seaboard. Lime from mid- coast Maine was marketed as mortar, plaster, cement, fertilizer, whitewash, medicinal drinks, and “lime pencils,” which burned with an intense white light for lantern shows, searchlights, and theatrical spotlights—the last giving rise to the expression “in the limelight.” From the exposed granite along the coast, farmer-fishermen cut paving stones—also used as ship ballast—and the lime industry relied on farmers cutting spruce from their own back lots for fuel wood, barrel staves, and hoops. Others along the Kennebec River harvested ice for the gigantic ice houses that shipped this winter windfall to the seaboard cities in summer, and those on Cape Cod enjoyed a similar boon producing salt for the fisheries.31 industrializing the margins | 113

These extractive industries employed thousands of seasonal workers, but they were vulnerable to market shifts and resource depletion, and one by one the economic supports for this tightly integrated coastal economy were knocked clear. In the 1830s, the Erie Canal’s feeder lines reached the rich brine fields in New York’s Onondaga County, driving most of Cape Cod’s salt producers out of business. Whale oil production, which brought untold wealth to New Bedford and Nantucket, received a near-fatal blow when petroleum, discovered in 1859 in Pennsylvania, was rendered into kerosene and lubricants. Shipbuilding declined after 1860 when steam-powered vessels built of iron and steel appeared in force on the seas. Home refrigerators devastated the ice industry, leaving a legacy of ghost towns along the lower Kennebec River. Granite and lime quarrying suffered when railroads reached good stone deposits farther inland and as the focus of American city building moved west. In the 1880s, builders shifted to a cement that required less lime, and concrete and steel girders replaced granite in structures ranging from bridges to skyscrapers. Coastal farmers turned to producing hay for East Coast cities, and when this soil-depleting practice ran its course, or when markets succumbed to the automobile revolution, they abandoned their farms or sold them to summer vacationers. “Here and there along the coast, one finds evidence of the pitiful degeneracy that comes in part from isolation,” E. P. Morris wrote at the turn of the nineteenth century, oblivious, perhaps, to the coast’s once-thriving economy, its intimate connection to seaports around the world, and a cosmopolitan outlook unique in rural America.32 The coastal and upland environment yielded huge fortunes for those who mastered the art of turning fixed natural assets into liquid capital. But in the long run, these winnings slipped out of New England when opportunities arose elsewhere. The economic disruption in small-town life underscored an essential environmental disadvantage the New England margins faced in the age of concentrated capital investments: natural resources and environmental advantages were spread widely and thinly across the forest and coastal regions. An early geographer pointed out that nature had been altogether too lavish in supplying New England with multiple sheltering bays and inlets and multiple sources of upland water powers. Had there been but two or three great harbors and two or three great watersheds, manufacturers would have concentrated their investments in these places to build huge cement factories, giant shipyards, integrated fish-processing plants, and large-scale lumber or paper mills, each with its own set of spin-off industries. The New England 114 | chapter 4 environment spread its staples industries across too many fishing outports and small woodworking centers, leaving each poorly equipped to compete in an era of industrialization.33

Economic and Environmental Adaptations Industrialization on the margins disadvantaged New England’s coastal and upland communities, and their populations were winnowed accordingly. But those who remained adapted and continued a way of life closely attuned to the patterns of weather, season, and resource availability. In 1933 the forester R. T. Fisher wrote that upland New England’s greatest liability was “the extent to which forest weeds . . . have multiplied as compared with the species of greatest use.” Forest owners might have prevented this condition by thinning and replanting, but lumber imports from the Pacific Northwest sent prices so low that such measures were unprofitable. These twin pressures—western competition and resource depletion—drove the large industrial sawmills out of the region; small mills and woodworking shops persevered, although their numbers were likewise thinned. At the end of the nineteenth century, about half the sixty-five wood-processing establish- ments in New Hampshire still used waterpower, and more than half ran for only two to six months each year. This low overhead allowed them to retool rapidly to take advantage of the changing mixed-growth forest and shift from one niche market to the next. With a vigorous stand of second-growth forest arriving at maturity, they cut timber for boards, boxes, veneer, toys, wooden ware, furniture, shoe lasts, tool handles, spools, bobbins, doors, house trim, sashes, fencing, poles, and even toothpicks. They converted cherry, poplar, and birch into excelsior and spool stock and made small-diameter chestnut and oak into railroad ties, posts, and poles. Pasture pine became box boards or match blocks, and second-growth beech, birch, and maple were distilled into denatured alcohol and acetate or made into charcoal. These mills helped clear the forest of low-value species and hasten the return to oak, pine, and spruce.34 Outport fishermen followed a strategy similar to that of the owners of small up-country mills. Shut out of the heavily industrialized offshore fisheries, small-vessel owners spread their activities across a broad range of marine and on-shore resources. In small, multiple-purpose vessels they moved from one catch to the next as species availability and market opportunity dictated. Men- haden returned to the coast each spring in huge, closely packed schools easily industrializing the margins | 115

exploited with simple fishing gear. Although not a food fish, it was valuable as bait and as a source of oil, which was used as an industrial lubricant. Quickly overexploited, menhaden disappeared from New England waters in the 1890s, and the fish-oil business went with them, but by this time coastal inhabitants were taking advantage of other inshore fisheries. Sea herring, among the world’s foremost food fishes, migrated inland each spring for spawning, and in 1875 seafood canners in Eastport found a way to process them into a plau- sible substitute for the Mediterranean “fish of Sardinia.” By 1880 locals were building shore weirs, or stationary nets made of brush, to supply the scores of canneries along the eastern Maine coast. Lobster catching was even more profitable. In the 1850s, fishermen developed an effective trap made of laths, hoops, and netting. Within decades they were selling their catch to resorts, restaurants, and canning factories, while wholesalers packed lobster in ice and seaweed and shipped them to the West. In the off-season, fishers dug quahogs or soft-shelled clams or dipped oysters.35 Although none of these fisheries provided a year-round livelihood, small-vessel fishermen, like upland mill owners, moved quickly from opportunity to opportunity. “On a Gloucester fishing schooner,” a geographer wrote in 1916, “the word farmer is a term of deep contempt; not so in Maine, where every farmer has a boat of his own and is a fisherman and boat-builder himself.” To make the most of their limited capital, they used their vessels to carry lobsters, wood, or produce to larger ports as part of a seasonal round of farming, woods work, hand-lining, lobstering, clamming, and weir and net fishing. They knew their local environments intimately—the seabed configurations that optimized the deployment of lobster traps, hand-lines, and drag-nets; the tides, currents, and weather conditions that brought certain species to the shore, and the fluctuating markets for each crop, wood product, or catch of fish. Cruising close to the margin of profitability, they used this keen knowledge to exploit new opportunities as they appeared. Being “on the spot” at their own front doors, they enjoyed a clear advantage over nonlocal industrial-scale operators in the opportunistic exploitation of coastal New England’s scattered resources. Overlapping work patterns gave a cluttered appearance to coastal and hill-country landscapes, where fishing gear or logging equipment in all stages of repair lay scattered among gardens, grazing livestock, farm implements, and wood-working tools. The informal look of these dooryards, harbor fronts, and mill yards added to the romantic appeal of rural New England, providing 116 | chapter 4 tourists and travel writers with innumerable examples of carefree lives patched together from whatever source of income seemed near at hand. These rustic musings, however, missed the true significance of occupational pluralism. As Béatrice Craig noted, it was less a symptom of economic stagnation than an adaptive response to complex cycles of resource availability and markets for forest and fish products. Owners of these small boats and small mills flourished in a volatile resource-based economy where ingenuity and flexibility counted more than capital resources. The sea and forest offered multiple opportunities that no single company could monopolize, and by taking advantage of these opportunities, New Englanders persevered in a distinctive way of life inseparable from the natural environment.36

Natural Legacies A century of intensive logging left New England with a new forest, less stable and ecologically diverse than the forest managed by native peoples before contact. In the high elevation spruce–fir forests in Maine and New Hampshire, loggers and pulp cutters had taken virtually every standing tree, since fierce winds blew down any that remained after cutting. Slash fires burned away the thin mantle of organic soil and left a rocky landscape nearly barren of vegetation. Below, conditions were more encouraging. In 1896 Aus- tin Cary surveyed the spruce–fir forests of the upper Kennebec watershed and found large tracts of woods still in “primitive condition,” mixed with areas where heavy cutting produced thick stands of second-growth spruce and fir mixed with beech, poplar, birch, and maple. While Cary found cause for optimism in the forests’ regenerative power, he also noted burn paths of low-grade hardwoods extending for miles, and because spruce and fir had shallow roots, improper cutting resulted in large swaths of blow-downs. Cary also found areas where loggers took only the accessible stands and left the rest to grow old and decay, or they left behind pioneer hardwoods to reseed and suppress the spruce and fir. “A hundred years will not suffice to grow another crop of spruce logs on that ground,” he summarized at one place. On such land, the best option was to “burn it clean, and take the chances on an entirely new crop.”37 In the lower foothills, about 70 percent of the land had been cleared. When railroads reached into the uplands, they opened new lands to logging, consumed enormous amounts of wood for fuel, ties, and bridge construction, and industrializing the margins | 117

set off forest fires with sparks from their boilers. In 1873 the New Hampshire legislature distributed a questionnaire to selectmen inquiring about the state of the forest, and the responses reflected a widespread concern over wood supplies. Officers in the hill towns claimed that nearly all the valuable timber had been cut, leaving a legacy of tangled sprout lands and second-growth woods. Forest cover in Vermont towns averaged about 30 percent statewide, but as the farm reformer William Chapin noted, this forest was “more bushes than trees.” The Pine Tree State, according to theMaine Farmer, was 46 percent forested in 1879, but “every year the spruce that floats down our rivers is growing smaller and smaller, and good pine is hardly known.” Farm abandonment released some seven million acres of former crop land and pasture, but loggers using portable steam sawmills moved into the new forest and cut heavily for box boards and match-wood. The forest remained resilient, but trees were younger, thinner, less vigorous, and more closely spaced—“too little wood on too many trees,” as one observer commented—and these uniform stands were more vulnerable to insect infestation and disease.38 In 1917 the U.S. forester H. O. Cook conducted a survey of Worcester County, which produced about a third of the locally grown wood used in Massachusetts. For nearly three centuries, farming, logging, and natural reforestation had been in a state of dynamic tension in the county, leaving about 57 percent of the land forested and 31 percent in farmland. Cook found that the condition of the new forest varied from township to township; some towns had been devastated by logging, chestnut blight, gypsy moth, and fires; others were blanketed with thick stands of pine and pioneer hardwoods. His overall assessment, however, was sobering. “Many areas are found where cutting has [removed] . . . everything merchantable,” he wrote of Westminster Township, “leaving the land butchered, with slash and débris scattered about, forming veritable tinder piles. . . . This land is now growing up to gray birch, sprout chestnut or brush, and is well-nigh in a useless condition. . . . Fires have run through the cut-over lands and left them in a very poor condition.” The town and its neighbors still sent timber to small mills and woodworking shops, but dimension lumber stock had long since disappeared.39 The environmental consequences of industrial logging are not easily generalized. Forest destruction increased run-off and soil erosion, silted lake beds, degraded stream habitat, and filled harbors at the mouths of the rivers. How widespread these effects were is difficult to judge. Healthy forests absorb rainwater and retard snowmelt, which moderates the flow of streams and rivers 118 | chapter 4 and prevents flooding and siltation. Yet trees also decrease overall stream flow because they draw water from the soil and release it into the air through a process called evapotranspiration. The combined effect of rapid runoff and tran- spiration varies from watershed to watershed, but in New England, denuded lands revegetate rapidly, and watersheds carpeted with grasses and pioneer woody species are as effective as forests in regulating water flow.40 In 1992 Jamie Eves challenged the virtually unanimous nineteenth-century opinion that deforestation made flowage less dependable and drove upland sawmills and gristmills out of business. His research on central Maine showed that deforestation did increase surface run-off, but the thousands of lakes and bogs scattered across this section of the state, coupled with a latticework of forest debris in the rivers and streams, kept water flow fairly constant through the era of intensive forest clearing. Millwrights typically located below lakes or bogs and enhanced this natural storage by constructing upstream dams. Sim- ple technology compensated for the changes in stream flow produced by loss of forest cover. Deforestation peaked in 1880, but for several decades after that date, the number of sawmills and gristmills in the Penobscot basin remained relatively constant. They declined after 1920, largely because of an increase in steam-powered mills, a change in lumber markets, and a shift in agriculture from milled grains to potatoes, sweet corn, and dairy. On a broader scale, as Gordon Whitney points out, the height of deforestation in New England coincided with the construction of huge textile mills whose owners carefully regulated flowage on every significant watershed in central and southern New England. Thus, despite the widespread conviction that deforestation brought dramatic fluctuations in stream flow, evidence is inconclusive owing to the intensive management of water resources. For whatever reason, water flowage seems to have remained relatively stable through the latter nineteenth century, despite the almost universal commentary on dry stream beds and disappear- ing mills.41 The effects of forest cutting on wildlife are equally difficult to generalize. Logging undoubtedly destroyed critical forest and stream habitats, and this new environment was no substitute for old-growth ecologies. In most areas pine was the most aggressive colonizer, and although mature pine is a valuable component of the ecosystem, the young stands that covered the open country in the later nineteenth century were nearly empty of animals and birds. On cleared land, pine regrowth resulted in a thick, almost impenetrable stand with a closed canopy that shaded the forest floor and covered the ground with industrializing the margins | 119

a thick carpet of needles. Reforestation completed the exhaustion of soils already impoverished by farming or slash fires, and the carpet of acidic needles drove off decomposers and arrested organic decomposition. These conditions offered little understory to nurture animals or birds, and since pine are long- lived, no competing plants or trees appeared until fire, windstorm, disease, insect infestation, or human disturbance removed them.42 The loss of old-growth forest was calamitous for many wildlife species. These ancient sites provided cavities for dens and nesting places, sources of wood-boring insects, and an overall thermal stability important in some animals’ energy budget. The quiet ambiance beneath the tall trees offered a sense of security, and the process of decay left the forest floor spongy, moist, and cool—easy traveling for large and small mammals. Yet the disturbed ecology, with its varied habitats and many ecotones, was congenial to such species as raccoons, skunks, rabbits, bobcats, bear, and lynx. Birds nested in the scrubby growth that followed clear-cutting, snowshoe hares found abundant browse on shoots of cherry and aspen, ruffed grouse favored the expanding white pine stands, and woodcocks enjoyed a feast of blackberries, blueberries, viburnum, hawthorn, and birch buds. According to one authority, of 125 neotropical bird species that nest in the Northeast, 74 require disturbance-generated habitats or young forests.43 Given these uneven impacts, it seems that human predation was more significant than habitat loss in the overall decline of wildlife on forested margins. Hunting all but eradicated deer, moose, caribou, and most fur-bearing mammals in the early nineteenth century, and bounties on predators like wolves, bobcats, lynx, fox, eagles, and hawks were variously successful in accomplish- ing the same. Some mammals recovered when these practices were brought under control. As a habitat generalist, deer benefited from the early succession growth in the clear-cuts and abandoned fields and orchards, as they did from eradication of their nonhuman predators and the implementation of game laws late in the nineteenth century. Deer introductions, one of the region’s great conservation success stories, suggest the resilience of wildlife in the second-nature landscape.44

Forest and Sea in the New England Economy From Puritan times to the present, forest and sea have been central to the New England economy, but their contributions changed over the 120 | chapter 4 years. Exploitation in both industries shifted from highly prized resources— pine timber and cod—to a progression of less profitable species. This regres- sion alarmed many who saw diminishing stocks of valuable trees and fish as a threat to the New England way of life. In the 1840s, Henry David Thoreau drew attention to the impoverishment of nature from Concord to Cape Cod and northern Maine. Two decades later, the Vermont naturalist George Per- kins Marsh echoed these concerns in his monumental book Man and Nature, which argued convincingly that New Englanders would be well served by protecting the forests so essential to their existence. In the wake of Marsh’s revela- tions, New Englanders took up the banner of conservation.45 Resource depletion and resource conservation make up a complicated historical legacy in New England, and both terms bear closer scrutiny. In an article written in 1952, Edward Higbee observed that the region’s landscape, some 12,000 years in the making, was old “but hardly senile.” The land, he noted, was first used as a hunting and planting ground for Indians, then as a foundation for subsistence farming, and finally as a resource for the modern industrial city; in each of these eras it provided a new set of resources unexploited by earlier cultures. Indians, farmers, and industrialists all crafted their own “earth” out of the materials at hand, using nature in new ways to build a new civilization. Higbee’s panoramic message was that Indian, farmer, and industrialist, with different economic needs, exploited this land in diverse ways: each discovered a generous supply of unappropriated material to be turned into a source of wealth. “Resource,” Higbee implied, is a history-bound term, and, significantly, so is “depletion.”46 Fourteen years later, Hugh Raup of the Harvard Forest refined this perspective by arguing against the idea that resource depletion threatened the New England way of life. Reviewing the many changes in wood products over the previous two hundred years, Raup concluded that whatever the future held, the New England forest, because of its resiliency, would remain productive as long as New Englanders found new ways to market its resources. “I suggest that the principal role of the land and the forests has been that of stage and scenery,” Raup argued. “The significant figures have always been the people, and the ideas they have had about what they might do at specific points in time with the stage properties at hand.” Concern for the loss of forest resources was “in serious conflict with reality.” Given the long record of deforestation, reforestation, and market change, it is easy to understand Raup’s conviction that conservation fears were misplaced, and his argument in some ways forecast industrializing the margins | 121

the debates that would arise when ecologists, Raup included, began ques- tioning the idea of a universal “balance of nature” that served as a benchmark against which the health of forests could be judged.47 In 2004 Brian Donahue commented on Raup’s thesis, pointing out once again that the resource base on which New England’s economy depended had changed appreciably since colonial farmers and loggers began constructing their own earths. Donahue saw a different dynamic at work. Colonialists had only “tenuous links” to the market economy, he proposed, and their use of the land was largely sustainable. But when markets and profits became dominant social forces, land use intensified with each cycle of exploitation. Prof- iting from less marketable trees or less valuable fish invariably involved more intensive and destructive industrial techniques, and every advance in industrialization further undermined the viability of the biome. Rejecting Raup’s laissez-faire “get-it-while-you-can” philosophy, Donahue argued instead for Aldo Leopold’s less situational idea of a land ethic: humans should strive to sustain the richness of the earth and achieve a degree of permanence in their use of nature.48 There is a little of both Raup and Donahue in the record of land use in New England. Recognizing the ever-increasing intensity of resource exploitation, groups of concerned citizens, politicians, and, indeed, business leaders devised a broad spectrum of rules and regulations—forest practice acts, fishing limits, fish and game closures, tax code innovations, subsidies, town-planning ordinances, conservation acquisitions, stewardship programs, and other devices—to slow the pace of degradation. Far from misguided, these responses signaled a recognition that resource exploitation in the era of industrial fishing and forestry threatened the natural environment and the very basis of New England identity. Over time, these conservation rules became at least as important to the welfare of the region as finding new markets for its resources. Raup’s admonition that we need not fear the use of our natural resources is well taken, but so is Donahue’s insight that conservation is increasingly important as New England continues to industrialize its forest and sea environments. Chapter 5 Farm and Factory 

n the decades after the Revolution, New England seaport mer- Ichants became master players in the global system of commodities exchange. Their ships carried grains, fish, livestock, and lumber to the West Indies, ferried sugar to Europe, and crossed the Pacific to bring back spices, teas, brocades, and other exotic wares. In contrast to these busy port cities and their commercialized forest and fishery hinterlands, the New England backcountry remained insular and traditional. Except in a few prosperous farming districts, land was tilled in time-tested fashion, and most of the product was used for subsistence and local exchange. Light plowing and large pastures minimized soil compaction and erosion, and the rhythms of farm work—planting, harvesting, shearing, butchering, woodcutting—were closely adapted to the rhythms of nature. Mill owners in turn synchronized their operations with these agricultural cycles. Sawmills ran in late winter when farmers cleared new land and dragged their logs on the snowpack; fulling mills operated in spring when households sent cloth made during winter to be dressed, with carding mills joining in after sheep-shearing time in midspring; and gristmills were busy in autumn following the grain harvest.1 Work in rural New England was community based and earth bound, an organic economy revolving around the shifting flows of energy that made up the seasons. This seemingly stable second-nature world was changing in the nineteenth century. Port cities expanded their reach into the countryside via canals and

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railroads, craft workers experimented with water turbines and export markets, farmers added artificial fertilizers to the manure-to-crop cycle, and manufacturers imposed a dense thicket of interlocking machines between their workforce and the natural materials those workers transformed into commodities. Other technologies distanced New Englanders from the organic world so prominent in the traditional economy. Better home-building and heating methods insulated them from the region’s notorious cold snaps, and new ways of processing and distributing food loosened their dependence on seasonal harvests. Similar technologies allowed them to dress, travel, and work in ways unconnected to the natural surroundings. Increasingly, New Englanders looked abroad for their economic needs, to Pennsylvania and Nova Scotia for coal, to Europe for tin and copper, and to the South and Latin America for cotton. As the region shifted from an eotechnic to a paleotechnic age—from an organic way of life to an urban-industrial economy—machines and the capital used to purchase them replaced nature as the dominant influence in the world of work.2 Industrialization separated New Englanders from the land, but this relation was far more complicated than a simple equation might suggest. Nature was, in fact, a fundamental ingredient in the Industrial Revolution. Moisture-laden air tracked eastward from the Great Lakes and northward from the Gulf of Mex- ico, dropping an average of forty-three inches of water on the region annually. In a flow of hydraulic energy unrivaled in eastern America, this water dropped off the Appalachian Plateau and passed through a vast network of rivers, lakes, and bogs to the coastal plain. Concentrated by mill dams and channeled over water wheels and turbines, this energy powered industry. Nature also directed the flow of people off the farm and into the mills and factories. New England’s limited agricultural prospects forced many farmers into the cities, but it left those who stayed behind sufficiently prosperous to invest in the industrializing process and purchase factory-made goods. The persistence of nature in the industrial age was evident in this ongoing connection between farm and factory. Historians typically think in neat, linear terms—first an agricultural frontier and then an industrial era—but in New England, farms and factories evolved in tandem as partners in a regionwide agro-industrial transformation.3 This dual revolution eclipsed and even impoverished the environment in countless ways, but nature remained a shaping force both on the farms and in the cities. 124 | chapter 5

The Farmer’s Place in the Industrial Revolution Farm surpluses—both food and capital—were essential to industrial development, and in many ways the shift from an organic way of life to an urban-industrial economy began on the farm. Despite the persistent localism of the farm economy, New England had always been an agricultural exporter to some extent. In early colonial times, drovers collected cattle, hogs, and sheep and herded them to the cities, and farmers made one or two trips to market each year with ox cart or sleigh loaded with cured meat, cheese, wool, dried fruit, maple sugar, flax, potatoes, potash, or other merchandise. To lower transportation costs, they milled grains into meal or flour, converted apples to cider, and transformed other agrarian products into low-bulk, high-value merchandise, a practice that explains the small mills, tanneries, and distilleries spread evenly across the countryside. Although a small consideration on each farm, such transactions were, in the aggregate, a significant portion of the New England export trade.4 In return for these efforts, farmers found a growing array of nonlocal consumer goods at their disposal. Craftsmen moved from farm to farm making shoes, clothes, ironware, and barrels, and peddlers traveled the back roads selling small, high-value items, like needles, scissors, combs, tinware, buttons, and books. The latter avoided remote borderland settlements because of low population densities and bad roads and competed poorly where country stores carried a wider selection at better prices. But along the back edge of the expanding frontier they filled an important niche, loosening the structure of local exchange and forging a nascent consumer market in the sparsely settled New England hinterland. Country merchants played an important role in this growing market economy. They sold a modest stock of items for which prices were relatively stan- dardized, and most accepted payment in farm and forest products. With cash in short supply, they issued bills of credit for the agricultural goods they purchased, and farmers circulated these promissory notes as a medium of exchange. To raise the value of these goods, they often built processing facilities: potash works, lumber mills, gristmills, slaughterhouses, tanneries, carding and fulling mills, flaxseed factories, cooper shops, or distilleries. Thus they were important agents of rural development—the economic innovators of their day.5 Standing at the interface between the organic neighborhood exchange system and the Atlantic economy, country merchants confronted a bewildering farm and factory | 125

array of personal and financial relationships. Transactions were small and included a broad range of currencies and commodities; banks were unreli- able, business communications poor, and standards of quality for “country fare” difficult to enforce. Merchants were attuned to the mutualist obligations of the local economy, yet they were compelled to derive profit from neighbors and kin. To retain customers, they extended long-term credit, accepted payment in a variety of forms, and, like other townsfolk, remained willing to help a neighbor in distress. They were generally yeomen, but however socially integrated, they faced a deeply ingrained suspicion of middlemen and a tradition of use-value exchange that left customers resistant to the idea of profit. With varying rates of success, merchants were able to ease farmers into the commercial world by promoting new products and advancing the benefits of surplus crop production.6 Despite the persistence of tradition, the rural economy was the seat of the Industrial Revolution. The Revolutionary War forced many farm families to take up home production. In the nineteenth century, women picked and carded wool, spun yarn, worked looms, made carpets, and took in materials from merchants to finish shirts, hats, boots, and shoes. In 1810, Vermont, not usually considered an industrial powerhouse, turned out more manufactured products than any other state in the Union, almost all made without machinery. Home manufacturing strained the family labor system, but this “industrious revolution,” as Jan De Vries calls it, gave country people a taste for the mechanical arts, introduced them to the idea of cash exchange, whetted their appetite for consumer goods, and helped prepare them for the new work rhythms of the factory system. Laboring by candle- and firelight on winter afternoons, these home-based industrialists forged what Percy Bidwell called a “union of agriculture and manufactures.” The Industrial Revolution incu- bated in these myriad small-scale enterprises, and when sons and daughters left for the city, they took with them an enthusiasm for labor-saving devices that they had cultivated as children toiling at the hearth.7 Industry’s shift from home to village, an important step in the industrialization process, depended on New England’s most important industrial resource: water falling over the transverse ledges stepping down from the Appalachian Plateau. Upland towns invariably contained at least one stream or river with a fall of water suitable for manufacturing. In the eotechnic age, a community’s economic potential was limited to the amount of energy supplied by this natural source. But in the aggregate, towns produced an astounding quantity 126 | chapter 5 and variety of industrial items—an outpouring from foundries, forges, sawmills, gristmills, tanneries, distilleries, starch factories, potash works, barrel and furniture shops, tailor shops, and carding, spinning, shingle, stave, lath, paper, powder, flaxseed, linseed, and spice mills. These village entrepre- neurs responded not so much to growing regional markets, but to a lack of them. “In the absence of a transportation system over which goods could be moved economically, each community had to rely upon its own physical and human resources for the goods and services which it required,” Robert Le Blanc explains. Having once secured this local market, artisans then turned to producing export items, the proverbial “Yankee notions” carried around the world by the New England merchant marine.8 Because lumber was nonperishable and could be rafted to market, sawmills were the catalyst, as Béatrice Craig calls it, for upland economic development. Millwrights processed timber for farmers and independent loggers, marketed the lumber, and funneled capital from seaports into the upland community. And because they were intermediaries in this exchange with outside markets, mill owners enjoyed sufficient capital reserves to open a general store or add other processing facilities at their dam sites. These mill complexes were primitive, but they were ubiquitous, providing multiple services within hauling distance of almost any farm. Maine’s 1820 tax valuation listed 524 gristmills and 746 sawmills, many more of each than there were towns in the state. The town of Peacham, Vermont, supported two sawmills and two gristmills in 1800; one gristmill and six sawmills in 1840; and two gristmills and four sawmills in 1860. Industrialism was inherent in the dynamics of rural exchange.9 Despite the advances made by peddlers, merchants, and village artisans, the Industrial Revolution awaited a better transportation system. The region’s larger rivers flowed north to south, meaning that communication between port cities and the hinterland directly to the west “crossed the grain of the country,” as Lee Newcomer describes it. Roads overcame this geographical limitation, but they were abysmal as modes of transport—both a cause of, and a testament to, the farmer’s casual relation to the market—and were seasonally impassible because of rain, snowmelt, or bridge washout. Bulky items could be profitably moved no more than a dozen miles.10 In the 1790s private companies, financed largely by port-city merchants looking to enlarge their hinterlands, began building turnpikes. Among the earliest in the nation, these thoroughfares offered easier gradients and graded surfaces that drove down transportation costs and facilitated the shift from ox farm and factory | 127

carts to horse-drawn wagons. As roads improved, a class of drovers and team- sters emerged to convey livestock and produce to nearby urban markets, and each year the quantities they carried grew as farms shifted into commercial production.11 By the 1820s, urban merchants were also building canals. The first of these, begun in 1792, simply bypassed a series of falls in the Connecticut River; however, the more ambitious Middlesex Canal, built in 1803, routed a significant portion of the Merrimack Valley trade through Boston, while the Blackstone Canal, completed by 1828, similarly benefited Providence. In 1828 the Farm- ington Canal linked New Haven to Northampton, Massachusetts, and in 1830 the Cumberland and Oxford Canal extended Portland’s hinterland westward beyond Sebago Lake. Before canals, the movement of goods was limited by topography (the southward flow of the rivers) and weather, especially the rain and mud that increased friction on the roads. Canals eliminated some of these natural limitations. Water travel was virtually friction-free, and lock systems reversed the direction of travel on the rivers. But for all their technological sophistication, canals were still subject to floods, droughts, and ice; as Kent Ryden notes, they were “deeply implicated and entangled in the natural world.”12 Railroads released the flow of trade. Pressed by New York’s spectacular success in tapping the western interior via the Erie Canal, in 1834–35 Boston merchants completed the nation’s first long-distance rail network, first to Worces- ter, where it recaptured trade moving down the Blackstone Canal, and then along the Middlesex Canal to the Merrimack River, and quickly thereafter to Providence. The more ambitious Boston and Albany line opened in 1841, reaching the eastern end of the Erie Canal, and by 1850 Boston was connected by rail to Lake Champlain and southern Maine. By this time, few farms in southern and central New England were more than twelve miles from a railroad depot. Rail travel overcame the inconvenience of weather, topography, and distance, liberating the economy from the uncertainties of nature. Lines linked farms to the cities, and farmers changed their cropping strategies accordingly. The fluid flow of materials across the region allowed farmers to purchase gypsum, lime, plaster, potash, guano, and fish-meal for new commercial crops and made cradle scythes, seed drills, mowing machines, and horse rakes more available, expanding the range of the family labor system. Like the railroads, these new additions freed farmers from the uncertainties inherent in their relation to nature.13 128 | chapter 5

Farm to Factory There was no obvious reason that New England would be an early leader in the Industrial Revolution. Its capital was tied up in ships and land, its workforce scattered on farms and in small towns, and its land base lacking in essential resources such as coal, oil, iron, copper, tin, cotton, or wheat. What, then, pushed this region into the industrial age? Cultural conditioning has some bearing. Like their Pilgrim and Puritan forebears, nineteenth-century New Englanders were willing to take risks to improve their situation. Port-city merchants linked their welfare to the volatile Caribbean economy, the engine of economic growth around the North Atlantic rim, and hazarded their ships in circumnavigating British mercantile laws. After the Revolution, they entered the highly speculative China Trade in competition with the powerful East India Company and funded the adventuresome Nantucket whalers who brought home lamp oil and fine lubricants from the frigid Arctic waters. The return on local agriculture was too small to attract their interest, so they invested huge sums in frontier land speculation and built bridges, turnpikes, canals, and railroads to extend the hinterland into the West. Immersed in the carrying trade, they built gristmills, lumber mills, tanneries, sugar refineries, and distilleries to process the raw materials that passed through their hands. As they gained experience in manufacturing, they oversaw the production of cooperage, ships, paper, and other items they needed in this commercial-industrial exchange. These ventures, with all-or- nothing outcomes, honed their ability to assess the potential for profit and sharpened their appetite for taking chances. When seaborne commerce disappeared during the War of 1812 and western land values collapsed in the Panic of 1837, they turned to industrial investments, the gamble being modest by comparison.14 Natural resources played a role as well. Waterfalls powered the new mills, and water low in mineral content served as a medium for bleaching and dyeing cloth products. Forests of pine and deposits of granite, slate, and marble provided foundations for buildings in the industrializing cities, and marine clays in the lower river valleys and limestone on the coast became their bricks and mortar. The furnaces along the Taunton River and in Connecticut’s Housatonic backcountry, each with a vast forest network of fuelwood and charcoal suppliers, ushered in the age of iron. New England was also fortunate in its compact geography and access by coast and river. These environmental farm and factory | 129

features lowered the costs of production, made a wide variety of skills and services available to manufacturers, and encouraged a cross-fertilization of ideas. They made possible the economics of agglomeration: the advantages of clustering similar economic activities in a given location. Aside from abundant waterpower, geographical situation was New England’s most significant natural advantage.15

Environment, Culture, and the Slater Mills The Industrial Revolution is usually associated with massive factories and powerful capitalists, but in fact it began on a much smaller scale. Mechanized textile production dates to 1789, the year the English immigrant Samuel Slater arrived in America. With his working knowledge of British spinning technology, Slater formed a partnership with Providence merchants William Almy and Moses Brown, who, like other industrialists, oversaw textile production by purchasing wool, flax, and cotton and then passing the materials on to local spinners and weavers. In 1792 Slater and his partners constructed a dam and a small post-and-beam spinning mill on the Blackstone River in Paw- tucket. The yarn was bleached and dyed and sent out to home weavers, who finished the cloth at their own pace, much as they had for centuries.16 Slater built more mills at Slatersville in Rhode Island and in Dudley and Webster, Massachusetts, and his competitors took up privileges elsewhere. By 1815 there were 169 mills within thirty miles of Providence, forming a dispersed factory system that blended British manufacturing technology into the region’s traditional countryside. Southern New England’s small, scattered waterpowers determined the size and location of these manufactures, but the mills themselves were an adaptation of the traditional work-culture of the countryside. Mill work was not physically demanding, but it required sustained attention and repetitive motions uncharacteristic of rural labor, which was based on nature’s seasonal and diurnal rhythms and the periodicity of task-oriented processes. Rural workers were a “tough and independent sort,” steeped in the revolutionary rhetoric of independence and egalitarianism and wary of the “corrupt dependency” that British industrial labor brought to mind. Harnessing these workers to the machine-paced rhythms of the Black- stone mills would be the manufacturers’ greatest challenge.17 The first recourse was to employ children as “apprentices,” a term poorly suited to this type of labor; children left as quickly as they came, finding higher 130 | chapter 5 wages and more familiar routines as farmhands or casual laborers. When owners extended the workday by lighting candles on winter afternoons, disgrun- tled fathers at times brought operations to a halt. Some owners then resorted to hiring entire families, hoping to use the paternalistic labor system to enforce new work patterns, but the high turnover, absenteeism, theft, disrup- tive behavior, and in some cases sabotage and arson continued. Still tuned to the seasonal pattern of the organic economy, families left the mills to harvest crops, hunt, or pick berries when occasion arose, and they moved frequently to improve their working conditions.18 Like harnessing human labor, bringing river energy to bear on the industrial process crossed the grain of New England culture. For centuries farmers had integrated the rivers into their own agricultural economies, using the spring floods to irrigate and fertilize meadows and folding the annual runs of salmon and shad into their subsistence strategies. In the colonial period, the mill dams that interrupted this flow of water and fish were rarely in dispute because the small mills were part of the organic economy. New Englanders, according to Gary Kulik, “did not conceive of their mills as independent commercial ventures, but as extensions of their farm economies.” Mill owners were often farmers themselves, and their small dams could be easily opened to accommodate migrating fish or fitted with a fish ladder. Industrialization separated river use from this natural and community context; owners of the new textile mills were clearly interested in private gain rather than community welfare, and their demands on river flowage ignored the passage of fish and the spring floods that renewed the meadows. This alienation, as Joseph F. Cullon notes, “signaled one of the many ways that the rise of mills and the new relations of labor and land were not unanimously embraced.”19 Over the next few decades lawsuits filled the court dockets. To encourage mill development, in 1713 and 1734 Rhode Island and Massachusetts passed mill acts offering a procedure for dispensing damage payments when dam owners changed the river flowage. Over time, such legislation brought a subtle change in the legal definitions ofpublic nuisance, common good, and flowing water. Pro- tections for “natural and customary use” gave way to “reasonable use,” a meaning that encouraged industrialization by granting rights to those who promised greater social benefits from their own use of the water. Since agriculture and fishing were less dynamic and less profitable than manufacturing, courts endorsed the more aggressive river engineering necessary for textile production.20 Industrialization extracted human energy and the energies of the river in new farm and factory | 131

and often disagreeable ways. To smooth the transition, Slater and his peers took great pains to embed their mills physically in the agrarian landscape. Each village differed in layout and architectural style, but in most cases they were designed to blend as evenly as possible into the surrounding countryside. Using flowing water rather than coal-fired steam power, mill owners avoided the sharp contrast between factory and farm so evident in English manufacturing cities, and by relying on local carpenters and materials, they mimicked the local communities’ traditional architecture. They lined the streets with shops, stores, homes, churches, and schools and provided cottages for workers with space to grow vegetables and graze livestock. They operated farms and built company-owned gristmills and slaughterhouses to emphasize the mutuality of industry and agriculture and created riverside parks to screen out the industrial sights and sounds. Integrating mill towns into the surrounding landscape was partly a humanitarian gesture, but it was also a reflection of the fierce competition for labor in these small, out-of-the-way manufacturing sites. The lure of the West was strong in upland New England, and mill villages experienced high rates of transiency. For these and other reasons, the Rhode Island factory system brought only a small measure of change in the organic world of upland New England.21 Nevertheless, by the 1820s, mill owners found the reservoir of rural landless workers running dry, especially when legislatures began placing restrictions on child labor. In 1824 Pawtucket became the site of the nation’s first textile strike, and the rise of a Workingmen’s Party in 1833–34 signaled a new level of resistance among workers. But as alternative opportunities in the woods and on the farms disappeared, absenteeism and turnover in the mills declined. Owners grew more experienced in disciplining the labor force through fines and self-adjusting machines, and in the 1840s they began importing workers from Ireland, Germany, Scotland, England, and Canada.22 After a half century of experimentation, southern New England’s mills entered the industrial era, marking a more definitive separation from rural culture and natural context.

New England’s Diffused Industrial Revolution Slater was a pioneer in industrial technology, but he was by no means the region’s first industrialist. Rural New England’s flexible class system, tradition of household manufacturing, and culture of creativity nurtured a dispersed company of tinkerers looking for inventive ways to overcome the limitations of the family labor system. Persistent labor shortages sustained 132 | chapter 5 high agricultural wages and kept farmers interested in labor-saving technologies—the number of patents they recorded in the first half of the century far exceeded those from the cities. The episodic nature of farm work left certain seasons free for experimentation, and the ubiquitous small waterfalls beckoned. With a limited investment, farmer-artisans could set up a shop, try out a new idea, and market the result locally. Poor transportation insulated them from competition and favored the even spread of shops and mills across the landscape. The distance between these water-power sites was large enough to encourage innovators to work out solutions on their own, yet close enough that they could compare results. New technologies were rapidly diffused from town to town as mechanics put these resources to work driving lathes, drills, pottery wheels, trip hammers, and myriad other industrial machines.23 Farmers participated in these enterprising episodes by purchasing village-made goods, investing their savings, and training their sons and daughters in mechanical arts. Some towns specialized in a particular branch of production. In Connecticut, Fairfield and New Haven cast bells and made clocks, Norwich produced paper, and Middletown, Weathersfield, and Hartford specialized in carriages; the metal trades gravitated to New Haven and New Britain. In Massachusetts, Easthampton was a button manufacturing center, and Roxbury and Concord were famous for their potteries; Braintree specialized in glassware, and Lynn made the nation’s shoes and Danbury its hats. Providence, Sharon, and Attleboro were jewelry producing centers; Pittsfield produced tinware, Lenox, metal castings; Watertown, iron products; Gar- diner furniture; and Scituate wooden combs. These towns benefited from the agglomeration economics that encouraged artisans to collaborate and provided banking and marketing services tailored to their needs. The metalworking trades concentrated around large iron deposits in western Connecticut’s Salisbury district, where machine-savvy young men experimented with fine tolerances that left industrial machines running flawlessly with less energy. Over time, these artisans developed power-driven, self-acting machinery so precise that the parts they produced were virtually interchangeable, completing a crucial step toward mass-production technology.24 The even spread of this proto-industrial activity underscores the importance of agriculture in the Industrial Revolution. François Weil points out that early industrialization was not funded by urban merchants but by farmers seeking outlets for their savings. Only when the horsepower needs of the expanding mills exceeded the output of the upland streams and tributaries did farm and factory | 133

metropolitan capitalists step in to finance main-stem dams and build bigger mills. At that point the Industrial Revolution—already a fact of life in rural New England—proceeded with breathtaking speed.25

The Waltham-Lowell System In 1850, according to the historical geographer Robert Le Blanc, New England was “made up of hundreds of towns in which manufacturing was an important part of the economy.” The decades afterward brought massive changes as this activity was consolidated at a few large main-stem waterpower sites. Rather than build small mills on numerous tributaries, a pattern adapted to the smaller flowage of the Blackstone Valley, Boston merchant-manufacturers took advantage of northern New England’s larger and swifter rivers to build much larger dams and combine all phases of production—carding, spinning, weaving, dyeing, and printing—in a single operation.26 In 1810 Francis Cabot Lowell traveled to Great Britain to inspect spinning and weaving machinery. Upon returning to the United States, he completed the first of these integrated mill complexes in 1814 at Waltham, where the Charles River drops twelve feet at a sharp bend. In 1821, four years after Lowell’s death, P. T. Jackson and Nathan Appleton began a similar undertaking at Pawtucket Falls, where the Merrimack River, draining over four thousand square miles of mountain territory, dropped thirty-two feet in coursing around a bend at East Chelmsford. The two men named their community after Waltham’s founder. To fund these ambitious projects, kin-related Bos- ton merchants formed a joint-stock industrial investment company called the Boston Manufacturing Association. After completing Lowell, they moved up the Merrimack to an equally powerful waterfall at Lawrence and then on to Nashua, Manchester, and Concord on the Merrimack and Springfield, Chi- copee, and Holyoke on the Connecticut. In similar fashion, Boston merchants industrialized the Saco, Androscoggin, and Kennebec Rivers in Maine, eventually controlling a fifth of the nation’s cotton textile production. In contrast to the mill villages of southern New England, these were true industrial cities, dramatically different from the rural environment that provided their labor, markets, and industrial power.27 As in Rhode Island, Massachusetts mill owners found labor recruitment a challenge. To avoid the culturally distasteful prospect of a permanent industrial workforce, they sought out unmarried farm women, who stayed only 134 | chapter 5 long enough to sample urban life and lay aside a savings—on average, four or five years. With factory-made cloth having displaced homespun, women were released from their long hours at the spinning wheel and loom, and they left for the city, some to avoid the oppressive hand of the family patriarch and others to help with finances or save for a dowry or education. Leaving the home and moving to the city put young women’s moral character at risk, and to overcome fears that city life would debase these country maidens, mill owners provided company-owned boardinghouses and enforced strict rules of conduct.28 The dormitory rooms, although crowded, had an “air of neatness and comfort,” and women found time to write poetry, attend lectures, join improvement circles, read, and produce literary magazines. Observers were struck by the robust demeanor of these operatives, but industrial life was not as welcoming as it seemed. The women worked long hours in noisy rooms, operating two or three looms each. Windows were closed both summer and winter, and steam sprayed into the air to dampen frictional electricity and keep the threads pliable. The workspaces were filled with cotton dust, fibers, lamp smoke, and oil -resi due; the fast-moving belts, gears, and pulleys were dangerous, and the clatter of the looms discouraged casual conversation and led to hearing loss. Women were constrained by company rules, the relentless pace of the machines, and the regimented visual order of the urban environment. To soothe their discomfort in these artificial surroundings, they spent Sundays in the open country, grew potted flowers on the sills of the factory windows, and wrote odes to nature in the Lowell Offering. Mill owners did what they could to accommodate these rural longings by spacing buildings apart and lining the streets with trees and shrubs. “Early pictures show . . . Lawrence . . . as . . . a pleasant town with trees, grass, wandering animals, and children at play,” Donald Cole wrote.29 Here, too, New England moved reluctantly from an organic to an industrial economy. These diversions could not mask the deeper tensions in the industrialization process. As mill operations expanded, open spaces disappeared, and the long brick buildings closed off views of the countryside. As competition increased, working and living conditions worsened. Wage reductions closed off options for workers, who in earlier times could return to the farm occasionally or take time off for other pursuits. As their relation to the machines became more rigid, operatives began to associate this work with Southern slavery. In a series of walk- outs in the 1830s, they expressed their resentment by drawing contrasts between their idealized vision of the forests and fields of home and the conditions in the mills. TheLowell Offering included many references to nature, Chad Montrie farm and factory | 135

points out, and “such sentiments . . . factored into the militant resistance [when] mill hands began to organize in the 1830s.”30 Shoe production, New England’s second most important manufacturing activity, remained more integrated into rural life. It developed as a by-employment to fishing and farming, a form of “adaptive traditionalism” that required relatively little capital and preserved elements of the family work unit. Since shoes were made largely by hand, early shops were not consolidated around large waterpower sites. Around 1800, however, merchants intervened in the production process by supplying leather and selling ready-made shoes; as output increased, they began assigning workers specialized tasks and provided the long- term credit necessary to complete the months-long cycle from imported leather to finished article. As skills were broken down, widows of seafarers in ports such as Salem, Revere, and Marblehead began taking in uppers and soles and sewing them at piece-rate wages. Later, as employers sought out additional cheap labor, the industry spread into Maine and New Hampshire. At midcentury the McKay stitcher mechanized the process, allowing manufacturers to draw shoemaking out of the country and concentrate production in centralized factories.31

Commercial Farming The Industrial Revolution is usually viewed in the context of regional specialization: New England produced manufactured goods and marketed them in the South and the West, which, in return, shipped agricultural products—cotton, rice, grains, and processed meat—to the Northeast. But as David Meyer points out, through the first half of the century, the southern and western regions were only minor markets for eastern industrial goods; the geographical context for New England industrialization was its own countryside. The industrializing cities bought produce, dairy, and hay from rural areas, and commercializing farms created markets for consumer goods and farm equipment. In short, the urban demand for food, fodder, and capital brought natural process back into the industrializing economy.32 Some historians describe the market revolution in agriculture as a regionwide break from the older organic economy, but in fact the process was uneven, dependent on local environment and economic circumstances. M. R. Pabst surveyed six adjacent towns in the Connecticut Valley and found that each responded to market opportunities in a different way. Where soil and transportation were favorable, farmers turned to market farming as early as the 136 | chapter 5

1790s; in upland districts, the transition came later, and even within each town, growing conditions varied. Nor was the process linear; as prices rose and fell, families shifted from regional export to neighborhood exchange, and almost all operated at least partly in both worlds. In the Connecticut Valley, upland farmers were likely to concentrate on subsistence crops. However, many rented their pastures in summer to lowland commercial dairy and beef farmers, retaining the milk, cheese, and butter and using the manure to fertilize their crops, which included commercial yields of broomcorn and cider apples. In short, the agricultural revolution involved complex cycles of production and exchange, some breeding innovation and others encouraging caution.33 Irregular as it was, the market revolution pushed farmers to unsustainable levels of production, a problem that was clearly evident in the rise of wool production after 1800. Sheep were ideal for the rugged lands and thin soils of the upland farm. The Marino breed, imported from Spain around the turn of the nineteenth century, excelled at free-range foraging and could graze pastures where corn would languish and cattle starve. Moreover, cold weather brought out the heavier fleece characteristic of the breed and gave New England sheep a worldwide reputation. Sheep also fit neatly into existing mixed-husbandry routines. Farmers sold their fleece to regional markets but consumed and exchanged mutton and lamb in ways that reinforced the older neighborhood economy. And since sheep-raising required little labor, families were free to pursue traditional multicropping routines. As a commercial product, fleece was light, nonperishable, and easily transported. For these reasons, New England’s first great agricultural boom drew even the most isolated upland districts into commercial production.34 Sheep-raising brought dramatic changes in the upland landscape. Forest clearing had been relatively light when farmers grew mixed crops, but commercial sheep pasturing was a land-extensive activity, and because sheep were versatile foragers, farmers cleared even the steepest and rockiest hillsides for pasture. Vast sheep-runs overspread the upland townships, and improved breeds with heavier fleeces siphoned even more nutrients from the thin soils. By midcentury the woodland cover in some towns had been reduced to 10 to 20 percent of the land area, and where pastures were overgrazed, soils eroded and brush colonized the rocky residue. “The old-time forest cover vanished,” Harold Wilson wrote, “and the landscape found its dominant note in the bold sweeping contours of pastured hills.”35 Sheep husbandry declined in the later 1830s, the result of falling tariff barriers farm and factory | 137 and competition from cotton fabrics and western ranches. Farmers with sufficient capital and labor turned to producing fresh milk, cheese, and butter, which brought higher returns as cities expanded. Late in the century, Boston milk dealers used refrigerated rail cars to extend the city’s “milkshed” into Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, and better rural roads linked almost every farm in New England to an urban market. Encouraged by state dairymen’s associations, farmers imported grain concentrates from the Middle West, grew silage corn, oat hay, alfalfa, and clover to increase butterfat content, and spread the manure from the dairy barn to rejuvenate pastures devastated by sheep grazing. Imported grains and fertilizers attenuated the farmer’s relation to the local environment, but the shift to dairy did much to stabilize the rural landscape. Rougher lands that could not easily be manured or mechanically harvested were abandoned, and these reverted to forests. On the lower pastures, cattle avoided the woody growth, and this more selective palate gave the hillsides a “frowsy appearance,” as the Ver- monter George Aitken put it. Tree-studded pastures became another signature of New England’s second-nature farmland.36

Leaving the Farm Despite the profitability of market-based farming, the nineteenth century brought steady declines in rural population. Between 1850 and 1860, 53 percent of the towns in Vermont, along with 47 percent of those in New Hampshire and 39 percent in Maine, saw their populations decline. This trend increased after the Civil War, causing concern not only locally but in the national press as well. “There was a time when New England was looked upon as a sort of reservoir of the true American spirit,” one observer complained in 1888. “No one . . . can, to-day, travel through New England and fail to note the changes which time has made in the habits and characters of the people.” Others saw farm abandonment as a case study in poor land management; hill-country farmers, they reasoned, exhausted the soils and moved on, leaving ruined farmlands and empty villages in their wake. The idea has some merit. Sandwich Notch, in the New Hampshire foothills, lost nearly 45 percent of its population between 1840 and 1850, mostly latecomers who purchased marginal land from earlier settlers, farmed it for a generation, and then moved on. Anthropologists found evidence of their negligence in a system of terraces built to shore up their houses and barns as the earth around these buildings washed away because of poor farming techniques.37 138 | chapter 5

However, the causes of out-migration were more complex. Farm abandonment was a national phenomenon brought on less by soil exhaustion than by urban growth, federal land distribution in the West, the California gold rush, a long-term drop in grain prices with the opening of new farmlands in the United States, Canada, and Australia, and the rise of the Chicago meat-packing industry. In fact, states with soils far better than those in New England— New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois—lost rural population at even more dramatic rates. Out-migration also reflected the shift to dairy products, which required less labor than field crops. In New England and elsewhere, a steady increase in per-acre yields, a consequence of better equipment and artificial fertilizers, more than compensated for the loss of rural population. Despite the contemporary commentary about exhausted soils, per-acre expenditures for fertilizer in New England remained lower than in the rest of the country, while the total value of farm products per acre remained among the nation’s highest.38 New England’s hill country did experience high rates of out-migration, but much involved land unsuited to sustained agricultural settlement. This marginality was not so apparent when farmers harvested with hand tools and consumed most of what they produced, but the advance of commercial agriculture made these drawbacks clear. Transporting crops was costly in the hilly terrain, and farmers faced stiff competition from their low-country neighbors and western farmers. By husbanding the land more carefully, they might have remained on their farms—and some did. But, given the poor returns possible from any investment in labor and fertilizers, as well as the lure of an expanding consumer culture, abandonment was usually the wiser choice. Still, Howard Russell explains, “nearly all really good farms remained occupied,” and indeed not every hill farm was an exercise in ecological disaster. Weak markets and chronic labor shortages discouraged aggressive, nutrient-draining cropping strategies, and the traditional practice of mixed farming and long fallows slowed the rate of soil exhaustion and erosion. Impacts varied, but in some cases, the land remained surprisingly fertile. In the long run, as Harold Wilson pointed out, “there was . . . no evidence to show that the hill-country soils had any less plant food than they possessed when first cultivated.”39 Despite the disadvantages, farming persisted in the hill country. Families clung to the “steep, rocky slopes” of the Appalachian foothills, as the Vermont senator George Aiken noted, not because they lacked ambition, but because they had come to terms with their environment. Their “long-used soils” farm and factory | 139

supported family and livestock with a small yield for the market: late-season strawberries or cauliflower, sweet corn, maple syrup, or dairy products, perhaps. They savored the “freedom of thought and action” inherent in this rugged landscape, according to Aiken, and their multiple income possibilities preserved an element of choice important to their self-image. They survived because they required less: they kept a cow fresh for their own dairy needs, raised poultry, tapped maple trees, cut their own fuelwood, made their own bread, raised their own livestock, and grew their own grains, vegetables, and fruits. As Sara Gregg observed, hill farming “challenged a family’s creativity and resourcefulness.” Men worked on the roads or cut timber; women sold canned food or preserves, knitted stockings and mittens, and made ash baskets; and families gathered ferns for florists and spruce and fir boughs for Christmas greens. “The land on these hill farms doesn’t wear out with use and don’t let anyone tell you it does,” Aiken insisted; “when treated decently it becomes richer year after year.”40 Hal Barron, who explored the social dynamics of hill country out-migration, found that remaining families consolidated the abandoned farms, invested in local shops and mills, and passed these assets on to their children, who married into other prosperous local families. These “mechanisms of persistence,” as Robert Mitchell called them, created incentives for sons and daughters to remain nearby. The towns sustained a lively community interaction through fraternal orders, baseball leagues, temperance societies, Grand Army of the Republic and grange posts, ladies’ aid societies, and literary, political, and religious organizations. This stability, as one geographer put it, reflected the community’s “intellectual and spiritual harmony with its environment.”41 The New England lowlands continued to produce specialized commercial crops, becoming, acre for acre, the most productive agricultural area in the country. Here, as in the hill country, farm acreage shrank, and forests reclothed the marginal fields and meadows. Imports of Peruvian guano and Midwestern feeds encouraged intensive farming, which, along with the shift to automobiles and the decline of haying, freed up nearly seven million acres of marginal fields and pastures between 1880 and 1925. Sites near farmhouses and roads—first cleared, most intensively used, and last abandoned—were still open at the beginning of the twentieth century. But the once-bare hillsides grew thick with trees. Forest cover grew from around 50 percent regionwide in the 1850s to about 68 percent in the late 1920s, with Rhode Island’s covering about 44 percent of the land, Connecticut’s at 48 percent, Massachusetts’ at 140 | chapter 5

64 percent, Vermont’s at 65 percent, and Maine’s at 78 percent. In part, reforestation was possible because West Virginia, Ohio, and the Pacific Northwest were stripped of their coal, oil, and timber. But in regional context, the return of the woods showed that even in the most market-intensive farm districts, environmental sins were not irredeemable.42 Out-migration encouraged an impression that the New England countryside was insular and stagnant, but ironically this aura of traditionalism was a source of economic change. In the eyes of nostalgic urban Americans, the seemingly timeless landscapes of rural New England came to represent the values that guided the nation since Puritan times. These second-nature landscapes—an appealing blend of revegetation, natural adaptation, and urban imagination—stimulated a vigorous tourist trade and an infrastructure of summer hotels, resort facilities, railroad depots, sporting goods manufacturers, and guiding fraternities. This economic overlay added yet another source of dynamism to the complex upland economy.43

New England’s Mills in a Modern Age As agriculture settled into stable environmental and market niches at the end of the nineteenth century, New England manufacturers experienced a radical readjustment that demonstrated once again the resiliency of an industrial economy in a region with limited natural resources. Before the Civil War, New England furnished almost a third of the nation’s manufacturing employment, an advantage sustained by its maritime access to world markets, well-developed rail connections, abundant waterpower, pool of skilled workers, and aggressive merchants and manufacturers. Drawing on these resources, in the second half of the century industrialists introduced a range of new products, including business instruments, sewing machines, typewriters, agricultural implements, and, later, bicycles, automobiles, and airplanes.44 By the end of the century, New England manufacturers were competing against producers in other parts of country where populations and markets were expanding more quickly. Between 1880 and 1920, New England’s manufacturing employment more than doubled. However, this growth rate lagged behind other regions, and between 1920 and 1940 regional manufacturing declined in absolute terms. The main victim of this restructuring was the textile industry, still New England’s basic industrial engine. In the 1880s it began migrating to the Carolinas and Georgia. Although New England was closer farm and factory | 141

to the nation’s major fabric market in New York City, southern producers had better access to cotton suppliers and benefited from a labor surplus squeezed out of the hard-pressed cotton and tobacco economies. New England made textiles in old, multistory buildings that were poorly suited for new unit-drive electrical machines and located on downtown real estate difficult to reach by trucks. Its seaport facilities were antiquated, its capital markets eclipsed by New York and Chicago, and its energy costs among the highest in the nation. Mill managers, with more experience and capital, remained competitive in higher quality fabrics, but the new synthetic fibers developed in the 1920s forced difficult choices about expensive modernization. The number of New England mills continued to expand until 1914 in cottons and 1919 in woolens, but the fate of the industry was clear. During the nationwide textile slump of 1920–21, New England faced a shrinking national market in which southern manufacturers enjoyed the advantages of faster machinery, larger tax concessions, fewer restrictions on working conditions for women and children, and lower wages. In 1928 the economist Percival White took note of Manches- ter’s massive Amoskeag Company mills, still the largest plant of its kind in the world, and remarked that it was “almost unimaginable” that such a facility would ever consider liquidation. Yet in December 1935, in the depths of the Great Depression, Amoskeag closed, never to reopen.45 The shoe industry, with an abundance of low-skilled workers and an extant network of heel, last, sole, lace, eyelet, thread, and nail suppliers, remained stable until later in the century. In 1907 Haverhill manufacturers introduced a wooden heel covered in celluloid, making the city a center for stylish shoes. In the late 1920s, however, manufacturers seeking lower labor costs shifted production to New Hampshire and Maine, and Haverhill’s century-old factory buildings fell empty. From Rhode Island to Maine, industrial plants shared a similar fate. Cleveland thrived on the metalworking plants that were once the basis of Worcester’s industrial economy; Cincinnati machine-tool production dominated an industry pioneered in Hartford; and the furniture once fabricated in central Massachusetts now came from High Point, North Carolina, and Grand Rapids, Michigan.46 Given this vulnerability, New England needed a technological innovation that would reshape its economic future, and that is precisely what emerged in the second half of the century. Capitalizing on developments in semiconductor design, New England moved to the forefront of the new electronics industry in the postwar years, once again demonstrating that regions without 142 | chapter 5 significant natural resources could foster prosperous industries and resilient economies. Freed from attachment to a landed resource base, the national electronics industry was amazingly decentralized, but the region’s compact geography and excellent highway and commuter rail transportation ensured its agglomeration advantages. New England’s unparalleled higher education system, coupled with a workforce trained in machine production and assembly, sparked a new industrial revolution equally as significant as the changes wrought by Samuel Slater and Francis Cabot Lowell.47

The Legacy of the Agro-Industrial Revolution The commercial and industrial order that began with Samuel Slater in 1792 brought mastery over raw materials and a triumph over geography. But it also ushered in a new way of living that separated New Englanders from their local and natural surroundings. Decisions made by industrialists, developers, and commercial farmers were more abstract and less likely to reflect an understanding—even, in some cases, an awareness—of natural process or community culture. Yet this revolution left much of New England with a signature landscape that seemed, at least from a distance, stable, traditional, and organic. New Englanders addressed this sense of alienation by bringing the natural world into the cities and extending their sense of identity into the countryside. They achieved a sense of place by embracing nature in its most spectacular forms: the White Mountains, Maine coast, Berkshire Hills, and vast seashore expanses of Cape Cod. They also found connections to the well-trammeled landscapes of rural New England. Kent Ryden characterized this rural world as a “place where nature is inextricable from human life and culture, [and where] many individuals and small communities . . . manage to live on the land in ways that are respectful, sustainable, and—crucially—directed and constrained by the cycles and capacities of the local environment.” Ryden’s characterization calls to mind a different kind of nature: not a relic of aboriginal wildness hidden in the recesses of the northern woods, but a humanized nature, shaped and reshaped by a long succession of cultures and economies.48 Constructing this second nature rooted people in the land, not as observers but as participants in its creation, and in the eyes of the writer, poet, and artist, this was a connection of compelling beauty and psychic power. In the mid-nineteenth century, this second-nature landscape nurtured a Romantic celebration of New England that would continue to the present. Chapter 6 A Transcendental Place 

ndustrialization separated New Englanders from the organic Ieconomy that emerged in the postpioneer era. This separation changed the way New Englanders used nature, but it also had important cultural implications. In an essay written in 1928, the regional planner Ben- ton MacKaye pointed out that societies draw energy from the environment through three methods: biological conversion, mechanical conversion, and psychic conversion. Plants become food, wood and water become steam, and “the elusive thrill of an early spring morning is caught by a Wordsworth or a Whitman and placed before us upon the printed page.” Just as soils, forests, and seas sustained New England’s material culture, its furrowed coastlines and lofty mountains provided the psychic energies that fueled the ambition to build a material culture and imagine others beyond it.1 These psychic energies were important to the well-being of the region. Native Americans drew power from the spiritual meanings they discovered in their relation to nature, and they reinforced that power through ritual ceremony. Euro-Americans did the same through literature, painting, and the rituals of tourism. These cultural expressions were more than simple reflections on nature’s beauty; they addressed an ongoing dilemma at the heart of New England identity. The “habits of civilized life,” as Nathaniel Southgate Shaler commented in 1898, distanced people from the “charm of the world about them,” and in the age of industry this separation became ever more

| 143 144 | chapter 6 conspicuous. Shaler’s biographer, David N. Livingstone, completed the ven- erable geographer’s line of reasoning: “only by approaching so close to nature that the throb of life could be felt” could industrial-age humans recapture the psychic energies so elemental to their being.2 Fascinated by the mysteries of this elemental creative force, the New England Romantics achieved a spiritual conversion as important as the biological and mechanical conversions that undergird the industrial economy. But their visions of sublime nature—the White Mountain peaks or the great north woods—were troubled by an ancient aversion to primitive places. Uneasy with the chaotic vastness of first nature, Romantics turned to the domestic—to New England’s signature second-nature landscapes, with their more ordered and subdued natural forms. Thus they drew psychic energy from two sources: wild New England and pastoral New England. The creative tension between these two ways of connecting to nature generated the complexities and subtleties that made New England the seat of the American Romantic movement.

The Roots of Romanticism The Puritan interpretation of New England’s wilderness was rig- idly polarized. Puritans saw the first-nature forest ashorribilis naturae—alien and “other”—but they also believed that God created everything with a purpose. A few saw beauty, bounty, and spiritual inspiration in these unfamiliar surroundings and salted their accounts with veiled gender references to virgin lands, voluptuous mountains, and sweet flowing springs. This polarized motif—wilderness and garden, fear and fascination, masculine and feminine, separation and immersion—remained a part of New England nature writing long after the Puritans lost their hold on the regional imagination.3 As the forests were felled and the Indians pushed aside, New England’s gently rolling hills and broad valleys seemed all the more alluring. Jonathan Edwards, whose writings bridged the Puritan and Romantic literary traditions, saw nature as a mirror of divine forms otherwise beyond human com- prehension, a world rich in inspiring metaphors: “The green trees and fields, and singing of birds, are the emanation of His infinite joy and benignity. The easiness and naturalness of trees and vines are shadows of His beauty and loveliness. The crystal rivers and murmuring streams are the footsteps of His favor, grace, and beauty. When we behold the light and brightness of the sun, a transcendental place | 145

the golden edges of an evening cloud, or the beauteous bow, we behold the adumbrations of His glory and goodness; and in the blue sky, of His mildness and gentleness.” The representation of God’s glory in nature, with its tempting sexual imagery only slightly below the surface, brought New Englanders closer to the natural world their forebears had kept at such distance.4 Edwards’s message of redemption through nature prepared New England for a change in thinking in the years after the American Revolution. English writers began using the term sublime in the early 1700s to describe their emo- tional reaction to scenery. According to Mary Woolley, this distinctive rhetor- ical device appeared in American poetry only in the 1780s. The timing makes sense. As David Lowenthal points out, Americans in the early republic aspired to become a nation “wholly outside history.” Having heaved the cultural bag- gage of European civilization, they found in nature a new national character. In the Lockean ideology so important to these Americans, nations grew out of the state of nature, and their founding principles were sustained by this grounding in the primitive world. European landscapes seemed complicated and corrupt; America’s appeared natural, simple, and undefiled. This sense of fresh beginnings sparked a blizzard of reform associations—bible societies, peace organizations, educational institutes, abolitionist crusades, temperance leagues—and the drive to perfect the individual and society drew inspiration from the state of nature, where relations among plants and animals seemed so ordained and cooperative. Seeking to perfect these relations in civil society, Americans thought of themselves as nature’s nation, a new world patterned after the harmony of the cosmos.5 New Englanders were at the forefront of this rediscovery of nature. In a region just then throwing off the burden of Calvinist original sin, they found assurance in nature’s primitive innocence. Their villages seemed to emerge organically from the surroundings, each a small republic in itself. Yet the region was also the seat of American industrialization, and as factory development altered the countryside, nature seemed even more precious. As Leo Marx pointed out, the factory was “a sudden, shocking intruder” in the New England landscape, and this unsettling presence encouraged a keener appreciation for deep forests and quiet pastoral landscapes. Haunted by William Blake’s references to the “dark, satanic mills” of old England, New England writers took solace in the harmonious farm-and-village world.6 They also drew inspiration from nature untamed. By the late colonial period, rapturous exclamations from travelers to the White Mountains 146 | chapter 6 had become “somewhat of a ‘fad,’ ” according to Woolley. Two such commentators, Timothy Dwight and Jeremy Belknap, reveal how this emerging Romantic literature linked the domestic and the wild. Deeply pious and conservative, both men felt that the young nation needed moral grounding, and they translated the Puritan dread of wildness into a fear of the chaotic energies unleashed by national independence, unchecked individualism, and frontier settlement. Transforming the wilderness was testament to the enterprise of America’s pioneering folk, but a people roaming such remote places could “scarcely be more than half civilized.” Gentle manners, Dwight commented, gave way to a “forbidding deportment which springs from intercourse with oxen and horses, or with those who converse only to make bargains about oxen and horses.”7 How, indeed, was this coarse cloth to become the fabric of the nation? Dwight and Belknap found reassurance in the New England town. The region had been settled in the “village manner,” Dwight wrote; elsewhere planters located where “convenience dictated,” aware that fewer neighbors meant fewer obligations. By contrast, New Englanders settled in orderly communities where they could depend on those nearby for material support and spiritual guidance. This middle landscape preserved the simple virtues of a primitive society even as the nation responded to the demands of the commercial age. Belknap, as New Hampshire’s historian, similarly chronicled his state from log-cabin wilderness to a world of villages and towns, where citizens engaged in the “daily intercourse which softens and polishes man.”8 Dwight’s faith in the domestic was confirmed in the Connecticut Valley, a place, according to Joseph Conforti, where civic-minded village culture was fully realized. The valley’s deep soils nurtured a “regular, but easy, industry,” Dwight insisted; the resulting pastoral scene reflected the “temperate virtues and moderate institutions” of those who created it. Like a “vast canal,” the river ran between banks “beautifully alternated with a fringing of shrubs, green lawns, and lofty trees,” and mill streams flowing from the mountain forests conducted the energies of the rugged terrain down into the lowlands. Like Dwight, Belknap praised the river terraces of his home state as “artificial gardens” and traced this fertility back to the surrounding mountains, which released a rich organic silt in flood time to renew the alluvial soils. Impressed by the power flowing out of the wilderness, Belknap wrote his epic poem, The Foresters (1792), to show “how much human . . . ingenuity can perform in a short time, when nature has already done her part toward making a good a transcendental place | 147

country and a happy people.”9 The village collected and ordered the psychic energies of raw nature. Anticipating the Romantic reevaluation of nature, Belknap shifted his gaze to the sources of this energy and found the mountains of New Hampshire worthy of the sublime rhetoric Europeans lavished on their own ancient cultural landmarks: “aged mountains, stupendous elevations, rolling clouds, impending rocks, verdant woods, crystal streams, the gentle rill, and the roar- ing torrent, all conspire to amaze, to soothe, and to enrapture.” Dwight, too, commented on these spiritual energies, contrasting the White Mountain sublime with the “grovelling propensities” that drove men to think of nature purely in monetary terms. “Almost every page of [Dwight’s] . . . description of the White Mountains abounds in expressions of admiration for their rugged grandeur,” Woolley wrote. Yet Dwight’s first nature was mere prologue to his celebration of New England domesticity. Logging and field clearing left the land in shambles, but eventually it would be measured out in farms and enhanced by cultivation. “Whatever is rude, broken, or unsightly on the surface will within a moderate period be leveled, smoothed, and beautified by the hand of man.” Fusing wild and domestic, chaotic and ordered, Dwight and Belknap developed a motif that would dominate New England cultural identity in the middle decades of the century.10

Romanticism’s Literary Forerunners Writers such as Belknap and Dwight highlighted the importance of nature in sustaining the nation, yet they remained ambivalent about the disordered flow of energies in the natural and pioneer environments. This reserve was also reflected in the short stories and essays of Nathaniel Haw- thorne. Like his Puritan ancestors, Hawthorne harbored a “constitutional ambivalence toward nature,” according to Robert Milder, exemplified by his boyhood summers in rural Maine and his winters in Salem, Massachusetts. He spent three years of his adult life in Concord, where, like Thoreau and Emerson, he tended a bean field, roamed the surrounding hills, and recorded his observations and reflections in a journal. “If he lacks Thoreau’s inimi- table knowledge of the detail of natural life, he has the same sharpness of sight,” an early critic noted. Hawthorne conveyed this sensitivity by shaping the external environment to the personality of his characters: “the moment a figure appears in the landscape, the landscape begins to relate itself to the 148 | chapter 6 figure, to take on its character, to wear the color of its mood, to suggest its innermost experience.”11 Hawthorne’s interest in the connection between landscape and people is best articulated in his 1843 essay “Buds and Bird-Voices,” in which the gloom of winter—figuratively Salem—brightens into Concord’s springtime sunshine. “The trees, in our orchard and elsewhere, are as yet naked, but already appear full of life and vegetable blood.” Here and in other writings he celebrated nature’s psychic energies. But however attractive, the Concord woods lacked the corrective moral weight of the Salem environment. Redemption for his characters came not in the forest but in the conventionalities of home and hearth, much as the House of the Seven Gables was purified by the innocent, cheerful thoughts of a country girl. Phoebe was indeed a rustic from an outlying village, but it was her middle-class domesticity rather than her rural origins that sanctified the sin-wracked house.12 James Fenimore Cooper, who spent his boyhood in the dense woods around Cooperstown, New York, became the first American novelist to embrace nature with the intensity of a true Romantic. Where Hawthorne’s forest environments were shadowed by the specter of sin, Cooper’s Leath- erstocking Tales, a series of novels published between 1823 and 1841, revealed nature as a source of redemption. Reminiscent of early New England writers, Cooper used feminine sexual imagery to portray nature’s beauty, but he also linked these primeval energies to Natty Bumppo’s masculinity while darken- ing the village landscape with references to various forms of moral vacuity.13 Similar to Cooper’s experience in western New York, William Cullen Bry- ant spent his childhood roaming the woods of western Massachusetts. This background, coupled with an intense spirituality and a fascination with the works of William Wordsworth, prepared Bryant as New England’s most popular nature poet. Although he never quite succumbed to Wordsworth’s belief in nature as a sentient, mystical force, Bryant derived his themes from careful observation, and here the echoes of Puritan ambivalence grow faint. He remained, like Cooper, unabashedly enthusiastic about nature’s power to reform the human soul and valorized unimproved nature over a pastoral landscape. In “Green River” (1854), he hinted that nature’s purity was tarnished by contact with society:

Yet fair as thou art, thou shunnest to glide, Beautiful stream! by the village side; a transcendental place | 149

But windest away from haunts of men, To quiet valley and shaded glen; And forest, and meadow, and slope of hill, Around thee, are lonely, lovely, and still. . . .

Bryant’s escape narrative inverted an age-old preference for the improved landscape over wild nature. And where Belknap saw the river as a means of connecting the wild and the pastoral, Bryant saw this relation as corrupting nature. A similar imagery, prefiguring the Romantic mourning for a vanishing wilderness, appeared in Bryant’s “Indian at the Burial Place of His Fathers” (1854):

A white man, gazing on the scene, Would say a lovely spot was here, And praise the lawns, so fresh and green, Between the hills so sheer. I like it not—I would the plain Lay in its tall old groves again.

Observing that “the springs are silent in the sun; / The rivers, by the blackened shore, / With lessening current run,” the Indian reinforces Bryant’s conclusion that village life corrupts the environment and dissipates the nation’s psychic energy. Bryant’s most powerful images remain, as Kinereth Meyer points out, an “elegy both for the land and for the landscape.”14 These same themes were present in the works of the Cambridge poet and critic James Russell Lowell, perhaps best known as editor of the Atlantic Monthly and North American Review in the 1850s. Widely regarded as a man of letters, Lowell was not a spokesman for nature in the sense that Bryant was. “I look upon a great deal of the modern sentimentalism about Nature as a mark of disease,” he once wrote in reference to Thoreau. Unlike Bryant, he favored the pastoral over the primitive. Although he traveled to northern Maine, the Adirondacks, and the West, his image of nature came largely from the farmlands along the Charles River. “Nature dominated by man gave him as much delight as he craved, and the ‘mountain gloom’ and the solitude of the ocean seemed to repel him.” Like Hawthorne, he saw unimproved nature as morally inert, preferring the textured and symbol-laden pastoral scene as the source of his messaging.15 150 | chapter 6

Yet far more than Hawthorne or Bryant would have found prudent, Lowell was willing to abandon himself to these second-nature landscapes, “to lux- uriate in the sunshine, to feel the soft lapping of the summer breeze coming over the meadows with the fragrance of buttercups and clover and the tinkling rapture of the bobolink.” Lowell’s “Birch-Tree” describes this deeply intimate, even sexual relation to nature in the domestic landscape.

Rippling through thy branches goes the sunshine, Among thy leaves that palpitate forever. . . . Thou art to me like my beloved maiden, So frankly coy, so full of trembly confidences; Thy shadow scarce seems shade, thy pattering leaflets Sprinkle their gathered sunshine o’er my senses, And Nature gives me all her summer confidences.

The spiritual, and sensual, possibilities of melding with nature took Lowell a step beyond the early Romantics and into the realm of transcendentalism. He embraced nature, “ ’till it possessed me wholly, and thought ceased, / Or was transfused into something to which thought / Is coarse and dull of sense.” But at the same time, he kept nature at a distance, seeking truth in his own subjec- tivity rather than in external senses. “What we call Nature,” he wrote, is “but our own conceit of what we see.”16 Here again the creative tension between wild and domestic brought to light the psychic energies in the second-nature landscape. John Greenleaf Whittier was likewise wary of the “seduction of the spirit by the senses.” Raised on a farm in Haverhill, the Quaker poet was, like Lowell, most at home in a simple pastoral setting, in this case, the lower Merrimack Valley.17 Whittier, however, was willing to sample the beauty and power of nature in its wildest forms. Among his most memorable poems is “Songs of Labor—The Lumberman” (1850), an epic nature-drama in which winter’s grip on the northland is broken, and the foresters drive the season’s cut of logs to the mills. Invoking the rugged mountain landscapes romanticized by Belknap, Whittier painted a striking image of the primitive transforming energies of Maine’s deep woods.

Wildly round our woodland quarters, Sad-voiced Autumn grieves; Thickly down these swelling waters a transcendental place | 151

Float his fallen leaves. Through the tall and naked timber, Column-like and old, Gleam the sunsets of November, From their skies of gold.

The drumming cadence of Indian place-names, much like the heartbeat of nature itself, gives the poem a haunting, lyrical quality:

Where the crystal Ambijejis Stretches broad and clear, And Millnoket’s pine-black ridges Hide the browsing deer: Where, through lakes and wide morasses, Or through rocky walls, Swift and strong, Penobscot passes White with foamy falls. . . .

Amid glimpses of Katahdin’s rocky flanks, Whittier again draws fine the Romantic tension between appreciating raw nature and anticipating the improved landscape. He saw wilderness as a place of work: his foresters were nature-heroes, drawing spiritual energy from their shaggy forest surroundings.

Not for us the measured ringing From the village spire, Not for us the Sabbath singing Of the sweet-voiced choir Ours the old, majestic temple, Where God’s brightness shines Down the dome so grand and ample, Propped by lofty pines!

A true source of psychic energy, nature fueled the foresters’ masculine confrontation with the trees, but ironically they would remain free and strong only as long as the Penobscot ran wild. Whittier left the reader to ponder this ambiguous message, with his epic loggers “still renewing, bravely hewing / Through the world our way!” 152 | chapter 6

First-Nature Sublime: Wilderness and Domesticity in New England Art In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, New England art presented an equally conflicted vision of romantic nature and the domestic landscape. As with literature, art followed trends in Europe, where such painters as Salvator Rosa in Italy and Claude Lorrain in France were experimenting with the sublime in their melodramatic depictions of cliffs, chasms, and “all the agonized shapes and forms of nature in her most violent aspects.” In America, the rise of Manifest Destiny excited interest in nature, as did the work of naturalists, like William Bartram, Alexander Wilson, and John James Audubon.18 During the early nineteenth century, the New England art scene remained conservative, dominated by an older tradition of biblical backdrops and allegorical subjects. New York was more receptive, however, and in late 1825, when a young artist named Thomas Cole arrived in town, the prospects for art with a “recognizably American stamp” grew decidedly brighter. Cole began his painting career in Steubenville, Ohio, moved to Philadelphia in 1824 to train as an engraver, and then continued on to New York, where his renderings of the Hudson River highlands created a sensation. In a short time Cole’s massive and unrealistically steep mountains became the signature feature of a new landscape genre known as the Hudson River School, largely dependent, in its early years, on the depiction of a dramatic first-nature sublime. In contrast to the European gothic tradition of painting brooding history-laden ruins, Cole shifted to a more optimistic and spiritual sublime, abandoning, as Robert McGrath and Barbara MacAdam suggest, “the fearsome for the transcendent.”19 Cole asserted his independence from European art by using the vistas of the untamed Catskills, and later the Adirondacks and White Mountains, as a thematic alternative to Europe’s ancient castles, monasteries, and cathe- drals. At Niagara Falls, he sensed the force of nature coursing through his body, and this transforming moment blossomed into a philosophy of art dedicated to nature’s powers of inspiration. Cole used small foreground figures and buildings half hidden by foliage to provide perspective, framed his scenes with blasted stumps or bleached limbs, and compressed the middle ground to bring viewers closer to the soaring peaks. Arching over this first-nature sublime was a striking atmospheric display, perhaps a dramatic passing storm that leaves the scene bathed in light. The influence of this technique was clear in the work of Asher B. Durand and John Frederick Kensett, who a transcendental place | 153

took up landscape painting about the time Cole arrived in New York. Frederic Edwin Church and Albert Bierstadt, later arrivals, reinforced a trend begun by Durand and Kensett in rendering natural scenes with finer precision in the belief that nature was a form of divine truth. The combination of panoramic vastness and meticulous, almost scientific foreground detail characterized the full flowering of the Hudson River School.20 New England provided an ideal setting for this romantic reinterpretation, with its gentle, understated pastoral foreground framed by rugged mountains and set off by banks of clouds typical of the region’s humid climate. In 1827 Cole “discovered” New Hampshire’s White Mountains, a savage country of magnificent peaks that demonstrated the frailty of human existence as surely as the mountain villages accentuated its perseverance. “Bare peaks of granite, broken and desolate, cradle the clouds,” Cole enthused, “while the valleys and broad bases of the mountains rest under the shadow of noble and varied forests.” In the 1830s, hundreds of painters converged on the region, which was then beginning to develop a thriving tourist trade. These painters formed a subset of the Hudson River School known as White Mountain art, sometimes associated with Benjamin Champney, who founded an art colony in North Conway at the base of Mount Washington in the early 1850s.21 These artists pieced together their compositions carefully. Because patrons wanted an authentic landscape experience, their paintings were grounded in real places, but the scenes were arranged as statements. The goal was transcen- dence: they invited the viewer to meld with the details, and then rise above them. To achieve this end, artists rendered the mountain peaks to suggest, as Durand put it, a “realm of light above and beyond the dark and defective world,” where soaring heights and “unbroken solitude” impressed the observer with the sublime glory of God’s creation.22 The Hudson River artists defined a new national aesthetic for America. In his 1836 “Essay on American Scenery,” Cole admitted that America was destitute of “castled crags, . . . vine-clad hills, and ancient villages,” but he found in his travels a freshness and innocence seen nowhere else, a perfect union of first and second nature. In Europe, nature was subdued and tamed; in America it represented the raw energies that gave force and conviction to the country’s destiny. But Cole’s essay raised a discordant note that found its way into much of the landscape painting of the era: the natural scene was as transient as it was transcendent. European painters valorized the past in their depictions of ancient castles and ruins; the scenes their American counterparts rendered foreshadowed the 154 | chapter 6 future. “Where the wolf roams, the plough shall glisten; on the gray crag shall rise temple and tower.”23 Cole’s faith in progress and improvement was typically American, but it hinted at an underlying uncertainty: what would a future without wolves and crags mean for the soul of America? Cole’s dilemma hinted at a deeper tension between first nature and second nature in New England art. In an age drawn to simple polarities, he offered a complicated message: cultural refinement was possible only by improving nature, yet wild nature was the source of primitive energies that made improvement possible. How was America to preserve its vigor and innocence while achieving the material well-being and cultural sophistication that this fecund landscape seemed to promise?24 In 1836, the year he published “Essay on Amer- ican Scenery,” Cole opened a private exhibition in New York City to display his heavily allegorical painting The Course of Empire, a five-frame sequence depict- ing an arcadian world rising to imperial glory and falling into decay. Although European in inspiration—the scenes were based on classical ruins he sketched on a trip to Italy in 1829–32—the series served as a stark warning to Americans. The first two plates depict “savage” and “pastoral” themes, the latter a morning after a storm, with earthy folk plowing fields, tending flocks, and crafting simple tools. The third scene shows the same setting at noontime, now refashioned into a world of gigantic marble structures and fountains, and the fourth, “Destruc- tion of Empire,” reveals a panicked crowd fleeing invaders across a crumbling bridge. The final plate is a nighttime scene set amid the ruins of empire, with nature reclothing the abandoned landscape. Representations throughout the middle decades hinted at the underlying tensions in The Course of Empire. Village scenes were awash in light and color, but above them mountain crags leaned in precariously and stormy skies suggested an uncertain, even apocalyptic, future. Romantics had yet to resolve the tension between first and second nature.25 Cole’s uncertainty was evident in his depiction of the same Connecticut landscape that Dwight had found so reassuring in his travels in New England. The former’s well-regardedView from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massa- chusetts, after a Thunderstorm, known as “The Oxbow,” displays the signature elements of the Hudson River School: a panoramic vista from a mountain perspective, with contrasting natural and pastoral scenery rendered in precise detail and surmounted by a dramatic storm. With the wilderness of Mount Holyoke dominating the western half of the scene and a pastoral to the east, the painting was both sublime and picturesque. But it did nothing to hide Cole’s ambivalence—his nature was broken and angular and loomed perilously over a transcendental place | 155

the soft arcadian features below. Jagged precipices and blasted trees expressed the disquiet he felt in the wilderness but also helped direct the viewer’s eye to the cultivated settlements on the valley floor. Improvement, as Cole wrote, brought “a thousand domestic affections and heart-touching associations,” which dissipated the “stern sublimity of the wild.” Like Hawthorne’s Concord, Cole’s Connecticut Valley was a conflicted prospective of reassuring domestic harmony and chaotic natural energy.26 By midcentury younger artists, including Champney, Durand, and Ken- sett, were centering their landscapes on the valleys—on second nature— rather than on the peaks. Working in the White Mountains a decade or so after Cole discovered the region, the three artists responded to the tension in Romantic themes by emphasizing the arcadian perspective. Kensett’sWhite Mountains—Mt. Washington (1851), perhaps the most celebrated pastoral of the era, reflected a new, more nostalgic and sentimental perspective on second nature. Bathed in warm light and framed with aged trees, the ancient buildings and lush pastures suggest deep roots in the land and a gentle reordering of nature’s elements. Still, like Dwight and Belknap, painters sensed the natural energies that animated these village scenes. As McGrath and MacAdam explain, the sentimentalism of the bucolic foreground was tempered by the wildness of the mountain backdrop, producing a world “in which the Pastoral merges imperceptibly with the Sublime.”27 The arcadian emphasis reflected several developments in the 1850s, when New England’s rural landscapes were changing dramatically at the hands of loggers, settlers, farmers, and industrialists. Younger painters, like Kensett and Church, were torn between celebrating national achievements and drawing attention to the nostalgic charm of the domestic scene. Farms and villages suggested the newness of the republic, while a canal boat or train moving across the background introduced a qualified approval of the technologies that would advance the nation beyond this pastoral state. The arcadian theme also reflected the appearance of Rocky Mountain art, which represented the sublime far more effectively than the White Mountains, and of photography, which forced landscape painters to amplify emotive and nostalgic effects.28 In philosophic terms, the village scene represented an uneasy resolution to the age-old question of the New Englander’s place in the natural landscape. With the seat of wilderness imagery shifting westward, New England painters concentrated on a more “reposeful manifestation” of first-nature sublime, using representations of light, space, and atmosphere to invoke the 156 | chapter 6 transcendental themes earlier expressed in soaring peaks and great distance. Luminist painting, an offshoot of the Hudson River School, was characterized by the use of lower horizons, an expanse of water, and a calm atmosphere to create a more impressionistic and introspective mood. Among the most effective in using these compositional techniques was Martin Johnson Heade, who rendered salt marshes and seascapes as unpopulated settings etched by weaving tidal streams and set off by dramatic skies. The absolute stillness of Heade’s salt marsh scenes drew on a different form of first-nature sublime: the unconquerable vastness of the open sea looming beyond the wetland fringe. Despite its impressionistic cast, luminist painting recalled the earlier Hud- son River technique of rendering first nature in spiritual terms, and like those earlier artists, luminists dwarfed their human subjects in an overwhelming natural setting. Still, the scene itself was humanized. Fitz Henry Lane, who rendered the tranquil waters of Penobscot Bay in a series of flat uncluttered compositions set off by diffused atmospheric light, exemplified this compromise between first-nature sublime and the nostalgic rendition of second nature. Lane, Heade, Kensett, and Sanford Gifford, key figures in the luminist movement, achieved a sublime sense of calm by centering their compositions on broad, still, transparent water surfaces that gave the impression of arrested time, a compelling image for a society torn by sectional and industrial strife.29 The Civil War highlighted the inhumanity of America’s burgeoning industrial society and again changed the balance of sublime and pastoral in New England art. After the war, Durand, Kensett, Martin, and other New England painters turned to forest interiors, seeking not so much spiritual inspiration as refuge and assurance. Where the grand vistas painted in the antebellum period reflected limitless spiritual possibilities for the young nation, postwar artists sought solace and healing in intimate natural settings, forest glades, and quiet pools with moss-covered rocks. Bierstadt, known for his grandiose Rocky Mountain paintings, returned to the White Mountains in the 1860s, this time to paint more intimate scenes. His Mountain Brook invoked the healing power of rushing water to draw the viewer out of the hectic urban environment and into the mountain’s recesses. Bathed in light and detached from human events, it was more private chapel than sublime scene, a logical outgrowth of a decade of national disruption and violence. Americans had grown weary of the infin- ity of stone, “whether in mountains or tombs,” as Janice Simon points out.30 While Bierdstadt distanced the White Mountains from the world of human events, Winslow Homer focused on the human figures that populated a transcendental place | 157

the barren world above the timberline. His studies of White Mountain tourists were typical of his interest in people within natural settings, but they also reflected the broader shift from sublime vistas to a “more reductive vision of nature.” Homer’s experience as an artist for Harper’s Weekly during the Civil War left him seeking certainty in the domestic lives of ordinary rural New Englanders. He redefined national identity in the region’s domestic simplic- ities, celebrating the quiet strength of figures engaged in working the land or ranging the sea. His fascination with Americans acting out the normal routines of everyday life represented a decisive turn from first-nature sublime to the textured village-and-woodland world that came to epitomize rural New England. Here, he and other artists resolved the longstanding tensions that alienated people from nature by embedding them in humanized natural scenes—in New England’s second nature.31 This tension between first-nature sublime and second-nature domesticity put Romantics in the forefront of the preservationist movement. “I shall be excused for saying a few words on the advantages of cultivating a taste for scenery,” Thomas Cole began his “Essay on American Scenery.” Nature, he argued, was the “exhaustless mine from which the poet and the painter have brought such wondrous treasures.” In “Lament of the Forest,” a poem published in 1841, he dramatized the horror of this heedless squandering:

mighty trunks, the pride of years, Rolled on the groaning earth with all their umbrage. Stronger than wintry blasts, and gathering strength, Swept the tornado, stayless, still the Earth, Our ancient mother, blasted lay and bare Beneath the burning sun.

Other artists shared Cole’s concern about the destruction of first nature. J. F. Cropsey, known for his highly sentimentalized rural scenes, wrote in 1847 that “the axe of civilization is busy with our old forests, and artisan ingenuity is fast sweeping away the relics of our national infancy. . . . It behooves our artists to rescue . . . the little that is left, before it is too late.” Although Cropsey’s plea was partly offered to sharpen romantic appeal by introducing a sense of urgency, the wording suggests that one motive behind landscape painting was the impulse to document the natural scene before it disappeared. Frederic Edwin Church’s Twilight in the Wilderness (1860), a dramatic scene framed with gnarled pines and 158 | chapter 6 ragged, underlighted clouds fanning across the sky, depicts a lake leading back to a skyline at sunset. Church never explained whether the dusky setting was an exercise in luminescence or a statement of impending doom, but the theatrical- ity of the composition left one historian convinced that the work was an “early signpost” of the American preservationist movement. By contrast, Sanford Gif- ford’s Hunter Mountain, Twilight of 1866 was far less ambiguous. Centered on a stump-filled depression in the mountains, it portrays a settler’s desolate hut and a small herd of cattle engulfed in a majestic foothills setting, suggesting paradise despoiled.32 Unquestionably, wild nature had become precious to painters like Church, Cropsey, and Gifford, and the felling of the forest said something about America’s passage from innocence. In scenes like these, the distance between Romanticism and conservation was but a short step.

Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendental Experience If luminists represented the culmination of artistic Romanticism, then transcendentalism was its philosophic epitome. Although geographically confined to the Boston environs, the transcendental movement achieved enormous literary, philosophical, and theological influence, transforming Americans’ diffuse love of nature into a highly refined intellectual and spiritual discourse. Enlightenment thinkers defined nature in mechanistic terms and believed that by understanding its particular parts the observer could understand the whole. Transcendentalists adopted a more organic view in which these higher truths were accessible only by looking at the whole, as much through intuition, symbols, and allegories as through reason, logic, and the senses.33 The transcendental movement was a response to the waning of Puritan influence in New England. Intense piety had carried the faithful through the rigors of the Great Migration and the Puritan diaspora in the early 1600s, but these heights of religious fervor could not be sustained indefinitely, and by the end of the 1700s, old-style Puritanism had passed its prime. Transcen- dentalism was spearheaded in the 1830s by Unitarian ministers who, by virtue of their nonconformist views, were disposed to explore new approaches to piety. At first they turned to English rationalistic thought, but this philosophic method left them “emotionally starved,” and the bolder among them experimented with German idealism and British Romanticism as well as Greek and Roman theology and eastern religion. Together they formulated a new system of beliefs based on the accessibility of absolute ideas through transcendent a transcendental place | 159

experience—that is, the ability to rise above personal consciousness in part by contemplating nature.34 Well grounded in European Romantic philosophy, transcendentalists were particularly inspired by German idealists, who in the late eighteenth century rejected sensory perception as a means of perceiving reality, reasoning that archetype ideas were universal in the human mind across cultures, religions, and geographical influences. The Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant, who published the influentialCritique of Pure Reason in 1781, concluded that the mind alone could not form impressions of universal concepts such as God, the soul, and the nature of the universe; these ideas had to be innate and transcendent. Johann Gottlieb Fichte likewise resolved that external reality could not be proven—that images of external phenomena need not, in fact, have physical existence. Ideas, not externalities, were the ultimate reality and the source of all human creativity. American transcendentalists also drew inspiration from English Romantic writers, particularly Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, who, although not strict idealists like their German counterparts, experimented with stripping away external preconceptions to find eternal truths, or, as George Ripley said, looking at nature “as if she had never been looked on before.”35 Despite these influences, transcendentalism was at its base an American invention. English Romanticism, Orestes Brownson thought, was inappropriate for “young republicans” bred with “simplicity of thought and taste.” Here again, New Englanders looked to their surroundings for a uniquely American cultural expression, fusing German and English ideas with New England’s longstanding search for meaning in the natural world. Similar to the German idealists, transcendentalists believed that ideas were innate—links between mind and God—but perceived these archetype ideas in the “stupendous machinery of the universe.” More certain of external reality than Kant or Fichte, they turned to nature, where, according to William Ellery Channing, “we discern more and more of God in every thing, from the frail flower to the everlasting stars.”36 At the forefront of the transcendental movement was Ralph Waldo Emerson. The descendant of eight generations of Puritan clergymen, Emerson inherited an intense, contemplative spirit and an acute sense of social responsibility. “Sat- isfaction with our lot,” he wrote in his journal in 1826, “is not consistent with the intentions of God & with our nature. . . . It is our duty to be discontented.” Emer- son endorsed the reform fervor of the early nineteenth century but saw it as an outward sign of an inner spiritual malaise brought on by the material bent of the 160 | chapter 6 commercial age. He found the antidote not in Calvinism but in a nature-based pietistic faith, returning to a theme first raised by Bryant: “in the woods . . . a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of his life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth.”37 To understand the importance of nature in troubled times, Emerson thought deeply about the relation between the soul, society, and the external world, and his ideas came to fruition in his essay Nature. Published in 1836, the small volume was difficult to understand and sold only 500 copies in the first twelve years of publication. Nevertheless, the few influential friends who labored through it, according to Octavius Brooks Frothingham, “recognized signs of a new era, even if they could not describe them.” Emerson began with the material relation to nature. Human needs, ambitions, and ingenuity ordered nature and gave it substance in the form of commodities and con- veniences. However, these material benefits were among the “least parts” of nature’s meaning. Its higher use was its metaphorical relation to “the absolute order of things,” and contemplating this relation led to higher truths. Emer- son dismissed the debate over idea and externality by arguing the necessity of both. Universal truths were innate and God-given, but nature was the substan- tive reflection of this universal consciousness. It was not simply an illusion; it was the intermediary between God and humanity.38 In Nature’s best-known passage, Emerson wrote of the dissolution of separate sensation and the reunion of observer and universe, an experience that took place in a natural context:

Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. . . . [I] return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life,—no disgrace, no calamity . . . which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground,— my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball. I am nothing.

Emerson’s much-discussed transparent eyeball was a metaphor for the experience of becoming part of, and truly beholding, nature. In a moment of epiphany, nature became pellucid; alienation ceased, the body dissolved into the infinite, and the spirit behind external reality was revealed. Emerson saw through matter to the absolute and became transparent himself, a transcendental place | 161

reliant on pure faith and divine intuition. In 1840 the Concord transcendentalist Bronson Alcott related an experience similar to Emerson’s revelation on the bare common: “In moments of true life, I feel my identity with her; I breathe, pulsate, feel, think, will, through her members, and know of no duality of being.” This highly sensual apprehension of nature—the oneness Hawthorne refused to accept in walking the same woods and fields—was the transcendentalist’s source of spiritual inspiration.39 Emerson derived this rich and multifaceted philosophy out of his love of place. As with many New England literary figures, he first learned to appreciate nature by wandering the hills of his hometown, often with his friend Henry David Thoreau. On walks like these, he wrote, nature “speaks to the imagination.” As an idealist, he reasoned that nature was but a reflection of universal ideas, but time and again, in walking the woods of Concord, he was drawn back to the “independent existence of the world about him.” He reveled in this environment: “the Universe is a more amazing puzzle than ever as you glance along the bewildering series of animated forms,—the hazy butterflies, the carved shells, the birds, beasts, fishes, insects, snakes.” Tempered by the experience available outside his door, he remained realist enough to share the Romantics’ apprehension about the abuse of nature, which, like the commercial spirit abroad in America, seemed emblematic of a deeper sense of alienation. “I talk with very accomplished persons who betray instantly that they are strangers in nature,” he wrote. “They are visitors in the world.” If indeed nature was metaphor for universal truth, the loss of contact that came with industrialization was a matter of great concern. “The ancient precept, ‘Know thyself,’ and the modern precept, ‘Study nature,’ become at last one maxim.”40

Henry David Thoreau and the New England Environment Like Emerson, Henry David Thoreau explored the possibilities for finding spiritual contact with the natural world, and in his discoveries he came closer than any other romantic to reconciling the wild and the domestic in the New England landscape. In his own time, Thoreau was an enigmatic figure. He was a “poet-walker,” as was Wordsworth, but where Wordsworth walked to meet people, Thoreau walked to escape them. Wordsworth reveled in the cultivated landscape; Thoreau sought out the wild even in the tamest of places. In Concord he was known as an idler who failed to live up to his Harvard education. Emerson acknowledged Thoreau’s “rare powers of action” 162 | chapter 6 but regretted that someone so capable of intellectual leadership chose only to serve as “captain of a huckleberry party.” The literary critic James Russell Lowell berated him for preferring the “society of musquashes,” and few if any contemporary naturalists cited his work. Yet Thoreau was by any account a keen and sensitive observer; he knew the smells, tastes, sights, sounds, and feel of the Concord landscape, and he conveyed these impressions with literary flair. Less noticed was his achievement in defining the New England landscape archetype. The region was “as large a piece of territory as could claim his allegiance,” Lewis Mumford said, but Thoreau knew it intimately. Almost all his published works were grounded in place—Concord, Cape Cod, the Maine woods, the Merrimack River, Wachusett Mountain, or Walden Pond—and he left his mark in describing them. Using references drawn from local history, natural history, geology, eastern and classical philosophy, and contemporary European Romantic literature, he crafted these ordinary landscapes into representations of the universal. His intimate understanding of nature rendered portions of New England as romantic as the fabled Lake District of England.41 Thoreau’s best-known work was the product of his two-year stay at Walden Pond, a Wordsworthian attempt to discover the “true necessities and means of life.” As he wrote in his Walden diary, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” This experiment had higher purposes as well. Industrial society had multiplied material things to a point of interfering with the essence of living, he reasoned; in their shops, offices, and fields, people did penance for their consumption by leading “lives of quiet desperation.” Concerned about this spiritual apathy, he distanced himself from Concord society and pondered Emerson’s advice to “save [nature] on the low levels and spend on the high ones.” At Walden, he searched his natural surroundings for the sources of human contentment. Although the true lesson of Walden was the virtue of simple living, the small book was also an important milestone in reconnecting New Englanders to nature. Thoreau hoped to discover the good life by living mostly “out of doors.” Every morning, he wrote, was a “cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself.” Not only did he carefully describe the changing seasons outside his hut—a motif reproduced in countless nature books that followed—but he used the seasons as a metaphor for proper living: life would be a pleasure if lived simply within nature’s laws. Like Emerson, he believed that human alienation derived a transcendental place | 163

from an incomplete knowledge of these laws, and he hoped to remedy this deficit by traveling through life as “but a sojourner in nature.”42 Like Emerson, Thoreau saw nature as a portal to higher self-awareness, but he was also keenly interested in nature as an independent reality. “For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snow storms and rain storms, and did my duty faithfully,” he wrote in Walden. He was familiar with the works of naturalists such as Asa Gray, George B. Emerson, and Louis Agassiz, and although he never felt comfortable in this scientific community, like them he kept systematic records and used proper nomenclature, drawing out the theological implications of his discoveries. The modern supposition that he was the first naturalist “to keep extended records of his observations” is patently false, as is the notion that he stood alone among contemporaries in making ecological connections between species. Later, natural historians adopted a much more rigid system of objective observation, but while Thoreau was writing, his tendency to connect phenomena into a unified whole was not unique. Still, his stature as a naturalist deserves acknowledgment. Laura Walls and Frank Edgerton argue persuasively that Thoreau fits neatly into a broad spectrum of Humboldtian scientists who stressed the unity of natural phenomenon and the need for philosophical interpretation; if not a path breaker in the search for meaning in nature, he was certainly the most inspirational among American naturalists in this regard.43 Thoreau’s uniqueness lay in his close connection to Emerson and transcendentalism, which took primacy in his search for meaning in nature. On the one hand, this transcendental background influenced his field methods. Thoreau’s approach was to observe nature by becoming part of it—to explore it through all his senses. “As I go here or there, I am tickled by this or that I come in contact with, as if I touched the wires of a battery,” he wrote. He devoted an entire chapter in Walden to sounds. Again, he was not alone in this approach—William Bar- tram refined this field method as America’s first romantic naturalist in the late eighteenth century—but Thoreau took this sensual experience far more seriously than any other naturalist. On the other hand, as a transcendentalist Tho- reau viewed nature through a highly subjective lens; his observations elevated his own consciousness. Like Emerson, he used these observations to plumb the human soul—to spend nature on a higher plane. Only gradually did he shift from questing after the transcendental experience to measuring the mechanisms of plant succession and seed dispersal, and even then he retained a strong regard for the vitalist energy that underlay these natural phenomena.44 164 | chapter 6

Thoreau narrated his quest for these psychic energies in an early essay entitled “Winter Walk.” Nature, he argued was evident even in the stillest and coldest of seasons. Frigid air left the observer acutely sensitive to sources of warmth: sunlight heating the bare rocks or steam rising from springs in the woods. “As the day advances . . . we hear a faint but sweet music, where flows the rill released from its fetters, and the icicles are melting on the trees; and the nuthatch and partridge are heard and seen.” To the senses, the landscape appeared cold and dead, but to the imagination it exhibited the “glow of thought and feeling.” Even in winter Thoreau sensed a “slumbering subterranean fire in nature which never goes out, and which no cold can chill.”45 In other seasons, Concord’s heavily domesticated landscapes revealed an electric quality that was almost tactile:

The bullrushes and flags seemed to rejoice in the delicious light and air; the meadows were a-drinking at their leisure; the frogs sat meditating, all Sabbath thoughts, summing up their week, with one eye out on the golden sun, and one toe upon a reed, eyeing the wondrous universe in which they act their part; the fishes swam more staid and soberly, as maidens go to church; shoals of golden and silver minnows rose to the surface to behold the heavens, and then sheered off into more sombre aisles.

Nature struggled to repossess the farmer’s field, and domesticated animals occasionally reasserted their “native rights” by jumping a fence or swimming a river, evidence that they had not “wholly lost their original wild habits and vigor.” On hillside pastures, cattle browsed back the wild apple trees but the sprouts persisted, extending laterally along the ground until, amid this protective bramble, the tree “darts upward with joy: for it has not forgotten its high calling, and bears its own peculiar fruit in triumph.” The apple that fell from this errant tree exuded a wildness wholly consonant with the subterranean fires Thoreau imagined in the winter landscape: “it will have some red stains, commemorating the mornings and evenings it has witnessed; some dark and rusty blotches, in memory of the clouds and foggy, mildewy days that have passed over it; and a spacious field of green reflecting the general face of nature.” Standing alone in the high pasture, savoring the taste of this acrid fruit, Thoreau contemplated the primitive energies circulating just below the surface—the “howling wilderness” his Puritan forebears had been so intent on eradicating. Discovering the latent a transcendental place | 165

wildness in the domesticated landscape was a crucial step in constructing New England’s second-nature archetype.46 Thoreau’s intent, as for all Romantics, was to find his own connection to these latent energies. Like Emerson, he sought out places where “all divisions between subject and object vanish.” He first felt these possibilities during his Walden retreat, where he experienced an epiphany vaguely reminiscent of Emerson’s walk on the bare common. Returning to his hut at dusk, he spied a woodchuck and “felt a strange thrill of savage delight, and was strongly tempted to seize and devour him raw; not that I was hungry then, except for that wildness which he represented.” Immersed in nature, he became conscious of an inner animal self, “reptile and sensual,” that was of the same wildness as the subterranean fires around him. Here indeed was his connection to nature, and like Thomas Cole he realized the need to preserve the source of these psychic energies. In one of the most memorable passages penned by an American conservationist, he wrote that he wished to “speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom . . . merely civil.” He continued:

What I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the World. . . . From the forest and wilderness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind. Our ancestors were savages. The story of Romulus and Remus being suckled by a wolf is not a meaningless fable. The founders of every state which has risen to eminence have drawn their nourishment and vigor from a similar wild source. . . . I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows. We require an infusion of hemlock, spruce or arbor-vitae in our tea.

This terse proclamation encapsulated the significance of wilderness and spoke for all those Romantics—poets, novelists, and artists—who searched for contact with its sustaining energies, even in the most domestic of landscapes.47 Thoreau’s conservation ideal was centered on acknowledging the latent energies in the domestic world. In Concord’s second-nature landscapes, he was delighted to find an occasional grand old oak, with its broad canopy “waving and creaking in the wind”—a glimpse of what the country was like in Indian times. In the 1850s, he became increasingly systematic in his journal entries, hoping to chart the vegetation of Concord, show why plants were distributed as they were, and trace the history of the forest back to its presettlement days. 166 | chapter 6

These observations would map out nature’s design, and this logic would then guide the construction of New England’s second-nature landscape and show where human endeavor went against the natural grain. He noted, for instance, the sandy soil washing down from the denuded hills and concluded that farmers would do well to study nature in order to “ ‘anticipate’ her.”48 Thoreau’s best-known lesson in anticipating nature was a lecture on oak–pine succession before the Middlesex Agricultural Society, later published in 1860 in the New-York Weekly Tribune as “The Succession of Forest Trees.” He pondered a question that appeared often in farmers’ conversations and in contemporary natural history writing: how was it “that when a pine wood was cut down an oak one commonly sprang up, and vice-versa.” The key, he thought, was “to show how the seed is transported from where it grows to where it is planted.” Oak seedlings proliferated in the pine forest, but they failed to prosper when shaded by the pine. When the pine was cut, the oaks had several years’ start in growth over the pine seeds. When an oak forest was cut, pine seeds, carried by the wind, arrived from distant forests. Squirrels served the same agency by storing acorns in the ground, but pines grew faster, leaving the oak seedlings in the shade. Thus “a rotation of crops is kept up,” he concluded. The wise farmer would command nature “by obeying her,” carefully examining the ground to “ascertain what kind of wood is about to take the place of the old and how abundantly.”49 Unearthing the subterranean fire in the domestic landscape, Thoreau resolved the Romantic ambivalence about New England’s second-nature landscape. But he was also America’s pioneer wilderness advocate, and for this role he turned to a landscape far more primitive than his Concord woods. Thoreau was not the first naturalist or Romantic to argue the need for wild places, but he was the first to justify them on the high philosophical scaffold- ing that transcendentalism had prepared.

Thoreau and the Idea of Wilderness On three occasions, Thoreau traveled to the north woods of Maine seeking adventure and a better understanding of the relation between nature and the soul. His journeys took him into a region that at midcentury was still the domain of the Indian, logger, and occasional settler: the “grim, untrodden wilderness” he spent his life imagining. Thoreau was not at home in the Maine forest. This was nature on a scale far different from the woods and clearings of his Concord home. Almost primordial in its bearing, it was a silent, dreary, a transcendental place | 167

and desolate land of ancient trees and still mountains. On each trip, he kept the true wilderness—the deep woods—at arm’s length. He remarked on its beauty and mystery but, except when climbing the flanks of Katahdin, never wandered far off the paths his guides followed. In 1846, as Thoreau ventured on his first trip north, Francis Parkman embarked on a similar journey across the Great Plains. In the widely read Oregon Trail, Parkman offered up an enticing narrative of open skies and bold tests of masculinity; Thoreau, by contrast, was guarded, equivocal, and psychically closed in—clearly more observer than participant in his adventure. “A man must be fellow in some degree to the moose or the bear in order to enter that forest,” he marveled.50 More tourist than adventurer, Thoreau traveled under the careful watch of his Indian guides. “There is a popular notion that Thoreau was a great woodsman, able to go by dark or daylight, without path or guide,” the Maine folklor- ist Fanny Hardy Eckstorm wrote in 1908. She proceeded to demonstrate that he was nothing of the sort, and since Eckstorm knew the Maine woods better than any writer in her day, there is reason to take her somewhat peevish com- ments seriously. But if not a woodsman, she pointed out, Thoreau excelled as a wilderness interpreter. He saw transcendent meaning in the thick woods around him and conveyed this significance to a world just beginning to accept wilderness as something other than a barrier to civilization. He put the Maine woods, as Eckstorm said, in “the service of . . . the soul of man.”51 Thoreau kept a diary of his three trips and published his accounts inUnion Magazine and Atlantic Monthly. He wrote for a middle-class audience with the resources and leisure to follow him into the woods, or at least to realistically imagine doing so. Tourists like these were beginning to bypass fashionable watering places to explore the more remote recesses of the Northeast, and Thoreau was mindful of a growing body of popular literature that played on this interest in wild places. To this genre he applied his own expansive imagination, presenting the north woods—and the American wilderness—as a counterpoint to the country’s fascination with progress and Manifest Des- tiny. Doing so required an approach both factual and philosophical. As in all his writing, he used to great advantage his sensual method of observation, describing the colors, scents, sounds, and tastes of north woods travel. But he also framed these observations as thoughtful reflections on wildness and the human spirit. “The finest passages in this book are poetical,” Eckstorm wrote; they struck “like a spark out of flint.” It was this rare “power to see” that transformed wild places into wilderness all across America.52 168 | chapter 6

“On the 31st of August, 1846, I left Concord in Massachusetts for Bangor and the backwoods of Maine,” Thoreau began his first essay, “Ktaadn.” He traveled by rail and steamboat to Bangor, where he met his uncle George Thatcher, a lumber dealer interested in timberland on the West Branch Penobscot River. Intent on climbing Katahdin, the party traveled up by bateau to the base of the mountain. He returned to Maine in 1853 to join a moose-hunting expedition with the Penobscot Indian guide Joe Aitteon, and again in 1857 with the Con- cord naturalist Edward Hoar and their Penobscot guide, Joe Polis. Thoreau spent the final months of his life preparing these essays for publication, and they appeared posthumously as The Maine Woods in 1864. This volume, Brad- ford Morgan writes, articulated “for the first time the impact of the wilderness upon the national character.”53 Thoreau never clearly explained his reasons for traveling to Maine, but pars- ing his purposes helps clarify the basic impulses behind the wilderness movement in America. He hoped to observe Native Americans, to botanize, and to experience nature in its wildest form, and like most wilderness travelers, he relished the adventure. In 1846 few people had climbed Katahdin, and, as Thoreau correctly observed, it would be “a long time before the tide of fashionable travel sets that way.” He had read the Puritan accounts of wild New England, and the images they projected became highly symbolic in his mind. Like all Americans, he fancied the leather-clad hunters immortalized by James Fenimore Cooper, John Filson, and Timothy Flint. In Maine, native people still roamed freely in their homelands, bringing intriguing thoughts of a life immersed in nature.54 Thoreau was after more than adventure, however. He wanted to believe that an unconquered landscape still existed in New England, and he hoped to discover its scientific and transcendent meanings. “Humboldt has written an interesting chapter on the primitive forest, but no one has yet described for me the difference between that wild forest which once occupied our oldest townships, and the tame one which I find there to-day.” Like Whittier, he relished the throb of primal life, the wildness he first discovered in feral apples on an upland pasture. Along the West Branch, the “free and happy evergreen trees, waving one above another in their ancient home,” seemed unbounded and more alive, and his description of Bangor hinted at the vitality this freedom imparted to the half-wild city scene. “Like a star on the edge of night, he wrote, Bangor was “still hewing at the forests of which it is built, already overflowing with the luxuries and refinement of Europe, and sending its vessels to Spain, to England, and to the West Indies for its a transcendental place | 169

groceries,—and yet only a few axe-men have gone ‘up river’ into the howling wilderness which feeds it. The bear and deer are still found within its limits; and the moose, as he swims the Penobscot, is entangled amid its shipping and taken by foreign sailors in its harbor.” These were journeys of discovery and self-discovery; as at Walden Pond, he wished to examine the virtues of a life stripped to essentials—the Indian life.55 North of Bangor, the appearance of fir and spruce tops above the mist signaled a world far different from the subterranean wildness he discovered in Concord. Crossing a lake at night a few days later, he heard a wolf calling off in the “drear and boughy wilderness,” and later that night over the campfire he imagined a “moose . . . silently watching . . . from the distant coves, or some surly bear, or timid caribou had been startled by our singing.” Intense, deep-set images—part natural science, part vivid imagination, and part mysticism— shaped Thoreau’s understanding of these elemental forces and laid a foundation for America’s love affair with wilderness.56 If wildness was palpable in the Concord woods, it was unrelenting in Maine. “What is most striking in the Maine wilderness is the continuousness of the forests, with fewer open intervals or glades than you had imagined,” he wrote at the beginning of his first journey. He was overwhelmed by the sheer geographical expanse of wild nature—the opportunity to travel in the “old heroic” way. “None of your half-mile swamps, none of your mile-wide woods merely, as on the skirts of our towns.”57 Here the naturalist drew back from nature, reluctant, as Kent Ryden observes, to “fully immerse himself in that wild landscape.” He savored the closeness of the wild territory as he glided gently downstream, but he kept to its margins. Just as Melville was unnerved by the fathomless depths of the ocean, Thoreau was dismayed by the endless- ness of the forest beyond his campfire. He might “penetrate half a dozen rods further into that twilight wilderness . . . and wonder what mysteries lie hidden still deeper,” but there would be “no sauntering off to see the country.” Wilder- ness was a place to be pondered but not engaged.58 The culminating experience in Thoreau’s construction of wilderness was his ascent of Mount Katahdin—his one venture beyond the veil. His party approached the mountain from the West Branch at Abol Stream. They camped at the river, and early in the morning Thoreau set out alone for the peak. Work- ing his way up the flank, he peered down into the thick dwarf spruce to imagine bears’ dens, with the animals “even then at home.” On the barren tableland, he spied the summit, still distant and “deep within the hostile ranks of clouds.” 170 | chapter 6

The wind was rising, and knowing that the clouds might rest on the mountain for days, he descended without reaching the summit.59 Standing in the driving mist on the tablelands, Thoreau pondered classical references—Cyclops, Prometheus, Caucasus, Aeschylus—as he struggled to describe the scene. Here wildness seemed titanic and overwhelming; its oth- erness was terrifying. He felt acutely alone, aware, perhaps for the first time, “that nature could be indifferent to man, if not hostile.” The Katahdin passages, as many critics note, were written in a markedly different tone—“frantic,” as one commentator put it. The primordial mountain scene yielded none of the rich human metaphors that Thoreau found in the Concord woods, nothing to trigger an epiphany as on Emerson’s bare common. The mountaintop was strangely empty of meaning. This was not nature, he concluded, but the primal inorganic material out of which nature was made. At Walden, he reduced his own life to its basic elements and immersed himself in his surroundings; on Katahdin’s rocky tableland, nature itself was reduced to its most basic elements. Where poets and painters before him had kindled these vast open vistas into sublime inspiration, Thoreau found no connection; Katahdin was prenature and, hence, premeaning.60 On his descent, Thoreau passed through a swath of recently burned land, and here, rather than on the plateau, he discovered the meaning of Maine’s wildness. It was neither the deep forest nor the primordial bare peak that put him in touch with the “continual process of . . . creation,” but rather a tangle of brush and early succession trees on Katahdin’s flanks. It was here in this recently burnt land, ironically, that he became truly conscious of the “primeval, untamed, and forever untameable Nature” that had drawn him to the north woods. “We . . . presume [human] . . . presence and influence everywhere,” he explained. “And yet we have not seen pure Nature, unless we have seen her thus vast, and drear, and inhuman.” The scene triggered the most salient wilderness imagery ever penned by Thoreau: “this was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. Here was no man’s garden, but the unhandselled globe. It was not lawn, nor pasture, nor mead, nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, nor waste-land. It was the fresh and natural surface of the planet Earth, as it was made forever and ever,—to be the dwelling of man, we say,—so Nature made it, and man may use it if he can.”61 From this observation, Thoreau immediately turned to the spark of wildness within: “I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound has become so strange to me. . . . Talk of mysteries!—Think of our life in nature,—daily to a transcendental place | 171

be shown matter, to come in contact with it—rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! Thesolid earth! Theactual world! Thecommon sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? Where are we?” This wild, ecstatic exclamation was an attempt to describe the direct, bodily experience of nature, as Emerson had described it on the bare common, and it was as close as Thoreau came to the sublime appreciation of wilderness. Unwilling to give himself up to primal nature, he nevertheless appre- ciated its significance. The rock-strewn ravines were the sources of “mighty streams, precipitous, icy, savage” that flowed off the primordial tablelands to drive the plunging Penobscot waters and their charge of logs to Bangor. Preci- pices like these nourished “not only Sacos and Amazons, but prophets who will redeem the world.” Like Belknap, Thoreau saw human creativity springing from raw nature, but on Katahdin he realized how separate this primitive energy was from human consciousness.62 As did the Romantics before him, he hesitated on the brink of immersion, but at last he understood the source of psychic energy that infused the domestic landscape with nature’s power. Thoreau’s moment of awareness was intensely solitary, but in other instances he clearly recognized the Maine woods as an inhabited place. Of these north woods inhabitants, he was most interested in Indians, having filled some two thousand journal pages with notes from missionary accounts, captive narratives, government reports, and linguistic studies. Predisposed by this research, he was disappointed to find that the Penobscots neither dressed nor acted in traditional ways; nevertheless, over the course of his three trips, he came to admire their casual intimacy with nature. Joe Polis’s skills “appear on nearly every page,” one scholar notes:

He dresses a deer skin, makes campfires, finds dry bark, constructs fir- branch beds, makes a birch-bark bowl, candle, and pipe, splits spruce roots, mixes pitch for repairing his canoe, cleans and cooks fish, spots, shoots, skins, and cooks moose, finds ingredients for and cooks lily [root] soup, follows animal trails and tracks, imitates snakes, owls, and muskrats, knows birds by sight, knows medicinal uses for plants, knows about the lives and behaviour of red squirrels, herons, caribou, and mos- quitoes, navigates through woods and waterways, . . . and paddles and portages canoes through rough water and terrain.

Thoreau never abandoned his preconceptions about the “noble savage,” but his experiences refined his idea of the Indian’s place in the union of 172 | chapter 6 nature and humanity. Joe Polis traveled the woods guided only by the look of a hillside, the bend of a tree bough, or the lay of the rocks on the shore. Asked how he accomplished this, Polis replied, “O, I can’t tell you. . . . Great difference between me and white man.” At the end of the trip, Thoreau asked Polis if he was glad to be home, to which the latter replied: “it makes no difference to me where I am.” There was, Thoreau concluded, “no relenting to his wildness”: he was “home” everywhere in the woods. Domestic and wild were one and the same in the Indian landscape.63 Thoreau’s impression of other north woods inhabitants was more conflicted. He admired the loggers, settlers, and hunters who made up this masculine world, again for their spontaneous connection to nature. As did Whittier, he celebrated the logger who, with a “whoop and halloo,” sent “a fair proportion of his winter’s work . . . scrambling down the country . . . toward the Orono Mills.” Like mountain rivers, loggers connected the civilized world to primal nature. They were America’s youth, its wildness. Yet next to his Katah- din commentary, his most memorable remarks on the north woods were those criticizing the lumbermen who, like so many “vermin gnawing at the base of her noblest trees,” leveled the forest monarchs and then “scamper[ed] off to ransack some new wilderness.” Like other Romantics, he both glorified and condemned those who changed the natural world. On the West Branch, he took some delight in watching Joe Aitteon chase down a moose cow and calf but grew more somber and introspective as he watched the guide skin the cow, with the body “still warm and palpitating.” The moose kill, a climax to the 1853 narrative, conveyed Thoreau’s ambivalence toward humanity and nature. He measured the moose in the interest of science and described the taste of the fried meat, but he refused to accompany Aitteon on a second hunt.64 The moose hunt was a turning point in Thoreau’s transition from transcendentalism to preservation. He juxtaposed the logger and hunter against Emer- son’s vague and ethereal admonition to “spend on the higher levels,” and in the middle of The Maine Woods he penned his most memorable plea for preserving the wildness of nature.

There is a higher law affecting our relation to pines as well as to men. A pine cut down, a dead pine, is no more a pine than a dead human carcass is a man. . . . These are petty and accidental uses; just as if a stronger race were to kill us in order to make buttons and flageolets of our bones; for everything may serve a lower as well as a higher use. Every creature a transcendental place | 173

is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine-trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it. . . . Is it the lumberman then who is the friend and lover of the pine-stands nearest to it and understands its nature best? . . . No! no! It is the poet; he it is who makes the truest use of the pine—who does not fondle it with an axe, nor tickle it with a saw, nor stroke it with a plane; who knows whether its heart is false without cutting into it. . . . The poet, who loves them as his own shadow in the air, and lets them stand.

Thoreau found concrete meaning for Emerson’s invocation to spend on a higher plane, and he raised a plea that would echo into the conservation era.65 No doubt with some relief Thoreau returned to the “art and refinement” of his native Concord, and in this sense, he joined Hawthorne, Lowell, and Whit- tier in celebrating the domestic above the wild. “Whatever the value of wilderness,” the literary critic Edward Foster wrote, “it was in the pastoral realm that Thoreau pitched his tent.” But he was reminded that “not only for strength, but for beauty, the poet must, from time to time, travel the logger’s path,” and that in every domestic landscape the psychic forces he sensed in Maine were just below the surface.66 In part because of his Maine woods experience, Thoreau joined a legion of Romantic writers, poets, and naturalists in raising a cry against the unbridled assault on the wilderness. “The kings of England formerly had their forests ‘to hold the king’s game,’ for sport or food, sometimes destroying villages to create or extend them,” Thoreau wrote. “And I think that they were impelled by a true instinct. Why should not we, who have renounced the king’s authority, have our national preserves, where no villages need be destroyed, in which the bear and panther, and some even of the hunter race, may still exist, and not be ‘civilized off the face of the earth’?” At midcentury, these thoughts were simply eddies in the vast current of Manifest Destiny, and it is no surprise that Thoreau’s ideas were conflicted. He was not alone in cherishing the beauty and force of raw nature. “Spirits of a yet more liberal culture” were abroad; wilderness poets were traveling the loggers’ path.67 Their voices were faint, and like Thoreau they were wary of yielding completely to the mysteries of an enveloping nature. But their call for preservation was rich and evocative, and even in the era of Manifest Destiny it touched the heart of the New Englander, who came to appreciate not only the wild landscapes of Thomas Cole and 174 | chapter 6

Frederic Edwin Church, but also Thoreau’s passion for the wildness of the second-nature landscape—the lawns, pastures, meads, woodlands, leas, arable, and wastelands so notably absent on the flanks of Mount Katahdin. There they found resolution to the longstanding tension between the domestic and the wild. Part III Synthetic Technologies, Organic Needs Conservation in New England, 1850 to 2000 

hapter 7 addressed the spiritual dilemma of alienation from Cnature, and the next three chapters discuss the same predic- ament, largely from a political perspective. Conservation, urban reform, and environmentalism all had deep roots in New England society; consequently, each chapter in Part III begins in the mid-nineteenth century and extends into the twenty-first. Conservation is a compelling issue in any region, but in New England the story is complicated by a long history of postpioneer land use. Campaigns to protect resources were burdened by the legacy of longstanding private and common claims to the land, a situation that required a careful balance between traditional understandings of nature and the new forms of scientific expertise emerging from the conservation movement of the Pro- gressive Era. The tradition of local common-resource management, dating to the earliest Puritan settlement, gave conservation in New England an early start in the colonial period as well as a distinctive grassroots character. This legacy resurfaced in the early nineteenth century in attempts to protect community-based

| 175 176 | part iii river and coastal fishing against dam development and commercial fisheries. State legislatures deferred to these communities well into the twentieth century. On the larger rivers, efforts to protect the common good were overshadowed by the individualist instincts of commercial fishermen and waterpower users. Weirs, nets, dams, and industrial pollution blocked upstream salmon and shad migrations, bringing these species to the edge of extinction in all but a few New England rivers. State fish commissioners were more effective in restocking inland lakes with resident, as opposed to migratory, fish, but this effort too required a careful balance of traditional rights and new forms of access. Despite setbacks, these early measures helped reconcile differences between conservation science and folk knowledge, and they redefined the principle of common use for an age of modern resource extraction. Protecting forest resources was the region’s most notable conservation achievement, and in this sphere, states achieved greater success in balancing private rights and public good. Energized by the legacy of Romanticism and encouraged by women’s clubs and farmers’ organizations, conservationists launched a vigorous effort to protect forests from the twin scourges of abusive logging and fire. Although measures varied, by the early twentieth century each state had found some means to ensure the health of its related industries. Conservation in the offshore fisheries was a different story. Industrial-scale fishing initiated a downward spiral in which vessels harvested a species until it was commercially exhausted, then moved on to more remote waters or less marketable fish. The prospects for sustaining this vast resource are not yet clear. Chapter 8 considers a different form of conserving a heavily humanized landscape. Civic ecologies—the network of interrelationships that binds the urban environment—are essentially artificial, but they include a variety of natural elements, including water supplies, park systems, rivers, streams, and relic forests. In the mid-nineteenth century, urban reformers recognized the importance of these organic features and began campaigning to reintroduce synthetic technologies, organic needs | 177 or restore them. Microbial interactions between water and sewage, for instance, forced them to find new ways of directing pure water into the city and flushing contaminated water out; to overcome the dehumanizing effects of the brick-and-concrete environment, they created parks that mimicked natural landscapes. Late in the twentieth century, reformers embraced nature by revegetating streets and plazas, transforming rivers into urban amenities, and highlighting other natural features in the civic ecology. At the same time, a proliferation of grassroots inner-city social justice organizations worked to neutralize toxic contamination of the urban environment and restore its deteriorating infrastructure. In these and other ways, urban conservationists negotiated the tensions between synthetic technologies and organic needs. The concluding chapter surveys the broader environmental movement in New England. Like conservation, environmentalism was essentially a grassroots affair, drawing inspiration from the old New England commons. Both developed unique solutions in response to the region’s cultural attachment to humanized, second-nature landscapes. Inspired by Romantic art and regional literature, environmentalists moved quickly from cleansing the rivers of pollution to protecting the banks from residential and commercial development. After this thrust, they expanded the preservationist mandate by sheltering farms, villages, and woodlands—New England’s classic second-nature landscapes—from urban sprawl and other land-use threats. As in other forms of New England environmentalism, protecting the wilderness required innovative approaches. Initiatives had to be tailored to the relatively small size of the public parcels, to the ecological dynamism of the “recovering wilderness,” and to the conflicting commercial and recreational claims arising from a century of prior use. The most spectacular success in rewilding New England was the campaign to remove several centuries-old dams to restore habitat for salmon and other species; the rivers’ unexpectedly rapid return to life has inspired similar restoration efforts across the country. 178 | part iii

Conservationists accepted the challenge of protecting this diverse array of heavily humanized environments, from remote forests to industrialized rivers to urban neighborhoods. Meeting this challenge required a broad range of innovative policies, no one of them a panacea in itself. But together they formed a fascinating network of regulations adapted to protecting and restoring nature in a variety of forms and guises. Across this wide spectrum, certain themes stand out. Conservationists remained true to the region’s grassroots political culture, they launched a pragmatic blend of public and private initiatives, and, above all, they transcended the nature–culture division so prominent in most forms of environmental rhetoric. The campaigns to save second nature, whether a village center, a family farm, an industrial river, or a working wilderness, are not easily generalized into a unified environmental movement. As disparate as these efforts were, all were brilliantly suited to the region’s land- use history, its environment, and its culture. In this sense, they serve as a fitting capstone to the environmental history of New England. Chapter 7 Science, Conservation, and the Commons 

ndustrialization imposed a broad range of technological buffers Ibetween society and nature, and Romantic writers and artists explored the prospects for transcending this separation. The relation between Romantic ideals and new industrial demands corresponded to a similar dialectic between exploiting nature and conserving it. As historians have made clear, the tendency to abuse New England’s sparse resource base—its timber, fish, and soils—dates from the first European arrivals. Yet the Puritan mission to subdue the wilderness and market its resources was tempered by an even older English tradition of resource management: a conservation impulse so ingrained in English thought that, as Frances Malamy demonstrated in her study of colonial New England, “at times it seemed to amount to obsession.” Throughout the region’s history, exploitation and conservation operated in tandem. New Englanders depleted their fisheries and devastated their forests, but they also established America’s first permanent fish, forest, and soil conservation agencies.1 This tension lies at the heart of the region’s environmental history. In the American West, conservation came to fruition in the management of the national forests, parks, and irrigation districts created during the Pro- gressive Era. The watchword in these new federal agencies, as Samuel P. Hays pointed out in his 1959 book Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency, was expertise.2 Using the dictum “greatest good to the greatest number in the long run,” scientific experts hoped to shift access to resources from local users,

| 179 180 | chapter 7 thought to be inefficient and unscientific, to large corporations, which could market these materials more competitively and perhaps with less waste. In New England, science played a similar role in leveraging resource management out of the hands of local users. But a history of use dating back to early colonial times left a thick crust of folk understanding and local conviction almost impossible to penetrate. The new science of resource management remained, for the most part, incidental to a land-use tradition that, as Malamy suggests, predated use of the term conservation by nearly three centuries. The New England story was unique in other ways as well. Western conservation focused on lands in the federal domain, where the basic logic of government oversight was seldom at issue. In New England, typically resources were owned privately. A late-nineteenth-century Vermont editor summarized this inherent tension in forest conservation: any landowner enjoyed the “right to do with his own that which seemeth good in his sight, even if the exercise of that right is injurious to the public welfare or the welfare of future generations.”3 Each state dealt with this dilemma in its own fashion. Massachusetts and Connecticut used state funds to purchase forests for conservation purposes, Rhode Island accepted private donations to establish state forests and parks, New Hampshire and Vermont campaigned for a national forest, and Maine left its forests in private hands but insisted on the public’s right to tres- pass for recreational purposes. In each case, states managed in some fashion to preserve the balance between public benefits and private rights, but conservation issues were still much more complicated than those in the West. Despite the dominance of private landownership, New England pioneered the idea of conservation in America, and it did so for four reasons. First, a long settlement history gave New Englanders a sense of place unknown in the pioneering West, and this connection to the past endowed conservation with a strong grassroots flavor. Second, Puritan ideology and New England town founding fostered a strong sense of obligation to the common good, an ancient law of the commons that favored the conservation impulse. The third reason was environmental: New England was less expansive than the West, and its resource base was more fragile. Winnowing of the hill-country population and deforestation in the White Mountains, among other concerns, forced New Englanders to recognize that their own supply of valuable resources was finite at a time when resource exhaustion was still a distant horizon in the West. Finally, the Romantic movement in art and literature was more intense in New England than elsewhere. This Romantic legacy, coupled with a robust science, conservation, and the commons | 181

tourist industry dependent on the mountain sublime, was a powerful invocation to protect forest resources. For these and other reasons, New England was first among U.S. regions in developing a conservation tradition.

Conserving River Fisheries Three of these four factors—long settlement history, the ancient law of the commons, and resource depletion—are important in the debates over conserving fish resources. River and in-shore fisheries were critical to New England’s ecological health and human subsistence. The most abundant of the river fish, shad and salmon, arrived in immense schools in May, drawing cod and other groundfish into shallow waters as they moved toward their natal streams. The fry remained in the upland lakes and streams, where they encountered fewer prey; while there, they imprinted a chemical marker. In one to three years they moved downstream to the ocean, and at sexual maturity they returned, carrying upriver the biomass and energy they gained from the teeming ocean waters to enrich the headwaters ecosystem. They also filled a critical gap in the pioneering economy. Arriving in early spring, when stores laid in from the previous harvest were depleted, fish sustained families until lambs were old enough to slaughter. In the same fashion, towns along the ocean shore managed a river herring (alewife) fishery, and here again spring migrations apportioned the bounty to each town in due proportion as citizens extracted a share sufficient to their own subsistence. According to Matthew McKenzie in his 2010 study of Cape Cod, the towns “used what they knew of the inshore environment to balance commercial and subsistence uses of commercially valuable fisheries.” Spring fishing was also an important ritual of community bonding; “rum was plenty, [and] there was of course much noise, bustle and confusion,” the local historian Sylvester Judd recalled.4 By the late colonial period, however, this community-based balance of stewardship and exploitation was beginning to disintegrate. A 1788 contest in Falmouth, on Cape Cod, suggests the multiple pressures that disrupted community consensus on the fisheries. In that year Barnabas Hinckley constructed a mill dam across a local river. When townspeople complained that he destroyed the alewife run, he argued that his mill was essential to the local economy and that access to flowing river water was a private right of the abutting landowner, rather than a common property. The town’s more prosperous farmers, interested in milling grain for export, defended Hinckley’s gristmill, 182 | chapter 7 while those who relied on fish for supplemental subsistence supported the town’s laws. After a long and contentious battle, Hinckley agreed to open the gates in spring if the town compensated him for the loss of water through his dam. The community preserved the fishery but acknowledged Hinckley’s claim over the water commons. Similarly, a dispute over alewives in the mid- Maine coast towns of Newcastle and Nobleboro suggests a growing opinion that fish and water were private rather than common resources. In the late eighteenth century, citizens cleared several natural obstructions on the Dam- ariscotta River to create an alewife fishery. As the run increased, landowners below the towns set weirs across the river and captured the entire run. Upriver towns protested, insisting that they had created the runs and therefore owned the fish; they further argued that the fish caught in Nobleboro and Newcastle were a shared community resource, whereas downriver weir owners simply shipped the catch off to Boston to their own profit. The two towns won their case, but once again community claims to fish and water were becoming more ambiguous.5 Controversies based on this intractable contradiction erupted on almost every river system in New England. Despite such challenges, the ancient law of the commons lingered into the early nineteenth century. In upland towns, local conservationists restocked their ponds and lakes with bass, pickerel, and trout and won permission from the state to manage the resulting fishery. Town committees banned fishing with spears, multiple hooks, and nets and restricted ice-fishing, torch-light fishing, and other destructive practices. Echoing the colonial ordinances that governed timber and meadow use, fish conservationists identified abuses of the resource with outsiders, either interlopers from neighboring towns or unethical “foreigners” whom they hoped to exclude from the town’s water commons. The impact of these ordinances was mixed, but they carried the tradition of community stewardship forward into a more individualistic age.6 In the river fisheries, maintaining the balance of exploitation and conservation was more contentious. Since colonial times, farmers, fishers, and mill owners had been engaged in an ongoing dispute over river use, and amid these legal and political squabbles, the weakest voices were those who, as Henry David Thoreau put it, “spoke for the fish.” This situation began to change at midcentury. In 1849 a massive main-stem dam at Holyoke halted upstream migrations on the Connecticut River, and shad and salmon, forced to run a gauntlet of dams, weirs, and nets, decreased everywhere. Towns upstream from the new high dams, dependent on the fisheries and wedded to the idea science, conservation, and the commons | 183

of a river commons, flooded the state legislatures with petitions demanding conservation measures such as fishways and periodic closures on weir fishing. The tensions generated by industrializing the rivers touched off the era of state conservation in New England.7 Responding to citizens’ complaints, in 1856 Massachusetts sued the dam owners at Lowell, on the Merrimack River. The courts sided with the dam owners, but the debate continued until it was halted in 1861 as the nation plunged into civil war. In 1865 another round of petitions prompted New Hampshire and Vermont to form the nation’s first permanent fish commissions, with Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Maine following suit in 1866–67. The Massachusetts Fish Commission compiled water tables suggesting that flowage was sufficient to power mills and fill the fish ladders, and Vermont’s commissioner, the highly respected naturalist George Perkins Marsh, compiled an impressive compendium of facts relating to fishways and propagation dating from Roman times. The consensus in the reports was that fish restoration was practical if scientifically managed, and in 1867 commissioners from the states bordering the Connecticut River met to discuss a restoration strategy. Vermont and New Hampshire would stock the upper river with shad and salmon fry, Massachusetts would compel dam owners to build fishways, and Connecticut would regulate shad fishing at the river mouth. The commissioners entered the modern conservation era with a great deal of optimism. Like the plants that released clouds of pollen in springtime, fish laid millions of eggs, and like farmers who nurtured the pollen into crops, the commissioners hoped to use scientific techniques to fill the rivers with fish. Massachusetts completed the country’s first state fish hatchery in 1867 at South Hadley Falls, releasing several million fry into the Connecticut and Housatonic Rivers and boosting the runs successfully in subsequent years.8 The campaign for fishways was less successful. Since colonial times, towns and state legislatures had required dam owners either to install methods for fish to pass around their structures or to open their spillways during spawning season. Compliance was uneven, and new dams appeared everywhere during the age of rapid industrialization. Demands for fish ladders came at a time when manufacturers were using every means possible to boost power for their expanding mills, leaving them reluctant to cede even a drop to marine life. Owners of the Lawrence mills on the Merrimack completed a fishway in 1866 over a dam twenty-eight feet high. Meanwhile, on the Connecticut River, the Holyoke Water Power Company, forced by the courts to open a fishway in 184 | chapter 7

1867, demanded another court hearing; when their fish ladder was finally completed, the hatchery shad refused to ascend. Discouraged by the failure of the Holyoke fishway, legislators in Connecticut repealed the act regulating weirs below the still-impassable dam, much to the shock of the commissioners in all four states; those in Massachusetts responded by abolishing fishing regulations in their own section of the river. When Raymond McFarland wrote A History of the New England Fisheries in 1911, the commissioners were still trying to protect the diminishing shad runs. By this time, waste from sawmills, paper mills, tanneries, and municipal sewers made the dam question somewhat superfluous, since few fish survived in waters depleted of dissolved oxygen from rotting organic waste.9 In addition to the mills, dams, and pollution, commercial fishers remained intractable, and the agrarian reformers who first inspired the fish conservation movement lost interest when farmers began producing commercial crops for the very mill towns that had earlier aroused their protests. In response, commissioners abandoned the main river stems and concentrated on restocking the upper watersheds with resident, as opposed to migratory, fish. Unlike their commercial counterparts, the genteel anglers who fished for trout and land- locked salmon in these waters complied with the laws, and the money they spent on local guides, hotels, and other services returned more to the states than the commercial river fisheries had in their heyday.10 Commissioners found it difficult to override local fishing traditions in these upland towns, however. In many cases, the statewide regulations designed to protect sport fishing criminalized the casual fishing practices that had sustained farm families for generations. Earlier experiments with town-based regulations had received at least partial support, but the state’s authority was untested, and farmers saw little reason to conserve fish simply for the amuse- ment of city-bred outsiders. Some commissioners responded by introducing hatchery stock that required no regulation. As Maine’s fish commissioners saw it, “aristocratic fish,” like trout and salmon, required too much pampering and too many rules. So commissioners experimented with perch, smelt, pickerel, and black bass—“plain old-fashioned democratic fish,” they called them, that could survive the pressures of open-access fishing. Species like these, of course, could quickly clear a pond of juvenile trout, and under protest from rod and gun clubs, commissioners were thrown back on rearing species that needed close regulation. As hotels and private angling clubs spread through upland New England, proprietors stocked nearby ponds with trout and salmon and science, conservation, and the commons | 185

petitioned the legislatures to ban bait-fishing and ice-fishing and allow fishing only in late summer, high season for the tourist trade but a time when farmers were fully occupied with the harvest. Arguments over fishing techniques and close seasons spread through the upland vacation belt and were resolved only on a lake-by-lake basis, giving New England a confusing tangle of fishing rules shaped by the relative influence of farmers and hotel owners in any given area.11 Although state conservation codes failed to separate inland fishing from its community context, this first attempt at “speaking for the fish” provided -sev eral lessons about sustaining the balance between exploitation and conservation. First, it brought science into the service of natural resource management, however inadequate that science was in these early stages. Second, it resulted in the realization that fish and water resources were finite—even when augmented by science—and that their use had to be managed in some fashion. Third, fish commissioners were forced to acknowledge the colonial tradition of equitable access to nature, largely because that was the only way they could achieve a modicum of local cooperation. Finally, controversies over conservation contributed to the notion that rivers had to produce both fish and waterpower. Negotiating these two demands, commissioners pioneered the idea of multiple-use resource management. These four principles—science, sustainable management, equity, and multiple use—provided a foundation for conservation not only in New England but across America as well.

Coastal Fisheries in the Age of Science Conservation of inshore fisheries had been formulated according to the ancient law of the commons, and state fish commissions faced the challenging prospect of convincing fishermen with several generations of experience at sea to shift allegiance to a new set of standards based on scientific rules and statistical inferences. Their success was mixed. Along the coast, migratory runs of herring were taken by hook and line or in traps set upriver on the coastal streams, and for the most part the fish was consumed locally. With agriculture on the wane, the runs were, as Matthew McKenzie explains, “an essential component in the long-term survival of communities.” At midcentury, vessels engaged in the banks fishery began using river herring as a source of bait; with towns in control of the rivers, those seeking to capitalize on this new market had to construct weirs and nets offshore, beyond local jurisdiction. Owners of the weirs and nets, whose business it was to turn “real fish into 186 | chapter 7 mere revenue streams . . . for short-term private gain,” considered their catch apart from the traditional community context.12 In 1869 shore communities in Rhode Island petitioned for laws prohibiting near-shore nets and weirs, and a similar petition was signed in 1870 by three thousand Massachusetts townspeople. These devices, they argued, threatened the livelihood of those who took fish in the time-honored traditions of hand-lining from boats or setting upriver traps. State fish commissioners sided with the commercial interests. Rejecting the community understanding of migrations, they drew on the emerging international scientific opinion that overexploiting a sea fishery was nearly impossible. Fish produced uncountable numbers of eggs each season, scientists reasoned, and thus could easily repop- ulate a given habitat despite any amount of fishing. Rejecting centuries of folk experience, the commissioners, like the weir owners, extricated the resource from its traditional cultural context; the fish could be explained only by “rendering them into numbers.”13 In 1871, the year after the “great petition” in Massachusetts, the state’s commissioners rented a weir in Waquoit Bay and scientifically recorded the catch, hoping to demonstrate that fishing could be individualized without harming community welfare. The results were inconclusive: fish populations, they discovered, were subject to perplexing cycles of scarcity and abundance that were impossible to attribute to a single cause. Lacking convincing evidence, they declared weir owners and natural predators, like bluefish, equally culpable in the decline of alewives. Given the speculative basis of these conclusions, the state legislature rejected the scientific recommendations and banned weirs, traps, purse seines, and gill nets in Buzzards Bay, the seat of the controversy. But the bay was not an important source of bait fish, and the victory had no immediate effect. More important was the affirmation of community rights, which led to the spread of similar bans outward along the Cape, sustaining a way of fishing deemed equitable—and thus enforceable—to those living in the area.14 Weir fishing was irrepressible, however, and despite ordinances, the inshore fisheries succumbed to rising market pressures by the end of the nineteenth century. Faced with diminishing resources both on land and at sea, families living on Cape Cod began boarding summer visitors to supplement household income. In yet another turn in the rush to “speak for the fish,” tourist-related interests deemed the use of weirs unfair to sport fishers, but again the political outcome did little to preserve the fish.15 With bait fishing on the wane, weir fishing became less profitable, and the new legislation regulating them science, conservation, and the commons | 187

succeeded only in bringing closure to the era of contention along the Massa- chusetts coast—and to the hopes that scientific expertise could prevail over local knowledge and community management. In eastern Maine, weir fishermen were engaged in a similar battle over shore fisheries. In the 1870s, fish-processing companies perfected methods for canning juvenile herring and marketing them as “sardines,” and soon canneries appeared in several towns east of Penobscot Bay. Local fishers built shore weirs to meet the demand for herring, but because the runs were seasonal, they folded such operations into a mixed livelihood made up of farming, wood cutting, shipping, net fishing hand lining, lobster catching, and clamming. These occupational choices were dependent on growing cycles and marine migrations rather than industrial routines or market forces, and they introduced a degree of personal decision making into a fishery that was otherwise moving rapidly toward monopoly. In the 1890s, giant packing houses based in Boston, New York, and Chicago consolidated the canneries and set out to reduce the industry to a “perfect system with uniform prices for fish, supplies and labor and a uniform price for the goods when packed,” as one local journalist summarized.16 The independent weir owners remained a bottleneck in this rationaliza- tion. To extract the herring fishery from the traditional organic economy, the syndicates invested in a fleet of purse seine vessels and petitioned the Maine legislature to allow them to set their nets within 600 yards of the weirs. At town meetings all along the eastern Maine coast, residents drafted petitions insisting that herring management should remain under the towns’ purview. Weirs, the petitioners explained, provided sufficient quantities for any reasonable person, and they damaged the fish runs less than purse seining. In this debate, as in the controversy over weirs in Buzzards Bay, the commissioners dismissed folk understandings of marine dynamics and shore conditions and reduced the runs to abstract profit calculations. Purse seines, they reasoned, were more efficient in effort and yield, and their use would spur industrialization along the coast. The legislature, ignoring the commissioners’ findings, deferred to the ancient law of the commons, sustaining each town’s rights to dictate restrictions on the seines, including mesh size, net placement, and hours of use.17 Although science was emerging as an important ingredient in the conservation movement, commissioners in New England, no matter how dedicated they were to the gospel of efficiency, were forced to acknowledge the validity of folk science and the ancient law of the commons. 188 | chapter 7

Clams, Lobsters, and the Coastal Commons The difficulty in reconciling science and community custom was also apparent in shellfish harvests. As early as 1795, Massachusetts law had protected community rights to regulate clamming as a source of sustenance and income for the “poorer sort of people,” but over time commercial pressures threatened this resource. Quahogs, the large hard-shelled clams found on the southern Massachusetts coast, were traditionally used for domestic consumption and bait in the local line fishery. But with alewife populations declining, offshore schooner operators began using clams as bait at the end of the nineteenth century, a time when seafood canneries and coastal tourism placed even more pressure on the resource.18 As they had since colonial times, towns stepped in to ban the sale of clams to outsiders and limit local catches, but in this case the new rules spawned a perplexing philosophical debate. Some considered clam flats part of a vast marine commons available to any and all participants. Others assumed they were subject to traditional community sanctions as part of the local town commons. Yet another group considered them a private domain belonging to abutting landowners. Taking fish from the open sea was considered a legitimate livelihood, but living off the town commons was deemed somewhat irre- sponsible, a matter of existing, as one fish commissioner put it, “literally from day to day, barely tiding over the severe winters with the money earned during the summer’s fishing.” If clam flats were private property, harvesters were more akin to respectable farmers cultivating their crops; with this vision in mind, fish commissioners proposed dividing the flats and beds among individual owners. According to the fish commissioner Theodore Lyman, maintaining the ancient law of the commons was a matter of “swimming against the currents of history.” On their own private flats, clam diggers would be industrious and independent, like farmers, and both land and labor would be brought “to their highest degree of usefulness.”19 With prices rising, landowners attempted to close the flats to the public, triggering an acrimonious town-by-town debate over common and private rights. In 1880 state legislators gave the towns authority to regulate the flats as they saw fit, but because this management system was local, ordinances were difficult to enforce. When one town closed its flats to allow stocks to recuperate, diggers simply moved to the next town, increasing the pressure on the open flats. Some towns responded by closing flats to outsiders, and others science, conservation, and the commons | 189

by leasing them to private cultivators; both solutions generated a vigorous defense of common access and common management.20 In these confusing circumstances, clam stocks declined while acrimony over the resource intensified. Fish commissioners insisted that through scientific management they could adjust the productivity of the flats precisely to meet the demand for clams, and to implement their plan, they asked for state-controlled reservations. When citizens objected, they turned to a second solution: renting the flats to private “quahaug farmers” who could reap the benefits of their scientific husbandry. Dividing the clam-flat commons would eradicate the “remnant . . . of the primitive communism which on land was so unsatisfactory to our ancestors.” A few towns licensed private cultivators, and others experimented with size limits, close seasons, and artificial cultivation. But with state commissioners fixated on the politically inexpedient idea of private leases, quahog populations continued to decline. Diggers moved into deeper waters to harvest clams from small boats, and by 1909 only about 3,552 acres of the state’s 60,000 acres of potential shellfish ground offered “anything approximating the natural yield,” with many flats contaminated by sewage. Over the next half century, conservation efforts brought mixed results, and the towns’ rights to regulate the resource remained inviolate. The town common prevailed, even to the detriment of sustainable shellfishing.21 Conservation in the lobster fishery brought greater success, also largely under local management. With coastal tourism and lobster canning on the rise in the 1880s, lobster fishing grew phenomenally, causing Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts to begin regulating the industry more closely. Here, too, conservation was a jealously guarded local prerogative. Because lobsters are typically sedentary, catchers in each harbor developed a claim to their own territory and kept outsiders away by vandalizing traps and lines. Rising commercial demand undermined this informal system and touched off a debate over conserving the fishery. In 1874 seafood cannery owners in Massachusetts demanded a close season between August and mid-October, a time when molted lobsters were less palatable but also peak season for summer hotels and restaurants. Sensitive to the importance of tourism, the state instead established a minimum size limit of ten and a half inches. Canneries, which used mostly cheap juvenile lobster, were disadvantaged, and when Maine followed with a minimum limit in 1883, the canning business migrated to Maritime Canada, were regulations were based on season rather than size.22 Because lobster conservation was so politicized, the size limit proved 190 | chapter 7 difficult to enforce. States hired only a few wardens to guard the entire New England coast, and fishers could spot their vessels at great distance. The use of marine engines in the 1880s allowed catchers to double the number of traps they tended, and the commissioners responded by suggesting a maximum as well as a minimum size limit, since lobsters over the proposed maximum size were more fertile than the protected undersized females. To enforce the double-limit rule, they proposed restricting trap entrances to three and a quarter inches to exclude the largest lobsters, with slats one and a half inches apart to allow the smallest to escape. Rejecting this reasoning, legislators inexplicably reduced the minimum size to nine inches, launching a free-for-all on the previously illegal nine- to ten-and-a-half-inch crustaceans. Despite the reduction in minimum size, Massachusetts lobster landings settled into a sustainable annual yield, and by the 1890s wardens and their rules were gaining a measure of credibility. In part, this success was due to experiments by fishers and dealers in forming local lobster associations to protect their own jurisdictions along the coast. Using a territorial system devised informally by “harbor gangs” in Maine a half century earlier, members pledged to throw back short lobsters and egg-bearing females with the understanding that they would be allowed exclusive rights to reap the benefits of their stewardship. Although these exclusions were not legally binding, they did restore a sense of community stewardship over the fishery. Moreover, the state promised to release hatchery-bred lobsters in waters where associations complied with the law.23 Maine held to the ten-and-a-half-inch minimum, even though catchers along the southern border were painfully aware that undersize lobsters caught in their waters were shipped over state lines to dealers in New Hampshire and Massa- chusetts, where nine-inch lobsters were legal.24 Catchers from these southern counties asked the legislature to equalize the size limit with the two adjacent states, while those from eastern Maine, where large lobster were still abundant, insisted on maintaining the ten-and-a-half-inch restriction. Political bickering undermined the law’s legitimacy, and illegal fishing remained rampant. In the twentieth century, the problem was exacerbated by the Great Depres- sion, which drove unemployed Mainers into the lobster fishery and resulted in a rash of complaints from those established in the trade. State commissioners approached their counterparts in New Hampshire and Massachusetts to lobby for a regionwide law limiting lobster size to ten and a half inches; when this initiative failed, they suggested that Maine adopt the “double gauge” nine- to thirteen-inch limit proposed earlier by scientists and commissioners in science, conservation, and the commons | 191

Massachusetts. Doing so, they argued, would protect the same number of eggs and equalize Maine’s law regarding minimum size with those of New Hampshire and Massachusetts. In 1933 the double-gauge law went into effect in Maine and remained the standard for the state’s lobster fishery. As with fisheries all along the New England coast, conservation was based on a territorial system that echoed the ancient law of the commons. Elsewhere in North America, federal fishing regulations superseded local management systems, but in New England the persistence of community stewardship provided a level of compliance not found in other resource industries. Coastal herring, clam, and lobster fishers defended their local commons in the face of an increasingly scientific rationale for conservation. To the degree that conservation remained sensitive to these ancient local traditions, it stood a far better chance of success.25

Science and Agricultural Reform Against a backdrop of concern about rural depopulation, soil conservation also gained attention in the late nineteenth century. As early as the 1790s, New England farmers had begun meeting in county organizations to discuss various forms of farm improvement. In Vermont in 1806 and Massa- chusetts in 1811, farmers organized county and state agricultural societies to publish pamphlets, sponsor addresses, and hold competitive livestock and produce exhibitions at fairs. The Massachusetts organizations came together in 1852 to create a state Board of Agriculture, and the other New England states followed in the 1860s. These semiofficial commissions organized and publicized the agrarian conservation impulse and later campaigned for agricultural colleges. In 1862, largely through the efforts of Senator Justin S. Morrill of Vermont, Congress passed the Land Grant College Act, which set aside proceeds from the sale of federal lands in the West to endow every state loyal to the Union cause with funds to build an agricultural college. Massachusetts responded in 1863 with the region’s first land-grant college, with Vermont following in 1864 and Maine in 1865.26 The pace of agrarian reform was quickened late in the nineteenth century when industrialists began purchasing country estates and conducting experiments with new farming methods, livestock breeds, and field crops. Con- cerned about rural out-migration, these gentlemen-farmers understood that the prosperity of emerging industrial cities depended on the well-being of the agricultural hinterland. They also realized that the agricultural landscape held 192 | chapter 7 symbolic significance. They saw the course of civilization as cyclical, beginning with a simple pastoral society and proceeding through stages of prosperity and luxury to decay and decline. Better farming methods, they reasoned, would sustain the yeoman republic through the era of mechanized progress. In 1875, under the combined influence of agricultural societies and these gentlemen-farmers, Connecticut became the first state to appropriate public funds for an agricultural experiment station. Massachusetts followed suit in 1882, Maine in 1885, and New Hampshire and Vermont in 1886. The Hatch Act, passed in 1887, provided federal funding for experiment stations across the nation.27 Farm improvement took two forms, each with a following in the agricultural press. The first, as the historian Steven Stoll points out in his 2002 history of soils, was grounded in traditional understanding of natural process and originated in the local farm clubs and county agricultural societies. This folk science, oriented to the tradition of mixed husbandry, guided farmers in squaring up fields, straightening rows, clearing brush from the margins, and removing stumps, stones, and boulders to accommodate a shift from oxen to horse-drawn equipment. Those along the coast dyked salt marshes to leach the salt and increase the yield of grass, while those in the interior drained freshwater marshes, swamps, and ponds and cultivated the organic muck trapped beneath their waters. They experimented with exotic livestock breeds and new forms of crop rotation, produced more animals by selling them at a younger age, used better plows to furrow more deeply, seeded their pastures with timothy, herd’s grass, red clover, and redtop, and experimented with natural and mineral fertilizers such as seaweed, muck, peat, ashes, compost, fish, gypsum, lime, and plaster, all to conserve a traditional mixed-farming way of life.28 A second impulse, headed by universities and the regional network of gentlemen-farmers, urged a more scientific approach oriented to commercial crops, new machinery, chemical fertilizers, and imported feed grains. Declaring obso- lete the practices of mixed husbandry and subsistence production, these scientific reformers offered a new calculus of conservation based on horse-drawn cultivators and harrows that softened and prepared the soils as well as lighter vehicles to carry crops to the local rail depot. Profits from the fields, meadows, and orchards meant new mowing machines, horse rakes, and hay tedders and lifters that would shift the burdens of farming from people to animals. Reform- ers advised dairy farmers to stall-feed their cattle with corn and purchased grains rather than turn them loose on hillside pastures. Profits from such reforms would make rural life more pleasant and stem the impulse to abandon the farm. science, conservation, and the commons | 193

Although these two approaches to soil conservation were never recon- ciled, together they transformed New England agriculture. Overall acreage in fields and pasture decreased after 1880, but the value of field crops and dairy products rose as farmers cultivated their remaining acres with more care and used larger applications of fertilizer. These advances came at the expense of the farmer’s close relation to nature, however. Western feed allowed them to produce milk throughout the year rather than on a cycle based on seasonal supplies of fodder, and new chemical fertilizers reduced the need for fallowing and crop rotation. As Carolyn Merchant indicates in Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England, the land no longer required rest and recuperation like the human body, and the annual recycling of natural elements—seeds, ashes, manure—became less important as farmers turned to extraregional suppliers.29 The shift to commercial production was by no means universal. As late as 1950, the majority of upland farms in New Hampshire and Maine were either “self-sufficing” or “general farms.” Farmers continued to raise much of their own food, but they also found ways to ease into market niches using the environment to their advantage. Those in the upper river valleys found New England’s warm and humid summers ideal for growing sweet corn for canneries. Blueberries were grown to perfection in the thin, coarse ground east of Penobscot Bay, and in the wet, acid mucks of lower Cape Cod, Martha’s Vine- yard, and Nantucket farmers produced an unrivaled crop of cranberries. Ver- mont’s rich Champlain Valley soils grew the clover that made the state nationally prominent in dairy production, while the adjacent upland forests yielded an equally renowned crop of maple syrup. Hill-country farmers exported dairy products, cider, maple syrup, cold-weather vegetables, and frost-hearty apples, and as mountain resort hotels appeared, they turned to fresh fruits, vegetables, and dairy products. In the Connecticut low country, Polish, Aus- trian, Lithuanian, and Russian tenant farmers grew tobacco, strawberries, and vegetables.30 The result was a cautious commitment to the market economy that preserved rural New England’s traditional agrarian landscapes. Between self-sufficing and commercial, in some ways modern and in others traditional, neither wholly wild nor completely domesticated, the New England countryside had become the icon of rural America: second nature to those who inhabited it, and a form of land art to those who viewed it from the outside. 194 | chapter 7

New England’s Forestry Commissions The core of the New England conservation tradition was its forests, which were central not only to the regional economy but also to the sense of place. Generations of poets and artists had romanticized the woods as a backdrop for the pageant of New England history. George Bancroft, who traced the nation’s Anglo-Saxon heritage back to the Teutonic European heartland, demonstrated that forests were racially inscribed in the American character, and Francis Parkman, likewise of Boston patrician lineage, used the northern forest as a setting for his compelling seven-volume France and England in North America. Parkman, as the plant ecologist Gordon Whitney points out, was largely responsible for America’s popular impressions of the “forest primeval”: an environment so dense with life that trees seemed animated by the fierce competition for sunlight. Like Thoreau, Parkman saw this primitive wildness as a source of national vitality, and he likewise resented the commercialized overburden that stifled it. As early as 1888, Parkman suggested a policy of selective cutting in the White Mountains to protect the region culturally, economically, and ecologically.31 The pivotal figure in molding this Roman- tic appreciation into a conservation movement was George Perkins Marsh, a lawyer, farmer, congressman, diplomat, and naturalist from Woodstock, Vermont. While serving as ambassador to Italy, Marsh traveled the Mediter- ranean Basin, read widely, and wrote a brilliant synthesis of his observations on deforestation in Europe and New England. Man and Nature, published in 1864, reminded Americans that forest resources were not inexhaustible and that improper use could indeed upset the entire balance of nature.32 Against this Romantic and scientific backdrop, the catalyst for forest conservation was the alarming increase in rates of resource use by the pulp and paper industry. The earlier logging enterprises had been somewhat selective: sawmills required large-diameter logs to make dimension lumber, and the cost of moving timber by horse, sleigh, and river ensured that only the largest and soundest trees would be sent for processing. By contrast, pulp mills used virtually any size spruce, poplar, or fir tree. Aiding in the depletion of these species were the narrow-gauge railroads that snaked into the upper valleys, hauling out even the smallest trees on a paying basis. Industry consolidations brought further concern. In the 1890s, International Paper Company was formed when Hugh J. Chisholm and fellow capitalists bought up more than a score of pulp and paper mills in New York and New England. Wary of the science, conservation, and the commons | 195

company’s near monopoly of newsprint production, newspaper producers in New York formed Great Northern Paper Company, building a huge mill virtually overnight and establishing a complete town at Millinocket, on the banks of the still-wild Penobscot River. Over the next several decades, the two giants bought up entire townships, built roads and railroads, and altered the flow of rivers, all to funnel the vast northern New England spruce–fir forest into their mills and through their fourdriniers.33 Forests, like fish, were embedded in community context. Access to the woods was an important symbol of freedom and independence in a region where work was closely contoured to the natural landscape, and these huge financial transactions seemed to threaten a traditional way of life. A local newspaper editor described the disconcerting concentration of power in the sleepy farm towns of the upper Androscoggin Valley: “The Rumford Falls Power Company owns the land, American Reality Company owns the forests, and the Light and Water Company owns the lights and water, Rumford Falls Real- ity company owns the houses for rent, the Dunton Lumber Company owns the timber for building houses, the Rail Road Company owns the transportation, the banks control finances, the Corporations own the mills and control the labor, and Hugh J. Chisholm owns and controls them all.”34 Corporate control, huge mill complexes, and burgeoning foreign populations unsettled the upland communities. Fears of modernity were expressed in a variety of ways, including a sizable Ku Klux Klan membership in New England in the 1920s, but among the more positive responses was a growing public attention to conserving the forests that had fallen under the paper industry’s control. The conservation coalition that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century contained several elements. Farmers, concerned that deforestation would affect rainfall and stream flow, were joined by local hotel owners, regional hiking clubs, and travel writers who were interested in forests for aesthetic reasons. The tourist-oriented Board of Trade in Portland, Maine, noted that it normally “hailed with much pleasure and satisfaction the entry of new industries to our state, excepting in our heart pulp companies, for while recognizing fully the amount of money they bring . . . we know also the terrible destruction that [they] . . . mean to our beautiful forests that now make Maine the playground of the nation.” In addition, downstream textile firms worried that heavy cutting in the upper watersheds would affect flow in the rivers that powered their mills. The Maine Farmer considered it “idle talk” to expect corporations to “care for our forest lands.” Those who refused to “recognize the 196 | chapter 7 just claims of the state” forced the question: should forest owners be allowed to threaten the common good?35 In 1881 Joseph B. Walker, considered the father of New Hampshire forest conservation, convinced the state legislature to form a temporary forestry commission to assess “the extent to which the forests of New Hampshire are being destroyed by the indiscriminate cutting of wood and timber for transportation to other states.” The commission became permanent in 1893 and began accepting land donations to establish state forests. Vermont’s forestry movement was spearheaded by Joseph Battell, a legislator from Middlebury who in 1883 convinced Governor John L. Barstow to appoint a legislative commission with a mandate similar to New Hampshire’s; in 1904 the legislature created a Forest Commission, funded a tree nursery, and endorsed a rudimentary program of forest-fire control. Maine created a forest commission in 1891, and the Con- necticut Forestry Association prompted the legislature to attach a forester to the state agricultural experiment station in 1901. The Massachusetts Forestry Association accomplished the same in 1903, as did Rhode Island in 1906.36 The work of these state agencies was largely educational. Through public addresses and newspaper articles, commissioners cautioned against care- less fires, encouraged tree planting, and lobbied for state forests. Given New England’s dominant private ownership patterns, stronger measures were politically impossible. The United States chief forester Henry S. Graves, speaking to a New England audience, noted that politicians remained cool even to fire-fighting expenditures because the public received no guarantees that the forest they protected would be used wisely by the lumber operators who owned them. Yet, until the threat of fire was reduced, landowners would refuse to invest in conservation.37 This fatal circularity, generated by the awk- ward blend of public and private interests, complicated conservation policies through the first decades of the twentieth century.

Beyond the Forestry Commissions With state legislators baffled by the dilemma of private ownership versus public good, conservation assumed a grassroots flavor. Among a growing contingent of vocal supporters were women. Active in benevolence, temperance, and abolition societies since the 1830s, women became more visible publicly as the suffrage movement gained momentum in the 1880s. At century’s end, the Boston blue-blood Harriet Hemenway had united her science, conservation, and the commons | 197

upper-class contemporaries against the use of wild bird feathers in women’s hats, helping to revive the Audubon Society, which had flourished briefly in the late 1880s under George Bird Grinnell. In 1898 the naturalist Mabel Osgood Wright became the first president of the Connecticut Audubon Society, and, with Frank M. Chapman, she helped launch Bird-Lore, later named Audubon magazine. Advocates like Hemenway and Wright drew on women’s sense of higher moral authority to push for forestry legislation, state forest acquisitions, and university forestry schools. Likewise, Caroline Severance formed the New England Woman’s Club in Boston 1868, and in 1892 local clubs in Maine formed the Maine Federation of Women’s Clubs and began coordinat- ing statewide reform efforts. Much of the clubs’ conservation work fell under the heading of “town and village improvement,” which included, along with roadway and park beautification, the issue of preserving state forests.38 The Federation of Women’s Clubs in New Hampshire grew concerned when logging operations threatened scenic vistas and important watersheds in the White Mountains. In 1901 Ellen Mason, a member of the federation, met with a group of prominent New Englanders, and together they launched the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests (SPNHF). The example of the Adirondack Preserve, created in New York in 1891, inspired a proposal for the purchase of critical mountain forest, but conservationists conceded that the state’s finances were insufficient to the task and instead turned to the federal government. The SPNHF and women’s clubs issued news releases, distributed posters, presented lectures, and, in 1902, placed a bill before Con- gress calling for a “national park or forest reserve” similar to a proposed federal purchase in the southern Appalachians. The following year saw an expansion in lumbering activity, a devastating series of forest fires, and several violent floods, all of which provided a dramatic backdrop for the forest reserve idea.39 But Congress’s authority to purchase private forests extended only to the protection of navigation on interstate waters. Therefore, in 1908 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers investigated stream-flow records on the Merrimack River to determine the effects of deforestation. The study was crucial because the proportion of cleared and forested land on the Merrimack had changed dramatically since mill owners first began measuring water flow in the 1840s. The agency found no support for the popular belief that deforestation increased the incidence of floods. Rather than lay the issue to rest, however, the study precipitated a vigorous debate between Forest Service officials, who insisted that healthy forests were essential to protecting stream flow, and Corps of 198 | chapter 7

Engineers officers, who maintained that only dams could ensure a dependable flowage. Although the outcome was inconclusive, most popular commentators accepted the Forest Service’s arguments as intuitive.40 Despite the bureaucratic impasse, Congress took action. In 1909 Represen- tative John W. Weeks of Massachusetts introduced a bill calling for the federal purchase of private lands on watersheds of navigable streams. The bill passed in March 1911, and after a complicated set of surveys and title searches, the U.S. government purchased some 225,000 acres in New Hampshire and western Maine. The White Mountain National Forest was created in 1918 by presiden- tial proclamation, as were several other eastern national forests. The Weeks Act—the most significant forestry legislation in the region in the twentieth century—accelerated the trend toward public forestry already under way at the state level. In 1924 the Clarke-McNary Act broadened the federal mandate to include timber management as well as watershed protection, and it offered federal matching funds for forestry education and forest-fire prevention.41

Public Forestry on Private Lands The creation of the White Mountain National Forest demonstrates one form of compromise between private rights and public welfare. In Maine, forestry followed a different path, and as a result the conservation movement was much more attenuated. “Early conservation activity in Maine took the form of a private, business-inspired movement,” the scholar Charles Roundy argued, noting that it was “designed to perpetuate the Maine wilderness for economic reasons.” Yet the tension between private goals and community welfare surfaced here as well. Early state foresters were unsure about the long-term impact of pulpwood cutting. Maine’s first commissioner, Cyrus A. Packard, offered assur- ances that if all forestry practices were modeled after those of the big companies, pulp cutting could be sustained indefinitely. Nevertheless, he included in his report a lengthy warning from the lumber manufacturer George F. Talbot that “to expect of men whose prudent judgment has led them to fortune, to make investments in enterprises, from which no substantial return is to be expected until after the lapse of a century, is making too large a demand upon the disin- terestedness of human nature.” To determine the need for state forestry intervention, in 1895 the commissioners sent a U.S. forester named Austin Cary to inventory the spruce-fir stock of the upper Kennebec watershed. Cary’s report, published the following year, dismissed talk of a timber famine, but he too was science, conservation, and the commons | 199

ambivalent, predicting that “the yearly cut of spruce lumber on the river must soon shrink.” The debate over public forestry on Maine’s private timberlands was not to be settled on scientific terms.42 In 1901 Edgar E. Ring became the state’s forest commissioner. A timberland owner himself, he dedicated the commission to extricating forestry matters from popular debate and community context. Working with Great Northern Paper Company, Ring hired the Bureau of Forestry’s Ralph Hosmer to survey the upper Penobscot watershed and determine a sustainable level of cutting. Hosmer’s report, replete with voluminous statistics, signaled the arrival of science in the forest conservation movement, but it ended by dismissing popular fears of forest depletion. Impressed by Hosmer’s scientific conclusions, in 1903 legislators budgeted a generous $10,000 for fighting forest fires; when huge conflagrations that summer brought calls for even more funding, they declined, pointing out that fire-fighting appropriations protected an investment that simply lined the pockets of speculators in Bangor, Boston, and New York City.43 By the first decade of the new century, conservation thought had coalesced into two camps. Tourist businesses, down-river manufacturers, farmers, and women’s clubs insisted on aggressive public conservation mandates; timberland owners narrowed the conservation options to privately managed scientific forestry and state-funded fire suppression. In 1907 the former group asked for a law mandating a statewide twelve-inch cutting diameter for spruce and pine trees and an increase in the ridiculously low tax on forest lands. The legislature sent the cutting limit proposition to the state supreme judicial court for an opinion, and to the surprise of everyone, the court deemed regulations within the scope of government. Ignoring the ruling, the legislature hewed to Ring’s plan for fire suppression. Why politicians backed away from public conservation is something of a mystery. Although it seems a clear victory for private forest management, Roundy insists that most large landowners supported the bill and that opposition came from small operators in southwest- ern Maine who were clear-cutting wood lots for box boards and matchsticks. Suffice to say, the issue was complicated by competing claims from within and without the forest industry.44 On the issue of timberland taxes, landowners stood united, pointing out that the access they granted to hunters, campers, and anglers made their lands a public benefit—and that was tax enough. When the summer of 1909 brought another series of forest fires and sharper cries for state fire protection, legislators sought a compromise that would leave forestry decisions in private hands, 200 | chapter 7 maintain access rights for recreationists, and settle the issue of taxes paid on wild lands. Landowners agreed to a special state tax on timberlands dedicated exclusively to funding a Maine Forestry District. When the district was formed in 1909, it performed superbly in the narrowly targeted conservation arena that forest owners wanted. In his inaugural address in 1913, Governor William T. Haines, also a forest owner, tried to put to rest the issue of public forestry. Maine might have erred in selling off its public lands in the 1870s, he admitted, but it was “much better to leave all our wild lands as they are today, in the hands of private owners, with the right reserved as it now is, to every- body to go upon them for . . . recreation and pleasure, which makes of them a great natural park, in which all of the people have great benefits and great interests.” Calls for state and federal forests rose again in Maine in the 1930s, but public use of private forests remained the bedrock of that state’s policy well beyond the conservation era.45 As in New Hampshire, Vermont’s solution to the dilemma of protecting public benefits on private lands was to lobby for federal forest purchases. Between 1890 and 1929, Vermont experienced the loss of one-third of its wood firms, the result of timber depletion, market decline, and company consolidation. Here, too, farm organizations, women’s clubs, the Green Mountain Club, and forestry organizations raised the alarm. The 1927 flood, one of the greatest natural disasters in the state’s history, increased public support for the national forest, and in 1928 the federal government began acquiring lands for the establishment of the Green Mountain National Forest. Dedicated in 1932, it eventually encompassed about 9 percent of the state’s land base.46 A study of New Hampshire, Maine, and Vermont highlights the diverse approaches to reconciling private ownership and public benefits in forest conservation. Energized by New England’s strong sense of place, its tradition of community responsibility, and its Romantic ideals, women’s clubs, farmers’ organizations, and resort owners launched a conservation movement that challenged unbridled private control over forests. Differing environmental conditions help explain the solutions that each state developed. They all had a community stake in the forest, but Maine’s gently rolling hills and broad rivers were less subject to flooding, erosion, and landslides, whereas deforestation in the White and Green Mountains of New Hampshire and Vermont posed more serious threats that required stronger public oversight in the form of national forests. Also in the latter two states, commercial forests were intermixed with settled areas, which visibly linked the fate of the forest to that of the nearby science, conservation, and the commons | 201

communities. Maine’s key lumbering districts were more remote and isolated, and its larger forest area gave more assurance that big cuts could be sustained without affecting public welfare. Maine’s landowners, whose holdings ranged in the tens and hundreds of thousands of acres, were more entrenched and less willing to abdicate their prerogatives than the small holders in Vermont and New Hampshire. Lastly, forest products were more important to Maine’s overall economy. Wood products industries, as important as they were in New Hampshire and Vermont, paled in comparison to investments in tourism and water-powered textile manufacturing; in short, trees were more valuable on the stump than in the pulp mills. Despite differences in strategies, by 1909 the entire region was on the road to protecting its forests, following the lead of the national conservation movement and bending to local concerns about scenic values, environmental effects, and the prerogatives of private owners.47

Federal Conservation in New England The Great Depression locked the New England lumber industry into a downward spiral at a time when saw timber was understocked, and cardboard, plastics, clay materials, wire fencing, concrete, and metal alloys were encroaching on traditional markets for wood products. Pulp and paper producers likewise suffered from a combination of depressed conditions and structural weaknesses. In 1911 Congress dropped the tariffs on Canadian pulp and paper, and in the 1930s chemists discovered ways to pulp southern pine. Using cheap labor and vast tracts of reforested cotton fields, Southern producers expanded rapidly, as did those in the Lake states “cutover,” the northern townships that had been devastated by earlier logging and forest fires and were, by the 1930s, reforesting to spruce and poplar.48 Making matters worse at this time were several exotic pests invading New England forests. Gypsy moths, having escaped from a silkworm experiment at Harvard University in 1868, attacked the industry’s key hardwood species, and the proliferation of old-field pine across central New England fed epidemics of white pine weevil and blister rust. After 1900, brown-tail moths spread northward from southern New England, also defoliating hardwoods, just as softwood species were being attacked by the European spruce sawfly migrating southward from the Gaspé Peninsula. Chestnut blight, introduced in New York from China around 1900, devastated one of the industry’s most important hardwoods, and Dutch elm disease, which arrived from Europe around 202 | chapter 7

1930, ravaged trees along city streets and country roads. White birch dieback, beech scale, and hemlock woolly adelgid edged into the region as well.49 The hard-hit industry benefited from federal conservation programs. The Civilian Conservation Corps, inaugurated in 1933, began recruiting young unemployed men to help with reforestation, forest protection, and national and state park development across the nation. In New England, crews planted and thinned trees, surveyed the national forests, enhanced wildlife habitat, and built roads, bridges, bathing beaches, visitor centers, camping sites, cabins, and picnic groves in state parks and national forests. They also cleared hiking trails and fire lanes, constructed downhill and cross-country skiing and snowshoeing facilities, raised lookout towers, and helped complete the Appalachian Trail to the summit of Mount Katahdin. On the disease front, they battled white pine blister rust, gypsy moths, brown-tail moths, blister rot, and spruce sawfly. After the hurricane of 1938, which leveled nearly 3 billion feet of timber in central New England, the corps worked with the Northeast Timber Salvage Administration, the Forest Service, and state agencies to salvage the downed wood, reduce the threat of fire and insect infestation in the blow-down, and begin a massive reforestation program aimed at creating an “entirely new set of woods” that would be friendlier to animals and more productive for the forest industries. These goals were eclipsed by wartime emer- gencies in 1941, but cooperation among federal, state, and private conservation groups became commonplace after World War II.50 Earlier, during the Great Depression, New England’s two national forests presented unique problems. Both included lands in various stages of recuperation—abandoned fields, brushlands, diseased stands, and thick patches of hardwoods—and thus improvement policies had to be determined on nearly an acre-by-acre basis. Moreover, federal officials purchased land for these national forests from numerous small owners, and the resulting patchwork meant that national forest lands were woven into the pattern of villages, towns, and local tourist businesses. Given this complex interlacing of private and public land, national policies often conflicted with local aspirations, generating much suspicion. Select board members in nearby communities began demanding a voice in policy decisions on the national forests. In 1935 Vermont amended the state Enabling Act that sanctioned the creation of the national forest to ensure local input into purchasing decisions; in response, federal foresters increased public access to the Green Mountain National Forest and emphasized recreation in their multiple-use programs. Vermont later passed a science, conservation, and the commons | 203

law requiring written approval from local select boards for new national forest purchases, a provision found in no other National Forest Service unit. Rising timber sales at the end of the decade improved relations between communities and federal foresters, but the changes to the Enabling Act brought an end to expansion of the Green Mountain National Forest.51 These tensions between local and federal officials were acerbated by a New Deal Resettlement Administration project aimed at retiring marginal farmlands through federal purchase and moving families to more promising areas. In Vermont, these proposals touched a raw nerve. In the 1920s, the state had organized the Vermont Commission on Country Life, which investigated social and hygienic conditions in rural areas and published a highly controversial report calling for resettlement of families deemed “deficient” because of hereditary weaknesses. In early 1934 the Resettlement Administration approached the Vermont legislature with a removal program that seemed to echo the eugenics premises of the earlier report. The plan sparked a political firestorm, with opposition led by Lieutenant Governor George Aiken, who made resettlement a campaign issue in his successful bid for the governorship in 1936. Two other conservation controversies affected relations between Vermont and federal foresters. The first was a proposal for flood-control dams, which Aitken interpreted as an attempt to transform Vermont into a smaller version of the federally controlled Tennessee Valley Authority. A second involved a proposed 150-mile Green Mountain Parkway, similar to the Blue Ridge Park- way in the Shenandoah Mountains. The landscaped highway, designed as a recreational link between the metropolitan Northeast and northern New England, would have required federal purchase of 35,000 acres for roads, parks, foot trails, and bridle paths along the spine of the Green Mountains. The debate became so heated that Vermont’s legislature sent the proposal to the towns, and on Town Meeting Day in March 1936 it was voted down by a margin of 58 to 42 percent. In broader terms, the debate provided a forum for addressing deep-seated concerns about the state’s scenic integrity. In effect, the controversy was a referendum on traffic congestion, commercialized landscapes, and “outside” influence, and in rejecting the parkway, Ver- monters voted to preserve a landscape that seemed to reflect their values and “unspoiled” way of life.52 204 | chapter 7

Ocean Fisheries in Crisis New England’s conservation story extended beyond its shores to the banks off Cape Cod and the Gulf of Maine. Late in the nineteenth century, longer multiple-hook trawl lines quadrupled cod landings, and mackerel catches increased tenfold with the introduction of purse seines. At the turn of the twentieth century, steam engines increased the pulling power of fishing vessels and made possible the development of otter trawls, huge conical bags dragged along the bottom to stir sediment and attract fish. The trawls once again increased landings, but they also destroyed sea-floor habitat, scooped up juvenile fish, and crushed the merchantable catch at the end of the bag.53 By the 1930s, the Georges Bank populations of haddock, by then New England’s most important food fish, were depleted. Rather than adopt large-mesh nets or catch limits, the industry pushed outward some 500 miles to the Nova Sco- tian banks. The Georges Bank haddock rebounded, but the incident revealed an unsettling trend. Whales were first taken in the Gulf of Maine in colonial times, but when these pods were exterminated, vessels shifted to the Arctic Sea. Likewise, when halibut became scarce in New England waters, fishermen simply extended their operations to Nova Scotia, the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and finally Greenland and Iceland. After 1880, mackerel schools appeared less often in the Gulf of Maine, once again sending the fleet farther afield. New filleting techniques encouraged flounder fishing on Georges Bank, and when the catch fell by half between 1929 and in 1936, the fleets left for Nova Scotia. In the mid-1930s, redfish landings jumped as demand rose for fresh-frozen “ocean perch,” but this bounty proved evanescent as well.54 In a 1938 article, Edward Ackerman summarized this pattern: when a market appeared for any species, it was “pursued relentlessly” until fish populations dropped below commercially viable levels, and then fishers moved on. In some cases stocks recovered, but in others they never returned in commercially usable numbers. Populations were subject to multiple layers of predator–prey relations, and these balances were easily disturbed; loss of one species might allow less merchantable species to fill its niche. Given the open access to the resource and the complexity of fish population dynamics, neither the federal nor the state governments could regulate fishing effectively. Lessons of the past were forgotten, Ackerman admonished, even though the history of fishing was “filled with stories of over-exploitation.”55 The years after World War II saw an explosion of new industrial-scale fishing science, conservation, and the commons | 205

technology. Vessels working out of Gloucester, Rockland, and Portland were large enough to dress, freeze, and package fish at sea, and they quickly overhar- vested redfish, shifted to whiting, and then returned to haddock. Fish biologists urged conservation measures, but in 1960 even larger factory ships appeared off the New England coast, this time hailing from Europe, Japan, Canada, and the Soviet Union. In 1963 the Soviet Union alone sent 300 vessels—more than the entire New England offshore fleet—to Georges Bank. Moving in packs stretching from horizon to horizon, the Soviet vessels swept the ocean bottom using a technique known as pulse fishing, or working one fishery until it was depleted and then moving on to another while the first presumably recuperated. In 1964 Congress passed the Fishing Fleet Improvement Act, designed to make New England vessels competitive on this scale of operations. Groundfish landings grew spectacularly to 1974, then dropped precipitously. Dogfish and skate replaced groundfish on the banks, and when these too were fished out, herring and mackerel, prey species for cod and dogfish, thrived.56 As early as 1964, Massachusetts fishermen were pushing for prohibitions on foreign fishing in U.S. territorial waters. In 1974, with over a thousand foreign vessels amassed off the North American coast, Congress finally took up the issue. The 1976 Fishery Conservation and Management Act, sponsored by Senator Warren Magnuson of Washington, set out to restore stocks by phas- ing out foreign fishing in an Exclusive Economic Zone running 200 miles off the coast. The law established regional councils to manage the fisheries based on a combination of quotas, no-fishing zones, catch limits, day limits, equipment bans, and other measures. Vessel owners seemed confident that such actions could ward off disaster, and encouraged by federal tax incentives and subsidies, they plunged into debt, bought bigger boats, and fished on a scale reminiscent of the foreign factory ship days.57 The bonanza was short-lived. The Magnuson Act specified local representation on the councils, but because enforcement was difficult at sea, even local control fell short of compliance. Moreover, fishermen were deeply divided according to the type of gear they used, their ports of origin, and even their ethnicity. Adding to restoration problems was a deterioration in breeding environments; otter trawls eradicated habitat, and urban and suburban development destroyed the salt marshes and estuaries that bred food stock for the commercial species. In 1991, with cod, flounder, and haddock on the verge of collapse, the Conser- vation Law Foundation brought suit to compel the New England Council to develop a viable recovery plan. Three years later, the council closed thousands 206 | chapter 7 of miles of New England fishing grounds and imposed a series of catch limits, gear restrictions, and moratoria in other areas. Fishermen were offered federal reinvestment subsidies and boat buyouts. In the mid-1990s, amid predictions of further decline, the council established rolling closures, reduced days at sea, and carved the fishery into smaller regions, each with its own quotas. Environmental organizations were skeptical, but by the end of the decade groundfish seemed to be recovering on Georges Bank, although mixed fish stocks in the Gulf of Maine continued to plummet.58

Conservation in the Industrial Forest In the postwar years, the forest industries experienced a similar cycle of resource exhaustion, conservation, and limited recovery. Prosperity at the end of World War II had unleashed a huge demand for wood and paper products, but labor shortages plagued logging camps, the result of the difficulty of woods work, poor compensation, and an overall decline in the rural workforce. To compensate, companies experimented with portable debark- ing, peeling, and hoisting devices, and in 1949 the Homelite Company began marketing a one-person saw with a light two-cycle engine. Mechanization was still in its infancy, but during these stressful years there was, as David C. Smith noted, a “general air of experimentation in woods work.” In the 1960s, articulating grapple skidders equipped with winches and cables opened up rocky, steep, and boggy areas, extending the cutting season. Together, these machines brought an end to the eotechnic age—the era of labor-intensive, self-limiting, low-impact logging.59 Also in this decade, paper companies came under intense competitive pressure as the industry globalized. Most mills survived by downsizing, selling off timberlands, laying off workers, and either automating or using antiquated but fully depreciated equipment. Such uncertainties affected the mood in the mill towns, however, with cutbacks and layoffs creating a sense of helplessness. In the woods, corporations increased their control over nature, using capital resources to bring in even bigger machines, build more roads, and increase the clear-cuts. Between 1972 and 1986, a severe spruce budworm epidemic spread through Quebec, New Brunswick, and northwestern Maine; in addition to an aggressive program of areal spraying, companies increased the size of the clear-cuts to reduce the infestation and start a new regeneration cycle.60 Clear-cutting began as a short-term response to labor shortages and the science, conservation, and the commons | 207

budworm epidemic, but it was allowed to continue when companies realized that it was cost effective. In the 1970s, they brought in gigantic feller bunchers, delimbers, and whole-tree harvesters that cut, limbed, and loaded in a single operation. Like the factory ships at sea, these massive machines worked best where they could harvest an entire biomass, and by the late 1970s, clear-cuts up to a mile square were appearing in the northern woods. During the OPEC oil crisis, use of wood for heating skyrocketed, and late in the twentieth century a new market developed for wood chips used to generate electricity, which encouraged the practice of whole-tree harvesting. With western U.S. logging operations curtailed by insect infestations and new forest-practices laws, Asian and European producers began purchasing New England forest lands.61 Harvesting on such a scale affected the environment in myriad ways. New England’s damp, littered, moss-covered forest floor was an efficient agent for blending minerals, detritus, sunlight, and water into a biologically rich topsoil—an ecosystem in itself containing thousands of species of worms, millipedes, slugs, arthropods, fungi, and microorganisms. Clear-cutting and whole-tree harvesting left the ground dry and exposed, and wheels, treads, and fat tires compacted the soils and scoured down to mineral base, eliminating the ecological dynamic that prepared the land for regeneration. Gradually the clear-cuts filled in with raspberry, pin cherry, birch, and poplar. But even after these pioneer species were replaced by softwoods, the effects of clear-cutting lingered in the dense stands of suppressed fir and spruce and even-aged, single-species regeneration, aesthetically monotonous, biologically sterile, and vulnerable to forest pathogens. These practices ignited widespread public concern, and with the rise of the environmental movement in the 1970s, protests took on a sharper edge.62 The forest-practices codes that resulted from these protests were once again initiated at the community level. New England states had been experimenting with forestry regulations since the 1930s, beginning with laws mandating that seed trees be left onsite after logging operations. In the 1970s, Massachusetts towns began imposing forestry ordinances in their own jurisdictions, and in 1982 loggers and foresters supported the state Forest Cutting Practices Law to preempt ordinances passed on a town-by-town basis. The law mandated a cutting plan, required notification of abutting owners, specified buffers around property lines, water bodies, and wetlands, and allowed state inspection during and after the harvest. Maine followed in 1989 with a Forest Practices Act that, among other things, limited clear-cutting. Weaknesses in the law led to 208 | chapter 7 anti-clear-cutting referenda in 1996 and 1997, and although both failed passage, the close votes forced state legislators to provide more precise cutting restrictions. Vermont, with its many small logging operations and wood-processing plants, maintained a less adversarial climate for forestry regulation. As town ordinances proliferated in the 1980s, however, the state enacted laws requiring certified cutting plans for operations over 40 acres and tighter regulations in the mountain areas. Connecticut’s 1.5 million acres of privately owned forest were held mostly in small parcels and managed indifferently, but when the second-growth forests matured, logging accelerated, and several towns enacted forestry ordinances. As in Massachusetts, the state preempted the town-based conservation codes by enacting the Forest Practices Act in 1991.63

New England Conservation in Retrospect Conservation challenges continued into the twenty-first century. Wood-based rural economies rebounded as the forest in central New England matured and manufacturers developed techniques for producing pressed- board panels and wood composites for decking, trusses, roofing, and siding. Gypsy moth outbreaks were less destructive in the older growth, and scientists achieved some success in breeding disease-resistant strains of chestnut and elm species. New pathogens replaced these old forest threats, however— some encouraged by acid deposition, which weakened tree resistance, and others by global climate change, which increased insect survival in places formerly too cold to accommodate them. In addition, commercial forests were circumscribed by suburban expansion, mall and highway construction, large- lot “exurban” developments, and “shadow conversions”—zones in which logging became impractical because of the proximity of suburban development. No-trespassing signs proliferated along the exurban fringe, imperiling the tradition of public access to private lands for hiking, cross-country skiing, snow- mobile travel, hunting, and birding.64 Ocean fisheries remained under threat as well. Despite the fragile compro- mises between exploitation and preservation, fish stocks were still precarious, and like the working woods, the working waterfronts of New England have been crowded out by condominiums, vacation homes, and marinas. Regu- latory agencies wrestled with the fisheries problem, with some arguing that conservation goals would be best accomplished by supporting “intentionally less efficient, small-scale, locally based operations,” a rethinking of the local science, conservation, and the commons | 209

folk science that had provided the original impulse for conservation in New England.65 The changing interaction between fish, forests, and people presented a complex and fluid management problem, but the long history of attempts to protect these valuable resources offers three important lessons. First, despite the specter of rising resource depletion and international competition, human ingenuity will not see the region’s forests and seas sitting idle. New Englanders will continue to find new uses for forest and marine resources in an ever-changing national and global market. Second, history shows that each new round of exploitation will be more intensive, and indeed more damaging to the entire ecosystem. In the past, logging and fishing faced several depletion crises, and both industries reacted by adopting new technologies aimed at more intense exploitation of less valuable species. Conservation laws will have to be rewritten as these environmental impacts became more severe. Third, it is clear that in navigating between exploitation and stewardship over this long history, New Englanders have gradually tipped the scales toward the latter, partly because they could import fish and wood from elsewhere, but also because they learned the lessons of ecological disruption. In the twenty-first century, New England has set in place the basic legal apparatus to meet the challenge of increasingly intensive resource use. Although neither forest nor sea is a healthy ecosystem today, the region has the means to restore them, when it musters the political will to do so. Chapter 8 Conserving Urban Ecologies 

long history of resource use complicated the meaning of A nature conservation in New England, and these complica- tions were compounded in the region’s cities. In fact, the term conservation is not generally applied to the heavily humanized urban environment, where builders cleared away nearly all vegetation, paved over soils, channeled rivers, and changed the very topography of the landscape.1 Aware of the effacement of nature in the city, historians of conservation initially limited their studies to rural developments, including frontier resource extraction and the Romantic reinterpretation of nature. In the 1950s, however, urban geographers began likening cities metaphorically to natural ecosystems that grew and evolved in response to external stimuli, and in the 1980s, environmental historians also began describing the built environment in ecological terms. Civic ecologies were like natural ecologies in that they absorbed air, water, food, fuel, and building material and gave off solid and liquid waste, gasses, and heat.2 As environmental historians began exploring the naturalness of the city, they became aware of certain parallels between nature conservation and urban reform. Civic ecologies were indeed artificial, but they embraced a variety of natural elements. Water supplies, organic waste, parks, streams, ponds, over- grown vacant lots, and relic farmlands and forests influenced human health and well-being, even in a world dominated by concrete and brick. In fact, nineteenth-century cities were surprisingly organic places: domestic animals

210 | conserving urban ecologies | 211 roamed the streets as they did the barnyard, pasture, or forest. Not until 1850 did Boston ban cattle, goats, and swine, and then only because these animals interfered with the city’s draft animals. As the primary motive power in the nineteenth-century city, horses required thousands of tons of hay and oats, and they produced equal amounts of manure. The latter was sold to farmers, who used it to produce the hay and oats that in turn fed the city’s horses. This particular ecological exchange was cut short by electric trolleys and automobiles, but in other ways the natural world remained a part of city life. Trees and plants found their way up through the pavement, microbes proliferated in wastewater and stagnant rainwater, meadows sprouted in vacant lots, and low spots became wetland ecosystems—all testament to the irrepressible force of nature.3 Over time, urban reformers began to assess the benefits and drawbacks of these features and set out to reshape nature in the urban environment. In this way, they brought the city into the broader dialogue in the search for organic connection in the humanized landscape.

Coastal and River Cities Cities were founded in nature. Boston’s deep-water harbor, for instance, set the stage for its commanding role in the transatlantic merchant trade. Cape Ann offered little of significance to the farmer, but its convoluted shores, oak forests, and proximity to Georges Bank inspired ship designers to build the sturdy Gloucester schooners that could reach the banks quickly yet withstand the fierce gales of the North Atlantic. Salem, also on a peninsula, looked to shipping lanes for its economic well-being.4 Newport used its location on the rim of Narragansett Bay to take advantage of the coasting and transatlantic trade. Over time, cities like these acquired new technologies that supplemented or transcended their initial environmental advantages, changing their relation to nature. Providence, some thirty miles deep in Narragansett Bay, languished in the shadow of Newport’s bustling seaport. But in the 1760s, the city’s merchants overcame their locational disadvantages by investing in new transportation technologies—turnpikes and canals—that linked to a hinterland impossible to reach from its rival. By 1837, the town of Mendon, high in the Blackstone watershed and with only 3,657 residents, boasted eight cotton mills, four woolen mills, a casting forge, two scythe manufactures, a plow man- ufactory, a hat factory, and dozens of independent boot, shoe, and harness makers; it sent this burgeoning product to Providence down the Blackstone Canal. 212 | chapter 8

Providence’s ascendancy demonstrated the potential for using technology to augment or circumvent natural limitations to urban growth.5 Farther from the coast, a different set of topographical features determined the site and development of cities. Early town founders had settled in the broad river bottoms, where they farmed the rich alluvial soils and cut meadow grasses. By contrast, nineteenth-century industrialists looked to the narrow steep-sided valleys upriver where granitic or gneiss bedrock constricted the water’s flow and concentrated its energy. The emerging textile cities were carefully adapted to environmental and technological considerations. Each was built at a powerful fall of water, typically where canals could be cut across a bend in the river. The land between the canals and the river was soon filled with multistory brick mills; to withstand flood waters and machine vibration, the buildings were set on massive foundations, with first-floor walls measuring more than three feet thick and those above progressively thinner and lighter. Potential energy loss along wooden shafts and leather belts dictated the construction of long, rectangular buildings placed close to the sources of power. Narrow multistoried designs also favored the placement of machinery close to windows, the main source of light.6 Mills and boarding houses occupied the flats near the canals, and a business district extended along the main road paralleling the river. Up the sides of the valley spread a socially stratified residential order, with recent immigrant families in old houses or shanties near the river and machine operatives occupying tenements or small multiple-family dwellings farther back. Skilled workers, merchants, and managers lived on progressively higher ground, where they enjoyed pure air, safety from floods and disease, and the symbolic satisfactions of such elevated sites.7 Location and layout in the textile cities followed the logic of topography. Textile cities adapted to the environment, but they also influenced their surroundings. The industry’s primary environmental requirement was a dependable all-season water flow. To prevent power-related work stoppages, manufacturers extended the industrialization process far into the countryside, taking charge of the watersheds from rivulet to millrace. To match the river’s flowage to the needs of the mills was a difficult undertaking given the complex interaction between weather, hydrology, and forests on the same slopes that also served as logging and farming districts. Industrialization came at a huge cost to upriver inhabitants in the form of flooded pastures, hazards to steamboat operations, and diminished fish runs, and citizens besieged the corporations with lawsuits and acts of sabotage. Industrialization cost the environment greatly as well. conserving urban ecologies | 213

Rapid alterations in temperature and nutrient sources were inimical to preex- isting lake and river ecosystems, and fluctuating water levels left the most productive part of lakes—the edges and shallows—lifeless and barren. Engineers understood the importance of water to life in the mill towns, but they seldom considered its significance to the broader systems beyond municipal borders.8

New Technologies Like the canals that linked Providence to the coasting trade, the technology of stationary steam engines freed cities from a dependence on location. Rather than drive turbines, water could be boiled into a gas, and the energy from that expanding gas freed industrialists from topography and other environmental considerations. Although British manufacturers began using steam in the mid-eighteenth century, New England’s ample waterpower reserves delayed the conversion in America for half a century. Then in 1804, Philadelphia’s Oliver Evans invented a workable and commercially practical high-pressure engine that offered advantages over traditional sources of industrial energy. The engine was improved in the mid-1840s by George H. Corliss of Providence, who designed an automatic variable cut-off that controlled its speed and increased efficiency. Steam engines did not entirely separate cities from nature; in fact, water-powered production continued to grow in the decades after 1850. Shipping coal was expensive, and new turbine designs made waterpower more efficient. Elaborate watershed-scale dam and reservoir systems eliminated much of the uncertainty in waterpower generation, and even in the age of steam, industrialists still depended on rivers to fill boilers, transport coal, and carry away spent chemicals. As late as 1870, only 40 percent of all power supplied to New England mills came from steam. But as dams aged and maintenance costs rose, some owners shifted to steam power and others refit existing dams to produce hydroelectricity.9 Steam technology did allow cities to industrialize based on a different set of environmental advantages. Seaports, often lacking waterpower resources, enjoyed access to ships laden with cotton, coal, or European immigrants, and the maritime climate provided the high humidity necessary to keep cotton fibers supple and reduce static electricity. In just two years between 1871 and 1872, Fall River gained twenty-two mills, increasing the city’s population by 20,000. New Bedford made a similar transition from whaling to textiles, with a 300 percent increase in population between 1880 and 1910.10 214 | chapter 8

As the natural features that shaped early industrialization became less important, another kind of factory town developed in the mixed industrial and residential suburbs of such cities as Boston and Providence, one that was based partly on old environmental advantages and partly on the benefits of new transportation and energy technologies. Shoe factories, foundries, sugar, coal, and oil refineries, and glass, soap, candy, and piano factories, all driven by steam power and supplied by railroads, became part of the industrial landscape. Fed by these new suburbs, cities distanced themselves from the natural features that had spawned the Industrial Revolution. But even in the great age of mechanized technology, urban environments hosted a surprising range of natural features.

Conserving the Ecologies of Urban Life Built on the prospect of appropriating the natural flow of a river, the industrial city emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century as a sprawling cosmopolitan environment separated from the rural world around it. Yet despite its artificiality, urban life remained centered on water resources. New England cities lay on a gentle, relatively regular slope tilting down off the Appalachian Plateau. This slope conducted a massive flow of water to the sea along a thick weave of rivers and streams, and as this water moved seaward, it sank into an overburden of fluvio-glacial gravels, where it was filtered, purified, and softened. In coarser lenses, it traveled rapidly and produced hillside springs; in clay soils, it slowed and dropped into pockets of gravel lying in bedrock basins, where it was accessible by wells. This wealth of water was essential to urban life for drinking, washing, cooking, industrial processing, and waste removal.11 Water was a blessing to the New England city, but as the medium for a variety of biological processes, it was also the city’s deadliest form of interaction with nature. In colonial times, urban dwellers collected rainwater in cisterns for bathing and laundry and drew water out of wells for drinking. The wastewater from homes and factories found its way into yards, streets, or nearby water bodies. In the nineteenth century the amount of waste water grew exponentially. The iron, brass, wool, and cotton firms in New Britain, Connecticut, used Piper Brook as a sink for spent sulfuric acid, caustic soda, varnish, oils, and grease; residents of Northampton, Massachusetts, used Mill River as a common sewer; and the town of Lawrence, Massachusetts, drained its sewage into conserving urban ecologies | 215

the Spicket River, which by midcentury contained a “disgusting array of slime and carcases.” Sink spouts from poorly maintained privies led directly into a nearby canal or brook. Microbes proliferated in a heady mix of waste- or rainwater, horse dung, and garbage, and epidemics of typhoid, dysentery, and cholera swept down the river valleys in waves, striking one city after another as residents drank water contaminated by residents upstream. City reformers attributed these diseases to “loose and dirty habits,” particularly among immigrant groups. Although they failed to understand water as a disease vector, they believed that a more abundant supply would quench the need for strong drink, and clean clothes and bodies would ward off immorality. They looked to the pristine natural lakes on the city outskirts as a remedy for both contaminated water and corrupted lives.12 Water conservation had practical import as well. Fires were an ever-present danger in the wooden buildings and narrow streets of early-nineteenth-century cities. Homeowners used open flames for heat, light, and cooking, and businesses needed fire for industrial processes such as baking, tanning, and brewing. Hay sheds, with their highly combustible contents, were everywhere. In 1824–25, Boston suffered several destructive fires that drew attention to inadequate water supplies, and for more than two decades afterward the city debated the relative virtues of low taxes versus public safety. Gathering their resolve, in 1848 officials purchased Long Pond, rechristening it Lake Cochit- uate to give its waters a romantic bearing, and completed a fifteen-mile-long aqueduct into the city. At the opening celebration, James Russell Lowell read his “Ode on the Introduction of Cochituate Water,” proclaiming that the outlying lake “sends four royal gifts by me: / Long life, health, peace, and purity.”13 Between 1810 and 1890, the percentage of urban New Englanders supplied with public water grew from 41.6 to 81.6 percent, and by 1891 all but seven towns in Massachusetts with populations over 4,000 had public water supplies. A few cities had large, uncontaminated bodies of water nearby: Burl- ington, Vermont, used Lake Champlain, for instance, and Portland, Maine, drew on Sebago Lake. For others, public wells provided pure drinking water, although the supply was likely to be limited. Reservoirs provided a more abundant supply, but they had to be sited far enough away from the city to avoid pollution yet close enough that the water could be transported inexpensively. Water drawn directly from rivers was the least costly solution, but it presented the highest risk of contamination. In 1902–3, a severe epidemic of typhoid fever swept down Maine’s Kennebec Valley, reaching Waterville in December, 216 | chapter 8

Augusta two weeks later, and Richmond downstream in January; Gardner, which drew its water from a tributary, avoided contagion. In the ensuing years, Waterville extended aqueducts southeastward to China Lake, and Augusta reached northwest to Carleton Pond. In 1875 Springfield abandoned the Con- necticut River for a reservoir system, Providence flooded several villages to dam the Scituate River, and Hartford built reservoirs on nearby Talcott Moun- tain. Boston engineers completed the 4,135-acre Wachusett Reservoir in 1908, inundating land in three towns to create it. A prolonged drought beginning in 1928 forced the city to connect the Ware River to the reservoir with tunnels and aqueducts extending more than halfway across Massachusetts. The most dramatic turn in Boston’s water narrative was the damming of the Swift River, in the western part of the state, to build Quabbin Reservoir in 1939. The largest drinking-water reservoir in the world, it drowned four towns, dislocated 2,500 people, and forced several cities to seize rural property in their own vicinities to prevent the capital from absorbing additional water resources. By the end of the century, Quabbin was supplying about 40 percent of the Massachusetts population.14 This water imperialism, the historian Sarah Elkind notes, “sacrificed rural prosperity and independence for urban, industrial growth.” In addition to flooding towns, mills, and farms, municipal authorities banned beach-going on many beautiful lakes. Still, engineers were careful stewards of the watersheds they wrested from their rural neighbors. They established tree nurseries, reforested thousands of acres, and provided a model of scientific forestry for the rest of the region. When Quabbin Reservoir was completed, the 96,000- acre watershed set-aside, located in one of the most densely populated sections of the country, became a haven for wildlife. Edward Higbee, writing in 1952, raised the possibility that reservoirs like Quabbin could become the nexus of a new conservation ethos: “perhaps, as the states of southern New England begin to realize that their good water supply is somewhat unusual, more thoughtful consideration will be given to the wisest means of preserving that advantage through better woodland management.” Urbanization, so often accomplished at the expense of the countryside, in this respect encouraged better rural resource use.15 The problem of pure water became more critical toward century’s end. As Yankee women who had staffed the first mills were replaced by French Canadian, Polish, Italian, Greek, Portuguese, Syrian, Armenian, and Jewish immigrants, corporations lost interest in providing the natural amenities and conserving urban ecologies | 217

rural-like atmosphere that had characterized early experiments with industrialization. Working-class families were crowded into multistory wooden tenements that lacked direct sunlight, offered little fresh air, and had no means of escape from fire. “Portions of yards are covered with filth and green slime,” a state housing survey found in 1874, “and within twenty feet, people are living in basements of houses three feet below the level of the yard.” Inspectors marveled at the “hell-hole that industrial development had created . . . where twenty-five years before cattle had browsed.”16 As the inspectors observed, New England’s cities were expanding rapidly, and as these places outgrew the old individualistic approach to urban water supplies, officials abandoned the pay-as-you-go philosophy of public works and began issuing municipal bonds—a prerequisite for the expensive water projects they were taking on. Moreover, public health officials were beginning to understand the true sources of crowd diseases. The English reformer Edwin Chadwick’s Report of the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain, published in 1842, was influential throughout the industrial world, and in 1850 in New England a bookseller and statistician named Lemuel Shattuck compiled the equally impressiveReport of the Sanitary Commission of Massachusetts, offering wide-ranging recommendations that included public bathhouses, nurse training schools, maritime quarantines, smallpox vaccina- tions, regulation of food additives, and a state board of health.17 As Barbara Rosenkrantz points out in her groundbreaking 1972 book Public Health and the State, Shattuck “concluded that it was immigrants who were primarily responsible for bringing disease and impoverishment to an otherwise pre- dominantly healthy and productive native stock,” but he and other reformers were beginning to note a connection between the ignorance, intemperance, and sensuality that seemed to cause disease and the urban environment that bred these moral weaknesses. “Where even the sustenance of man is bad, . . . is it strange that both moral and physical strength give way, and theft, violence and crime are rife?” Sanitary reformers attributed epidemics to “miasmas” given off by decaying organic material, and although the theory was wrong, it established a link between garbage, sewage, and disease, transforming health from a personal failing into a social problem. In 1854 the London anesthetist John Snow traced a cholera outbreak to a single public well in Soho, proving his theory that diseases were spread not by “sewer gases” but by contaminated water. The American Public Health Association took up the campaign for safe drinking water in the 1870s, and in the next decade the German pathologists 218 | chapter 8

Friedrich Henle and Robert Koch, England’s Joseph Lister, and France’s Louis Pasteur isolated the bacteria responsible for several contagious diseases.18 The U.S. Sanitary Commission, established in 1861 during the Civil War and staffed largely by women volunteers, provided a template for health organizations nationwide. New England followed its lead by creating state boards of health: Massachusetts in 1869, Connecticut in 1877, New Hampshire in 1881, and Vermont in 1886. Advancing the idea that public health was a birthright, Connecticut’s commissioners pondered the government’s duty to “protect that class called the poor [that] . . . suffers most from . . . unwholesome surroundings and other unsanitary conditions.” As in the case of the Sanitary Commission, women volunteers and women’s clubs provided moral weight that kept the issue before the public.19 Cities took steps to curb the dangerous interaction between microbes and water by importing this precious resource from more rural settings beyond their limits.

Dirty Water Ensuring pure water was an important conservation step for New England, but with ample supplies flowing into the cities, demand soon skyrocketed. Homeowners installed baths, water closets, and sinks, and factories turned to the city to deliver the water needed in their operations. Per capita use in Boston rose from five gallons a day in the 1840s to seventy-three in the 1870s, and the resulting flood of contaminated water became a problem of epic proportions. The problem of dirty water had long plagued the city. In colonial times, Boston residents built private sewers to drain storm water from their cellars and sumps. Later, in the 1820s, the city assumed responsibility for laying and repairing common sewers and permitted householders to drain their privy vaults into the system, assuming that storm water would flush the waste to sea. The system was inadequate: sewers clogged and back-flowed into streets and buildings, and in-filling in the harbor changed the outfall gradients, allowing sewage to settle and harden in the pipes. The mud flats that ringed the city reeked at low tide, and by midcentury Boston’s maze of poorly laid and decaying sewage and storm-water pipes was clearly overloaded. To resolve these problems, city officials designed a system of intercepting sewers along the waterfront and holding tanks on Moon Island, which discharged into the harbor during the first two hours of each outgoing tide. Between 1877 and conserving urban ecologies | 219

1884, Boston completed the Main Drainage System, laying sewers more than twenty feet below the harbor surface to drain even the lowest pipes crossing the peninsula. By this time, however, industrial and residential expansion was threatening Lake Cochituate, and along the Mystic River fish and eels were dying en masse. To protect its own water supplies, the city extended the Main Drain System back ten miles into the suburbs, and in 1889 the state legislature created the Metropolitan Sewerage Board and the Metropolitan Water Board. The two agencies were merged in 1901, creating one of the first regional public works administrations in the United States. In 1874 Providence completed a sewer system much like Boston’s, and at the turn of the twentieth century, after a series of typhoid outbreaks in towns along the Merrimack, Connecti- cut, Kennebec, and Penobscot Rivers, interest in citywide systems along these rivers moved to the forefront of civic agendas.20 Success with integrated sewage systems simply shifted the pollution problem to the nearest large body of water. In 1878 the Massachusetts courts ruled that industries, however much they served the public good, could be restrained from dumping wastes into the state’s rivers and harbors; in response, the commonwealth gave its Board of Health sweeping authority over pollution in local rivers, although it exempted the Merrimack, Concord, and Connecti- cut from regulations. Despite growing public concern about water supplies, health boards in Massachusetts and elsewhere met stiff political resistance to pollution control. One barrier was the common assumption of the time that contamination was rendered harmless as it flowed downstream. For instance, Lawrence took its drinking water from the Merrimack nine miles below Low- ell’s sewer discharge, trusting in the benefits of oxidation and diffusion. Health officials considered water polluted only if it looked, smelled, or tasted that way, and many people believed that caustic industrial wastes eliminated harmful bacteria. The water’s “naturalness” became cause for concern, for rivers that supported fish and plant life could also sustain dangerous bacteria. Such was the logic that exempted the heavily contaminated Merrimack, Concord, and Connecticut Rivers from antipollution codes. By the late nineteenth century, sanitary reformers were casting doubt on the dilution theory. Sewage and industrial fibers depleted oxygen in the water, thus reducing its capacity to purify, and caustic chemicals destroyed the bacteria that oxidized organic waste. With the incidence of epidemic disease still rising, in 1886–87 the Massachusetts Board of Health established a laboratory in Lawrence. The facility was directed by Hiram Mills, chief engineer at the Essex 220 | chapter 8

Company in the town, in conjunction with the pioneering epidemiologist Wil- liam T. Sedgwick and Ellen Swallow Richards, a chemist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who developed the world’s first water purity tables, and Thomas Drown, who helped establish the nation’s first chemical engineering program at the institute. The station experimented with sand and gravel filters that allowed air to enter the filtering bed and interact with the sewage, and in 1893 Lawrence became first in the country to filter its drinking water. By 1934 more than 600 such filtering plants were in operation along the Atlantic coast.21 Technological solutions such as reservoirs, aqueducts, filters, and chlori- nation helped insulate urban residents from the ecologies of contaminated water and suggested that cities could use this technology to continue pollut- ing rivers without harm to themselves. By the end of the century, however, other environmental problems had surfaced. Fish conservationists noted rafts of dead fish below the sewer outfalls; farmers found their cattle sickened by contaminated river water; oyster growers and clam diggers protested the closing of beds and flats at the river mouths; and city inhabitants declared pollution offensive to civic pride and public decency. This was a time of widespread reform in resource conservation, and rivers, like forests and soils, were subject to the calculation of efficient use and greater public good. By 1905 eight states across the nation had workable water-pollution enforcement codes, including Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Vermont, and courts were taking up pollution cases based on the argument that “reasonable use”—the principle of common water rights in New England—did not include gross contamination. “To a greater extent than most people realize,” Martin Melosi writes in Sanitary City, “active or prospective litigation prompted communities to adopt sewage treatment works.”22 As John Cumbler points out in Reasonable Use, his study of the impact of industrialization and urbanization on New England’s environment, the region’s waters were no cleaner in 1950 than they were in 1870, but they were far less dangerous. Even more important, as a result of these timid beginnings, they would be much less polluted by the end of the twentieth century. Urban conservation campaigns, Cumbler notes, created a new set of citizen rights: freedom from water-borne diseases and liberty to enjoy a wholesome environment. Just as New England pioneered the industrial landscape, so too did it initiate the attempt to make that landscape livable.23 conserving urban ecologies | 221

Civic Ecologies Water supplies were but one part of a complex system of exchanges—transfers of energy, resources, products, information, and finances—that sustained the city of Boston. The framework for this civic ecology, a dense network of buildings, streets, sidewalks, water mains, sewers, trolleys, railways, subways, and gas lines, was built mainly around the flow of commerce. Less than one mile across, the Shawmut Peninsula, Boston’s inner core, contained 93,000 inhabitants by 1840, and nearly every square foot of this landmass had been arranged to maximize the city’s role as a place of business. Functions were arranged geographically into a triangle, as was common in port cities. At its base was a concentration of mercantile and wholesaling activities near the docks and wharves, with warehouses spreading southward to the railroad terminals in South Boston. Behind this wholesale district was a row of counting houses centered on State Street, close enough to glean information from the waterfront yet beyond the noise and bustle. The apex of the triangle was the Common and the State House, set amid a cluster of professional offices. Commercial expansion kept this pattern in flux. In colonial times, retail vendors edged into the narrow streets between the wholesale warehouses and the financial district, and in 1740 Peter Faneuil anchored this new commercial district by constructing a central market near the waterfront. Between 1823 and 1826, Mayor Josiah Quincy demolished the old counting houses, banks, and insurance offices along State Street, widened the street, and built Quincy Market around Faneuil Hall on land reclaimed by in-filling. In the 1830s, merchants built more warehouses, docks, and wharves along the waterfront, and the East Boston shipyards expanded to accommodate the transpacific trade. Boston’s narrow one-way streets grew increasingly congested, and trucking expenses forced the commercial district away from this compacted waterfront and toward the Common.24 Between 1835 and 1855, Boston completed eight railroad lines linking the city to a hinterland stretching from Providence to Portland and west to Albany and the Erie Canal, connections that encouraged a new overlay to the civic ecology. In the West End’s crowded tenements and old buildings, manufacturers set up sweatshops and small machine shops to produce garments, footwear, furniture, books, and other consumer items. New avenues sliced through the tangled cluster of narrow streets to feed this expanding manufacturing district. On Fort Hill, 222 | chapter 8 seemingly stable postrevolutionary middle- and upper-class neighborhoods fell from fashion, and families migrated across the peninsula, dragging their churches and schools behind them. Irish immigrants filled the old residential neighborhoods in the North End, and African Americans occupied the crowded tenements and subdivided homes in South Boston and Beacon Hill.25 Discomfited by this shifting commercial and residential pattern, upper- class Bostonians built the nation’s first commuter suburbs in the farmlands of Roxbury, Charlestown, Cambridgeport, and South Boston, while those who remained in the city took measures to ensure the permanence of their neighborhoods. Since the seventeenth century, merchants had enlarged their land- holdings by building wharves and filling the harbor between them. In 1795–99 the Mount Vernon Proprietors, headed by the politically powerful Harrison Gray Otis, used the concept of in-filling to move the tops of Mount Vernon and Beacon Hill to the tidal flats at their base, making way for new upper-class homes isolated from the West End neighborhoods by the now-foreshortened hills. A rival group created a similar upper-class enclave on the flats of South Boston in 1804–5. In the 1850s, developers used two relatively new technologies, railroads and steam shovels, to transform some 580 acres of Back Bay mudflats into a residential haven buffered from commercial expansion by the Common. Begun in 1857, the project continued for twenty-five years as one of the most ambitious land reclamation undertakings in nineteenth-century America. Boston’s involvement in building such textile centers as Lowell, Lawrence, and Man- chester gave its ruling class vast experience in designing and redesigning urban space, and they used this knowledge to great advantage in arranging their own residential neighborhoods. Inspired by Baron Haussmann’s design for rebuilding Paris under Napoleon III, the commissioners in charge of the Back Bay property planned out five broad avenues and a series of open public squares, wrote restrictions into deeds to ensure the architectural stability of the neighborhood, and set aside large tracts of land for the Boston Society of Natural History, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Public Library, and Harvard Medical School. In Boston and elsewhere, steam shovels and rail cars provided urban elites with earth-altering capabilities that transcended the contours of the land and the strict logic of commercial exchange, lending credence to the impression that city form was immune to nature’s laws.26 conserving urban ecologies | 223

Preservation and Parks Boston’s increasing artificiality made the civic ecology more efficient, but it also inspired reform efforts to naturalize and humanize this increasingly synthetic environment. Rapid changes in the civic ecology were disorienting to inhabitants, and as familiar neighborhoods fell before the engine of progress, certain structures took on symbolic importance as anchors in the past. Boston pioneered the art of architectural preservation, partly because its ambitious landfill projects eased the pressure to replace outmoded buildings and partly because the epic achievements of Boston’s neoclassical architect Charles Bulfinch gave the city a reason to assume that some buildings should be considered immortal. Preservation was a means of coping with a changing civic environment, and in this sense it was an outgrowth of the city’s conservative commercial culture. Boston elites made their fortunes in shipping, textiles, banking, transportation, and marine insurance, following a colonial-era family-based corporate model. These families led the way in financing New England industrialization, although the textile firms themselves shifted their headquarters to New York to be near clothing retail outlets. This New York textile–clothing nexus spawned a huge stratum of midlevel corporate leaders willing to take great risks and welcome innovations, whereas Boston’s financial clans adhered to a set of common values that, by comparison, amounted to ancestor worship. The city’s upper-class families—dubbed the Brahmins by Oliver Wendell Holmes—all belonged to the same clubs and social groups; they intermarried, and they did not welcome newcomers or fresh ideas. Conservative in finance, they were also traditionalist in civic design: Back Bay’s federalist architecture, harking back to the golden age of New England shipping, stood in sharp contrast to the explosion of lavish, eclectic styles along New York City’s Fifth and Park Avenues.27 Conscious of their ancestors’ importance to American history, Boston elites were in the forefront of the heritage preservation movement. Boston’s elite-led preservation movement emerged only in the 1870s. Earlier, in 1826, the city demolished the Old State House but erected a statue commemorating the historic events that occurred within its walls. About the same time, officials began building the Bunker Hill Monument in Charlestown, although they destroyed the battle’s last remaining traces to put the obelisk in place. Clearly, it was not yet established whether posterity required the presence of 224 | chapter 8 the historic structures or simply the memory of what had happened in them. Destruction of the Brattle Square Church in 1872 brought public outcry, but the furor quickly died after the structure was demolished. Several other historic churches quietly disappeared when their congregations moved to new locations.28 Boston’s first significant preservation success was Old South Meeting House. Built in 1729, Old South was put up for sale in 1872, the year of the Great Boston Fire. The church was spared the flames, but some saw the confla- gration as an opportunity to rebuild the city center, and the church stood as an obstacle to this project. At the last moment, Boston’s leading women launched a fund-raising appeal and purchased the structure from a salvage contractor. Standing on some of the most valuable real estate in America, Old South became a monument not only to Boston’s Puritan beginnings but also to the birth of the urban preservationist movement—to the process, as Walter Firey described it in a 1945 article, of transforming urban space into cultural symbol. Successes with Old South, the Charles Bulfinch–designed State House, Park Street Church, King’s Chapel, the Athenaeum, and the Paul Revere House tes- tified to the strength of traditionalism in coping with a modern city’s changing civic ecology.29 Parks were founded on the same conservative principles, and here again Boston led the way. Industrial technologies rendered topography, water, sewage, animals, and other natural elements less intrusive in people’s lives, but paradoxically this increasingly engineered environment left reformers uneasy about the absence of vegetation and open space in the urban landscape. By the nineteenth century, several New England cities, Boston included, had grown so large that walking into the countryside to escape the bustle and din had become impractical. According to prevailing thought, this loss of contact dehumanized civic space and enervated city people. Reformers pondered the virtues of bringing nature back into the city. Boston’s park movement had begun somewhat inadvertently in 1634, when the city purchased the Boston Common at least in part to preserve its greenery. For more than a century, the Common served as a pasture for cows and sheep and occasionally for executions, militia drills, and revivals, but in the 1790s it took on new meaning as a verdant buffer for upper-class homeowners living along the back edge of the city. Aside from its importance in maintaining real estate values, the Common represented Boston’s pioneering contribution to the conservation of natural spaces in the urban environment. Workers filled conserving urban ecologies | 225

in the marshes, graded the grounds, planted trees, and refashioned the space into an antipode of the harsh commercial landscape a few blocks east. The resulting public park became, to quote an admirer, “one of Nature’s noblest . . . temples, where the devout mind can worship God more fervently than in houses of wood and stone.”30 The 1831 founding of Mount Auburn Cemetery in nearby Cambridge and Watertown as America’s first garden cemetery inspired park builders to more elaborate reconstructions of nature. By this time, the accumulation of interred bodies in city churchyards had become a public concern. The two-acre Gra- nary Burying Ground near the Common, for instance, contained an estimated 5,000 burials, stacked as many as five deep. This situation seemed both impi- ous and unhygienic, and the solution was to move cemeteries to the outskirts, where a combination of natural scenery and open space could tranquilize the mind of the bereaved. The Harvard botanist Jacob Bigelow planned Mount Auburn’s gardened grounds, and within a few years most major American cities featured similar cemeteries. The idea that natural landscapes could ele- vate the spirit and protect the health of an urban population had a quickening effect on the downtown parks movement.31 Boston’s parks were created in the wake of New York’s spectacular success with Central Park, and they drew on the genius of that landscape’s primary designer, Frederick Law Olmsted. Lacking the open spaces that New York enjoyed at the edge of its downtown, Boston innovated by creating a system of smaller parks and wild areas in and around the city. In the 1850s, the landscape gardener Robert Copeland formulated a plan for a public embankment along the Charles River and a series of parkways connecting it to Boston’s newly annexed suburbs; in 1869 a Boston lawyer, Uriel Crocker, concerned about urban expansion into the still-rural land west of Boston, petitioned the City Council for a series of parks and parkways. Shortly afterward, the legislature passed an act permitting Boston to establish a park system, and in 1876 park commissioners recruited Olmsted, then America’s foremost landscape architect, to bring these earlier ideas to fruition. Olmsted shared the Romantics’ faith in nature’s healing qualities, but he also saw natural spaces as a means of facilitating interaction among urban residents, particularly those of different classes. Placed in more natural circumstances, he thought, people would come together “communicatively,” transcending narrow class viewpoints.32 Boston’s so-called Emerald Necklace was a middle ground—a “creative synthesis,” as the scholar David Schuyler describes it—between nature and metropolis. It 226 | chapter 8 was designed to enhance adjacent real estate values and provide upper classes with a venue for display, but it was also premised on the assumption that nature had spiritual, psychological, and hygienic benefits. Olmsted screened out the urban bustle and re-created the naturalistic design that he felt city inhabitants needed. Busy streets left people wary, watchful, and devoid of compassion; natural settings encouraged “genteel intercourse.” Open areas, sunlight, and foliage disinfected vitiated air, added oxygen to the atmosphere, bestowed an appreciation for beauty, and humanized the civic environment. Like pure water, vegetation and rural spaces brought the benefits of the country into the city.33 Guided by Olmsted’s protégé Charles Eliot and the journalist Sylvester Baxter, park commissioners began implementing this vision in 1878. Among the first projects was Arnold Arboretum, created on a 210-acre farm willed to Harvard University in 1842 and funded by an 1868 bequest from the amateur horticulturist James Arnold. The more complicated project involved the Fens, a narrow and winding tidal marsh stretching along Muddy River between Bos- ton and Brookline. Filling the Back Bay had reduced the river’s tidal flow, and by 1880 its stagnant waters served mainly as a sink for garbage and sewage. In consultation with city sanitarians, Olmsted landscaped the curving stream to screen the cityscape for canoeists, strollers, and equestrians. He envisioned not so much a pastoral landscape or formal garden as a functioning tidal marsh woven into the urban environment—a natural means of releasing water and removing wastes. For West Roxbury Park, renamed Franklin Park for the Bos- ton native Benjamin Franklin, Olmsted sought a blend of soothing greenery, sweeping lawns, and gently rolling hills. He divided the park’s nearly 500 acres into two sections: an open valley nearly a mile in length and a so-called ante- park set aside for active recreation. The last large metropolitan park in the system was Jamaica Pond, renamed Olmsted Park in 1900.34 The Emerald Necklace offered a diverse array of public spaces, including smaller neighborhood recreation areas, beaches, parkways, and forest reserves at Middlesex Fells, Waverley Oaks, and Stony Brook, on Boston’s periphery. These reserves had been used for centuries by woodcutters and quarry workers, but revegetation left them looking more natural. Park officials encouraged this sense of wildness by removing buildings, clearing paths, planting shrubbery, recovering Indian names, and providing “an idealized history . . . in place of the more gritty realities of the past.” In 1893 the state created a permanent Metropolitan Park Commission under Charles Francis Adams—the first of its kind in America—and by 1902 the city controlled about 15,000 acres, conserving urban ecologies | 227

including thirty miles of river frontage, ten miles of ocean shoreline, and twenty-two miles of parkways.35

Class and Conservation These attempts to conserve nature and humanize the city sometimes fell victim to the class tensions inherent in using urban space. In Maine, Portland’s reformers commissioned a string of parks and parkways linking its two wealthiest neighborhoods, the Eastern and Western Promenades, with the city’s expansive Deering Oaks park. Later, Mayor James Phinney Baxter commissioned Olmsted’s firm to draw up an ambitious plan for a parkway connecting Deering Oaks to the city’s Back Cove. Representatives from the working-class wards insisted that the plan ignored the needs of the lower classes in favor of providing a venue for the display of fancy carriages and steam launches, and they killed the plan.36 Class biases were more subtle in Hartford, Connecticut. In 1853 the city’s renowned Congregational minister Horace Bushnell launched an effort to convert an abandoned rail yard in the city center into a park. Like Olmsted, he believed that introducing rural elements into the urban fabric would encourage social mixing: the poor would emulate the manners of the rich, and the rich would cultivate a stronger sense of responsibility for the poor. Designers screened the grounds with natural vegetation and created a timeless arcadian world in the heart of a bustling city. The sense of permanence was difficult to manage, however. As Hartford’s commercial center moved back from the waterfront, immigrant and working-class families colonized the older middle-class neighborhoods around the park, and these new residents shared few of the middle-class assumptions that had gone into the park’s design.37 The premise behind naturalizing urban space was undermined when the types of behavior that planners hoped to reform— drinking, loitering, boisterous recreation—migrated from the streets and into the park. Dense vegetation provided opportunities for a whole spectrum of misbehavior previously associated with back alleys and dark hallways. In 1906 Hartford removed the shrubbery from the perimeter and devoted more space to active play. Gradually, park designers here and elsewhere learned to consider a park not as a place set apart for nature, but rather as a reflection of the constructed environment around it—an urbanized second nature. Like water moving through the cities, parks were both natural and artificial, a part of the evolving civic ecology.38 228 | chapter 8

In Worcester, Massachusetts, the city’s largest park was designed with broad stretches of lawn, flowering trees, exotic shrubs, pools graced by delicate arched bridges, and a ban on boisterous activity. Planners also laid out recreational parks in the working-class districts, but as Roy Rosenzweig explains in his study of working-class recreation, these spaces were bare, rundown, and overcrowded. Representatives from the working-class wards interpreted this discrepancy according to the class inequities in the broader civic ecology:

Our wealthy citizens live in elegant homes on all the hills of Worces- ter, they have unrestricted fresh air and perfect sewage; their streets are well cleared and lighted, the sidewalks are everywhere, and Elm Park, that little dream of beauty, is conveniently near. The toilers live on the lowlands, their homes are close together, the hills restrict the fresh air, huge chimneys pour out volumes of smoke, the marshy places give out offensiveness and poison the air, [and] the canal remains uncovered. . . . While the families of the rich can go to the mountains or to the sea during the hot months of summer, the families of the workers must remain at home.

Arguments over parks were part of a deeper environmental imbalance in the use of urban space.39 Early reformers laid out parks as islands of greenery sequestered from the busy streets, places where all citizens could contemplate the blessings of a life lived in nature. By the 1890s, it was clear that public space meant different things to different people, and planners altered their designs not so much to reflect an abstract and romanticized rural environment but rather to comple- ment life in the residential areas around these landscaped areas. They recognized the need to match their vision of nature to the complexion of the surrounding neighborhoods, that is, to meld nature and culture in the city.40 Visions of urban spaces varied according to time as well as class. In the automobile age, the parkways so carefully laid out in the era of park building lost their pastoral ambiance, as the urban planner James O’Connell notes; trees, shrubbery, medians, and scenic views fell victim to rising traffic demands and commercial development. Postwar suburbanites garnished their own back- yards with gardens, trees, shrubs, and barbeques, privatizing the advantages of nature that park reformers thought so necessary to urban life. School athletic fields, municipal pools, and playgrounds replaced the Olmsted vision of public conserving urban ecologies | 229

space. In the 1970s, with the rise of the environmental movement and the revitalization of downtown America, reformers began rethinking these urban places. “After years of neglect,” O’Connell notes, “planners, politicians, and citizens rediscovered Charles Eliot’s system of parks and parkways, regarding it as an urban icon.”41 Urban conservation had reached maturity.

Civic Ecologies and Rural Change Urban conservation made nature a part of the civic ecology, but cities depended on nature in other respects as well. Meeting these needs linked city and country into a single integrated system. Urban demand for wood products, for instance, provided 5 to 10 percent of all farm income in nineteenth-century New England, and comparable demand for produce, grains, hay, fish, limestone, marble, granite, slate, and other resources shaped the rural economy. Except in the far north, few New England farms were more than fifteen miles from an industrial center, and by 1930, 42 percent of all farmers in the region received income from some off-farm, usually urban-based, employment, a figure higher than in any other region in the country. During mill shutdowns, urban migrants returned to the ancestral farm, and just as often farmers took to the city in periods of agricultural slump—a reciprocal motion that cushioned economic shocks in both places. Given this flow of influences, one might question the boundary between rural and urban in New England.42 These metropolitan influences helped modernize the rural economy. Tourism—the urban flight to the periphery—provided hotel employment and encouraged market gardening, guiding, summer lodging, and craft production, all of which supplemented and sustained traditional forms of rural work. Urban “rusticators” purchased abandoned farms as summer homes, and because these old buildings needed considerable upkeep, they boosted employment for carpenters, plumbers, gardeners, and farm-based workers. Tourist homes, hotels, and inns stabilized local tax bases, created markets for dairy, poultry, and garden truck, and boosted patronage for railroads and country stores in places where local trade no longer sustained these activities. New England hosted some 130,000 summer homes by 1942, about 15 percent of the total number of dwellings in communities with fewer than 10,000 people.43 The extended urban ecology was also evident in suburban development. Early suburbs were simply lands given over to industrial activities necessary to, but not 230 | chapter 8 convenient in, the cities: businesses either too noisy, too dirty, or too large to fit into inner neighborhoods. New transportation technologies added residential suburbs to this outward flow. Boston’s railroads were initially designed to connect to other urban areas and the Middle West, but at midcentury railroad companies added intermediate stops in nearby towns and introduced the idea of commuted fares for regular service. The popularity of commuting encouraged horse-drawn street trolleys, which were lighter, more adaptable, and cheaper to maintain. In the 1880s, Henry Whitney’s West End Street Railway devoured the other local systems, resulting in the first unified public transit operation in a major American city, the largest single streetcar system in world, and the first such network to electrify. Transportation companies, often financed by real-estate speculators, became a major engine of outlying growth. Over time these “streetcar suburbs” melded into a mosaic of neighborhoods still somewhat dis- tinguishable by class, ethnic origin, and architectural form.44 Outlying residential growth changed the environment of the inner city. Spacious suburban homes created a revolution in consumer spending, and as streetcar lines converged on the downtown, merchants built opulent, multistoried department stores to capture the incoming trade. In Boston, a new retail district emerged in the 1890s between the financial quarter and the Com- mon, compounding the difficulty of circulating traffic along the city’s narrow streets. To handle the influx of customers, engineers developed an elevated train system in 1895, and because citizens objected to tracks running across the Common, they built America’s first subway in 1901, connecting Park and Boyl- ston Streets. Across New England, a network of trolley systems spurred out- of-town development and blurred the boundary between city and country.45

Accommodating New England’s Second Industrial Revolution The rush to the suburbs cost cities much of their dynamism in the post–World War II years, and in New England the problem was compounded by a dramatic downturn in textile production. The Southern textile industry had captured the market for coarse cloth in the first decades of the twentieth century, and by the 1950s New England mills were in deep crisis. But in the 1980s, cities in central New England rebounded, this time on the strength of an electronics revolution brought on by the invention of the solid-state semiconductor. The technology was used first in missile guidance systems, space vehicles, and navigation equipment and then was applied to a broad spectrum of conserving urban ecologies | 231

consumer products, including radios, televisions, and computers. Raytheon Corporation, a product of MIT’s industrial design laboratories, pioneered the related technologies of microwave emitters, flight simulators, and business machines. Another Massachusetts company, Digital Equipment Cor- poration, challenged the Midwest’s IBM as the nation’s leading manufacturer of computers. An Wang of the Harvard Computation Laboratory founded Wang Laboratories in 1951 in Cambridge (later relocated to Lowell), charting a course for the nation’s computer industries. The semiconductor was as significant to the New England economy of the twentieth century as the steam engine had been in the nineteenth.46 The electronics revolution distanced New Englanders even further from their natural surroundings. The textile revolution of the 1800s had depended on the flow of water over transverse bedrock ledges; semiconductors depended on the flow of electrons over circuits, capacitors, resistors, and transformers. Textiles came from cotton; semiconductors from plastic, metal alloys, and silicon. The primary component of the electronics revolution was human ingenuity, and this resource was as abundant in New England in the 1980s as the region’s waterpowers had been in the 1830s. Responding to the GI Bill, the postwar baby boom, and rising federal funding for research, New England invested heavily in higher education, complementing its first inventing class— village mechanics—with a new breed of college-educated scientists and tech- nicians. At the turn of the twentieth century, MIT looked to applied science as its land-grant mission, and it was there that Vannevar Bush and Lawrence Marshall experimented with vacuum tubes, radar, nuclear technology, and, after World War II, microprocessing computational devices. Clark University and Harvard followed suit, and elsewhere in New England the growth of state colleges and universities outpaced the nation. The region also excelled in supplying the electronics industry with low rents, workers skilled in industrial processes, and venture capital. Firms succeeded in electronics by entering a field, expanding, contracting, and then moving on—a strategy that relied on high-risk capital, low operating costs, and financial flexibility. Vacant mills offered cheap space, and old one-industry communities were willing to offer tax incentives to attract these start-up industries. Highly skilled workers at the creative end of the production process increased the productivity of semiskilled assembly workers, often women and men who had developed work habits in the mills and factories of the first Industrial Revolution. By 1986, 65 percent of New Hampshire’s workforce, 232 | chapter 8 once concentrated in textiles and shoes, was employed in electronics and light industry.47 Lastly, New England’s compact geography and excellent highway and rail connections facilitated coordination among university complexes, financial centers, and pools of skilled labor in the older mill towns. The growing industrial landscape along Boston’s Route 128 made clear the differences between the old Industrial Revolution and the new. The “scru- pulously clean interiors” of the production facilities—a stark contrast to the dingy, cluttered spinning and weaving rooms in the old mills—reflected a need to exclude all foreign matter from such delicate operations; in other words, to separate production as much as possible from nature. Yet there were similarities to the first Industrial Revolution in the way companies carefully landscaped their facilities, using a rural appeal to attract and retain highly qualified workers, much as Samuel Slater and Francis Cabot Lowell had naturalized their mill-based communities to draw skilled mechanics.48 Growth in the high-tech industries slowed in the 1980s, the victim of cuts in defense spending, changes in the global economy, and competition from California’s Silicon Valley. Nevertheless, a proliferation of small businesses encouraged by agglomeration economics and cheap rent in old mills sustained the manufacturing sector while the broader economy shifted into financial and business services, health care, insurance, banking, engineering, consulting, education, and software production. A textile mill in Wauregan, Connecticut, that had closed in 1958 housed fifteen tenants by 1961, its businesses collectively producing electrical equipment and apparel, selling mill remnants, assembling fishing rods, molding plastic parts, recapping tires, and grading eggs. Branch plants and offices fueled economic growth in places like Burlington and Portland, and investments in resorts, vacation homes, and ski areas added a green fringe to this increasingly artificial economy. A ready supply of skilled and educated workers, millions of square feet of space in sturdy old mills, the proximity of such financial centers as Boston, Hartford, and Providence, convenient air and ground transport, pleasant rural surroundings, and a strong sense of community helped stabilize the New England economy in the postelectronics era.49

Greening the Civic Ecology New England’s electronics revolution fueled an equally dramatic development in reconnecting nature and civic space. This new conservation phase began as a public reaction against the urban renewal projects of the 1950s. conserving urban ecologies | 233

One of the most controversial took place in Boston’s West End. Planners had targeted the district for slum clearance as early as the 1930s, despite the vitality of its Italian American working-class community. In 1954 the city completed a multilane central artery that isolated the district from downtown Boston, and a few years later it used federal funding to raze the West End’s Scollay Square and build Government Center, a complex of brutalist-style private and public buildings grouped around a vast, empty concrete plaza. The eventual disloca- tion of about 10,000 West Enders, along with many businesses, epitomized the insensitivity of urban renewal projects as cities across the country eradicated not only “slums” but also viable ethnic and working-class neighborhoods, replacing them with huge, blank concrete buildings standing in vacant, wind- swept plazas. Boston’s Chinatown and South End African American neighborhoods were likewise fragmented, and although the Italian and Jewish North End fared better, portions were leveled to accommodate approaches to the Sumner and Callahan Tunnels and threatened by gentrification.50 Early urban renewal projects such as these accentuated the dehumanizing artificiality of the cityscape. Later projects met firmer resistance. Portsmouth had stagnated since its early nineteenth-century heyday as New Hampshire’s major commercial center, and by the mid-twentieth century its downtown had become a prime target for renewal. In the late 1950s, the city demolished sections of its historic north end, rich in colonial-era houses and sturdy brick warehouses, a loss that taught a lasting lesson. When developers then targeted several nearby homes dating from the 1630s, preservationists launched a “save our history” campaign. Using federal funds, they renovated the entire neighborhood as an open-air museum. Strawbery Banke opened in 1965, and with the district anchored in local history and regional culture, builders revitalized the downtown without threatening its historic integrity.51 As Portsmouth’s renaissance suggests, strategies for reforming civic ecologies changed considerably between the 1950s and the 1970s. In 1975 Massa- chusetts commissioned a Heritage State Park commemorating Lowell as the cradle of American industry, and three years later the federal government established Lowell National Historical Park, resulting in a significant boost to the downtown economy. By the end of the century, Lowell featured an annual folk festival, the Tsongas Industrial History Center, the American Textile His- tory Museum, the New England Quilt Museum, and the Sports Museum of New England, along with assorted galleries, museums, and theaters. Nearby 234 | chapter 8

Haverhill took advantage of new federal urban-renewal guidelines to refur- bish its riverside mills as shops and retirement housing. Boston featured the Revolutionary War–era Freedom Trail, and when this attraction drew visitors downtown, designers transformed the run-down central market, constructed in 1826, into the spectacularly successful Faneuil Hall Marketplace. Salem transformed its downtown into a heritage destination by linking the more authentic House of the Seven Gables, Peabody Museum, and Custom House to a variety of ersatz witch-related sites. The Blackstone National Her- itage Corridor performed a similar service for factory towns along this historic river. Investors in Portland, Maine, organized the Old Port Association in 1977 and redesigned the brick commercial buildings along the waterfront as a nineteenth-century New England seaport, complete with cobble streets, boutiques, bakeries, arts-and-craft shops, pubs, and specialty restaurants.52 Rejecting the blank, angular brutalist architecture that marked the earlier urban renewal projects, planners redesigned inner-city areas as expressions of regional culture.53 Smaller cities experimented with the postindustrial renaissance as well. When the working waterfront in Rockland, Maine, declined in the 1970s, developers capitalized on the city’s location along the busy Route 1 tourist corridor. With nearby art, transportation, and lighthouse museums and a lavish golf resort just up the coast, the town sponsored an annual lobster festival, a blues festival, a friendship sloop celebration, and a wooden boat show. Curio shops, jewelry stores, boutiques, restaurants, and art galleries crowded out the old marine supply shops and bars along the main street, and yachting facilities jostled with a seaweed extract plant, a boat storage yard, a fish pier, a shipyard, and several machine shops along the waterfront. Although prosperous, the new postindustrial leisure economy rested awkwardly on the old industrial infrastructure, leaving citizens somewhat confused about the town’s identity.54 The urban renaissance was neither complete nor painless. Providence is New England’s most dramatic urban renaissance success. Like all cities, Providence owed its founding to a complex of natural advantages: forests, marine resources, salt marshes, and the convergence of three rivers. Time obscured this connection to nature; the forests were cleared, the fisheries depleted, the salt marshes drained and filled, and the waterways closed off to shipping by bridges and eventually covered with street decking. During the mid-twentieth century, the downtown grew increasingly dilapidated, and in 1960 the City Planning Commission suggested a revitalization conserving urban ecologies | 235

project akin to Boston’s Government Center. The city refused the plan, and Providence was spared the urban renewal disasters that devastated not only West Boston but also cities like Bridgeport, Hartford, New Haven, Waterbury, Springfield, and Worcester. In the late 1970s, Mayor Vincent Albert (“Buddy”) Cianci Jr. launched a revitalization campaign with a pronounced heritage theme focused on restoring Union Station, the landmark Biltmore Hotel, and the 1828 Providence Arcade, reputedly America’s oldest shopping mall. His efforts were complicated by a huge downtown rail yard that separated the Capitol complex from the business district. In 1981, however, federal reconstruction of the Northeast rail corridor eliminated the freight yards, and developers, using a broad mix of private and public funding, began building a commercial complex to link the State House to the downtown. With this project under way, city officials removed the road decking over the rivers and built twelve elegant arched- span bridges that permitted leisure craft to enter the heart of the city. Along the riverbanks, cobblestone walkways and shaded pedestrian parks attracted restaurants, water-taxi services, gondola vendors, kayak outfitters, trolley-tour stations, art galleries, and a museum and repertory theater. In 1994 Barnaby Evans created an art event that featured dancing fires anchored in the Provi- dence River. Made permanent in 1997, WaterFire became a symbol of the city’s transition from industrial engine to urban playground.55 The Providence renaissance was somewhat unique. Rhode Island’s small size encouraged close cooperation between state and municipal entities, and the relocation of the rail yards opened up land that elsewhere would have required massive demolition. But the city was typical in using heritage and nature conservation to humanize the civic ecology. By this time, “daylight- ing” long-obscured waterways had become a common feature in downtown redevelopment. Flowing water, cleansed of pollutants, was once again a centerpiece for parks, walkways, corridors, and retail districts. And while Prov- idence was disinterring its rivers, Boston was entombing its roadways. The so-called Big Dig, to date the most expensive single road project in American history, buried the central artery and freed up surface space for the Rose Fitz- gerald Kennedy Greenway, a mile-long naturalized urban space that opened in 2007–8, connecting the North End, the Wharf District, and Chinatown.56 Other cities, having gained an appreciation for the ecological, hydrological, recreational, and aesthetic benefits of conserving urban nature, also found new public uses for relic forests, neglected streambeds and ravines, and vacant 236 | chapter 8 lots. They opened waterways, revegetated stream corridors, established community gardens, gentrified abandoned aqueducts and canals, and transformed old railroad and trolley beds into bikeways and long, thin “linear parks.” Indus- trial-era mill ponds offered opportunities for reconstructing marshlands, and land left behind in public works projects, derelict industrial sites, blighted vacant lots, city dumps, and sand and gravel pits provided new opportunities for greening the civic ecology.57 If New England’s industry was becoming less organic in the age of electronics, its cities were rediscovering their natural and historical roots. Human-scaled, pedestrian-friendly “urban villages” and “festival malls,” with their vernacular styles, renovated buildings, and diversity of shapes, colors, and textures, brought New England’s second nature to the city.

The Challenge of Urban Environmentalism Successes in reconnecting cities to their past were offset by a more dangerous legacy of the industrial era. Deindustrialization left cities across America pocked with toxic sites containing dioxin, asbestos, polychlorinated biphenyls, arsenic, lead, mercury, heavy metals, and pesticides. But not all neighborhoods were polluted equally: people of color and low-income residents were three to four times more likely to live in contaminated neighborhoods than were white, middle-class Americans. This imbalance reflected the segregation of neighborhoods, but it was also a product of new environmental regulations that gave wealthier citizens effective legal tools for fighting off these hazards. Developers responded by seeking out neighborhoods less likely to mount legal resistance. Studies conducted in the early 2000s by the sociologists Daniel R. Faber and Eric J. Krieg show that New England was no exception to this pattern. Problems with contaminated groundwater along Route 128 in Massachusetts, host to the state’s microprocessor and electronics boom, demonstrated that toxic pollution could occur almost anywhere. Nevertheless, high-income communities averaged 4.6 hazardous waste sites per square mile, whereas low-income communities and those with significant minority populations averaged 19.2. Five of the state’s six largest power plants, most of the 980 land- fills, and six of the nine trash incinerators were located within low-income communities and communities of color.58 Inequities such as these gave rise to the environmental justice movement. A fusion of environmental and civil rights protest, the movement developed conserving urban ecologies | 237

in a complicated social context wherein problems of toxic contaminants and polluted air were intertwined with a series of other social problems, including joblessness, poor educational opportunities, substance abuse, official neglect, and deteriorating infrastructure. As in any human ecology, these issues were interrelated, and a crisis in any single area created negative feedback loops that resulted in an overall climate of defeat. Problems at home reduced the effec- tiveness of the school system, and poor school performance led to juvenile crime, substance abuse, school-age childbearing, and problems at home. Dis- crimination in bank lending resulted in deteriorating commercial property, and that in turn influenced community self-perceptions, which affected bank lending policy.59 Conversely, successes in environmental issues could initiate a spiral of community revival. The environmental justice movement in Connecticut’s Naugatuck Valley suggests this potential. The valley’s economy, based on brassware, vulcanized rubber, and machine tools, flourished until World War II; in the 1980s, predatory conglomerates bought out the older companies, sold off their assets, and moved on, leaving behind nearly 200 abandoned hazardous sites. In 1983 a coalition of labor unions, social justice organizations, chambers of commerce, banks, government planning offices, churches, and developers formed the Naugatuck Valley Project to take on the problems of disinvestment and contamination. Focusing on “brownfields”—abandoned sites with moderate levels of toxic pollution—project directors enlisted the federal Environmental Protection Agency and began removing wastes, cap- ping contaminated soils, and reopening the sites to factories, storage facilities, shopping malls, and, in some cases, housing developments. The initiative favored nonpolluting “green” redevelopment based on recycled or renewable materials and low-energy technology. Brownfield reclamation lowered development pressures on the surrounding farmlands and woodlands, increased property values, reduced commuting distances, and raised community self-esteem. Moreover, the emphasis on community decision making helped convince residents that they, rather than multinational corporations, were in charge of the valley’s future.60 Environmental justice organizations in South Boston, home to working-class African American, Puerto Rican, Cape Verdean, and white citizens, were also a catalyst for broader reforms. Hard hit by disinvestment and slum clearance, Roxbury and North Dorchester were left with vacant lots that contained 64 percent of Boston’s trash transfer stations, dumpster storage lots, and junkyards. 238 | chapter 8

These imbalances triggered several campaigns in the 1990s, including the Rox- bury-based Alternatives for Community and Environment, launched in 1993, and the Archdale Roslindale Coalition, formed in 1996. These organizations joined with broader mainstream groups, federal agencies, inner-city religious societies, and public health associations to force the city to address environmental threats. The name of the Roxbury Environmental Empowerment Proj- ect revealed a strategy common to these movements: the cultivation of young leaders who would gain the experience they needed in neighborhood politics to prepare them for other civil rights and social justice issues.61 The most successful among these South Boston initiatives emerged in 1984 in the Dudley Street neighborhood in Roxbury and North Dorchester. The Riley Foundation, one of the state’s largest philanthropic organizations, agreed to help revitalize the community, but local residents rejected the foundation’s plan because the project advisory board lacked grassroots representation. Organizers from Riley reconstituted the board as the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI), staffed it with ample community membership, and then canvassed the neighborhood to let citizens identify the environmental problems they considered most pressing. DSNI first tackled the area’s 1,300 abandoned lots, which served as magnets for garbage haulers from around the city, by inaugurating the “Don’t Dump on Us” campaign. With residents blocking access to the lots, Boston mayor Ray Flynn took the garbage companies to court. After the dumping was halted, the community cleaned up the lots, forced the city to tow away abandoned cars, and began advocating to remove other hazardous materials. By convincing citizens that collective protest could achieve positive results, the campaign paved the way for more ambitious projects. In 1990 Boston officials transferred ownership of the tax-delinquent abandoned lots to DSNI and gave the organization power of eminent domain over others still in private hands. Two years later the Ford Foundation provided $2 million for land purchases and redevelopment. DSNI set up a community land trust and filled the vacant spaces with urban gardens, affordable housing, shopping facilities, a town common, a park, and two community centers. Building on these successes, it launched a variety of community projects, including a multicultural festival, a lead-removal program, and a campaign for street safety. Greater political awareness resulted in better schools and a larger police force, and DSNI employed neighborhood youths to maintain community gardens, assist elderly residents with yardwork, clean up weed-strewn conserving urban ecologies | 239

lots, and landscape parks and streets using plants and materials supplied by the Boston Urban Gardeners and other organizations.62 Campaigns like these challenged the environmental movement. They generated new organizational models and increased popular sensitivity to inequities based on class and race. Headed primarily by women of color, the organizations that fostered them generated respect for cultural diversity in the white-dominated environmental community, and the emphasis on grassroots participation reconnected the movement with its democratic roots. More- over, the desperate neighborhood battles for justice added a sense of urgency to a movement that had grown complaisant with Washington insider compromise.63 The environmental justice movement produced an urban renaissance smaller but no less vibrant than the urban renaissance occurring in places like downtown Providence and Boston. As the urban renaissance and environmental justice movements suggest, nature was part of the urban landscape, and urban reform was part of the conservation movement. In the early nineteenth century, builders created a radically synthetic urban environment, cleared of almost all visible natural features, but they were unable to insulate the city entirely from the natural processes that shape life everywhere. To counter the action of microbes in metabolized water, they reached into the countryside to tap more natural supplies, and to counter the inhumanity of the concrete environment, they invited nature back into the city in the form of parks and green spaces. City dwellers developed an unimaginably complicated relationship with the world around them, but through these obscure and attenuated links, they maintained an ongoing, and indeed ever-richer, connection to the natural environment they so adamantly rejected but so desperately needed. Chapter 9 Saving Second Nature 

ew England is a land of thin soils and long winters, the geog- Nrapher Helen Strong wrote in an article published in 1936, and these fundamental facts, in her estimation, shaped the lives of those who lived there. “The New Englander who did not work hard in his fields during the short summer, who did not carefully conserve the results of his labor, perished,” she stated bluntly. Those remaining were driven by environmental necessity to become self-sufficient, practical, and independent. Long winters kept them indoors, where they engaged in discussion and deep contempla- tion—pastimes, according to Strong, that added a curious poetic overlay to the region’s stern, pragmatic outlook.1 Strong’s attempt to define the New Englander by looking to the land was part of a literary and scholarly tradition known as regionalism: an understanding that a culture was validated by its organic and historic connection to the land. Regionalism emerged in the 1880s, a time when Americans in general were abandoning local connections for a broader identity based on national organizations, metropolitan influences, and mass media. In this confusing transition, many found comfort in familiar surroundings; they realized, as Ful- mer Mood wrote in 1951, that “they are not as their fellow [Americans] are, nor are their fellows as they are.” Responding to this rising interest in place-based identity, writers, artists, geographers, folklorists, and planners began exploring the lifeways and memories that anchored people to the land.2

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Culminating in the 1930s, the regionalist movement became an important foundation for the environmental politics of the 1960s. Historians have proposed several theories to explain the dramatic change in social consciousness that launched the movement, but most treat environmentalism as more or less monolithic. In fact, the term meant different things in different regions. Strong may have exaggerated the degree to which the soul of a region can be read in its bedrock, but she was correct in assuming that each one had its own set of connections to the land. They all developed a unique brand of environmental politics based on what people felt was important to their sense of place. New England’s environmentalism was distinctive in three ways. First, its campaigns were more localized than most. With relatively few federal lands in their purview, environmentalists were more active in state and local affairs than they were in Washington, DC. This approach was compatible with New England’s town-meeting politics and its small-scale topography. Without the huge biomes, vast river systems, and continent-spanning mountain ranges characteristic of the American West, activists focused on the small environments they understood intimately. Second, the campaigns were characterized by a complicated negotiation between governments and nonprofit groups. This cooperative approach entangled private organizations in multiple layers of government bureaucracy and subjected public agencies to the uncertainties of volunteer activism. Despite its drawbacks, this system brought impressive results. Government involvement raised the stature of participating private organizations, just as private organizations provided grassroots credibility for government programs.3 Third, New England environmentalists rejected the nature–culture duality so common in environmental rhetoric. National preservation politics centered on the great unspoiled earth monuments of the West, and the desperate battles to protect these commanding symbols of wild America were predicated on a clear conceptual boundary between nature and society: the first was pristine, the second was profane, and the purpose of environmentalism was to keep them separate. New England offered little in the way of true first-nature wilderness, but it contained several iconic second-nature landscapes, ranging from working woods to rolling farmland, each with a distinctive humanized but functioning ecosystem. This hybrid world of farms, woodlands, cut-over forests, and past-enshrouded fishing outports, all centuries in the making, was the focus of New England environmentalism. Writing in 1926, Lewis Mumford captured the essence of this second-nature landscape: “The moorland pastures by the sea, dark with bayberries and sweet 242 | chapter 9 fern breaking out among the lichened rocks; and the tidal rivers bringing their weedy tang to the low meadows, wide and open in the sun. . . . Pine groves, where the needles . . . hum to the wind, or the knotted New England hills, where the mountain laurel in June seems like upland snow. . . . The fringe of sumach by the roadside, volcanoes of reds and crimsons; the yellow of Sep- tember cornfields, with . . . pumpkins lying between the shocks.” The strategies used to protect this “living landscape,” as the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy called it, are more difficult to define than those in the win-or-lose battles over the earth monuments of the West, but they remain New England’s greatest contribution to the American environmental movement.4

The Language of Place The imaginative construction of New England’s second nature was closely related to the rise of tourism, which secularized the Romantic rhetoric of mountain sublime and applied it to New England’s more humble forms of scenery. In the Northeast, tourism began in the 1830s when traveling elites added U.S. points of interest to the European “Grand Tour.” Summer travel afforded respite from the epidemics that swept through the great cities of Europe and America each summer, and as Dona Brown relates, it promised social mobility for aspiring couples who found class rituals more relaxed in rural settings away from home.5 When tourists began appearing in the White Mountains, farmers converted their homes and barns into way stations to accommodate the travelers. In 1819 Abel Crawford and his son Ethan built a makeshift hotel at their home in Crawford Notch and cut hiking trails up the side of Mount Washington. The Lafayette House in Franconia Notch opened in 1835, and similar venues soon followed; within a few years the region was laced with trails and bridle paths and dotted with rustic hotels and campsites. Outing clubs, beginning with the Exploring Circle founded in the late 1850s in Lynn, Massachusetts, added to the popularity of mountaineering and encouraged a view of these rugged landscapes as timeless, wild, and adventuresome.6 Romantic art laid the philosophic foundations for scenic appreciation. Because mountain tourism was relatively new in the nineteenth century, hotel proprietors and rail companies published guidebooks that translated this Romantic appreciation into a socially appropriate discourse based on such concepts as composition, framing, palate, perspective, and symbolic saving second nature | 243

association. In Heart of the White Mountains (1882), Samuel Adams Drake recalled an unvarnished traveler who stood with him before the “amazing apparition” of Mount Washington rising two thousand feet into the sky; all Drake’s companion could muster by way of admiration was “by Jove! . . . This beats Kentucky!” Appreciation for scenery had to be cultivated like any other art form, and the exercise, according to Nathaniel Shaler, demanded great “strength of mind and intellectual labor.” In this new language of place, tourists and locals alike discovered a form of communication appropriate to their growing attachment to the land.7 From the White Mountains, tourism spread to the lowlands at a time when declining agricultural prospects left rural New Englanders ready to embrace the “summer trade.” Mineral spas in Vermont, seaside resorts in Maine, and religious encampments on Martha’s Vineyard and Cape Cod capitalized on the region’s reputation for healthy living and sound morals. Middle-class visitors, raised in an atmosphere of severe self-denial, found this emphasis on hygienic and spiritual rejuvenation a convenient entrée into the world of leisure and display. Having justified their indulgence, they adapted the symbol-rich discourse of mountain tourism to the historic texture and natural scenery of the lowland towns and seaside villages. Small-town provincialism became a celebration of Yankee wit and native intelligence; hardscrabble farms personified the tenacity of pioneering America, and abandoned mills and fishing vessels became quaint artifacts of days gone by. “The landscape gains much from its associations with mankind,” Shaler reminded his readers.8

Village and Folk in the Second-Nature Landscape Touring visitors often carried pencil and sketchbook and “took pictures” of the antique farmhouses and historic homes they encountered in their travels. Late in the nineteenth century, women’s organizations began campaigning to preserve these old structures, giving rise to a general celebration of the family life, customs, and fashions of colonial times. In 1877 the renowned architects Charles McKim, William Mead, and Stanford White made detailed studies of colonial buildings in Marblehead, Salem, New- buryport, and Portsmouth, heralding the colonial revival, and over the next two decades writers published hundreds of volumes on the folkways of early America. The colonial revival was a national movement, but it was particularly strong in New England, partly because Americans associated Puritanism with 244 | chapter 9 national beginnings, and partly because so many colonial-era structures had been preserved by New England’s persistent rural stagnation. Unnerved by the social upheavals of the 1870s, wealthy urbanites retreated to upland villages for summer respite, and they rebuilt their residences not in the ornate Victo- rian style in vogue elsewhere, but in ways that emphasized the somber colors and simple lines cherished by their Anglo-Saxon ancestors.9 The most prominent example of the colonial revival was Litchfield, Con- necticut. Settled in the 1630s, Litchfield remained through most of the nineteenth century a cluster of simple, unpainted frame houses and dirt streets, with most of the population scattered on farms across the township. During the national centennial celebration in 1876, summer residents formed the Vil- lage Improvement Society and hired Frederick Law Olmsted’s firm to restore the town center as an “idealized composite of several non-colonial New England greens.” In 1930 preservationists moved a dilapidated Congregational church to the green and hired the New York architect Richard Henry Dana Jr. to oversee its restoration. As America’s first comprehensive village preservation project, Litchfield became an object of national attention. Throughout the region, whitewashed houses, elm-shaded streets, picket fences, and sani- tized greens made the New England village one of the great icons of regional America: a centerpiece of the second-nature countryside.10 With the colonial revival focusing attention on the New England village, regionalist writers romanticized the folk who created it. Beginning with a universal stock “rustic”—simple, shrewd, and humorously unpredictable— regionalist writers gave their characters local flavor by adding historical context, vernacular speech, and a distinctive environment. They then set these characters in a landscape of economic decay, painting an “autumnal picture” as one critic put it, that emphasized a particular relation to nature. In a world well past its heyday, the frenzy to exploit nature mellowed into a more harmonious relation between people and land. Weathered boards and vine-covered buildings masked the initial violence of transforming nature into cultural form and erased the boundary between human and nonhuman.11 The literary landscape was a seamless blend of resurgent nature and folk culture. Among the best known of New England’s regionalist writers was Sarah Orne Jewett. Born in 1849 in a small southern Maine town, Jewett spent her most prolific years, the 1880s and 1890s, writing novels and short stories about isolated Maine harbors inhabited mostly by elderly women. Like other regionalists, she draped her landscapes in images of decay, and the painstaking detail saving second nature | 245

she lavished on her coastal environment, the sense of timelessness, and her exclusion of all but pure Yankee stock characters gave her out-of-the-way villages a palpable organic quality. Echoing the colonial revival, Jewett introduced a preservationist theme in her stories, most apparently in the “White Heron,” which featured an ornithologist and a country girl torn by the naturalist’s offer of ten dollars to guide him to a heron’s nest. The ornithologist studied nature, but the girl was embedded in it. “The wild creaturs,” her grandmother explained, “counts her one o’ themselves.” The girl watched the outsider “with loving admiration” and grieved that the “longed-for white heron was elusive,” but in a moment of angst, she refused the hunter’s offer, sobered by memories of “thrushes and sparrows dropping silent to the ground, their songs hushed and their pretty feathers stained and wet with blood.” A simple tale of preserving rural innocence, the story reflects a prominent theme in regionalist literature: a tension between the folk landscape and the metropolitan culture that threatened it. Like the white heron’s protectress, Jewett’s characters were subtly defensive of their second-nature world.12 Celia Thaxter, New Hampshire’s best-known nineteenth-century poet, spent most of her life on the Isles of Shoals, where her father built one of the first summer hotels on the New England coast. The islands had been denuded by fishermen and sheepherders in the seventeenth century, leaving only bushes and patches of grass clinging to nearly bare rocks. Wildflowers, relics of a once-vibrant natural world, returned each summer, only to be mowed down by the island’s ravenous livestock; in this sparse environment “every flower seems twice as beautiful.” Thaxter’s nature was both stern and enchanting. Her “Wreck of the Pocahontas” foreshadowed the literary naturalism of Stephen Crane and Jack London in casting nature as clearly hostile: “Like all the demons loosed at last, / Whistling and shrieking, wild and wide, / The mad wind raged, while strong and fast / Rolled in the rising tide.” Yet her folk characters, like the wildflowers growing among the bare rocks, seemed firmly rooted to this bleak landscape, and like the flowers, they were dignified by the starkness of their surroundings. Fisherman and vessel melded together in a single purposeful unit in the brutal north sea environment; the men, she wrote, “become strongly attached to their boats, which seem to have a sort of human interest for them,—and no wonder. They lead a life of the greatest hardship and exposure, . . . setting their trawls fifteen or twenty miles to the eastward of the islands. . . . It is desperately hard work . . . with the bitter wind blowing in their teeth, and the flying spray freezing upon everything it touches.” Thaxter wrote of the “strange affliction” islanders felt for this barren, 246 | chapter 9 solitary world. “Nobody hears of people dying of homesickness for New York, or Albany, or Maine, or California, . . . but to wild and lonely spots like these isles humanity clings with an intense and abiding affection.” It was the inseparability of human and natural history—the intense belonging to a second-nature environment—that set the Isles of Shoals apart from the world of her urban readers.13 New England’s most revered poet, Robert Frost, epitomized this attachment to place. Frost’s well-known Yankee persona, as Joseph Conforti notes, was “something of an acquired identity,” which perhaps accounts for his fierce dedication to New England. His mother grew up in Scotland and Ohio, and his father, a Southern sympathizer, named his son after Robert E. Lee. Frost was born in San Francisco, but when his father died the family moved to Law- rence, where Frost’s grandfather was overseer in a mill. Frost moved to Great Britain, then returned to New England in 1915 to purchase a farm in Franconia, having already succeeded as a poet with North of Boston. While in England he developed an affinity for the Georgian poets and their romantic vernacular depictions of the English countryside. He experimented with their technique, adjusting rhyme, theme, and symbol to his New England setting.14 Like Jewett, who distanced herself from the characters in her stories by using city-bred summer visitors as narrators, Frost betrayed a certain tension between self and subject matter. His finely crafted New England colloquial- isms, careful attention to landscape detail, and obvious love of nature epitomized Yankee culture. But beneath the vernacular phrasing, he remained, as Conforti says, “somewhat of an outsider.” This separateness is evident in “Mending Wall,” in which the neighborly nonlocal describes the scene: “And on a day we meet to walk the line / And set the wall between us once again. / We keep the wall between us as we go.” The poem, as John C. Kemp explains in his biography, “is capable of carrying the reader forward through a succession of striking images, surprising and stimulating observations, and deeply felt emotions.” But the voice, Kemp points out, belongs to the city man, not the laconic Yankee farmer. In “The Pasture,” Frost’s uncertainty rises to the surface:

I’m going out to clean the pasture spring; I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away (And wait to watch the water clear, I may): I shan’t be gone long.—You come too. saving second nature | 247

Frost veils his true motives, exploring the literary potential of this classic New England scene, behind a practical purpose his Yankee fence-mender might understand. However, the parentheses betray his fear that “real” New Englanders might consider watching water a singular waste of time.15 Like Jewett, Frost approached New England as an outsider seeking to preserve a sense of regional identity. In his poem “Christmas Trees,” a farmer considers a city merchant’s offer to purchase and cut his pasture pines; much like Jewett’s young girl, the farmer refuses the man’s remuneration, confirming the Yankee’s rootedness and the moral superiority of his second-nature world. Like Thaxter, Frost understood the tensions in this connection between people and place. In “Hill Wife,” composed in the dreamlike Georgian cadence that inspired his early descriptions of New England, a woman succumbs to the hopelessness of her backcountry existence and wanders off into the woods, never to be found. Examples of the darker side of New England life can be read in other regionalist writers, among them Mary Wilkins Freeman, Edith Whar- ton, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Edwin Arlington Robinson. Yet despite their somber reflections, these authors did much to render New England’s second nature iconic. Roads not taken, bending birches, stone walls, apple orchards, spring pastures, cellar holes, and woodpiles, as the scholar David Watter notes, became Frost’s “literary property.” Regionalist writers gave good reason for the fierce protective stance that environmentalists took in the 1960s.16 Like Frost, the modernist painter Marsden Hartley was known for producing bold and original images that enhanced New England’s reputation for stark beauty and rugged individualism. Born in 1877 in Lewiston, Maine, Hartley trained at the Cleveland Institute of Art before moving to New York City, where he joined a group of expressionist painters associated with the avant- garde photographer Alfred Stieglitz. In 1912 he traveled to France and Ger- many, where his painting style became more abstract, and then to Province- town and Santa Fe. In 1930 he moved back to New England and two years later published “The Return of the Native,” a poem that signaled his new identity as “the painter from Maine.” In the mythic construction of Hartley’s life, this homecoming was a defining moment. In fact, his regional reawakening was, like Frost’s, a conscious decision to embrace the Yankee persona. Inspired by the Midwestern regionalist painters Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood, he gravitated to an art form that objectified regional values, executing a difficult triangulation between his evolving technique, his Maine coast subjects, and his New York viewers.17 248 | chapter 9

Hartley embraced the surge of regionalist imagery in the 1930s, and like Frost he did much to shape those images. His paintings of the White Moun- tains and Maine coast, as Robert McGrath and Barbara MacAdam note in their 1988 book A Sweet Foretaste of Heaven, projected a “powerful emblematic sense of place” expressed in clean, powerfully lined renderings. As with Frost’s poetry, these works accented the primitive qualities in the relation between land and people. All this he “handled broadly,” as a critic wrote in 1947, “without undue detail.” Like Thaxter’s poems, his minimalist landscapes drew attention to the deeper interactions between people and land, and both writer and artist saw something romantic and heroic in this stark relation. Angular forms and bold lines reflected the severity of the New England environment, but here too the archetype was deeply humanized: even Hartley’s depictions of pure nature said something about Yankee character.18 Largely missing from this surge of cultural regionalism was New England’s Native American heritage. In the American West, Indians were an undeniable part of regional imagery, but in the East, indigenous culture was subsumed in a denser Euro-American settlement. If mentioned at all in Anglo literature, modern Indians were either denigrated as relics of the past or criticized as corrupted by white society. Translating aboriginal tradition into written word was left to native elders and a few dedicated anthropologists. Charles Leland’s Algonquin Legends of New England, published in 1884, and Life and Traditions of the Red Man, written a decade later by the Penobscot tribal governor Joseph Nicolar, described a cultural identity based on the legendary trickster Glooskap, who acted out moral lessons by fashioning nature into a better world for his children. Glooskap patted the squirrel down to size, made maple sugar thinner so people would not get lazy or fat, and left his footprints, possessions, and kills around the countryside to form islands, mountains, and lakes.19 In tribal lore, the landscapes of New England remained sacred. Along with tribal elders, craft workers and performers perpetuated native culture. Women sold grass and ash baskets in traditional motifs, and both male and female Indians accented the native presence by translating their songs, legends, and dances into vaudeville clichés. Frank Loring, who styled himself “Big Thunder,” was one of many New England Indians who became “chiefs” on the entertainment circuit. Loring worked with P. T. Barnum’s circus, returned to Maine, and in 1889 opened a museum in the Penobscot village on Indian Island. He was, his biographer concludes, a “cultural survivalist,” critical of white civilization but “not above . . . fooling the affluent white folk visiting his saving second nature | 249 humble abode and milking them for all they were worth.” Henry Perley, known as Henry Red Eagle, grew up on the shores of Maine’s Moosehead Lake, where he worked as a logger, guide, and craftsman. Like Loring, he joined several traveling shows and worked at D. W. Griffith’s Biograph Film Studio in New Jersey. Back in Maine, he wrote short stories for outdoor adventure magazines. At a time when most regionalist writers ignored Indians, Red Eagle, as biographer Dale Potts shows, portrayed them not as primitive forest dwellers in an idealized primeval wilderness, but as loggers, trappers, and guides in a working woods. Red Eagle also wrote for travel magazines, inserting an occasional complaint about logging clear-cuts and overly lavish tourist facilities. He used his Indian persona and his cachet as a forest dweller to validate these criticisms, although like Jewett and Frost, he voiced his preservationist instincts as something of a cultural outsider. His message was ambiguous, but his imagery was clear: rather than invent an idyllic primitive wilderness setting for his Indian characters, he too humanized the natural world he wrote about.20

The Regional Planning Movement As writers and artists were encoding the second-nature landscapes of New England, scholars were turning to the region in search of an authentic American culture. In 1867 William Francis Allen, a classicist at the University of Wisconsin, published Slave Songs of the United States as a study in regional culture; his most influential student, Frederick Jackson Turner, then went on to inspire a generation of historians to record the history of America region by region. In the early 1900s, the North Carolina sociologist Howard Odum published several studies of Southern folk culture as part of a broader search for America’s “forgotten heroes,” and in 1930 a group of twelve prominent American writers known as the “Southern Agrarians” published a collection of essays entitled I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, in which they extolled the virtues of traditional Southern life. The following year, Walter Prescott Webb producedThe Great Plains, his monumental history celebrating the rural West. In 1933 the literary critic Bernard DeVoto penned his classic “New England: There She Stands” for Harper’s Magazine, and beginning in 1935, the Farm Security Administration hired photographers to record images of ordinary people representing each section of the country. Regionalism was not without its contradictions, as Joseph Conforti notes; too often scholars ignored the dynamic elements in regional identity and accepted 250 | chapter 9 poverty or racism as a “folkway” indigenous to, and indelible in, the region. But it was a powerful force in academic life, and it gave scholarly distinction to the regional focus in literature and art.21 In 1923 the geographer Harland Barrows offered a more precise delineation of regionalism by redefining the concept of human ecology formulated earlier by the urban sociologist Robert E. Park. Barrows identified an indigenous culture for each region, defined as an interaction among human and nonhuman elements “so intertwined that they cannot be untangled.” That same year, the architects Clarence Stein and Henry Wright, literary critic Lewis Mumford, economist Stuart Chase, and forester Benton MacKaye founded the region- ally based Planning Association of America, whose mission was to protect America from the homogenizing influences of mass media, mass advertising, mass consumerism, and New Deal federalism—that is, from the synthetic elements that threatened the human ecology of the region.22 Like their counterparts in literary fiction, regional planners were convinced that the indigenous blend of nature, folk, and history in each region was more authentic than its urban cultures, and like other regionalists, they were defensive about this indigenous culture. “In small trickles and runnels,” Benton MacKaye wrote, hinterland towns sent their resources to the city, only to be inundated by a “backflow” of consumer products, radio broadcasts, advertising, and suburban development. Best known as the inspiration behind the Appalachian Trail, MacKaye saw the project as a foundation for rural redevelopment along the length of the mountain spine, with recreational and forestry camps, wood products plants, service communities for hikers, health centers for victims of tuberculosis and mental stress, and small farms and ranches. Like the Romantics before him, he saw nature as a source of spiritual strength, and his understanding of nature contained a human element as well.23 As it did in the colonial revival, New England loomed large in the regional planning movement. Mumford made this connection clear in his 1926 Golden Day when he rejected Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous dictum that Ameri- can character was forged on the western frontier. Pioneers, Mumford argued, moved too fast and too often to produce a truly indigenous culture. In New England, towns, farms, houses, and ideas grew organically out of their geographical and historical circumstances—this was the true hearth of Ameri- can culture. The planning expert Myles McDougal considered New England a “model region”: large enough for “rational control of resources” and small enough to manage these resources democratically. New Englanders, he saving second nature | 251

thought, were particularly close to the cycles of the seasons, the shape of the hills, and the flow of the rivers; closeness to nature gave them a vibrant indigenous culture and a firm foundation for regional planning.24 The years after World War II saw few practical applications of the lofty ideals put forward by Mumford, MacKaye, and others, but the postwar explosion of suburban development put a premium on controlled growth. Between 1940 and 1975, New England launched some 100 interstate compacts to tackle issues ranging from economic growth to flood control to pollution abatement.25 These planning efforts fell short of the ambitious programs advanced in the 1930s, but the concept of land and culture as a single indigenous ecology—a second nature—had enormous staying power.

Pollution and the Dawn of Environmentalism The discourse on second-nature landscapes in the colonial revival, the literature of tourism, and the regional planning movement provided a compelling backdrop for New England environmentalism. As a national force, environmentalism was a reaction to the postwar era’s profligate consumerism and the quest for a better quality of life; the movement was animated by the student protests of the 1960s as well as a series of nationally publicized environmental disasters. In New England, it began less dramatically as a campaign to control water pollution. As early as the 1920s, states had begun creating pollution control agencies to rid rivers of septic waste, industrial fibers, chemicals, dyes, and other pollutants, but initially these agencies were ineffective. One reason was because New England still presented the recreationist with numerous rivers and streams in relatively pristine condition. In addition, the hard times faced by the textile industry in the early twentieth century left legislators reluctant to impose regulations that might further burden mill owners. As a result, New Englanders largely ignored the caustic fumes and oxygen-starved waters that flowed downriver from their industrial cities.26 Some of the worst effects appeared in southern Connecticut’s burgeoning postwar suburbs, where overworked sewage systems poured raw waste into the Housatonic, Naugatuck, and Connecticut Rivers, already contaminated by industrial pollutants. Caustic hydrogen sulfide fumes from the oxidizing waste in the industrialized river systems throughout New England blackened paint on riverside buildings and tarnished silver in homes. In 1941 business owners along the lower Androscoggin River, host to dozens of paper and 252 | chapter 9 textile mills, formed “action clubs” and took their complaints to the governor. They received little immediate satisfaction, but their organization marked the beginnings of grassroots environmental protest in New England. In the 1950s, public health officers began drawing connections between pollution and infant diarrhea, enteritis, infantile paralysis, and poliomyelitis, triggering concern among women’s groups. In 1950 representatives from the Connecticut Forest and Park Association, the Federated Garden Clubs, and several other organizations formed the Natural Resources Council of Con- necticut; similar umbrella organizations materialized in New Hampshire in 1953, Maine in 1959, and Vermont in 1963. Drawing energy from the combative social climate created by the civil rights, antiwar, and feminist movements, these organizations rallied behind the vision of unspoiled New England crafted by generations of writers and artists. Concern over water pollution broadened with growing public awareness of the toxic effects of heavy metals, solvents, pesticides, and petrochemicals. After publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, these contaminants became impossible to ignore. When the 1967 federal Clean Water Act provided matching funds for municipal water treatment plants, Massachusetts and Connecticut spent over a billion dollars to bring the Connecticut River up to Class B status, making the river safe for recreational uses and suitable habitat for aquatic life. Governments and industries conducted a similar campaign along the Merrimack River between 1968 and 1983, and in 1967 Governor Kenneth Curtis of Maine launched a $60 million campaign to restore the heavily industrialized Androscoggin, Kennebec, and Penobscot Rivers. The 1972 amendments to the Federal Water Pollution Control Act set national standards for water purity, but in many cases New England waters were already well on their way to recovery as a result of sustained efforts dating back into the early postwar years.27 The region’s most difficult cleanup occurred in Boston Harbor. In the 1930s, bacteria counts in its waters were among the highest in the nation, forcing the city’s Metropolitan District Commission to construct swimming pools in lieu of allowing ocean bathing; as late as the 1970s, outmoded municipal treatment facilities released over five billion gallons of raw or minimally treated sewage into the harbor yearly. Although the city received a waiver from federal pollution-control legislation because of the sewage system’s deep-water ocean discharge, in 1982 the city of Quincy filed a civil suit against the commission to bring the system into compliance with federal law. By this time matching federal funds for water treatment facilities were exhausted, and the agency missed saving second nature | 253

several deadlines mandated by the resulting court order in the late 1980s. Under pressure from the federal courts and the Environmental Protection Agency, Boston officials constructed twelve enormous digesters that heated the clarified sewage to reduce volume and then sent the residue to a processing facility, where it was rendered into cakes, pellets, and fertilizer. As Sarah Elkind notes in Bay Cities and Water Politics: The Battle for Resources in Boston and Oakland, the cleanup was in some ways simply “a longer pipe . . . extending . . . into yet deeper water,” but the new facilities, she points out, left the bay in a far cleaner condition. By the early twenty-first century, Boston Harbor was again host to pollutant-sensitive organisms, and bathers were returning to the beaches, with more thorough treatment on the horizon.28 With the rivers recovering, antipollution groups shifted to protecting them from residential and commercial development by establishing green belts, negotiating watershed-wide building restrictions, opening public access points, and monitoring nonpoint source pollution. One example is the Nashua River Clean-Up Committee, which reinvented itself in 1969 as the Nashua River Watershed Association and, over the next decade, established some eighty-five miles of protected greenway along the shores of the now-attractive waterway. The model for these new river-keeper organizations was the Connecticut River Watershed Council. Founded in 1952 to campaign against federal dams, water pollution, and water diversions, the council eventually worked with federal agencies to establish the Lower Connecticut River Con- servation Zone and to restore migratory fish runs.29 These types of committees were clearly grassroots in their composition and mindset, but members were willing to cooperate with state and federal agencies to accomplish their objectives. When the Sudbury River’s marshlands were threatened in the 1950s, the Massachusetts legislature passed an act mandating state action, but Conservation Commissioner Charles Foster preferred to let community-based organizations work out their own solutions. Almost immediately they began buying up wetlands, accepting gifts of land, purchasing easements, and lobbying for stronger zoning ordinances. Using a mix of public and private devices so dense that it was “impossible to chart them clearly on a map,” conservationists brought the marshes under permanent protection. Similarly, that same decade Boston’s Metropolitan District Commission launched the Upper Charles River Protection Proj- ect. When water quality improved in the 1980s, the commission linked arms with local and statewide environmental organizations and the U.S. Army 254 | chapter 9

Corps of Engineers to form a park along the banks of the river between Bos- ton and Waltham.30 Similar efforts continued in northern New England. In 1973 southern Maine activists created the Saco River Corridor Commission, made up of representatives from each of the twenty towns along this heavily used recreational waterway. The commission established watershed-wide standards for setbacks, frontage, and public access, and a decade later the Maine Rivers Act applied these specifications to rivers throughout the state. When the Massa- chusetts Department of Environmental Protection initiated a similar Scenic Rivers Program, towns used the Saco model to develop their own regulations. In 1976 New Hampshire residents formed the Merrimack River Watershed Council and put nearly 80 percent of the shoreline under some form of locally mandated protection. On the Pemigewasset, one of the state’s most scenic waterways, property-rights activists killed a proposal for federal Wild and Scenic River status, but towns created a protective system almost as effective through a coordinated set of rules based on the Saco plan.31 Only eight New England rivers received federal Wild and Scenic River status. The program was lightly used in the region because it was created to protect pristine western rivers, and New England’s community management tradition provided alternatives for conservation. In a few cases, however, it answered the needs of users, particularly where it prevented objectionable alternatives such as hydroelectric development or water diversion. Here again, environmental policy was rewritten to accommodate second-nature landscapes. The Concord and Assabet Rivers were included in the program because of their historic rather than wilderness associations, and in almost all cases, the des- ignated rivers presented a mixed panorama of village, farmland, forest, and industrial landscapes. At a time when national environmental organizations were fixed on protecting pristine rivers flowing through uninhabited, federally owned land, grassroots organizations achieved some form of protection for almost every river in New England, even the most industrialized. The clean-water campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s laid out the basic arguments for nature protection, but environmentalism became a household word in New England in the 1970s through several much more confrontational campaigns to protect the coast. Like rivers, coastal areas were classic second- nature landscapes, steeped in maritime history and romanticized by writers like Jewett, Thaxter, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. In 1969 protests over a nuclear power plant at Seabrook, New Hampshire, drew attention to development saving second nature | 255

pressures along the coast; four years later, the shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis proposed a $600 million oil refinery complex on Durham Point in New Hampshire’s Great Bay Estuary, one of the largest brackish ecosystems on the eastern coast. The state defeated the refinery proposal in 1989 and went on to create the 14,000-acre Great Bay Reserve, protected by a complicated alliance of federal and state agencies and the nonprofit Great Bay Stewards. Responding to a host of similar threats, Rhode Island and Massachusetts created pioneering coastal-resources management agencies in 1971 and 1975; after a series of acrimonious public debates over oil-refinery and tanker-port proposals at four of its seaports, Maine reached a similar consensus on development. These high-profile campaigns fused the national concern for ecological preservation to New England’s most cherished cultural landscapes and set the environmental movement on a path to protecting second nature.32

Preserving Second-Nature Icons New England led the nation in the 1970s not only in river and coastal environmentalism but also in protecting pastoral landscapes against the threat of suburban development. In the early postwar years, suburbs seemed a progressive solution to naturalizing the urban environment, but over time planners realized that these communities were also voracious consumers of open space. In the towns around Boston, the average lot size for a single-family home increased to over an acre by the end of the century; in Maine, suburban land use nearly doubled in the second half of the century, expanding to approximately 1.2 million of the state’s 19.7 million acres. During the 1960s electronics boom, factories, office buildings, and residential neighborhoods filled the open land along Route 128 west of Boston, and over the next two decades suburbs spread from Cape Cod west to Worcester and north into New Hampshire. Suburban sprawl effaced community character, crowded out traditional land uses, and put enormous pressure on highway, utility, and emergency-response systems; “indigenous culture” was threatened in ways that regional planners of the 1930s could never have imagined.33 During the 1960s, the Pennsylvania journalist William H. Whyte published a series of influential essays on town planning that echoed concerns raised earlier by the regional planning movement. Whyte recognized the importance of visionaries like Mumford and MacKaye, but he also understood that most people would consider planning on this scale too radical. Instead, he 256 | chapter 9 suggested a range of more limited options shaped to local circumstances: zoning ordinances, preferential taxation for farmland and forests, conservation easements, visual buffers, building-design guidelines, setbacks, incentives for cluster development, and targeted public purchases to protect aquifers, wetlands, wildlife habitat, and floodplains. Inspired by Whyte’s formulations, state planners wrote up practical guidelines for local planning boards in the 1970s, and states passed growth management laws requiring each town to prepare a comprehensive plan to protect its “village character.” As one land-use planner put it, New England towns had evolved over centuries in a “gradual, organic way . . . a result of the efforts of hundreds of individual builders working within the widely accepted social, aesthetic and physical constraints.” This history made single-design suburban housing tracts especially inappropriate in New England. At the same time, however, planners were advantaged by the fact that New England communities were often centuries old, which gave them a social cohesiveness rarely achieved in America’s new satellite communities. Resi- dents—even recent arrivals—could be united around this shared heritage.34 Nevertheless, protecting iconic second-nature resources such as village centers, rolling farmlands, winding country lanes, stone walls, and wooded hillsides presented unprecedented challenges. In 1982, at the request of local and regional planning commissions, the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Man- agement completed an inventory of the state’s cultural landscapes, places where, as the report stated, human habitation “complemented rather than destroyed the natural environment.” These features were so vast and so enmeshed in human history, the report concluded, that they could not be saved through wholesale public purchase but must be protected “indirectly” by using the planning tools Whyte had proposed two decades earlier. As the nation’s first statewide survey of cultural landscapes, the Massachusetts inventory became a template for hundreds of more focused studies that offered local planning boards better perspective on what to protect and how to protect it. Challenged by powerful real-estate developers as well as rural New England’s well-known resistance to land-use rules, these boards compiled a mixed record in implementing state guidelines. But where population pressures were high, land-use controls were often sophisticated and effective. Backed by state planning agencies, the local boards felt their way to an appropriate balance of progress and tradition, forging a system of environmental rules as significant as any in the environmental era.35 Farmland was critical to this effort. Farms everywhere were important to the environment: their permeable soils recharged aquifers; their operations saving second nature | 257

increased public awareness of food production; their open lands supported hunting, hiking, and snowmobiling; and their woodlots provided habitat for birds and animals. Those in New England were particularly important. In continuous use in some cases since the eighteenth century, their mixed-crop operations gave a rich texture to the landscape—a pleasing blend of antiquity, productivity, and spontaneous nature. Farms had been the focus of popular concern since the rural abandonment crisis of the 1880s and 1890s and the Country Life Movement of the next decade, and the New England practice of “rusticating”—boarding out with farm families during summer months or converting played-out homesteads into summer retreats—added even more cultural cachet to these fondly remembered places. The back-to-the-land movements of the 1930s and 1960s reinforced the same cultural values at a time when books by Henry Beston, Elisabeth Ogilvie, Ruth Moore, Louise Dick- inson Rich, Bernice Richmond, and E. B. White had thoroughly romanticized New England’s agricultural tradition. Saltwater farms fringing the coast, hill farms with their pastures running back to the wooded slopes, and vast cultivated intervales along the central river valleys became as iconic as the pristine natural monuments that epitomized visions of the West.36 Still, the suburban threat came at a difficult time for the New England farm. During the 1940s, huge federally funded irrigation projects in the Columbia, Colorado, and Snake River basins brought millions of acres of western dry- lands into agricultural production, and the interstate highway system built in the 1950s, coupled with refrigerated trucking, gave these new farms easy access to markets in the East. Capital-intensive developments, like mechanization, synthetic fertilizers, and chemical pesticides, disadvantaged New England family farms in this increasingly competitive atmosphere, leaving them vulnerable to rising land values and complaints from suburban neighbors about early-morning tractor noise, dust, pesticide spraying, manuring, and animal odors. Acreage in farmland fell by 63 percent in New England between 1950 and 1980, compared to 14 percent nationwide. But after 1980, even as agricultural acreage continued to fall across the country, it stabilized in New England, partly because of preservation efforts.37 Tax policy was one key to farmland preservation. Taxing land according to its highest potential use, a standard valuation practice, disadvantaged farmers when suburban development elevated nearby land values, and as early as the 1950s farmers began pressing for current-use valuation based on timber tax policies implemented earlier in the century. In the late 1960s, Connecticut 258 | chapter 9 passed a current-use tax law that applied to farms as well as forests, and other states enacted similar legislation. Vermont’s Use Value Assessment Program added special rates for protected wetlands, vernal pools, and other sensitive areas, and the state’s Land Gains Tax imposed a penalty on lands purchased and resold in fewer than six years. New Hampshire voters endorsed a current-use tax law in 1968, Maine in 1970. In addition, state agencies purchased development rights to high-priority farmland, which provided capital for farmers’ operations and kept their lands off the market. University extension services encouraged small farmers to experiment with specialty vegetable production, direct-to-consumer sales, buy-local campaigns, cooperative marketing, sustainable agriculture, crop diversification, integrated pest management, organic food production, and other means of competing in a corporate-dominated agricultural market.38 By the 1980s, states were applying comparable planning tools to the more sparsely inhabited lands along the northern fringe. Completion of the interstate highway program in the 1970s, coupled with a boom in second homes, retirement complexes, and ski resorts, brought dramatic changes in the rural landscape. In 1970 Massachusetts state planners developed an inventory of “unusual or unique natural features,” and towns used this list to regulate development in identified areas. That year, Vermont passed Act 250, known as the Land Use and Development Law, which created a state environmental board and a series of regional environmental commissions to consider all developments encompassing more than ten acres, including public review and detailed performance criteria. A year later, Maine created a Land Use Regu- lation Commission to provide similar oversight in its unincorporated townships, which amounted to about half the state’s land base. Like Vermont’s Act 250, Maine’s commission helped manage a booming market for second homes and forest mini-estates and subjected all large development projects to some form of citizen review.39

Land for the People The classic goal of the environmental movement—the protection of uninhabited natural areas—was as complicated in New England as was protecting its second-nature lands. Creating state parks and forests was traditionally a private initiative in New England. As early as 1865, the Vermont conservationist Joseph Battell purchased Bread Loaf Mountain in Ripton and donated saving second nature | 259

the property to the state, with other Vermonters later following his example. In Massachusetts the landscape designer Charles Eliot and several colleagues formed the Trustees of Public Reservations in 1891 and were authorized by the commonwealth to select, acquire, and manage lands for public use. Eliot predicted that “generous men and women would be ready to buy and give into its keeping some of these fine and strongly characterized works of Nature; just as others buy and give to a museum fine works of art.” The Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests, formed in 1901, played a similar role in that state, and in 1895 the nonprofit Connecticut Forest and Park Association launched an acquisition program. Maine’s Percival P. Baxter purchased 6,000 acres of timberland around Mount Katahdin in 1930 and eventually deeded 210,000 acres to the state to form Baxter State Park. Acadia National Park was created out of a similar acquisition program headed by George B. Dorr, John D. Rockefeller Jr., and other wealthy Mount Desert Island summer visitors. In Rhode Island, the nonprofit Southern New England Forest Consortium, the Rhode Island Forest Conservator’s Organization, and the Rhode Island Tree Council, all founded between 1985 and 1994, worked with public agencies to protect rural lands in that state.40 In the absence of an aggressive government acquisition program, New England’s most innovative contribution to preserving uninhabited land was the private, nonprofit land trust, an idea pioneered by the Trustees of Pub- lic Reservations in 1891. The concept gained ground during the 1950s when economic prosperity, a shorter work week, better highways, paid vacations, greater disposable income, and the looming threat of suburban sprawl put a premium on open lands. The Nature Conservancy, which became the largest land-trust organization in America, made its first acquisition in 1955 in New York State, and in 1957 Massachusetts passed an act authorizing towns to form volunteer conservation commissions to accept gifts of property, maintain lands and trails, and protect critical natural areas. Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire followed in the early 1960s, and Vermont and Maine in the early 1970s, providing a template for numerous small, private land trusts across the region. Although some trusts were statewide, regional, or national concerns, most were local affairs, growing out of intimate knowledge of a specific locale. Well-grounded in local political culture, they could adjust their mandates to accommodate anything from wilderness to working farm and choose to permit any number of locally accepted activities. During the Reagan era, they 260 | chapter 9 were sheltered from the antienvironmental, antigovernment backlash by their strong local connections, and they filled an ongoing need for open-space preservation. In 1987 the Lincoln Institute for Land Policy counted some 535 land trusts across the nation, with about 40 percent in New England. The number of new land trusts began to fall off in the 1990s, possibly because of financial constraints or a “saturated market,” but by this time trusts had been formed in virtually every area of New England. And if the number of trusts was stabiliz- ing, their acreage continued to grow.41 The proliferation of land trusts led to a second preservation device tailored to New England’s privately held natural landscapes. In 1961 the Nature Con- servancy acquired development rights to property on the Bantam River in Connecticut while the property itself remained in private hands, and thus was born the modern conservation easement. The idea was not entirely new; easements were used in the post–Civil War years to protect battlegrounds and war memorials and to encourage farmers to continue working these sites as they had been worked before the war; in addition, states occasionally used easements in the 1950s to guard highways against billboards and other forms of commercial blight. This type of land conservation was perfected in 1969 when the Maine Coast Heritage Trust, headed by Peggy and David Rockefeller and fellow summer resident Thomas Cabot, lobbied the Maine legislature for a conservation easement statute and then went on to purchase development rights to lands along the coast. The idea floundered somewhat as titles passed to a second generation of property owners, the victim of vague legal enforcement procedures. Nevertheless, litigation generally supported the easements, and by the end of the century there were more than 900 in New England and New York, protecting approximately 300,000 acres. Although both land trusts and conservation easements were used widely across the nation, they were New England inventions, best adapted to the privately owned second-nature landscapes at the heart of the preservation agenda across the region.42 In addition, New England also pioneered the idea of town forests. An 1882 Massachusetts state law allowed towns to purchase land for forest preservation, and the act was used regionwide to create parks and stimulate interest in forest management. Unlike in a land trust, towns acquired forests haphazardly. “Throughout their histories,” Robert McCullough writes, “New England towns . . . secured the odd parcel of timberland whenever opportunity and need became aligned. Whether for recreation, watershed protection, timber growth, or, ultimately, conservation, whether to supply poor farms with saving second nature | 261

pasture or fuelwood or simply to reduce town debt, woodland has always been a readily available commodity.” Some towns actively replanted these lands or appointed foresters to manage them, but most were eventually given over to recreation or nature preservation. In the 1950s, conservation commissions assumed responsibility for town forests. “The accent shifted slightly,” McCullough notes, as town forests “grew to encompass concern for the fragile balance of ecology in a world of unyielding change.”43 Toward the end of the twentieth century, the states themselves became more active in land preservation, adding an overlay of government activism to the already vigorous nonprofit effort. In 1963 New Hampshire authorized a $9 million bond issue to expand the state’s park system, and in 1986 it established a Land Conservation Investment Program to help towns, state agencies, and nonprofit organizations acquire lands. The nonprofit Trust for New Hampshire Lands solicited donations to augment these state funds, resulting in thousands of acres of protected riverbanks, forests, farmlands, bogs, and mountaintops. In Connecticut, federal and nonprofit groups worked together to protect the lower Connecticut and Housatonic marshes, which were crucial to the Atlantic flyway. Maine’s state acquisition program began almost inadvertently in 1972 when a newspaper reporter named Bob Cummings wrote a feature on the “public reserved lots,” lands set aside in each township in the original surveys to fund schools and churches. Because the townships in the logging districts were never incorporated, companies had absorbed these lots into their private holdings. The state sued the major landowners and won back over 500,000 acres, which were then consolidated around some of the most spectacular wild lands in the state. In 1987 Maine voters endorsed a program called Land for Maine’s Future, which over the next two decades acquired a half million acres in fee land and conservation easements. In 1978 Rhode Island’s Agricultural Lands Preservation Commission began purchasing development rights to farmlands, and together with local and regional trusts, the commission eventually protected about 20 percent of the state’s land area.44 Another transfer of private lands came in the 1970s in a series of legal claims brought by the Wampanoag Indians on Martha’s Vineyard, the Mashpees on lower Cape Cod, Rhode Island’s Narragansetts, Connecticut’s Mashantucket Pequots, Mohegans, Schaghticokes, and Mohegans, Vermont’s St. Francis Sokoki, and Maine’s Maliseets, Passamaquoddy, and Penobscot Indians, all of whom either received federal tribal status or sued municipal, state, or federal agencies to regain lands that had been taken from them during the previous 262 | chapter 9 two centuries. The most successful restitution involved Maine’s Passama- quoddy and Penobscot nations. Attorney Thomas Tureen, working with the Passamaquoddy Tribal Council, discovered that their land had been taken in violation of the federal Indian Nonintercourse Act of 1790, which prohibited the sale of Indian lands without direct approval from Congress. Disappointed by a meeting with the state attorney general, the tribe prepared a lawsuit, and as the implications of the law became clear, the Passamaquoddies and Penobscots filed claim to millions of acres of former tribal lands. State officials failed to take the lawsuit seriously until 1975, when lending agencies began refusing to approve municipal bonds in the affected territory and real estate sales halted. Federal interveners negotiated a solution, and in 1980 President Jimmy Carter signed the Maine Indian Land Claims Settlement Act, awarding the tribes $81.5 million in compensation, to be used in part to purchase up to 300,000 acres of former tribal lands. The settlement was the largest victory of its kind in American history, and among other outcomes, it helped confirm native stature as stewards of the land.45 Land trusts, conservation easements, town forests, and state purchases blurred the boundary between public and private preservation in New England. Although mixed public–private conservation became common in the 1980s across the United States, this tradition too was born in New England, where it yielded some dramatic conservation lands, including the Bigelow Range in Maine, New Hampshire’s Great Bay Estuary, the marshes along the Connecticut River, the Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge in Massa- chusetts, Vermont’s BattenKill, and the Narragansett Bay Island Park in Rhode Island—all in one sense or another a result of partnerships in federal, state, and nonprofit conservation.46

Public Lands in the Modern Era State and nonprofit land acquisitions took on a special urgency during the 1980s in what was widely perceived as a landownership crisis in the Northern Forest. Northern New England is part of a larger temperate forest system that stretches from Maine to Minnesota, a sparsely settled region close to metropolitan areas containing about 40 percent of the nation’s population. Although more than 80 percent of this 32.5-million-acre forest is in private hands, the public has enjoyed a longstanding right of access. Traditionally, those who lived in the region were content with this situation. Vacationers, saving second nature | 263

as the writer Louise Dickinson Rich wrote in 1942, saw the industrial timberlands as a kind of “privacy insurance, our guarantee that we won’t wake up some morning and find new neighbors building a pink stucco bungalow down the river from us.”47 As long as timberland was cheap, paper companies were content to hold this property, despite its low annual yield. In the 1980s, however, rising interest rates and increased management costs altered this strategy. As land values rose, many companies liquidated their holdings and purchased pulpwood from outside sources. The trend culminated in 1988 when the British corporate raider James Goldsmith gained control of Diamond International Corporation in a hostile takeover, liquidated the mill properties, and sold nearly a million acres of timberland in northern New England and New York to a French holding company. Commercial timberland companies purchased 790,000 acres of Diamond land in Maine, New Hampshire acquired about 45,000 acres under its Forest Legacy Program, and speculators closed in on the rest. Between 1988 and 1999, more than 5.5 million acres in northern New England were sold at least once, and more than half were sold two or three times. The potential for forest fragmentation and loss of public access drew widespread concern from government agencies, industry, and conservation organizations.48 Since the Northern Forest was the last remaining opportunity for large- scale conservation in the East, the land sales of the 1980s and 1990s drew interest around the country. National organizations—the Wilderness Soci- ety, Sierra Club, Appalachian Mountain Club, Audubon Society—proposed different solutions, but all were united in their goal of protecting both the working woods and the forest’s ecological integrity. In 1988—the year of the Diamond land sales—the U.S. Forest Service organized the Northern For- est Lands Study, and the governors of Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire, and New York formed the Governors’ Task Force on Northern Forest Lands. In 1991 the task force commissioned the Northern Forest Lands Council to generate recommendations, and later the Appalachian Mountain Club helped create the Northern Forest Alliance to coordinate conservation, recreation, and forestry organizations across the region. Despite much contention, the various organizations reached a consensus that the best protection for the industrial forest and its ecological values was an incremental approach using a wide array of land-management tools including strategic purchases, conservation easements, land trusts, tax codes, zoning rules, and special protections for critical wildlife habitat and line-of-sight views. At the core of this concern was 264 | chapter 9 the “intimate connection,” as one report described it, between upland towns and their forest environments.49 At the same time, states and nonprofit organizations took advantage of the landownership crisis to acquire public land. The program Land for Maine’s Future purchased the spectacular 43,000-acre Nahmakanta Lake region and the 9,000-acre Debsconeag roadless area; in addition, New Hampshire’s Nature Conservancy and Forest Society worked with the state and the U.S. Forest Service to save the 40,000-acre Nash Stream valley, and Vermont’s natural resources agencies joined the nonprofit Vermont Land Trust and several other conservation organizations to purchase land in the state’s Northeast Kingdom. In 1998 the Nature Conservancy bought development rights to 220,000 acres on the St. John River in Maine—the last large undammed river east of the Mississippi—and the following year the Pingree family sold conservation easements on 754,000 acres of timberland in the same area to the New England Forestry Foundation. The Nature Conservancy also acquired 41,000 acres near Mount Katahdin to connect Baxter State Park to the state- owned Nahmakanta Ecological Reserve. The Northeast, Emily Bateson and Nancy Smith wrote in a 2001 essay, was “in the midst of [a] land ownership change so enormous it is almost impossible to fathom.”50 New England emerged from these acquisitions with a stunning collection of wild and semiwild lands protected under various forms of preservation and easement, all acquired piece by piece. State agencies drew on federal programs, such as the Land and Water Conservation Fund, the Cooperative Endangered Species Conservation Fund, and the Forest Legacy Program, and enlisted the efforts of dozens of nonprofit organizations, innumerable private landowners, and thousands of individual contributors. Cooperative efforts like these protected about 5 percent of Maine’s total land area, 10 percent of New Hamp- shire, 20 percent of Vermont, and 19 percent of Massachusetts. Although the main goal of the acquisition program was ecological preservation, the organizations and agencies also worked to safeguard the traditional working woods and the deep sense of place among those who lived nearby—goals that were not evident in the western wilderness model.51

Rewilding an Accidental Wilderness Managing this fragmented second-nature wilderness was immensely complicated. Western wilderness management typically involved saving second nature | 265

first-nature lands: vast roadless areas deemed “untrammeled and free,” as the 1964 Wilderness Act stated. This kind of pre-Columbian nature was virtually nonexistent in New England, but at the same time rapid revegetation could return even the most abused lands to seemingly wild conditions within a generation or two. Recognizing the potential of these second-nature forests, in 1975 Congress passed the Eastern Wilderness Areas Act, which added sixteen new units to the National Wilderness Preservation System. However, the act provided no guidelines for identifying and managing these smaller and less pristine areas, and Eastern preservationists were left with the prospect of rewriting wilderness policy for both the federal areas and the lands under state and nonprofit stewardship. Did wilderness require the presence of all the area’s original plant and animal species? Could wilderness mean something other than the original climax forest? Could it be smaller than the range of its top predators? Should nonnative species be considered part of the “new” wilderness? Answers to these and other questions required, as one study put it, “new, imaginative and perhaps radically different [ways of] thinking and doing.” In Maine, some groups argued for a three-million-acre North Woods National Park and Preserve that would protect wilderness qualities in some areas and accommodate traditional forms of forest use in others; other groups clung to the idea of public use of private forests. New England, Lloyd Irland writes in The Northeast’s Changing Forest, was “developing its own approach to the wilderness question, and . . . doing it quietly and slowly.”52 To address these questions, preservationists could draw on a long history of preserving New England’s second-nature landscapes. Charles Eliot, who founded the Trustees of Reservations in 1891, acknowledged that the vegetation cover on some of the Trustee lands was a result of “continuous interference with natural processes by men, fire, and browsing animals.” He mentioned this fact not to exclude the lands from the reservation system but to point out that they might be further “controlled and modified” to make them even more appealing, just as his mentor, Frederick Law Olmsted, had modified the landscapes of Boston’s Emerald Necklace. New England’s preservationist history drove home the practicality of Eliot’s willingness to compromise with nature.53 The first large-scale application of this practical approach was the protection of Maine’s remote and wild Allagash River, which flows northward through some of the state’s most isolated commercial timberlands. In 1956 the state’s park commission suggested shoreland acquisitions to protect the river, 266 | chapter 9 and a year later the National Park Service published plans for a park along the river corridor that would draw up to a million visitors per year. Other federal officials envisioned a massive dam, the so-called Dickey-Lincoln School Lakes project, on the nearby St. John River that would flood the lower Alla- gash, along with hundreds of thousands of acres of commercial timberland. In 1965 an unlikely alliance of timberland owners and environmentalists proposed a state-owned corridor along the Allagash to shield the river—and the industrial forest—from the dam and park proposals. At a time when wilderness advocates out West were battling to preserve pristine, untrammeled lands in the federal domain, Maine preservationists dubbed the Allagash region a “working wilderness,” a somewhat ironic concept that combined the masculine imagery of Indians, loggers, hunters, and skidder operators with a more conventional vision of virginal, unspoiled nature. In Maine’s dense spruce–fir stands, forester Henry Clepper pointed out in 1964, “an army of loggers might be felling pulpwood a mile inland, and unless the canoeist heard a power saw he would never be aware of the logging or see evidence of it.” In 1966 Maine voters endorsed a $1.5 million bond issue to purchase, with matching federal funds, a strip of land on each side of the river, and in 1970 the Allagash was dedicated as the nation’s first state-managed unit in the National Wild and Scenic River program.54 Protecting a “working wilderness” differed from classic wilderness management in four ways. First, New England’s wild areas had been used for centuries for a variety of industrial and recreational purposes, and prior claims to the land were strong. Mixing human history into wilderness management complicated policy decisions about hunting, motorized recreation, public access, structure removal, and fire, blow-down, and insect salvage—decisions that could be made virtually by fiat in the more sparsely settled West. In the 120,000-acre Quabbin Reservoir “wilderness” in Massachusetts, for instance, hunting was initially prohibited as part of the watershed protection plan, but lacking natural predators, deer populations expanded to the point where browsing threatened the forest understory. After five years of technical review and acrimonious public hearings, managers reintroduced hunting in 1991, much to the dismay of many who by this time considered Quabbin more a wildlife preserve than a watershed protection area.55 Second, the New England wilderness was ecologically dynamic. Classic wilderness brought to mind stable, climax ecosystems spread over vast roadless areas and spared almost all human impact—places where high altitude, saving second nature | 267

severe climate, and limited soil moisture slowed the succession process and made nature seem almost eternal. In New England, exotic introductions, rapid revegetation, and loss of top predators made management goals a moving target; maintaining “natural” ecosystems often required ongoing programs of burning, mowing, draining, clearing, or herbicide applications—that is, a set of conscious decisions about which plant and animal species to encourage and which to suppress. Nantucket Island’s heath habitat had been shaped by Indian burning over thousands of years, for example, but when Europeans ended this practice in the late 1600s, oak and pine intruded. These woodlands were pushed back again by cattle and sheep pasturing, and when this practice ended in the twentieth century, the trees returned again. By this time the heath supported several rare and endangered species and had become a signature island landscape, prompting conservationists to resort to prescribed burning—much as the native populations had done—to protect the vegetation that islanders considered natural. In these heavily humanized and dynamic landscapes, active wilderness management was all but mandatory.56 A third departure from classic wilderness policy was the relatively small size of the protected areas. New England’s patchwork of town, state, federal, and trust lands not only was matched to its smaller physiographic features, prevailing landownership patterns, and localized conservation initiatives, but it also reflected New Englanders’ basic understanding of nature. Henry David Thoreau, as the ecologist Daniel Botkin points out in his 2001 study of the poet’s writings, rarely mentioned the vast Katahdin wilderness aside from his essays in The Maine Woods: “In contrast, it was the biologically rich swamp, surrounding him so closely with life that distant vistas were obscured and size became irrelevant, that held the deepest meaning.” Following in Thoreau’s footsteps, New England nature writers emphasized the microcosm, and it was this ideal that inspired the region’s preservation approach. There were advantages to wilderness on this scale. Small natural areas scattered across the countryside invited access by a broader spectrum of people, and close boundaries encouraged visitors to develop an intimate, as opposed to panoramic, appreciation for nature. As Nora Mitchell and Rolf Diamant point out in their essay in Wilderness Comes Home, these small, recovering wilderness areas were instructive conceptual “ecotones”: porous boundaries between culture and nature that offered a chance to explore humanity’s proper role in a changing natural system and, perhaps, to discover new ways of living lightly on the land.57 Nevertheless, this fragmented wilderness posed difficulties for a fourth 268 | chapter 9 distinctive characteristic of New England wilderness policy. The 1964 Wil- derness Act had been created largely to benefit the recreationist—to provide respite or inspire a sense of awe and humility. Eastern wilderness was created in good measure to secure habitat for wildlife. It was, in this respect, a response to the dramatic rebounding of various species brought to the edge of extinction during the settlement process. White-tailed deer, moose, and caribou had disappeared from southern and central New England; large predators like wolves, panthers, fisher, bobcat, lynx, wolverine, and eagles had succumbed to bounties, and fur-bearing mammals had been trapped to virtual extinction.58 As the environment stabilized and states introduced game laws, many of these species reappeared. State conservation programs paid huge dividends in reestablishing deer herds and inland fish populations, just as new state forests and parks provided protection for other reemerging species. Beavers were reintroduced in the 1920s and went to work transforming stream systems into wetlands to nurture fish, birds, amphibians, insects, raccoons, muskrats, mink, otter, and moose. Deer, small mammals, and birds found food and cover in the revegetating farmlands, and fishers, reintroduced to control porcupine populations in 1950s, rebounded, as did pine martens when trapping was regulated. Lynx, bobcats, and black bears edged outward from their remote forest habitats. Owls and woodpeckers became more common in the maturing forests, and after the ban on DDT, bald eagles and ospreys returned to the skies above the renaturalizing wetlands and rivers. In the 1930s and again in the 1970s, game wardens reintroduced wild turkeys, and the flocks proliferated beyond expectations. Coyotes, drawn to the expanding deer herds, reached New York in the 1920s and New Hampshire and Maine in the 1930s, filling an ancient niche left vacant when wolves disappeared in the 1850s.59 New England’s patchwork wilderness was not ideal habitat for this recovering wildlife, but conservation organizations devised creative approaches to solve the problem. In Massachusetts, the Wildlands and Woodlands project, spearheaded by scientists connected to Harvard Forest, set out a plan to preserve large areas of working forest and increase the number of smaller reserves; meanwhile, states and private organizations sponsored critical habitat inventories, enlisted federal agencies, and worked with private landowners, land trusts, and volunteer groups to protect functioning ecological systems. Similar coalitions joined New Hampshire’s Ecological Reserve System Project, Ver- mont’s Biodiversity Project, and Maine’s Forest Biodiversity Project to piece together a regionwide public/private wildlife conservation program. They saving second nature | 269

mapped out core wilderness areas where they hoped to recapture the biological integrity of the original forest, and around these they designed a system of protective buffers made up of less sensitive plant and animal communities in the working woods. Finally, they identified corridors that linked core and buffer areas throughout the region. These connectors permitted regionwide territorial migrations, promoted genetic diversity, and expanded the potential range for large carnivores. The most ambitious was the Algonquin to Adiron- dack Connectivity Zone, a patchwork of wild and semiwild lands that allowed wolves, lynx, and other species to move from central Quebec to the Adiron- dack Park and adjacent New England wild lands.60 Restoring historic migratory fish runs was another step in the rewilding of New England. The most important of these species was the spring run of Salmo salar—the Atlantic salmon—which at one time frequented at least twenty-eight river basins in New England. In 1965 government agencies, nonprofit organizations, and the Penobscot Indian Nation began restoration efforts on the Penobscot River; three years later a coalition of state, federal, and nonprofit groups launched a similar program on the Connecticut River, which by this time was blocked by seventeen main-stem dams, some as high as fifty feet. Salmon farming took some pressure off the North Atlantic wild stocks, and in 1972 U.S. and Danish authorities signed an agreement limiting commercial catches off Greenland. By the end of the 1980s, Connecticut River salmon were able to reach approximately 88 percent of their ancestral main- stem waters. Boosting the migratory run required massive private fund-raising, international fishing quotas, a regionwide hatchery and stocking program, investments in fish passages, and a new round of industrial and municipal water treatment projects—a sophisticated, transatlantic life-support system put in place to sustain the few hundred “wild” salmon that found their way back to New England. But the extent of private and public cooperation was encouraging, and the mystique of the salmon—large, primitive, hard fighting—ensured that efforts would continue. And as restoration science improved, biologists shifted from stocking smolts to stocking fry. They protected the just-hatched fish with antibiotics, managed genetic stocks more carefully, and expanded stocking efforts to produce about 10 million fry per year. Volunteers conducted headwaters-to-outlet stream enhancement programs and improved fish passages to open more territory to migrations. Salmon numbers increased in the 1980s, then dropped off toward the end of the century, perhaps because of increased catches off Greenland, reductions in federal funding, overfishing 270 | chapter 9 smaller fish consumed by salmon, or sea temperature changes that shifted the balance of species. By 2011, however, counts were again rising.61 Largely with fisheries restoration in mind, New England also pioneered the process of dam removal. The Edwards Dam at Augusta on the Kennebec River, built in 1837, was the first in the nation to be breached against the owner’s wishes. This historic development began in 1989, when American Rivers, Atlantic Salmon Federation, Natural Resources Council of Maine, and Trout Unlimited formed the Kennebec Coalition and urged the Federal Energy Reg- ulatory Commission to deny the dam’s license renewal. In response, dam officials announced a $30 million reconstruction plan and “state-of-the-art” fish passageway. Casting itself as victim in a “vast environmental conspiracy,” the company used a number of tactics to influence federal regulators, but in 1997 the agency rejected the renewal application. Bath Iron Works, a shipbuilding firm downriver from the dam, agreed to help fund the removal in return for rights to develop thirteen acres of wetlands at the shipyard. In a ceremony that included the governor, the mayor of Augusta, and Secretary of Interior Bruce Babbitt, the dam was breached in July 1999. Removal of the Edwards Dam restored several migratory species to the lower Kennebec. With increased oxygenation, insect counts tripled, and the Kennebec hosted a run of some two million alewives, the largest such migration event on the eastern seaboard. Five-foot-long sturgeon breaching the surface became common. Rewilding the Kennebec encouraged boating, angling, bird watching, and hiking, and it emboldened environmentalists elsewhere to push for removal of antiquated or underutilized dams. Across the nation in the 1990s and early 2000s, some 465 dams were removed and scores more decommissioned.62 New England’s rewilding, a complicated negotiation between dedicated people and a dynamic ecology, suggests the diversity of regional approaches to protecting nature across America. In New England, environmentalists took on the difficult task of protecting their natural resources, naturalizing their cities, and saving second nature, and in the process they created a relation to the land that was in many ways unique. But New England environmentalism had lessons for all Americans. Protecting a village center, a family farm, an industrialized river, or a working wilderness drove home the reality of nature’s presence in even the most artificial environment. This approach to environmental advo- cacy extended the preservation mandate outward and confirmed the agrarian activist Wes Jackson’s useful dictum, “either all the earth is holy or none is.” saving second nature | 271

Environmentalists rallied to save the last relics of pristine nature in the North- east, but they also took measures to protect the more subtle forms of nature in Sarah Orne Jewett’s Maine coast, Marsden Hartley’s North Shore harbors, Robert Frost’s New Hampshire farms, and Henry Red Eagle’s north woods. Saving second nature was less dramatic than protecting the great earth monuments of the West, but it was a goal worth pursuing at a time when “first” nature was shrinking all across America at an alarming rate. In this sense, New England’s preservationist achievements remain, today more than ever, the region’s greatest gift to the American environmental legacy.63 “This page intentionally left blank” notes

Introduction: People and the Land in New England 1. George Wilson Pierson, “The Obstinate Concept of New England: A Study in Denudation,” New England Quarterly 28 (March 1955): 7; John R. Stilgoe, “Defining a New England Rural Landscape,” in New England Center, Planning for the Changing Rural Landscape of New England: Blending Theory and Practice (Durham, NH: By the Center, [1986?]), 2; Myles S. McDougal et al., The Case for Regional Planning with Special Reference to New England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1947), 38–39; Blake Harrison and Richard W. Judd, eds., A History of New England Landscapes (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011). 2. N. S. Shaler, “Environment and Man in New England,” North American Review 475 (June 1896): 732–33, 736, 739. 3. H. Roy Merrens, “Historical Geography and Early American History,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 22 (October 1965): 530, 533–35; Ellen Churchill Semple, American His- tory and Its Geographic Conditions (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903); Albert Perry Brigham, Geographic Influences in American History (Boston: Ginn, 1903); David Arnold, The Problem of Nature: Environment, Culture and European Expansion (Oxford: Blackwell 1996), 29–31, 36–37; Stephen Frenkel, “Geography, Empire, and Environmental Determinism,” Geograph- ical Review 82 (April 1992): 143–44. 4. Frederick Jackson Turner, “New England, 1830–1850,” Huntington Library Bulletin 1 (May 1931): 153–98. 5. Harlan H. Barrows, Lectures on the Historical Geography of the United States as Given in 1933, ed. William A. Koelsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 96–98, 100–102, 111, 113. 6. Arnold, Problem of Nature, 10–11, 115–16; Alfred W. Crosby, “The Past and Present of Envi- ronmental History,” American Historical Review 100 (October 1995): 1183–84; Jamie Eves,

| 273 274 | notes to pages 7–12

“A Valley White with Mist: Settlers, Nature, and Culture in a North Woods River Valley, 1800–1870” (PhD diss., University of Connecticut, 2005), 25. 7. John K. Wright, “New England,” Geographical Review 19 (July 1929): 479–94 (quote on 479). 8. James Truslow Adams, The American: The Making of a New Man (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1943), 44–45. 9. J. R. McNeill, “Observations on the Nature and Culture of Environmental History,” His- tory and Theory 42 (December 2003): 14; Melvin M. Knight, “Review: The Geohistory of Fernand Braudel,” Journal of Economic History 10 (November 1950): 212; Crosby, “Past and Present,” 1185; John M. Bumsted and James T. Lemon, “New Approaches in Early American Studies: The Local Community in New England,”Histoire Sociale / Social History 2 (1968): 98–111. 10. Edward C. Higbee, “The Three Earths of New England,” Geographical Review 42 (July 1952): 425–38. 11. Charles E. Clark, “Beyond the Frontier: An Environmental Approach to the Early His- tory of Northern New England,” Maine Historical Society Newsletter 11 (Summer 1971): 5–8, 10–15, 18. 12. Rhys Isaac, “The New EnglandMentalité: Ecologies, Structures, and Longues Durées from Algonquian to Yankee,” review of Changes in the Land, by William Cronon, Reviews in American History 12 (June 1984): 170–71; William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), 21; Carolyn Merchant, Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989). 13. Eves, “Valley White with Mist,” 32 n. 14. Isaac, “New England Mentalité,” 172–74; Alan Taylor, “Unnatural Inequalities: Social and Environmental Histories,” Environmental History 1 (October 1996): 6–7; Stephen Mosley, “Common Ground: Integrating Social and Environmental History,” Journal of Social His- tory 39 (Spring 2006): 919–20, 922; Arnold, Problem of Nature, 48. 15. Geoffrey Eley, “What Is Cultural History?”New German Critique 65 (Spring/Summer 1995): 19–36; Peter Burke, What Is Cultural History? (Malden, MA: Polity, 2008), 4, 8. 16. William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature (New York: Norton, 1995); McNeill, “Observations,” 16; John Stilgoe, “A New England Coastal Wilderness,” Geographical Review 71 (January 1981): 33–50; Richard White, “Discovering Nature in North America,” Journal of American History 79 (December 1992): 874. 17. Norman L. Christensen, “Landscape History and Ecological Change,” Journal of Forest His- tory 33 (July 1989): 116–17; Whitney, From Coastal Wilderness to Fruited Plain, 55, 67; John Kricher, “Nothing Endures but Change: Ecology’s Newly Emerging Paradigm,” Northeast- ern Naturalist 5, no. 2 (1998): 165–74; Emily W. B. Russell, People and the Land through Time: Linking Ecology and History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 16–18. 18. Christensen, “Landscape History,” 118; McNeill, “Observations,” 40. 19. Samuel P. Hays, “Toward Integration in Environmental History,” Pacific Historical Review 70 (February 2001): 59–62. 20. David Foster, preface to Lloyd C. Irland, The Northeast’s Changing Forest (Petersham, MA: Harvard Forest, 1999) xix; William F. Robinson, Abandoned New England: Its Hidden notes to pages 13–24 | 275

Ruins and Where to Find Them (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1976), xi; Christopher McGrory Klyza, ed., Wilderness Comes Home: Rewilding the Northeast (Hanover, NH: Mid- dlebury College Press, 2001), 31–46; Kent Ryden, Landscape with Figures: Nature and Cul- ture in New England (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2001); Jan Albers, Hands on the Land: A History of the Vermont Landscape (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000). 21 Roderick Nash quoted in Karl Jacoby, Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 3; John Opie, Nature’s Nation: An Environmental History of the United States (Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace, 1998), 2; Hal S. Barron, Those Who Stayed Behind: Rural Society in Nineteenth-Century New England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 3; Mar- tyn J. Bowden, “Culture and Place: English Sub-Cultural Regions in New England in the Seventeenth Century,” Connecticut History 35 (1994): 68–146; Brian Donahue, The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). 22. Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 6, 57; Clark, “Beyond the Frontier,” 13. 23. Theodore Steinberg,Nature Incorporated: Industrialization and the Waters of New England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); John T. Cumbler, Reasonable Use: The Peo- ple, the Environment, and the State, New England, 1790–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Diana Muir, Reflections in Bullough’s Pond: Economy and Ecosystem in New England (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2000), 81.

1. New England’s Natives 1. David Sanger, “Culture Change as an Adaptive Process in the Maine-Maritimes Region,” Arctic Anthropology 12, no. 2 (1975): 60–61; Bruce J. Bourque, Twelve Thousand Years: Amer- ican Indians in Maine (Lincoln: University of Kansas Press, 2001), xvi–xvii. 2. William A. Ritchie, “Fifty Years of Archaeology in the Northeastern United States: A Ret- rospect,” American Antiquity 50 (April 1985): 412. 3. Kathleen Joan Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 1500–1650 (Norman: Uni- versity of Oklahoma Press, 1996), xvii; D’Arcy McNickle, “Americans Called Indians,” in North American Indians in Historical Perspective, ed. Eleanor Burke Leacock and Nancy Oestreich Lurie (New York: Random House, 1978), 29; Ritchie, “Fifty Years of Archaeol- ogy,” 414. 4. Don W. Dragoo, “Some Aspects of Eastern North American Prehistory: A Review,” Ameri- can Antiquity 41 (January 1976): 3–8; Dean R. Snow, The Archaeology of New England (New York: Academic Press, 1980), 102–17; E. C. Pielou, After the Ice Age: The Return of Life to Gla- ciated North America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 147; Robert L. Kelly and Lawrence C. Todd, “Coming into the Country: Early Paleoindian Hunting and Mobility,” American Antiquity 53 (April 1988): 233–34. 5. Steven L. Cox, “The Paleo-Indian Period,” in Bourque,Twelve Thousand Years, 13; Pielou, After the Ice Age, 87, 109; Kelly and Todd, “Coming into the Country,” 232–33; McNickle, “Americans Called Indians,” 33; Snow, Archaeology of New England, 117–22. 276 | notes to pages 24–30

6. Gary Haynes, “The Catastrophic Extinctions of North American Mammoths and Mast- odonts,” World Archaeology 33 (February 2002): 392–93, 399–400; Snow, Archaeology of New England, 120–22. 7. R. B. Davis and G. L. Jacobson Jr., “Late Glacial and Early Holocene Landscapes in North- ern New England and Adjacent Areas of Canada,” Quaternary Research 23 (1985): 341–68; Betty Flanders Thompson,The Changing Face of New England (Boston: Houghton Miff- lin, 1977), 6–15; Dena F. Dincauze, “An Introduction to Archaeology in the Greater Boston Area,” Archaeology of Eastern North America 2, no. 1 (1974): 43. 8. Pielou, After the Ice Age, 83–89, 91–92, 167–68, 171–73; Sheila Connor, New England Natives: A Celebration of People and Trees (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 5–6. 9. Dena F. Dincauze, “A Capsule Prehistory of Southern New England,” in The Pequots in Southern New England: The Fall and Rise of an American Indian Nation, ed. Laurence M. Hauptman and James D. Wherry (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990), 20; Brian Denis Jones, “Human Adaptation to the Changing Northeastern Environment at the End of the Pleistocene: Implications for the Archaeological Record” (PhD diss., University of Connecticut, 1998), 46, 51, 221; Dragoo, “Eastern North American Prehistory,” 5. 10. Dragoo, “Eastern North American Prehistory,” 9; Cox, “The Paleo-Indian Period,” 19, 36; W. D. Strong, “North American Indian Traditions Suggesting a Knowledge of the Mammoth,” American Anthropologist, n.s., 36 (January–March 1934): 81, 85–86. 11. Snow, Archaeology of New England, 150–51, 153–54; Kelly, “Coming into the Country,” 239; Jan Albers, Hands on the Land: A History of the Vermont Landscape (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), 47; Jones, “Human Adaptation,” 9–12, 14–15; Cox, “The Paleo-Indian Period,” 22, 25. 12. Kelly, “Coming into the Country,” 240; Jones, “Human Adaptation,” 110–11. 13. James B. Petersen, “Early Holocene Occupation in the Central Gulf of Maine Region,” in Early Holocene Occupation in Northern New England, ed. Brian S. Robinson, James B. Petersen, and Ann K. Robinson (Augusta: Maine Historic Preservation Commission, Haf- fenreffer Museum of Anthropology, Maine Archaeological Society, 1992), 1–3 (quote on 3), 15; Ritchie, “Fifty Years of Archaeology,” 414–15. 14. Petersen, “Early Holocene Occupation,” 14–15, 17, 19–20, 23–24. 15. Cox, “Paleo-Indian Period,” 32–33; Albers, Hands on the Land, 51; Connor, New England Natives, 11; Snow, Archaeology of New England, 155, 169–70; Jones, “Human Adaptation,” 16. 16. David J. Bernstein, “Trends in Prehistoric Subsistence on the Southern New England Coast: The View from Narragansett Bay,”North American Archaeologist 11, no. 4 (1990): 322–23; Jones, “Human Adaptation,” 30; Bourque, Twelve Thousand Years, 72; McNickle, “Americans Called Indians,” 37. 17. Connor, New England Natives, 11, 13; McNickle, “Americans Called Indians,” 29, 35; Bourque, Twelve Thousand Years, 41–42. 18. Theodore E. Bradstreet and Ronald B. Davis, “Mid-Postglacial Environments in New England with Emphasis on Maine,” Arctic Anthropology 8, no. 2 (1975): 7–22; Connor, New England Natives, 14; Sanger, “Culture Change,” 60–75. 19. Ritchie, “Fifty Years of Archaeology,” 415–16 (quote on 416); Sanger, “Culture Change,” 60–61; Dean Snow, “Rising Sea Level and Prehistoric Cultural Ecology in Northern New England,” American Antiquity 37 (April 1972): 212; Snow, Archaeology of New England, 190, notes to pages 30–36 | 277

197, 200–201, 211–12; Bourque, Twelve Thousand Years, 43–61; Dincauze, “Introduction to Archaeology,” 43–49; David Sanger, “Maritime Adaptations in the Gulf of Maine,” Archaeol- ogy of Eastern North America 16 (1988): 84–89. 20. Snow, Archaeology of New England, 245; Dena F. Dincauze, “The Late Archaic Period in Southern New England,” Arctic Anthropology 12, no. 2 (1975): 27; Sanger, “Culture Change,” 69. 21. Bourque, Twelve Thousand Years, ch. 3; Ritchie, “Fifty Years of Archaeology,” 417. 22. David R. Yesner, “Archaeology of Casco Bay: A Preliminary Report,” MS 81-81, Maine His- torical Society; Connor, New England Natives, 16; Snow, “Rising Sea Level,” 213–19; Sanger, “Culture Change,” 69–75; David P. Braun, “Explanatory Models for the Evolution of Coastal Adaptation in Prehistoric Eastern New England,” American Antiquity 39 (October 1974): 582–87; Sanger, “Maritime Adaptations,” 91–92. 23. Bourque, Twelve Thousand Years, 92–95; Connor, New England Natives, 16–17; Sanger, “Mar- itime Adaptations,” 91–92. 24. Bruce Smith, “Origins of Agriculture in Eastern North America,” Science 246 (December 22, 1989): 1566–71; Peter Bellwood, First Farmers: The Origins of Agricultural Societies (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 19, 20–23; McNickle, “Americans Called Indians,” 39. 25. Mitchell T. Mulholland, “Territoriality and Horticulture,” in Holocene Human Ecology in Northeastern North America, ed. George P. Nichols (New York: Plenum, 1988), 140; Brag- don, Native People of Southern New England, 85; Connor, New England Natives, 35. 26. Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 16, 109–18, 120; Carolyn Merchant, Eco- logical Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 79–80; William E. Doolittle, “Agriculture in North America on the Eve of Contact: A Reassessment,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 83 (September 1992): 393. 27. Dincauze, “Capsule Prehistory of Southern New England,” 25–31; David Rindos, The Origins of Agriculture: An Evolutionary Perspective (New York: Academic Press, 1984), 4–6; Albers, Hands on the Land, 54; Snow, Archaeology of New England, 71–77. 28. M. K. Bennett, “The Food Economy of the New England Indians, 1605–75,”Journal of Politi- cal Economy 63 (October 1955): 370; Arthur E. Spiess and Mark H. Hedden, Kidder Point and Sears Island in Prehistory, Occasional Publications in Maine Archaeology no. 3 (Augusta: Maine Historic Preservation Commission, 1983), 159–62; Sanger, “Maritime Adaptations,” 92; Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 38, 65, 71–74, 81–83. 29. Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 76–77; Sanger, “Maritime Adaptations,” 92; Snow, Archaeology of New England, xii, 25, 37; Ruth Lynn Friedman, “Governing the Land: An Environmental History of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, 1600–1861” (PhD diss., Brandeis University, 1992), 41–43. 30. Morton quoted in Bennett, “Food Economy of the New England Indians,” 374–75; Shep- ard Kretch III, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (New York: Norton, 1999); Karl W. Butzer, “The Americas Before and After 1492: An Introduction to Current Geographical Research,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 82 (September 1992): 347; Mer- chant, Ecological Revolutions, 46. 31. Peter A. Thomas, “Contrastive Subsistence Strategies and Land Use as Factors for 278 | notes to pages 37–42

Understanding Indian-White Relations in New England,” Ethnohistory 23 (Winter 1976): 13–14; Gordon G. Whitney, From Coastal Wilderness to Fruited Plain: A History of Environ- mental Change in Temperate North America, 1500 to the Present (New York: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 1994), 105–7. 32. Gordon M. Day, “The Indian as an Ecological Factor in the Northeastern Forest,”Ecology 34, no. 2 (1953): 329; Diana Muir, Reflections in Bullough’s Pond: Economy and Ecosystem in New England (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2000), 19; Stanley W. Bromley, “The Original Forest Types of Southern New England,”Ecological Monographs 5 (January 1935): 64; Tim Parshall and David R. Foster, “Fire on the New England Landscape: Regional and Temporal Variation, Cultural and Environmental Controls,” Journal of Biogeography 29 (October/November 2002): 1212–14; Calvin Martin, “Fire and Forest Structure in Aborigi- nal Eastern Forest,” Indian Historian 6 (Summer 1973): 23–24. 33. William A. Patterson III and Kenneth E. Sassaman, “Indian Fires in the Prehistory of New England,” in Holocene Human Ecology in Northeastern North America, ed. George P. Nichols (New York: Plenum, 1988), 110, 126, 129; Day, “Indian as an Ecological Factor,” 333, 336; Emily W. B. Russell, “Indian-Set Fires in the Forests of the Northeastern United States,” Ecology 64 (February 1983): 83, 85–86; Martin, “Fire and Forest Structure,” 25. 34. Day, “Indian as an Ecological Factor,” 320, 334–35; J. Fuller et al., “Broadscale Forest Response to Land Use and Climate Change,” in Forests in Time: The Environmental Conse- quences of 1,000 Years of Change in New England, ed. David R. Foster and John D. Aber (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 119; James H. Brown, “The Role of Fire in Altering the Species Composition of Forests in Rhode Island,” Ecology 41 (April 1960): 310–16.

2. Contact, Colonization, and War 1. Jered Diamond, “Predicting Environmental History,” in Major Problems in American Envi- ronmental History: Documents and Essays, 3rd ed., ed. Carolyn Merchant (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1993), 9–14; James M. Blaut, “Environmentalism and Eurocentrism,” Geographical Review 89 (July 1999): 391–408. 2. Carville Earle, “The Americas Before and After 1492: Current Geographical Research,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 82 (September 1992): 489–95. 3. John L. Allen, “From Cabot to Cartier: The Early Exploration of Eastern North America, 1497–1543,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 82 (September 1992): 500–503; William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), 35–37. 4. Allen, “From Cabot to Cartier,” 507–9 (quote on 509); Earle, “Americas Before and After 1492,” 479; Henry F. Howe, Prologue to New England (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1943), 9. 5. Allen, “From Cabot to Cartier,” 513–14 (quote on 513); Kirsten A. Seaver, “Norumbega and ‘Harmonia Mundi’ in Sixteenth-Century Cartography,” Imago Mundi 50 (1998): 39 (quote), 43; T. J. Brasser, “Early Indian-European Contacts,” in Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 15, Northeast, ed. Bruce G. Trigger (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1978), 80; Howe, Prologue to New England, 10–12, 16–20. 6. Seaver, “Norumbega and ‘Harmonia Mundi,’ ” 34–36, 39–42, 47–48. notes to pages 43–49 | 279

7. Howe, Prologue to New England, 39–54; Augustus Freedom Moulton, Maine Historical Sketches (Lewiston, ME: State Printers, 1929), 3; Earle, “Americas Before and After 1492,” 579–81. 8. Howe, Prologue to New England, 98, 100, 118–19, 122, 130 (quote). 9. Ibid., 66–69, 71–72 (quotes), 74–76. 10. Ibid., 86–93 (quote on 89), 95; Louis B. Wright, ed., The Elizabethan’s America: A Collection of Early Reports by Englishmen on the New World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), 144–48, 150, 153; George Parker Winship, Sailors’ Narratives of Voyages along the New England Coast, 1524–1624 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1905) 137. 11. John G. Reid, Acadia, Maine, and New Scotland: Marginal Colonies in the Seventeenth Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), 16–17; Moulton, Maine Historical Sketches, 5, 17. 12. Howe, Prologue to New England, 147, 154–64 (quote on 163). 13. John S. C. Abbott,History of Maine, 2nd ed. (Augusta, ME: E. E. Knowles, 1892), 68 (quote); Howe, Prologue to New England, 164; Reid Acadia, Maine, and New Scotland, 17–18; Douglas R. McManis, Colonial New England: A Historical Geography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 18–19, 22. 14. John Smith, “A Description of New-England,” in Collections, vol. 6, 3rd ser. (Boston, 1837), Massachusetts Historical Society, 105, 109, 113, 125; Howe,Prologue to New England, 236–37, 243, 246–48, 251; Philip L. Barbour, The Three Worlds of Captain John Smith (Boston: Hough- ton Mifflin, 1964); John Fiske,The Beginnings of New England (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1901), 78; Wright, Elizabethan’s America, 12–15, 260–63. 15. Reid, Acadia, Maine, and New Scotland, 10. 16. Ibid., 10 (quote), 27, 44; Edwin. A. Churchill, “A Most Ordinary Lot of Men: The Fishermen at Richmond Island, Maine, in the Early Seventeenth Century,” New England Quarterly 57 (June 1984): 184–204 (quote on 196); Alaric Faulkner, “Archaeology of the Cod Fishery,” Historical Archaeology 19, no. 2 (1985): 57–86; Robert E. Moody, A Proprietary Experiment in Early New England History: Thomas Gorges and the Province of Maine (Boston: Boston Uni- versity Press, 1963), 7–9, 13, 23; Charles Clark, The Eastern Frontier (New York: Knopf, 1970), 19–23; Daniel Vickers, “Work and Life on the Fishing Periphery of Essex County, Massachu- setts, 1630–1675,” inSeventeenth-Century New England, ed. David D. Hall and David Grayson Allen (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1984), 92–99; Richard A. Preston, “Fish- ing and Plantation,” American Historical Review 45 (October 1939): 29, 33. 17. William A. Starna, “The Biological Encounter: Disease and the Ideological Domain,”Amer - ican Indian Quarterly 16 (Autumn 1992): 511–14; A. W. Crosby, “Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the Aboriginal Depopulation in America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 33 (April 1976): 290, 293–98; Sherburne F. Cook, “The Significance of Disease in the Extinction of the New England Indians,” in Biological Consequences of European Expansion, 1450–1800, ed. Kenneth F. Kiple and Stephen V. Beck (Aldershot, Hampshire, UK: Vario- rum, Ashgate, 1997), 253, 259–61, 267; William Bradford quoted in Henry Reed Stiles, The History and Genealogies of Ancient Windsor, Connecticut (Hartford, CT: Case, Lockwood & Brainard, 1891–92), 27. 18. William Bradford quoted in Wright, Elizabethan’s America, 265, 267; Howe, Prologue to New England, 292–96. 280 | notes to pages 49–55

19. William Bradford quoted in Wright, Elizabethan’s America, 272; Howe, Prologue to New England, 299–305. 20. Reid, Acadia, Maine, and New Scotland, 11–27; Howe, Prologue to New England, 194–99, 207–16; Leon E. Cranmer, Cushnoc: The History and Archaeology of Plymouth Colony Traders on the Ken- nebec, Occasional Publications in Maine Archaeology no. 7 (Augusta: Maine Archaeological Society, Fort Western Museum, Maine Historic Preservation Commission, 1990). 21. Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (New York: Norton, 1975), 15 (quote), 40. 22. Bruce J. Bourque and Ruth H. Whitehead, “Tarrantines and the Introduction of European Trade Goods in the Gulf of Maine,” Ethnohistory 32 (1985): 327–36; Emerson W. Baker, The Clarke & Lake Company, Occasional Publications in Maine Archaeology no. 4 (Augusta: Maine Historic Preservation Commission, 1985); Bruce J. Bourque, Twelve Thousand Years: American Indians in Maine (Lincoln: University of Kansas Press, 2001), 117–27. 23. Roger Williams quoted in Kathleen Joan Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 1500–1650 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996), 120–21; Peter A. Thomas, “The Fur Trade, Indian Land and the Need to Define Adequate ‘Environmental’ Parameters,” Ethnohistory 28, no. 4 (1981): 363–64; Baker, Clarke & Lake Company; Reid, Acadia, Maine, and New Scotland, 60, 67; Bourque, Twelve Thousand Years, 129–30. 24. Baker, Clarke & Lake Company; Bourque, Twelve Thousand Years, 124–27; Cranmer, Cush- noc; T. J. C. Brasser, “The Coastal Algonkians: People of the First Frontiers,” inNorth Amer- ican Indians in Historical Perspective, ed. Eleanor Burke Leacock and Nancy Oestreich Lurie (New York: Random House, 1978), 68–70; Bourque, Twelve Thousand Years, 129–30. 25. Laurence M. Haupman, “The Pequot War and Its Legacies,” inPequots in Southern New England: The Fall and Rise of an American Indian Nation, ed. Laurence M. Hauptman and James Wherry (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990), 69–71; James David Drake, King Philip’s War: Civil War in New England, 1675–1676 (Amherst: University of Massachu- setts Press, 1999), 23–24. 26. Jennings, Invasion of America, 19–21, 178–79, 186–89, 193–99; Neal Salisbury, “Indians and Colonists in Southern New England after the Pequot War: An Uneasy Balance,” in Haupt- man and Wherry, Pequots in Southern New England, 86; Hauptman, “Pequot War,” 71; Steven T. Katz, “The Pequot War Reconsidered,”New England Quarterly 64 (June 1991): 206–9. 27. Hauptman, “Pequot War,” 69, 72–73, 76–77; Katz, “Pequot War Reconsidered,” 210–13; Drake, King Philip’s War, 28–29, 111; Jennings, Invasion of America, 202–3, 206, 210–12, 257. 28. Jennings Invasion of America, 128; Wilcomb E. Washburn, “Seventeenth-Century Indian Wars,” in William C. Sturdevant, ed., Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 15, Northeast (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1978), 89–99; Ronald Takaki, “The Tempest in the Wilderness: The Racialization of Savagery,”Journal of American History 79 (December 1992): 893–95, 908, 911; Peter Neil Carroll, Puritanism and the Wilderness: The Intellectual Significance of the New England Frontier, 1629–1900 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 76–79; John Canup, Out of the Wilderness: The Emergence of an American Identity in Colonial New England (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1990), 159. 29. William Wood quoted in Canup, Out of the Wilderness, 22. 30. Canup, Out of the Wilderness, 5–10, 22–23, 25–26, 34, 41–43, 49–50, 91–94 (quote 91), 106–9; notes to pages 55–58 | 281

Michael Wigglesworth quoted in David Jacobson, Place and Belonging in America (Bal- timore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 47; William Hubbard, The History of the Indian Wars in New England from the First Settlement to the Termination of the War with King Philip, in 1677, rev. ed. (Roxbury, MA: W. Elliot Woodward, 1677), 70, 93–95; Carroll, Puri- tanism and the Wilderness, 10–11, 47, 51, 61, 66, 147, 153; Peter A. Fritzell, “The Wilderness and the Garden: Metaphors for the American Landscape,” Forest History 12 (April 1968): 22; Clifford K. Shipton, “The New England Frontier,”New England Quarterly 10 (March 1937): 28; Earle, “Americas Before and After 1492,” 479. 31. Drake, King Philip’s War, 2–3, 42 (quote), 44; Salisbury, “Indians and Colonists,” 94; Doug- las Edward Leach, Flintlock and Tomahawk: New England in King Philip’s War (New York: Norton, 1966), 1. 32. Colin G. Calloway, The Western Abenakis of Vermont, 1600–1800: War, Migration, and the Survival of an Indian People (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990), 43; Jennings, Invasion of America, 89–94; Reid, Acadia, Maine, and New Scotland, 60; Brasser, “Coastal Algonkians,” 71; Peter A. Thomas, “Cultural Change on the Southern New England Frontier, 1830–1665,” in Cultures in Contact: The European Impact on Native Cultural Institutions in East- ern North America, A.D. 1000–1800, ed. William W. Fitzhugh (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985), 154–55. 33. Alice Outwater, Water: A Natural History (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 21–32. 34. Calvin Martin, Keepers of the Game: Indian-Animal Relationships and the Fur Trade (Berke- ley: University of California Press, 1978); Shepard Krech III, ed., Indians, Animals, and the Fur Trade: A Critique of Keepers of the Game (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1981). 35. Carolyn Merchant, Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 59–60; Cronon, Changes in the Land, 93; Jennings, Invasion of America, 41, 88; Brasser, “Coastal Algonkians,” 88. 36. Lynn Coci, “Native Wampum as a Peripheral Resource in the Seventeenth-Century World-System,” in Hauptman and Wherry, Pequots in Southern New England, 51–63; Drake, King Philip’s War, 22; David Jaffee,People of the Washusett: Greater New England in History and Memory, 1630–1860 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 38–39; Salisbury, “Indi- ans and Colonists,” 87–89; Jennings, Invasion of America, 255. 37. Cronon, Changes in the Land, 81; Jaffee,People of the Washusett, 21, 28; Brasser, “Early Indian-European Contacts,” 84; Brasser, “Coastal Algonkians,” 29, 65, 72, 75–76; Carroll, Puritanism and the Wilderness, 182; Jennings, Invasion of America, 135–36; Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 24–45, 80–81, 83; Thomas, “Fur Trade, Indian Land,” 369–72; Salisbury, “Indians and Colonists,” 83, 85; Thomas, “Southern New England Fron- tier,” 133–36, 144, 151. 38. Thomas, “Fur Trade, Indian Land,” 375–77; Anderson,Creatures of Empire, 187–92, 196–98, 209, 211, 218–19; Thomas, “Southern New England Frontier,” 151; Thomas, “Contrastive Sub- sistence Strategies and Land Use as Factors for Understanding Indian-White Relations in New England,” Ethnohistory 23 (Winter 1976): 14–15. 39. Thomas, “Fur Trade, Indian Land,” 364, 369; Brasser, “Coastal Algonkians,” 65–71; Salis- bury, “Indians and Colonists,” 90–94; Brasser, “Early Indian-European Contacts,” 84–86. 282 | notes to pages 59–66

40. Jennings, Invasion of America, 133–34, 228, 255 (quote); Thomas, “Fur Trade, Indian Land,” 372–74; Thomas, “Southern New England Frontier,” 145; Drake,King Philip’s War, 949. 41. Jennings, Invasion of America, 255, 268, 270, 273–85, 289–93, 294–96, 304; Drake, King Philip’s War, 57, 85. 42. Drake, King Philip’s War, 75–77, 141; Jennings, Invasion of America, 305–9; Hubbard quoted in Carroll, Puritanism and the Wilderness, 207; Salisbury, “Indians and Colonists,” 93–94; Anderson, Creatures of Empire, 237. 43. Bourque, Twelve Thousand Years, 153–59; Abbott,History of Maine, 175–77. 44. Bourque, Twelve Thousand Years, 149–53; Calloway, Western Abenakis of Vermont, 84–95. 45. Alan Heimart, “Puritanism, the Wilderness, and the Frontier,” New England Quarterly 26 (September 1953): 371 (quote), 372–73, 378 (quote), 380–82; Anderson, Creatures of Empire, 237; Drake, King Philip’s War, 4, 169; Carroll, Puritanism and the Wilderness, 208; Canup, Out of the Wilderness, 184. 46. William Burgess Leavenworth, “The Ship in the Forest: New England Maritime Industries and Coastal Environment, 1630–1850” (PhD diss., University of New Hampshire, 1999), 266; Bourque, Twelve Thousand Years, 159–68. 47. Calloway, Western Abenakis of Vermont, 103–9; Bourque, Twelve Thousand Years, 147–208. 48. Anderson, Creatures of Empire, 224; Kenneth M. Morrison, The Embattled Northeast: The Elusive Ideal of Alliance in Abenaki–Euramerican Relations (Berkeley: University of Califor- nia Press, 1984). 49. Bourque, Twelve Thousand Years, 197–200; Calloway, Western Abenakis of Vermont, 113–33, 143–45, 159. 50. Calloway, Western Abenakis of Vermont, 164–82, 187. 51. Neal Salisbury, introduction to Algonkians of New England: Past and Present, ed. Peter Benes (Boston: Boston University, 1993), 10; Calloway, Western Abenakis of Vermont, 53–54; Kevin A. McBride, “ ‘Ancient and Crazie’: Pequot Lifeways during the Historic Period,” in Benes, Algonkians of New England, 7, 66, 72, 84; Daniel R. Mandell, Beyond the Frontier: Indians in Eighteenth-Century Eastern Massachusetts (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 48–50, 69–74, 78–87, 94–96, 110. 52. Steven T. Katz, “The Pequot War Reconsidered,”New England Quarterly 64 (June 1991): 223; Jack Campisi, “The Emergence of the Mashantucket Pequot Tribe, 1637–1975,” in Hauptman and Wherry, Pequots in Southern New England, 118, 123–26, 132–33. 53. Mandell, Beyond the Frontier, 24–25, 27–29, 41; Jean M. O’Brien, “ ‘Divorced’ from the Land: Resistance and Survival of Indian Women in Eighteenth-Century New England,” in After King Philip’s War: Presence and Persistence in Indian New England, ed. Colin G. Calloway (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1997), 147; Calloway, Western Abenakis of Vermont, 239–41, 243–44; Ruth Wallis Herndon and Ella Wilcox Sekatau, “The Right to a Name: The Narragansett People and Rhode Island Officials in the Revolutionary Era,” in Calloway, After King Philip’s War, 115, 122. 54. Bourque, Twelve Thousand Years, 207–8, 217–20; Jacques Ferland, “Tribal Dissent or White Aggression? Interpreting Penobscot Indian Dispossession between 1808 and 1835,” Maine His- tory 43 (August 2007): 125–70; Pauleena MacDougall, The Penobscot Dance of Resistance: Tra- dition in the History of a People (Lebanon: University of New Hampshire Press, 2004), 107–24. notes to pages 66–71 | 283

55. Jean M. O’Brien, Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachu- setts, 1650–1790 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 7 (quote), 104, 91, 108, 124; O’Brien, “ ‘Divorced’ from the Land,” 145–46 (quote on 145), 150; Calloway, “Introduction: Surviving the Dark Ages,” in Calloway, After King Philip’s War, 7; Mandell, Beyond the Fron- tier, 116–22. 56. Mandell, Beyond the Frontier, 4–5, 9–11, 13, 57; Bert Salwen, “Indians of Southern New England and Long Island: Early Period,” in Sturdevant, Handbook of North American Indi- ans, 164; Thomas L. Doughton, “Unseen Neighbors: Native Americans of Central Massa- chusetts, a People Who Had ‘Vanished,’ ” in Calloway, After King Philip’s War, 208–9. 57. Eugene Vetromile, The Abenakis and Their History (New York: James B. Kirker, 1866), 35; David L. Ghere, “The ‘Disappearance’ of the Abenaki in Western Maine: Political Orga- nization and Ethnocentric Assumptions,” in Calloway, After King Philip’s War, 74, 82–84; Calloway, Western Abenakis of Vermont, 231–35. 58. O’Brien, Dispossession by Degrees, 21 (quote); Bourque, Twelve Thousand Years, 220; Harald E. L. Prins, “Tribal Network and Migrant Labor: Mi’kmaq Indians as Seasonal Workers in Aroostook’s Potato Fields, 1870–1980, in Calloway, After King Philip’s War, 232–36; MacDou- gall, Penobscot Dance of Resistance, 125–49, 165–95. 59. Dean R. Snow, “Eastern Abenaki,” in Sturdevant, Handbook of North American Indians, 145; Anderson, Creatures of Empire, 213–15. 60. Salisbury, introduction to Algonkians of New England, 10–11; Mandell, Beyond the Frontier, 2, 37–46, 60–62; Brasser, “Coastal Algonkians,” 86–87; O’Brien, Dispossession by Degrees, 132–33, 151–82. 61. Thomas Morton quoted in Edward C. Higbee, “The Three Earths of New England,”Geo - graphical Review 42 (July 1952): 426.

3. The Ecologies of Frontier Farming 1. Gordon G. Whitney, From Coastal Wilderness to Fruited Plain: A History Environmental Change in Temperate North America, 1500 to the Present (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 131; Charles Francis Carroll, The Timber Economy of Puritan New England (Providence: Brown University Press, 1973), 60–61. 2. Archer B. Hulbert, Soil: Its Influence on the History of the United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1930), 1, 89. 3. Carl Bridenbaugh, “The New England Town: A Way of Life,” inEarly Americans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 168–69; Joseph S. Wood, The New England Village (Balti- more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 21; R. Cole Harris, “The Simplification of Europe Overseas,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 67 (December 1977): 471. 4. Stephen Hornsby, British Atlantic, American Frontier: Spaces of Power in Early Modern British America (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2005), 129; Harris, “Simplifica- tion,” 470. 5. J. Ritchie Garrison, Landscape and Material Life in Franklin County, Massachusetts, 1770–1860 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 11–12; Preston E. James, “The Blackstone 284 | notes to pages 72–75

Valley: A Study in Chorography in Southern New England,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 19 (June 1929): 68–70, 85–88; Michael Bell, The Face of Connecticut: People, Geology, and the Land (Hartford: State Geological and Natural History Survey of Connecticut, Department of Environmental Protection, 1985), 20–21; Betty Flanders Thompson,The Changing Face of New England (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), 145–46. 6. Wood, New England Village, 20, 22–24, 27–29; Thompson, Changing Face of New England, 66; Hulbert, Soil, 84–85. 7. Henry Reed Stiles, The History and Genealogies of Ancient Windsor, Connecticut (Hart- ford, CT: Lockwood & Brainard, 1891–92), 50; William Ladd Chaffin,History of the Town of Easton, Massachusetts (Cambridge, MA: J. Wilson and Son, 1886), 15–16; Charles John Hogan, “Puritans and Meadows: The Interplay of English Culture and the American Envi- ronment in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1630–1660” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1986), 10. 8. Stiles, Ancient Windsor, 51; Martha Krug Genthe, “Valley Towns of Connecticut,” Bulletin of the American Geographical Society 39, no. 9 (1907): 516, 532. 9. Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 166–67; Stiles, Ancient Windsor, 24–25, 28–29 (quote on 29); Benjamin Trumbull, A Complete History of Connecticut, Civil and Eccle- siastical, vol. 1 (1797; repr., New London, CT: Utley, 1898), 28, 34–35; Hulbert, Soil, 96–98; Genthe, “Valley Towns of Connecticut,” 513–15. 10. Trumbull, History of Connecticut, 67; David Grayson Allen, “Both Englands,” in Seven- teenth-Century New England, ed. David D. Hall and David Grayson Allen (Boston: Colo- nial Society of Massachusetts, 1984), 68; Dorothy Deming,The Settlement of the Connecticut Towns (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1933) 10; Bruce C. Daniels, The Connecticut Town: Growth and Development, 1635–1790 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1979), 10, 17; Thomas R. Lewis, “The Landscape and Environment of the Connecticut River Valley,” in The Great River: Art & Society of the Connecticut Valley, 1635–1820, ed. Gerald W. R. Ward and William N. Hosley Jr. (Hartford, CT: Wadsworth Atheneum, 1985), 10; Sylvester Judd, History of Hadley (Springfield, MA: H. R. Huntting, 1905), 37, 432; G. T. Trewartha, “Types of Rural Settlement in Colonial America,”Geographical Review 36 (1946): 569. 11. Hogan, “Puritans and Meadows,” 24; Wood, New England Village, 16; Howard S. Russell, A Long, Deep Furrow: Three Centuries of Farming in New England (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1982), 40; William Haller, The Puritan Frontier: Town Planting in New England Colonial Development, 1630–1660 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1951), 36. 12. Brian Donahue, The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 169; Chaffin,Town of Easton, 34; Trewartha, “Types of Rural Settlement,” 570. 13. Robert McCullough, The Landscape of Community: A History of Communal Forests in New England (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1995), 25–29; Peter Neil Car- roll, Puritanism and the Wilderness: The Intellectual Significance of the New England Frontier, 1629–1900 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 188–92; Richard W. Judd, Common Lands, Common People: The Origins of Conservation in Northern New England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 42, 44, 46; Frances Malamy, “The Creation of a Land notes to pages 75–78 | 285

Use Policy in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts: A Complex Interaction of Legal and Intellectual Traditions” (PhD diss., Tufts University, 2000), 364–66; Hogan, “Puritans and Meadows,” 76–77, 101; Garrison, Franklin County, 19, 21. 14. Donahue, Great Meadow, 107; Hogan, “Puritans and Meadows,” 38 (quote), 40–47; Jamie Eves, “A Valley White with Mist: Settlers, Nature, and Culture in a North Woods River Valley, 1800–1870” (PhD diss., University of Connecticut, 2005), 111; William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), 74. 15. Leonard W. Labaree, Milford, Connecticut: The Early Development of a Town as Shown in Its Land Records (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1933), 4–5, 22 (quote); David Jaffee,Peo - ple of the Washusett: Greater New England in History and Memory, 1630–1860 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 4, 6 (quote), 8–9; Hogan, “Puritans and Meadows,” 70–71; Donahue, Great Meadow, 107–15, 142, 155; Trewartha, “Types of Rural Settlement,” 570, 578; Deming, Settlement, 75; Linda Auwers Bissell, “From One Generation to Another: Mobility in Seventeenth-Century Windsor, Connecticut,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 31 (January 1974): 82; David E. Van Deventer, The Emergence of Provincial New Hampshire, 1623–1741 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 21, 23, 26; Cronon, Changes in the Land, 73; Eves, “Valley White with Mist,” 171. 16. Robert R. Walcott, “Husbandry in Colonial New England,”New England Quarterly 9 (June 1936): 222–23; Harry J. Carman, ed. American Husbandry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 48; Hogan, “Puritans and Meadows,” 32–33, 71; Michael Zukerman, “The Social Context of Democracy in Massachusetts,” inColonial America: Essays in Politics and Social Development, ed. Stanley N. Katz et al. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993), 229–31. 17. Haller, Puritan Frontier, 51–54; Stanley D. Dodge, “The Frontier of New England in the Sev- enteenth and Eighteenth Centuries and Its Significance in American History,”Papers of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters 28 (1942): 435–39. 18. William Hubbard, The History of the Indian Wars in New England (Roxbury, MA: W. Elliot Woodward, 1677), 75; William Burgess Leavenworth, “The Ship in the Forest: New England Maritime Industries and Coastal Environment, 1630–1850” (PhD diss., University of New Hampshire, 1999), 28–29, 124, 129–31, 134–36, 205, 211–12, 229. 19. James A. Henretta, “Families and Farms:Mentalité in Pre-Industrial America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 35 (January 1978): 7–8, 30–32; Robert A. Gross, “Culture and Cul- tivation: Agriculture and Society in Thoreau’s Concord,”Journal of American History 69, no. 1 (1982): 44 (quote); Robert A. Gross, The Minutemen and Their World (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976), 75–79, 100–106; Daniel Scott Smith, “The Demographic History of Colonial New England,” Journal of Economic History 32 (March 1972): 165; Kenneth Lockridge, “Land, Population and the Evolution of New England Society, 1630–1790,” in Colonial America: Essays in Politics and Social Development (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971), 475–77, 481. 20. Patricia J. Tracy, “Reconsidering Migration within Colonial New England,” Journal of Social History 23 (Fall 1989): 93–113; Eves, “Valley White with Mist,” 151–52; J. J. Waters, “Family, Inheritance, and Migration in Colonial New England: The Evidence from Guilford, Con- necticut,” William and Mary Quarterly 39 (1982): 65. 21. Stephen Innes, Labor in a New Land: Economy and Society in Seventeenth-Century Springfield (Brunswick, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 9–10, 13–14, 33. 286 | notes to pages 79–84

22. James L. Garvin, “The Range Township in Eighteenth-Century New Hampshire,” inNew England Prospect: Maps, Place Names, and the Historical Landscape, ed. Peter Benes (Boston: Boston University, 1980), 47–68 (quote on 47); Richard W. Moore, “Lines on the Land,” in Shaping the Place We Call New Hampshire: A Land Use History, ed. Richard Ober (Concord: New Hampshire Historical Society and the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire For- ests, 1992), 38; E. T. Price, Dividing the Land (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 66. 23. Eves, “Valley White with Mist,” 180–81, 201; Douglas R. McManis, Colonial New England: A Historical Geography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 54–55, 66. 24. James, “Blackstone Valley,” 75; Eves, “Valley White with Mist,” 309, 323–55. 25. Carolyn Merchant, Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 105–6, 112, 116, 134, 153–59, 193; Tim Brosnihan, “Commerce and Continuity: The Evolution of Mixed Husbandry on the Waters Farm, 1760–1840” (master’s thesis, University of Maine, 1999), 50–52; Kent C. Ryden, Land- scape with Figures: Nature & Culture in New England (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2001), 142, 144; Steven Stoll, Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002), 14. 26. Béatrice Craig, Backwoods Consumers & Homespun Capitalists: The Rise of a Market Culture in Eastern Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 143–47; Garrison, Franklin County, 116–18; Brosnihan, “Commerce and Continuity,” 9, 13, 15–17, 20, 22–23, 31–33. 27. Brosnihan, “Commerce and Continuity,” 18, 52; Russell, Long, Deep Furrow, 66, 175; Max George Schumacher, The Northern Farmer and His Markets during the Late Colonial Period (New York: Arno Press, 1975), 3. 28. Eves, “Valley White with Mist,” 121, 305; Walcott, “Husbandry,” 228–30; Whitney,Coastal Wilderness to Fruited Plain, 139; Anderson, Creatures of Empire, 142, 144; Judd, History of Hadley, 353–55, 358. 29. Christopher Clark, “The View from the Farmhouse: Rural Lives in the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 24 (Summer 2004): 198–207; Laurel Thatcher Ulrich,Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650–1750 (New York: Knopf, 1982). 30. David P. Szatmary, Shays’ Rebellion: The Making of an Agrarian Insurrection (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), 1–3; Schumacher,Northern Farmer, 2; Walcott, “Husbandry,” 240; Anderson, Creatures of Empire, 145, 157; Whitney, Coastal Wilderness to Fruited Plain, 130; Jared Eliot, Essays upon Field Husbandry in New England, and Other Papers, 1748–1762, ed. Harry J. Carman and Rexford G. Tugwell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934), 28–29. 31. Carl O. Sauer, “The Settlement of the Humid East,”Climate and Man: Yearbook of Agricul- ture 1941 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1941), 159–60 (quote on 159); Trumbull, History of Connecticut, 37–38. 32. Hornsby, American Frontier, 146–48; Robert B. Gordon and Patrick M. Malone, The Tex- ture of Industry: An Archaeological View of the Industrialization of North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 251; John L. Brooke, The Heart of the Commonwealth: Society and Political Culture in Worcester County, Massachusetts, 1713–1861 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 51. notes to pages 84–87 | 287

33. Schumacher, Northern Farmer, 73, 88–91; Daniel Vickers, “Competency and Competition: Economic Culture in Early New England,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 47 (Janu- ary 1990): 7–9, 25; Christopher Clark, The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts, 1780–1860 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 87–88; Cronon, Changes in the Land, 76; Richard L. Bushman, From Puritan to Yankee: Character and Social Order in Connecticut, 1690–1765 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 73–77; Jaffee, People of the Washu- sett, 5; Henretta, “Families and Farms,” 11–12; Allan Kulikoff, “The Transition to Capitalism in Rural America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 46 (January 1989): 124–27, 130, 133; Richard Lyman Bushman, “Markets and Composite Farms,” William and Mary Quarterly 55 (July 1998): 358. 34. Schumacher, Northern Farmer, 105. 35. Cronon, Changes in the Land, 140; Percy Wells Bidwell, “Rural Economy in New England at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century,” Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences 20 (April 1916), 255–59, 267–68, 294–95, 299–303, 328–30, 337, 366, 368; Percy Wells Bidwell, “The Agricultural Revolution in New England,” American Historical Review 26 (July 1921): 685, 700; E. L. Bogart, Peacham: The Story of a Vermont Hill Town (Montpelier: Vermont Historical Society, 1948), 83–85; Schumacher, Northern Farmer, 105. 36. Kulikoff, “Transition to Capitalism,” 128–29; Harris, “Simplification,” 471–72 (quote on 472); Vickers, “Competency and Competition,” 3–4, 7; Szatmary, Shays’ Rebellion, 6–7; Vir- ginia DeJohn Anderson, New England’s Generation: The Great Migration and the Formation of Society and Culture in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 123–24, 128–29; Joseph S. Wood, “New England’s Exceptionalist Tradition: Rethink- ing the Colonial Encounter with the Land,” Connecticut History 35 (1994): 157; Bushman, “Markets and Composite Farms,” 352, 359–60; Clark, Rural Capitalism, 154; Michael Zuker- man, Peaceable Kingdoms: New England Towns in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), 47–49, 107–10, 118; Haller, Puritan Frontier, 38–39. 37. David C. Hsiung, “Food, Fuel, and the New England Environment in the War for Indepen- dence, 1775–1776,” New England Quarterly 80 (December 2007): 614–54; Lee N. Newcomer, The Embattled Farmers: The Massachusetts Countryside in the American Revolution (New York: King’s Crown Press, 1953), 109–10, 120–21; Russell, Long, Deep Furrow, 124–25; Rolla Milton Tryon, Household Manufactures in the United States, 1640–1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1937), 112–19, 143–56. 38. Newcomer, Embattled Farmers, 16, 95, 104–5; Gregory Nobles, “The Rise of Merchants in Rural Market Towns: A Case Study of Eighteenth-Century Northampton, Massachusetts,” Journal of Social History 24 (Autumn 1990): 13; Hsiung, “New England Environment,” 628, 645, 647–50; Russell, Long, Deep Furrow, 127, 151. 39. Newcomer, Embattled Farmer, 131–34, 155; Bogart, Peacham, 53, 56–57; Richard Brown, “Regional Culture in a Revolutionary Era: The Connecticut Valley, 1760–1820,” in Ward and Hosley, Great River, 44; Gross, Minutemen and Their World, 160–61; James T. Adams, New England in the Republic, 1776–1850 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1926), 136–38, 140–41, 144, 149. 40. Newcomer, Embattled Farmer, 123–28; Bogart, Peacham, 86; Szatmary, Shays’ Rebellion, 17–18, 30–32, 33, 40. 288 | notes to pages 88–92

41. Ryden, Landscape with Figures, 74; Clark, Rural Capitalism, 49, 74–75, 147; Brosnihan, “Commerce and Continuity,” 56–60; Whitney, Coastal Wilderness to Fruited Plain, 248. 42. Charles S. Grant, Democracy in the Connecticut Frontier Town of Kent (New York: Colum- bia University Press, 1961), ix; Martyn J. Bowden, “Culture and Place: English Sub-Cul- tural Regions in New England in the Seventeenth Century,” Connecticut History 35 (1994): 68–146; Hogan, “Puritans and Meadows,” 78; John M. Bumsted and James T. Lemon, “New Approaches in Early American Studies: The Local Community in New England,”Histoire Sociale / Social History 2 (November 1968), 102, 104; Harris, “Simplification,” 472–80; Wood, New England Village, 65; Wood, “New England’s Exceptionalist Tradition,” 151. 43. Virginia DeJohn Anderson, “The Origins of New England Culture,”William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 48 (April 1991): 231–37; Wood, “New England’s Exceptionalist Tradi- tion,” 147–49, 160; Hornsby, American Frontier, 148. 44. Innes, Labor in a New Land, xvi– xvii. 45. Schumacher, Northern Farmer, 27, 34–36; Harlan H. Barrows, Lectures on the Historical Geography of the United States as Given in 1933, ed. William A. Koelsch (Chicago: Univer- sity of Chicago Press, 1962), 101; Carman, American Husbandry, 46–47; Gross, “Culture and Cultivation,” 42, 48–49; Bidwell, “Agricultural Revolution,” 688–89; Bidwell, “Rural Economy in New England,” 278, 284–85, 291; Peter J. Coleman, The Transformation of Rhode Island, 1790–1860 (Providence: Brown University Press, 1963), 7, 13. 46. Eliot quoted in Schumacher, Northern Farmer, 31; Brian Donahue, “Henry David Thoreau and the Environment of Concord,” in Thoreau’s World and Ours: A Natural Legacy, ed. Edmund A. Schofield and Robert C. Baron (Golden, CO: North American Press, 1993) 185–86; Merchant, Ecological Revolutions, 185–88, 190, 193; Whitney, Coastal Wilderness to Fruited Plain, 250–52, 254; Cronon, Changes in the Land, 142; E. L. Jones, “Creative Disrup- tions in American Agriculture, 1620–1820,” in Biological Consequences of European Expan- sion, 1450–1800, ed. Kenneth F. Kiple and Stephen V. Beck (Aldershot, Hampshire, UK: Variorum, Ashgate, 1997), 337–38; Lockridge, “Evolution of New England Society,” 469, 473–74; Gross, Minutemen and Their World, 82–87, 106. 47. Innes, Labor in a New Land, 44, 64, 172; Deming, Settlement, 53; Schumacher, Northern Farmer, 30; Kevin Sweeney, “From Wilderness to Arcadian Vale: Material Life in the Con- necticut River Valley, 1635–1760,” in Ward and Hosley, Great River, 19, 21–24. 48. Garrison, Franklin County, 13–16, 56–60, 75, 97; Bell, Face of Connecticut, 57–58; Harold Fisher Wilson, The Hill Country of Northern New England: Its Social and Economic History, 1790–1930 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936), 17–18; M. R. Pabst, “Agricultural Trends in the Connecticut Valley Region of Massachusetts, 1800–1900,”Smith College Stud- ies in History 26 (1941): 19–20. 49. Paul Brooks, The View from Lincoln Hill: Man and the Land in a New England Town (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976), 65–66; Ernest M. Gould and Carl H. Reidel, “The Yankee Forest,” Journal of Forestry 77 (September 1979): 560; James, “Blackstone Valley,” 67–109. 50. Brian Donahue, “Environmental Stewardship and Decline in Old New England,” Journal of the Early Republic 24 (Summer 2004): 237, 240; William F. Robinson, Abandoned New England: Its Hidden Ruins and Where to Find Them (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1976), 41–42. notes to pages 93–101 | 289

51. Stanley W. Bromley, “The Original Forest Types of Southern New England,”Ecological Monographs 5 (January 1935): 68–69; Brian Hall et al., “Three Hundred Years of Forest and Land-Use Change in Massachusetts, USA,”Journal of Biogeography 29 (October/Novem- ber 2002): 1319–35; G. G. Whitney and W. C. Davis, “From Primitive Woods to Cultivated Woodlots: Thoreau and the Forest History of Concord, Massachusetts,”Journal of Forest History 30 (1986): 70–75; Carman, American Husbandry, 61. 52. Marsh quoted in Diana Muir, Reflections in Bullough’s Pond: Economy and Ecosystem in New England (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2000), 67; Cronon, Changes in the Land, 122–24; Whitney, Coastal Wilderness to Fruited Plain, 241–42; Alicia Daniel and Thor Hanson, “Remote, Rocky, Barren, Bushy Wild-woody Wilderness,” inWilderness Comes Home: Rewilding the Northeast, ed. Christopher McGrory Klyza (Hanover, NH: Middlebury College Press, 2001), 34–36. 53. Eves, “Valley White with Mist,” 302–3, 357; Jones, “Creative Disruptions,” 329, 333–36; Rus- sell, Long, Deep Furrow, 90. 54. William Ladd Chaffin,Town of Easton, 17; Judd, History of Hadley, 248–52; Carroll, Puritan- ism and the Wilderness, 192–94; Jones, “Creative Disruptions,” 323, 326–27, 330–33; Robert P. Wilson, “An Inquiry into the Use the English Inhabitants of Colonial Maine Made of the Fish and Game Resources of That Region” (master’s thesis, University of Maine, 1953), 3–4. 55. Eliot, Field Husbandry, 54–55, 61; Bromley, “Original Forest Types of Southern New England,” 69; Walcott, “Husbandry,” 227. 56. Bridenbaugh, “New England Town,” 182.

4. Industrializing the Margins 1. E. P. Morris, “Along the Maine Coast,” Geographical Review 2 (November 1916): 331; Richard W. Judd, Aroostook: A Century of Logging in Northern Maine, 1831–1931 (Orono: University of Maine Press, 1989), 17–19. 2. Harry J. Carman, ed., American Husbandry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 44; Henry S. Kernan, “From Ship Masts Down to Boxboards,” American Forests 52 (August 1946): 120–21; Michael Williams, Americans and Their Forests: A Historical Geography (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 5; Thomas R. Cox,The Lumberman’s Frontier: Three Centuries of Land Use, Society, and Change in America’s Forests (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2010), 70–71; Charles Francis Carroll, The Timber Economy of Puritan New England (Providence: Brown University Press, 1973), 25–27. 3. Lloyd C. Irland, The Northeast’s Changing Forest (Petersham, MA: Harvard Forest, 1999), 27; Charles V. Cogbill, John Burk, and G. Motzkin, “The Forests of Presettlement New England, USA: Spatial and Compositional Patterns Based on Town Proprietor Surveys,” Journal of Biogeography 29 (October/November 2002): 1279–1304; Cogbill, “Vegetation of the Presettlement Forests of Northern New England and New York,” Rhodora 102 (2000): 256; David R. Foster and John D. Aber, eds., Forests in Time: The Environmental Consequences of 1,000 Years of Change in New England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004); Stanley W. Bromley, “The Original Forest Types of Southern New England,”Ecological Monographs 5 (January 1935): 61–89 (William Wood quoted 74); C. G. Lorimer, “The Presettlement 290 | notes to pages 102–107

Forest and Natural Disturbance Cycle of Northeastern Maine,” Ecology 58 (1977): 142–43; Craig G. Lorimer and Alan S. White, “Scale and Frequency of Natural Disturbances in the Northeastern US: Implications for Early Successional Forest Habitats and Regional Age Distributions,” Forest Ecology and Management 185 (2003): 50, 57. 4. Richard A. Wahle, “Fisheries in a Sea of Change: Ecology and Oceanography of New England’s Fishing Grounds,” Northeast Naturalist 7, no. 4 (2000): 318–19, 320–23; William Burgess Leavenworth, “The Ship in the Forest: New England Maritime Industries and Coastal Environment, 1630–1850” (PhD diss., University of New Hampshire, 1999), 152–56. 5. Richard W. Judd, The Untilled Garden: Natural History and the Spirit of Conservation in America, 1740–1840 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 240–45. 6. William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983); Frances Malamy, “The Creation of a Land Use Policy in Seventeenth Century Massachusetts: A Complex Interaction of Legal and Intellectual Tra- ditions” (PhD diss., Tufts University, 2000), 172, 226, 234–37, 258–62, 309–10, 325, 334–50, 384–86, 392–402, 415–18; Charles John Hogan, “Puritans and Meadows: The Interplay of English Culture and the American Environment in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1630– 1660” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1986), 109, 111, 124–26, 129, 384–85, 402–3, 417–18; Yasudihe Kawashima, “Forest Conservation Policy in Early New England,” Historical Journal of Massachusetts 20 (Winter 1992): 1–15; Sylvester Judd, History of Hadley (Springfield, MA: Huntting, 1905), 99. 7. Lorenzo Sabine, Report on the Principal Fisheries of the American Seas, Prepared for the Trea- sury Department of the United States (Washington, DC: Robert Armstrong, 1853), 182–83; Malcolm Keir, “Some Influences of the Sea upon the Industries of New England,” Geo- graphical Review 5 (May 1918): 399–404; Carroll, Timber Economy, 69–71. 8. Robert G. Albion, Forests and Sea Power: The Timber Problem of the Royal Navy, 1652–1682 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1926), 232, 236–39, 240–41; Williams, Americans and Their Forests, 90–92. 9. Joe Malone quoted in Matthew Bampton, “From Social Conflict to Environmental Change: Colonial Forestry’s Impact on New England’s Piscataqua Drainage Basin,” Historical Geog- raphy 27 (1999): 199, 200–201; Albion, Forests and Sea Power, 235, 242, 251–55; Henry N. Andrews, “The King’s Pines,”Historical New Hampshire (March 1947), 6–7. 10. Bampton, “Social Conflict,” 204–6; Albion,Forests and Sea Power, 256, 260–61, 270–71. 11. Albion, Forests and Sea Power, 276–77, 279–82, 289, 293–97, 299–301, 309–10. 12. Ruth Lynn Friedman, “Governing the Land: An Environmental History of Cape Cod, Mas- sachusetts, 1600–1861” (PhD diss., Brandeis University, 1992), 32–39, 49–50. 13. Friedman, “Governing the Land,” 65–71, 84, 93, 95–99, 106–9, 111–17, 119, 127 (quote). 14. Ibid., 131–39, 142, 163–65, 184–87, 219–24, 231–33, 274–79, 322, 326. 15. Wayne M. O’Leary, Maine Sea Fisheries: The Rise and Fall of a Native Industry, 1830–1890 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996), 7, 12–15 (quote on 12), 86, 88–89, 91; Harold Innis, The Cod Fisheries: The History of an International Economy (New Haven: Yale Univer- sity Press, 1940), 6, 9; Douglas R. McManis, Colonial New England: A Historical Geography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 103, 105; Raymond McFarland, A History of the New England Fisheries (New York: D. Appleton, 1911), 83, 144–45, 176; Sabine, Principal notes to pages 107–112 | 291

Fisheries, 82–83, 139; Matthew McKenzie,Clearing the Coastline: The Nineteenth-Century Ecological & Cultural Transformation of Cape Cod (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2010), 25, 27. 16. Margaret E. Dewar, Industry in Trouble: The Federal Government and the New England Fisher- ies (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983), 28; O’Leary, Maine Sea Fisheries, 215–29, 242–47. 17. Sabine, Principal Fisheries, 160–61 (Franklin quote on 161); McFarland, New England Fisher- ies, 136–37, 161–62, 143; O’Leary, Maine Sea Fisheries, 22–23, 40–41, 44–46, 62. 18. Sabine, Principal Fisheries, 184–85; O’Leary, Maine Sea Fisheries, 96–107, 113–34; McFarland, New England Fisheries, 166–72. 19. Carroll, Timber Economy, 69–71, 78–81, 83–85; Judd, Aroostook, 9–17. 20. Cox, Lumberman’s Frontier, 50; Williams, Americans and Their Forests, 103–4; Robert D. Stanley, “The Rise of the Penobscot Lumber Industry to 1860” (master’s thesis, University of Maine, 1963), 24. 21. Williams, Americans and Their Forests, 96–99. 22. Ibid.; Judd, Aroostook, 151. 23. Williams, Americans and Their Forests, 96; Cox, Lumberman’s Frontier, 57–66. 24. Béatrice Craig, Backwoods Consumers & Homespun Capitalists: The Rise of a Market Cul- ture in Eastern Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 4; Henry S. Graves, “Forest Economics and Policy in New England,” in New England’s Prospect: 1933, ed. James Truslow Adams et al. (New York: American Geographical Society, 1933), 229; Judd, Aroos- took, 81–101; Richard W. Judd, “Lumbering and the Farming Frontier in Aroostook County, Maine, 1840–1880,” Journal of Forest History 28 (April 1984): 56–67. 25. Stanley, “Penobscot Lumber Industry,” 77; Lloyd C. Irland, “Maine Lumber Production, 1839–1997: A Statistical Overview,” Maine History 38 (Summer 1998): 40, 44; Roland M. Harper, “Changes in the Forest Area of New England in Three Centuries,”Journal of Forestry 16 (April 1918): 442–52; Judd, Aroostook, 223–42. 26. David C. Smith, A History of Lumbering in Maine, 1861–1960 (Orono: University of Maine Press, 1972), 385–97; Diana Muir, Reflections in Bullough’s Pond: Economy and Ecosystem in New England (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2000), 195–96; Nancy M. Gordon, “The Economic Uses of Massachusetts Forests,” inStepping Back to Look Forward: A History of the Massachusetts Forest, ed. Charles H. W. Foster (Petersham, MA: Harvard Forest, Harvard University, 1998), 90–91. 27. Smith, History of Lumbering, 233–46; R. C. Estall, New England: A Study in Industrial Adjust- ment (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1966), 133–44; Sylvester Baxter, “The Redevelop- ment of an Old State,” Review of Reviews 33 (January 1906): 55–62. 28. Keith Huntress, “The Passing of Redding, Maine,”New England Quarterly 20 (June 1947): 247–52 (quote on 252); Gordon B. McKinney, “The Land No One Wanted: An Economic History of Whitefield, New Hampshire.”Historical New Hampshire 27 (Winter 1972): 185– 209; Steven Rubin, “How the Timber Industry Cut Down a Small Maine Town,” Business and Society Review 91 (Fall 1994): 51–53. 29. O’Leary, Maine Sea Fisheries, 136–55, 253–55, 285–91. 30. Ibid., 160–63, 186–94, 272–74, 281; Morris, “Along the Maine Coast,” 325–33; L. O. Packard, 292 | notes to pages 112–117

“The Decrease of Population along the Maine Coast,”Geographical Review (November 1916): 334–41. 31. William Francis Fagan, “From Lime Kilns to Art Galleries: A Historical Anthropology of the Maine Coast City of Rockland” (PhD diss., Louisiana State University, 2003), 13–14, 155–58, 177, 218–19; Grant E. Finch and George F. Howe, “The Lime Industry at Rockland, Maine,” Economic Geography 6 (October 1930): 389–97. 32. William B. Meyer, “Nature and Society in New England: The Other Dimension,” inBoston and New England: Advancing the Revolution in Geographic Education in a Region of Change, ed. Theodore S. Pikora and Stephen S. Young (ERIC Clearinghouse, 1999), 23; Packard, “Decrease of Population,” 333, 339–40; Finch and Howe, “Lime Industry,” 396; Fagan, “From Lime Kilns to Art Galleries,” 218–27. 33. Packard, “Decrease of Population,” 337. 34. R. T. Fisher, “New England Forests: Biological Factors,” in Adams, New England’s Prospect, 218–19; Judd, Aroostook, 224–25; Irland, “Maine Lumber Production,” 40–44; Alfred K. Chit- tenden, Forest Conditions of Northern New Hampshire (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Forestry, 1905), 14–15, 91; Henry I. Baldwin and Edgar L. Heermance, Wooden Dollars: A Report on the Forest Resources of New England, Their Condition, Economic Significance and Potentialities (Boston: Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, 1949), 55–66. 35. McFarland, New England Fisheries, 22–27, 178–79, 199–208, 211–14, 223, 232–36, 240–49, 251; O’Leary, Maine Sea Fisheries, 110, 256–61; Edward A. Ackerman, “Depletion in New England Fisheries,” Economic Geography 14 (July 1938): 237; Sabine, Principal Fisheries, 193–94. 36. Morris, “Along the Maine Coast,” 331; George Brown Goode, The Fisheries and Fishery Industries of the United States, vol. 2 (Washington, DC, 1887), 15, 19, 25, 85; Ansley Hall, “The Herring Industry of the Passamaquoddy Region, Maine,” U.S. Commission of Fish and Fisheries, Report of the Commissioner 22 (Washington: GPO, 1896): 452–53; Dewar, Industry in Trouble, 17–18; Craig, Backwoods Consumers, 4. 37. Chittenden,Forest Conditions, 78; Carol R. Foss, “Wildlife in a Changing Landscape,” in Shaping the Place We Call New Hampshire: A Land Use History, ed. Richard Ober (Concord: New Hampshire Historical Society and the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests, 1992), 19; Austin Cary, “Report of Austin Cary,” in Third Annual Report of the Forest Commissioner of the State of Maine, 1896, ed. Charles E. Oak (Augusta, ME: Burleigh & Flynt, 1896), 24–31, 33 (quote), 39, 67–68, 101–2 (quote). 38. New Hampshire Agriculture: Annual Report of the Board of Agriculture (Nashua, NH: O. C. Moore, 1873), 419, 422, 436–37, 440, 477; Henry J. Oosting and John F. Reed, “Ecological Composition of Pulpwood Forests in Northwestern Maine,” American Midland Naturalist 31 (January 1944): 182–84; Kernan, “Ship Masts,” 121; Richard W. Judd, Common Lands, Common People: The Origins of Conservation in Northern New England (Cambridge: Har- vard University Press, 1997), 91–93 (quote on 92), 100–101; A. F. Hawes, “New England Forests in Retrospect,” Journal of Forestry 21 (1923): 222–23; George P. Ahern, Forest Bank- ruptcy in America: Each State’s Own Story (Washington, DC: Green Lamp League, 1933), 168–73; Graves, “Forest Economics,” 226; Charles H. W. Foster, “The Massachusetts Forest: An Historical Overview,” in Foster, Stepping Back to Look Forward, 14. 39. Harold Oatman Cook, The Forests of Worcester County: The Results of a Forest Survey of the notes to pages 118–123 | 293

Fifty-Nine Towns in the County and a Study of Their Lumber Industry (Boston: State Printing Office, 1917), 8–19, 29, 83–84 (quote). 40. Graves “Forest Economics,” 224, 229–31; Alicia Daniel and Thor Hanson, “ ‘Remote, Rocky, Barren, Bushy Wild-woody Wilderness’: The Natural History of the Northeast,” inWil - derness Comes Home: Rewilding the Northeast, ed. Christopher McGrory Klyza (Hanover, NH: Middlebury College Press, 2001), 36; Gordon G. Whitney, From Coastal Wilderness to Fruited Plain: A History Environmental Change in Temperate North America 1500 to the Present (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 266–68, 270; Robert B. Gordon, “Cost and Use of Water Power During Industrialization in New England and Great Britain: A Geological Interpretation,” Economic History Review 36 (May 1983): 254. 41. Jamie H. Eves, “ ‘Shrunk to a Comparative Rivulet’: Deforestation, Stream Flow, and Rural Milling in 19th-Century Maine,” Technology and Culture 33 (January 1992): 39, 52–53, 56–59, 63–64; Whitney, Coastal Wilderness to Fruited Plain, 271. 42. Will Lindner, “Choices, Chances and Close Calls: How Vermont Grew to Value Its Natural Environment,” Vermont Environmental Report (Summer 2003): 20; Fisher, “New England For- ests,” 219–20; Betty Flanders Thompson,The Changing Face of New England (Boston: Hough- ton Mifflin, 1977), 28. 43. Foss, “Wildlife in a Changing Landscape,” 20–22; Fisher, “New England Forests,” 221. 44. Lorimer, “Presettlement Forest,” 145; Michael R. Pelton, “The Importance of Old Growth to Carnivores in Eastern Deciduous Forests,” in Eastern Old-Growth Forests: Prospects for Rediscovery and Recovery, ed. Mary Byrd Davis (Covelo, CA: Island Press, 1996), 67–69; Lorimer and White, “Natural Disturbances,” 42; Richard M. DeGraaf and Deborah D. Rudis, New England Wildlife: Habitat, Natural History, and Distribution (Broomall, PA: USDA Forest Service, 1986), 1, 19–20; Irland, Northeast’s Changing Forest, 66–67. 45. Brian Donahue, “Environmental Stewardship and Decline in Old New England,” Journal of the Early Republic 24 (Summer 2004): 234; Irland, Northeast’s Changing Forest, 307. 46. Edward C. Higbee, “The Three Earths of New England,”Geographical Review 42 (July 1952): 425–38 (quote on 425). 47. Hugh M. Raup, “The View from John Sanderson’s Farm: A Perspective for the Use of the Land,” Forest History 10 (April 1966): 2–11. 48. Donahue, “Environmental Stewardship,” 4; Brian Donahue, “Another Look from Sand- erson’s Farm: A Perspective on New England Environmental History and Conservation,” Environmental History 12 (January 2007): 9–34.

5. Farm and Factory 1. Brian Donahue, “Environmental Stewardship and Decline in Old New England,” 24 Jour- nal of the Early Republic (Summer 2004): 239; William Burgess Leavenworth, “The Ship in the Forest: New England Maritime Industries and Coastal Environment, 1630–1850” (PhD diss., University of New Hampshire, 1999), 351. 2. Margaret Ellen Newell, “The Birth of New England in the Atlantic Economy,” inEngines of Enterprise: An Economic History of New England, ed. Peter Temin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 12–17. 294 | notes to pages 123–126

3. Betty Flanders Thompson,The Changing Face of New England (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), 17, 33–37. 4. Max George Schumacher, The Northern Farmer and His Markets during the Late Colonial Period (New York: Arno Press, 1975), 50–52, 55; E. L. Bogart, Peacham: The Story of a Ver- mont Hill Town (Montpelier: Vermont Historical Society, 1948), 294–97; Daniel Vickers, “Competency and Competition: Economic Culture in Early New England,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 47 (January 1990): 4, 6; David R. Meyer, The Roots of American Industrialization (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 33. 5. David Jaffee, “Peddlers of Progress and the Transformation of the Rural North, 1760–1860,” Journal of American History 78 (September 1991): 511–35; Richard Lyman Bushman, “Mar- kets and Composite Farms in Early America,” William and Mary Quarterly 55 (July 1998): 363; Meyer, American Industrialization, 41; Christopher Clark, The Roots of Rural Capital- ism: Western Massachusetts, 1780–1860 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 156–61; Béatrice Craig, Backwoods Consumers & Homespun Capitalists: The Rise of a Market Culture in Eastern Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 113–14; Margaret E. Mar- tin, “Merchants and Trade of the Connecticut River Valley, 1750–1820,” Smith College Studies in History 24 (October 1938–July 1939): 155–56, 184, 187, 204–5. 6. Clark, Rural Capitalism, 166–72, 195–97, 223; M. R. Pabst, “Agricultural Trends in the Con- necticut Valley Region of Massachusetts, 1800–1900,”Smith College Studies in History 26 (1941): 12; Martin, “Merchants and Trade,” 6, 150–54; Gregory Nobles, “The Rise of Mer- chants in Rural Market Towns: A Case Study of Eighteenth-Century Northampton, Massa- chusetts,”Journal of Social History 24 (Autumn 1990): 8–9; Schumacher, Northern Farmer, 93. 7. Jan De Vries, “The Industrial Revolution and the Industrious Revolution,”Journal of Eco- nomic History 54 (June 1994): 255–58; Percy Bidwell, “Rural Economy in New England at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century,” Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences 20 (April 1916), 268 (quote), 275; Percy Bidwell, “The Agricultural Revolution in New England,” American Historical Review 26 (July 1921): 695; Har- old Fisher Wilson, The Hill Country of Northern New England: Its Social and Economic History, 1790–1930 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936), 29; Bogart, Peacham, 257; J. Ritchie Garrison, Landscape and Material Life in Franklin County, Massachusetts, 1770–1860 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 109; William F. Robinson, Abandoned New England: Its Hidden Ruins and Where to Find Them (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1976), 123–24. 8. Robert G. Le Blanc, Location of Manufacturing in New England in the Nineteenth Century (Hanover, NH: Geography Publications at Dartmouth, no. 7, 1969), 16–18; Rolla Milton Tryon, Household Manufactures in the United States, 1640–1860 (Chicago: University of Chi- cago Press, 1937), 119, 190–91; Bogart, Peacham, 260–66; Bidwell, “Rural Economy,” 275, 379; Edward P. Hamilton, The Village Mill in Early New England (Sturbridge, MA: Old Sturbridge Village, 1964), 2, 22; Jamie H. Eves, “ ‘Shrunk to a Comparative Rivulet’: Deforestation, Stream Flow, and Rural Milling in 19th-Century Maine,” Technology and Culture 33 (January 1992): 43–44; Clark, Rural Capitalism, 99–105. 9. Craig, Backwoods Consumers, 98; Eves, “ ‘Shrunk to a Comparative Rivulet,’ ” 46; Bogart, Peacham, 255–56; Robinson, Abandoned New England, 60–61. notes to pages 126–130 | 295

10. Lee N. Newcomer, The Embattled Farmers: The Massachusetts Countryside in the American Revolution (New York: King’s Crown Press, 1953), 2, 10; Meyer, American Industrialization, 6; Bogart, Peacham, 81–82; Harold Fisher Wilson, “The Roads of Windsor,”Geographical Review 21 (July 1931): 379–97; Bidwell, “Rural Economy,” 312–13. 11. Bidwell, “Rural Economy,” 316; Bogart, Peacham, 297–300; Wilson, “Roads of Windsor,” 383–84; Robinson, Abandoned New England, 10–14; Meyer, American Industrialization, 29–31. 12. Kent C. Ryden, Landscape with Figures: Nature & Culture in New England (Iowa City: Uni- versity of Iowa Press, 2001), 172–73, 192–93; Robinson, Abandoned New England, 19, 22–23, 27–34; Meyer, American Industrialization, 143–46; David Stradling, The Nature of New York: An Environmental History of the Empire State (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), 50, 52, 72. 13. Bidwell, “Agricultural Revolution,” 683–84; Wilson, Hill Country, 44–45. 14. John S. Hekman and John S. Strong, “The Evolution of New England Industry,”New England Economic Review (March/April 1981), 35; Caroline F. Ware, The Early New England Cotton Manufacture: A Study in Industrial Beginnings (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1931), 6–8; Winifred Barr Rothenberg, “The Invention of American Capitalism,” in Temin,Engines of Enterprise, 69–74. 15. Robert B. Gordon, “Hydrological Science and Development of Waterpower for Manufac- turing,” Technology and Culture 26 (April 1985): 204–35. 16. Barbara M. Tucker, Samuel Slater and the Origins of the American Textile Industry, 1790–1860 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 50–51, 71–72; Ware, Cotton Manufacture, 21–28. 17. Gary Kulik, “Factory Discipline in the New Nation: Almy, Brown & Slater and the First Cotton-Mill Workers, 1790–1808,”Massachusetts Review 28 (Spring 1987): 177. 18. Ibid., 165, 180; Steve Dunwell, The Run of the Mill: A Pictorial Narrative of the Expansion, Dominion, Decline and Enduring Impact of the New England Textile Industry (Boston: David R. Godine, 1978), 21; Jonathan Prude, The Coming of Industrial Order: Town and Factory Life in Rural Massachusetts, 1810–1860 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 10, 15–17, 44, 72–73, 77, 120; Tucker, Samuel Slater, 83–85; Robinson, Abandoned New England, 114; Joseph Brennan, Social Conditions in Industrial Rhode Island, 1820–1860 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 1940), 42–43; Gray Fitzsimons, “The Slaters of Rhode Island and the Rise and Fall of American Textiles,” in Landscape of Industry: An Industrial History of the Blackstone Valley (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England for the Worcester Historical Museum, 2009), 45. 19. Gary Kulik, “Dams, Fish, and Farmers: Defense of Public Rights in Eighteenth-Century Rhode Island,” in The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation: Essays in the Social History of Rural America, ed. Stephen Hahn and Jonathan Prude (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 26, 29–33 (quote on 30), 36, 40–41, 45; Joseph F. Cullon, “A River Transformed, a Valley Remade,” introduction to Landscape of Industry, 5; Frederic P. Fitts, “Water Rights in Rhode Island, 1790–1840: The Commodification of the Landscape,” Rhode Island History 50 (1992): 27–28; Richard Greenwood, “A Landscape of Industry,” in Landscape of Industry, 16; John T. Cumbler, Reasonable Use: The People, the Environment, and the State, New England, 1790–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 64. 296 | notes to pages 130–134

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44. Foerster, Nature in American Literature, 79–81 (Thoreau quote on 79); Miller, Transcenden- talists, 326–27; Whitford, “Thoreau and the Woodlots of Concord,” 293; Richard J. Schnei- der, “ ‘Climate Does Thus React on Man’: Wildness and Geographical Determinism in Tho- reau’s ‘Walking,’ ” in Thoreau’s Sense of Place: Essays in American Environmental Writing, ed. Richard J. Schneider (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000), 49–50; Baym, “Thoreau’s View of Science,” 233. 45. “A Winter Walk,” in Thoreau,Natural History Essays, 52, 54–56, 59, 67; Robert Sattelmeyer, introduction to Thoreau,Natural History Essays, xvii. 46. Thoreau quoted in Conron, “ ‘Bright American Rivers,’ ” 160; Thoreau, “Walking” and “Wild Apples,” in Natural History Essays, 122, 188–89, 192–95, 199–223 (quote on 202); Foer- ster, Nature in American Literature, 101; Stanley A. Tag, “Growing Outward into the World: Henry David Thoreau and the Maine Woods Narrative Tradition, 1804–1886” (PhD diss., University of Iowa 1994), 349; Thoreau,Walden, 316. 47. James McIntosh, Thoreau as Romantic Naturalist: His Shifting Stance toward Nature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974), 60 (quote), 104; Thoreau,Walden, 278, 290; Thoreau, “Walking,” in Natural History Essays, 93, 112–23; Foerster, Nature in American Literature, 111. 48. Thoreau quoted in Edmund A. Schofield, “The Ecology of Walden Woods,” Thoreau’sin World and Ours: A Natural Legacy, ed. Edmund A. Schofield and Robert C. Baron (Golden, CO: North American Press, 1993), 177; Baym, “Thoreau’s View of Science,” 226; Whitford, “Thoreau and the Woodlots of Concord,” 295; William Rossi, “Thoreau’s Transcendental Ecocentrism,” in Schneider, Thoreau’s Sense of Place, 28. 49. Thoreau, “The Succession of Forest Trees,” inNatural History Essays, 73–74, 78, 82; Thoreau, “Wild Apples,” 259–60; Whitford and Whitford, “Thoreau,” 294; Whitford, “Thoreau and the Woodlots of Concord,” 296–301; Baym, “Thoreau’s View of Science,” 225. 50. Thoreau quoted in Sherman Paul, “Thoreau, ‘The Maine Woods,’ and the Problem of Ktaadn,” in Mazel, Early Ecocriticism, 332; Thoreau quoted in McIntosh,Thoreau as Romantic, 190. 51. Fannie Eckstorm quoted in Mazel, Early Ecocriticism, 166–69. 52. Eckstorm quoted in Mazel, Early Ecocriticism, 169–71; Olson, “Cultural Study,” 9–11, 37, 39; Tag, “Growing Outward,” 5, 8. 53. Henry D. Thoreau,The Maine Woods, ed. Joseph J. Moldenhauer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 3; Olson, “Cultural Study,” 3, 106; Bradford A. Morgan, “Thoreau’s Maine Woods: Transcendental Traveler in a Primordial Landscape” (PhD diss., University of Denver, 1978), 6. 54. Thoreau,Maine Woods, 4; Olson, “Cultural Study,” 126–27, 147, 162–66, 172; Tag, “Growing Outward,” 75–76; Kaufmann, “ ‘Naturalizing the Nation,’ ” 669, 673. 55. Thoreau,Maine Woods, 36, 82–83, 151–52; Philip F. Gura, “Thoreau’s Maine Woods Indi- ans: More Representative Men,” American Literature 49 (November 1977): 369; Schramm, “Inspirational Wilderness,” 113; Gura, “Thoreau’s Maine Woods,” 371. 56. Thoreau,Maine Woods, 38, 86–87. 57. Ibid., 80, 152, 219. 58. Kent C. Ryden, Landscape with Figures: Nature & Culture in New England (Iowa City: Uni- versity of Iowa Press, 2001), 120–21; Thoreau,Maine Woods, 252–53, 275. 59. Thoreau,Maine Woods, 57–67; Olson, “Cultural Study,” 133. 304 | notes to pages 170–183

60. John G. Blair and Augustus Trowbridge, “Thoreau on Katahdin,”American Quarterly 12 (Winter 1960): 508–11 (quote on 511); McIntosh, Thoreau as Romantic, 189 (quote), 198–99; Paul, “Problem of Ktaadn,” 333–34; Tag, “Growing Outward,” 294. 61. Thoreau,Maine Woods, 70. 62. Ibid., 71; Tag, “Growing Outward,” 351, 356–57, 359; Thoreau quoted in Blair and Trow- bridge, “Thoreau on Katahdin,” 515–16 (quote on 515); Olson, “Cultural Study,” 63, 135; McIntosh, Thoreau as Romantic, 201. 63. Tag, “Growing Outward,” 277–78; Thoreau,Maine Woods, 185, 296; Olson, “Cultural Study,” 95–96, 104–8, 112; Gura, “Thoreau’s Maine Woods,” 372, 379–80, 383. 64. Thoreau,Maine Woods, 16–17, 44–45, 77–78, 110–17, 228–29; Olson, “Cultural Study,” 48, 149–51; Gura, “Thoreau’s Maine Woods,” 375. 65. Thoreau,Maine Woods, 119–22; Jamie Eves, “A Valley White with Mist: Settlers, Nature, and Culture in a North Woods River Valley, 1800–1870” (PhD diss., University of Connecticut, 2005), 9. 66. Thoreau,Maine Woods, 155–56; Edward Halsey Foster, The Civilized Wilderness: Back- grounds to American Romantic Literature, 1817–1860 (New York: Free Press, 1975), 54; Foer- ster, Nature in American Literature, 118–19. 67. Thoreau,Maine Woods, 156; Olson, “A Cultural Study,” 154.

7. Science, Conservation, and the Commons 1. Frances Malamy, “The Creation of a Land Use Policy in Seventeenth Century Massachu- setts: A Complex Interaction of Legal and Intellectual Traditions” (PhD diss., Tufts Uni- versity, 2000), 19. 2. Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Move- ment, 1890–1920 (1959; repr., New York: Atheneum, 1969). 3. Vermont Watchman and State Journal, May 10, 1882. 4. Matthew McKenzie,Clearing the Coastline: The Nineteenth-Century Ecological & Cultural Transformation of Cape Cod (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2010), 36–39; Sylvester Judd, History of Hadley (Springfield, MA: Huntting, 1905), 309; Diana Muir, Reflections in Bullough’s Pond: Economy and Ecosystem in New England (Hanover, NH: Uni- versity Press of New England, 2000), 67. 5. Ruth Lynn Friedman, “Governing the Land: An Environmental History of Cape Cod, Mas- sachusetts, 1600–1861” (PhD diss., Brandeis University, 1992), 155–62, 189, 190–99, 200– 205, 249; Richard W. Judd, Common Lands, Common People: The Origins of Conservation in Northern New England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 123–30. 6. Judd, Common Lands, 40–43, 47–59. 7. John T. Cumbler, Reasonable Use: The People, the Environment, and the State, New England, 1790–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 69–72 (quote on 72); Lorenzo Sabine, Report on the Principal Fisheries of the American Seas, Prepared for The Treasury Department of the United States (Washington, DC: Armstrong, 1853), 192; Judd, Common Lands, 125–27, 131–32, 159; Raymond McFarland, New England Fisheries (New York: D. Appleton, 1911), 196–99, 215–16; Judd, History of Hadley, 307. notes to pages 183–191 | 305

8. Cumbler, Reasonable Use, 77, 85, 92; Judd, Common Lands, 146–57; McFarland, New England Fisheries, 218–19. 9. McFarland, New England Fisheries, 219; Judd, Common Lands, 142–43, 145, 158–67; Cumbler, Reasonable Use, 92. 10. Judd, Common Lands, 168–72. 11. Ibid., 165–71, 173–75, 177–84 (quote on 177), 186, 206–8; Cumbler, Reasonable Use, 96–97. 12. McKenzie, Clearing the Coastline, 40–41, 43, 91–93, 101, 105. 13. Ibid., 106–9, 111–21. 14. Ibid., 122–27, 131–34; Friedman, “Governing the Land,” 332–36; Judd, Common Lands, 234–30. 15. McKenzie, Clearing the Coastline, 154–58, 164–72. 16. Judd, Common Lands, 240–41. 17. Ibid., 241–45. 18. Friedman, “Governing the Land,” 226; Annual Report of the Commissioners of Fish and Game (Boston, 1910), 82. 19. Annual Report (1910), 63–65; Annual Report of the Commissioners of Fish and Game (Boston, 1912–14), 8–9; Theodore Lyman quoted in McKenzie,Clearing the Coastline, 124; Friedman, “Governing the Land,” 174–75, 225–26, 250–52. 20. Annual Report (1910), 60–61; “An Act Concerning the Clam Fisheries in the Town of Winthrop,” March 20, 1875, Legislative Documents (hereafter, LD) 1875, chapter 60, Mas- sachusetts State Archives, Boston (hereafter, MSA); “An Act to Authorize the Selectmen of Towns . . . to Control Certain Fisheries within Said Towns and Cities,” April 17, 1880, LD 1880, chapter 200, MSA; “An Act to Protect the Fisheries of the Towns of Mashpee and Barnstable,” LD 1884, chapter 264, MSA (and similar acts for Brewster, Swansea, and Somerset, chapters 38, 116, 185); “An Act Authorizing the Planting of Clams in and around the Shores of Essex,” April 9, 1888, LD 1888, chapter 202, MSA; “Remonstrance of John Kennick,” February 6, 1888, LD 1888, chapter 198; “Petition of Lucius Floyd,” January 31, 1888; “Remonstrance of George Eldridge,” February 9, 1888, LD 1888, chapter 202, MSA. 21. Annual Report of the Commissioners of Fish and Game (Boston, 1904), 42, 44–45; (1901), 53; (1907), 3–4; (1908), 3–4; (1909), 42; (1910), 10 (quote), 60–65, 84–85; (1901), 52–53; (1912–1914), 8–9; “Act Concerning the Shell Fisheries in the Towns of Swansea and Som- erset,” April 10, 1875, LD 1875, chapter 116, MSA; “Petition for Repeal of Chapter 185, 1874”; “Act Concerning the Clam Fisheries in the Town of Winthrop,” March 20, 1874; “Petition of Samuel Irgalls,” December 15, 1874, LD 1875, chapter 61, MSA; “An Act to Provide for the Protection and Cultivation of Quahaugs in the Towns of Eastham, Orleans, and Wellfleet,” January 28, 1904, with petitions LD 1904, chapter 269; “An Act Relative to the Propagation and Cultivation of Shellfish,” April 30, 1904, LD 1904, chapter 282, MSA. 22. Judd, Common Lands, 247–48; Edward A. Ackerman, “Depletion in New England Fisher- ies,” Economic Geography 14 (July 1938): 234. 23. Judd, Common Lands, 248–54. 24. Ibid., 255. 25. Ibid., 257–62; James M. Acheson, Capturing the Commons: Devising Institutions to Manage the Maine Lobster Industry (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2003), 86–87; 306 | notes to pages 191–195

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“Prospective for a National Forest: Economic Influences on Vermont’s Efforts to Manage For- est Resources,” Vermont History 54, no. 2 (1986): 77; “Weeks Act, 1911,” Encyclopedia of Amer- ican Forest and Conservation History, ed. Richard C. Davis (New York: Macmillan, 1983), 685. 42. Charles G. Roundy, “Changing Attitudes toward the Maine Wilderness” (PhD diss., Uni- versity of Maine, 1970), 2; Judd, Common Lands, 111–20 (quotes on 113–14); Charles E. Oak, Second Annual Report of the Forest Commissioner, 1894 (Augusta, ME: Burleigh & Flynt, 1894), 7; Austin Cary, “On the Growth of Spruce,” in Oak, Second Annual Report, 21, 105. 43. Judd, Common Lands, 116–17; Edgar E. Ring, Fourth Report of the Forest Commissioner, 1902 (Augusta, ME: Kennebec Journal Print, 1902), 32–43; Ralph Hosmer, “A Study of the Maine Spruce,” in Ring, Fourth Report, 5. 44. Judd, Common Lands, 116–18; Frank Putnam, “Maine: A Study in Land-Grabbing, Tax Dodging, and Isolation,” New England Magazine 36 (July 1907): 515–40; Liberty B. Den- nett, “Maine’s Wildlands and Wildlanders,”Pine Tree Magazine 6 (1907–8); Roundy, “Changing Attitudes,” 115–20. 45. Judd, Common Lands, 118–19 (quote); Judd, Aroostook, 212–18. 46. Judd, Common Lands, 92–95; Douglass, “Prospective for a National Forest,” 72–74, 78, 80–85; John Aubrey Douglass, “The Forest Service, the Depression, and Vermont Political Culture: Implementing New Deal Conservation and Relief Policy,” Forest & Conservation History 34 (October 1990): 164–65; Sara M. Gregg, “From Farms to Forest: Federal Con- servation and Resettlement Programs in the Blue Ridge and Green Mountains” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2004), 244. 47. Judd, Common Lands, 119–20. 48. Judd, Aroostook, 243–45; Lloyd C. Irland, “Maine Lumber Production, 1839–1997: A Statis- tical Overview,” Maine History 38 (Summer 1998): 40. 49. Carol R. Foss, “Wildlife in a Changing Landscape,” in Shaping the Place We Call New Hamp- shire: A Land Use History, ed. Richard Ober (Concord: New Hampshire Historical Soci- ety and the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests, 1992), 19–20; John F. O’Keefe and David R. Foster, “An Ecological History of Massachusetts Forests,” inStepping Back to Look Forward: A History of the Massachusetts Forest, ed. Charles H. W. Foster (Peter- sham, MA: Harvard Forest, 1998), 43; William H. Rivers, “Massachusetts State Forestry Programs,” in Foster, Stepping Back, 171–74. 50. “Rebuilding of Ruined Forests Confronts New England,” Science News-Letter 34 (October 15, 1938): 252–53; Charles H. W. Foster, “Environmental Conservation in Massachusetts: A Twentieth-Century Overview,” in New England Land Conservation, 187; Douglass, “Forest Service,” 168; Rivers, “Massachusetts State Forestry Programs,” 202–13; Jon A. Schlenker, Normal A. Wetherington, and Austin H. Wilkins, In the Public Interest: The Civilian Con- servation Corps in Maine (Augusta: University of Maine at Augusta Press, 1988), 6, 12–13, 24–28, 49–50; Stephen H Spurr, “Natural Restocking of Forests Following the 1938 Hurri- cane in Central New England,” Ecology 37 (July 1956): 443–44, 448; O’Keefe and Foster, “Massachusetts Forests,” 52. 51. Douglass, “Forest Service,” 165–68, 172–75; Christopher McGrory Klyza, “Public Lands and Wild Lands in the Northeast,” in Wilderness Comes Home: Rewilding the Northeast (Hanover, NH: Middlebury College Press, 2001), 78. notes to pages 203–209 | 309

52. Harrison, View from Vermont, 124–30 (quote); Gregg, “From Farms to Forest,” 191–92, 219– 20, 224–29, 232–34, 237–40, 248; Douglass, “Forest Service,” 170–71; McCullough, Ginger, and Baumflek, “Unspoiled Vermont,” 140–42. 53. Wayne M. O’Leary, Maine Sea Fisheries: The Rise and Fall of a Native Industry, 1830–1890 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996), 160–63, 166–70, 172, 176–78; Lewis Rad- cliffe, “The Fisheries of New England,” in Adams, New England’s Prospect, 248–49; McFar- land, New England Fisheries, 267, 269–71. 54. McFarland, New England Fisheries, 260, 262–65; Margaret E. Dewar, Industry in Trouble: The Federal Government and the New England Fisheries (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983), 13; Ackerman, “Depletion in New England Fisheries,” 235–38; William Francis Fagan, “From Lime Kilns to Art Galleries: A Historical Anthropology of the Maine Coast City of Rockland” (PhD diss., Louisiana State University, 2003), 243–50. 55. Ackerman, “Depletion in New England Fisheries,” 233, 237; Richard A. Wahle, “Fisheries in a Sea of Change: Ecology and Oceanography of New England’s Fishing Grounds,” North- eastern Naturalist 7, no. 4 (2000): 324, 326. 56. Dewar, Industry in Trouble, 5, 11–12, 14, 20, 35–41, 68–73, 96, 107–16, 119–22, 125; Judith A. Layzer, “The New England Fisheries Crisis,” inThe Environmental Case: Translating Values into Policy (Washington DC: CQ Press, 2002), 185; Wahle, “Fisheries in a Sea of Change,” 323–24. 57. Dewar, Industry in Trouble, 132–43, 147. 58. Layzer, “New England Fisheries Crisis,” 184, 188–89, 192–204; Muir, Reflections in Bullough’s Pond, 229; Fagan, “Lime Kilns to Art Galleries,” 254–55. 59. Smith, History of Lumbering, 425–27 (quote on 427); Judd, Aroostook, 250–52; Paul R. Josephson, Industrialized Nature: Brute Force Technology and the Transformation of the Natu- ral World (Washington, DC: Island Press / Shearwater Books, 2002), 89–93. 60. Thomas M. Beckley, “Pluralism by Default: Community Power in a Paper Mill Town,”For - est Science 42, no. 1 (1996): 43; Lloyd C. Irland, The Northeast’s Changing Forest (Petersham, MA: Harvard Forest, 1999), 283–84; James Acheson, “Clearcutting Maine: Implications for the Theory of Common Property Resources,”Human Ecology 28 (June 2000): 161; Bret Wallach, “Logging in Maine’s Empty Quarter,” Annals of the Association of American Geog- raphers 70 (December 1980): 542–52; Judd, Aroostook, 257–58. 61. Judd, Aroostook, 250–52; Daniel S. Smith, “The Discipline of Nature: A History of Environ- mental Discourse in the Northern Forest of New England and New York” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2003), 307. 62. Wallach, “Logging in Maine’s Empty Quarter,” 549–50; Irland, Northeast’s Changing Forest, 94–99; Acheson, “Clearcutting Maine,” 150. 63. Frederick W. Cubbage and William Siegal, “State and Local Regulation of Private Forestry in the East,” Northern Journal of Applied Forestry 5 (1988): 103–6; Acheson, “Clearcutting Maine,” 148–49, 156–59; Smith, “Discipline of Nature,” 388, 423. 64. Irland, Northeast’s Changing Forest, 116, 122, 128, 131–33, 326; Ahern, Forest Bankruptcy, 122; William A. Niering, “The New England Forests,”Restoration & Management Notes 10 (Sum- mer 1992): 25–26; McCullough, Ginger, and Baumflek, “Unspoiled Vermont,” 155; Foss, “Wildlife in a Changing Landscape,” 20. 65. McKenzie, Clearing the Coastline, 177. 310 | notes to pages 210–212

8. Conserving Urban Ecologies 1. Anthony N. Penna, “Introduction: Boston from Peninsula to Metropolis,” in Remaking Boston: An Environmental History of the City and Its Surroundings, ed. Anthony N. Penna and Conrad Edick Wright (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), 5; William B. Meyer, “Nature and Society in New England: The Other Dimension,” inBoston and New England: Advancing the Revolution in Geographic Education in a Region of Change, ed. Theo- dore S Pikora and Stephen S. Young (Indiana, PA: National Council for Geographic Edu- cation, 1999) 20–21. 2. Martin V. Melosi, The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 3–6; Martin V. Melosi, “The Place of the City in Environmental History,” Environmental History Review 17 (Spring 1993): 3–4; Anne Whiston Spirn, The Granite Garden: Urban Nature and Human Design (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 243; Stephen Mosley, “Common Ground: Integrating Social And Environmental History,” Journal of Social History 39 (Spring 2006): 917. 3. Clay McShane, “Gelded Age Boston,” New England Quarterly 74 (June 2001): 274–302; Ted Steinberg, Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 157, 160–61; Michael Hough, “Design with City Nature: An Overview of Some Issues,” in The Ecological City: Preserving and Restoring Urban Biodiversity, ed. Rutherford H. Platt, Rowan A. Rowntree, and Pamela C. Muick (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), 41–42. 4. Stephen Young and Theodore Pikora, “An Overview of Greater Boston from Space,” in Pikora and Young, Boston and New England, 12–13; Theodore S. Pikora, “Salem, Massachu- setts: The Changing Geography of a Coastal Community in New England,” in Pikora and Young, Boston and New England, 41–42, 49–51. 5. Peter J. Coleman, The Transformation of Rhode Island, 1790–1860 (Providence: Brown Uni- versity Press, 1963), 13, 16, 66–68, 71; John S. Garner, The Model Company Town: Urban Design through Private Enterprise in Nineteenth-Century New England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982), 23; John S. Gilkeson,Middle-Class Providence, 1820–1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 13–14, 18–20. 6. Steve Dunwell, The Run of the Mill: A Pictorial Narrative of the Expansion, Dominion, Decline and Enduring Impact of the New England Textile Industry (Boston: David R. Godine, 1978), 24, 69, 128; Robert B. Gordon and Patrick M. Malone, The Texture of Industry: An Archaeo- logical View of the Industrialization of North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 87–88; Sylvia Chace Lintner, “Mill Architecture in Fall River: 1865–1880,” New England Quarterly 21 (June 1948): 193–94; David A. Zonderman, Aspirations and Anxieties: New England Workers and the Mechanized Factory System, 1815–1850 (New York: Oxford Uni- versity Press, 1992), 64. 7. Stephen Matchak, “The Heritage of the Textile Industry in the Social Fabric of Lowell, Mas- sachusetts,” in Pikora and Young,Boston and New England, 58–59; Patricia Trainor O’Mal- ley and Paul H. Tedesco, Haverhill, Massachusetts: A New England City (Northridge, CA: Windsor, 1987), 12, 33, 38; John Coolidge, “Low Cost Housing: The New England Tradition,” New England Quarterly 14 (1941): 13; Garner, Model Company Town, 26; Dunwell, Run of the Mill, 97. notes to pages 213–216 | 311

8. Theodore Steinberg,Nature Incorporated: Industrialization and the Waters of New England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 83–84, 86–88, 99, 101, 104; Steinberg, “Dam-Breaking in the 19th Century Merrimack Valley: Water, Social Conflict, and the Waltham-Lowell Mills,” Journal of Social History 24 (Autumn 1990): 25–28, 30–31; Robert B. Gordon, “Hydrological Science and Development of Waterpower for Manufacturing,” Technology and Culture 26 (April 1985): 206–10, 235; Diana Muir, Reflections in Bullough’s Pond: Economy and Ecosystem in New England (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2000), 163. 9. Dunwell, Run of the Mill, 67; Robert G. Le Blanc, Location of Manufacturing in New England in the Nineteenth Century (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth, 1969), 102–3, 108; Gordon, “Hydro- logical Science,” 225–26, 228–30, 235; Robert B. Gordon, “Cost and Use of Water Power during Industrialization in New England and Great Britain: A Geological Interpretation,” Economic History Review, n.s. 36 (May 1983): 242; William F. Robinson, Abandoned New England: Its Hidden Ruins and Where to Find Them (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1976), 119; Garner, Model Company Town, 27–28. 10. Le Blanc, Location of Manufacturing, 102–4; Dunwell, Run of the Mill, 105–6, 111–12; Mal- colm Keir, “Some Influences of the Sea upon the Industries of New England,”Geographical Review 5 (May 1918): 403; Kingston W. Heath, The Patina of Place: The Cultural Weathering of a New England Industrial Landscape (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2001), 33–34, 44–46. 11. Carol Y. Mason, “Water Supplies of New England,” Economic Geography 13 (October 1937): 347, 355. 12. Donald B. Cole, Immigrant City: Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1845–1921 (Chapel Hill: Univer- sity of North Carolina Press, 1963), 61–62 (quote); Eric Jay Dolin, Political Waters: The Long, Dirty, Contentious, Incredibly Expensive but Eventually Triumphant History of Boston Har- bor—A Unique Environmental Success Story (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004), 18–19 (quote); John T. Cumbler, Reasonable Use: The People, the Environment, and the State, New England, 1790–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 49–55, 62; Louis Taylor Merrill, “Mill Town on the Merrimack,” New England Quarterly 19 (March 1946): 29; Michael J. Rawson, “Nature and the City: Boston and the Construction of the American Metropolis, 1820–1920” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, Madison, 2005), 94, 97–100, 102–3. 13. James Russell Lowell quoted in Mason, “Water Supplies of New England,” 348; Letty Anderson, “Hard Choices: Supplying Water to New England Towns,” Journal of Interdisci- plinary History 15 (Autumn 1984): 212, 217; Rawson, “Nature and the City,” 82–85, 87, 89–93; Arthur W. Brayley, A Complete History of the Boston Fire Department (Boston: Dalle, 1889), 148–49; Sarah S. Elkind, Bay Cities and Water Politics: The Battle for Resources in Boston and Oakland (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998), 19–25. 14. Anderson, “Hard Choices,” 213, 222–23; Mason, “Water Supplies of New England,” 349, 351–53, 355–57, 358; Susan I. Hautaniemi, Alan C. Swedlund, and Douglas L. Anderton, “Mill Town Morality: Consequences of Industrial Growth in Two Nineteenth-Century New England Towns,” Social Science History 23 (Spring 1999): 5–6; Peter B. Lord, “The Rhode Island Conservation Story,” in Twentieth-Century New England Land Conservation: 312 | notes to pages 216–221

A Heritage of Civic Engagement, ed. Charles H. W. Foster (Petersham, MA: Harvard Forest, 2009), 232; Minnie E. Lemaire, “Wachusett Reservoir: A Metropolitan Water Supply,”Eco - nomic Geography 13 (April 1937): 181–82, 185; Elkind, Bay Cities, 108–10, 165; Brian Donahue, “Remaking Boston, Remaking Massachusetts,” in Penna and Wright,Remaking Boston, 119. 15. Elkind, Bay Cities, 109, 113; Edward C. Higbee, “The Three Earths of New England,”Geo - graphical Review 42 (July 1952): 437; Mason, “Water Supplies of New England,” 350; Paul K. Barten et al., “Massachusetts: Managing a Watershed Protection Forest,”Journal of Forestry 96 (August 1998): 10–12. 16. Constance McLaughlin Green, Holyoke, Massachusetts: A Case History of the Industrial Rev- olution in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1939), 113, 116–18 (quote on 117), 121, 261; Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor,Sixth Annual Report, 1875 (Boston: Wright and Potter, 1875), 392; George H. Long and Carroll Davidson Wright, “The Sanitary Con- dition of Working People,” Fifth Annual Report of the Bureau of Statistics of Labor (Boston: Wright & Potter, 1874), 33, 116–17; Barbara Rosenkrantz,Public Health and the State: Chang- ing Views in Massachusetts, 1842–1936 (Cambridge, 1972), 9; Dunwell, Run of the Mill, 117–19; Joseph W. Lipchitz, “The Golden Age,” inCotton Was King: A History of Lowell, Massachu- setts, ed. Arthur L. Eno (Lowell, MA: Lowell Historical Society, 1976), 99, 102. 17. Melosi, Sanitary City, 44, 46–47, 62–65, 104–5. 18. Rosenkrantz, Public Health, 30–32, 36; Long and Wright, “Sanitary Condition,” 32, 35, 41, 46; Cumbler, Reasonable Use, 107, 114–15, 136; Anderson, “Hard Choices,” 214–18, 221; Elkind, Bay Cities, 52–53. 19. State Board of Health quoted in Cumbler, Reasonable Use, 111; Rosenkrantz, Public Health, 65–69; David Stradling, The Nature of New York: An Environmental History of the Empire State (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), 120; Melosi, Sanitary City, 107. 20. Rosenkrantz, Public Health, 87–88; Dolin, Political Waters, 44–50; Elkind, Bay Cities, 11–17, 49–53, 55, 59–62, 81–84, 88, 91–93, 99; Steven M. Rudnick, “Remaking Boston Harbor: Cleaning Up after Ourselves,” in Penna and Wright,Remaking Boston, 58, 60–63; Lord, “Rhode Island Conservation Story,” 224. 21. John T. Cumbler, “Whatever Happened to Industrial Waste? Reform, Compromise, and Sci- ence in Nineteenth Century Southern New England,” Journal of Social History 29 (Autumn 1995): 149–54, 158; Cumbler, Reasonable Use, 116, 136–39, 140–41, 157; Cole, Immigrant City, 29, 62; Melosi, Sanitary City, 164–70; Mason, “Water Supplies of New England,” 353. 22. Melosi, Sanitary City, 165–66; Cumbler, Reasonable Use, 62, 145, 149, 155–58, 181–82, 191; Suki Casanave, “Our Second Century: Reclaiming New Hampshire’s Waters,” Forest Notes, no. 223 (Autumn 1999): 4–5. 23. Cumbler, Reasonable Use, 86; Melosi, Sanitary City, 67–68. 24. Mona Domosh, “Shaping the Commercial City: Retail Districts in Nineteenth-Century New York and Boston,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 80 (June 1990): 272–73; Walter Firey, “Sentiment and Symbolism as Ecological Variables,” American Socio- logical Review 10 (April, 1945): 145; Lawrence W. Kennedy, Planning the City upon a Hill: Boston since 1630 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 48; David Ward, “The Industrial Revolution and the Emergence of Boston’s Central Business District,” Economic Geography 42 (April 1966): 153–54. notes to pages 222–228 | 313

25. Ward, “Industrial Revolution,” 155, 158, 160–64; Kennedy, Planning the City, 44–46; Michael Holleran, Boston’s “Changeful Times”: Origins of Preservation & Planning in America (Bal- timore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 54–55; Walter Firey, Land Use in Central Boston (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1947), 62. 26. Firey, Land Use in Central Boston, 66, 68; Kennedy, Planning the City, 5–6, 17, 31–33, 38, 63; Rawson, “Nature and the City,” 209–11; Mona Domosh, Invented Cities: The Creation of Landscape in Nineteenth-Century New York and Boston (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 101–10, 116; Holleran, “Changeful Times,” 80–81. 27. Holleran, “Changeful Times,” 4, 9–10, 48–49; Kennedy, Planning the City upon a Hill, 23, 25, 34, 41; Domosh, “Shaping the Commercial City,” 269–77; Ward, “Industrial Revolution,” 157. 28. Domosh, Invented Cities, 33; Firey, “Sentiment and Symbolism,” 140–41, 144; Holleran, “Changeful Times,” 33, 43–44, 47, 84–85. 29. Firey, “Sentiment and Symbolism,” 146, 170; James M. Lingren, “ ‘A Spirit that Fires the Imagination’: Historic Preservation and Cultural Regeneration in Virginia and New England, 1850–1950,” in Giving Preservation a History: Histories of Historic Preservation in the United States, ed. Max Page and Randall Mason (London: Routledge, 2004), 108; Michael Holleran, “Roots in Boston, Branches in Planning and Parks,” 81–87, in Page and Mason, Giving Preservation a History, 108; Holleran, Boston’s ‘Changeful Times,’ 15–17, 88–104, 109. 30. Domosh, Invented Cities, 133, 138; Rawson, “Nature and the City,” 51–61, 69 (quote). 31. David Schuyler, The New Urban Landscape: The Redefinition of City Form in Nineteenth- Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 37–38, 40–44, 52–55. 32. Cynthia Zaitzevsky, Frederick Law Olmsted and the Boston Park System (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1982), 20–22, 35–37, 76; Schuyler, New Urban Landscape, 137–39, 141. 33. Schuyler, New Urban Landscape, 6–7, 36, 59–66; Kennedy, Planning the City upon a Hill, 89–91; Firey, Land Use in Central Boston, 137; Zaitzevsky, Olmsted, 74–75; S. B. Sutton, ed., Civilizing American Cities: A Selection of Frederick Law Olmsted’s Writings on City Landscapes (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971), 70. 34. Norman T. Newton, Design on the Land: The Development of Landscape Architecture (Cam- bridge: Belknap Press, 1971), 324; Zaitzevsky, Olmsted, 55–63, 65–73, 82–85; Schuyler, New Urban Landscape, 141; Holleran, “Changeful Times,” 113. 35. Rawson, “Nature and the City,” 266–70 (quote); Sam Bass Warner, “Today’s Boston: A History,” Massachusetts Historical Review 1 (1999): 9; Schuyler, New Urban Landscape, 143– 44; Newton, Design on the Land, 326–28; James C. O’Connell, “How Metropolitan Parks Shaped Greater Boston, 1893–1945,” in Penna and Wright, Remaking Boston, 175–76. 36. Deborah Krichels, “Reaction and Reform: The Political Career of James Phinney Baxter, Mayor of Portland, Maine, 1893–1897, 1904–1905” (master’s thesis, University of Maine, 1986), 145–50, 152–59, 161–69. 37. Peter C. Baldwin, Domesticating the Street: The Reform of Public Space in Hartford, 1850–1930 (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1999), 18–19, 25–26, 118–19, 124. 38. Ibid., 130–33, 139, 140–41. 39. Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 11–13, 129, 131–39, 145–46, 192. 314 | notes to pages 228–233

40. Baldwin, Domesticating the Street, 116–17; Rosenzweig, Eight Hours, 130. 41. James C. O’Connell, “Greater Boston,” 195, 197. 42. Helen H. Balk, “Reurbanization of Worcester’s Environs,” Economic Geography 21 (April 1945): 110–11, 116; J. O. Hertzler, “Some Sociological Aspects of American Regionalism,” Social Forces 18 (October 1939): 28; Roland B. Greeley, “Part-Time Farming and Recre- ational Land Use in New England,” Economic Geography 18 (April 1942): 146–48, 152; T. D. Seymour Bassett, “A Case Study of Urban Impact on Rural Society: Vermont, 1840–80,” Agricultural History 30 (January 1956): 28–30. 43. Mark Luccarelli, Lewis Mumford and the Ecological Region: The Politics of Planning (New York: Guilford Press, 1995), 35; Greeley, “Part-Time Farming,” 146–50. 44. Henry C. Binford, The First Suburbs: Residential Communities on the Boston Periphery, 1815–1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 18–19, 88–93, 155–57, 160; Charles J. Kennedy, “Commuter Services in the Boston Area,” Business History Review 36 (Summer 1962): 155–58, 164–66; Sam Bass Warner, Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870–1900 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962). 45. Ward, “Industrial Revolution,” 164–67; Holleran, “Changeful Times,” 119, 128; Balk, “Reur- banization of Worcester’s Environs,” 111–13. 46. John S. Hekman and John S. Strong, “The Evolution of New England Industry,”New England Economic Review (March/April 1981), 39, 41; R. C. Estall, “Electronic Products Industry of New England,” Economic Geography 39 (July 1963): 190, 193–94; R. C. Estall, New England: A Study in Industrial Adjustment (New York: Praeger, 1966), 17, 23, 33, 36–39, 79–84; Michael P. Conzen and George K. Lewis, Boston: A Geographical Portrait (Cam- bridge, MA: Ballinger, 1976), 15. 47. Estall, “Electronic Products Industry,” 193, 196–97, 199, 205, 208, 212–14; Estall, New England, 86, 94; Warner, “Today’s Boston,” 17; Lynn Elaine Browne and Steven Sass, “The Transition from a Mill-Based to a Knowledge-Based Economy: New England, 1840–2000,” in Engines of Enterprise: An Economic History of New England, ed. Peter Temin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 202–18, 225–40; William H. Wallace, “Merrimack Valley Manu- facturing: Past and Present,” Economic Geography 37 (October 1961): 299, 303; Christine L. Hobart, Population Growth in New Hampshire during the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (ERIC Clearinghouse, 1986), 26–27. 48. Estall, “Electronic Products Industry,” 215; Conzen and Lewis, Boston, 50–54. 49. Robinson, Abandoned New England, 122; Browne and Sass, “Transition,” 222–25, 242–47; Lawrence Dame, New England Comes Back (New York: Random House, 1940), 4–7, 17–18, 58–60; William S. Devino, Arnold H. Raphaelson, and James A. Storer, A Study of Tex- tile Mill Closings in Selected New England Communities (Orono: University of Maine Press, 1966), 17–18, 42, 53, 56–57, 59; George K. Lewis, “Population Change in Northern New England,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 62 (June 1972): 316; Rachelle L. Levitt, ed.,Cities Reborn (Washington, DC: Urban Land Institute, 1987), 14. 50. Levitt,Cities Reborn, 16–17; Conzen and Lewis, Boston, 69–71; Janet Duncan, “Neigh- borhoods in the ‘Walking City’ of Boston,” in Pikora and Young, Boston and New England, 40. 51. Richard Candee, “A Closer Look,” in Shaping the Place We Call New Hampshire: A Land Use notes to pages 234–238 | 315

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57. Daniel B. Botkin, No Man’s Garden: Thoreau and a New Vision for Civilization and Nature (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2001), 156; Mitchell and Diamant, “Stewardship and Sus- tainability,” 216, 225. 58. Passanisi, “Redefining Wildness,” 85, 88; Foster, “Wildlife Dynamics,” 1347. 59. Stephen C. Trombulak and Kimberly Royar, “Restoring the Wild: Species Recovery and Reintroduction,” in Klyza, Wilderness Comes Home, 163–72; Foster, “Wildlife Dynamics,” 1339, 1342–48, 1351; Muir, Reflections in Bullough’s Pond, 232–33; Richard M. DeGraaf and Deborah D. Rudis, New England Wildlife: Habitat, Natural History, and Distribution (Wash- ington, DC: U.S. Forest Service, Northeastern Forest Experiment Station General Techni- cal Report NE-108, 1986), 336, 343, 353, 362. 60. Stephen C. Trombulak, “Ecological Reserve Design in the Northeast,” in Klyza, Wilderness Comes Home, 107–9, 112–18; Sayen, “Opportunity for Big Wilderness,” 131–32; Irland, North- east’s Changing Forest, 318–19. 61. Charles H. W. Foster, Yankee Salmon: The Atlantic Salmon of the Connecticut River (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1991), 4–6, 14, 17–18, 27–28, 37, 119, 127, 129, 158–64; Stephen Gephard, “Last Chance for Atlantic Salmon,” Connecticut Woodlands 71 (Spring 2006): 7–10; Peter Lamothe,” Atlantic Salmon Spring Runs Double in 2011 (Washington, DC: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 2011). 62. Klyza, “Eastern Turn for Wilderness,” 25; Jeff Crane, “Finding the River: The Destruction and Restoration of the Kennebec and Elwha Rivers” (PhD diss., Washington State Univer- sity, 2004), 34–35, 78, 80–83, 122, 125, 208–17, 222–26, 229–30. 63. Wes Jackson quoted in Klyza, “Eastern Turn for Wilderness,” 21. “This page intentionally left blank” Index

Abenakis, 60, 63–64, 67. See also Native Civilian Conservation Corps, 202 Americans Civil War, 111, 156 Adams, James Truslow, 6 clams, conservation of, 188–89 Allagash River, 265–66 Clark, Charles, 7–8, 13 American Revolution, 85–88, 104–5, 125 Clements, Frederic, 10 Annalistes, 6 Clovis and Folsom points, 23–24 Archaic periods and people: early, 28–29; Cole, Thomas, 153–55, 157 middle, 29; late, 29–30; terminal, 30 colonial revival, 243–44 Archaic Readjustment, 27 Connecticut Valley, 70–72, 78–79, 82, 90 conservation, 179–85 Barron, Hal, 12 conservation of forests, 194–204, 206–9; Barrows, Harlan H., 4–5 women conservationists, 196–97 Beard, Charles and Mary, 2 Cooper, James Fenimore, 148 Beaver Wars, 58 Corte-Real, Gaspar, 41 Belknap, Jeremy, 146–47 Cotton, Joseph, 73 Boston, 221–27, 237–39, 252–53 The Course of Empire (Cole), 154. See also Bowden, Martin, 88 Cole, Thomas Braudel, Fernand, 6 Cronon, William, 8–10, 83, 102 Broad Arrow acts, 104 Bryant, William Cullen, 148–49 da Verrazano, Giovanni, 42 Day, Gordon, 37 Cabot, John, 41 deforestation. See forest use Cape Cod, 35, 105–6, 181, 186 Dincauze, Dena, 34 Cartier, Jacques, 42 Donahue, Brian, 121 Cary, Austin, 116 Dummer’s War, 62, 108 Champlain, Samuel de, 34, 43 Dwight, Timothy, 146–47

| 325 326 | index

Edwards, Jonathan, 144–45 King Philip’s War, 59–61 electronics revolution, 231–32 King William’s War, 61–62 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 158–61 environmental determinism, 3–6, 22 land preservation, 258–67 environmental history, history of, 11–15 land trusts, 259–60 environmentalism, 251–58 lobster, conservation of, 189–91 environmental justice movement, 236–39 logging and lumbering, 108–11, 114, 116, 126, European settlement, 4–5, 21, 39–68, 70–74 129–30, 194–98 Lowell, Francis Cabot. See Waltham-Lowell farm abandonment, 137–40 system farm reform, 191–93 Lowell, James Russell, 149–50 farms, 80–83, 85, 90–91, 93–94, 135–37, 256–57 market revolution, 135–37 Fishery Conservation and Management Marsh, George Perkins, 93, 120 Act, 205 Martin, Calvin, 37, 56 fishing, 101–2, 105–8, 111–15, 181–91, 204–6 Martin, Paul S., 24 Folsom points. See Clovis and Folsom Massachusetts Fish Commission, 183 points McDougal, Myles, 2 forest types, 100–101 Merchant, Carolyn, 8, 33, 56, 80–81, 193 forest use, 102–5, 116–19 Middle Archaic, 29 French and Indian War. See Seven Years’ Mi’kmaqs, 51 War Mohawks, 52, 58 frontier, 77–80 Morton, Thomas, 36 Frost, Robert, 246–47 fur trading, 50–52, 56–57, 58 Narragansetts, 50, 57, 65 Nash, Roderick, 12 Gosnold, Bartholemew, 43 Native Americans, 30–38, 40, 44, 49–52, Grant, Charles, 88 55–59, 64–68, 171–72, 248–49, 261 Great Migration, Puritan, 49 “natural” landscapes and definition, 10–11, 13, 19 Hakluyt, Richard (Elder and Younger), 43, New England: colonization of, 44–52; as 44 distinct region and cultural identity, 1–6, Hartley, Marsden, 247–48 13–15, 17–19, 21–22; prehistory of, 22–35 Hatchet Lake Reservation, 37 Nipmucs, 65 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 147–48 Northern Forest Alliance, 263 Hays, Samuel P., 179 Higbee, Edward, 7, 120 Opie, John, 12 Homer, Winslow, 156–57 Hornsby, Stephen, 83–84, 89 Paleoindians, 23–24, 25–28 Hudson River School, 152–56 parks, 223–29 Hulbert, Archer, 69–70 Passamaquoddies, 65 Penobscots, 65–66, 171–72 Indian reservations, 64–67 Pequots, 64–65 industrial cities, 214–22 Pequot War, 52–55 Industrial Revolution, 123–35 plagues, 48, 56 Pleistocene, 22–24 Jewett, Sarah Orne, 244–45 Plymouth colony, 49, 73 index | 327 pollution, 251–53 Susquehanna. See Archaic periods and possibilism, 5 people: terminal Pring, Martin, 43 Progressive Era, 179 textile mills, 140–41 public waterworks, 215–21 Thaxter, Thelia, 245–46 Pynchon, William, 51 Thomas, Peter, 36 Thoreau, Henry David, 161–74 Queen Anne’s War, 62 tourism, 242–43 town founding, 74–76 Raup, Hugh, 120–21 transcendentalism, 158–61 regionalism in New England, 1–6, 13–15, transportation systems, 126–27 17–19, 21–22, 240–42, 244–49 Treaty of Casco, 60–61 regional planning, 249–51, 255–58 Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, 50 Ritchie-Fitting hypothesis, 27 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 4–5, 7, 12, 69 river-keeper organizations, 253–55 Romanticism, 144, 146–55, 165–66, 180–81, urban ecologies, 210–29, 233–36 242–43 urban planning. See parks

Sauer, Carl, 5, 83 Walden (Thoreau), 162–63 sea fishing, 101–2 Waltham-Lowell system, 133–35 second nature, 13, 19 Wampanoags, 49, 50, 59 Semple, Ellen Churchill, 3–4 water conservation, 215 Seven Years’ War, 63–64 waterworks, public, 215–21 Shaler, Nathaniel Southgate, 3 Wentworth, Benning, 78–79 Shays’ Rebellion, 87 Weymouth, George, 43–44 sheep, 136–37 White Mountain National Forest, 198 shipbuilding, 103–5 Whittier, John Greenleaf, 150–51 shoemaking, 135, 141 wildlife recovery, 268–71 Slater, Samuel, 129 Williams, Roger, 52 Smith, John, 45–47, 49 Winthrop, John, 57, 73 Soil: Its Influence on the History of the United Woodland people, 30–38; agriculture, 32–35; States (Hulbert), 69–70 altering landscape, 32–38 state parks, 259 Worster, Donald, 13 steam technology, 213 Wright, John K., 5–6 sublime. See Romanticism suburbs, 222, 229–31, 255 “This page intentionally left blank” Richard W. Judd was born in Cheboygan, Michigan, in 1947 and moved with his family to California in 1963. He received a PhD from the University of California, Irvine, in 1979, and was assistant editor of the Journal of Forest History from 1981 to 1984. He has been a member of the history faculty at the University of Maine since 1984 and is currently the Col. James C. McBride Professor of History, editor of the journal Maine History, and chair of the history department. He and his wife, Pat, live on the banks of the Penobscot River in central Maine, a few miles south of the university. His book publications include A Landscape History of New England, coedited with Blake Harrison (2011); The Untilled Garden: Natural History and the Spirit of Conservation in America, 1740–1840 (2009); Natural States: The Envi- ronmental Imagination in Maine, Oregon, and the Nation, with Christopher S. Beach (2003); Common Lands, Common People: The Origins of Conservation in Northern New England (1997); Maine: The Pine Tree State from Prehistory to the Present, coedited with Joel W. Eastman and Edwin S. Churchill (1995); and Aroostook: A Century of Logging in Northern Maine, 1831–1931 (1989).  “This page intentionally left blank” “This page intentionally left blank” ichard W. Judd explores the mix of ecological process and human activity Judd Rthat has shaped New England over the past 12,000 years. He traces a succession of cultures through New England’s changing postglacial environment to the 1600s, when the arrival of Europeans interrupted this coevolution of nature and culture. He shows how Frontier expansion culminated in a unique Second Nature landscape of forest, farm, and village that has become the embodiment of what Second Judd calls “second nature”—culturally modified landscapes that supersede a more pristine “first nature.” An Environmental History of New England Judd considers how in the 1800s, despite industrialization and urbanization, the dominant cultural expression of Romanticism provided new ways to appreciate nature and sustained a long tradition of local resource management.

He demonstrates how in the 1970s environmentalists moved quickly from N

battling pollution and preserving wild lands to sheltering farms, villages, and at woodlands from intrusive development. These campaigns, uniquely suited to

the region’s land-use history, ecology, and culture, were a fitting capstone to the ure environmental history of New England.

A volume in the series Environmental History of the Northeast

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