This week in the Columbia Paper: "Spring Flowers"
Claudia Knab-Vispo will introduce you to some of the bloomin' greenery currently enlivening our landscape
Land as Wealth: Background & Exploration
[UPDATED 1 June 2014]
Acknowledgements first: none of these ideas are original to
me - farmers, like Mike Scannell and Willie Denner, and historians,
like Brian Donahue, have helped me put these pieces together. Apologies
to them if I mangle their ideas.
Beebe Hill State Forest, located on the northern edge of Austerlitz, is now a largely wooded landscape (see location map).
Our regular hike route (below) passes by a pair of old foundations,
neighbored by old-field White Pine. It is hilly, rocky cold land, but
those foundations and a network of stonewalls indicate that it was once
'good enough'.
(click on image for enlargement)
The 1858 (below; I've included the modern road names) Beers maps of the
County shows a pair of residences corrosponding to the two foundations
we found along our hike The more northerly structure appears to have
been that of J. Beebe and the more southerly that of a Mrs. Burrows (or
Buroughs).
(click on image for enlargement)
(click on image for enlargement)
The above aerial photograph from the 1940s shows ample traces of fields in what is now a largely forested landscape. The location of foundations is marked by the circles.
(click on image for enlargement)
By our millennium (above; with foundations indicated by purple circles), this is a wooded
landscape.
This region was something of a no-man's land,
claimed by the van Rensselaer's, but nonetheless settled by many New
England squatters. It may not have been great land, but perhaps it was
attainable. An inspection of the 1850 Agricultural returns for J. Beebe, S. Burroughs, and Egbert J. Barret (from west to east) show
that these were modest farms, the first two being only 35 improved
acres a piece, the latter being 150 improved acres. As summarized in this table,
they raised a few sheep, grew some rye, oats, corn, potatoes,
buckwheat, and hay. Butter was made from the pair of cows at each farm.
The larger Barret farm, with 120 sheep, apparently produced wool, but
it is unclear what else was for commerce vs. family consumption.
Exploring the old maps in a bit more detail shows that the precursor of
Route 5 actually used to go west of Barret Pond (then called a 10-acre
Trout Pond), a path evident in the below extract of the 1873 Beers map.
(click on image for enlargement)
Studying these maps and the historical aerial photographs suggests an
original route of the road something like that portrayed by the dashed
line below. This road eventually returned to the modern Route 5
corridor shortly before that corridor hits what is, today, Route 22. A
spur off of this older road led up to the Beebe and Buroughs places.
The southern portion of the old road is now a vague trail, but the
northern section, together with the spur road and a continuation piece,
lead to the Fire Tower, which you shouldn't overlook.
(click on image for enlargement)
Relating to some of the more philospophical aspects of this nuggets, there numerous works which describe agriculture's early
role in the political philosophy of this country and the subsequent
evolution of that philosophy and related policy. Somewhat regional works
include Harvest of Dissent by Thomas Summerhill, focussed on central New York and Columbia Rising
by John Brooke about ... Columbia County. Both of these books touch
upon the firey local issue of manors and tenant farming. Geographically
broader books include Wendell Berry's well-known Unsettling of America and Paul B. Thompson's The Agrarian Roots of Pragmatism (which, I confess, I have not yet actually looked through). Finally, Steven Stoll's Larding the Lean Earth
has a soil-based twist on agrarian thought and politics. Two books
which provide a historical background to the regional evolution of
agriculture as it entered the commerical/industrial age are Thomas
Wermuth's Rip Van WInkle's Neighbors and, one of our favorites, Martin Bruegel's Farm, Shop, Landing. None
of these provides a recipe for current policy, but they at least help
us understand where we have been. Two works that try to take this
historical background and apply it more explicity to current issues are
Eric Freyfogle's Agrarianism and the Good Society and Brian Donahue's Reclaiming the Commons.
Understanding the early agroecology of our landscape is
somewhat hampered by the realization that, at one point or another,
people did everything they could think of to improve their lot. Until
one immerses oneself in the literature and historiography of the time,
this can make it difficult to isolate general patterns from 'freak'
occurrences, at least for me. That's an apology for what might be a
personal discovery of the obvious: farmers of the colonial and early
federal periods relied heavily on wet meadows as a crucial ingredient in
the agroecology of their farms.
In some cases, those were natural wet meadows; in some
cases, those were meadows created in uplands by what was, essentially,
hydroengineering (following techniques common in some parts of the "Old
World"); often, it seems they were 'improvements' made to natural
wetlands (e.g., constructing drainage so that flow could be better
regulated; plowing and seeding during dry periods). The most explicit
case study of such practices in the Northeast is probably Brian
Donahue's, The Great Meadow,
a study of farm history and land management in and around Concord
Massachusetts. However, as one reads historical accounts and explores
the landscape, it seems clear that such a primacy for wet meadows was
not a localized event. Although the planting of upland hay fields seems
to have been one of the major innovations of late 18th century
agriculture in our region, wet meadows appear to have retained an
importance well into the 19th century.
One illustration of that continued importance is the
landscape maps facilitated by the Brian Hall and colleagues, who
georeferenced 1830s land survey maps from Massachusetts. Such maps seem
to make clear that hay meadows were still a largely lowland affair.
(click on image for enlargement)
This
map shows the location of hay meadows (indicated in bright green) in a
portion of Berkshire County adjacent to Columbia County; notice that
they are along valley waterways.
The story about the Shaker staddle is somewhat speculative.
Lots of pieces seem to fit: the architectural remains seem to indicate a
structure meant to keep something high and dry from the nearby swamp;
locals mention the storing of hay in that structure during the last
century; and Shaker accounts refer to haying in the swamp. What we don't
know is how important that swamp hay was to their overall operation -
was it a key component? was it a sidelight? The massiveness of the
foundation suggests some importance, and yet, judging by some of their
stonewalls, the Shakers seemed to build solid structures for anything
they put their minds to.
Amanda Beloit, a 2010 summer intern, stands beside an apparent staddle by Shaker Swamp.
(click on image for enlargement)
A somewhat hypothetical nutrient-flow mapping for one aspect of agriculture at the New Lebanon Shaker village.
I have collected these and some more images of the Shaker
structure, of staddles in action, and maps of the landscape in this pdf file. For more on staddles in general see Wikipedia.
They served dual purposes: lifting a structure away from dampness and
preventing rodent infestations of stored crops. None of the round
'mushroom caps' associated with rodent-repelling staddles were evident
during our visit, suggesting that keeping hay crops away from moist
ground may have been the primary architectural goal.
If you have any comments on local agricultural architecture
or know of historical sources that might let us better understand the
historical agricultural landscape, we'd appreciate an email.
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Two Old Foundations:
Of Land as Wealth
One
Easter, I took a cusp-of-dawn walk up Beebe Hill. It was a hollow hour,
this one before sunrise; a time painted by sounds, when sight, still
frustrated by darkness, was almost a distraction. The birds were awake,
their songs crisp and filling. A Thrush posted its song on the wall of
stillness like an oriole would flash its orange in the sun. Beside the
dirt road, barely visible beneath the deeper shades of old-field pine,
was a small foundation, little more than a slight elaboration of the
stonewalls that angle through these woods. I knew of it from previous
walks, and so perhaps it was more felt than seen.
The question posed by this rock wall of early morning was
not so much the purpose, but the place - the context. When those who
lived here awoke on a similar Easter morning, 150 years ago, were there
Thrush flutes to greet them, albeit from more distant forest? What did
they see when they walked out their door into this same hill air? And,
more importantly, if more nebulous, what did they think?
***
The discovery that we made on another day, one warm and
well-lit by the summer sun, was, in fact, a discovery only to us. The
study of history is largely about re-discovering the once obvious and
mundane. Glorious cathedrals, extensive canals, presidential deeds and
domiciles are usually well marked in history. Forgotten are the ‘little
facts’ such as the color of bootlaces, the usual location of the hay
stack, or what people thought as they washed the dishes.
What we found that day by Shaker Swamp was a discovery to
us only because, ironically, it had once been so much part of the
everyday. There, coddled by a green forest grove, were the remains of a
foundation. It took our minds a moment to assemble the outline of the
human construct midst the trunks of trees. It had been a large,
rectangular structure, 100’ by 25’. Rock defined three sides, and the
open side faced the Swamp. Within that outline was an oddity: an array
of three-foot high stone and mortar pylons or pillars, arranged in
careful rows. They now shared floor space with saplings from the
returning forest.
The intended permanence of the structure (there were some big stones in that foundation) and clear evidence of particular intent (these rows of pylons must have been for something)
made it feel as if one had wandered into an uninhabited but fully
furnished house. A stranger’s living room, with no stranger present to
be queried, is like a ‘pocket Stonehenge’ in terms of the mysteries that
it poses.
***
The trappings of the past do not necessarily hold current
answers – the architecture of those foundations, the tools that leaned
against the now-gone walls, the ways of dressing field and body – might
or might not have some current utility. And yet the deepest challenges
of our ways change little: we must still live coherently and consciously
with each other and the land. It is as if the vessels of our wandering -
our individual beings - may contain different captains and varied
bearings, and yet retain a common hull-work and hence move similarly
through the wind and water of time. New tools, new picks and shovels for
achieving our immediate intents, do not change that, but they can bury
important past insights under the conceit of the present.
At present, for example, the idea of ‘land as wealth’
invokes many connotations: land as bankable reserve (our ‘real estate’);
land as a source of physical and mental satisfaction - be we hunters,
hikers or gardeners; land as a symbol of economic status. But these are
not the only ways in which land has been and can be wealth.
The family who built foundation, house and farm on the
rocky soils of Beebe Hill was probably not looking for self-expression
or a connection to the land, at least not in their modern, abstract
forms. They may not have even considered their land in terms of resale
value and future estate. However, one thing they were almost certainly
looking to create was that which some call the only true wealth: the
production of the Earth.
There is something miraculous about the creation of
‘something from nothing’ that is the essence of farming. One only
creates it from ‘nothing’ in the economic sense that agriculture is one
of the few honest ways to ‘print money’(i.e., to create wealth); the
ability to produce food, rather than to dig gold, is a natural standard
for our riches. In a practical sense, such creation of wealth does
require, at the least, labor and land.
The core linkages among welfare of the family (and
community), land access, and the potential for self-sufficiency
encapsulated much of 19th century agrarianism, and, before
that, were deemed key ingredients of a healthy republic by several
founders of this country. The fact that tax structures and agricultural
macroeconomics have now largely erased such potential, partially
explains the frustration felt by those farmers who, while they have the
will and ability to work and may own substantial acreage, now find
themselves unable to pay the bills on their table.
That mysterious collection of stone pylons that sprang up
beside the Swamp was probably the remains of a ‘staddle’ – a structure
that, in this context, bore hay above periodically wet ground. Records
from the Shaker community uphill from the Swamp do mention hay harvest
on these lowlands and the inclusion of livestock in the farming; a
network of impressive stonewalls arrayed above the ‘staddle’ second that
connection.
From the Euphrates and the Nile on down through history,
flowing water has been recognized as a source of replenishing nutrients.
The Shakers apparently relied upon water-borne nutrients (some perhaps
contributed by upstream farms) to feed their hay, upon hay-borne
nutrients to feed their cattle, and upon manure-borne nutrients to feed
their upland fields. The unplowed meadows of perennial grass and sedges
controlled soil erosion during floods and helped trap passing,
nutrient-bearing sediments.
Pictured as a whole, such systems provided ways of reversing the usual downhill leakage of nutrients.
As was apparently the case with the Shakers and with the
well-studied colonial farmers of Concord MA, among others, these
landscape-scale nutrient flows were parts of a community-wide approach
to agricultural sustainability in the Northeast during the 17th - 19th
centuries. As important as the agronomy of such systems was their
sociology: lots and fields of the village were carefully laid out by
mutual consent so as to assure agrarian wealth not only to individual
farmers but also to the local society as a whole.
The pair of ideas illustrated above cannot necessarily be
resurrected in the same way that one might restore faithful
reproductions of wooden super-structures above our stone foundations.
Agriculture and society have changed. And yet, as relatively
long-practiced ways that people came to terms with the land and with
themselves, the core questions of these practices deserve to remain part
of modern discussions:
Specifically, can we create a set of social policies that
make the direct derivation of well-being from farming more widely
accessible? And, can we think of our agriculture not only in terms of
individual farms, but also in terms of the regional geography of
collaborating farms that will result in the most efficient use of soil
nutrients and so benefit the most people for the longest period of time?
Old foundations in the woods are intriguing for the past
realities of the land which they evidence; paralleling those physical
structures were once-built conceptual foundations of how humans lived
with that landscape. While neither past barn nor former politic might
fully fit into the present, both continue to ask resonant questions.
---
Conrad Vispo.
Please
send any thoughts and comments to fep@hawthornevalleyfarm.org. Copies
of previous “Perspectives on Place” columns are available on our
website, at /fep/ columns.htm.
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