The evolution of the dining room in the nineteenth century

In her popular 1844 domestic manual, The House Book, Eliza Leslie advised her readers about how best to furnish their dining rooms. “A large closet,” she noted, “is indispensable to a dining-room.” By “closet,” Leslie meant a sideboard—the most prominent piece of furniture in the mid-nineteenth-century American dining room. To her middle-class readership, Leslie recommended “two small side-boards, one in each recess,” which would “occupy less space than a large one standing out.” In her discussion of this archetypal fixture of the American dining room, Leslie illustrates some major developments in the nineteenth-century domestic realm: the emergence of the dining room, with its familiar furnishings, as a permanent, dedicated space in the middle-class home and the need for a large, visible storage closet for dishes, tea sets, silver, and all the other accoutrements of middle-class Victorian dining. By looking at the development of a few pieces of dining furniture over the first half of the nineteenth century, we can follow the dining room as it evolved into an essential attribute of the middle-class American home.

The sideboard is perhaps the most illustrative piece of dining room furniture. While it was one of the most fashionable furniture forms, the sideboard was a relatively new entry on the American furniture scene in the early nineteenth century. Sideboards had been used in European courts since the sixteenth century, but the first American pieces were produced in the late eighteenth century by cabinetmakers in cities like New York, Boston, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. An accessory to the dining table, the federal-era sideboard, as pictured below, was a long, narrow table with drawers and small cabinets underneath.

This piece, in the collections of the New York Historical Society, was originally owned by Revolutionary soldier Joseph Wilcox. Measuring about seven feet wide and two-and-a-half feet deep, it has three cabinets and five drawers. The cabinets held plates and serving dishes while the drawers stored silverware and serving utensils. The long, narrow top was used as a buffet during formal dinners. This form of sideboard replaced the shorter, simpler sideboard table form, which had no storage space and served simply to provide an extra surface for meal service.

Eighteenth-century sideboards like the Wilcox one above were owned exclusively by the wealthy. These and other pieces of fine furniture were among the props that refined and genteel families used to display their status and prosperity. With the growth of mechanized manufacturing in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a profusion of affordable consumer goods flooded the American market. To store these goods, the growing American middle class turned increasingly to the hand-crafted furnishings that had formerly adorned only the most stately homes.

Though specialized dining-room furniture grew more widespread in the Federal era, the dining room itself was less specialized, functioning as a sitting room, parlor, or other common room had in most colonial households. Even elite homemakers used their dining rooms for sitting, visiting, and sleeping. For example, one early nineteenth-century visitor found that it was common “for temporary beds to be laid out in dining rooms . . . being of course, removed sufficiently early in the morning to prevent inconvenience.”

In keeping with the multiple uses to which rooms were put in the colonial and early federal periods, dining furniture was designed for flexible use. An example is this three-part dining set, a common form of the period.

This set, consists of three pieces—two circular tables and a central leaf. When not in use, the leaf extension could be stored, and the tables could be pushed against the wall for use as side tables. Also common were sets of three distinct tables, including a center table with drop leaves and two identical side tables. The center table could be extended by lifting the leaves and could stand alone or be combined with one or both of the side tables. When the family was not entertaining, all three tables could be used for card playing, writing, tea, small meals, and other activities.

Toward the beginning of the nineteenth century, as the elite built larger, more lavish homes and designated rooms for specialized uses, dining furniture grew larger and more cumbersome. Sideboards shifted from sleek, long tables to heavily-carved pieces with larger cabinets underneath. And the streamlined legs of the dining tables gave way to heavy, pedestal bases in a style pioneered by New York cabinetmaker Duncan Phyfe.

By the third decade of the nineteenth century, householders of middling means began to replicate these trends. The development was made possible, in part, by new mechanized methods for manufacturing furniture. Small furniture workshops gave way to large factories, with dozens of cabinetmakers using mechanically powered lathes and routers to fashion furniture that had long been beyond the reach of any but the wealthiest Americans. Another related development was the evolving eating habits of the American middle class. Improved roads and canals as well the rise of the steamship and the railroad meant that ordinary consumers could now obtain a broader array of foodstuffs.

Meanwhile, new kitchen gadgets and appliances allowed for the preparation of more complex dishes and meals. For example, the cook stove, a requisite component of the middle-class kitchen by the 1830s, provided the cook with several novel cooking techniques that were impossible to achieve over an open fire. While open-hearth cooking lent itself to one-dish meals, the cook stove allowed for different kinds of cooking—boiling, roasting, baking—with the same fire. With one instrument, the American cook could prepare a roasted entrée, boiled vegetables, and a sweet and savory pie. And the entire meal could come out of the oven at once. To help her in this endeavor, she could consult any of a plethora of cookbooks, which the American publishing industry was churning out in the nineteenth century. These books included recipes designed for the new stoves and brought more elaborate and diverse food choices to the middle-class table.

Along with the broadening of the palate came a taste for dining rooms suited to more epicurean appetites. Indeed, by the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the designated dining room had become a central fixture of the Victorian home. Scholars have focused on the parlor as the locus of the growing bourgeois culture of the period, seeing it as central to the domestic ideal of the family by the hearthside but also essential to the middle-class display of its consuming prowess. It was in the parlor that families displayed colorful prints, books, and other consumer goods. But the dining room was equally significant. Like the parlor, this room served as the space where the middle-class family entertained company—and where they showed off the trophies of bourgeois consumerism.

The dining room also had a privileged place in the home as the space where the family gathered at least once daily for dinner. Domestic advisers highlighted the vaunted role of the dining room as a gathering space for the increasingly fragmented middle-class family. For many families, the family meal and particularly dinner became an extremely important ritual, a time for the family to gather, converse, and instruct. It was in the dining room, architect Calvert Vaux explained in 1857,

“that the different members of the family are sure to assemble several times a day, though they may be almost completely separated at other times by circumstances, or the various pursuits that occupy their attention, and it is highly desirable that such a room should fitly and cheerfully express its purpose, and be one of the most agreeable in the house, so as to heighten the value of this constant and familiar reunion as much as possible.”

Parents were encouraged to use the opportunity of this reunion to educate and socialize their children. “More than means of sustaining physical wants,” claimed popular novelist Catharine Sedgwick, family meals were “opportunities of improvement and social happiness,” a chance to “teach, at the rate of three lessons a day, punctuality, order, neatness, temperance, self-denial, kindness, generosity, and hospitality.” If the family was, as historian Mary Ryan claims, the “cradle of the middle class,” then the dining room was the cradle’s cradle.

Befitting the dining room’s very particular function, by the 1860s dining furniture was more specialized than ever before. Unlike the multi-use furniture of the early nineteenth century, midcentury and postbellum sideboards and dining tables were permanent features in a room dedicated to their use. The extension dining tables pictured here may have a changeable size, but whatever their configuration, their essential purpose is fixed.

The heavy pedestal bases and patented interior mechanisms made these pieces large and cumbersome. Unlike their predecessors, mid-nineteenth-century dining tables were meant to remain in place.

Likewise, the Victorian sideboards bore little resemblance to the sleek, table-like forms of the early nineteenth century, as this piece from the collections of the Yale Art Gallery shows (link to Yale Art Gallery Website).

This large, heavy cabinet is eight-and-a-half feet wide and six-and-a-half feet tall. Clearly, it was designed to permanently anchor a room. While federal-era sideboards were primarily surface—up to seven feet wide—with small drawers and cabinets underneath, Victorian sideboards like this one had far more storage space. And unlike the low, long federal-era sideboards the newer ones reached to the ceiling, filling the room. Their multiple display and storage spaces were meant to accommodate the family’s growing stocks of silverware, dishes, and other dining utensils. More modest examples of midcentury sideboards, like this one from the 1868 Cabinet Maker’s Album of Furniture, still had impressive dimensions and substantial space for holding and showing off the many props of dining.

The development of the sideboard form from the clean, straight lines of the Federal period to the more elaborate and ornate decoration of the Victorian era reflects, of course, a stylistic shift. But it reflects two other factors as well: the increasing importance of the dining ritual in the middle-class home and the need for more storage. 

Over the course of the nineteenth century, the number of specialized dishes, forks, spoons, and other dining accessories recommended by domestic advisers grew exponentially. Midcentury dinner sets contained up to five hundred pieces, including dinner plates, soup plates, side plates in various sizes, hot water plates, serving bowls, platters, soup tureens, sauce tureens, and gravy boats. Flatware sets included such specialized implements as fish forks, oyster forks, grapefruit spoons, and asparagus forks. While few middle-class families actually needed or used such a large collection of dishes and utensils, families that hoped to serve proper dinners in several courses required a far greater variety of accoutrements than ever before.

The dining room itself was increasingly designed as a specialized room. Recesses were placed in the walls to accommodate sideboards and in some cases, sideboards were actually built into the dining room walls. Architects arranged dining rooms to have fine views of nature and when nature was not present, as in urban settings, the windows themselves often depicted agreeable stained-glass scenes. Dining-room lighting increasingly took the form of low-slung chandeliers rather than fixtures set on the walls or closer to the ceiling. High enough to cast a pleasing light over the dining table but low enough to inhibit free movement beneath them, these chandeliers secured the dining table as the centerpiece of the dining room.

As the domestic space became ever more idealized in the nineteenth century, the spaces within it took on increasingly important symbolic functions. The dining room served as a family gathering space at a time when the family was celebrated as never before. And it served to display the gentility and prosperity of families at a time when ownership of consumer goods and adherence to a genteel lifestyle were vital status markers. It is fitting, then, that the furnishings that filled the dining room grew more permanent and more imposing as the century progressed. As the home emerged as the theater for middle-class aspirations and accomplishments, the sideboard took center stage.

Further Reading:

Primary sources cited in this article include: Eliza Leslie, The House Book (Philadelphia, 1844); Henry Bradshaw Fearon, Sketches of America (London, 1818); Calvert Vaux, Villas and Cottages: A Series of Designs Prepared for Execution in the United States (1857; reprint, New York, 1968); Catharine Sedgwick, Home (New York, 1837). Information on early nineteenth-century furniture was drawn from: Helen Comstock, American Furniture (West Chester, Penn., 1961); Charles F. Montgomery, American Furniture: The Federal Period (New York, 1966); John T. Kirk, American Furniture (New York, 2000).

On nineteenth-century homes and the growth of the dining room, see: Clifford E. Clark Jr., “The Vision of the Dining Room: Plan Book Dreams and Middle Class Realities,” in Kathryn Grover, ed., Dining in America, 1850-1900 (Amherst, 1987); Myrna Kaye, There’s a Bed in the Piano: The Inside Story of the American Home (Boston, 1998); Charles Lockwood, Bricks and Brownstones: The New York Row House, 1783-1929 (New York, 1972); Richard Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York, 1992); Russell Lynes, The Domesticated Americans (New York, 1963); Susan Williams, Savory Suppers and Fashionable Feasts: Dining in Victorian America (New York, 1985); Kenneth Ames, Death in the Dining Room and Other Tales of Victorian Culture (Philadelphia, 1992); Ruth Cowan Schwartz, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York, 1983).

On domesticity and the middle-class ideal, see: Mary Ryan, The Cradle of the Middle Class (Cambridge and New York, 1981); Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women (New Haven, 1982); Katherine Grier, Culture and Comfort (Amherst, Mass., 1988); Clifford E. Clark, Jr., “Domestic Architecture as an Index to Social History: The Romantic Revival and the Cult of Domesticity in America, 1840-1870,” in Robert Blair St. George, ed., Material Life in America, 1600-1860 (Boston, 1988); Stuart Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class (Cambridge and New York, 1989).

This article originally appeared in issue 7.1 (October, 2006).

Cindy R. Lobel is an assistant professor of history at Lehman College, CUNY. She is currently working on a study of food, eating, and the rise of a consumer culture in New York City in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

In 1685, John Wilkes, a Birmingham locksmith, made a stunning brass and steel lock whose decorative front artfully erases and enlarges its insensate materiality. Housed in the London Victoria and Albert Museum, this 6-by-4.5 inch example of high-end seventeenth-century English locksmithery swells the mechanics of a keyhole to exuberant postcard-size grandeur. It now opens up to a good long look thanks to the V&A’s online exhibition. There too, you can watch an additional video that showcases the device’s nifty mechanisms. Neither mere object nor quite subject, Wilkes’s artifact challenges the notion of keys and locks as mute matter. Patrolling next to the knob, an English cavalier in high relief sports a tight doublet, wide knee-length breeches, and some dramatic heels; he is both literal and symbolic key. A gentle nudge at the brim of his hat triggers a quick lockdown easily reversed by the same movement plus a turning of the knob. Full shutdown requires insertion of the key into a secret keyhole, hidden by the cavalier’s surprisingly flexible left leg. Every turn of the key makes the cavalier’s pointer hop a unit ahead on the round, numbered dial and record how many times the lock has been opened. Hovering in front of this spry custodian, a querulous it-narrative (that curious genre that makes objects such as coins, lapdogs, coats or corkscrews into subjects of first-person narratives) waxes in parodistic and versed animation: “If I had ye gift of tongue, I would declare & do no wrong, who ye are ye com by stealth, to impare my Masters welth.” Protesting a lack of communicative powers, the soliloquy pits objects and subjects as competitors and dramatizes the slippery mutualities of property, the ways ownership reconceives objects into belongings and people into proprietors. The ingenious device also focuses attention on the delicious satisfaction seventeenth-century people located in the material world and in gatekeeping specifically.

In a time when old-fashioned keys are under erasure and remote keyless systems the Keyser Soze of electronic locksmithery, Wilkes’s dashing artifact registers the forgotten social prestige and power locks and keys once held. It also reminds us that material objects not only ordered English and early American outside worlds but served as cognitive furniture to remote inner worlds as well. Mary Douglas already knew “all margins are dangerous,” but gatekeeping matters as much for material as for spiritual possessions. Keys are border-phenomenon that split the world into a within and a without and, in the seventeenth century, record a surprisingly tight fit between subject and object. In fact, many literary Keys were handed to readers on both sides of the Atlantic. For early America, think about Roger Williams’s first Native American dictionary, A Key into the Language of America (1643) and John Cotton’s The Keyes of the Kingdom of Heaven (1644). Unconcerned with the promissory potential of keys that open spiritual knowledge, Cotton and Williams exploit the ambiguous powers locked in the suggestive position of key-holder itself. Like Wilkes’s wayward cavalier, neither entirely subservient object nor fully empowered subject, sometimes antagonists Cotton and Williams position themselves as unassuming holders of keys, at once self-effacing instruments of a higher truth and exalted voices of authority. The agenda of Cotton’s The Keyes is to grant autonomy to each individual Congregationalist church. The solution? St. Peter’s pair of keys, traditionally one silver and one gold, mushroom into infinity alongside Cotton’s explanation that Jesus distributed “the whole power of the keys to all the apostles as well as to Peter.” Likewise, Roger Williams’s keys are fruitful and multiply. Even if his dictionary’s title speaks in the singular, A Key, Williams is quick to add that “a little Key may open a Box, where lies a bunch of Keyes.” Laying bare an infinite regress of unlockings, Williams voices his radical skepticism about human ability to know and authorize church authority. On this point Williams was relentless, for the living doors to heaven were firmly shut. Keys lead to other keys, further questions, and figures of interpretative impotence emptily circling back unto themselves.

If Puritan keys feel uncomfortably morose, skip to the Mount Vernon website. In George Washington’s central hall, you find the key to the Bastille in a glass case sent by the Marquis de Lafayette to Washington after the French Revolution as “a Missionary of liberty to its patriarch.” Or order a “key-to-the-Bastille” silk tie from the online gift shop and become yourself gatekeeper of such a fine key to freedom and liberty. All this does not sound very ill, to channel Montaigne’s ominous ending in “Of Cannibals,” if only the keys on that tie wouldn’t so alarmingly multiply.

Further Reading

Though Wilkes’s detector lock is part of the V&A’s British Galleries, their decorative and fine art objects are as much early American as they are English (sorry, Brits, horses for courses). Dividing lines here have more to do with modern national imperatives and the whimsies of periodization than with historical facts. All the more reason for early Americanists to plunder the breathtaking V&A collections of over a million objects. After all, the archives are searchable online and additional well-curated period sites provide information, for example, on seventeenth-century design styles, costume, and theatre history.

The best sources on seventeenth-century keys and their material logic and mechanic histories are a bit grizzled but still relevant: Albert A. Hopkins, The Lure of the Lock (New York, 1928), Vincent J. M. Eras, Locks and Keys Throughout the Ages (Whitstable, 1974) and H. H. Mullner, The Decorative Arts in England, 1660-1780 (London, 1923). The latter discusses an almost identical Wilkes’s detector lock (Fig. 156). Another location to study Wilkes’s distinctive locksmithery is the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, which also houses a look-alike sans inscription. For those keen on digging deeper into the recalcitrant reflexivity of it-narratives, strong discussions of the genre appear in The Secret Life of Things, ed. Mark Blackwell (Lewisburg, 2007) and Jonathan Lamb, The Things Things Say (Princeton, 2011). My Mary Douglas quote is of course from Purity and Danger (New York, 1966), her brilliant analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo.

For English examples of literary keys, see William Sclater’s A Key to the Key of Scripture (1617), Richard Bernard’s A Key of Knowledge for the Opening of the Secret Mysteries of St Iohns Mysticall Revelation (1617), and Daniel Featley’s Clavis Mystica: A Key Opening Divers Difficult and Mysterious Texts of Holy Scripture (1636). Thomas Huntington and William Nealand provide advice about slightly different “spirits” in The Distiller of London, with the Clavis to Unlock the Deepest Secrets of that Mysterious Art (1652). 

This article originally appeared in issue 17.3 (Spring, 2017).

Steffi Dippold has a thing for thinking with things about early America. In 2012, Steffi received her PhD from Stanford University. She is assistant professor at Kansas State University, where she teaches courses on early and Native American literatures, material culture, and book history.

Pictures and their meanings in a Victorian home

Entering the Evergreens, the home of Austin and Susan Dickinson, the brother and sister-in-law of Emily Dickinson, is akin to experiencing an archaeological site. Members of the Dickinson family lived in the house continuously between 1857, when it was built, and 1943, when Austin and Susan’s daughter Martha died. Elements from the 1850s are still there today, along with other household objects and artwork chosen and arranged in subsequent years—creating, in effect, layers linked by networks of meanings and associations.

The Evergreens was home to a family whose members expressed themselves, their ideas, values, and feelings through furnishings, artwork, and household objects. Looking at photographs of nineteenth-century interiors and visiting historic houses like the Evergreens challenges us to explore the relationship between objects and their owners. While much has been written about how people interact with their material world and about how domestic objects were “expressions of sensibility,” I am particularly interested in understanding just how nineteenth-century Americans interacted with and assigned meaning to the growing body of images available for their consumption. Austin and Susan Dickinson’s home is an ideal place for this sort of inquiry.

Austin Dickinson married Susan Gilbert in 1856 and moved into the Evergreens a year later. The house is next door to the Homestead, where Austin grew up and where his sister Emily lived and died. With Susan’s substantial dowry and Austin’s work as an attorney in his father’s firm, the couple could afford the finest art for their home. The couple’s selection and arrangement of artwork and decorative objects created a setting for hosting elegant parties and entertaining prominent visitors (fig. 1).

It was in the front hall and the parlor, interior spaces where visitors were welcomed, that these visitors first encountered the Dickinson’s good taste and proper values. So, for example, featured on the mantelpiece in the parlor was a reproduction of an eighteenth-century statue—Cupid and Psyche, by the Italian sculptor Antonio Canova (fig. 2). It was a work of art imbued with notions of love, devotion, and constancy and made popular by the contemporary mythologist Thomas Bullfinch. In Bullfinch’s words, “Jupiter handed Psyche a cup of ambrosia, and said, ‘Drink this, Psyche, and be immortal; nor shall Cupid ever break away from the knot in which he is tied, but these nuptials shall be perpetual.’ Thus Psyche became at last united to Cupid, and in due time they had a daughter born to them whose name was Pleasure.” The statue was a symbol of Austin and Susan’s love for each other, and its prominent placement on the mantel would have immediately registered with family, friends, and visitors. Other American families at that time displayed the statue on their piano, another centerpiece of the upper-middle-class home.

The Dickinsons installed their most prized paintings in the parlor (fig. 3). The room and its contents raise the question of who was actually placing the family’s artwork. We know that decisions about which household goods to purchase were shared by husbands and wives in middle-class households, but much work remains to be done to understand the various ways decisions were made concerning the arrangement of household furnishings once they were purchased. 

When photographs of interiors are examined, it is not always easy to determine—strictly from the photograph—whether a man or a woman selected and arranged the pictures in the room.

We can get some clues from Susan’s 1895 inventory of furnishings, as well as the notations on the backs of the paintings in the Evergreens. These documents indicate that Austin and Susan shared a passion for art collecting. They began collecting paintings and other works of art by American artists of the Hudson River School including John Frederick Kensett and Sanford Gifford. They also collected European paintings from the Barbizon School of landscape painting as well as paintings of biblical, historical, and everyday life. Susan’s dowry enabled her to purchase landscape paintings in the early years of their marriage, but it was Austin who recklessly bought paintings year after year. He guiltily hid them in the guest bedroom, till he was ready to show off his extravagance to his wife and sister Emily. Martha recalled seeing her parents flushed and excited as they gazed on a new acquisition.

The Evergreens is an excellent site for studying the choices involved in picture collecting and display. There are approximately thirty paintings, fifty prints, several large framed photographs and photomechanical reproductions of artwork acquired by the Dickinsons. Beginning in the 1850s, tastemakers encouraged homeowners to create highly personal, eclectic arrangements of household furnishings, decorative artifacts, and visual images as a manifestation of refinement and personal taste. Such eclectic arrangements would give owners the freedom to effectively personalize art, by assembling it in such a way that it would evoke particularly meaningful family lore or memories of an inspiring trip abroad. This Victorian aesthetic also emphasized the value of owners’ distinct connection to individual works, suggesting that the narrative of owners’ relation to the work was more important than its particular aesthetic qualities. On their honeymoon in Canada, for instance, Austin and Susan purchased a small winter landscape—Country Farmhouse in Winter, painted in 1857 by Cornelius Krieghoff—that suggests the ideal family home life, in harmony with neighbors and animals (fig. 4). The scene encapsulated the belief that “the good picture . . . is either like a sermon teaching a great moral truth, or like a poem, idealizing some important aspect of life.” Catherine Beecher and other tastemakers recommended great works of art as visual lessons in history, values, deportment, and refinement, especially useful for families like the Dickinsons, whose art would be viewed by their own young children and visiting students from Amherst College.

Austin and Susan encouraged their three children to study and enjoy visual culture ranging from fine works of art to pictures in family magazines. Their daughter Martha recalled going with her father to art galleries in New York City and Boston, marveling at his excitement in the presence of so many works of art. The three Dickinson children also spent time cutting pictures out of magazines and using these to decorate the doors of their bedrooms and the nursery (figs. 5 and 6).

While Austin and Susan impressed their guests with their art collection in the parlor, their children entertained their own guests upstairs in the nursery, where the backs of doors became the site for the children’s art gallery. That the house remained untouched for so many years is especially fortuitous, since it allows us to see rarely preserved children’s art. The nursery picture gallery in the Evergreens bears striking resemblance to the scrapbooks made during the period. This popular amateur art form coincided with the preference for clustering furniture, objects, and paintings into arrangements loaded with associations. Mass-produced handsome albums of blank pages provided flat surfaces comparable to blank walls on which the scrapbook creator could assemble and arrange personally selected collections of visual images together with mementoes of trips, special events, celebrations, and friendships. Cultural anthropologists have argued that assemblages of pictures in domestic installations—sometimes described as home altars—allow for the creation of a dream world or alternative visual environment from which the viewer can derive a complex web of meanings. The Dickinson’s art collection was an essential element in creating and maintaining their home as a sacred site for the cultivation of such meanings, particularly those associated with Victorian family values.

Austin, Susan, and their three children appeared to have had a wonderful life together until the 1880s. In that decade the youngest son, Gib, died at the age of eight, as did Austin’s father and sister Emily. In addition, Austin met Mrs. Mabel Loomis Todd, the wife of an Amherst professor, and the two began a passionate love affair, which lasted until Austin’s death in 1895. During these years, Austin’s interest in art collecting declined.

Meanwhile, Susan continued to collect art and decorate her home, maintaining as best she could some sense of normalcy. In 1885, she redecorated the front hall, perhaps hoping to convey a new message to family and visitors. At the center of that message would have been an impressively large biblical scene, Abram and Sara , painted by the Florentine Alessandro Cavazza in 1870 (fig. 7). Its placement was purposeful. On one level it was a sign of the family’s affluence, religiosity, and good taste, but the picture must have been much more than a symbol of upper-middle-class status. The painting depicts Genesis 12:10-20, in which the young Abraham and his wife Sarah are in Egypt, refugees from the famine then raging in their homeland of Canaan. The Pharaoh, according to the Bible passage, forced the beautiful Sarah to become his wife. Knowledgeable viewers would know that God then punished the Egyptian Pharaoh with a plague for failing to honor marital vows. The scene affirmed the sacredness of marriage vows, and its prominent placement in the front hall could stand as a warning against wayward intruders, such as Mrs. Todd, intent on disrupting families and breaking God’s law.

Susan made other selections informed by her dismay over her husband’s change of heart. She placed a large reproduction of a sixteenth-century painting—The Vision of St. Helena by Paolo Veronese (fig. 8)—on an easel in the northwest corner of the parlor, opposite the sculpture reproduction of Cupid and Psyche.

St. Helena’s mournful posture is in contrast to the romantic ecstasy of Cupid and Psyche. The subject, Helena, was spurned by her husband but respected by her son, the Roman Emperor Constantine, whom she converted to Christianity. The Veronese painting depicts the moment when, in her dream, the location of Christ’s holy cross in Jerusalem was revealed to her. Helena traveled to Jerusalem and brought a piece of the cross and the four nails back to Rome. While crossing the Adriatic Sea, the empress heard accounts of frequent drowning there. She was so strongly moved by the stories that she took one of the four crucifixion nails and threw it into the sea, and according to legend, the Adriatic Sea became peaceful. Christ’s sacrifice, symbolized by the nail, had the power to tame wild and violent things, making them gentle and docile. Perhaps St. Helena inspired Susan to believe she could tame her wild husband and bring him back to the perpetual love represented by Cupid and Psyche. How painful it must have been for the family to live together, passing in the hallways, hearing each other in their daily activities. How much worse it must have been to know that members of the small community of Amherst were aware of the unwed relationship in their midst and were watching Austin, Susan, and the Todds struggle to maintain the façade of family harmony.

After Austin’s death in 1895 Susan and her two remaining children continued to live in the Evergreens. They took several trips to Europe, where they purchased photographic reproductions of artistic masterpieces and important historical sites. As so many contemporary tastemakers suggested, these relatively cheap mementos could serve an important educational function by preparing the children for visits to museums and art exhibits. As they moved through the house, the Dickinsons could also see pictures that reminded them of European cathedrals or art masterpieces they may have visited. The stairway was a convenient location for groups of pictures whose meanings often intertwined (fig. 9). Susan and her daughter were particularly interested in religious works. In the Evergreens stair hall they hung photographs of European cathedrals next to a lithograph published by Sachse, after Raphael’s painting of St. Cecilia, and an engraved reproduction of an angel by Fra Angelico. The Dickinsons also brought back a painted reproduction of the central panel of Simone Martini’s Annunciation after seeing the original in the Uffizi in Florence. They placed it in the parlor, adjacent to Austin and Susan’s most treasured paintings.

Much as Susan and Austin had done, she and her daughter continued to arrange the family’s art according to personal associations and values rather than abstract aesthetic ideals. Such, as we have seen, was the advice of the Victorian era’s most important tastemakers. Hence, one hangs a view of the Bay of Amalfi near a reproduction of the Venus de Milo “because [the latter] came from those suns and skies of Southern Italy,” instructed Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1872. 

Further Reading:

Information about tours of the Evergreens, as well as the home of Emily Dickinson, the Homestead, is available at the Website of the Emily Dickinson Museum. On the Dickinsons and their circle, see Jerome Liebling, The Dickinsons of Amherst (Hanover, N.H., 2001); Polly Longsworth, The World of Emily Dickinson: A Visual Biography (New York, 1990); Martha Dickinson Bianchi, The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson (New York, 1971); and Barton Levi St. Armand, Emily Dickinson and Her Culture: The Soul’s Society (Cambridge, 1984).

On household decoration see Kenneth L. Ames, “Meaning in Artifacts: Hall Furnishings in Victorian America,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 9 (Summer 1978): 19-46; Joan M. Seidl, “Consumers’ Choices: A Study of Household Furnishing, 1880-1920,” Minnesota History 48 (Spring 1983): 182-197; and Beverly Gordon, “Woman’s Domestic Body: The Conceptual Conflation of Women and Interiors in the Industrial Age,” Winterthur Portfolio 31 (1996): 281-301. The phrase “expressions of sensibility” applied to material culture is from Katherine C. Grier, Culture and Comfort: People, Parlors, and Upholstery, 1850-1930 (Amherst, Mass., 1988).

For secondary sources about family life at home, see Clifford Edward Clark Jr., The American Family Home, 1800-1960 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1986) and David P. Handlin, The American Home: Architecture and Society, 1815-1915 (Boston, 1979).

For the story of Cupid and Psyche, see Thomas Bulfinch, The Age of Fable; or, Stories of Gods and Heroes (Boston, 1855; reprint ed., New York, 1998).

On arranging and viewing pictures at home, see Katharine Martinez, “At Home with Mona Lisa: Consumers and Commercial Visual Culture, 1880-1920,” in Patricia Johnston, ed., Seeing High and Low: Representing Social Conflict in American Visual Culture (Berkeley, 2006): 160-176; Susan Tucker, Katherine Ott, and Patricia P. Buckler, eds., The Scrapbook in American Life (Philadelphia, 2006); David Morgan, Visual Piety: A History and Theory of Popular Religious Images (Berkeley, 1998); David Morgan, Protestants and Pictures: Religion, Visual Culture, and the Age of American Mass Production (New York, 1999).

This article originally appeared in issue 7.4 (April, 2007).

Katharine Martinez is the Herman and Joan Suit Librarian of the Fine Arts Library at Harvard University. She has a Ph.D. in American Studies from George Washington University; her essays on nineteenth-century American art and taste have appeared in several journals and books.

The confession is clear and unrepentant: “I bored a very small hole through the wainscot in the seat of my window.” And so this historian went hunting for that historic act of vandalism. The vandal in question, Benjamin Franklin, put the hole in his landlady’s house on Craven Street in London, where he lived for two extended stays between 1757 and 1775. Remarkably, the house still exists (fig. 1), the only Franklin residence that does. His humble birthplace in Boston was long ago swept away, as was the grand suburban house he rented at Passy just outside Paris. His Philadelphia townhouse still stands but is a mere shell, a well-swept ruin. In contrast, the house on Craven Street withstood Franklin’s modifications as well as several historic crises. Why does any piece of the past survive? To an unsettling degree, it’s a matter of luck. Franklin’s house has been very lucky. And lucky us, to have inherited from the past such a revealing artifact of the long, complicated connections between Britain and America.

The area around Craven Street is now known for its dominant structures: Charing Cross Station, Trafalgar Square, and the National Gallery just north of the square (fig. 2). The neighborhood was different in the eighteenth century. It had escaped ruin in the Great Fire of 1666 and benefited from the rebuilding that followed that disaster. Londoners wanted houses built of stone rather than flammable timber, and those who could afford it wanted to live on streets shielded from the bustle of shops and public life.

Craven Street was a typical result: a row of residences, in this case Georgian townhouses, near businesses but not among them. To the north, it encountered the Strand, which led to several cultural centers, including the Royal Society of Arts, to which Franklin belonged. The Strand also ran down to Westminster’s government offices, where Franklin went to lobby for Pennsylvania and the other colonies he represented. The south end of Craven Street terminated on the Embankment along the River Thames, a great convenience in a city that still used the river for everyday transport.

The house where Franklin lived was built around 1730 and owned by the Stevenson family. Rising four floors above a cellar, it is tall and narrow. Whereas an older house might have had a great room where visitors entered, meals were taken, and servants slept, this modern house had many smaller rooms with distinct functions—entertaining, dining, or sleeping. From the widowed Margaret Stevenson, who lived with her daughter Mary (or “Polly”), Franklin rented a bedchamber and sitting room on the story just above the street, though he also entertained visitors in Mrs. Stevenson’s parlor on the ground floor.

In fact, he pretty much took over the house. The Stevensons quickly learned that their lodger was eminent, charming, and amazingly well connected. Letters from many notables were addressed to “Mrs. Stevenson’s / in Craven Street.” Guests to the house included George Whitefield (the famous preacher), Israel Wilkes (brother to political firebrand John Wilkes), William Strahan (the printer who published Samuel Johnson’s dictionary), John Pringle (the King’s physician and later president of the Royal Society), and Joseph Priestley (clergyman and chemical experimenter).

The many men of science hint at Franklin’s continued interest in the wonders of nature. When he and Sir John Pringle visited the German speaking countries in 1766, Franklin discovered “pulse glasses,” tubes of glass filled with alcohol and sealed with a slight vacuum. The devices registered small changes of temperature—slight warmth made their contents bubble. Franklin employed London instrument makers to fashion even more sensitive versions; to test these he bored that hole near a window. Even with the top of the tube exposed to the window’s draft, the warmth of the room (Craven Street had many fireplaces [fig. 3]) made bubbles rise, “to the no small surprise,” Franklin exulted, of the “philosophical spectators” who were unfamiliar with the device. (One wonders whether Mrs. Stevenson was philosophical about the damage to her wainscot.)

A steady train of Franklin’s relatives came to Craven Street. Some of them bore American groceries for the homesick Philadelphian. Codfish, pippin apples, cornmeal, and ham were among the delicacies that Franklin shared with the Stevensons, who became for him a kind of surrogate family. While Franklin’s son William studied law in London, he too resided in the house (along with his and his father’s slaves, Peter and King). Franklin and Mrs. Stevenson thought William and Polly might marry each other, but the union was not to be.

Franklin carried on an affectionate correspondence with Polly and gave her away at her wedding to Dr. William Hewson in 1770. He and Polly used their letters to discuss scientific topics. He proposed various experiments she could do in the Craven Street house and its garden. And he published eight of his letters to her in the fourth edition of his Experiments and Observations (1769), advertising his conviction that women, no less than men, could master science.

When Mrs. Stevenson was away for a week in 1770 and the Hewsons kept the house for Franklin, he wrote the comical “Cravenstreet Gazette” to document the chaos while “Queen Margaret” was away. The subjects of her kingdom, especially “Dr. Fatsides,” the “Great Person,” groaned under the “corrupt, ignorant, blundering, foolish, crafty, and Knavish Ministers,” meaning Dr. and Mrs. Hewson. I hope the ministerial Hewsons saw the humor in Franklin’s very timely satire of British government: “If these nefarious Wretches continue in Power another Week, the Nation will be ruined—Undone!—totally undone, if the Queen does not return.”

Peace returned more quickly to Craven Street than to Britain and its empire. Franklin left London in 1775, for the big, obvious reason. He would formally break with Great Britain the next year, when he signed the Declaration of Independence. He nevertheless managed to keep in touch with many British friends, including the Stevensons, who loyally forwarded household items he had, in his haste, left behind.

After Franklin’s departure and Mrs. Stevenson’s death, the neighborhood around Craven Street changed yet again. The creation of Charing Cross Station, which opened in 1864, required demolition of several streets south of the Strand. Craven Street is now the western boundary of the station—had the railroad terminus needed more space or been differently configured, the street might not have survived. The station’s dirt, noise, and traffic sent middle-class Londoners packing. Many of the houses on Craven Street became hotels for travelers. (Herman Melville stayed at number 25 for two months in 1849.) In such boarding houses, existing rooms were cut up; Georgian architectural details were covered over or removed; overuse and damage went unattended. Still, the street survived the Blitz of World War II, the worst disaster to strike the city since the Great Fire. The Germans bombed the National Gallery and Trafalgar Square, both of which were damaged, as was Charing Cross Station.

At some point in the twentieth century, the Craven Street house was abandoned and left dangerously unrepaired (fig. 4). Even so, the Franklin connection remained known and, sometime before the 1930s, the London City Council put up a bronze plaque commemorating his residence at what is now numbered 36 Craven Street (fig. 5). The dark bronze tablets were early versions of what are now the eye-catching blue plaques that dot buildings throughout London, marking spots where famous people lived (as with the one that notes Melville’s stay at 25 Craven Street). Anyone who consulted a guide to the blue plaques would know where to find Franklin’s house and could go gaze upon its neglected exterior.

It is neglected no more. The Friends of the Benjamin Franklin House, who recently acquired the structure, raised money for its renovation, and reopened it to the public in 2006, the tercentenary of Franklin’s birth. They saved the building—the house was in danger of collapse and might have brought down the houses on either side of it. The interior required much painstaking attention (fig. 6) to restore a semblance of the house Franklin would have known.

Even with all the restoration, Franklin probably would not recognize his London home. It has almost no furnishings (fig. 7). Visitors to historic sites love to look at stuff: the impossibly big soupspoons from which our ancestors supped, the ridiculously high beds into which they clambered and slept, the upliftingly large tomes with which people in a pre-internet society whiled away the long, empty hours. What things the Craven Street house does have are not even associated with Franklin; not so much as a stray button or tattered pamphlet remains from this most famous occupant.

The curators have three clever solutions. First, visitors go down to the cellar to view an introductory film and look at the few artifacts associated with the house. The film is a brisk overview of Franklin’s life and accomplishments; the artifacts are mostly meant to explain the startling discovery, during renovation, of human bones in the cellar. No, Dr. Franklin was not the Sweeney Todd of Craven Street. Rather, Dr. Hewson (Mrs. Stevenson’s son-in-law) did anatomical research at the house. Franklin regarded him as a fellow man of science and approved his diligent pursuit of knowledge, which proved fatal—Hewson accidentally cut himself during a dissection and perished of septicemia. Bones left from his investigations are displayed alongside period medical instruments.

Visitors next meet “Polly Stevenson” (fig. 8). I braced myself. Despite a delightful encounter with “Edward Winslow” at Plimouth Plantation many years ago, I generally hate it when some tall, well-nourished person, visibly equipped with a mouthful of gleaming white teeth, tries to convince me that he or she is a Viking, or whatever. But the actress who played Stevenson was quite convincing, especially in her performance of the eighteenth century’s balance between formality and sentiment. Stevenson explains the coming rupture between her country and Franklin’s as both a national and a personal tragedy. This approach would appeal to British and American visitors alike because it personalizes a grand historic event and reinforces the “special relationship” between Britain and the United States. Yet even as “Polly Stevenson” laments the likely loss of her friend, she calls him “Dr. Franklin,” never stooping to the gropingly familiar “Ben,” the anachronism American tour operators love to use.

Finally, there is an audiovisual show. Slides project onto the walls various images, contemporary and modern, of places and things to which the soundtrack refers. Enter Mrs. Stevenson’s parlor and you can hear William Strahan and John Pringle (they’re the ones with the Scottish accents) stir their tea and gossip with the lady of the house. Margaret Stevenson is played by Imelda Staunton, star of Vera Drakeand the newest Harry Potter movie. I applaud Peter Coyote’s patriotism in performing Benjamin Franklin but cringed at his midwestern accent. Franklin probably had a New England accent, acquired from his Nantucket mother. (Imagine the Mayor Quimby character on The Simpsons as Benjamin Franklin.)

After my tour of the house, I lingered with one of the curators to inspect the wainscot around the windows, looking for that historic vandalism. Alas, Franklin’s designations of a “small hole” and “my window” were maddeningly vague. (How small? Which window?) Assuming that Franklin’s philosophical spectators had not crowded into his bedchamber, I focused on his and Mrs. Stevenson’s sitting rooms. But the renovators had carefully painted over any minor damage, which might, in any case, have been repaired once Franklin had put away his pulse glasses.

Thousands of visitors have now seen the house on Craven Street, including hundreds of British schoolchildren. The kids get a double dose: science (Dr. Franklin’s electricity and Dr. Hewson’s anatomy) and history (a calm assessment of Britain’s long history of gaining and losing colonies). Tour guides squarely address serious historical problems, including chattel slavery. And the site is interestingly presented as a crossroads for the varied people, commodities, and ideas of the Atlantic world. It’s one of the few places in London that embraces Britain’s colonial American past, even to the point of celebrating the Fourth of July this year, complete with cake and champagne.

But London faces new threats. The impending Olympic Games will channel National Lottery funds toward sports and away from museums such as the Franklin house—every London curator is worried about budget cuts. Much more dangerously, terrorists have targeted London since the start of the Iraq War. The area around Craven Street was unaffected by the July 2005 transport bombings, but one of the two gas-packed Mercedes-Benzes detected in London this summer was parked near Trafalgar Square. It may be a matter of luck that certain pieces of the past have come down to us, but luck shouldn’t be the only reason it happens.

This article originally appeared in issue 7.4 (July, 2007).

Joyce E. Chaplin is James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History at Harvard University and the author of The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius (2006). She is currently working on a history of circumnavigation.

Not all roads lead to the Mohawk Valley, but they used to.

It was pouring as I made my way towards Albany, some 194 miles along Interstates 91 and 90. The trip took about four hours all together, thirty minutes more than I’d anticipated. I arrived late: it must have been four o’clock as I wound my way along the Mohawk River’s south side, past a shabby motel, a restaurant or two, decaying storefronts (one sign read “Sir William’s Antiques”), and up a winding incline through one small neighborhood and then another. At last I could see him standing above me as I approached, a twentieth-century statue that might have commemorated Washington or Jefferson, so conventionally “colonial” did he look from a distance. Beyond the statue now, and up the drive and to the house itself: Johnson Hall, the largest and most stylish place for miles.

In its current setting, the house overwhelmed me with its remoteness. But if today it stands apart from the world, in a dying industrial town, Johnson Hall once stood at the center of much that was worldly about early America. For much of the seventeenth century and three-quarters of the eighteenth, the Mohawk Valley occupied one of the busiest trade corridors in North America. Furs and foods of all sorts; the spiritual paraphernalia of Protestantism and Catholicism; weapons; the stuff of everyday life (pots, pans, hoes); European “luxury items” (tea, sugar, cloth); Indian and white captives en route to fates as various as they were unsettling–all of these made their way up and down the Mohawk River, along its connecting tributaries and thence to Canada, Albany, New York City, or to Britain, or France, or the West Indies. And most of them passed through Johnson Hall.

The house is pleasing enough from the outside, but its interior really captivates. I had read various eighteenth-century accounts and knew that within the hall’s eight rooms, scattered across its horizontal surfaces and upon its walls, the man depicted in the statue had displayed English silver and ceramics, tomahawks and moccasins, wampum of every shade and ritualistic function, and Mohawk-language editions of the Book of Common Prayer, among further wonders. But for whom, and to what end? Once upon a time, I knew, there might have been seven hundred natives in evidence at any given moment, sometimes as many nine hundred–in the cobblestone courtyard, in the garden, in the house; at dinner, over tea, playing billiards on the second floor; talking among themselves or with any number of British aristocrats who made the house a stopover on their whirlwind tours of North America.

I stayed on in Mohawk country for two days. My conversation that first night with the curator, Wanda Burch, and her husband, over wine in the warmth of their late-Victorian, seems in retrospect to have resembled any number of Mohawk Valley nights in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when people gathered to gossip and rehearse the many stories they had heard about scurrilous happenings at the house itself. Our surroundings merely enhanced this sense of continuity between the centuries. Outside darkness reigned: no streetlights to speak of, no traffic, the wind gathering force. My hosts, I discovered, had been living with the house for two decades. They had much to tell; and as the midnight hour drew near, I began to despair of knowing the place in full, if at all. Where would the story begin, and with whom? With a blind man imported from Ireland to regale Johnson’s guests with the sound of his harp? A swashbuckling Dutchman who plied Mohawks with rum, only to kidnap and exhibit them in London’s alleyways and gin houses? A sword-wielding bastard son called “Wild William”? The cast of characters grew as the evening progressed.

But always in my mind I returned to the house–the long shadow it had cast not only in Mohawk country, but also in London and Paris. It struck me as the perfect vantage point from which to survey all that had led its owner there, and all that had followed. So it would be a house story, a book about the domestic and diplomatic worlds that coexisted side by side within Johnson Hall. Few places in American history have been so much to so many: a house for parents and children; a workplace for slaves and servants; and, for the Indians who journeyed there from as far as Nova Scotia and South Carolina, an embassy, a store, and a clearinghouse for news. With the possible exception of Monticello, no early American house offers such an extraordinary perspective on racial mingling over time. The questions came fast and furious, the answers less so. But the point of my project became apparent soon enough. I would repopulate this historic site as best I could; I would write a dissertation about family ties forged across the so-called “cultural divide.”

Johnson Hall still stands, forty-five miles northwest of Albany, in the easternmost corner of what used to be Iroquoia, on an elevation that descends southward to the northern bank of the Mohawk River, four miles below. It belongs now to the state of New York. But for eleven years between 1763 and 1774 it occupied a state unto itself: at Johnson Hall, “shelter” and “civilization” assumed forms never before taken. Indians wandered constantly through its rooms, and so did Europeans and their descendants. And if what came of all that wandering has been notoriously difficult to fix upon the page, this much is transparent: always centermost (indeed, center stage) was Sir William Johnson (1715-74)–immigrant Irishman turned English gentleman, His Majesty’s Superintendent of Indian Affairs, Mohawk sachem; collector of Indian “curiosities,” cultivator of plants and persons, founder of a métis dynasty. And, not least, builder of the hall.

Historians of architecture would call the house “late Georgian,” for on its face it resembles any number of mid-eighteenth-century British and North American houses with balanced facades and symmetrical floor plans arranged around an axial hall. But the history of Johnson Hall’s rooms, and of their use, is anything but typical. Built in 1763 (at the end of one war) and abandoned in 1777 (during another), Johnson Hall may well have been the most notorious late-Georgian structure in British North America–a house known to Washington and Jefferson and Franklin, a house familiar to Londoners and Parisians too. Here, it was said, there lived a freewheeling war hero and adventurer who mixed so easily with the Indians that he dressed and painted his face as they did, revered their traditions, spoke in their tongue, and bedded their women. How peculiar to white outsiders it must have seemed–and how bewitching–this decorative and diplomatic universe inhabited by Sir William Johnson, his Mohawk “paramour” Molly Brant, their eight children, and by the large native population that sought companionship within the house, as in its surrounding garden and fields.

Those approaching from the river, or the south, would have arrived at the front door; those approaching from the woods, or the north, would have arrived at the back–and found themselves standing in a small cobblestone courtyard. A Palladian window still dominates this rear view; it is Johnson Hall’s single most conspicuous concession to formal British architectural style. From the second floor, where Johnson and his friends drank and played billiards late into the night, you can look through the window onto an empty cobblestone courtyard in which hundreds of Indians used to gather.

Rather than the attached dependencies traditionally seen on similar houses in Britain (and elsewhere in British North America), this house has flanking dependencies: free-floating stone “wings” detached from either side of the main structure. Although not unattractive, and certainly not uncommon in Indian country, these miniature fortresses with their multiple gun portals hew closely to a siege aesthetic, designed as they were for the family’s defense in case of attack. They remain today, unsettling reminders that desperate measures and sturdier shelter were sometimes called for far from Britain’s familiar shores.

In the eighteenth century, the phrase “Johnson Hall” designated a seven-hundred-acre estate, not merely the house that was its cultural hub. William Johnson had begun settling Palatine German families there as early as 1754, on an eighteen-thousand-acre tract acquired from the Mohawks. To satisfy their needs, and to fulfill his obligations as their protector and landlord, he built for them a town in 1763. He called it Johnstown. Early travelers through the place would have seen various outbuildings already standing or, if not, in various stages of construction: barns, a blacksmith’s shop, kilns for brick making, a caretaker’s house, an Anglican church, a graveyard, a grist mill, a small island in the nearby creek, a jail (or “gaol”), a parsonage, a potash factory, a sawmill, a school, slaves’ quarters, a wash house. A two-and-a-half-acre garden was always the object of favorable comment. The list of “improvements” goes on, and the overall effect would have been impressive–one of sound, motion, expansion, civilization. A far cry, to be sure, from the scenes of primitive living glimpsed here and there along the way: a fitting manifestation of Britain’s reach–an empire within the Empire.

But no matter. To any white person traveling there from Britain by way of Manhattan, and from Manhattan by way of the Hudson and Mohawk rivers, Johnson Hall stood at the margin of Britain’s empire, an outpost of civilization, or so it seemed, in a landscape seemingly bereft of all that civil people held dear. However well traversed and densely populated, the Mohawk Valley scarcely qualified as urban. Objects reflecting the tastes of London, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston may have meandered their way to Mohawk country, courtesy of the sailing vessels that linked Albany to the wider Atlantic world; yet despite its well-deserved reputation as one of North America’s busiest trade corridors, the Valley remained a backwater to most who hailed from anywhere vaguely refined. If the journey had been long and difficult at times to bear, so much the better: several nights in the North American outdoors–on pine needles beneath a forest canopy or, if you were lucky, in an Indian’s house–could make castles of cottages.

To the builders of Britain’s brick and stone palaces, the country houses that extended for miles across the countryside of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, it couldn’t have looked like much. By their ostentatious standards, Johnson Hall was indeed a modest house. There were no ballrooms here, no antechambers upon antechambers, no retinues of servants and footmen. Even if he could have afforded one, such a vast house would not have suited Johnson’s needs or tastes. But in the end, the contours of the house itself are much beside the point, because what made Johnson Hall grand and unforgettable in the eyes and minds of its British visitors was precisely what put them off–its setting. Even Sir William Johnson, a man devoted to publicizing the Mohawk Valley as stable, populous, and economically viable, insisted on welcoming his guests “to this Wild place.”

The power of place is a difficult concept to take stock of, especially when the place in question is 250 years old and its original occupants long since dead. But the affectionate place that Indians reserved in their heart for Johnson Hall is not in doubt. From the hands of its master and mistress, and from its many storehouses, native peoples took what they needed to survive and craved to be seen with: frying pans, razors, and “Fine Wrought Pens,” among other wonders of the British marketplace. They came for food, shelter, smallpox inoculations, and, for those who required one, a decent burial. Warren Johnson observed in 1760 that his brother’s establishment at Fort Johnson (the predecessor to Johnson Hall) boasted “More Custom . . . than any Inn in England.”

Johnson Hall did better, because it was grander. And for the Indians that meant regular exposure and physical proximity to a parade of worldly goods. It meant participation in an expanding repertoire of domestic rituals made possible by creamware teacups and saucers, decanters, wineglasses, pickle plates, and forks of all sorts. Far from being worthless “trinkets,” these objects carried a great deal of symbolic weight for those who used and owned them; they fostered among some Indians a genuine, continually evolving sense of membership in the empire.

Where that sense of belonging originated, and how it was nurtured, remains for me the biggest question of all, as well as the toughest one to answer. But amid a dense tangle of motives that bound some native peoples to the struggles of their oppressors, the power of this place loomed large. The sort of amalgamation of British and native styles of life first glimpsed at Johnson Hall guided the course of Mohawk aspirations long after Johnson’s death in 1774. Trapped, historians have argued, between a rock and a hard place, the Mohawks and most of their Iroquois brethren chose the more familiar of two evils; they gambled in aligning themselves with Britain, only to pay with their lives and their land.

Those with intimate ties to Sir William Johnson and to the biracial establishment he maintained at Johnson Hall saw it differently. For them–a special group, a gentry class of sorts–the American Revolution more nearly resembled an assault on their (predominantly British) style of living than the white man’s war it has been made it out to be. The War of Independence looks rather different from the threshold of Johnson Hall than it would from, say, Mount Vernon or Monticello, especially when we place Johnson and the Mohawks at the front door. These were the lords of the manor. Indeed, the great irony here is that certain Iroquois peoples living in what is now upstate New York were not only unapologetic Loyalists, but also richer and more polished than many of their white neighbors. In Mohawk country, “patriotic” zeal and white rage were not merely the consequences of land scarcity among settlers; they were a violent reaction against the Indians’ obvious material fortune. Which is to say that class resentment may well have been a more potent catalyst to violence than ethnic hatred.

How anyone might go about recovering for a wide readership the Loyalist sentiments of Indians who left few written records requires serendipity and imagination, frequently in heavy doses. The more time I have spent wandering the rooms of Johnson Hall and standing in the Mohawks’ clapboard Anglican chapel (built for them by Johnson in 1767), the less I have become convinced of the written record’s ability to shoulder the full burden of my interpretive and explanatory tasks. Because Johnson’s capacity for self-reflection was less developed than we of the early twenty-first century would prefer, his correspondence sometimes obscures more than it reveals about how he perceived himself, much less his feelings for all the Indians in his life. In the absence of any word from Johnson or the Indians, I have found myself turning again and again to the house itself–and to the objects that fostered and sustained conviviality therein.

Johnson Hall was more than just a funky place to visit with Indians who sometimes dressed as well, and sometimes better, than Anglo-Europeans. It was a place where the idea of what it meant to be a British subject was tried, tested, and ultimately enlarged to accommodate native peoples. If it is true that being British in the eighteenth century required a great deal more than a fancy suit of clothes and a certain facility with the king’s tongue, then just how, exactly, might one go about becoming British? This is not a simple question, yet for some Indians it was an urgent one. Britons living in North America (as elsewhere in the expanding Empire) demonstrated their allegiance to the Crown in ways as mundane as they were various. They fought wars, they built houses of stone and mill-sawn lumber, they tended livestock, they fenced and defended the acres they farmed, they prayed in Anglican churches and read from Anglican prayer books, they toasted the king’s health, they drank tea from British ceramics and Chinese porcelain, and they wore British fabrics.

Some Mohawks did too. They participated as exuberantly in the spiritual, martial, and domestic rituals of empire as did their British neighbors. Often they participated more exuberantly, and with an ardor that surprised Britons and Indians alike.

Unless they are also archaeologists, or simply collectors, historians of early America rarely find themselves in the company of objects; and this is too bad. To ask readers to contemplate the symbolic and social value that accrues to material possessions in any culture is to make the past tangible–and vibrant, and relevant, and interesting to wrestle with. In the silver communion vessels sought by the Mohawks and sent to them by Queen Anne in the 1710s, we have just one instance of a native population finding in the British much to admire and emulate. Indeed, Sir William Johnson merely elaborated on a tradition of collaboration and mutual affection established long before his own appearance in the New World. If not for Molly Brant’s grandfather, celebrated in his day as one of “four Indian kings” to meet with Queen Anne on a highly sensitive diplomatic mission in 1710, the silver never would have come. After his London journey, things were never the same in Mohawk country. He and his three compatriots returned from their audience with Queen Anne to inaugurate one of the most extraordinary alliances ever forged between native peoples and a colonizing power, an alliance as spiritual and cultural as it was martial.

The silver communion vessels given to the Mohawks by the Queen remain in Iroquois hands today, saved as they were from rebel thieves during the Revolution and taken to what is now Six Nations Reserve in Canada, home to the only royal chapel in North America. The church that became the chapel was founded by none other than Molly Brant and her son George, her second son by Sir William Johnson. But we can look elsewhere, far from Canada, for evidence of Britain’s lingering influence upon the landscapes and peoples it once ruled. The world of Johnson Hall did not die with Johnson’s death, or with the Revolution, or with the exile of Loyalist Indians to the reservations that haunt our country still. While the founding generation haggled over of the Treaty of Paris and began building a country, another generation of British colonial administrators, cultural chameleons all, could be found adapting the hybrid spirit of Johnson Hall to another part of the empire–India.

Further Reading: Much of Sir William Johnson’s correspondence is collected in Milton W. Hamilton et al., eds., The Papers of Sir William Johnson, 14 vols. (Albany, N.Y., 1921-65).

Among the best secondary sources are Colin G. Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities (Cambridge, 1995); John Demos, The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America (New York, 1994); Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America (Ithaca, N.Y., 2000); Daniel K. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1992) and Looking East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge, Mass., 2002); James H. Merrell, Into the American Woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier (New York, 1999); Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (Cambridge, 1991).

This article originally appeared in issue 2.3 (April, 2002).

Kirk Davis Swinehart, a doctoral candidate in American studies at Yale, currently holds the Mellon Research Fellowship in American history at the University of Cambridge. This essay derives from his dissertation, “This Wild Place: Sir William Johnson among the Mohawks.” In the fall, he will join the history department at Wesleyan University.

We generally associate industrial revolution with the destruction of artisanal labor. Wendy Gamber reminds us in her history of the nineteenth-century boardinghouse that American capitalism destroyed the household as well and consequently revolutionized the meaning of home. This explains the nervous response by contemporaries to the growing practice of boarding, which filled a vital niche in an industrial system that moved people around as much as it moved goods. It increasingly moved them off the farm and into the city where they found employment (judging from the large number of young clerks populating Gamber’s boardinghouses) administering all the new commercial activity.

But boarding was not just a servant of the industrializing economy. It was itself an exchange relationship. And that is what made it so dangerous, for in organizing domesticity around a business plan, the boardinghouse subjected the home to baser material concerns and so violated an emerging consensus regarding the need to keep commerce out of private life. And yet, as Gamber makes clear, “if the nineteenth century was the golden age of the bourgeois home, it was also the age of the boardinghouse” (3). She confronts us with a familiar dialectic by which the redemptive powers of progress generate the social ills they then pretend to remedy. “Only with the rise of home as a cultural icon,” Gamber continues, “did numerous Americans begin to perceive boarding as a social problem” (3)—a problem because it introduced the promiscuity of an anonymous market into the putatively virgin territory of the home.

Controversies over boarding consequently became a way for talking about industrial dangers and negotiating the transformations overtaking family, womanhood, city life, and middle-class propriety in general. And yet, Gamber’s very success in exposing this crowded site of cultural anxiety and conflict is also a source of frustration for the reader, for she keeps her archaeology ever close to the surface. The reason is clear in the book’s “essay on sources,” comprised almost exclusively of works of history, a sure recipe for under-theorization and missed opportunities in a study that promises to examine what generations of historians have failed to notice. It is not enough, in other words, to make formerly marginal subjects the focus of scholarly attention: social and cultural history must also engage other disciplines, whose distinct contextualizations will then guide our own rereading of the sources.

Eating is a good example. “Social commentators spilled more ink on food than on any other aspect of boardinghouse life,” Gamber tells us at the opening of a chapter entitled “Boarders’ Beefs” (78). This comes as no surprise. If boardinghouses represented the subversive forces unleashed by capital’s destruction of agrarian patriarchy and household hierarchies, then a proper diet offered a practical means for reestablishing stability in a society that now rested on the personal prerogatives and sovereign status of the individual. Abstaining from meat, or coffee, or tea, or from strongly flavored food of any kind, preferring bran breads, dried apples, and ever-greater quantities of water, all in order to ward off dyspepsia and chronic gastritis, among other recently diagnosed nervous disorders that attacked the body’s digestive system (and that required close attention to matters of hygiene, comportment, and exercise as well)—this was how the self-help literature of the period convinced the self-interested citizen to take control of his appetite.

None of these “dietetics,” however, are included in Gamber’s chapter on food (not even a passing reference is made to Grahamite boardinghouses), despite their promise to broaden the discussion and incorporate the boardinghouse in a social anthropology of liberalism. Instead, “Boarders’ Beefs” addresses a single, albeit not unimportant, aspect of the moral economy of food. This subject is also essential to the book’s central, if under-argued, thesis that women were the scapegoats for the cultural crisis triggered by capitalism. Thus, efforts by boardinghouse keepers to control expenses made them into a symbol of parsimony serving up “leather steaks” and “indigestible pies and doughnuts,” the evil twin of the industrious, frugal housewife whose own economizing was carried out for its own sake, that is, without reference to profit margins. The boardinghouse menu consequently became a notorious sign of transgression, revealing an all-too prevalent breach of the boundary “between love and money” (8). “By turning every square inch into a commodity,” boardinghouse keepers erased any distinction between the home and its ideological antagonist, the market (42).

The commodification of intimacy has long worried the bourgeoisie, which otherwise enjoyed the fruits of the widening web of commercial exchange. This found a persistent expression in the intensifying discourse over prostitution—what Baudelaire called the “savage face of civilization,” in recognition of the modern character of this “oldest profession.” The prostitute was reinvented in the nineteenth century as a morality tale, a horrifying lesson of what awaited all “public women” who ventured too far outside the realm of domestic virtue and engaged too closely in the world of trade. Gamber takes note of the whorish stigma that was attached to boarding and explains the analogy: “Like brothels, [boardinghouses] sold women’s services, bringing housewifery into the marketplace” (97). And so, we encounter another figure in the modern pantheon of dangerous women who violated their womanhood by selling services that should never have been put up for sale in the first place. The larger history of the boardinghouse, it turns out, is a history of women’s labor in a man’s economy.

This is an important conclusion, for it also explains how the fate of labor and the household were intertwined and how women’s work became a “wedge issue” for separating them and so bolstering the post-agrarian axiom that separated home from the rest of society. The ambiguous publicness of the boardinghouse would seem, then, to have served the new ethos of individualism, and angry rhetoric about indigestible pies and doughnuts might also have been a way to legitimate the new bourgeois family. I was left waiting for Gamber to elaborate on these themes and to further explore their relationship to virtue, privacy, urban space, and the labor market, all equally fundamental to the boardinghouse and to modern life. Only once this is done will the history of boarding acquire the heft Gamber assigns it.

This article originally appeared in issue 8.1 (October, 2007).

Michael Zakim is the author of Ready-Made Democracy (Chicago, 2003). He teaches history at Tel Aviv University.

In March of 1823 schoolmaster Caleb Burge notified readers of the Hartford Connecticut Courant that his school for young ladies would open the following month in the town of Glastonbury. In addition to instruction in the branches of education “usually taught in Female Academies,” Burge offered his pupils a course of lectures on the “very fashionable, useful and pleasing” science of botany. Burge’s school was just one of many that dotted the landscape (especially in New England) in the early years of the nineteenth century. Burge was not unique in providing botanical instruction; this branch of natural philosophy drew increasing numbers of female students and practitioners.

Anglo-American women’s acquaintance with the natural world was tied to early exploration and settlement. Colonists were scientifically curious about North American flora and fauna, but they also had a practical need to harvest plants and animals. Bioprospectors contributed to knowledge of new and often unfamiliar environments. Seeds, plants, and animals were collected, shared, traded, and studied. John Bartram, the eighteenth-century Philadelphia botanist, for example, was embedded in a transatlantic network of scientific inquiry fostered by British gentlemen-scientists such as London-based merchant Peter Collinson, a Royal Society Fellow who financed Bartram’s North American collecting journeys, and Royal Society president Sir Hans Sloane, whose natural history collections and cabinet of curiosities formed the basis of the British Museum. Many American plants grew well in British gardens. From their new Old World home, botanical specimens were transformed into objects for study and delight. Curiosity about American nature fit well with the literary and artistic interests of Georgian Britain and America. Augustan pastoral poetry celebrated the natural world. Accurate and beautiful prints of North American flora graced American walls. These same prints were copied onto ceramics—Americans dined off imported Chelsea plates and sipped tea from cups that showcased the continent’s botanical abundance.

Immersed in this aesthetisized botanical world, women expressed their interest in, and knowledge of, nature through a gendered material culture. Floral designs abounded on English textiles ordered by colonists. Not merely idealized florals, these designs were often copied, as the Chelsea tableware was, directly from botanical prints. American women also created their own botanical fabric: some colonial quilters, through judicious and creative use of costly or scarce textiles, fashioned nature studies in the quilting style known as broderie perse. Women also evoked the pastoral landscapes of Augustan poetry in needlework. Especially popular were scenes copied from the illustrated versions of James Thomson’s poem, “The Seasons” (1730). “Autumn,” for example, an embroidered picture by student Sally Phelps at the Litchfield Academy in Connecticut, depicts an orchard scene with trees laden with apples and two young men and a woman collecting the fruit. This genre of landscape work was a standard part of drawing as well as needlecraft instruction in early nineteenth-century girls’ schools such as the Litchfield Academy, where Clarissa Deming chose a more personal image to showcase both her drawing skills and her horticultural knowledge: her map is correctly labeled with the different varieties of fruit trees that grew in her family’s orchard.

British women in the Atlantic world dressed themselves, their beds, their walls and firescreens—even their hair—with reminders of American floral abundance. English author Hannah More described this fashion to a correspondent in 1777: “The other night we had a great deal of company—eleven damsels to say nothing of men. I protest I hardly do them justice when I pronounce that they had, amongst them, on their heads, an acre and a half of shrubbery, besides slopes, grass plots, tulip beds, clumps of peonies, kitchen gardens and greenhouses.” More’s comment, though exaggerated, was a response to a style popular among the metropole’s fashionable elites.

Embroidered orchards and peony hair ornaments testify that women were practitioners of floral display, but many women sought knowledge as well as style. Linnaean taxonomy gave order to the botanical world; plants could be identified and classified by anyone once they mastered Linnaeus’s straightforward system based on the sexual characteristics of plants. Jane Colden is perhaps the best example of an eighteenth-century American woman who diligently studied the Linnaean system (albeit in English rather than Latin). As a teenager living with her father, the scientist Cadwallader Colden, in New York’s Hudson Valley, she put her knowledge into practice by classifying over 300 species of local plants in the 1750s. British collector Peter Collinson learned of Jane Colden’s achievements through correspondence with her father, and Collinson passed on to Linnaeus himself the fact that Jane Colden was “perhaps the first lady that has perfectly studied Linnaeus’ system.” Colden continued her botanical studies up until her marriage, at age thirty-five, in 1759. She passed away the following year. Her notebook, carefully preserved by her family, eventually found its way into the Natural History Museum in London.

How could a woman on the periphery of empire have mastered the precepts of botanical science? Print culture provides at least part of the answer. Colden read some of the imported botanical texts available to Americans through direct shipments from overseas acquaintances. Her father requested Peter Collinson to send a variety of botanical illustrations and texts from London: “As [she] cannot have the opportunity of seeing plants in a Botanical Garden I think the next best is to see the best cuts or pictures of them for which purpose I would buy for her Tournefort’s Institutiones [Rei] Herbariae, Morison’s Historia Plantarum, or if you know any better books for this purpose as you are a better judge than I am will be obliged to you in making this choice.” By the close of the eighteenth century, British women authored as well as read botanical texts. Priscilla Wakefield’s An Introduction to Botany, in a Familiar Series of Letters (1796) was the first of many instruction books aimed at an amateur reader. Sarah Fitton’s Conversations on Botany (1817) and Jane Marcet’s Conversations on Vegetable Physiology (1829) were among the most popular works in the early nineteenth century, competing with Wakefield’s text, which continued to appear on booksellers’ lists. Occasionally we can document that specific American women read these works: Philadelphian Rueben Haines kept a lending record of his books. In 1805 his friends Martha Robeson, Susan Emlen and Lydia Coates each borrowed Wakefield’s An Introduction to Botany. The titles suggest why these books appealed to women: all three authors placed botanical instruction within an intimate setting; learning botany was something to do within a circle of friends (such as the epistolary correspondence of Wakefield’s characters), or between a mother and child (in Fitton’s book, a mother talks with her young son). Learning was conversation, rather than a rigorous drill. Nevertheless, all three authors emphasized that botanic study was an active exercise, one ideally performed out of doors. Wakefield encouraged her readers to leave the parlor and walk among the plants, and to examine living samples with a microscope small enough to fit in a female pocket.

Women clearly were interested in botany. Whether or not botany was deemed to be a suitable occupation for women is another matter. Two gendered portrayals of female practitioners in the early eighteenth century show how some men depicted such women. German Naturalist and artist Maria Sibylla Merian, who travelled to Surinam in 1699 with her daughter, produced a comprehensive volume,Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium, on the insects and flora of the colony. Merian was knowledgeable and thorough: she bred insects so she could illustrate each stage of the life cycle. A portrait painted during her lifetime shows her as a scholar, surrounded by instruments, books and the insects she studied. Yet the frontispiece to an edition of her work published after her death shows Merian seated calmly at a table while at her feet, mischievous putti rummage through collections of flora and other study objects. Alan Bewell has suggested that this maternal, rather than scientific, depiction of Merian may have “reduc[ed] social anxieties raised by the unconventional aspects of Merian’s life by [intimating] that ultimately her primary commitment as a female naturalist was to domestic family life, not to the study of nature.”

A retreat to domesticity in order to raise the comfort level of the early eighteenth-century readers of Merian’s work was not the only strategy employed by men who encountered botanically savvy women. Charleston, South Carolina, nursery owner Martha Logan procured plants for customers in the colonies and Britain. When John Bartram met Logan during his southern tour in the 1760s, he paid her the compliment (in a letter to Peter Collinson rather than to Logan herself) that she knew her horticulture well. Logan’s own letters confirm how knowledgeable she was, and they demonstrate that she was part of a local network of fellow horticulturists, some of whom were women. Logan’s Gardener’s Calender, which instructed southern gardeners about what, and when, to plant, was printed at the back of South Carolina almanacs until the end of the eighteenth century. Yet Bartram thought of her quite differently than he thought of male practitioners. To Collinson, Bartram described Logan as his “fascinated widow,” a sexualized creature who panted after him. Bartram bragged to Collinson that he had also fascinated two other women: “two men’s wives, although one I never saw; that is, Mrs. LAMBOLL, who hath sent me two noble cargoes; one last fall, the other this spring. The other hath sent me, I think, a great curiosity. She calls it a Golden Lily.” Needless to say, Bartram had a rather exaggerated opinion of his ability to “fascinate.” And note that he uses fascinated rather than fascinating—indicating that he had done the fascinating, not that he found these women to be so. In Bartram’s depiction of Logan, Lamboll, and the unknown wife, women used plants as tribute or enticement, but not as a straightforward exchange of botanical specimens among equals.

Women’s botanical activity raised concerns because it removed them from the domestic sphere and because it placed women within a heretofore masculine network of plant fanciers. But not everyone feared that women who studied the natural world threatened the gender status quo. Wakefield’s popular An Introduction to Botany, and the nineteenth-century works that followed hers, seamlessly incorporated science study with maternity and domesticity. Author and lecturer Benjamin Tucker believed that botany was a suitable subject for women, though other “walks of science” he explained, “must be trod by men alone.” Charles Willson Peale assured parents that girls would readily take to science generally: “The lively fancy of the youthful fair, would quickly catch a fondness for a science of such infinite variety.” He observed that girls’ “fondness” would yield social benefits: “What a charming topic for conversation would this [scientific knowledge] afford in their social parties! And if we reflect how the various parts of natural science branch out into all the household and economical concerns, can we find any part of female education of greater import?” An anonymous letter to the Pennsylvania Packet in 1790 by “A Lover of Nature” praised Peale’s museum as an educational tool for girls: “a young lady, with all her taste in finery, is wanting in fine taste if she has no desire to be acquainted with the sweet little humming bird, the gay paradise bird, the golden pheasant, the beauteous ring-dove, and many other lovely fellow beings.” These sentiments echoed those expressed earlier by Jane Colden’s father, who in 1755 wrote to the Dutch naturalist Jan Frederik Grovonius, “I thought that Botany is an Amusement which may be made agreeable for the Ladies who are often at a loss to fill up their time if it could be made agreeable to them[.] Their natural curiosity and the pleasure they take in the beauty and variety of dress seems to fit them for it.”

In all three instances these arguments for female learning took a gendered perspective: Peale assumed that sociability and domesticity determined appropriate subjects for instruction. The anonymous “Lover of Nature” linked a woman’s fondness for display to an interest in natural history. Cadwallader Colden also believed that women’s love for adornment would make flowers (though perhaps not the drab ones) an attractive subject for study in what Colden assumed to be a woman’s otherwise unoccupied hours. When Rueben Haines described to his friend James Parke a botany lecture Haines and his wife attended in New York City in 1812, he expressed the hope that “the young of Linnaeus of this city may particularly among its fair inhabitants diffuse a knowledge of and create a taste for the Science which thee ardently loves.” That Haines used the expression “a taste for” botany suggests that it was both a genteel pursuit, and, like the sentiments expressed by the anonymous “Lover of Nature,” botany complemented women’s attraction to visually pleasing objects. Another Haines friend, the ichthyologist Samuel Latham Mitchell, went further in this linkage of women and flowers. After learning of the success of a series of botanical lectures for women at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, Mitchell commented, “I am glad to hear that your Philadelphia damsels are indulging their taste for Botany. It will be a charming employment for those whose situation in life likens them to the lilies of the valley … It would gratify me highly to step in, and take a seat among these blooming daughters of Flora.” Mitchell’s response underlines the tension implicit in women’s presence at such public lectures: they were both observers and the observed, objects of desire as well as subjects for scientific education.

But feminizing science provoked another set of anxieties concerning male practitioners. Satirist Matthew Darley chose to portray botanist Daniel Solander and entomologist Moses Harris in Macaroni style. Macaronis, those fashionable dandies who wore elaborate wigs and tricorn hats, challenged masculine gender identity with their feminized dress and foppish, unmanly mannerisms. As the Oxford magazine observed in 1770, “there is indeed a kind of animal, neither male nor female, a thing called a Macaroni.” The Simpling Macaroni depicts Linnaean protegé Solander, whom Sir Joseph Banks employed to assist him in collecting and describing plant specimens taken on Cook’s first Pacific voyage, as a fat dandy. He grasps his pruning knife in one hand and an oversized vegetable in the other. The Aurelian Macaroni, Moses Harris, is so devoted to his bugs that he has begun to turn into one himself: his wig is composed of caterpillars, his hat is made of butterfly wings and his coat buttons are living snails. Rousseau, though himself a gardening enthusiast, complained of such men: “Nothing is more pedantic or ridiculous, when a woman, or one of those men who resemble women, are asking you the name of an herb or a flower in a garden.” Perhaps the promotion of naturalists as robustly masculine in character and behavior (a la John James Audubon) was a response to such cartoons and comments. From this perspective, John Bartram’s sexual jesting at the expense of Martha Logan may have been a defensive maneuver, designed to protect him from suspicion that plant collecting was a less than manly occupation; if women found him sexually attractive, his masculinity was assured.

Women were not immune from botanical satire. Publishers responded enthusiastically to women’s increasing engagement with botany and horticulture. By the second quarter of the nineteenth century, botanical texts competed with gardening manuals and a plethora of new hybrids such as Sarah Josepha Hale’s Flora’s Interpreter: or, The American Book of Flowers and Sentiments (1832), which combined Linnaean taxonomy with sentimental verse. It may have been in reaction to this burgeoning genre that French author J.J. Grandville produced the lavishly illustrated The Flowers Personified (1849), a translation of Les Fleur Animées. Here, women were not simply likened to flowers, women were flowers. In this disturbing book, Grandville offers readers a series of hackneyed female types imagined as lilies and peach blossoms. His figures include the obligatory damsel in distress—a wallflower ripped from her moorings by a botanist—and a hemlock distributing poison, popularly thought to be a woman’s weapon.

Women pursued botanical study and practice in multiple ways. In gendered activities, such as floral needlework, they combined science with art. But most often women encountered botany in the same way men did: they attended public lectures, read texts, and engaged in fieldwork. Women walked through gardens and along roadsides, identified and collected specimens, and scrutinized them under a lens. American women confidently engaged with the natural world. They gained some of this confidence from courses offered in female academies such as Sarah Pierce’s well-known school in Litchfield, the more obscure Caleb Burge’s academy in Glastonbury, and via books aimed specifically at female readers. Amidst the plethora of flowers and sentimental poetry books, there was a healthy assortment of offerings for the serious female botanist or horticulturalist in the early nineteenth century. Jane Loudon’s Gardening for Ladies and Companion to the Flower-Garden (1846) directed women to apply their botanical knowledge to the rigors of horticulture. Chapter Five, for instance, opens with pruning instructions. Loudon acknowledges that pruning appears “at first sight, a most laborious and unfeminine occupation,” but she encourages her readers to arm themselves with “a small, and almost elegant pair of pruning shears,” with which to easily deal with branches “that a strong man could scarcely cut through with a knife.” Loudon’s message is clear: armed with the right tools and a modicum of knowledge, a woman can accomplish anything. Like Catherine Beecher’s instruction manuals for homemakers, Loudon’s text espoused an ideology in which women fulfilled nineteenth-century gender roles through a command of science and technology—engaging in practical activities that required brain rather than brawn. Women’s botanical study and activity was complicated by society’s ambivalence toward women’s engagement with science. As a result, women seized formal educational opportunities when they could, but also found informal paths to acquire knowledge and to demonstrate their learning. They did so, sometimes quite literally, in a gendered fashion.

Further reading:

For British women’s relationship to botany see Ann B. Shteir, Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora’s Daughters and Botany in England, 1760-1860 (Baltimore, 2009). For information on the transformation of American botanicals into English silks see Zara A. Bernhardt’s dissertation “Portrait of a Woman in a Silk Dress: The Hidden Histories of Aesthetic Commodities in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World” (PhD thesis, University of Delaware, 2009). Botanical needlework instruction at the Litchfield Academy is discussed and illustrated (including Sally Phelps’ “Autumn” and Clarissa Deming’s orchard map) in Theodore and Nancy Sizer, To Ornament Their Minds: Sarah Pierce’s Litchfield Female Academy, 1792-1833 (Litchfield, Conn., 1993). Jane Colden’s botanical practices are discussed in Sara Stidstone Gronim, “What Jane Knew: A Woman Botanist in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Women’s History 19:3 (Fall 2007): 33-59, and Mary Harrison, “Jane Colden: Colonial American Botanist,” Arnoldia 55:2 (Spring 1995): 19-26, and in the introduction to the facsimile of Jane Colden’s botanical manuscript, Botanic Manuscript of Jane Colden (Garden Club of Orange and Duchess Counties, New York, 1963). Ella Reitsma’s Maria Sibylla Merian & Daughters, Women of Art and Science (Waanders, 2008) contains biographical information about Merian (and many of her lovely illustrations). Alan Bewell discusses the iconography of Merian’s frontispieces in his essay, “A Passion that Transforms: Picturing the Early Natural History Collector,” in Ann B. Shteir and Bernard Lightman, eds., Figuring It Out: Science, Gender and Visual Culture (Hanover, N.H., 2006): 28-53. Susan Scott Parrish discusses John Bartram’s uneasy relationship with Logan and other female practitioners in “Women’s Nature: Curiosity, Pastoral, and the New Science in British America,” in Early American Literature 37:2 (2002):195-245 and in her book American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (Chapel Hill, 2006). For Rousseau, see Sam George, “Linnaeus in Letters and the Cultivation of the Female Mind: ‘Botany in an English Dress,’ ” British Journal for Eighteenth Century Studies 28 (2005): 1-18.

This article originally appeared in issue 12.2 (January, 2012).

In 1836, the French novelist X.B. Saintine (nom de plume of Joseph-Xavier Boniface) published a novel entitled Picciola about a man who falls passionately in love with a flowering plant. Translated into English in 1838, the novel became a bestseller in America almost overnight. An 1839 review in Ladies’ Companion called Picciola “the most striking and original tale that has appeared in our country for a long time” and noted that the book passed through four editions in its first month of publication. By 1847, reviews in a wide range of periodicals—from women’s magazines to agricultural journals—were already hailing it as a classic. A few decades later, the publishing house J.B. Ford anthologized Picciola among other “standard masterpieces of imaginative fiction,” alongside Robinson Crusoe, Pilgrim’s Progress, Gulliver’s Travels, Arabian Nights, and The Vicar of Wakefield, in a collection to which Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote the introduction. Some of the most famous American authors of the century were fans. Stowe praised its “tenderness and sweet simplicity” and Emily Dickinson thanked her cousin for recommending the novel. Its appeal also seems to have been long-lasting: Marcel Proust likewise counted Picciola among his favorite books.

The story of a man’s love for a plant may be unusual, but the narrative foundation is entirely conventional. The protagonist is an aristocrat, Count Charles Veramont de Charney, who receives a first-rate education but whose lack of faith leads to dissipation. Charney finds himself in successive thrall to “twenty rival truths” of various metaphysical philosophers—“spiritualists, materialists, idealists, ontologists, and eclectics.” Like a college student in a great books course, he immerses himself in each until exposure to a proliferation of truths provokes a universal skepticism; Charney renounces the idea of a stable universe and adopts “chance” as his God. He joins a conspiracy against Napoleon Bonaparte, fancying himself a social “leveller,” and at the end of the first chapter Charney is imprisoned for this crime in a castle-turned-penal institution on the border between France and Italy. It is here that a plant becomes the means of Charney’s salvation.

Botany and Moral Education

To understand how a plant might serve as an agent of moral reform requires us to abandon our view of botany as a strictly empirical enterprise. Nineteenth-century educators and theologians promoted the science as a pious activity that could illustrate the relationship between all of God’s creations. Botany rapidly grew in popularity in America during the first half of the nineteenth century precisely because advocates praised its ability to inculcate good morals. It was the first scientific subject to become widely adopted in early schools for both sexes in large part because the close study of the natural world was believed to promote health and systematic thinking, and to reveal the beauty and order of God’s creation. Botany put students into natural spaces and brought natural objects into classroom settings. And part of the usefulness of botany as a tool for moral education lay in its very materiality. By studying individual plants, students could gain tangible experience establishing the relationship between parts and whole on a small scale, a pattern that could be extrapolated to the whole of an ordered natural world. As botanical educator Almira Lincoln Phelps emphasized in her Botany for Beginners (1829), “[in botany] the objects about which you are to learn, will be placed before you, to see, to touch, and to smell. Thus three of your senses will be called upon to aid the memory and understanding; and as flowers are objects of much beauty and interest, your imagination may also be gratified.” She then added, “Your emotions, too, will be warmed by the thought of His love and kindness who causeth the earth to bring forth, not only ‘grass for the beast of the field, and food for the use of man,’ but a rich succession of curious and lovely blossoms for our admiration and enjoyment.” The standard practice of botany, as Phelps framed it, brought together sensory understanding, imagination, and emotion, all in the service of reverence for God.

Charney illustrates how the materiality of plants could elicit such a reverent response. He is at first “deeply vexed” by the appearance of a “miserable weed” in his prison courtyard not long after his internment, but he quickly grows “amused to find himself interested in [its] preservation.” In particular, Charney is fascinated by the plant’s agency: its abilities to protect itself from frost and rain, and to grow by its own directives. Studying the plant, Charney becomes increasingly “enchanted by the prodigious and immutable congruities of Nature.” Shortly thereafter the man who had once been an atheist finds a way to believe in God.

The path toward religion lies in adopting the habits of a botanist. Studying the stamens and pistils of the flower, “Charney’s perceptions rose till they embraced the vast scale of the vegetable and animal creation. He recognized with a glance the mightiness, the immensity, the harmony of the whole.” This sense of holism arising from his study of Picciola moves Charney to confession: “Oh! mighty and unseen God!—the clouds of learning have too much confused my understanding,—the sophistries of human reason too much hardened my heart, for thy divine truths to penetrate at once into my understanding.” Charney becomes a model student of natural theology: his observations of the plant in front of him lead him toward a sense of divine power across the whole of nature. This sense of natural order correlates with Charney’s increasing respect for the social order, an association that would have been familiar to nineteenth-century readers. Charney’s plot against Napoleon and subsequent imprisonment results from his rejection of the current political hierarchy, yet the divine order of nature offers a lesson about where the individual aristocrat belongs in an equally ordered social universe. 

Reviewers praised Picciola for the moral quality of this trajectory toward social order. An 1843 review in Godey’s Lady’s Book hailed Picciola for its goal of “illustrat[ing] the truths of natural religion by a tale” and noted that “This touching story will reach many a heart on whom the elaborate reasoning of [prominent English theologians Joseph] Butler and [William] Paley would produce no effect.” In 1847 another review in Godey’s Lady’s Book praised the “common sense and good taste” of the publishers Blanchard and Lea for putting forth their tenth edition of Picciola with engravings. “A thousand editions of Picciola will not be too many for its merit,” the reviewer continued, praising it particularly for its “moral charms” in “assail[ing] the secret infidelity which is the bane of modern society.” Likewise, the same year a reviewer for the American Agriculturalist extolled “This beautiful little work, which has assumed the position of a classic in several languages,” noting that “For some it will possess a charm, for others, utility, and for all its moral bearing is excellent.”

The Coquettish Plant

For all that Picciola celebrates the moralizing power of botany, Charney’s interest in the plant quickly becomes an infatuation that threatens to destabilize the very natural order that the study of plants is meant to uphold. In his introductory epistle to the story, added at some point during the 1840s, Saintine writes, “There is love in my story, but it is the love of a man for—Shall I tell you? No! Read, and you will learn.” The ellipsis signals that the object of affection is unexpected; reading on, we learn that it is Charney’s obsession with this prison weed that brings about his change of heart and mind. Charney’s attachment here is a conflation of scientific and sexual desire in the context of a plot that becomes increasingly sentimental. The longer Charney observes Picciola, the more he is drawn to the plant and fascinated with its physiology. Picciola progresses from weed to flower to “she,” and Charney softens in his affection for her as he simultaneously wants to understand everything about how the plant lives.

Linnaeus’s sexual classification of plants in the mid-eighteenth century made it common to think of plants in sexualized terms, and to use the sexing of plants as a veiled reference to gender and sexuality in human society. Erasmus Darwin’s late eighteenth-century long poem “The Loves of the Plants” teaches readers about the different botanical classes by anthropomorphizing stamens and pistils, the sex organs. Many other late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literary works inversely use plants as tropes for human behavior, frequently comparing women in particular to flowers on the cusp of sexual maturity. “Blooming” young women, as Amy King has pointed out, were popular in English novels from Austen to Dickens and Eliot, and helped naturalize certain courtship plots. But Picciola engages with another motif of nineteenth-century domestic fiction—not the plant realm as proxy for human society, but the transformative experience of living with plants. That is, the novel invites us to think about Charney’s ardor for an actual plant.

Charney’s study of the plant is matched by his regular amazement. The moment that Picciola first blooms, Charney is so overwhelmed by feeling that he cannot think rationally. “Analysis or investigation seemed out of the question, engrossed as he was by love and admiration for the delicate thing whose fragrance and beauty breathed enchantment upon every sense!” This love and admiration overpowers analysis and translates into an intensely protective feeling. When a storm threatens Picciola, he covers the plant with his own body, and when the wind blows hard, he builds it a shelter using firewood from his meagre stash. This protectiveness is reciprocal: Charney looks out for the plant because it has also rescued him. At one point Charney falls ill and his jailor, believing the plant to have medicinal qualities, prepares some of the leaves for Charney to drink. Charney miraculously recovers and is distressed to learn about the act of “mutilation” that was committed to save him. As soon as he can walk again, he rushes to visit Picciola, but not before he dresses especially for the occasion: “He actually looked into his pocket-glass while he arranged his hair to do honour to his visit to a flower!—A flower?—Nay—surely something more? His visit is that of the convalescent to his physician,—of the grateful man to his benefactress,—almost of the lover to his mistress!” Charney attributes his recovery to the medicinal application of the plant, and feels gratitude in that regard. But the hyperbolic escalation of relation here reveals desire as well as indebtedness. The invitation to imagine the plant as mistress is coupled with scenes of intense male gaze under the guise of natural history:

He had formerly heard, and heard with a smile of incredulity, allusion to the loves of the plants, and the sublime discoveries of Linnaeus concerning vegetable generation. It was now his pleasing task to watch the gradual accomplishment of maternity in Picciola; and when, with his glass fixed on the stamens and pistils of the flower, he beheld them suddenly endowed with sensibility and action, the mind of the sceptic became paralyzed with wonder and admiration!

The plant’s sexual maturity holds Charney in thrall, and Picciola is elsewhere variously characterized as “the enchantress” and “the coquette.” As an object of Charney’s scrutiny, Picciola is also the object of Charney’s affection.

Charney’s desire for the plant is coupled with sexual fantasies about the plant as woman. Locked away in his tower courtyard, Charney dreams of the high society he left behind, fantasizing about being able to “stand gazing” at the crowds of people in saloons or at balls of his past. In the “brilliant crowd” of his reverie, he delights in the possibility of having his choice “among so many consummate enchantresses” but he comes to choose a woman whom he then recognizes to be the human incarnation of his plant: “His feelings were gently agitated by the lovely vision. But how much more when, on raising his eyes to the dark braids of her raven hair, he beheld a flower blooming there, his flower, the flower of Picciola! …the fair maiden and fair flower appeared to melt into each other. The fragrant corolla, expanding, enclosed with its delicate petals the loveliest of human faces, till all was hidden from his view.” Whereas readers would have been familiar with plant metaphors to express human behavior, the inversion here is striking. Charney fantasizes about a woman who is an incarnation of the flower he nurtures.

Such a reversal might reflect new attitudes about the agency of plants. By the time Saintine wrote Picciola, botanists in Europe and America were increasingly debating whether it was appropriate to ascribe feeling to plants. And whereas Charney at one point has difficulty rationalizing his sense of kinship with a “non-sentient being,” his observations of the plant are full of awe for its faculties. These include descriptions of the kind of evidence that naturalists cited to speculate that plants had some kind of sentience that shaped their behavior, for instance the “faculty exhibited by Picciola of turning her sweet face towards the sun, and following him with her looks throughout his daily course.” Beyond mobility, Charney also recognizes Picciola’s ability to mark time, noting that after “reiterated experiments” he is “able to designate to a certainty the hour of the day, according to the varying odour of the flower.” These experiments echo the work of contemporaneous naturalists who marveled at the behaviors of plants without being able to reach consensus as to the meaning of those behaviors.

Picciola might be seen as a literary iteration of this debate, one that highlights how the agency of a plant might cast doubt on humanity’s elevated place in the universe. In his introduction to the 1849 edition, Saintine characterizes Picciola as the book’s “heroine,” a characterization that, if taken seriously, could call into question the Great Chain of Being that botany broadly upheld. The subversive potential of this thinking has implications for the political realm as well. Charney landed in prison because he took umbrage at the emperor’s power. And while botany becomes a way for him to believe in an ordered universe where natural theology correlates with the naturalness of Napoleon’s rule, Picciola’s liveliness threatens to undermine the most basic element of this order.

Conservative Conclusions

But instead, Charney’s radical love for the plant begins to flag. As the novel progresses, Charney decouples his conflation of plant and woman and shifts his attention toward the possibility of human companionship. This marks a turn to the conventional: “Thus passed the days of the prisoner; and after whole hours devoted to inquiry and analysis, Charney loved to turn from the weariness of his studies to the brightness of his illusions,—from Picciola the plant to Picciola the blooming girl.” Eventually, he discovers that the woman he’d pictured as Picciola actually exists in the flesh. She is Teresa, the daughter of the prisoner next door.

Charney’s passion for the plant also makes him less of a perceived threat to Napoleon, who eventually pardons Charney by rationalizing that “He who could submit his powers of mind to the influence of a sorry weed, may have in him the makings of an excellent botanist, but not of a conspirator.” After his pardon, Charney and Teresa marry, and on the final page of the story, readers discover that the plant, having fulfilled its purpose to rehabilitate Charney, has died from neglect. For all that Picciola is the “heroine” of the story, in Saintine’s assessment, “she” exists as Charney knows and needs her. The plant is entirely subjected to Charney’s whims, fantasies, and desires, and sacrificed for his material and spiritual health. Thus as soon as its role has been fulfilled, the plant is cast aside. Once Charney marries and has a family, he ignores the plant. The last two lines of the story read, “The appointed task was over. The herb of grace had nothing farther to unfold to the happy husband, father, and believer!” A more functional conclusion there may not be.

So whereas the sheer amount of attention to the plant may point toward a potentially radical form of sociality, Picciola becomes, in the final assessment, a means to an end. By ultimately redirecting this energy toward a human love interest, Saintine makes the plant an object lesson in domestic values. The conservative conclusion offers a lesson about how plants might foster family feeling. Once this is accomplished, Picciola is expendable. The Gilbert & Gihon frontispiece to the 1847 Blanchard and Lea edition foretells this fate through a constellation of scenes that are populated with various minor human characters. In the centerpiece Charney is depicted flanked by Teresa and her father, and Picciola, one could surmise, is the non-descript shrub toward which Charney gazes. 

Yet if Saintine ultimately snuffs the vitality of the plant to underscore the end of its usefulness, every aspect of the plot that precedes it invites us to contemplate Picciola’s liveliness right alongside Charney. Even as Charney grapples with the question of how to understand Picciola’s behavior, the narrator notes that “[w]here reason is paralysed, imagination exercises her influence without restraint.” Readers are invited to imagine both the agency of plants and the very human limits to our imaginations.

Further Reading

For an excellent study of the role of sentiment and sensibility in Enlightenment science, see Jessica Riskin’s Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment (2002). On botany and Romanticism, see Theresa Kelley’s Clandestine Marriage: Botany and Romantic Culture (2012). For associations between women and plants, see Amy King’s Bloom: The Botanical Vernacular in the English Novel (1998) and Janet Browne’s “Botany for Gentlemen: Erasmus Darwin and ‘The Loves of the Plants’” (1989). For more on flora and sexual desire, see Alison Mairi Syme’s A Touch of Blossom: John Singer Sargent and the Queer Flora of Fin-de-Siècle Art (2010). For contemporary discussions of plant intelligence, see Michael Pollan’s “The Intelligent Plant” (2013), Oliver Sacks’s “The Mental Life of Plants and Worms, Among Others” (2014), Peter Wolleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate (2016), Stefano Mancuso and Alessandra Viola’s Brilliant Green: The Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence (2015), Natasha Myers’ “Conversations on Plant Sensing: Notes from the Field” (2015), Michael Marder’s The Philosopher’s Plant: An Intellectual Herbarium (2014) and Richard Mabey’s The Cabaret of Plants: Forty Thousand Years of Plant life and the Human Imagination (2016).

This article originally appeared in issue 17.4 (Summer, 2017).

Mary Kuhn is assistant professor of Environmental Humanities at the University of Virginia, where she teaches in the English Department and the Program in Environmental Thought and Practice. She is currently working on a book about the ways in which nineteenth-century domestic writers in the U.S. used ideas about plant life and the global circulation of plants to address pressing political questions.

Be rather the Mungo Park, the Lewis and Clark and Frobisher, of your own streams and oceans; explore your own higher latitudes. … Be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels . . . of thought … It is not the while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar.
—Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854)

I used these words from Thoreau as a sort of descriptive come-on to promote an integrated set of courses I taught at the University of Oregon last spring (2017) with colleagues in biology and earth sciences, Bitty Roy and Josh Roering. We called the all-inclusive program “Oregon Abroad.” The plan, which had produced wonderful results previously, was to offer four interrelated courses (a student’s full schedule for the ten-week term) to fully immerse students in the study of Oregon’s natural and cultural history. By employing the classroom, laboratory, archive, and field study, these courses in history, field biology, environmental geology, and environmental studies were to provide a unique, comprehensive educational experience, in a way comparable to study abroad—except that the “abroad” here was close to home. Instead of going “round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar,” as Thoreau recommended against, we’d consider the pinnipeds beyond Portland, track the southward movement of Oregon Falls, examine the native wildflowers of our wetlands and sample sagebrush galls in the high desert, calculate Coast Range mountain debris flows, and determine if Lewis and Clark are the most overrated heroes in American history. We’d ask, why did many consider the Willamette Valley a paradise at the end of the Oregon Trail? And why and how did those pioneers (and their descendants) seek to “improve” it? We’d study why Oregon looks like Oregon, how it’s changed, and how that landscape is and was a product of nature and culture.

The explorers and colonizers Frobisher and Mungo Park are not exactly household names, though many students in Oregon know of the intrepid duo Lewis and Clark and have heard of the more antique Columbus. Lewis and Clark’s expedition represents the critical narrative moment at which Oregon history becomes American history. That would be a hook for us in the course, as would the loosely formed suspicion a few might have had that these two, along with Columbus, Frobisher, and Park, might carry some colonial baggage. I feared that the students didn’t know but were afraid to ask, “Who’s Thoreau?” As it turned out, existing knowledge gaps gave us more historical landscape to explore and metaphorically settle without the necessity of clearing lots of mythic underbrush. The educational ground was mostly fertile, not barren.

We enrolled nineteen undergraduates in this interdisciplinary, cross-disciplinary, immersive experiment. Each student took all four upper-division courses (there were no prerequisites), and no non-Oregon Abroad students were permitted to take any individual course, so the nineteen formed a discrete, cohesive group of learners. And that community of learners included us, the instructors, who sat in and participated in each other’s classes, co-taught an Environmental Studies seminar to fully integrate our disciplinary offerings, and together with our students spent one full day a week outside, in the field—in wetlands and upland prairies, dense forests and sagebrush steppe, desert playas and urban ecologies, coastal dunes and mountain ridges. For a week in May we decamped to the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in eastern Oregon for more intensive field study. Of the nineteen students, the majority were majoring in biology, two in geological sciences, a few in environmental studies and sciences, but only two in history, though some of our students had minors that pulled them into other academic worlds—philosophy, studio arts, education. In past iterations of the course, there has been a more diverse range of majors, which allows us to draw on more varied academic experiences and perspectives, aiding in our mutual education. The underrepresentation of history majors this past spring was not so much a problem as a challenge and opportunity in my teaching—to engage non-historians and fill in some gaps in their knowledge, to prod their curiosity and demonstrate to them that history was more interesting and important than they might have realized.

In the academy we celebrate interdisciplinary work and collaboration in research and teaching. And some of the great questions—and problems—of our world demand such approaches. Global climate change and inequality, for example, come quickly to mind. But historians’ record in rising to this challenge has been mixed—history is the most internally interdisciplinary of the major disciplines, and we’ve seen in history the creative and transformative incorporation of the concepts, tools, and approaches of other disciplines, particularly in the study of early America. But usually, in their scholarship and teaching, historians have worked in a certain solitary confinement.

History is a bookish discipline. Academic historians write books and articles, and to do so we conventionally read other books and articles, and other sorts of writing preserved in documents, the fragile materials best preserved in climate-controlled libraries and archives.  In isolated places, historians usually toil alone, building on each other’s work but doing so mostly in solitary ways. We might, generously, call this approach independent. But we live in an increasingly complicated, inter-dependent world—one that we can better address as historians if we get outside occasionally, both literally and figuratively.

In Oregon Abroad, we emphasized new forms of research and writing that challenged the cloistered approach to history—ones that pull historians into the field to examine other kinds of sources, like the varied landscapes that have been shaped by human ideas and action as well as nonhuman forces. And ones that demand specialized knowledge that historians don’t necessarily have, and that require collaboration with others who do. This sort of historical work, drawing on models more common in the sciences, enriches our own ability to understand and interpret the past and infuses other scholarly and applied work with historical analysis that might otherwise be lacking.

It was energizing—fun and rewarding—to get outdoors and to work with others to answer some pressing historical questions—in environmental history especially but not exclusively. And it was also exciting to find some new questions out there, which we could then take back indoors to address with the help of the archives.

Lately I’ve been thinking about the early modern phenomenon of natural history, and I’ve become a bit envious of its integration, what we might now call its “interdisciplinarity.” Natural historians in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries studied the natural and human world more comprehensively, in less specialized fashion. The early modern natural historian—including not merely the learned but the curious—scrutinized the world broadly. In a sense these laypeople and scholars were “undisciplined,” but in a good way—one that made them at once botanists, ornithologists, zoologists, geologists, paleontologists, archaeologists, even historians. Actually, our students, who take an array of courses in various fields, and who must cultivate breadth even when committed to particular majors, can offer models for how we might approach our complex, hyper-specialized world. If natural history in the early American republic was a widely shared “tool to investigate, to catalog, to explore, and, ultimately to know the new nation,” as the historian Andrew Lewis has argued in A Democracy of Facts: Natural History in the Early Republic (2011), then we might also use it as (to paraphrase Lewis) “a method and means for a new citizenry to take ownership” of our contemporary communities, broadly construed, natural and cultural, global as well as local.

How did we do this in Oregon Abroad?

It took considerable discussion and planning, but we three instructors synchronized our syllabi, blending chronology, themes, and topics to explore the natural and cultural history of Oregon and the Pacific Northwest. The three disciplinary classes were in some ways conventional—with appropriate readings, lectures, labs, papers, presentations—but we bent the courses toward each other to provoke cross-disciplinary questions and intensify learning. And we required students to keep a journal that combined their learning, reflections, and insights from all the courses in one considered place, again drawing on Thoreau as our model. Our approach was cumulative, loosely chronological, reiterative, with frequent variations on the same themes—and far from a linear, one-damn-thing-after-another style of describing and interpreting the past.

We began our teaching with concepts and big questions that have concerned us broadly, whether as humanists, social scientists, scientists, or simply denizens and citizens of the world. Such queries were persistently social and philosophical, scientific and historical. What is “nature,” and how is it related to “culture”? How are both related to the physical world? Does nature have a history? Is history fundamentally humanistic, or can the non-human world—or even the nonorganic world—have “history”? These matters are not easily settled, but laying them out early allowed us to revisit them constantly, and to consider them in various scholastic and material contexts, indoors and out. In the first week students read excerpts from Thoreau; from the Scottish naturalist David Douglas, who travelled in Oregon in the 1820s and for whom the Douglas fir is named; and from Paul Crutzen, the contemporary Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist known for introducing the term anthropocene to highlight our pivot into a new geological epoch corresponding to the unprecedented human impacts on the earth and its climate.

That first week we also spent a day walking the millrace adjacent to the University of Oregon, and exploring its connections to the Willamette River, which runs through campus and the city of Eugene. The city itself dates to the mid-nineteenth century, formally incorporated in 1862, but first emerging in the late 1840s when Eugene Skinner set up a trading post there, along the Willamette River about ninety miles south of Oregon City (the site of Willamette Falls) and Portland (at the river’s junction with the Columbia River).

Eugene occupies the southern edge of the Willamette Valley, where the Willamette River forms and heads north toward the Columbia. The valley was the magical destination of wagon trains on the Oregon Trail. But of course, those pioneers did not settle a people-less place. It was the home of Native Kalapuyans who had lived a rich life there for generations and shaped the landscape in ways that made it seem, ironically, Edenic to early nineteenth-century colonists. They thought it was wild, untransformed nature. It wasn’t—it was someone else’s homeland. We were mindful of this reality throughout Oregon Abroad, and in fact we studied not merely what was there in Oregon, but what was gone, or was missing—the result of willful exclusions in the natural and social ecology that continue to bedevil this relatively un-diverse state.

The millrace we walked in week one had been built in the 1850s, connecting two old sloughs or abandoned riverbeds with each other and the Willamette on each end. The canal became Eugene’s first industrial power source, enabling milling of grain and lumber, other processing of agricultural products, and some manufacturing. Over time, its economic success and purpose changed, as did the course of the river, and the millrace morphed over time as a place of commerce, recreation, aesthetic pleasure, and at times neglect and environmental degradation. For many now the millrace is invisible—a place not noticed or considered, like freeway medians or neglected roadside patches. Walking it gave us plenty to see anew and contemplate, considering the millrace as a historic relic and a riparian space that’s both artificial and natural, teaming with aquatic life, lined with plants, filled with a changing cast of avian visitors, and sometimes burdened with trash and pollution.

Our survey on foot had a practical purpose. The university is expanding and building a new campus in these environs, and the university currently manages the upper millrace. Planners needed to know more about it in order to determine how to incorporate it into the new campus. And its preservation was not a certainty. As part of the class, we required that students develop individual research projects related to the millrace that would inform this information-gathering and planning process. Their project could be historical, biological, geological, or even artistic, or multidisciplinary. Collectively and with some collaboration with each other and the instructors, their research could (and did) make an actual contribution, helping to preserve and guide renovation of a distinctive natural, utilitarian, historical, and potentially aesthetic feature of the campus and the city of Eugene.

In subsequent weeks, as students shaped their millrace projects, we assayed our natural, cultural, and historical landscape more expansively, breaking our study into weekly topics. We devoted a week to water—especially rivers and wetlands—asking some broad questions that we approached from diverse disciplinary perspectives: What is a river? Is it a physical, a natural, a human space? Is it a process, a machine, an organic being? What are the economics, politics, laws and ethics of its manipulation? How do we conserve, preserve, or restore it, and what are the practical implications of each?

Our inquiry was less abstract that it might seem. We grounded our study locally, exploring how Natives and newcomers to Oregon conceived of the region’s rivers differently and used them in contrasting ways. On a vaster historical scale, we learned about their geological creation and the repeated transformation of watersheds via the mechanisms of plate tectonics, volcanism, ice, and shifting climate. A field trip took us to Oregon City, the site of Willamette Falls (the largest waterfall by volume west of Niagara) where geology, biology, and human history converged. The falls have a long and complicated geological history, which is imbricated with a biological history (we focused on migrating salmon and eels and also spied a sea lion at the falls’ base), which is connected to a human history of Native people who gathered there to fish and to trade, and who encountered intrusive colonists, who then found it a congenial spot to raise the first major white settlement in the territory. In turn, these colonists used the power of the water there for manufacturing, transforming the falls into an organic machine, producing energy, including electricity, delivered in revolutionary fashion over wires to Portland, fourteen miles away, in 1889.  Now the rusting infrastructure of that process sits largely idle, sublimely postindustrial, defying conventional aesthetics but perhaps poised for renovation—which would entail, paradoxically, environmental restoration, innovation, and historical preservation.

Other weeks adopted the same approach—posing large questions, assessing them specifically, locally, physically, materially, in the realms of geology, biology, landscape studies, anthropology, literature, art, and history. The concept of landscape—as defined by scholars such as J.B. Jackson and John R. Stilgoe—proved particularly useful for blending our disciplinary inquiries into interdisciplinary knowledge. Landscape in this sense is not the physical land in some state unaltered by humans; it is land shaped by human and nonhuman forces into a hybrid space, both “natural” and cultural. The word landscape originated from the old Frisian word landschop—that is, shoveled land. In English by the sixteenth century, it had become landskep and eventually landscape, designating the surface of the earth shaped for human habitation.

Through landscape, we considered colonialism, not only linking settler-colonialism in Oregon to earlier practices in North America farther east, but also addressing environmental alteration, via the Columbian Exchange, the nature and impact of invasive species, and the fate of native plants and animals as well as people. We studied the impact of agriculture, including the introduction of new ways of owning, claiming, dispossessing, and “improving” land, and the impact of new plant regimes—that might feed more people and enhance human life but also have less benign effects, including the impoverishment of soils, waters, and people. We queried: What is a “natural resource”? (Are trees living organisms or proto-lumber?) What is a “forest”? (A surprisingly complex question, with technical answers in biology, history, and the law.) Why do we find the woods, alternatively, scary or picturesque, critical to clear (or to “harvest”) or important to conserve or preserve in reserves or parks? And how are such questions and answers culturally and historically specific? What happens—particularly on steep slopes—when we clear-cut them? (Tragically, in the Pacific Northwest, too often deadly landslides or debris flows.)

How and why are wetlands important—for all sorts of life, human and otherwise, and for their role in shaping the physical landscape itself, especially coastally? When did swamps become wetlands, why and to whom? Are mountains sublime or merely dreadful, and how are they formed, eroded, and rebuilt geologically? What is the role of ice in these places, and does ice have a history, or is it, in the form of glaciers, “history”? Are beaches wastelands, vital ecotones, or recreational spaces; are they beautiful or treacherous? When and how did a day at the beach become “a day at the beach”? What is a desert, and how odd is it that so much of Oregon constitutes desert, or that a good portion of the state resides, not on the Pacific Slope, but in the Great Basin? And how did the recent land rights controversy that erupted in Burns, Oregon, and the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in January 2016 stem from legal, constitutional, and political arrangements that date to the Constitution and to the Northwest land ordinances of the 1780s, when the Northwest meant Ohio?

Malheur, in addition to its deep and fascinating geological history and its biological wonders—including its place on a trans-American flyway accommodating birds travelling thousands of miles between the arctic and South America—served us as a microcosm of American history. It all lay before us, in texts, in local museum displays, and in a landscape of sage brush plains, ponds, rivers, and lakes, glaciated cliffs, volcanic cones and maars, and layers of human inscriptions, some obvious (roads, fences, grading, dikes, and canals), some faint (obsidian tool making sites, ancient petroglyphs). A long, complex Native history featuring environmental adaptation and alteration was disrupted by colonial incursions, beginning in the late eighteenth century, first through the fur trade, then through ranching, homesteading, warfare, and Native dispossession in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, the region saw the impact of Progressive Conservationism, Reclamation, New Deal reform, a new environmentalism, and the Sage Brush Rebellion.  

In short, our explorations in Oregon Abroad were wide-ranging but deeply grounded in the landscape, the history, and the natural history of, to use Thoreau’s language, our own “higher latitudes.” As it turns out, there’s lots of history in the Pacific Northwest that might be considered part of the early American past.  But more importantly, Thoreau’s latitudes exist in lots of other places. And it would be possible to do something similar to Oregon Abroad elsewhere—what locales do not possess interesting and significant geological, biological, and historical pasts (and presents and futures), if we’re willing to look for them? Places and stories vary, but wherever they occur they are no less amenable to integrated, immersive study—even the most urbanized landscapes—and the interdisciplinary mix of courses and instructors at other non-Zanzibar institutions might also vary to include other sciences, social sciences, or humanistic disciplines and the arts.

In my nearly thirty years of teaching, I’ve never had a better teaching experience than Oregon Abroad—professionally, intellectually, or personally. As the term ended, one student bemoaned that soon she’d have to return to “regular college.” Oregon Abroad taught us all to look and see differently, and to ask new questions. What actually lay before us, how did it get this way, and how might it have looked a hundred or a thousand or even a million years ago? We connected texts with contexts in fresh ways, making those contexts more material, topographical, and ecological. We reconsidered chronology and the temporal dimensions of our trade as historians, challenging ourselves to assess geological and evolutionary time scales beyond our normal modes of historical inquiry, and imagining the consequences of future historical, biological, and geological time scales interacting as climate changes. And we considered diversifying our historical sources and ways of knowing—in one case discovering, for example, that before written records in the Pacific Northwest we could nonetheless determine with precision the exact moment of a devastating Cascadia earthquake (with a magnitude of between 8.7 and 9.2), using geological and biological records, as well as distant historical sources. We know it occurred at 9 p.m., January 26, 1700, as exactly as if it had been reported in the New York Times, evidenced generally by the scientific study of the inundation and death of western red cedars near Copalis Beach, Washington, and more precisely by Japanese prefecture records recording the resulting tsunami that travelled thousands of miles across the Pacific and later crashed on Japan’s shores.

As a historian, I was gratified to attune the group to the importance of stories—our stock-in-trade. History is the art and craft of telling stories accountable to the facts as we can know them, and Oregon Abroad students who came without much experience in the discipline found it revelatory to distinguish between the past itself and history. What sort of stories do we tell about ourselves and our place, how true are they to the historical evidence, and how do they matter? In turn, we were able to compare history’s stories (and popular ones that historians critique) with those scientists tell—with science’s empirical and speculative explanations, often historical, that must be consistent with the facts. Our historiographical queries pushed our scientists to think through the meaning and implications, not merely of current scientific consensuses, but also of past ones. Ideally, such attention to stories and the past might not only prove historically illuminating but enhance our contemporary production of scientific knowledge and communication. Oregon Abroad helped make the case that stories matter.

Further Reading

Henry David Thoreau’s classic work is Walden or, Life in the Woods (1854); his writings can be found online. See especially the Walden Woods Project. For the botanist David Douglas’s natural historical chronicle of the early nineteenth-century Oregon Country, see Journal Kept by David Douglas During His Travels in North America 1823-1827 (London, 1914).

On landscape, see John R. Stilgoe, What is Landscape? (Cambridge, Mass., 2015); John R. Stilgoe, Common Landscape of America, 1580-1845 (New Haven, 1982). For a very short introduction to the concept of the anthropocene, see Paul Crutzen, “Geology of Mankind,” Nature 415: 23 (January 3, 2002). And see Richard Monastersky, “The Human Age,” Nature 519 (2015) 144-147, both online at nature.com. For an illuminating and challenging assessment of “wilderness” and the relationship between culture and nature in American culture, see William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature (New York, 1995) 69-90. On the beach as a place and concept see Daniela Blei, “Inventing the Beach: The Unnatural History of a Natural Place,” Smithsonian.com (June 23, 2016).

A brief, thought-provoking, and informative history of the Pacific Northwest’s great river is Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York, 1995). Joseph E. Taylor III, Making Salmon: An Environmental History of the Northwest Fisheries Crisis (Seattle, 1999) is the best book on this fraught subject. Peter G. Boag, Environment and Experience: Settlement Culture in 19th-Century Oregon (Berkeley, 1992) is an exemplary environmental history of the southern Willamette Valley and its Native and “pioneer” past. William G. Robbins, Landscapes of Promise: The Oregon Story, 1800-1940 (Seattle, 1997) is a comprehensive environmental history of Oregon; its sequel, Landscapes of Conflict: The Oregon Story, 1940-2000 (Seattle, 2004) takes the story through the twentieth century.

Jarold Ramsey, ed., Coyote Was Going There: Indian Literature Of The Oregon Country (Seattle, 1977) is a wonderful collection of narratives, which helps give voice to the resilient Native people of the region. Charles Wilkerson, The People Are Dancing Again: The History of the Siletz Tribe of Western Oregon (Seattle, 2010) is a recent exemplary historical and contemporary study of a Native people and their place. Useful general resources are Jeff Zicker, Kay Hummel & Bob Høgfoss, eds., Oregon Indians: Culture, History & Current Affairs, an Atlas & Introduction (Portland, 1983) and the Oregon Historical Society’s Oregon History Project.

Nancy Langston, Where Land & Water Meet: A Western Landscape Transformed (Seattle, 2003) is the definitive environmental history of the Malheur basin. Larry Pynn, “Written in Wood: The Western Red Cedars of Cascadia,” in Last Stand: A Journey through North America’s Vanishing Rainforests (Corvallis, Ore., 2000): 29-42, tells the story of the 1700 Cascadia earthquake as written on the landscape. William Cronon, “A Place of Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative,” Journal of American History 78 (March 1992): 1347-76, helps us understand the nature of story-telling about the past.

This article originally appeared in issue 18.2 (Spring, 2018).

Matthew Dennis is professor emeritus of history and environmental studies at the University of Oregon and the author of Cultivating a Landscape of Peace: Iroquois-European Encounters in 17th-Century America (1993); Red, White, and Blue Letter Days: An American Calendar (2002); Riot and Revelry in Early America (co-editor, 2002); Encyclopedia of Holidays and Celebrations, 3 vols. (editor, 2006); and Seneca Possessed: Indians, Witchcraft, and Power in the Early American Republic (2010); his current book project is American Relics and the Politics of Public Memory.