Horizon

The NPS has a good profile on the last homesteader, a Vietnam Vet who settled in Alaska in the seventies.

The thing that surprises me about the southern part of the Virginia Piedmont my family is from is how palpable the frontier seems in local history. The rare eighteenth-century buildings rumored to have murder holes for shooting at Indians mix in the common memory with tales about the owners of huge, empty plantations who'd "ride the line" once a year on a great white horse. Mix in stories from our grandparents' time of clearing fields to plow and much older family histories of moving west and you've got a surprising sense of wildness for an area first settled before the Revolution.

This wildness may simply be a function of the North American landscape. John Keegan writes in Fields of Battle: It is impossible to recreate in the imagination what England must have looked like before the forest went four thousand years ago; it is impossible in America not to feel the power of the forest or the desert or the rivers lurking at the edge of what man has wrought in two hundred years, watching for a moment of inattention or a relaxation of effort, waiting to return.

Regarding the Civil War, I do wonder about areas that did experience total war. None of that came to Pittsylvania County, though cannonfire was heard from the northern border. The only purely oral stories I inherited were about cavalry raids across the Potomac, which isn't exactly Miss Scarlett and the siege of Atlanta. Perhaps that experience (and its powerful myth) overshadowed the feeling of frontier in the Old Southwest. W. J. Cash echoes de Toqueville in The Mind of the South: the lord of the plantation on the eve of the war likely had a father who'd cleared the virgin forest himself, and who'd seen civilization grow around him. I'm not sure how accurate that is as biography, but the chronology is dead on.

If you're ever in the mood for excellent prose and a good mix of nature writing, history, and folklore, try John Graves's Goodbye to a River. It paints a picture of the scrubby parts of northwest Texas that's worth remembering.

Thx for that, especially re: Alaska, which I'd forgotten about although J. notes that homesteaders are mentioned in *Coming Into the Country*. Actually I went to law school with a member of the Boone family of Eagle, Alaska. He was an interesting dude. His whole early education was oral, not written, so he never felt a need to take notes in class. He knew about gold panning and salmon drying and stuff. He could also recite creaky comic poems like "The Cremation of Sam McGee."

P.S. I think you're a generation closer to the frontier than New England. There was a Victorian romanticization of old New England frontier tales -- *A Boy Captive in Old Deerfield* seems to have been first published in 1905 -- but the book itself is set in 1704.

Was your part of Virginia affected by the 1830 removal of the Cherokee and if so is that a big part of the folklore?

Nope -- the Cherokee were further south and west. B 1830 the region was beginning a demographic and economic decline that would continue until the discovery of bright tobacco in the 1850s.

The thing I found strangest about your post was the (to me false) dichotomy between "parceled out to private owners" and "freshly breaking fertile ground." Was your part of New England a solid patchwork of fields, or were they few in number and separated by vast woods (sometimes called "pasture" by way of euphemism)?

I don't know how intensively Massachusetts was farmed at whatever the peak moment would have been, but I believe that moment is well in the past. I think there is very little virgin forest left in the state, and I know for certain, having been made to color in maps for a school project, that Amherst, Massachusetts had been very nearly denuded of woods by the 19th century, becoming partly wooded again only in recent generations.

Here we go: more than twice as much forest now compared with the turn of the last century. There are some big old trees but not many. There are two-foot-wide planks in the floor of the church where I grew up but not many like that are cut any more.

Good links — I'd always heard that the low point for the American forest was our great-grandparents' day. Any idea what "many other stands were regenerated by the Hurricane of 1938" means?

Thirty-percent forestation sounds heavily-utilized to me. I suppose that because tobacco is such a labor-intensive crop, you only plant a few acres on your best land, and leave the rest in forest in a sort of long-fallow cycle. Only about a third of ours is cleared, and the crop rotates between those fields. It's a far cry from Kansas or Kent.

Sorry, no clue about the hurricane.

Massachusetts has been tobacco-growing country for a long time, probably in fact longer than the local history has been preserved, and I think I remember hearing that Massachusetts leaves are prized as outer cigar wrappers because there are fewer leaf-perforating bugs in such a northern location. But in the old days there would have been other crops and also cattle pasture. For one thing the Pioneer Valley of the Connecticut River grew a lot of asparagus in my childhood & was even alternatively known as the Asparagus Valley. (Hence Penn & Teller's Asparagus Valley Cultural Society, once IIRC known as the Asparagus Valley Marching and Chowder Society though that could possibly be wrong as I can't find it on Google.) The asparagus has been largely dropped now, I think because of a ban on field-burning that made it difficult to kill off pests after the harvest.

Again I don't know the big picture, but the Amherst, MA town common once ran for miles southward from the current town center, and somewhere in the late 1800s the town reported $6 income from sale of the common's crop of hay and thistles.

Sorry, you're getting stuff out of dusty childhood memory banks here so some of it may be wrong or misunderstood.

So enjoyed this comment dialogue! In the early 1940's, my father and grandfather homesteaded a piece of sagebrush land near the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming. They raised alfalfa hay as the cash crop, made possible via the area's irrigation project. Last year, at the age of 67, I and some of my family visited "the old Pilot Butte place." I turned small again, remembering when I was age six there in 1943, preparing for my first day at school. There I learned penmanship using a "Big Chief" red tablet and a fat pencil. I now write in my Dell Inspiron 9100 notebook. But a commitment to writing can begin anywhere, can't it? Even out in the hayfield.

Thanks much for that.

This may seem like an odd question, but was there any sense, even in the form of joking, that your family were a continuing part of the covered-wagon emigrations? Although I'm sure the day-to-day conditions on such a farm were not dreamy in the least, was there any romantic feeling about following in the pioneers' footsteps etc.?

I found out about Connecticut shade tobacco about ten years ago. That was during the cigar fad, and prices had risen above twenty dollars a pound — ten times the price of flue-cured! I gather there's been a great deal of consolidation among farmers there, with older ones cashing out while prices were high. Probably been some more consolidation on the downswing as well, of a less happy sort.

On land clearing: My mother remembers fresh land being cleared for tobacco through the fifties and sixties. In a lot of cases, farmers would literally taste the soil, looking for "sweetness." I guess that they were looking for a high pH, which might actually correspond to flavor.