Introduction The Environment, the People, and the State: The Connecticut River Valley, 1790-7930

Early twentieth-century conservation in the United States has been identified in the public mind with the West and the protection of wilderness, parks, and national forests. Some scholars have explored conservation through the writings of naturalists and antimodernists like Henry David Thoreau. What we have only recently come to appreciate is that there was a whole generation of reformers very much concerned about the environment who were neither antimodernists nor wilderness protectors. They were modernists who rejected not the modern world, but the way the modern world was being fashioned. They did not retreat or long to retreat into the wilderness but lived in cities and towns. And they struggled to make the environment of the most settled parts of the nation more amenable to human habitation. It was in New England where these reformers first began to make their claims for the rights of citizens to clean air, clean water, and clean soil. The Massachusetts board of health argued, less than five years after the Civil War, for aggressive state action on the claim that “all citizens have an inherent right to the enjoyment of pure and uncontaminated air, and water, and soil, that this right should be regarded as belonging to the whole community, and that no one should be allowed to trespass upon it by his carelessness or his avarice.” And the New Hampshire board, in its first report, stated that “every person has a legitimate right to nature’s gifts—pure water, air, and soil—a right belonging to every individual, and every community upon which no one should be allowed to trespass through carelessness, ignorance, or other cause.” New England’s first environmental crisis was brought on by its people’s fecundity and by their material practices in the late eighteenth century. Out of that crisis emerged a changed New England with concentrated manufacturing centers and increasingly market-oriented agriculture. Although not all New Englanders enthusiastically supported this change all were affected by it. Within three generations, New Englanders saw their region transformed. That transformation created a new set of troubles. The emergence of those new problems, and the solutions nineteenthcentury Yankees offered, is the story of this book.

“Most Beautiful Sewer”

The reforms of the late nineteenth century did help protect New England’s drinking water. The plague of water-borne diseases that made the region’s cities so infamously dangerous to live in seemed to be in retreat. For a moment, it looked as if the new century would bring a world in which there did not have to be trade-offs between economic development and environmental quality. The ideal articulated by Lyman and Mills—that professional expertise would transcend conflicts of interests between manufacturers and reformers—seemed at hand. Yet there were still problems that these optimists overlooked. And these problems broke into view again in the new century. Despite the health gains, New England’s rivers and streams continued to receive massive influxes of pollution of both industrial wastes and human sewage. The larger cities along the major river systems continued their practice of dumping raw sewage downstream, while manufacturers still saw running water as a natural disposal system for their wastes. Industrial wastes, although less central in the conversation around public health and the environment, were clearly polluting water systems, and reformers never completely gave up the struggle to clean water of industrial pollutants. In its 1896 report, the Massachusetts State Board of Health discussed possible solutions to the problems of “waste liquors or sewage from those manufacturing industries in the State which pollute or threaten to pollute our rivers and ponds.” The Lawrence station experimented with different methods of removing industrial wastes. Yet the “problem of successful and economical disposal of this sewage [remained].” As people began to look at clean water as an aesthetic as well as a health issue, the ability of water to sustain live fish, which had been dismissed twenty years earlier, now became a concern. Commissions on fisheries that had focused attention on fishways and fish cultivation in the nineteenth century began to revisit the issue of water pollution as they noticed their hatchery fish dying in polluted waters; oyster growers complained to the commissions that their oyster beds were being polluted.

Cooperation, Conflict, and Reaction

When James Olcott spoke before Connecticut farmers for “anti-stream pollution,” he urged the public to mobilize to stop water pollution by “ignorant or reckless capitalists.” In identifying the “ignorant and reckless capitalists,” Olcott focused the attention of the farmers on industrial waste and the role of manufacturers in their search for profits in causing pollution. Although manufacturers and the courts argued that industrialization brought wealth and prosperity to New England and hence was a general good, Olcott challenged this idea. He saw the issue as a conflict between industrialization and its costs on the one hand and the public good on the other. Concern over industrial pollution and the potential conflict between it and public health had already arisen in Massachusetts. Although the Massachusetts State Board of Health realized that the interests of the “capitalists” and those of the public health officials might be in conflict, in 1872 it hoped that with improved knowledge, “a way will be eventually found to joining them into harmonious relations,” much as Lyman believed science and technology would resolve the conflict between fishers and mill owners. The board's interest in “harmonious relations” also reflected a realization that at least for the last several years, the courts had seen pollution as an inevitable consequence of civilization and had been favorable toward industrialists, especially if no obvious alternative to dumping pollution existed. In 1866, William Merrifield sued Nathan Lombard because Lombard had dumped “Vitriol and other noxious substances” into the stream above Merrifield's factory, “corrupting” the water so badly that it destroyed his boiler. Chief Justice Bigelow ruled that Lombard had invaded Merrifield's rights. “Each riparian owner,” the judge wrote, “has the right to use the water for any reasonable and proper purpose. . . . An injury to the purity or quality of the water to the detriment of the other riparian owners, constitutes in legal effect, a wrong.” In 1872, Merrifield again went to court, claiming the City of Worcester regularly dumped sewage into Mill Brook, by which the waters became greatly corrupted and unfit to use.”

Health, State Medicine, and Henry Ingersoll Bowditch The Radical Approach

On September 15, 1869, Massachusetts governor Andrew appointed seven members to the state board of health. The men appointed to that board had a new vision of medicine and the roles of science and the state in protecting health. For these men, medicine should do more than just cure; it must also prevent illness. Their understanding of illness was expansive, and it led them to a concern about filth and pollution. They also came to believe that for science and medicine to perform their new role in society, they needed the backing and power of the state. On September 22, the board met for the first time, electing George Derby as secretary and Henry Ingersoll Bowditch as chair. Bowditch was a logical choice for chair. In addition to being one of the region’s leading doctors, he came from a respected Boston family, and he held the professorship of clinical medicine at Harvard School of Medicine. He was vice president of the American Medical Association (later he would be president) and the author of several scientificjournal articles. Bowditch served as a medical volunteer to the Union army and lost a son in battle. Moreover, it had been his idea to form a state board of health. In a speech before the Massachusetts Medical Society in 1862, Bowditch argued that medicine should serve the people. To do so required the creation of a state board of health, “one that eventually will be of more service . . . to the inhabitants of this state . . . by [its] united and persistent efforts to increase the state authority.” Bowditch was not the only one to advocate for a state board. Dr. Edward Jarvis, a well known sanitary reformer, had as well, and along with Bowditch, he pushed the idea, only to have it fail in the legislative house in April of 1866 as “inexpedient,” despite Governor Andrew’s endorsement. Three years later, a typhoid epidemic in western Massachusetts encouraged state representatives from the Connecticut River Valley and farther west to back a bill for a state board.

Fish, the People, and Theodore Lyman The Moderate Approach

On November 3, 1865, Theodore Lyman III handed his report for the River Fishery Commission to Massachusetts governor John Andrew. Then he headed north from Boston to Lawrence, where he met with newly elected New Hampshire governor Frederick Smyth and the fishery commissioners from other New England states. At that meeting, Governor Smyth, in Lyman’s words, “undertook the high horse and said they would shut down the water from Lake Winnepiseogee [the nineteenth century name for Lake Winnipesaukee] if we did not give the fishways.” Smyth was no one to take lightly. As the son of a New Hampshire farmer, he knew the importance offish to the rural diet, and as a founding member of the Republican Party, he was a politician of some significance. Smyth was also under pressure from rural farmers in the Connecticut and Merrimack River Valleys who had depended upon spring fish runs and now faced depleted rivers. Regarding the New Hampshire governor, Lyman wrote in his diary: “The threats of New Hampshire were some of my business as commissioner.” These threats were Lyman’s business in more than just his role as fish commissioner. The waters of Lake Winnipesaukee fed into the Winnipesaukee River, one of the main sources of the Merrimack River, which provided the power for the mills at Lowell and Lawrence. Without that water, those mills could not function. Lyman enjoyed healthy returns on his holdings in those mills. He not only held stock in these companies and in mills in Holyoke, he was also on several of their boards of directors. As he stated when he later ran for Congress, “I have been connected, and my father before me with the manufacturing interest.” As a major stockholder, Lyman had reason to be concerned about the waterpower of the mills along the Merrimack. Yet when he met with the governor and fish commissioners, he thought of himself not as the representative of the manufacturing interests but as a scientist and public servant. It was a role for which he had been preparing for a long time.

Farmers, Fishers, and Sportsmen

At the end of the nineteenth century, Edward Bellamy, one of the Connecticut River Valley’s most famous literary residents, created a fictional character who wanted to avoid “industrial existence” and instead “all day to climb these mighty hills, feeling their strength” and to “happen upon little brooks in hidden valleys.” Bellamy planned for his protagonist “to breathe all day long the forest air loaded with the perfume of the forest trees.” The wanderings of this turn-of-the-century fictitious character through thick forests and deserted hills reflects the changes engendered in the valley with the coming of industrial cities and the abandonment of hillside farms. When Bellamy was born in 1850 at Chicopee Falls in western Massachusetts, the region was in the process of deforestation and had few areas that were not intensely farmed. Yet as Bellamy himself noted in an 1890 letter to the North American Review, “the abandonment of the farm for the town” had become all too common. Deserted farms became one of the themes Bellamy sketched out in his notes for the novel. Bellamy had his character live in an “abandoned farmhouse. . . . The farmhouse was one of the thousands of deserted farms that haunted the roadsides of the sterile back districts of New England.” In viewing the depopulated countryside as a retreat from industrial existence, Bellamy’s character represented the fate of late-nineteenthand early-twentieth-century New Englanders. Increasingly, urbanized New Englanders began to look to rural areas not as sources of food or resources of necessity but as places to contemplate nature and practice fishing and hunting as sport. As rural areas, particularly on the hills and up the valleys, became less populated, farmers there lost much of their political voice. New city voices now became more important in the conversation about resource conservation. What farmers saw as abandoned and ruined farms, urban and suburban naturalists saw as rural retreats from the tensions and pollution of the cities. For these interlopers, rural New England represented a romantic ideal of a past they or their ances tors put behind them when they moved to the city.

Pre-1860 Responses to Change Views of the Public Good

Timothy and Theodore Dwight saw the coming of the mills and manufacturing as an example of industry and energy among the people of New England. The Dwights looked at the development of industrialization in New England at its early stages. For them, mills and manufacturing signified increased wealth and employment, a belief shared by many New Englanders. Theodore Lyman III believed that without manufacturing, New England would be poor, miserly, and ignorant. Not all New Englanders were as optimistic about manufacturing, but those who were had the support of the courts, and significant influence in the highest offices of the region. Nineteenth-century New Englanders of all stripes realized that a rural agrarian society was giving way to an urban industrial society. They understood that this transformation not only affected the immediate environment of cities and towns but also reached into the surrounding countryside, to the farms along the river valley, up to the forests of the hills and mountains, and into the waters of the rivers, brooks, and streams that flowed awav from the factories, towns, and cities. Dams dotted the late eighteenth-century countryside. But the dams, even the small eighteenth-century ones, also flooded fields and blocked the migrating fish. In the eighteenth century, farmers and fishers whose fields were flooded by the mill dams or whose fishnets were empty because of a dam blocking the migration of anadromous fish often took direct action against the dams. The judges of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court noted that if a dam was seen as a common nuisance, “any individual of their private authority might tear it down at any season.” In 1799, Elijah Boardman and several of his Connecticut River Valley friends climbed onto Joseph Ruggles’s mill dam and ripped out the upper portion, which had raised the dam an additional ten inches and flooded fifty acres of land. Boardman admitted to destroying Ruggles’s dam but claimed the right to do so on the grounds that the dam was a public nuisance. In 1827, Oliver Moseley and twelve of his friends entered Horace White’s mill dam site and tore down the dam across the Agawam River, claiming that the dam was a nuisance.

From Milling to Manufacturing From Villages to Mill Towns

The new world of New England was one of factories and factory towns, as well as farms and forests. It was a world where farmers, looking to those factory towns for markets, plowed their fields deep and intensively managed their land. It was a world where lumbermen stripped mountainsides of their forest cover to meet the cities’ growing appetite for lumber. It was a world of managed and controlled nature. It was also a world of rapid change, and increasingly after 1800, the force behind that change was the coming of the manufacturing mills. Levi Shepard’s 1788 duck-cloth factory was of a different type than the traditional mills of New England. Although mills that spun or fulled cloth had long been part of rural New England, Levi Shepard had a different market in mind when he encouraged local farmers to bring him their flax. Shepard wanted to take material from the countryside and, with the help of “workers employed,” “manufacture” it into a commodity for sale. Shepard’s decision to focus on manufacturing for distant markets represented a new world. Manufacturing in rural New England began small. And although it made a huge impact on travelers such as Timothy Dwight, it grew out of, while at the same time it transformed, traditional rural society. The processing of goods of the countryside was an integral part of traditional New England life, whether in 1650 or 1800. In 1790, the Hampshire Gazette commented that although “a large quantity of woollen cloth are made in private families and brought to market in our trading towns, a great part of [the woollen cloth] is not calculated for market.” The shift from milling produce for local use to manufacturing occurred initially for most of rural New England with the shift of small traders, merchants, and millers from processing for local farmers to processing for external markets. Edmund Taylor of Williamsburg on the Mill River, for example, at the turn of the century added carding and picking machines to his gristmill. As he did for grain, Taylor processed the material from the countryside, keeping a portion of it as his pay.

The Land, the River, and the People : The Connecticut Valley, 1790-1830

On Wednesday morning September 21, 1795, only a year after he was appointed president of Yale College, forty-four-year-old Timothy Dwight began the first of his thirteen excursions through New England and upstate New York. On six of his thirteen trips, he traveled through the Connecticut Valley, a valley he was familiar with since childhood and was linked to by both family and sentiment. The Connecticut River Valley was changing, as Dwight made his several trips through it. It was transformed under the impact of human activity. Increasingly, mill dams and factory villages were being built along the river and its tributaries. Technology, science, and the market were restructuring the way people were interacting with their environment. The land became less wild. That “civilizing” of nature, as Dwight called it, began first on the alluvial soils of the lower and central valley in the eighteenth century and then spread north and up into the hill country in the early years of the nineteenth century. By the end of the fifth decade of the nineteenth century, this new world had pretty much taken shape, and valley residents began to take stock of the changes that had occurred. Dwight began this process of accounting at the beginning stages of that transformation. And it was in the Connecticut River Valley that the changes made the biggest impact on him. At the center of the Connecticut Valley runs New England’s largest waterway. The Connecticut River flows south some four hundred miles from a series of small lakes in the swampy district of northern New Hampshire on the Canadian border. It eventually spills into Long Island Sound at Saybrook, Connecticut. To the west and east of the river are mountain ranges, the Housatonic and Green Mountains to the west and the White Mountains to the east. In northern New Hampshire and Vermont, the river travels through a narrow and rough mountain valley. As the river moves south into central Vermont and New Hampshire, the valley widens, particularly on the river’s western shore, and is intersected with tributary rivers and valleys.

Industrial Waste, Germs, and Pollution The Battle over Pollution

In 1905, the state board of health for Connecticut looked back over the last half century and noted the tremendous change that had occurred. In the first half of the nineteenth century, “all the towns and cities in Connecticut were very rural in character, and nowhere were populations so dense from overcrowding as to affect the public health. Hence there was no conspicuous disparity in the salubrity of different towns.” As Connecticut industrialized and urbanized, disparity in the salubrity of different parts of the state increased. It became “an accepted fact, sustained by careful observation, that the death-rate was always higher in cities than in the country.” Although the pure past to which the Connecticut State Board of Health alluded may not have been as pure and healthful as it assumed, nonetheless, the board was correct in noting the increase in mortality in the industrial towns and cities that grew up over the century. Growing awareness of the “effect of environment and employment upon the prevalence o f . . . disease” created momentum for public action. The vision of an activist state promoting public health and protecting the citizens, particularly the “weak” and “poor,” from the vagaries of the market—whether those were represented by “foul” water or depleted resources—increasingly found support among other reformers. The urban industrial setting that made Connecticut’s cities so unhealthy also generated concerns overworking children, long working hours for women in the paid labor force, industrial diseases, and overcrowded tenements. Like the antipollution reformers, those who were concerned over these conditions increasingly looked to the state to legislate remedies. Laws that limited women’s working hours and child labor and that controlled the conditions of tenements found favorable hearings among legislatures attuned to an electorate demanding reform of the conditions they found in their daily lives. Environmental reformers—both public health activists and supporters of protection for fish—were important voices in this rising chorus that favored a more active state. The momentum for public action began in Massachusetts, the most industrialized and urbanized New England state, and spread to the other states of the region and ultimately to the entire nation.