Old-Fashioned Words

Tags

etymology, history, Jane Hamilton, language, Lera Boroditsky, linguistics, Thad Snow, words

[A longer version of these thoughts was presented September 15 at the Quincy, Ill., Unitarian Church.]

People who hang around me long enough soon discover that I have a mad fondness for obscure, old-fashioned, and out-of-the way words. This is true for many people who love to write, but also true for others as well. There’s a special pleasure in finding a word that’s been lying around for hundreds of years, perhaps, just waiting for you to pick it up and put it in your pocket, like a coin on the sidewalk. A few years ago I picked up “petrichor,” which is the smell of earth after a rain, and ever since then I’ve been hollering out “petrichor” at every opportunity. A new old word is like a gift from the linguistic universe, a way of expressing something that previously seemed inexpressible. It’s a feeling similar to the experience I have whenever I get a new eyeglass prescription. Something that was blurry and indistinct, or perhaps even outside of my awareness, suddenly comes into sharp, precise existence. That’s what happens when you find a good, old, right word. The little dimple between your nose and your upper lip becomes a philtrum. And you’ve got a name for something previously unnamed. And what’s better is when you look up the origin of the word “philtrum,” and learn that it comes from a Greek word that means “love charm,” and now you’ll never look at a philtrum the same way again.

Other old-fashioned words are ones that you know quite well, but just never get the chance to use. Like steed, for example. Who wouldn’t love to be able to use steed now and then? But unless you’re willing to sound a little ridiculous,  the opportunity doesn’t arise, even if you do ride horses. But it’s a good word to have around. Still others are words that we might want to possess just because they’re so aesthetically pleasing. When you’re driving past a cornfield at sunset and see a flock of blackbirds or starlings all moving in unison, as if the entire flock is a single organism controlled by one brain, the word for that phenomenon is murmuration. I’ll probably never get to use murmuration in the wild, but I’m glad to know it’s there. Likewise with sillion, which is the name for the little furrow you make with a plow in preparation for planting seeds.

Old words reflect older ways of thinking, and thus they are a glimpse into history. I am struck by how many of our commonplace expressions and idioms have their origin from either agriculture or seafaring, two occupations that the great majority of Americans today have little or no knowledge of. When we talk about feeling in the doldrums, for example, we’re likely to forget that the Doldrums is an old word for an actual geographical location notorious for its lack of wind, known technically as the intertropical covergence zone. In the age of sail, getting caught in the Doldrums meant an extended period of forced idleness, debilitation, and inactivity that was not only tedious, but could even be fatal if your ship’s food stocks ran out. And who but the most dedicated farmers among us will recall that if you sow your wild oats, you’re likely to get a poor harvest, or none at all, and that you’re better off sowing those boring old tame, domesticated, tried-and-true oats. And what’s so bad about it when your chickens come home to roost? Nothing, it might seem, until you think about it in the original context of the metaphor. The original meaning of the phrase was that whatever you send out into the world will always come back to haunt you. In fact, the original expression was that curses are like chickens, in that they always come home to roost. As we might say today, karma’s gonna get you. So when I see an old-fashioned word, and understand where it came from, I am in a real sense looking back in time.

The other side of this observation is that some old-fashioned words deserve the obscurity they’ve been cast into, for they represent a way of thinking that we have thankfully outgrown. I’ve been reading a book lately called “From Missouri: An American Farmer Looks Back,” by a man named Thad Snow. Thad Snow was a farmer in the Bootheel during the first half of the twentieth century; he bought land near Charleston in 1910 and farmed it for more than forty years. Now Thad Snow was a true radical, one of those classic curmudgeonly Midwestern freethinkers who popped up from time to time during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His most famous moment occurred in January 1939, when he partnered with a sharecroppers’ activist named Owen Whitfield to support a widespread sharecroppers’ sit-in across southeast Missouri after many of them had been evicted by their landowners. He was the only major landowner to support the sit-in, and he was branded a traitor to his class by the other large farmers, who fancied themselves to be a plantation aristocracy of sorts. But in his memoir, written in 1954, he repeatedly refers to Owen Whitfield, his colleague in the sit-in, as a “darky.” Even given Snow’s penchant for making provocative remarks, which seems irrestible to him, this use of language that was out of date and offensive – even back then – makes me think less of him, and to reconsider his stance on behalf of the sharecroppers. Maybe he wasn’t acting out of principle, but just out of foolish contrariness. His language reveals more about his thinking than perhaps he had intended.

And that’s where I am headed with my thoughts on old-fashioned words. In linguistics, there’s a famous and rather controversial concept called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and it boils down to this: Our language shapes our thinking. In greater detail, the hypothesis makes the case that all languages focus on certain aspects of life, and the difference in those focuses leads to differences in our thinking. It’s a more scientific version of the old “Eskimos have forty words for snow” idea. If we have the words to express an idea, it will get expressed; if we do not have the words, it likely will not. Linguists have studied the many variations in languages around the world, such as languages that do not have “count nouns” (such as one, two, three, and so forth) and languages that use cardinal directions instead of concepts such as left and right. As you might imagine, the speakers of these languages possess some interesting capabilities that English speakers lack, and lack some capabilities that English speakers own without even being aware that they do. To illustrate that point, linguist Lera Boroditsky points out that although speakers of Kuuk Thaayorre, an aboriginal language from Western Australia, do not have what we think of as the basic concept of left and right, they do have a remarkably precise sense of orientation to their landscape. Even a small Kuuk Thaayorre child is able to point north-northwest at any moment, while we advanced Americans would need to get out our phones and hope for the best. The inherent limitations and biases of language are the subject of Suzette Haden Elgin’s science fiction novel series Native Tongue. In this dystopian series, set in the 22nd century, women have been stripped of their civil rights, and a group of female linguists create a language for women as an act of resistance. In this language, called Laadan, there are distinctively separate words for a range of female experiences. For example, there’s a word for being pregnant, a separate word for being pregnant for the first time, and another for being pregnant joyfully.

The words we possess shape the thoughts we can express. If we acquire, and habitually use, the language of violence and exclusion, we enable violent and exclusionary thinking. And the opposite is also true: acquiring and using language of appreciation and beauty bends our minds in those directions. Ruth Dahl, the narrator and central character of Jane Hamilton’s wonderful novel The Book of Ruth, tells us how the verbal poverty of her upbringing has affected her:

We were the products of our limited vocabulary: we had no words for savory odors or the colors of the winter sky or the unexpected compulsion to sing. The language I had to speak to be understood is not the language of poetry or clear thinking.

One of the most repeatedly humbling experiences of my life is teaching literature to young people, because a lot of young people are not instinctively inclined toward literature in the way that earlier generations were. They’ve grown up accustomed to other modes of expression, and a lot of school work involves reading for main ideas and essential elements, not the kind of slow, savoring reading that literary study asks. So you have to re-teach them into different reading habits: don’t count the number of pages till the end, but stop and reflect every so often. Instead of reading for the general sense of a passage, read for every last bit of significance. And when you encounter an unfamiliar word, celebrate! It’s a gift. Needless to say, that approach doesn’t always go over in class. But once in a while, a student will pick up the spirit and discover the hidden revelations of old-fashioned words, the ferocious rigor of keelhaul or the sweet promise of bower.

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Chain Migration

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chain migration, cultural geography, German, history, immigration, Missouri, Russel Gerlach

I’ve been re-reading Russel Gerlach’s classic study Immigrants in the Ozarks, originally published in 1976 and now out of print. As you might imagine with any 43-year-old work of scholarship, it has some things I would quibble with, but by and large it’s a fine study and the source of some excellent basic information. I was taken aback, though, at his casual use of a phrase that has taken on harsh political connotations in recent years.

He quotes an earlier work, Wilbur Zelinsky’s The Cultural Geography of the United States, published in 1974:

Once a viable ethnic nucleus takes hold in a given location, chain migration may be triggered. If communication lines are kept open between the new settlements and relatives and neighbors back home, positive information may induce the latter to pack up and follow. In this way, a great many . . . rural ethnic neighborhoods have been expanded.

Nowadays, of course, “chain migration” is used almost as a dirty word in the debate over immigration. I didn’t realize that the phrase had such a long history or neutral use. But a moment’s reflection made me realize that I should not have been so surprised. Chain migration, the phenomenon if not the term, has been the American norm. My own family story is one of chain migration. One adventurous son makes the journey; writes back that there’s opportunity to be had; his brother (my great-grandfather) follows; makes a start; writes home; more family members follow. Most of us, if we look back far enough, are chain migrants.

Sometimes even entire communities were the product of chain migration. As you drive the back roads, you’ll see the evidence of this phenomenon in the names of towns and settlements, some now gone, some still flourishing:

Altenburg

Bavaria

Belgique

Dresden

German

Kiel

Krakow

Rhineland

Swiss

Westphalia

Wittenburg

And the list could go on and on (and no, Japan was not named by a group of homesick Japanese settlers!) Everywhere I turn, I see evidence of chain migration’s effects.

 

Streetcar City

Tags

Hers and His STL, history, Kansas City, St. Louis, streetcars, World's Fair

During my research into turn-of-the-century St. Louis, I came across this marvelous blog post about the history of streetcars in the city. Ryan Albritton does a detailed analysis of two maps, one from 1903 and the other from 1940, showing the development (and decline) of St. Louis’ streetcar lines and the impact of those lines on the city’s population. It’s a fascinating account, and I recommend reading it. Here’s the 1903 map:

Albritton observes how the map resembles an anatomy drawing of the circulatory system, with a the heart (downtown) containing a dense network of lines on nearly every block, and an expanding fan of circulation outward into the residential areas. Lines also facilitated travel to cemeteries, parks, and the soon-to-open World’s Fair grounds. Interestingly enough, there were plenty of north-south lines, too; anybody who’s ever tried to go north-to-south in today’s St. Louis knows how difficult that is. Today’s ease of east-to-west and difficulty of north-to-south only exacerbates the city’s racial divide.

The sad history of the demise of America’s city streetcar lines, helped along by General Motors, Firestone, and Standard Oil as a way of replacing streetcars with buses and thus boosting their profits, is one of the tragedies of the 20th Century. Albritton cites statistics that between 1917 and 1928, streetcars in America carried 12 to 13 billion passengers annually. That’s an amazing number; think of the congestion that would be removed from our cities if such a system were in place today.

And yet this morning, I read an opinion piece in my local paper from a writer out of one of the usual sources (Heritage Foundation), complaining about the inclusion of “wasteful” mass transit funding in the federal highway bill. It’s only wasteful if you think strictly of governmental dollars and cents, not including the private expenditures on cars, gasoline, and related expenses, the growing gridlock and declining livability of our city centers, and the associated social and environmental costs of being locked into a transportation system tilted toward one person in a car, commuting from a distant suburb.

Serendipitously, I also read a fascinating piece in Politico yesterday about the growing success of Seattle’s mass transit system. Let’s hope that Seattle’s experience sparks other cities to re-examine their approaches to mass transit; nobody expects a return to the grid of electric streetcars that dominated transportation in the early 20th Century, of course, but certainly we should be imaginative enough to consider alternatives to the fossil-fuel powered systems that now rule us, and that relegate streetcars to the role of tourist novelties like the Loop Trolley and the KC Streetcar.

Hail the Local Historian

Tags

history, Lesterville, local history, memory

I just finished reading Lesterville Community: The Early Years, an oversized, 413-page book that I can guarantee will never be a best-seller. And that’s fine! Because what’s important about this book, and the many books like it, is that it exists in the first place.

The authors, John Jamison (now deceased), Paul Adams, and Wade Hill, all longtime Lesterville residents and graduates of Lesterville High School in the 1950s, have collected documents, stories, photographs, and memories of all things Lesterville-related up to the mid-20th Century, producing a comprehensive portrait of the community’s early settlers, schools, businesses, churches, and pretty much everything else. If you want to know when the first public school was established in Lesterville or who built the garage on Old Highway 21, this book will tell you.

Local historians – and every community, every county, has them, the stalwarts of the local historical society and the keepers of the obscure artifacts – don’t always get much respect from their professional counterparts, who see them as dabblers or region-specific obsessives, who fail to see bigger trends in their determination to record every name on every plat map and census record. But those local historians serve a valuable purpose. They excel at giving a deep feeling for a place, its essential characteristics and its essential people, and the good ones know how to tell a compelling story.

Local historians preserve the collective memory of a place, in an era when memory seems to be in dangerously short supply. And sometimes they discover important but overlooked stories that escaped mainstream attention for some reason. So celebrate your local historian, and contribute to your local historical society! (And if you’d like to buy a copy of Lesterville Community, contact me and I’ll hook you up.)

Taum Sauk reservoir north of Lesterville, under reconstruction in 2009 after its disastrous breach. Photo by KTrimble at English Wikipedia and used under Creative Commons license.

Map Time!

Tags

Current River, economics, history, Jefferson City, lumber, maps, Ozarks, Poplar Bluff, railroads, Van Buren

My affection for old maps goes back a long way, as any of my longtime friends and family can testify. Maps are fuel for the imagination, and I still use historic maps a lot.

I’ve developed a new talk that I’m ready to start giving to libraries and civic groups – it’s about the timber boom in Missouri that began in the late 1880s and continued into the teens, and the cultural and environmental repercussions of that boom. Needless to say, historic maps play a part. The one shown here is an 1877 railroad map of Missouri.

The solid line is the Iron Mountain Railroad, which had only reached as far as Pilot Knob before the war, but had by 1877 been extended all the way into Arkansas. The dotted lines are “projected” railroads; and by “projected” we can go all the way from “overtly planned” to “wishfully imagined.” I re-read Dee Brown’s classic Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow recently, and it was striking in his research how haphazard the railroad expansion was; if a speculator could get enough backers, then a railroad in that area would be built, regardless of need or connection to existing lines. Railroad mania extended to the local level in the form of county governments that would grant all kinds of incentives to railroad companies, including bonds that would burden the counties for decades afterward when the company went bust. David Thelen’s Paths of Resistance describes many instances of counties across the state that gave tremendous financial assistance to sketchy railroad companies, often assisted by liberal amounts of graft, followed by taxpayer revolts in later years as the bond payments came due. Indeed, some of the incidents of courthouse-burning that occurred in the state during the latter part of the 19th century can be attributed to taxpayers trying to wipe out the county’s tax records in a spasm of felonious retribution. (Other instances occurred because of another type of crime-covering, which I will devote a later post to.)

For the purposes of my talk, though, the item of interest on that map is the projected railroad between Van Buren and Poplar Bluff. In 1877, it was an item of fancy, although lines would eventually be built from Williamsville to Van Buren and from Neelyville (not shown on the map) to Doniphan. But the central development in the timber boom was what became known as the Current River Line, which came in from the west, snaking in from Willow Springs to Mountain View to Birch Tree to Van Buren and eventually to a town that didn’t even exist yet, the timber-milling hub of Grandin. That was the line that opened up the southern Ozarks to the timber boom.

I gave this talk at the Missouri River Regional Library in Jefferson City last weekend and was fortunate that Gene Brunk, a longtime forester in Missouri, was in the audience. Gene’s grandfather was a fireman (a boiler-stoker, that is, not a firefighter) at the smaller of the two Grandin mills, and Gene had some wonderful photos and stories to tell.

 

A Good Year in Ozarks Writing – Already

Tags

books, Brooks Blevins, history, literature, Ozarks, Phil Howerton, University of Arkansas Press, University of Illinois Press

2019 has barely begun, and I can already tell that it’s going to be a banner year for writing about the Ozarks.

I’ve been working my way through the first volume of Brooks Blevins’ A History of the Ozarks, entitled The Old Ozarks, and it’s a grand piece of work. Richly sourced, comprehensive, and adroitly written, it is the history we’ve all been waiting for. I’m eagerly waiting for the second and third volumes to appear so I can snatch them up, too. If you are interested in the Ozarks, or interested in history, you must get this book – or at least make sure your library has a copy.

And then next month, another landmark book will hit the shelves: The Literature of the Ozarks, a comprehensive anthology edited by Phil Howerton of Missouri State – West Plains. It’s been a long time since anyone attempted an Ozarks literary anthology, and I can’t remember if anyone has ever put together one of this magnitude, stretching from the early 19th century to the present day. It’s being published by the University of Arkansas Press, and although I haven’t seen a physical copy yet, I’ve seen the table of contents, and it’s magnificent. I say this with a blush, since a selection from one of my books is included. I’m thrilled to be among the company.

Two days into the new year, and already a memorable one. I’m eager to see what other reading treats await.

A Fascinating Resource

Tags

archaeology, Curtis Copeland, history, maps, Milton Rafferty, Ozarks, Ozarks Symposium, Schoolcraft

This year marks the 200th anniversary of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s trip through the Missouri and Arkansas Ozarks, which resulted in the earliest systematic recorded documentation of the people and places of the region. Schoolcraft’s journal has been used by historians and scholars to understand the early landscape and culture of the Ozarks, although his attitude toward the inhabitants was condescending and his understanding of nature was limited.

The exact route of Schoolcraft’s travels has also been a subject of interest. Milton Rafferty, the dean of Ozarks geographers, devoted years to the subject, and his efforts culminated in a map published in Rude Pursuits and Rugged Peaks, the reprint of Schoolcraft’s journal he annotated and edited.

Now, thanks to the amazing work of Curtis Copeland, the GIS/Mapping Coordinator for the city of Branson, Rafferty’s map has been refined and improved. Using a complicated layering of digital information, Copeland has produced a scalable, multiple-level interactive map of Schoolcraft’s route. He previewed this map at the recent meeting of the Missouri Archaeological Society that occurred this weekend, and as an attendee of the concurrent Ozarks Studies Conference I got to see it in action. It’s a wonderful piece of work!

The map is free and available to the public at this site. If you’re anything like me, you’ll find it endlessly fascinating. With the enthusiastic reception his presentation received at the conference, I have no doubt that this resource will continue to be refined and added to as the years go by. Take a look . . . but be prepared to lose a few hours.

Our Original Sin

Tags

Henry Caldwell, history, Iron County, Ironton, J. W. Emerson, John Abney, Larry Wood, lynching, Missouri, Ozarks, slavery, William Hinchey

The circumstances of the original incident between Henry Caldwell and a Mrs. Peck on July 27, 1882, are unclear. An account of the incident can be found on Larry Wood’s admirable Ozarks history blog. Mrs. Peck, according to the original newspaper report, was more than sixty years old and Caldwell was thirty-seven; but we’re left to guess who Mrs. Peck might be, since her first name is not given in the Iron County Register story. But since the incident took place in Ironton, my guess would be Adaline Peck, who would have been 64 that year according to census records.

In any event, according to the Register story, on that Thursday morning cries for help were heard. Neighbors rushed to the scene and found Mrs. Peck and Henry Caldwell in the front yard of her home, struggling. Henry was subdued, taken to the jail, and charged with assault and attempted rape.

The next chapter in this grim story is dispiritingly familiar. Thursday night passed, Friday night passed, with Caldwell still in jail. Then late Saturday night, a mob of thirty to forty men assembled, broke into the jail, and dragged Caldwell to the railroad bridge over Stouts Creek a few blocks away, a noose around his neck. The other end of the rope was tied to a bridge beam and Caldwell was thrown off, but desperate to live, he clung to the bridge timbers until someone took a knife to his arm. When he fell, another gruesome miscalculation; his feet touched the ground. The mob ended his life with a fusillade of bullets.

In his book Witnesses to History: Stories from Park View Cemetery, which is available from the Iron County Historical Society, John M. Abney quotes a different version. The letter from which this quotation is taken is in the possession of the Historical Society.

Henry did something that frightened old lady Peck and it was construed by some as an intended attack on his part.  I [the letter writer, Cora Chase Charlton, daughter of the prosecuting attorney at the time] – who have heard her minute account of what really happened more than once, did not think so.  But a bunch of men who spent their time in the Schultz saloon inflamed themselves with liquor to the point of taking poor Henry out, hanging him on the railroad bridge, and riddling his body with bullits.

Thus occurred the only documented lynching in Iron County, Missouri.

I first became aware of this event many years ago, when I read the diary of a little boy growing up in Arcadia during that time. The boy’s name was Stephen Hinchey, and the diary entry (which I carefully copied down and filed away – this was in the days before computers) read as follows:

Sat July 29

I studied most of the day.

In evening father heard, while in Ironton, that a negro was to be hung by a mob when night came. Father and I went to home of Judge Emerson to warn him of the mob’s plan.

Sunday 30th of July

This morning we heard that the mob hanged the negro on the Ironton railroad bridge. About 60 shots were fired into his body.

A later entry reads:

Sat. August 12th 1882

Today is my 9th birthday.

A few thoughts:

Stephen Hinchey’s father was William Hinchey, an artist and teacher at Arcadia College, and a prodigious diarist himself. William Hinchey’s diaries, written in shorthand and transcribed by Stephen years later, described his travels to the West, his observations during the Civil War, and his life in Arcadia and elsewhere. The Arcadia Valley has drawn many fine artists over the years, and Hinchey was but the first.

William Hinchey

Henry Caldwell, thirty-seven at the time of his death, was identified in the Register article as married with four children. Census records from 1880 confirm that his wife was Millie, and their children Stella, Peter, Edia, and Nettie. A man who was that age in 1882 would most likely have been born into slavery and lived in that condition until his late teens, nearly twenty. The Register describes him as a bit daft “and at times out-and-out crazy.” Whether there was truth to this description, or a connection to having lived half his life as a slave, cannot be determined, as news accounts of lynchings are notorious for their retrospective portrayals of victims as dangerous and mobs as honor-bound. But Cora Chase Carlton also believed something to be aberrant about Caldwell. The editor of the Register, Eli Ake, went so far to say in his article, “We are not an advocate of lynch-law, but if there ever can be a case calling justly for its intervention, this was one.” The entire account can be found in the Library of Congress’ records. I have been unable to learn what became of Mrs. Caldwell and the children.

The “Judge Emerson” to whom Stephen refers was another significant character in the history of that era: J. W. Emerson, Civil War colonel, war hero, circuit judge, and founding investor in the Emerson Electric Company, a name we still see on consumer products although the ownership of the company has long since passed into the stock exchange.

J. W. Emerson

This lynching predates the horrific spate of lynchings across the Ozarks chronicled in Kimberly Harper’s book White Man’s Heaven by about twenty years. But the pattern is certainly familiar. I am left with a few unanswered questions. The newspaper account depicts the county sheriff, William Fletcher, as surprised and overwhelmed by the mob; but was he? According to the article he had made preparations for mob law the two previous nights, but was caught unprepared on the fatal night. How likely is that? The “colored servant” who usually slept in the jail overnight was conveniently absent. If he sensed something amiss, how did the sheriff not? As Harper’s book observes, a common tactic for law enforcement officials seeking to prevent a lynching was to move the prisoner to the next town or county, making it more difficult for a mob to form and disperse inconspicuously. Why that didn’t happen in this case is impossible to know at this late date.

It’s worth remembering, moreover, that Iron County was firmly Democratic by then, and as Aaron Astor points out in Rebels on the Border, one of the tenets of border-state Democrats of that era was the restoration of the prewar social order, which would include the firm subjugation of African-Americans. The racist language of the Register article and the perception of Caldwell as “dangerous” and “a brute” fit into this mindset. (It’s also worth remembering that Eli Ake, the editor, was a complicated figure who doesn’t pigeonhole easily; John Abney reminded me in correspondence that Ake opened the pages of the Register to African-American correspondents for many years and repeatedly took some risky stands against the Ku Klux Klan in the ’20s and ’30s.)

On a TV show the other night, I heard a historian refer to slavery as “our original sin,” with our meaning “white Americans,” of course. Americans tend not to believe in original sin, a stark doctrine that robs us of individual agency and casts us as largely helpless in deciding our own fate. I’m not a believer in it either, at least not in the religious sense, but it’s surely a powerful metaphor for the unseen forces that shape our lives and our thoughts. To avoid the theological implications, I think of it as “stain” more than “sin.” Some stains simply don’t wash out, no matter how much we scrub.

Caldwell was buried in Park View Cemetery in Ironton, a cemetery also known variously as “potters’ field,” “City Cemetery,” or “the colored cemetery.” It is obscure enough today that it doesn’t even appear on Google Maps. Of the estimated 300 graves in that cemetery, only about thirty have markers. Stephen Hinchey, William Fletcher, J. W. Emerson, and Eli Ake are all buried in Ironton’s Masonic Cemetery. May they all rest in peace, and may we all eventually find some way to fully include that stain in our understanding of the social fabric of our lives. Because more than 130 years have passed and it still hasn’t washed out.

Park View Cemetery

Images of the Past

Tags

detail, history, interpretation, photography, St. Louis

Researching my next book, I came across this trove of photographs in the online magazine Monovisions. 

There’s something about the visual image that arrests in a way that verbal descriptions never do. I lose myself in a narrative or descriptive account, letting my imagination recreate the scene; but with a photograph or map I find myself studying ever more closely, seeking out meaning in the slightest detail.

This photograph was identified as “ca. 1900” and located on Market Street. Let’s assume that the street address on the photo – 1310 – follows the same numbering system in use today. Here’s what’s there now:

A pocket park next to City Hall.

I’m tempted by the story, how the city went from Image A to Image B, but I’m also irresistibly drawn to the image itself. The life in that photograph! The man peering out from the dark interior on the left – is he the proprietor? And what draws his attention? The blurred passerby near him, or the two loafers propped again the liquor window farther down? I can’t make out the posters in that window, but they appear to be promoting a circus that’s coming to town. Below that, California wines are advertised. California wine, in Missouri, at that time? I never imagined.

The enormous billboard on the roof is another infinite attraction. The Forest Park Highlands will be opening for the season soon! There’s a matinee at the Imperial! And who can resist Tomlinson’s Dead Shot and Quick Relief Oil? I’d buy a bottle just for the name.

And these pavers, identified as working on Compton Avenue north of Meramec in 1906, spiffy in their neckties. Why so many paving stones out? I’m guessing it had something to do with getting a good fit of the stones, with pride in one’s craft. Judging by the spires of St. Anthony of Padua in the background, this looks to be the block today:

Those stone paving blocks are still underneath the asphalt, I’ll bet. That would be Gasconade Street crossing, which puts the location way south in St. Louis, down in Dutchtown. A solid and respectable address even then, with gaslamps, limestone foundations, and a big brick neighborhood church. You can see in the background how the paved street will improve the place, as the rutted dirt track leads up the hill to St. Anthony’s.

Finally (for my purposes, anyway: there are more photos in the article), an unidentified street in the early twentieth century. It’s just the beginning of the motorized era; a sleuth more expert in early automobiles could probably identify the year by the look of the light cargo carrier in the right foreground. But carriages still dominate. Ahead of the man in the motorcar is another man in a one-horse gig, following a wagon that appears to be laden with sacks of grain as it labors up the muddy, tracked hill. But most fascinating of all is the heavy wagon coming in from a side street to the left, with an enormous wooden barrel. Delivering? Taking away? Whatever the task, I wouldn’t want to be that horse.

The marvel about old photographs is how the edges, the details, reveal as much or more than the putative subject. The cock of a hat, the item in a window, the passing glance, all speak to us.

The Stream of Time

Tags

Aging, Black River, Current River, historical fiction, history, Icarians, logging, Ozarks, St. Francis River, utopia

I grew up in the Missouri Ozarks, a forest-rich region containing nearly ten million acres of dense timberland, and spent much of my childhood exploring the steep hills and crystalline streams around my family’s farm. To my young mind, everything had always been as it was at the current time, so I never considered the history of the region, the environmental and cultural changes it had undergone, or the effects of those changes on the people who lived there. My grandfather, who lived with us during his final years, reminisced about having chopped out a farmstead along the St. Francis River. Our neighbor, a long-time resident, remembered helping his father float enormous rafts of railroad ties down the Current and Black rivers. These tales were just isolated curiosities to me; I never connected them to any larger narrative.

Not that history didn’t interest me. I was a good student, and history a favorite subject. But the missing part was the connection between history the subject, filled with names, locations, battles, and Important Doctrines, and history the lived experience.

When I began writing historical fiction, at the age of 52, I came to it as someone who had been writing fiction in a contemporary setting for decades. The year was 2007, the United States was at the peak of its embroilment in the Iraq war, and I had been engaged in the scholarly study of 19th-century utopian communities, more from personal curiosity than as part of any systematic agenda. I had developed an interest in utopian groups after reading a rather snide reference to the Icarians in The Communist Manifesto while I was teaching a Great Books class at Centenary College of Louisiana, wondering “Who the heck were the Icarians,” and then chasing the footnote across the country, as history fanatics often do. It turned out that the Icarians were a pre-Marxian communist group who emigrated from France to the United States in 1848 and had colonies in various parts of the country as late as the 1890s. Once bitten by the footnote bug, there is no stopping. That endeavor led me to a wider interest in utopianism, especially in Missouri in the years before the Civil War. In 2007, something in the news caught my attention, and I was struck by the parallels between the war in Iraq and Missouri’s experience in the Civil War: an occupying army, a restive civilian population whose loyalties were hard to determine, a landscape in which separating enemy from ally was a constant problem, bands of freelance fighters who used the larger war as an excuse to carry out their own vendettas, and a pervasive atmosphere of uncertainty and violence, in which battle lines were never clear, neighbor betrayed neighbor, and casual encounters escalated to deadly violence in an instant.

All at once the connection between my somewhat recreational study of history and my passion for creative writing became clear. The past could give insights into the present, not simply in the “Those who cannot remember history are doomed to repeat it” sense, but in a more visceral way, engaging with the hopes, jealousies, good intentions, and broken promises of ordinary people caught up in terrible times.

That realization marked the moment when I began to think about my own history, and my home’s history, in a different way. My grandfather’s stories about life on the St. Francis River at the turn of the 20th century; my neighbor’s reminiscences of work in the lead mines and the log woods, and his tales of the great tie drives, with miles and miles of green railroad ties, freshly hacked from the forest, bound together and floated down the rivers to the railhead; these stories from my childhood took on life again.

The Ozarks that I had known as a child had not, as I should have realized even then, always been that way. The thick woods, mostly oak and hickory trees a couple of feet in diameter or less, had once been largely pine, much taller and larger. The rivers, clear but relatively shallow, had indeed carried immense volumes of cut lumber. The mound of earth on the hillside above our pasture, oddly soft underfoot, was the long-ago sawdust heap from a mill that had disappeared, along with the village that had grown up around it, leaving only the stray evidence of an overgrown lane, pieces of equipment rusted to the point of unrecognizability, and a hoard of logging tools in the barn.

History, it seemed, was all around me. It had always been, but I had simply never noticed. And it wasn’t confined to monuments and battlefields, but woven into the scenery.

It’s hard to make the claim that one must reach a certain age to appreciate history this way, but my own experience tells me that perspective is what counts in this enterprise, and perspective is a gift of aging. One becomes aware of the passing of time, and of how familiar sights – a street, a building, a landscape – shift over time to reflect changing ways of life, attitudes, and circumstances. Evidence of life-and-death struggle is concealed in plain sight. A sunken roadbed marks where a forced Indian removal passed. The incongruous name of a boat landing reveals the drowned town that once flourished where waterskiers now skim. You don’t have to get old to notice these things, but age brings an understanding of the impermanence of objects and lives, even ones that we might have imagined as children to be imperishable.

In my case, the enriched understanding of my own heritage as a fifth-generation Ozarker led to an endless fascination with the stories and conflicts of my region. As a child, my parents repeated a family tale about a great-great uncle who had been killed by a bushwhacker—a guerrilla fighter—during the Civil War. My curiosity about this tale was rewarded when I found a copy of the bushwhacker’s reminiscences, dictated to postwar interviewers, for sale in an annotated edition from the University of Arkansas Press. Like other participants in the Missouri-Kansas-Arkansas theater of the war, which was dominated by savage guerrilla fighting with no fixed lines of battle, he had sought to retell his participation in the fight by casting it in the mythical light of honor and revenge, and an eager audience of fellow reinterpreters took down his musings and published them for posterity. I discovered that my family’s story was true, although the motives for the killing remain in dispute. I picked up books like David Benac’s excellent Conflict in the Ozarks and Kenneth L. Smith’s Sawmill: The Story of Cutting the Last Great Virgin Forest East of the Rockies and discovered that my neighbor’s memories of tie drives, two-man crosscutting, and forests so tall and shady, and thus free from undergrowth, that a man could navigate them at a gallop, were not his memories alone, but shared experiences across the Ozarks and into the Ouachita Mountains as far west as Oklahoma.

This renewed sense of history as lived experience has led me to focus, in my novels, on how people’s conflicting belief systems change the way they live. “Be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming,” Emerson famously said, and the utopian idealists, determined slaveholders, love-maddened romantics, and money-loving capitalists of my novels demonstrate that truism again and again. We are living through history, making history, and becoming history ourselves. So when I turn to history in my novels, I see this simultaneous process of being and becoming repeated at the individual scale, relationship by relationship, person by person.

My earlier novels explored the Ozarks during the Civil War and Reconstruction years. My most recent book looks ahead to the later part of the century, when the Industrial Age came to the region in the form of large lumber and mining companies based in the nation’s urban centers. These companies moved into the deep Ozarks, built railroad lines into areas previously considered impossibly remote, and enlisted the local population in the extraction of the region’s natural resources. From the early 1880s through 1910, Missouri forests produced about half a billion board feet of lumber each year, a number that is as mind-bogglingly large as it sounds. The impact of this era reverberates to this day in the Ozarks, in ways that even longtime residents don’t always notice. For example, the large national forests in Missouri and Arkansas, some of the most extensive national forestland east of the Rockies, largely derive from cutover land that the big timber companies were unable to sell and didn’t want to pay taxes on. The environmentally calamitous cut-and-get-out philosophy of one era resulted in a surprising, and unintended, scenic and environmental benefit in another era.

In The Language of Trees, the quiet utopian community established in the 1850s, having survived the ravages of the war and the agonies of its aftermath, confronts a new challenge: what to do when the Modern Age arrives? The agrarian ideals that dominated the founding of America were giving way to the industrial organization of society, with time clocks, factory whistles, and all the social upheaval that accompanies it. From the contemporary perspective, we might see this transformation as a loss of innocence, and indeed it was. But for the inhabitants of Daybreak, the arrival of the American Lumber and Mining Company is a more complicated encounter. The new people who come to the valley, offering more money than Daybreak has ever seen before for land and labor, are not all the wicked capitalists of communal nightmare; in fact, some are quite charming and conflicted in their own motives. And not all the Communists want to remain Communist. Ultimately the villagers have to find a path that threads between love and self-advancement, between cherished ideals and new opportunities, between a changing present and a fraught future.

And thus history makes its way, neither the steady march of progress our forbears liked to imagine nor the decline from innocence it sometimes seems now, but instead a swift and twisting river that loops back on itself, disappears and reappears, and carries us along with it as we try to steer a clear route while being borne by the current. Come to think of it, history is a lot like an Ozark float stream itself. We think we understand it, we even think we can control it, but in the end it surprises us with destruction, or beauty, or both.

This essay first appear in BLOOM.