8
Nature in the City
Cities were famously dirty. As city populations increased, so did the wastes generated within city limits. Human wastes were stored in cesspits and removed by horse-drawn wagons, but the volume of manure produced by horses drawing those wagons (and all the other city horses) dwarfed the volume of human wastes. Joel Tarr, an American expert on urban horses and their manure, figures that each working city horse produced about twenty-two pounds of manure a day and several gallons of urine. In 1880, New York City and Brooklyn were home to about 1.7 million people, with roughly one working horse for every ten people. That’s more than 3.4 million pounds of horse manure, every day, often deposited directly onto the street along with a flood of piss. With scant funding for street cleaning, the wastes that accumulated along the streets of rich neighborhoods were often dumped in the poorer sections of town.
In 1900, there were well over 3 million urban horses in the U.S., and those city horses deposited enough manure to breed billions of flies, each one a potential vector for disease.
In the United States, cities often made an effort to clean their streets during an epidemic, since it was believed that miasma caused disease and horse manure was miasmatic. But as a rule, people tolerated large piles of manure lining both sides of the street. Some cities allowed private contractors to collect the manure and sell it for fertilizer, but they typically neglected to collect other kinds of rubbish, leaving the streets less clogged but not clean.
Horse manure was reused on farm fields outside city limits, and other urban wastes were regularly recycled: ragmen collected and sold old clothing, while tinkers repaired and resold old pots and pans. But city folk did not generally compost their organic wastes. Instead, they dumped it into the street where it was eaten by feral pigs. Charles Dickens wrote of New York’s urban pigs in 1842: “Two portly sows are trotting up behind this carriage, and a select party of half-a-dozen gentlemen hogs have just now turned the corner.… They are the city scavengers, these pigs.” Pig feces smell remarkably like human feces. These were added to the horse manure, and streets turned into cesspools when it rained. Ladies trailed their skirts in fetid slop. Cities had no parks, there was nowhere to stroll, and nature was restricted to horses, scavenging pigs and goats, and their ordure.
Living amid all these wastes was deadly. Cesspit contents leached down into the groundwater and contaminated wells, increasing the likelihood that people would catch one another’s diseases. In addition, Judeo-Christians preferred to be buried in sanctified ground, so most churches and synagogues were flanked with small graveyards. Over time, these burial grounds were filled with layers of rotting caskets and putrefying bodies that slowly dripped down into the groundwater, a source of potent organic compounds that made water from some city wells taste ghastly. The overfilled city graveyards were unlovely, and thought to be pestilential.
Death was a familiar event in the 1800s. Incomes were rising, but child mortality rates remained stubbornly high. Most people were nursed at home, died in their own bed, and the wake and funeral were held at home as well. Elaborate rituals provided solace and guidelines for people to process their grief. Mourning protocols dictated how people dressed, behaved, and decorated their houses after a family member died.
A black wreath was hung on the front door, black bows were tied around doorknobs, and the doorbell was muffled. Curtains and shades were drawn, shutters closed, and the mirrors in the house were covered with black fabric. Black bunting could be used to decorate fireplace mantels, window frames, shelving, doors, and especially the bedroom of the deceased. The clock in the room where the death occurred was stopped, and restarted after the burial. White stationery with a black border was used for death announcements and funeral invitations as well as personal correspondence (the wider the border, the deeper the mourning). Death portraits and masks were popular. An 1848 advertisement in the Boston Directory reads, “Our arrangements are such that we take miniatures of children and adults instantly, and of DECEASED persons, either in our rooms or at private residences. We take great pains to have Miniatures of deceased persons agreeable and satisfactory, and they are often so natural as to seem, even to Artists, in a quiet sleep.” Hair from the dead (and the living) was artfully arranged into jewelry, corsages, or elaborately framed wreaths.
A widow’s ensemble was precisely defined. During the first year, a widow in deep mourning wore a Victorian version of a corseted burqa made of dull black cloth (ugly and uncomfortable). She did not leave home without full black attire (untrimmed but for the black ribbons on her underwear) and was shielded behind a weeping veil of impenetrable black crêpe; she was allowed to attend church services but little else. During the second mourning, as long as nine months, dresses were made of dull black cloth, but they could have trim. The black veil could be flipped back to expose the face and jet-black jewelry or hair brooches were permitted. Half mourning, the third stage of grief, lasted from three to six months, and widows could wear gray, lavender, mauve, or violet in addition to black, and all types of adornments.
In total, a widow would mourn for her spouse for as long as two and a half years, but could remarry after completing the first year of deep mourning. Widowers had simpler rules, with a man showing his grief in the width of his armband. Children dressed in white with white ribbons to mourn their siblings (by the rules, siblings wore mourning attire for six months). Men and women wore mourning cockades and badges both to the funeral and for months after. These dress codes allowed friends and strangers to identify the details of a bereavement without asking.
This was a society that dwelled on death, and when the cholera and yellow fever epidemics of the 1820s and ’30s arrived, cities needed thousands of new burial plots for the corpses. Urban churchyards were already packed. The solution was to dedicate garden cemeteries outside of city limits. No one wanted to linger in the moldering churchyards, but a country site where the wonders of nature were a backdrop to thoughts of the next world was a welcome innovation.
In Boston, the Massachusetts Horticultural Society bought 174 acres of land that they hoped would rival Père Lachaise Cemetery, the first garden cemetery of 110 acres in the heart of Paris, consecrated in 1804. Mount Auburn Cemetery, the first garden cemetery in the United States, was consecrated in 1831. It was designed to provide city dwellers access to pathways, ponds, and lavish landscaping.
Garden cemeteries had long, winding paths that looped around hills and ponds, creating serendipitous views and unexpected surprises. In contrast with traditional churchyards, these graveyards provided naturalistic landscapes, picturesque settings, and space for contemplation as well as interments. Historian David Charles Sloane wrote that rural cemeteries were seen as gardens of graves, or resting places where the public would visit to solemnly contemplate mortality. Carriages drove slowly on the winding roads, orienting passengers towards the cemetery’s internal ponds and hills. Visitors were embraced by nature. Tombstones became more elaborate, carved from granite, marble, and bronze, and deeply incised to last for generations.
The church burying ground gave way linguistically to the graveyard. One of the definitions of yard is a piece of land used for cultivation, a garden or field. A graveyard is a place where monuments grow. Cemetery is from the Greek koimētḗrion (κοιμητήριο), a sleeping place, and the garden cemetery movement encouraged the slumbering dead to enjoy a bit of nature.
Boston’s Mount Auburn Cemetery was popular among locals and visitors alike, and many garden cemeteries were built in the next decade. Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia, and dozens of others were used for strolling and picnicking, and visiting garden cemeteries became a major tourist activity.
These cemeteries were the first public landscapes, and they were used like public parks. The first big public park in the United States that wasn’t full of graves was New York’s Central Park, established in 1857 on what soon became 778 acres of land that was owned by the city (after using eminent domain to buy out about 1,600 African Americans and Irish immigrants).
Garden cemeteries had already established the public’s preferred picturesque, naturalistic landscape, and the chief innovation in the design for Central Park was to have separate pathways for pedestrians, riders, and carriages; the transverse traffic is concealed in sunken roadways that are screened from the park with shrubbery.
Landscape architecture, where traditional gardening is combined with city planning, was a phrase first used by Frederick Law Olmsted, who imposed nature’s curvilinear scenery on a rectangular urban grid to build Central Park. That was his first project, but he clearly had a knack for it and eventually built parks that paid attention to nature in cities across the country. From the US Capitol Building to Berkeley and Stanford with hundreds of projects in between, Olmsted followed the patterns of nature instead of planting straight rows of trees and blocks of plant material.
Olmsted was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1822 and stopped school at the age of fifteen. Instead of going to Yale, he learned surveying as an apprentice to a civil engineer; kept books for a dry-goods company in New York; and sailed to China on a merchant ship. At twenty-two, Olmsted managed a farm bought by his father in Staten Island, where he planted a pear orchard and changed the road from straight to meandering to improve the views. He took a six-month walking tour of Europe and the British Isles in 1850, where he visited orchards and private estates, parks, and scenic countryside. This trip was the inspiration for his first books, Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England volumes one and two, which sold well.
The success of his books on British farming led the editor of the New-York Daily Times to send Olmsted south to report on slavery. Olmsted traveled intermittently in slave states between 1852 and 1854, and produced many columns and three books. He was not a fan of the institution.
Olmsted’s first opportunity to create a space to foster social democracy came in 1858, when the design that he submitted with Calvert Vaux for New York’s Central Park won first prize. Olmsted had seen beautiful landscapes in England and had done some landscaping on his farm on Staten Island. But in reality, his first landscape project was Central Park. The curious part is that although he had no experience, his philosophical understanding of the role that a park could play in a city was profound. Olmsted’s intent was to create public spaces that were enjoyed by the poor as well as the rich, and his vistas were designed to create relaxation. His simplified landscapes remove distractions and demands on the conscious mind. He wanted to democratize nature and make its healing powers available to everyone.
“It is one great purpose of the Park,” he wrote, “to supply to the hundreds of thousands of tired workers, who have no opportunity to spend their summers in the country, a specimen of God’s handiwork that shall be to them, inexpensively, what a month or two in the White Mountains or the Adirondacks is, at great cost, to those in easier circumstances.”
The Civil War was launched before the park was finished, and Olmsted was appointed executive secretary of the US Sanitary Commission (later the American Red Cross). He had a hard war. Olmsted supplied the Union Army with medical supplies and supervised the care of the wounded, a gruesome job. He had a mental breakdown, resigned, and then moved to California to manage a mining estate where, Zelig-like, he helped draft legislation to reserve Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Sequoia Grove.
Olmsted believed that nature healed the individual and helped civilize society. In Yosemite, he saw the power of scenery. According to Olmsted, “The enjoyment of scenery employs the mind without fatigue and yet exercises it, tranquilizes it and yet enlivens it; and thus, through the influence of the mind over the body, gives the effect of refreshing rest and reinvigoration of the whole system.”
To Olmsted, landscape and social reform were inextricably combined. When his Central Park design partner, Vaux, asked him to return to New York City so they could work together as landscape architects, Olmsted bought a ticket east. Over the next thirty years, they designed more than 100 public parks, 200 private estates, 50 residential communities, and 40 college campuses. Olmsted believed that every site has unique ecological and spiritual qualities, and that people wanted “a simple, broad, open space of clean greensward, with sufficient play of surface and a sufficient number of trees about it to supply a variety of light and shade.… We want depth of wood enough about it not only in hot weather, but to completely shut out the city from our landscapes.”
For Olmsted, nature was not a substitute God, but a way to serve the public and private needs of people; nature was not a philosophical construct but a physiological requirement for a happy life. Since Olmsted believed that nature was necessary for happiness, he held that democracy could not succeed without public parks and access to nature.
I grew up near Shelburne Farms, a typical Olmsted project from the late 1880s. The owner, New York financier William Seward Webb, had bought all or part of twenty-nine farms to assemble a 2,800-acre parcel for an estate on the shores of Lake Champlain. The farms he bought were similar to those that once blanketed Vermont, built along straight roads with pastures outlined by stone walls, each property self-sufficient with its own woodlot, grazing, hayfields, orchard, barn, farmhouse, and outbuildings. Eventually he acquired almost 4,000 contiguous acres.
Olmsted had all of the barns and farmhouses torn down, the stone walls dismantled rock by rock, and the dirt roads and their ditches erased. Olmsted’s plantings and designs were site specific: “Plant materials should thrive, be non invasive, and require little maintenance. The design should conserve the natural features of the site to the greatest extent possible and provide for the continued ecological health of the area.” In many sites, that meant restricting his plant lists to native species. In Shelburne, he planted tens of thousands of trees, shrubs, and underbrush, using all native species (except for two non-native tree species: Douglas fir and Colorado spruce). His plant lists included most of the trees native to the Northeast: birches, basswoods, ashes, oaks, hickories, chestnuts, elms, and willows, along with thousands of native pines, hemlocks, and firs. His intent was to restore the land to what it might have been two hundred years ago, but better.
The main road curves through an expansive meadow, then rises up through a stretch of deep woods. The lake, great house, and barns are revealed and disappear as the road curves. The forests and meadows are placed to create views that beckon you to go farther. Olmsted’s design directs movement through the landscape, leading you along without you being aware that you’re being led.
The landscape looks natural, and today the clumps of 140-year-old trees seem as though they were always there. “Fine specimen trees of the old spontaneous growth are to be preserved,” wrote Olmsted, who saved every large tree he could. Trees and shrubs were planted back from the gracefully curving roads with species grouped in an apparently random way.
He planted shrubs by the thousands: alders, swamp azaleas, blueberries, black and red raspberries, thimble berries, elderberries, buttonbushes, pussy willows, wild roses, viburnums, witch hazels, and others that had been gathered from the wild by local nurseries. He also ordered native vines, including bittersweets, clematis, and wild grapes. Olmsted used common wildflowers, like goldenrods and asters, and fancy wildflowers like twinflowers and trailing arbutus.
At the time, landscape theory recognized three types of vistas: beautiful, picturesque, and sublime. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant defined sublime as the “infinite, dynamic, and fearsome qualities of nature.” The Hudson River School was all about the sublime. Beauty, found in boxwood hedges and formal gardens, was the result of proportion, utility, or perfection. Human mastery over nature was seen as beautiful. Picturesque—Mount Auburn’s style—is something in-between. A picturesque landscape is worthy of being included in a picture: “a picturesque view contains a variety of elements, curious details, and interesting textures, conveyed in a palette of dark to light that brings these details to life.”
Historian Charles Beveridge described Olmsted’s work as a balance between beauty and the picturesque. He always had a large open meadow in his parks, an element of grace that acted on you subconsciously as an antidote to the city. This was the smoothness and flow of the pastoral. This was beauty. The picturesque was the rough, shaggy ruggedness of the landscape planted with native species. The sublime—“the childish playfulness and profuse careless utterance of nature”—was something Olmsted believed was impossible for humans to create.
Olmsted designed city parks with a backbone of native plant species throughout the United States more than a century ago, when gardens everywhere were planted with rhododendrons and petunias. When you make a garden with native species or their cultivars, those fancified cousins with flashier colors or bigger flowers, then native birds and insects (including fabulous creatures like hummingbirds and bumblebees) will make a point of visiting your garden. Olmsted created habitat refuges in cities around the country.
When we built in the high desert, Bob decided that he was done with lawns, and sold his mower. The high desert is a tough landscape. If you don’t water it—if you leave the land to nature—you get a sagebrush–juniper complex in a hundred years, but in the first decade or so, it’s just bare ground with a few sprigs. Seeds are everywhere, though, and if you water this dry ground you get weeds and a broad variety of alien and native species that require more water than is naturally available. The only quick way to get native landscaping in the high desert is to grow the plants in pots, and then transplant, mulch, and water them for a year until they get established. When the new transplants’ roots are growing and the plants start to get bigger, you weed the entire area and reduce the amount you’re watering. It’s a nightmare.
Olmsted’s trick was to simplify the landscape, using larger numbers of fewer species to create sweeping pastoral views. I chose a short list of deep-rooted native grasses, from Indian grass, switchgrass, and big bluestem with roots that run eight to ten feet into the ground to little bluestem with five feet of roots (compared with a bare two to six inches of roots for Kentucky bluegrass). Unless a plant has an extensive root system to gather moisture from the soil, a few hours of a hot, dry wind can suck all the moisture out of a young transplant, and the wind can blow for days. To survive here, plants need to start with a substantial root ball. When a gallon-sized pot of grass is transplanted and mulched, the hot wind can blow and the plant will be able to gather enough moisture to keep itself alive.
Native grasses are finicky to grow from seed, but big plants are expensive. I went for the cheap third option and bought deep plugs for about a buck apiece. The plugs, at fifty plants per flat, have grooves down the side of each cell to encourage the roots to grow straight down. Each plug is a solid bunch of vertical roots about two inches long, and they are sent by mail just when the roots reach the bottom of their little cell, before they start looping around. If you transplant them into pots the day they arrive, they grow incredibly quickly.
It was a two-year project. I started with 200 plugs of grasses potted up into gallons, but most of them didn’t have enough root structure to be transplanted into the ground that fall. Potted plants freeze-dry in Colorado’s sunny winter days if they aren’t babied, so I overwintered the grasses with a truckload of mulch mounded around the pots, and watered the whole area once a month during the cold. The next spring, I lined up the big grasses and transplanted another 1,000 plugs of grasses and wildflowers into four-by-four pots for their first phase. I did all my transplanting at a friend’s greenhouse, and she kept my small pots inside and watered them daily until the cold weather had passed. I grew another thirty shrubs using naturally seeded sprigs from my next-door neighbor’s native shrubs. (I later added another 200 sweetgrass because the first twenty-five did so well, making a total of about 1,400 plants.)
A cold spring killed an easy 10 percent of the babies, and the plants took months to develop their roots. They were ready to go into the ground in waves, each with a handful of high phosphorus and potassium fertilizer to stimulate root growth. I had hoped they’d be able to live without mulch, but no such luck: the first week, they wilted and needed water three times a day. We put a mound of mulch around each plant, and they perked up five truckloads later. The game plan was to water the plants very deeply once a week, to drive their roots downwards. This meant that the weeds were going to grow like crazy, with plenty of water, plenty of sun, and fertilizer leaching from the transplants.
It was a terrible job. Each transplant has its own ring of mulch, and the weeds in-between had to be pulled before they flowered. The yellow clover was the worst. It’s a pretty non-native that grows on disturbed land, three feet tall with a root shaped like a little person with three or four long legs. If you do a bad job pulling out the root the first time, it grows into an octopus, each arm stronger than the next.
That summer, I spent one day a week weeding with a friend, a giant strong man whom I paid $20 an hour and an excellent lunch (around here, that’s good pay). When we were done for the year, he said that he would never, ever weed for me again. Ever.
It was done, though. The next year required nearly no watering, so the plants grew as they were intended to and the weeds were slow to develop, and manageable. The third year, some of the grasses and wildflowers I originally planted have disappeared and others have multiplied. The area has filled in and is on a virtuous cycle where the natives rule and there are very few weed seeds left. The landscaping fades seamlessly into the old-growth sagebrush—Olmsted would cheer—and it uses almost no water. It’s the prettiest garden I’ve ever built, but there is nothing simple about establishing a natural-looking landscape.
About the same time that Olmsted was building his parks, the city’s horse-drawn wagons, carriages, and omnibuses that stopped at any place along their route were disappearing. First came the gasoline-powered trucks and electric trolleys with defined stops; subways and streetcars followed. When the horses went, so did their manure, and cities became much, much cleaner.
Electric streetcars were introduced in 1887. They traveled at twice the speed of a horse-drawn carriage and required a significant investment. Tracks were usually laid by private businesses. Between 1890 and 1907, the total distance of streetcar tracks in American cities increased from less than 6,000 miles to more than 34,000 miles. The construction of these new streetcar lines allowed suburbs to grow.
The great historian Sam Bass Warner pointed out that railroad suburbs grew up around rail stations like little villages, while streetcar suburbs formed continuous corridors of single-family homes. Developers built subdivisions on a grid that was often an extension of the plan of the parent city. The houses were generally built within a five- or ten-minute walk from the streetcar line. The homes often had neither stables nor garages, because the whole community depended on the streetcar.
Streetcar companies extended the range of the commuter and opened fringe land for residential development by reducing the time and cost of traveling into the city. People wanted to live in nature with a lawn, house, and garden, spurring suburbanization. In the United States, cities had started installing massive public water and sewer systems in the 1860s, and most urban households had water faucets by 1880. About one in three urban households had toilets by that time, while two-thirds of all city residents shared public toilets or outhouses. When the streetcar lines were laid, tax-funded city water and sewer systems extended their services to the new lots, while services like telephone, gas, and electricity were provided by private businesses.
In practice, this meant that every suburban house had a flush toilet. The ideal of living in a place where nature presses in on you becomes even more attractive when coupled with modern plumbing. Any small house in the suburbs was healthier than a city apartment with a shared toilet.
The Ford Model T arrived in 1908, and allowed a broad spectrum of households to move to the suburbs. The automobile was adopted by upper-middle- and upper-income households, while the middle and working classes continued to use streetcars that generally became public utilities, adding buses, elevated trains, and subways to expand their routes.
Olmsted is often credited for the first American lawns. His 1869 design for Riverside, a Chicago suburb, included a lawn for every lot. Soon it was taken for granted that every suburban house was surrounded by a bit of nature. The inner city was dedicated to commerce and slums, while commuters mowed their lawns in the outer suburbs as their children played in nature. Along with suburban greenery, these new suburbs embraced a different concept of childhood.
The role of childhood had been debated for centuries. In theory, work was good for children since “idle hands are the Devil’s playthings.” Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, spoke for many people when he argued in 1857 that a working man’s children were “part of his productive power, and work with him for the staff of life; the daughters especially are the handmaids of the house, the assistants of the mother, the nurses of the younger children, the aged, and the sick. To deprive the labouring family of their help would be almost to paralyse its domestic existence.” It was also well established that children could be an indispensable source of family income. There were moral and financial reasons to support child labor.
Children worked for lower wages than adults, and they didn’t organize or argue. Child farm labor was standard practice for most of human history, and child factory labor was a natural extension of a child’s obligation to help the family. However, people were starting to see childhood in new ways. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile, or On Education, published in French in 1762 and in English the following year, laid out a Romantic view of childhood. Rousseau never raised a child: his five offspring (with his housekeeper) were each dropped off at the nearby foundling hospital where they most likely died of neglect. His fictional son, Émile, is raised amid nature and allowed to follow his natural curiosity. Émile’s virtue flowered, resulting in a well-adjusted adult who is also a good citizen.
Original sin dictated that children were small devils in need of correction. Rousseau saw children as uncorrupted and pure with natural freedom, creativity, and spontaneity, little tabulae rasae with the malleability to be formed however you wanted. William Wordsworth (who raised five) saw children as especially close to God. The aristocracy and middle classes embraced these Romantic views of childhood.
This new view of childhood as a special stage of innocence and learning saw the flowering of children’s literature. Little Women, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn were published in the United States; Heidi was published in Switzerland; The Adventures of Pinocchio in Italy; Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and The Jungle Book were published in Great Britain. The Victorian middle and upper classes emphasized the role of the family and the sanctity of the child, an attitude that has remained dominant in western societies, while the children of the lower classes endured grinding poverty and hard work.
Not surprisingly, people started to have smaller families when childhood became more valued. As a rule, city women had smaller families than country women, and wealthy folk have long had fewer children than poor folk. But after 1850, all of the different demographic groups—white, black, city, country, rich, poor—started having fewer children. A woman in 1800 was likely to have more than seven children, while in 1900 the average woman had 3.5 children.
The steep drop in fertility started before the Civil War, before the country was largely urban or industrial. In fact, the fertility rate in the United States began to decline before mortality did.
In an urban environment, children are more expensive to raise and less useful, particularly after child labor laws were passed, while the growth of industrial employment increased the value of education. In addition, there were significant advances in birth control. All of these factors reduced the birth rate.
Today, people routinely plan their pregnancies. In the 1800s, women tried to reduce the number of accidental pregnancies. The rhythm method was useless because the recommended “safe” days were the wrong days. Douching can reduce the likelihood of conception by 50 percent, and modern studies show that withdrawal can be 80 percent effective, or even higher. A sea sponge soaked in vinegar with a string attached was another method that worked relatively well. Instructions on the use of silk condoms were found in the bestselling, much translated “On the Use of Night-Caps—Seven Years Experience on the Practicability of Limiting the Number of a Family, by the Best Known Methods; Including Some Valuable and Novel Information, Never Before Published; Addressed Exclusively to Married Couples by a Married Man (with six children),” published in 1844.
Newspaper advertisements for birth-control devices and drugs to induce abortion (or “relieve female irregularities”) were common. Contemporary estimates of mid-nineteenth-century abortion rates in the United States suggest that between 20 and 25 percent of all pregnancies in the United States ended in abortion, and information on how to successfully end a pregnancy was readily available. Bestselling lay medical guides included William Buchan’s Domestic Medicine, published in 1784, with pages of various remedies for an “obstructed flux,” and Peter Smith’s The Indian Doctors Dispensary, published in 1812, which tells readers how to discreetly become “regular.”
Charles Goodyear, an American inventor, heated sulfur and natural rubber to make flexible, stretchable, durable vulcanized rubber in 1844. Natural rubber latex is made from the sap of the Brazilian rubber tree, and as soon as it was vulcanized, condoms could be made from latex instead of silk or intestines. Rubbers were produced in large quantities by 1860. They were cheap and could be rinsed and reused. In addition, primitive latex diaphragms, cervical caps, and weirdly shaped “womb veils” could be worn without your husband’s knowledge, and were available by mail. Douches made with rubber hoses and bags were better than the vaginal syringes they replaced. Finally, a reliable spermicide became available in 1885, when you could buy pessaries made of lumps of cocoa butter with some quinine mixed in, providing a greasy barrier and spermicide in one.
Birth control was one way to reduce family size; another was to abandon your children. American legal ideas about children were inherited from the English Poor Laws under the principle of parens patriae, where the state is the ultimate parent of all children. By the mid-1800s, there were hundreds of thousands of homeless children to care for in the United States, and there were many private and public solutions to the problem of child abandonment.
Foundlings were babies given up by their mothers, and the first foundling home in the United States was established in 1856 in Baltimore, Maryland. By the early twentieth century, most large cities had at least one foundling home (where mortality rates were often over 90 percent). Orphans were children who had lost one or both parents, or a child who was forced out or abandoned because of overcrowding, a more capacious definition than we use today. Poorhouses, county almshouses, and orphanages housed both foundlings and orphans, while runaways lived on the streets. More than 600,000 men died in the Civil War, increasing the number of stray children. In New York City alone, the number of children in almshouses and asylums tripled.
One solution to overcrowding in orphanages and poorhouses was to ship the children west as farm labor. Between 1854 and 1929, over 200,000 abandoned children were shipped west in so-called orphan trains. The children were advertised in advance of the train’s arrival, and the locals would come to the station to pick out a likely child.
With compulsory schooling, children changed from being an economic asset to a liability. From kindergarten through college, children need protection, food, and guidance. Schooling creates an extended period of nonproductive non-adulthood. And when the emphasis of childhood shifted from work to learning, childhood became a time of joy. Factory-made dolls and organized sports, smaller families, child labor laws, and the construct of childhood as a time of play and exploration led to nature study and summer camp, where city children experience nature.
Massachusetts was the first state to enact compulsory school attendance in 1852, and children between eight and fourteen were required to attend school at least twelve weeks a year. By 1918, every state required that school-age children attend school, and nature study was taught in most public schools.
The nature study movement believed that God is revealed in nature. Romantic and sentimental, the curriculums included Florence Holbrook’s books of myths, nature spirits, and fictional Indian stories and Anna Botsford Comstock’s Handbook of Nature Study, which sees nature as the best context for educating children: “study nature, not books.”
Louis Agassiz, a Harvard University zoologist, created nature study in the 1870s. Agassiz believed that natural history needed to be taught from “the direct observation of natural phenomenon rather than learning about the outdoors from textbooks.” He’d give graduate students a preserved fish and ask them to contemplate it deeply.
Nature study advocates believed that studying nature could reveal scientific truths, make students love nature, and bring joy to an industrialized world. According to the nature study model, nature itself was the rightful source of both the scientific thinking and ethical values that made a modern citizen.
Comstock’s Handbook of Nature Study, published in 1911, was close to 500 pages and grew to almost 900 pages in subsequent editions. It is divided into four parts: “How to Teach Nature Study,” “Animals,” “Plants,” and “Earth and Sky.” Birds are the first topic of study in the animal section. Here, Comstock reminds the teacher that studying birds is more than naming birds, and the real purpose is to understand the bird’s life. Using a notebook to record their observations, students answered questions like: On what date did you notice the first arrival of robins in the spring? Does the robin begin to sing as soon as it comes north? What is the color of the beak? What is the color of the tail feathers? Later questions cover singing, nest building, eggs, young, and finally observations over the summer break.
The Boy Scouts and Campfire Girls embraced nature study, but the movement was more widespread. By 1915, “14 states required elementary schools to teach nature study, and 23 states issued outlines for nature study instruction. A 1921 survey said ‘1905 to 1915 saw the incorporation of nature study outlined in the Course of Study of almost every state in the union.’” So many people participated in nature study that children, rural schoolteachers, and middle-class families became a source of ardent conservationists.
Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson, writers/scientists both, were taught nature study as children, and their work was profoundly influenced by their early exposure to nature journals. Nature was seen as a moralizing force, an antidote to industrial society, a crucible of democratic citizenship, and a place of respite and beauty.