William G. Thomas III, et. al., The Countryside Transformed

In May 1879, Howard Pyle, a young writer and illustrator and a keen observer, headed down to the Eastern Shore of Virginia to write a story for Harper's New Monthly Magazine. Born in 1853 and raised in Wilmington, Delaware, Pyle admired the realistic writing of William Dean Howells. Pyle set out to capture the daily life and record what he considered the feel and experience of the landscape on the Eastern Shore. Pyle described the shore as "a peninsular Canaan," a place of almost unbelievable fertility where "the lightest labor" brings forth "abundant return from this generous soil." The waters "teem" with all manner of wildlife: fowl, terrapin, snipe, fish, and the prized Chesapeake oyster. Separated from the rest of Virginia by the broad waters of the Chesapeake Bay, the Eastern Shore remained remote. "There is no railroad," Pyle explained. The peninsula was separated from the "vim and progress of modern utilitarianism," an island, as it were, cut off from "the outside world."15

For all of its rich bounty and stark beauty, the Eastern Shore was, according to Pyle, stuck in "a Rip Van Winkle sleep." It was a place where all that nature provided seemed to go unrealized and where modernity remained unclaimed. It was "sleepily floating in the indolent sea of the past, incapable of crossing the gulf which separates it from outside modern life."

Like many Americans of his day, Pyle saw the landscape as an expression of a human society and modernity as a geographic, as well as a social and economic system. In the case of the Eastern Shore, the landscape was in large part the product of an earlier time, the plantation South. Pyle saw vestiges of it everywhere he looked. The first signpost of an older order was a collection of old windmills in Northampton County. These were "landmarks of the past," "quaint," "abandoned," and representative of an outrageously outdated technology and society. Another "remnant" Pyle recorded was the "Negro burying ground." Although slavery was "a bygone thing," Pyle noted, its presence in the landscape was literally still visible in unruly clumps of trees that farmers ploughed carefully around. These copses marked the final resting place, Pyle explained without irony, of "the planter's former faithful servants."16

Pyle told his readers that the "remnant" of the Southern past remained deeply embedded in the landscape of the Eastern Shore where "the old style farming" was still practiced. "There were only three crops raised in Virginia," Pyle deadpanned, "corn, hogs, and niggers, of which the hogs ate all the corn, and the niggers devoured all the hogs. One of these 'crops,' however, is removed from the list." Pyle's comments, delivered with a wink-of-the-eye to his mostly Northern readers, were meant to buttress the Northern understanding of slavery and its landscape as hopelessly inefficient, a sort of shell game in which the players long ago lost track of the nut. The resulting legacy was, according to Pyle, an impoverished white class, "woefully ignorant," and an unproductive upper class, "indolently unprogressive."

Pyle saw only one way to bring the natural fruits of the soil and sea to full development and to establish a correspondingly modern social structure on the Eastern Shore: change the landscape. The coming of the railroad, he expected, would inaugurate sweeping changes in social arrangements and physical properties. Poor whites and indolent upper classes, not to mention blacks, would only disappear from the social landscape when the geography of modern America penetrated the region. A few years earlier Pyle had taken an excursion to Chincoteague to report on the local society and the annual roundup of the wild ponies on the barrier island. He described the ferry ride from the mainland across Chincoteague Bay for the prospective traveler: it "separates him from modern civilization, its rattling, dusty cars, its hurly-burly of business, its clatter and smoke of mills and factories, and lands him upon an enchanted island, cut loose from modern progress and left drifting some seventy-five years backward in the ocean of time. No smoke of manufactories pollutes the air of Chincoteague; no hissing steam escape is heard except that of the [steamboat] 'Alice;' no troublesome thought of politics, no religious dissension, no jealousy of other places, disturbs the minds of the Chincoteaguers, engrossed with whisky, their ponies, and themselves."17

Pyle was not alone in his perception of the landscape of the South and its holdover social structures, nor was his understanding of the landscape and the railroad's possibilities novel. For Pyle in the 1870s the Eastern Shore and the rest of the South were part Arcadia, part wolf pit. Nineteenth-century Americans had long associated the use of and control over nature with enlightenment and civilization. Travelers to the South before the Civil War, among them Frederick Law Olmstead, observed land use patterns as inefficient. They focused their attention on the unimproved acreage, abandoned lands, and wild growth that consumed the typical farms. In his A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States with Remarks on their Economy published in 1857, Olmstead admitted to being a "fault finder." And although his travels opened with a visit to a well-kept Maryland farm, Olmstead's train ride south revealed an abandoned, apparently unproductive landscape "grown over with briars and bushes, and a long, coarse grass of no value."18

Olmstead, Pyle, and other travel writers tied the landscape of the South to the character of its inhabitants; the land was, after all, a product of human intentions. Pyle remained decidedly Victorian in outlook, ironically detached from the transformations underway around him. His stereotypical account was meant more to titillate Northern readers with a close-to-home adventure story than to describe accurately the society and landscape he entered. Yet for all his nostalgia, Pyle observed the landscape of the Shore before the great layers of intervention between 1870 and 1900 had been completed or their complex repercussions felt, and he accurately sensed the magnitude of impending change.