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and representative of an outrageously outdated technology and society.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.
