"As long as I live…

… I’ll interpret the rocks, learn the language of flood, storm, and the avalanche. I’ll acquaint myself with the glaciers and wild gardens, and get as near the heart of the world as I can." John Muir

This week in my public history class, we discussed the topic of environmental history, a topic that I find fascinating, but I usually reserve as a casual interest of mine. If you caught my podcast episode, you’ll remember it was on milkweed and how it’s presence in the town of Petoskey, Michigan caused it to be one of the best materials for life vests in WWII and I may have mentioned the tragic Johnstown Flood in one of my posts as well.

I’ll be honest, our readings this week were absolutely FULL of mentions of Pennsylvania (by normal standards) including one written by my undergraduate advisor. I think I counted around 5 or 6 mentions of my home state (one of them mentioned Amish farmland so I’m just going to count that as a win).

It’s no surprise, there’s a lot of, well, environment in Pennsylvania. I mean, the name of the state translates to “Penn’s Woods”, so it’s fair to say the readings were right for bringing up the state.

The crumpled remains of Kinzua Viaduct - a bridge that was once a railroad bridge, but was destroyed by a tornado in 2003.

One reading that really caught my attention was one on interpreting landscapes by David Glassberg. In it, he takes a unique approach to defining what a landscape is. When you hear the word, you either picture one of those nice scenic mountain vistas that Bob Ross paints or the direction your paper is facing in a Word document. Instead of basing his definition on what is immediately seen, Glassberg makes it clear that landscapes are products of human interaction over time.

Mount Penn in Reading, PA. Atop sits the Pagoda, a landmark in the city

This can almost mean anything within reason is a landscape. For example, the mountains surrounding the city of Reading have constantly been affected by human interaction. An early example I can think of is the terraces made by Hessian POWs during the Revolutionary War on Mount Penn and the
eventual transformation of Neversink Mountain into the site of a resort, amusement park, and mountain railroad. 

What I find fascinating is the collective memory surrounding how we interpret these sites. When a public historian delves into landscape interpretation, they have to somehow connect all the ways a landscape is viewed. If I ask one person about Mount Penn, they might talk about a Hessian ghost they saw in the woods while hiking, while someone else might talk about a memory of taking a trolley up the mountain to picnic with their family. 

As a Public historian, interpretation is a necessity. No matter what field you enter, you will probably have to talk to people about where you work, an artifact, or give a full-blown presentation on any number of topics. Glassberg further breaks this down how public historians will engage with landscape interpretation into three categories:

1. Analyzing past land uses
2. Implementing appropriate preservation strategies
3. Creating museum exhibits, walking tours, and public programs

For the most part this goes for any sort of interpretation, but because of the complex nature of landscape interpretation, there’s a lot more to consider. I can lead a tour of the wagon works I worked at, but to break down where the wagon works came from, the town of Pleasant Valley, that’s a whole other can of worms. It’s a sensitive topic because a dam inundated the entire town allowing only for a few historically significant structures such as the wagon works to be moved.

The man-made lake that replaced the town of pleasant valley in 1976

As you can imagine, this is touchy for people. They lost homes that had been in their family for generations and all that was given for compensation was money. For some, that was enough, but for others, it never will be.

And of course, in true historian fashion, a landscape is not just a landscape. There are three types of landscapes that should be considered for protection. First there’s those that have been affected by humans. Plain and simple. These are like the remnants of canals. That ditch wasn’t there naturally. Nope, people dug that out!

There are also the landscapes that are the result of cultural evolution. Relict landscapes are those that are from a past culture that is no longer actively present such as Native Americans. Continuing landscapes though are those that have been affected by the same practices over years. This can be compared to Amish farmland. Farmland is passed from generation to generation and there is a reasonably low chance of it falling prey to anything other than its current purpose.

Finally, there are those sites that have associative cultural landscapes. This is just a fancy way of saying something important happened at the site instead of finding pottery buried in the ground. A home state example of this and the (5^th?) mention of Pennsylvania: GETTYSBURG!

Controlled burn in Gettysburg National Military Park

I’ve had plenty of field trips and personal visits to Gettysburg to have a basic understanding of the site. One of these visits, our guide was discussing the landscape plan for the battlefield. They pointed to a grove of trees and said, “We’re getting rid of that grove because it wasn’t there during the battle.” Now that is pretty hard-core to be able to justify that those trees don’t belong. Trees that were there during the battle are actually being re-planted. The end goal is that Gettysburg wants to look as it did 157 years ago. That’s why buildings can’t be changed and if there’s a cannonball wedged in the side of your house – yeah, that’s not going anywhere.

The preservation of not just buildings, but also land is something that needs to be considered. A plot of land might look like a simple farm with your typical farmhouses and barns, but if it was farmed by the same family for six generations and the first generation took part in the Whiskey Rebellion and another played a role in the Christiana Riots, then maybe, just maybe, it’s worth a little more than a strip mall.

Festina Lente my friends
--Jess--