Category Archives: History-Museums

History and Nature in Southbridge

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As a member of the Opacum Land Trust, I was invited to a guided walk this morning at the Claire Birtz Sanctuary in Southbridge, a 116 acre property on the west side of Route 169 and very near the Connecticut border.  Opacum Board member Alan Smith led a small group of us on a two hour hike: we started off on the Blue Trail, picked up the Yellow Trail, bushwhacked for a bit to the property line, and then returned to the parking area via the Blue Trail again.

The walk description promised us “a historical journey through the past use of this interesting property” as well as a discussion of natural features such as vernal pools.  A geologist and archaeologist, Al impressed us with his wealth of knowledge.  I wanted to soak in the atmosphere and enjoy myself, so I only scribbled down a few notes.  The following are more or less random observations, but they are what I found striking and worth recording, organized into four groups.

Geology

New England’s current landscape is glacially formed.  The retreat of the ice sheets during the most recent glacial period, the Wisconsin, occurred 12,000-15,000 years ago.  Landforms like drumlins and kettle ponds, common in New England, were formed when the glaciers receded.

Prior to the glaciation events, back in the distant past — in fact, 365-425 million years ago — this area experienced the Acadian orogeny, which was the third of the four orogenies that created the Appalachian Mountain chain.

These mountain-building events can be inferred from tilted planes of rock which we see on this property and at numerous nearby sites; these are evidence of thrust faulting.

Rocks in the Southbridge area are often granite (igneous) or granitic gneiss (metamorphic).

A glacial erratic is composed of rock that differs from the surrounding substrate, whereas a glacial boulder is a rock like all the other rocks around it, only bigger.

Scientists estimate that the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, but the oldest rocks in Massachusetts are only about a billion years old (due to extensive mountain building events which recycle and reform the Earth’s crust); these rocks from the Grenville orogeny, dated to about 1.2 billion years ago, can be found in the Berkshire highlands.

Archaeology and Human Habitation

Native Americans used waterways as roads; rivers and streams were their transportation corridors.  The pictures we have in our heads of Algonquian tribes paddling around in their birchbark canoes have a basis in fact.

Colonists who built stone walls used the materials they found to hand: blocky, rectangular stones from the mountain-building episodes and rounded stones sculpted into that shape by glacial action and running water.  You can see both types in this section of wall:

The shallow depression we saw near the property boundary line could be a cellar hole, but it could also have been a Native American sweat lodge.

In the mid-eighteenth century, when Native Americans were losing their land to settlers, they often lived “under the radar” so to speak; in the colonial era, they might have worked at the Sturbridge Lead Mine, but they also continued observing traditional practices to the extent that they could.  This stone structure could have served a religious or ceremonial purpose:

A common system for classifying soils defines distinct strata by their color and composition, as well as inclusions: A-dark, B-yellow, C-light yellow, then bedrock underneath.

Flora

Spicebush (Lindera benzoin) grows in rich soil; its tiny yellow flowers appear in early spring and red drupes (berries) in the fall.

Witch Hazel (Hamamelis virginiana) is used medicinally.

Ferns (Cinnamon, Interrupted, Christmas, and more!) are common in the understory.

Mountain Laurel (Kalmia latifolia) blooms in early summer.

Groundnuts (Apios americana) are edible and, although not cultivated, were used as a food source by the early colonists.

Maple Leaf Viburnum (Viburnum acerifolium) has leaves which look like maple leaves, but this plant is a vine, not a tree.

Plane trees (genus Platanus) are native to the northern hemisphere; their leaves may look like maple leaves, but this is a different genus; there are fossil records of plane trees from as far back as 115 million years ago.

The Cattail Swamp, adjacent to Morse Pond, is a prominent feature of the sanctuary.  The cattail (Typha latifolia) is a versatile plant for human use: the rhizomes can be ground into flour; the stems can be cooked; the leaves are edible, as are flowerheads; the fluff can be used to line moccasins or for bedding.

Fauna

Intermittent streams are home to salamanders.

Certified vernal pools do not have fish in them; instead they harbor species like frogs and fairy shrimp.  It’s hard to see in this photo, but this is a vernal pool:

Garter snakes are harmless and should be left alone:

At the end of the walk, Al offered to lead the group to the remains of a nineteenth century mill dam nearby, but I had another engagement on my calendar and had to hurry on home.

Plants and Place at Historic Deerfield

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I saw a blub in my local news weekly last month announcing a seminar sponsored by Historic Deerfield called Plants and Place: Native Flora of Western Massachusetts and thought to myself, “That sounds fascinating.”  After registering online, I waited eagerly for this day (the seminar was originally scheduled for the 1st but was postponed due to the late spring storm).

Shortly after 9 am, I signed in at the Flynt Center for Early New England Life, grabbed a cup of coffee, and settled myself in the Bartels Room.  I had not been here before and was suitably impressed with the facility — it certainly functioned well for our seminar of about thirty participants.  Our packets included the day’s agenda as well as short biographies of the speakers.  In the morning, Philip Zea, President of Historic Deerfield would welcome the gathering, then we would hear two lectures with a short break in between, then have lunch; in the afternoon, we would hear two lectures, then have a break, and then hear the last lecture.  It would be a full day!

I was here to learn, so I madly scribbled notes all day.  The following is an attempt to transcribe them accurately, while they are still fresh in my mind.

What Herbarium Collections Tell us about the Past, Present, and Future Distributions of Plants, by Dr Elizabeth Farnsworth, Chief Ecologist, New England Wildflower Society.

Dr Farnsworth began by exclaiming, “Hooray for herbaria!”  Herbaria are a notable source of scholarship.  A search of Rhodora (peer-reviewed botany journal) shows that 5,119 titles mention herbaria.  And these collections are numerous: there are 3,420 worldwide with 800 in the US.  They have preserved 90 million specimens and are a rich source of botanical history.  Plant studies might have focused on a specific time and place, such as Thoreau’s field notes to the Concord flora, whereas a comprehensive index such as Ray Angelo and David Boufford’s Atlas of the Flora of New England is based on herbarium data such as those found in the massive Harvard University Herbarium.

Dr Farnsworth declared that one could easily come up with a list of 100 uses of herbaria.  They certainly contain many kinds of data of interest to scientists because they record morphology, range shifts, taxonomic descriptions, and more.  In fact, because it often takes 23-25 years for a species to be described and officially accepted, possibly 60% of these species new to science may already exist in herbaria.  Herbaria are also of interest aesthetically and practically, in terms of their descriptions of medicinal uses of plants.

The botanist Arthur Haines recently completed a multi-year project studying the specimens in 42 herbaria.  He reviewed 18,042 specimens, with a particular focus on 532 rare species.  He annotated 2,095 rare specimens and 1,145 hybrids or non-rare; he also realized that a number of species are rarer than is commonly thought.  In studying the history of botanical collections, Haines found that numbers of rare plant species peaked in the Victorian Era; then there was another spike in the 1990s, due to the rise in natural history programs and the effort to enlist volunteers to find and catalog plants.

Current programs of conservation and research depend heavily on knowledge of historic populations of plant species, for which we need the data preserved in herbaria.  Comparison studies have indicated that plant ranges are shrinking and are more fragmented; ranges are shifting north due to losses of populations on the southern extremes.  As a group, rare plants are characterized by where they grow and how they are pollinated: 49% are found in wetlands, 35% in calcareous bedrock, 67% are insect-pollinated, and 38% reach their northern edge in New England (these are called guilds, or a group of species that exploit the same resources).  A tentative conclusion is that guilds differ in the extent of their losses.

A current trend in ecological studies has focused on phenology, the study of cyclic and seasonal natural phenomena, for which herbaria are proving quite useful for comparing plant flowering times.  Studies have indicated that plants are flexible and adjust flowering time to temperatures, which may be relevant to climate change debates.  Another study looked at invasives and discovered that many of them flower up to 11 days earlier than natives, which of course impacts the long-term stability of our populations of spring ephemerals.

Dr Farnsworth concluded her talk by describing the New England Vascular Plants Project, an effort to digitize plant collections, for which funding is needed.  In fact, herbaria are alive and well in the 21st century and new digital tools are available to introduce the public to the critical work of identifying and preserving the plants upon which all life depends.

Half the Pleasure of the Study is Lost if the Students be not the Collectors: Botanizing in 19th-Century America, by Maida Goodwin, Independent Researcher.

In an 1871 article in the Atlantic Monthly, “botanizing” is defined as a pleasurable activity.  Of course there were other motivations for studying plants: for millennia, plants provided humans with food, clothing, shelter, and medicine.  Botanizing always meant describing, collecting, and classifying plants, but in the nineteenth century it became a recreational outdoor activity and was pursued for pleasure.  Like the Brooklyn hipsters of today, these plant collectors looked the part: a man carried a walking stick, a vasculum, and a plant press on his excursions.  Botany clubs sprang up, and collectors avidly exchanged specimens.

Of course, botany continued to be pursued for scientific ends.  Ms Goodwin noted that it became part of the academic curriculum in Italy in 1543, at the insistence of Italian physician and botanist Luca Ghini, who is remembered today for creating both the first herbarium and the first botanical garden in Europe.  When Ghini’s students returned to their native lands, many in northern Europe, they continued documenting the local flora.  In medieval Europe, plants were critical for medicinal uses, and, in fact, physicians learned pharmacology from studying herbals, that is, books containing the names and descriptions of plants.

In the 1500s, about 800 species of plants were known in Western Europe; by 1623, that number had increased to 6000, one consequence of the Age of Exploration, which brought previously unknown specimens from the tropics, the New World, and the Far East to Europe.  Enter Carl von Linné (1707 to 1778), a Swedish botanist, whose system for naming plants has lasted for centuries; we know it today as the Latin-based binomial nomenclature (e.g., Phlox paniculata).  The importance of a system of scientific classification cannot be overstated; the Linnaean system has survived through the upheavals in biology engendered by both evolutionary theory and molecular genetics.

In our own country, interest in natural history grew steadily ever since the first arrival of Europeans.  Interest was first practical, then scientific.  Although at first the curriculum was heavily weighted in favor of classical studies, American colleges and universities eventually added courses in botany and other sciences.  Social improvement through knowledge and education was always the goal, even in the early grades.  Cataloging was emphasized; after all, the riches of America were the riches of its natural resources.  Botanists were trained in observation, on classification and naming.  We have a number of early educators to thank for this focus on botany: Amos Eaton from Troy, New York, Mrs Almira Lincoln Phelps, Alphonso Wood, Harvard’s Asa Gray, and our own Stephen West Williams, whose Botanical Descriptions became popular in elementary schools.

The Victorian and Edwardian eras witnessed an explosion of interest in botany: clubs sprang up, rambles were popular, museums were founded, and an incredible number of books, textbooks and field guides, were published.  Letters, diaries, and scrapbooks attest to this interest in botanizing.  In the Connecticut River Valley, we have Edward Hitchcock (1783-1864), primarily a geologist but also the author of Catalogue of Plants, Orra White Hitchcock, Emily Hitchcock Terry, Lydia Shattuck of Mount Holyoke College, Edward Tuckerman of Amherst College, Henry G Jesup, first a minister then a botanist at Dartmouth College, David Peck, a Congregationalist minister in Sunderland, Maria Owen of Springfield who studied the flora of Nantucket and helped found the Botanical Club of the Pioneer Valley.

Today, botanists are more attracted to studying plant physiology and ecology, and we have technological tools at our disposal that our forebears could only dream of, such as smart phones and GPS, for photographs and capturing precise locations.  But the tradition of “citizen science” continues, and there are many ways we can all participate in this endeavor.

Lunch was a wonderful meal at the Deerfield Inn, about a block from the Flynt Center.  It was such a gorgeous spring day, and I was entranced by the flowers and trees, which all seemed to have burst into new life right then and there, a perfect backdrop to our subject.

Who was the Williams Behind the Herbarium, by David Bosse, Librarian and Curator of Maps, Historic Deerfield.

The Williams family was a prominent one in the Pioneer Valley.  John Williams, one of the most well known members of the Williams family, was an ordained minister and an early settler of Deerfield. He lost his first wife, Eunice Mather, and two of his children in the Indian raid known as the Deerfield Massacre (1704) and was held in captivity in Canada for two years before returning to Deerfield.  I think I lost focus for a minute on Mr Bosse’s tracing of the genealogy, though, because I’m not exactly sure how our Stephen West Williams is related to this John Williams.  As far as I can trace back Stephen’s family, it began in the New World with Isaac Williams (1638-1708), continued to his son Ephraim Williams (1691-1754), continued to his son Thomas Williams (1718-1775), continued to his son William Stoddard Williams (1762-1829), who fathered Stephen West Williams (1790-1855).

Stephen West Williams, second son of William Stoddard and Mary (Hoyt) Williams, was born in 1790. He studied medicine with his father, supplementing this training by attending medical lectures at Columbia College in New York, for a year. He settled in Deerfield where he lived on the south part of Lot 14. In addition to his practice, he studied botany and chemistry and did research on local and family history. He occasionally lectured on medical jurisprudence at the Berkshire Medical Institution (1823-31), at Dartmouth Medical School (1838-41), and at Willoughby University in Ohio (1838-53). In addition, he wrote for the New York Historical Society and the Massachusetts Medical Journal. In 1818, he married Harriet Taylor Goodhue (1799-1874), daughter of Dr. Joseph Goodhue, an army surgeon, and the couple had four children. In 1850 they moved to Laona, Illinois. Stephen died there in 1855.

In 1811, Greenfield became the country seat of Franklin County, which surprised many, as at that time, Deerfield, with its 55 dwellings and population of about 300, was busy and prosperous and was considered the cultural center of the county.  At this time in his life, Stephen was a third-generation physician and thus a prominent member of Deerfield society.  A Renaissance man, he became interested in botany around 1816 and embarked upon a two year project to collect and catalog all the flora he could find within the Deerfield town boundaries.  He created two volumes, one the herbaria in which he mounted his specimens, and the second a compendium of data about the specimens, including both illustrations in watercolor and his observations on the medical, culinary, and other uses of the plant. Stephen’s “American Herbarium,” as he called it, was dedicated to Robert John Thornton.  Stephen Williams did not work alone.  The physician Dennis Cooley (1789-1860), also of Deerfield, worked with him; the two corresponded extensively with Amos Eaton at Williams College and Edward Hitchcock at Amherst, who published a compilation of Massachusetts flora in 1833.

The Williams herbarium came to Historic Deerfield by a somewhat circuitous route: it was purchased by Henry Flynt from Dorothy Williams Hartigan in 1959.  Since its purchase, it has been scanned at Harvard University and is now available for viewing through the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), which aims to make biodiversity literature openly available to the world as part of a global biodiversity community.

The Stephen West Wiliams Herbarium: Collection of an Early 19th Century Physician-Botanist from Deerfield, by Dr Karen Searcy, University of Massachusetts.

Ms Searcy’s talk focused on the collection itself: what’s in it and why is it important?  She first discussed a recent project to catalog the flora of Franklin County and answer the question of how it has changed through time; thus 52 collectors or collection teams identified 14,893 specimens from 8 different herbaria.  In 1980, Stephen West Williams was identified as the collector of one of these herbaria when its specimens were cross-referenced with the volume Botanical Descriptions (the fact that these two volumes had been prepared together had been lost over the years).  Historians came to believe that three people did the collecting: Williams, Cooley, and Hitchcock, all young men in their 20s and all under the influence of Amos Eaton.  For the most part, plants were collected from Deerfield itself.  Historians struggled to come up with an actual date for the collection and through analysis of correspondence and other dated specimens, eventually settled on 1816-1818, which makes it one of the oldest herbaria from a particular American locale.

Dr Searcy worked with Matt Hickler to transcribe the original scientific and common names of the plants in Williams’ collection.  This was a big task, as the volume contains 390 pages, with 556 specimens.  These contemporary botanists identified 453 species: 336 native and 117 introduced–these included naturalized as well as cultivated species.  Interestingly, of the 117 introduced species, only 4 are now considered invasive.  The botanists noted that the collection is only vaguely organized, into early season flowers, then mid, then late, probably corresponding to the time frames that the young men had for their collecting expeditions.  As a practicing physician, Williams described the medicinal properties for about 40% of the specimens.  Again, owing to his personal interests, Williams included a few garden plants in his collection, such as sweet pea and larkspur.  He probably used his collection as a reference, for both his writing and lectures, especially with respect to medical botany.

The significance of the Williams Herbarium is now widely accepted, insofar as it provides a date and location for 360 species of plants, about 34% of the taxa listed in Hitchcock’s Catalogue of Plants.  Thus, it can be used as a baseline to determine changes in the flora of Franklin County.  For example, between 1944-1988, botanist Robert G. Poland documented 1300 species in this area of the Valley.  Out of the 453 species identified from the Herbarium, 64 cannot be found today.  There could be a number of reasons for this, among them, changes in the town boundaries and changes in the habitats.  This herbarium also established a pre-1820 date for 90 introduced species that are currently considered naturalized; it is the first record for 29 currently naturalized species previously not documented until 1850; finally, it is the first record of 15 species currently considered waifs.

Conservation of the American Herbarium, Rachel Childers, Conservation Intern, Williamstown Art Conservation Center.

The Williamstown Art Conservation Center works on four basic types of materials: paper, paintings, textiles, and furniture.  Ms Childers, whose interest is in paper conservation, worked on this project with Leslie Paisley, Head of Paper Conservation, and Rebecca Johnston, Paper Conservator.

Ms Childers noted that the 196-page, leather-bound volume arrived in poor condition, and they needed to address its conservation in phases.  The first task was “dis-binding,” meaning that they took it apart one signature at a time (a signature is eight large sheets folded in half to create sixteen pages).  They dusted each page using dry chemicals, and the edges of torn pages were repaired using wheat starch paste and Japanese paper.  They also re-secured specimens which had come loose and also crumbled.  The original was prepared on laid paper with iron gall ink, but they used toned weave paper if they needed to replace any.  Each page was also photographed so that they would have a record of it.

The final phase consisted of creating a museum-board sink mat adhered to a four-ply window mat, and then securing the pages using clear Mylar.  The conserved pages were then numbered and stored in drop-front boxes, 16 in all.  Ms Childers showed us some slides of the restored herbarium, and I must say, it looks marvelous.

By the time Ms Childers finished her talk, it was nearly 5 pm, and I think we were all exhausted.  It was such a wonderful experience though.  I sat with a great group of people at lunch, and on my breaks, I wandered the exhibits in the Flynt building, including the Helen Geier Flynt Textile Gallery, the William Guthman Collection of engraved powder horns, and the Museum’s Attic.