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Book Review
| The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concordd. By Brian Donahue. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. xx + 311 pp. Illustrations, maps, tables, notes, index. $35.00.
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| New England's environmental history was seemingly set in stone several years ago with publication of William Cronon's Changes in the Land (Hill and Wang, 1983) and Carolyn Merchant's Ecological Revolutions (North Carolina, 1989). Together, these two books spun out a story of ecological decline in which market-oriented colonials set the land on the downward spiral that Harold Wilson described so poignantly in his depressing classic, Hill Country of Northern New England (Columbia, 1936). Recent books by Sheila Connor, John Cumbler, Diana Muir, and others present a more complex interaction, and now Brian Donahue brings to fruition this revisionist point of view. |
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In the tradition of colonial historiography, Donahue presents an intensive study of a single town, whose inhabitants he decodes through painstaking research in deeds, probates, and wills. Donahue brings to this tradition a working knowledge of Concord's stony soils and an innovative technique in GIS mapping. This allows him to explain and interpret the land-holding strategies that supported the agricultural system of colonial Concord. His conclusions challenge much of what we know about New England environmental history. |
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Donahue's premise is that colonial agriculture was an ecologically sustainable adaptation of English mixed husbandry. He also argues that common management in some forms persisted through several generations in Concord. Although he does not enter the debate over colonial mentalité directly, his families seem little interested in market production, and to the cultural limits on individual acquisitiveness identified by earlier historians, he adds environmental constraints and a clear understanding of family considerations in land-use decisions over several generations. |
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Donahue draws the reader into the world of the colonial husband by describing the sights, sounds, and smells of daily life in Concord, but the book is ecologically savvy as well. Great Meadow begins with a description of Concord's post-glacial mosaic of outwash gravels, sands, sediments, clays, mucks, and stony uplands, each a resource of sorts for colonial husbandmen. How, Donahue asks, were Concord's inhabitants able to transform these thin soils into fields and pastures, and to crop them repeatedly for a century and a half? |
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The answer lies in the ways they adapted English mixed husbandry to Concord's own woods, waters, and soils. Careful attention to manuring transferred nutrients from pasture to plow-field, and the Concord woods supplied many local needs. Streams and rivers renewed soil fertility, provided fish and eels, drove mill wheels, irrigated marsh grasses, and warmed the ground to encourage spring growth. Since soils were varied and subsistence demands were complex, families held land in scattered parcels of field, pasture, meadow, woodland, and wetland. In addition they held rights to the commons. Despite a vigorous trend in buying and selling, they maintained these scattered holdings through most of the colonial period. It is a tribute to Donahue's methods that he brings these intricate patterns to light, and to his ecological sensitivity that he is able to make sense of them. |
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At 1750, one-third of Concord's land was still in forest, but by this time families were cultivating every acre of plow-land they could manure. By Thoreau's time, a century later, interregional timber supplies and the use of coal for heat made these woodlands economically superfluous, and they, too, were cleared for pasture, giving Concord the "shorn look" that troubled Thoreau and gave William Cronon an entree for his declensionist narrative of New England. |
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This book has enormous implications for understanding colonial agriculture, and how well its thesis can be applied to the rest of New England is a question that could well occupy the next generation of regional scholars. For the lay reader, the book has important implications as well. Like Cronon and Merchant, Donahue uses his study to advocate living within limits, but he casts his argument in less judgmental and thus more convincing terms. So doing, he sets new standards for this advocacy-rich discipline. English planters, he concludes, took the world the Indians made and refashioned it into an new and equally diverse ecological system. Rescripting hallowed terms like diversity, degradation, and ecological balance, he challenges us to re-think the way we judge our forebears' relation to the land. |
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Richard Judd is professor of history at the University of Maine. His most recent book publication is Natural States: The Environmental Imagination in Maine, Oregon, and the Nation (with Christopher S. Beach, 2003), and he is currently researching environmental consciousness among early American naturalists. |
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