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Book Review
| Hard as the Rock Itself: Place and Identity in the American Mining Town. By David Robertson. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2006. Mining the American West series. xiv + 216. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. Cloth $50.00.
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| This handsome and well-written book explores an apparent paradox that its author stumbled across while engaged in fieldwork in environmental geography as a budding graduate student. Robertson writes that he was puzzled by the presence of deeply held connections to place among residents of environmentally devastated landscapes in former mining centers of the U.S. West, and he began to wonder why and how mining communities persist beyond "their industrial usefulness" (p. 3). Combing the tools of landscape history and cultural geography, and utilizing a wonderfully rich set of personal interviews, Robertson's book presents three detailed case studies of three very different post-mining communities—Toluca, Illinois, Cokedale, Colorado, and Pitcher, Oklahoma—where he uncovered some answers in similar stories of economic boom, economic decline, deindustrialization, and community persistence. |
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Our general surprise about finding community persistence in former mining towns is attributable to the "mining imaginary," Robertson argues, a cultural lens that most Americans engage with regard to mining towns that says these places are ephemeral as well as wasted, and thus unlikely to generate deep connection to place. What he finds instead is that the altered landscapes and difficult histories represent much more to long-time residents and former miners than symbols of environmental destruction or tales of social disorder; they have come to be part of the very identity of these communities, where labor and sacrifice coupled with friendship, family, and shared experiences. In all three examples, the complexity of connections to place, through memories, community, and labor are much richer and more deeply held than the typical dismissal of these landscapes would suggest. Robertson's conviction that these perspectives matter is supported by the fact that each of the communities he studied has experienced some level of interaction with federal or state agencies determined to remediate, restore, or historicize the landscape, a process made problematic for community members and bureaucrats alike by the shallow view of mining landscapes constructed through the mining imaginary. Sense of place is deep in these three post-mining communities, Robertson has shown, and failing to notice it does a potential injustice to these very important American places. |
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At its best, Robertson's book does a masterful job of balancing the multiple and often contending perspectives that make claims on these mining landscapes without diminishing or belittling any of them. In doing so, these stories challenge us to notice that having a 'sense of place' is not a condition reserved to the most ecologically or environmentally benign landscapes, but is the result of life- and community-making processes wherever they occur. |
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Two minor criticisms relate to the unevenness of the chapters—the study of Toluca is neither as richly developed nor as convincingly presented as the studies of Cokedale and Pitcher, and the study of Cokedale makes a substantially different argument about the relationship between sense of place and history than the studies of Toluca and Pitcher—and to the fact that none of the chapters engage the problematic of mining itself—making the book more about place and identity with mining as sort of fixed backdrop than about mining per se. Nevertheless, these case studies will be of interest to anyone concerned with understanding the complicated ways in which a sense of place is constructed. |
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Kent Curtis is an environmental historian and assistant professor of environmental studies at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida. He is currently completing a book examining the effects of nineteenth-century western metal mining on twentieth-century ideas about nature. |
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