Colonial Ecology, Atlantic Economy. Strother E. Roberts
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Merchant’s interpretive fixation upon capitalism was aggravated by their commitment to the theory (predominant in the historiography of the time) that the transition to capitalism was driven by late eighteenth-century agricultural improvements that encouraged the widespread adoption of commercial agriculture.25 As a consequence, they and other scholars have misdated the beginning of large-scale ecological change in the region to the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries.26
The Connecticut Valley’s rich soils, diversified colonial economy and strong ties to Atlantic trade recommend it especially well as the focal point of a study seeking to tie together early American economic and environmental history. The Connecticut River itself—the natural highway that connected the producers of these natural resources to the markets of the broader Atlantic World—is the longest in New England at approximately 410 miles. Its many tributaries stretching out to the east and west—embracing a basin of 11,250 square miles—expanded the commercial network of the Connecticut Valley even deeper into New England’s hinterlands. The Connecticut River has its headwaters in the unimaginatively named Fourth Connecticut Lake, just 300 yards from New Hampshire’s modern-day border with Canada. From its source, the river runs roughly south-southwest through a hard bedrock that keeps the valley walls rocky and steep. Around the modern site of Colebrook, New Hampshire, the river’s waters take a more southerly turn, passing through softer rock, the sides of its valley less sheer. But it is not until Stewartstown that the valley begins to open up and meander. It is here that the famously rich meadows of the Connecticut Valley begin.
The commercial potential of the Connecticut River, especially its navigability, shaped the development of the valley’s earliest English towns. The wealthy and powerful William Pynchon founded Springfield in 1636 just above the Connecticut’s first major cataracts. Here goods coming from the upper valley would need to be unloaded from rafts and portaged around the falls. Springfield’s position as the northernmost of the early towns also made it a funnel for receiving the Indian trade coming downriver and from the interior. William Pynchon’s son John would build a commercial empire and transform himself into a veritable feudal lord by exploiting Springfield’s fortuitous position. Running south from Springfield, the river continued its path beyond the bounds of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.27
The river may have formed the far frontier of early New Hampshire and Massachusetts, but in Connecticut the valley formed the very heart of the colony. Long the northernmost township in Connecticut, Windsor had been founded in 1635 at the confluence of the Connecticut and its largest tributary, the Farmington River. An important avenue for the local Indian fur trade, the Farmington would in later decades provide Windsor access to the produce of new towns founded in its own rich valley. Hartford, also founded in 1635, sat at the highest point on the river navigable by oceangoing craft, ensuring its commercial importance as the northernmost site where commodities from upriver could be loaded on ships bound for Atlantic markets, or goods sent in from England, the West Indies, and elsewhere unloaded and transferred to rafts and carts for sale to customers deeper in the interior. The earliest English settlers in the valley, those who founded “ancient” Wethersfield in 1634, claimed for themselves a site at the southernmost limit of the Connecticut’s meandering meadows. Even though it was not settled until 1650, the site of Middletown, too, enjoyed certain advantages. If Hartford marked the absolute limit for oceangoing navigation, Middletown marked the border of convenient navigation. Above Middletown, seated upon its deep river bend, shifting shoals and sandbars plagued any moderately deep-hulled vessel. Below Middletown, the Connecticut once again cuts through a bed of hard rock, passing below steep banks as it turns sharply southeast toward Long Island Sound. Here, Saybrook was founded in 1635 to guard the river’s mouth from imperial rivals, rounding out the list of the valley’s oldest towns.
Figure 1. This 1761 engraving was based on a sketch by Thomas Pownall, Massachusetts’ governor during the Seven Years’ War. It offers an idealized view of the colonial project by counterpoising a rough new settlement on the left with a fully improved farm on the right. Small river vessels (foreground) and trading sloops (background) highlight the commercial ambitions of both settlements. James Peake, “A Design to Represent the Beginning and Completion of an American Settlement or Farm,” London: 1761. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.
Colonial Ecology
Timothy Dwight—travel writer, theologian, and president of Yale University in the early nineteenth century—once described the Connecticut as the “Beautiful River.”28 What he meant was that the Connecticut and its valley corresponded to a Euro-American definition of aesthetics that identified beauty with agricultural fertility and agrarian productivity. Dwight encountered a Connecticut River frequented by cattle and sheep, interspersed with busy grist and sawmills, and everywhere flanked by the luscious meadows that for centuries had drawn both Native American and European settlers alike. For Dwight and his contemporaries, the banks of the Connecticut presented an image of utilitarian beauty. Although ostensibly he took the river valley as his subject, Dwight principally concerned himself with the region’s recent human history.
By contrast, an environmental historian can discern the natural processes at work within Dwight’s observations.29 The operations of glaciers had long ago stripped the valley of its best soil. The majority of what remained was the result of silt and sand, which had gradually accumulated at the bottom of Lake Hitchcock, together with a mix of clay washed down regularly from the mountains. Only along the banks of the river, where flooding deposited fresh earth every year, could the soil truly be called rich. Here, in the bottomlands regionally known as the intervales, nature presented a picture of agricultural plenty. Elsewhere crops grew, but not as well as grass or woods. Here were the luxurious green meadows, “which may [be] said literally to glow with verdure,” that made the valley such an important site for livestock husbandry.30 The pastoral beauty observed by Dwight hid the thousands of years of geological activity that had created the soils upon which this human idyll was built.
The ecological transformations of landscapes and waterscapes that occurred in Dwight’s time—the turn of the nineteenth century—and afterward have received the lion’s share of historians’ attention. The most visible human assaults upon the Connecticut River—canal building, industrial waste, electrical dams—were all the products of later decades. In fact, this work takes the 1790s as its endpoint precisely because that decade saw the rise of the large-scale canal building that marked a new ecological era in the life of the valley. But to ignore the equally dramatic changes brought about in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is to begin in the middle of the story.
Everything humans do on a river’s banks, or on the terraces overlooking those banks, unavoidably impacts the river itself. For every bundle of pelts, barrel of salted pork, or “hundred” of pipe staves produced, something had been taken from the colonial valley’s ecosystems. A particular choice, among conflicting options, had been made about how best to exploit its resources. In some way, great or small, the land- and waterscape of the valley had been changed. The valley’s ecological history lay bound up in the commodities its human inhabitants chose to produce.
To combine the history of the river and its human inhabitants means to write a history of environmental changes in both the land and water. Consequently, this work is not so much a history of the Connecticut River itself as of the Connecticut Valley, of the river’s watershed and the many human, animal, and plant communities that dwelled within it. In truth, a river and its valley are ecologically inseparable. The river creates its valley, slowly over millennia carving its way through rock and soil. Large rivers, like the Connecticut, define the climate of the lands that surround them, moderating temperatures and, in northern regions, extending the growing season for both wild plants and human crops. At least in the lowlands, a river determines the soils of its valley and determines which species of plants and animals will inhabit its banks. Rivers create land through the accretion of the sediments that they carry downstream. They also destroy land through erosion, shifting their banks sometimes rapidly—as when floods strike—but always gradually as the years, decades, and centuries pass. The relationship flows the other way as well, especially where human settlements