Wiki - Steamboats

The power of steam energy brought with it risks. So the steamboats that transformed industrial-age travel, were also inherently dangerous. The tragic stories of the Sultana (1,164), the Henry Clay (50-80) and the General Slocum (1,021 lost) each capture different dimensions of their times. The Henry Clay took Andrew Jackson Downing from us. The General Slocum tragedy is mentioned in both James Joyce's Ulysses and a recent Dean Koontz novel. At least eight different cities have erected monuments to the Sultana.

Wiki - Samuel Seymour

According to Wikipedia, Samuel Seymour held a couple of interesting distinctions:

1) the last person to report having witnessed the assassination of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln on April 14, 1865

2) the oldest person to appear on television (at the time of his appearance), 

Harris & Ewing Collection

The Library of Congress online includes the 41,000 photographs in the Harris & Ewing Collection, all searchable.

A 1914 photograph of U.S. diplomat Alvey Augustus Adee, the 72-year old Second Assistant Secretary of State, who rode his bicycle to work and took annual bicycle tours in Europe until World War I.

1911 photograph of a street in Bogota, Colombia.

Camp Dix in 1918.

Entrance to Glacier National Park in 1914.
 

"Arthur Kochler, wood identification specialist of the Department of Agriculture, says the piece of wood he is holding is 12,000,000 years old. It is a fragment from a fossil log of redwood, 7 feet thick, found by workmen of the Reclamation Service buried 150 feet below the bed of the Yakima River in Washington. The log was petrified, buried in the lava flow from volcanoes which have been dead for millions of years, 11/30"

How old is your canoe?

The North American landscapes may have a richer cultural heritage than many think. The Smithsonian magazine has a feature on the water-logged archaeologists that are finding ancient canoes. These are older than many might expect: "Once in a while, though, they’ll find a specimen that shares a timeline with Beowulf, the Phoenician alphabet or even early math."

Sycamore Gap Tree

How do you replace something that is irreplaceable? That is the struggle facing a community in northern England where vandals cut down a landmark 300-year old tree along Hadrian's Wall. The Sycamore Gap Tree was a solitary tree in an historic space, so it leaves a visible hole. Should they build a memorial to mark the spot? Plant a replacement tree? Install an artificial (presumably artistic) facsimile?

Old data models for a new world?

WLA says that Mapping and BIM are hot trends for 2023, while Map Happenings just posted a piece declaring that geospatial data is stuck in the year 1955.

 

Phil Lewis

The Wikipedia entry for Phil Lewis isn't great, but has some helpful details. His 1964 resource map of Wisconsin was a remarkable step.

Old Postcards

 Spring Break might normally be a time to send postcards back to your friends in New Brunswick. This year, things are different, so it is a good time to look at postcards FROM New Brunswick.

Ken Lew has posted historic postcards from all around the campuses including these of the Old Queens campus entrance, Balantine's Gymnasium, and the always charming Commons.

He also has scanned a 1977 pictorial summary of New Brunswick history from the First Savings and Loan Association. It includes a late 1800s photo of the steamer, New Brunswick, a women's suffrage march at George and Albany, and the great flood of 1920.

 

 

More maps

When you feel a little down, a stream of old maps will always be there for you.

National Parks and Parklands about 1 person

Someone asked me yesterday if there were many National Parks devoted to one person. Well, I said, there are lots about individual presidents (Adams NHP would count as 2 or 3?) so we should exclude them.

Harriet Tubman
Booker T. Washington
Eleanor Roosevelt
Maggie L Walker
Frederick Law Olmsted
Thomas Edison
Edgar Allen Poe
Augustus Saint-Gaudens
Martin Luther King Jr.
Thaddeus Kościuszko
César E. Chávez
John Muir
Eugene O'Neill
Thomas Stone
Jean Lafitte
Frederick Douglass
George Rogers Clark
Clara Barton
Charles Pinckney
Carter G. Woodson *
Carl Sandburg *
Mary McLeod Bethune *

The NPS uses a short "nickname" for parks. All of these use the person's name as the nickname except for the three marked with asterisks. These each add a variation on house to the name, but I don't think it represents a major change in the way that the Park Service treats those sites. Similarity, I don't know why Edgar Allen Poe couldn't be the Edgar Allen Poe House.

Almost none of these are really just about one person. That person represents something else. Olmsted is about landscape architecture and parks and cities. Edison is about the ways that innovation transformed America.
 
Who else represents a truly American Experience? When you include arts, it opens up some interesting conversations. Who should get a single person National Park site?

Frank Lloyd Wright
Ed Orgeron
George Lucas
Elvis
Ernest Hemingway

Top 10 Shapers

Thinking back over the Top 10 Shapers of the American Landscape, I would recommend a fun Reading Day readingBy John Muir in The Atlantic Monthly in April 1898, The Yellowstone National Park.

Here is the list of Top 10 Shapers that I presented, in alphabetic order. For comparison purposes I have linked each one to its entry in Wikipedia, but these are not definitive descriptions.

Daniel Burnham

Andrew Jackson Downing

Dwight D. Eisenhower

Herbert Hoover

Thomas Jefferson

William J. Levitt

Robert Moses

John Muir

Frederick Law Olmsted

Gifford Pinchot

The Original Pinelands Comprehensive Plan of 1980

I was pretty excited when I found out that both parts of the original 1980 New Jersey Pinelands Comprehensive Management Plan are available online.

Beatrix Farrand documentary

CORRECTION: On Wednesday at 7 join us for a visit from Karyl Evans as we learn about her documentary on Beatrix Farrand.

This is the first documentary ever produced about the life and gardens of Beatrix Farrand, the most successful female landscape architect in early 20th century America and one of the founders of the American Society of Landscape Architects.

This compelling film chronicles the life of Beatrix Farrand (1872-1959), the niece of Edith Wharton, who grew up in the privileged world of the East Coast elite and fought through the challenges of working in a male-dominated profession to design over 200 landscape commissions during her remarkable 50-year career.
The documentary takes viewers on an inspiring journey across the country as we explore her personal story and many of her most spectacular gardens, including Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C.; the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden at the New York Botanical Garden; Garland Farm in Bar Harbor, Maine; the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Garden in Bar Harbor, Maine; and her California gardens.

The narrative is recounted through interviews with Farrand scholar Diana Balmori, landscape historian Judith Tankard, and landscape architect Shavaun Towers. Current photographs and footage of more than 50 Farrand-related sites along with archival images from the Beatrix Farrand Archives at the University of California Berkeley are woven together to bring to life Beatrix Farrand’s extraordinary story, reminding us why her awe-inspiring work is still relevant to this day.

Karyl Evans is a six-time Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker. Ms. Evans, owner of Karyl Evans Productions LLC in North Haven, Connecticut has produced more than 50 historical documentary projects over her 30 year career. Karyl is on the National Speakers List for the Garden Club of America and is a Fellow at Yale University.

To learn more about the work of Karyl Evans visit: KarylEvansProductions.com 

Turn up the heat and see what you get

When we were kids we learned to write invisibly with lemon juice and then later we could reveal the secret message by holding it close to a flame. The heat revealed what had been previously hidden.

This summer's British heat wave is doing the same thing. The heat is revealing long lost patterns beneath the surface. Sam Knight digs a little deeper in this New Yorker piece on the visible archaeology. 

Caught Mapping

PlaNetizen had a great Friday Eye Candy on hand-drawn maps that included this classic film, Caught Mapping. It presents a fairly auto-centric view of mapping, but is a fun step back in time.

 

History maps

Mapping history has been around for a while. But I thought this series of maps from the Washington Post were very interesting. They asked where there were towns in the US named after towns in England. The maps, while simple, tell a story a bit different than I had expected.

Most Endangered in NJ

The most endangered historic sites in New Jersey has been announced for 2016. I was particularly disappointed to hear that the Whyman House in Elizabeth made the list. It must have been a very handsome house in its time, but now it is a somewhat expensive opportunity in a city where history seems often forgotten.

Princeton Battlefield

The Cultural Landscape Foundation has weighed in on one of New Jersey's special landscapes: the Princeton Battlefield. While part of the site is a State Park, part of it is owned by the Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS).

TCLF is concerned about the current threat to the IAS portion of the site: "The current IAS proposal calls for construction of fifteen faculty housing units on the very spot where historians believe Washington’s charge struck the British lines." With municipal authorities having given the project permission to begin, the site was cleared in November and December, but legal appeals may still change the course of this plan.

Byrne Seminar trip

Hallowed ground for landscape architects

More than 25 years ago I learned about Generalife and the Alhambra in one of my first college classes and I finally got to visit it this summer. While it was well worth the wait, I gather that if I had gone earlier, there would have been fewer rope barriers in spaces like the Court of Lions. But the restoration work would also not yet have improved some sections.

Not only is this a UNESCO World Heritage site, but it is also on the short list of greatest landscapes anywhere.