THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 3, 1995 TAG: 9508310621
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY DAVID MONROE
LENGTH: Medium: 83 lines
POQUOSIN
A Study of Rural Landscape and Society
JACK TEMPLE KIRBY
The University of North Carolina Press. 293 pp. $39.95; $17.95, paper.
In Poquosin: A Study of Rural Landscape and Society, Jack Temple Kirby provides another way to look at the environment and the people of southeast Virginia and northeast North Carolina. He creates an ``environmental history - a narrative of human-landscape interrelationships in the low country between the James River in Virginia and the Albemarle Sound . . . North Carolina.''
In an approach slightly different from soil scientist Bill Green's Water, Ice and Stone, which dealt with the Antarctic region, Kirby goes beyond ``geopoetry'' - the rich historical narrative of the land's development - to examine the influence of people on the land and the land on the people.
Pocosins - the American Indian spelling is poquosins - are the middle grounds between swamps, which have water moving through them most of the year, and swamps-on-hills, where the water stands still. Their soils have a vast capacity for storing carbon but are relatively nitrogen-starved and very acidic. The vegetation that does persist on pocosins requires fire for regeneration. The American Indians knew this and practiced agriculture based on burning the woods and planting corn. In Poquosin, however, Kirby chronicles and analyzes men's persistent attempts to force European farming techniques on the land.
Kirby, a history professor at Miami University, is fascinated by early white residents' efforts to duplicate European agronomy, with organized, clearly defined planted fields, and by how frequently those methods failed. He uses historic diaries extensively to demonstrate these men's relationships with the land and to explore what they were learning from their experience. Virtually every important Virginia and North Carolina low-country family is given space in his analysis.
In looking at the lives of the men who attempted to make their fortunes manipulating the land, Kirby brings us to a better understanding of the traditions, social structure, politics and economy of the region. Beginning with Edmund Ruffin, who founded the Farmer's Register, considered to be the best American agriculture journal of the 19th century, he examines the efforts to restructure the soil to be more productive of ``market'' crops.
Ruffin applied crushed shells to the soil to add calcium. Richard Eppes, Hill Carter, the Burgwyns and the Skinners all employed European-style deep plowing; fertilized with manure (and later chemicals); planted wheat, corn or tobacco; and established elaborate formal gardens around their mansions. They were the beautiful people, the cosmopolitans.
Frederick Law Olmsted, a bourgeois outsider who wrote with cold reality about his observations of the low country, noted that the European style of farming actually impoverished the countryside. He thought men who practiced these methods were lazy, careless and unscientific.
Indeed, the plow exposed soils to wind and water erosion. Streams silted to such an extent that some tobacco towns by the upper Chesapeake became isolated from river channels. The siltation clouded waters and upset the production of phytoplankton, thus causing losses in fish and shellfish populations. And the grain culture multiplied pest populations at the same time that the ``Swampers'' discovered the commercial value of hunting duck, geese and other birds that were natural predators of the pests. Pest populations exploded.
Swampers made drainage of stagnant waters a priority to stave off illness, but this diminished the swamps' productivity and thus diminished their independence. They subsequently turned to renegade activities to maintain livelihoods and became maroons and revolutionaries.
Each change imposed on the land caused an impact on the people who tried to maintain life on it. Kirby shows how the process has continued to recent times with the creation of pine plantations and the development of paper mills. ``The tragedy of a people no longer able to sustain themselves harmoniously on a rural landscape is inseparable from the tragedy of a landscape poisoned,'' he writes.
With Poquosin, Kirby gives us a thorough examination of the long and ambiguous relationship between humans and the rest of nature in a region too little explored. MEMO: David Monroe, a former town planner for Kitty Hawk, N.C., owns the
Island Bookstore in Duck, N.C. by CNB