A Little Leaven Leaveneth a Whole: Unearthing the Moral Ecology of Antebellum Quaker Appalachia
- A Little Leaven Leaveneth a WholeUnearthing the Moral Ecology of Antebellum Quaker Appalachia
Teaches history at Kent State University. He has published an article on woodland conservation in the Western Reserve in the Northeast Ohio Journal of History and is completing a book manuscript that examines cider making and the margins of labor and ecology in antebellum New England.
Footnotes
1. Ezra Cattell, “Report of the Harrison County Agricultural Society,” Third Annual Report of the Board of Agriculture of the State of Ohio to the Forty-Seventh General Assembly, January, 1849 (Columbus: C. Scott, 1849), 69.
2. Donald Brooks Kelley, “Friends and Nature in America: Toward an Eighteenth-Century Quaker Ecology,” Pennsylvania History 53 (Oct. 1986), 257–72 (quotes 263, 267–68); Kerry S. Walters, “The ‘Peaceable Disposition’ of Animals: William Bartram on the Moral Sensibility of Brute Creation,” Pennsylvania History 56 (July 1989), 157–76 (quote 157); Richard Judd, The Untilled Garden: Natural History and the Spirit of Conservation in America, 1740–1840 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 201–208 (quote 204). For eighteenth-century Quaker views of nature, see Frederick B. Tolles, “George Logan and the Agricultural Revolution,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 95 (Dec. 1951), 593; Brooke Hindle, “The Quaker Background and Science in Colonial Philadelphia,” Isis 46 (Sept. 1955), 244, 248; Donald Brooks Kelley, “‘A Tender Regard to the Whole Creation’: Anthony Benezet and the Emergence of an Eighteenth-Century Quaker Ecology,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 106 (Jan. 1982), 69–88; Kelley, “The Evolution of Quaker Theology and the Unfolding of a Distinctive Quaker Ecological Perspective in Eighteenth-Century America,” Pennsylvania History 5 (Oct. 1985), 242–53; and Larry Clarke, “The Quaker Background of William Bartram’s View of Nature,” Journal of the History of Ideas 46 (July–Sept. 1985), 435–48. For Protestant views of nature in colonial America, see Lynn White Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” Science, vol. 155, Mar. 10, 1967, pp. 1203–1207. For capitalism and agro-ecology, see William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983); and Carolyn Merchant, Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 165–70, 196–97.
3. “Township Farmers’ Clubs,” Ohio Cultivator, vol. 2, Jan. 15, 1846, p. 11; Ezra Cattell, “Short Creek Township Agricultural Society,” ibid., vol. 2, May 15, 1846, p. 79; Jona. T. Scholfield, “Farmers’ Club in Belmont County,” ibid., vol. 3, Jan. 1, 1847, p. 8; “More Signs of Progress,” ibid., vol. 4, Feb. 1, 1848, p. 20; James Ladd, “Letter from Jefferson County,” ibid., vol. 5, Sept. 1, 1849, p. 261; James Ladd, “Jefferson County Fair,” ibid., vol. 5, Dec. 15, 1849, p. 372 (quote).
4. Cattell, “Harrison County,” Fourth Annual Report of the Ohio State Board of Agriculture to the Forty-Eighth General Assembly of the State of Ohio, January, 1850 (Columbus: S. Medary, 1850), 109–10. So pronounced was the Quaker influence within the Harrison County Agricultural Fair that broadsides advertising the fair employed the Quaker dating style. See Broadside, Harrison County Agricultural Society Fair for 1848, Harrison County Historical Society, Cadiz, Oh.
5. Horton Howard to Thomas Rotch, Nov. 15, 1811, Rotch-Wales Collection, Massillon Public Library, Massillon, Oh. For traditional views of the agricultural marginality of the un-glaciated Alleghany Plateau region of Appalachian Ohio, see Robert Leslie Jones, History of Agriculture in Ohio to 1880 (Kent, Oh.: Kent State University Press, 1983), 3; R. Douglas Hurt, The Ohio Frontier: Crucible of the Old Northwest, 1720–1830 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 149, 155.
6. William Hocking Hunter, “The Pathfinders of Jefferson County,” Ohio Archaeological and Historical Quarterly 6 (Apr.–July 1898), 212, 234; Charles Augustus Hanna, Historical Collections of Harrison County, in the State of Ohio… (New York: Privately Printed, 1900), 27–33.
7. Hunter, “Pathfinders of Jefferson County,” 218, 263; “The Agriculture of Ohio,” Ohio Agricultural Experiment Station Bulletin, no. 326 (July 1918), 262, 318, 332.
8. “Editor’s Rambles,” Ohio Cultivator, vol. 2, July 1, 1846, p. 98. Agricultural figures for Harrison County and the Short Creek Valley (Short Creek...
