Stories in Stone: How Geology Influenced Connecticut History and Culture

Introduction

Introduction Connecticut—unique, peculiar, unmistakable As in the smell of a skunk, the taste of an onion Or the cry of a blue-jay screaming up the wind —Odell Shepard, 1939 Aperson can learn much about Connecticut’s landscape and past land use by taking a walk in the forests that cover its highlands. Follow any blazed trail and it becomes obvious that, with the exception of the northwest region of the state and the Central Valley, steep slopes and flat land are equally rare here. Instead, gentle sloping hills, rolling like ocean waves and changing color with the seasons, predominate. Along the path a profusion of rocks and boulders stick out of the ground, as if they had grown like mushrooms. Usually a faint mineral layering is perceptible on their surfaces not covered by lichens. Bands of light and dark crystals alternate. Their attitude varies greatly from stone to stone, suggesting that the rocks once belonged to a coherent mass that was broken up, its fragments scattered across the land by surging sheets of ice. Tall oaks and a few beech trees occupy the spaces between the boulders ; somehow their roots have found sufficient soil in which to grow. These trees are all young, with straight trunks that rarely exceed a foot in diameter. Old gnarly trees with their wide canopies and massive branches, winners of past struggles for sunlight, are missing. The reason for their absence becomes apparent when the path cuts through a gap in a stone wall, built from glacial boulders, that crosses the forest, climbs a hillside, and stretches on to the horizon (plate 1). Not so long ago these low walls bordered open fields and meadows; by the end of the eighteenth century, c in fact, more than three-fourths of Connecticut had been cleared and turned into farm and pasture land. New England households needed more than thirty cords of wood a year for domestic use alone, which represented the annual logging of an acre of mature forest. In 1834, in fact, Jedidiah Morse, in the account of his travels, wrote, “The whole state resembles a well cultivated garden.” This rather romantic view, however, ignored the many negative impacts of wholesale deforestation and denudation , which caused changes in weather patterns and especially summertime droughts. Soils rapidly lost their natural nutrients, which were washed downhill, where they silted streams and rivers. Water tables fell, and the ecology changed irreversibly. Many plants and animals also disappeared, although, as the poet Odell Shepard writes above, skunks and bluejays remained. Hardly a cultivated Garden of Eden! Significant regeneration, thankfully, has occurred in the last century. Forests have regained more then half of their original footing, but new land-use patterns continue to cause major problems. Houses, roads, and parking lots cover the best soils in the valleys and progressively crawl up the hillsides. As a result, clean freshwater, the state’s most important domestic resource, has become increasingly depleted or contaminated. More then one and a quarter billion gallons of water are withdrawn daily; though much of it will return to the land, it will be contaminated when it does. Because of excessive pumping, some streams and small rivers carry barely any water at all during dry summers. So far, Connecticut has actually been lucky; rain has continued to fall, and the Connecticut River slakes our thirst with waters that accumulate first in Vermont and New Hampshire. However, past droughts show that this could all change rapidly . We can and should learn from the interaction between people and the land in the last four centuries in order to avoid past mistakes. For early settlers, the seventeenth century was a period of much adaptation . They had to learn to deal with a different land and ecology. The soils in “old” England’s agricultural south, where most of these people originated, contain a lot of lime, derived from soft bedrock that had formed in warm, shallow seas. Such soils are chemically basic and provide much-needed nutrients for raising grain. Soils throughout glacially ravaged New England, on the other hand, derive from hard quartz–rich formations; they are acidic and frequently very rocky. Colonists had no experience raising native crops and early on decided instead to import cereals and grasses and experiment with those. 2 Introduction Without the annual addition of copious amounts of lime and fertilizers, however, “New” England’s soils were not kind...