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INTRODUCTION. The Soils of Old Virginia
- University of Georgia Press
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introduction The Soils of Old Virginia Hugh Hammond Bennett, founder of the Soil Conservation Service and one of America’s leading twentieth-century conservationists, liked to tell a story about his first experience with the agricultural and environmental history of Virginia. In 1905, Bennett had just graduated from the University of North Carolina with a degree in chemistry. His boss in the Bureau of Soils sent him, along with South Carolinian W. E. McLendon, to map the soils of Louisa County, in the center of Piedmont Virginia. The Piedmont was the heart of the South, extending from the Fall Line to the mountains, stretching south and west across the old slave states, through Virginia and the Carolinas into Georgia and on into Alabama and Mississippi. The Virginia Piedmont was a country of low, rolling hills covered with a rich, dense red clay soil underneath forests of oak and hickory. The region was also the cradle of the South and the United States: First settled by planters and slaves moving west out of the Tidewater , by the time of the Revolution the Piedmont was the home of Virginia’s revolutionary patriots. Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe all lived on “red land” plantations, while their mentor Patrick Henry farmed land in Louisa County itself. By the time Bennett arrived in the Piedmont, though, that tradition was a melancholy memory, marked on the land by a few evocative placenames and run-down mansions. Louisa itself was a rural backwater— scraggly, impoverished farms and old field pine stands broke up the forests, barely connected to the outside world by muddy roads leading to poorly served branch rail lines. In addition to the normal survey 2 introduction work, Bennett and his partner were told to report on the relationship between the county’s poverty and its agricultural soils. According to Bennett , Louisa’s residents claimed their red clays were barren, and the local farmers made little investment in improving their agriculture. Few of them believed that new crops, new equipment, or new methods would lead to prosperity in the Virginia Piedmont. Bennett was a native southerner, though, and he had been raised on the region’s lost glories. While no great romantic when it came to the “Old South,” Bennett never accepted that a region famous for its past prosperity and power was innately infertile. In later years, he would recall having a revelation that connected past and present as he and his partner went about their assignment. As Bennett would tell the story, he and McLendon were stirring through the woods down there . . . when we noticed two pieces of land, side by side but sharply different in their soil quality. The slope of both areas was the same. The underlying rock was the same. There was indisputable evidence that the two pieces had been identical in soil makeup. But the soil of one piece was mellow, loamy, and moist enough even in dry weather to dig into with our bare hands. We noticed this area was wooded, well covered with forest litter, and had never been cultivated. The other area, right beside it, was clay, hard and almost like rock in dry weather. It had been cropped a long time. We figured both areas had been the same originally and that the clay of the cultivated area could have reached the surface only through the process of rainwash—that is, the gradual removal, with every heavy rain, of a thin sheet of topsoil. It was just so much muddy water running off the land after rains.1 Bennett popularized the term “sheet erosion” to describe rainwater steadily , disastrously, washing topsoil from farm fields into muddy southern rivers, leaving infertile subsoils behind. In finding such a stark contrast between the Piedmont’s farmed and forested land, Bennett also understood the struggles of the region’s agriculture as a historic, not just a natural , problem. This realization propelled him from being a scientist from the South to being a southern historian—and a southern conservationist. Piedmont soils were a fragile resource, and their destruction had crippled the region’s economy for more than a century. Louisa County was poor, Bennett decided, because of what had been done to its fields back in the [174.129.93.231] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 15:30 GMT) the soils of old virginia 3 eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and because of what had not been done since then to repair the damage. But what had once been...