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3. Turnpikes and Romance in the Mountains
- The University of Tennessee Press
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Chapter 3 Turnpikes and Romance in the Mountains As the American wilderness began to diminish, the American people began to cherish it. With Indians subjugated and predatory animals greatly reduced, the wilderness no longer seemed so threatening. However, it remained rural and comparatively undeveloped and thus greatly appealing to those who lived in the Atlantic seaboard’s growing cities. The southern highlands also appealed to the southern plantation elite. Growing miles of turnpikes and hotel accommodations, as well as stagecoach and horse maintenance facilitated America’s first wave of tourism.1 This was what scholar Edward Halsey Foster described as Americans’ desire to establish a “civilized wilderness,” replete with travelers’ facilities and a dynamic social component.2 Nineteenthcentury travelers even created a tri-part categorization of rural scenery, which they described as either beautiful, picturesque, or sublime. Beautiful scenery was pastoral lowlands or hills, while picturesque and sublime were varying degrees of mountainous country. Tourists sought sublime lands most of all, for they had the power to unite humankind with eternity.3 Romanticism’s appeal during the early nineteenth century grew as a reaction against early industrialism and represented a departure from the Enlightenment ’s heavy emphasis on logic and reason to focus on aesthetics and emotion. But without the long literary, architectural, and artistic traditions of the Old World, the Romantic era in the United States grew intimately associated with natural beauty. As early as the 1820s–40s Thomas Cole and the Hudson River School of landscape painting captured this mood in their art that glorified the American wilderness. Romanticizing the mountains and the forest was far more than entertainment ; from the outset it carried religious overtones.4 As Cole himself wrote, “Poetry and Painting sublime and purify thought, by grasping the past, the present, and the future—they give the mind a foretaste of its immortality , and thus prepare it for performing an exalted part amid the realities of life.”5 The art that Cole referred to was, of course, oriented toward forested mountains not yet seriously altered by encroaching human activity. “Prophets of old retired into the solitudes of nature to wait the inspiration of 36 j Turnpikes and Romance in the Mountains heaven,” Cole wrote, and “that voice is YET heard among the mountains! St. John preached in the desert;—the wilderness is YET a fitting place to speak of God.”6 Cole also described the simple human enjoyment of beautiful, natural scenery and the important respite such lands offered people in an age of “meagre utilitarianism” and relentless toil.7 Cole singled out mountains as the most prominent landscape feature deserving praise and enjoyment, but also praised America’s rivers, forests, lakes, and even her skyscapes.8 Finally, Cole concluded that Americans were “still in Eden; the wall that shuts us out of the garden is our own ignorance and folly.”9 Early colonists had carried a paradox of fear and idealization toward the American wilderness that had its cultural roots in the Judaic-Christian tradition . Biblical attitudes toward the wilderness included both reverence for wild lands left over from mythic visions of the Garden of Eden, but also fear of wilderness as a source of satanic temptation.10 This cultural baggage, along with the realities of possible starvation, the threat of large carnivores and potentially hostile Indians, became posited in the early American mentality. A new phase in American environmental regard arose with the first elements of the new nation’s economic prosperity.11 Beginning in the late eighteenth century, privileged Europeans and the first group of Americans prosperous enough to travel in the back country at Illustrations such as this one epitomized the Romantic movement in southwestern Virginia. From Virginia Illustrated (1871). [34.206.1.144] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 08:08 GMT) Turnpikes and Romance in the Mountains J 37 their leisure, then return to eastern cities and write about their experiences, initiated the first romanticization of Virginia high country. This paradoxical aspect of humans in relation to the environment has, to some extent, characterized American environmental history ever since. A certain amount of economic prosperity generated, in part, by natural resource exploitation gives rise to conservation of (if not reverence for) those very natural resources. During the nineteenth century, these natural resources involved the mountainous eastern United States in general. But before travelers could begin romanticizing the hardships of earlier generations, they had to await the construction of hundreds of miles of turnpikes, hotels and inns, mineral springs facilities, and...