Patapsco: Life Along Maryland’s Historic River Valley (review)

If the word Patapsco resonates with you, chances are you are acquainted with the Chesapeake Bay watershed, where the Patapsco River is a major tributary. The villages and towns that sprang up there as early as the 1770s resulted from mills and other emerging industries powered by the river’s flow. The valley carved by the Patapsco has a broader national significance, however, since the young nation’s first railroad and federally funded highway followed the Patapsco River Valley corridor as the country began to expand westward. The late twentieth century obscured the region’s historical distinctions as modern manufacturing trends and an interstate highway walloped its economic stability and challenged the livelihoods of many living along the river. In Patapsco: Life along Maryland’s Historic River Valley, oral historian and folklorist Ali Kahn and photographer Peggy Fox vividly demonstrate the very real impact these transitions had on almost sixty individuals and their neighbors. Together the authors depict in words and images “a rural world born of river, road, and rail,” (26) and capture “the long view of the valley’s cultural legacy” (33).

The book opens with a thoughtful foreword by Harvard psychiatrist Robert Coles, who senses in Kahn and Fox’s work echoes of writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans’ seminal 1941 book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company), about three white tenant farm families in Hale County, Alabama. Coles recalls meeting Evans not long before he died in 1975, when the photographer worried that “future Americans may study their history lessons, but will they be able to know the past, see things as they were, hear people talking about how it went, day by day, for themselves?” (xi).

Fox’s pictures, taken between 1997 and 2008, make a very different impression from Evans’ straightforward documentary approach, however. Both photographers shot their images in black and white but Fox, the twenty-first century artist, uses the computer to introduce color—reminiscent of old hand-tinted postcards, creating effects sometimes eerie, and other worldly—to many of her scenes. Kahn writes that the technique reveals her co-author’s “personal and poetic response to the place, both real and imagined.” This, then, is the Patapsco River Valley of Fox’s mind, “a landscape of memory imbued with sensuality and nostalgia” (34).

Generously proportioned and cleanly designed, the book opens with two dozen full-page atmospheric views of rail lines and street scenes, gravestones and old mills, modest dwellings, and the ruins of a once elegant finishing school for young women, setting the stage for Kahn’s introduction and a short piece entitled “Valley Places” (which would have served the reader better if the sections had been merged since both discuss the ideas and methodology behind the book). Employing succinct yet elegant prose, Kahn’s essays introduce us to five communities, from trendy and touristy Ellicott City to Daniels, which no longer exists. The remaining and dominant narrative text is drawn from oral histories Kahn conducted between 1997 and 1999. “Memory makes mistakes,” she stresses, and concedes that memory “is a vital and imaginative process through which we continually make sense of our lives. It is what we perceive to have occurred” (28). This emphasis on the imagination clearly bonds Fox and Kahn and acknowledges that those who interpret communities approach the task from their own perspectives as well as those whose world they present.

Since Patapsco is geared to a popular rather than an academic audience, Kahn goes on to explain that oral history works as “a collaborative and subjective process.” Because the oral historian directs the event, “her intent shapes the exchange” (28). In a footnote, Kahn clarifies that although her text was drawn from verbatim transcripts, she has edited them “to eliminate some of the vagaries of speech for easier reading and for narrative flow...