Viewpoint: Introducing Environmental History into Vernacular Architecture: Considerations from New England's Historic Dams

At 9:06 a.m. on July 1, 1999, backhoes began removing a temporary sixty-foot-long curvilinear gravel cofferdam across a segment of the Kennebec River at Augusta, Maine, forty miles upstream from the coast (Figure 1). The resulting breach allowed water to pass through a recently removed portion of the Edwards Dam, a 917-foot-long and 24-foot-tall structure first built in 1837 of timber cribs filled with rock ballast to power seven adjacent sawmills, a gristmill, and a machine shop (Figure 2). The subsequent demolition of the remainder of the dam created open spawning grounds for several fish species and revitalized the river's ecology.¹ The now obsolete associated mill buildings also came down (Figure 3). When erecting the dam 162 years earlier, its owners installed a fish ladder to placate local fishermen who contested the dam's construction, though a flood the following year damaged it beyond repair. As a consequence, by 1860 spawning fish populations, unable to return to their traditional breeding grounds, plummeted to "just short of utter extinction," as contemporaries lamented.² While the fish population dwindled, the human population thrived thanks to controlled water-power that boosted an industrializing settlement at the state's newly inaugurated capital. Thus, at the moment the natural world suffered, its cultural counterpart flourished. Conversely, when environmental arguments brought down the Edwards Dam in 1999, the historic cultural landscape disappeared as "local residents watched part of Augusta's rich industrial heritage slowly drain into the Atlantic," in an event dubbed by environmental writer John McPhee, "farewell to the nineteenth century."³

Figure 1.

Removal of the Edwards Dam's cribwork of hemlock logs and stone (1837) capped with concrete (1870), June 1999. The gravel cofferdam (behind backhoe) withheld the Kennebec River temporarily to allow removal of this first portion of the dam (foreground). Photograph by John Patriquin, Portland Press Herald. Courtesy of Getty Images.

While this evidence suggests a strictly inverse relationship, the complex histories of dams showcase the inherent intertwining of nature and culture. Just as historical battles over dam erection often pitted their economic value against their environmental impact, current efforts by environmentalists to remove dams counteracted by resistance from preservationists aiming to keep them recapitulates similar rhetoric. Scholars of the built environment are already robustly equipped to address questions of class, ethnicity, gender, and race embodied in places ranging from intimate spaces to individual buildings to entire cultural landscapes.⁴ But these spaces also involve environmental factors, such as providing shelter from the elements, encouraging human interaction with nature, or actively shaping surroundings to affect behavioral change. By incorporating nature as a category of analysis, scholars of vernacular architecture and cultural landscapes can fundamentally strengthen their understanding of the built environment.

Figure 2.

Kennebec Dam (later named Edwards Dam), in Augusta, Maine, first erected in 1837, with associated mills. Detail taken from Walter Wells, The Waterpower of Maine (Augusta, Maine: Sprague, Owen & Nash, 1869), plate following p. 174. Collection of C. Ian Stevenson.

Figure 3.

Demolition of the former Edwards Mills, Augusta, Maine, July 1999. Although some of the complex succumbed to a 1989 fire, the removal of the adjacent Edwards Dam prompted demolition of the remainder. Photograph by Zachary Violette, 1999.

Early in the development of the field of environmental history, William Cronon identified distinct opportunities for the subdiscipline.⁵ Building on this approach, those who study vernacular building practices and cultural landscapes can contribute to environmental analyses writ large by treating landscape as an actor (rather than a stage).⁶ Many pioneering environmental historians viewed the built environment as a harbinger of declension—a belief in the lethal human hand toward a vulnerable nature—that did little to engender environmental history's methodological advantages for vernacular architecture scholars.⁷ A second generation of environmental historians began to problematize the notion of a neutral and static nature, leading to the increasingly popular belief that nature and culture do...