Nexus of Naturalists: Sharing Nature in the Columbus Dispatch Column of Edward Sinclair Thomas

Seventy-seven-year-old Edward Sinclair Thomas surely wished he was somewhere else when he found himself in an overcrowded room in Logan, Ohio, in March 1969. Given the choice, Thomas rarely chose to be indoors if he could be out in Ohio's woods, searching for new birds to add to his list of sightings for the year and exploring nature spots for his readers. He likely would have preferred to be at Neotoma, an undisturbed piece of wilderness he owned only ten miles from Logan, sitting on the porch of his cabin or tramping through the trees. After all, he had made a career of doing just that, working as a natural historian for the Ohio State Museum and writing weekly about Ohio's animals, plants, and places for the Columbus Dispatch.

On this day, however, Thomas was stuck in the overcrowded room, squeezed in with four hundred agitated people on a warm spring morning. Some were forced to stand, as there were more people present than chairs, and cars were crammed into every possible spot in the area around the building because the lot had quickly filled.¹ Many of those in attendance were likely there at Thomas's request—only days before he had encouraged readers of his column to show up and speak against a dam that threatened rare plant species and scenic attractions near Neotoma. Under the leadership of Thomas, known to many in attendance for his column, as well as preservationists from Ohio State University, the Sierra Club, and the Audubon Society, opponents of the dam managed to delay construction and, ultimately, kill the project altogether.²

The event highlighted the influence of Thomas, whose nature column reached hundreds of thousands of readers throughout central Ohio from 1922 until 1981, a span of nearly six decades. This article explores Thomas's writings in the Dispatch, presenting an overview of his career and writings as an example of American nature column writing. To do so, it utilizes an array of newspaper articles and archival sources, in addition to Thomas's column, to explicate not only the details of Thomas's life but the previously understated significance his work at the Dispatch had on naturalism in the state of Ohio. It argues that Thomas and his column functioned as a hub for a network of scientists, readers, and activists who communicated through his writings.

There are three primary reasons such a study is needed. First and foremost, this research helps scholars understand how nature columns such as Thomas's fit within the larger frame of environmental writing in American journalism and environmental history. Inspired by the environmentally conscious frontier histories of authors such as Frederick Jackson Turner and William Prescott Webb of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, researchers rose with the emerging ecological awareness of the 1960s and '70s to form American environmental history as a distinct field of historical study.³ Since this emergence, the field's researchers have sought to understand how representations of environment have changed throughout the history of the United States.⁴ As the following pages will show, Thomas was far from the only nature columnist in Ohio, and the work of twentieth-century newspaper nature writers followed centuries of environmental authors who came before them. Thomas's work with the Dispatch began in the early 1920s, a time when journalism on environmental topics had yet to develop as a niche of news reporting, pressing most coverage of environment, excepting crises like the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill, into columns and literature sections. As such, Thomas acts as a bridge between the nineteenth-century models of environmental discourse and the ecological model that gained prominence following publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in 1961.⁵ This article situates Thomas and his contemporaries contextually, connecting the fledgling genre of American nature writing of the nineteenth century with the modern environment beat.

Second, despite the fact that, throughout American history, most newspaper readers have been in cities and towns outside the distribution range of those...