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12 Agriculture and Urban Development Patterns in the Highlands Richard G. Lathrop Jr. Introduction Prior to European settlement, Native American tribal groups, most notably the Lenni Lenape, inhabited the Highlands (Kraft 2001). Compared with the dramatic changes that followed, the Native Americans had a light touch upon theland.Withtheadventof Europeancolonization,theHighlandsunderwent a major transformation as the land was cleared to support the fledgling iron industry and agriculture. By the mid-1800s much of the Highlands was either actively farmed or repeatedly cut over for timber or charcoal. As technology and transportation changed, these industries changed, as did their imprint on the landscape. By the late nineteenth century, the heyday of the iron industry had passed and agriculture was in decline. Abandoned lands were soon reclaimed by forest by the early twentieth century. The Highlands remained a largely rural area of forests and fields until the mid-twentieth century and post–World War II suburban expansion. The advent of major interstate highway construction that first started in the 1950s brought the Highlands within commuting distance of the Philadelphia–New York City–Hartford metropolitan regions. Since the 1950s, portions of the Highlands have undergone dramatic human population growth and suburban expansion. Chapters 6 and 11 examine the region’s forest history and the iron industry in greater detail, but this chapter will focus on the land-use implications of agriculture and urban development. I will start by tracing the history of farming in the Highlands before charting the post–World War II trends in population growth and associated urban development. Agriculture Land Use Post–European Settlement to Present Day As the name of the region implies, the Highlands are noted for their rugged upland topography, conditions not generally conducive to farming. However, the broader region encompassed within the boundaries of the 260 Richard G. Lathrop Jr. Highlands Conservation Act of 2004 includes the river valleys nestled between the Highlands ridges as well as the more rolling terrain of the adjacent Piedmont (to the south) and Valley portion (to the north) of the Ridge and Valley physiographic provinces. In the unglaciated portions of the southern Highlands, described in chapter 3, these lowland areas are blessed with prime agricultural soils derived from the limestone and sedimentary bedrock rather than the igneous and metamorphic rocks of the true Highlands backbone. The major river systems such as the Susquehanna, Delaware, and Hudson provided early avenues for European settlement of the arable lands in the southern Highlands and on the fringes of the northern Highlands (Fletcher 1950; Hedrick 1933; Wacker 1975). In many cases, these earliest agricultural settlements were in the river and stream valleys previously farmed by Native Americans decades earlier. While these areas were beginning to be cleared and settled in the early 1700s, the interior portions of the Highlands remained in frontier status for decades longer (Wacker 1975; Russell 1976). The settlement pattern in the rugged interior was governed more by the emergence of the iron industry spurred on by the demand for Revolutionary War munitions and subsequent industrial development than by agriculture. In many instances, employees on the larger iron “plantations” cleared land for farms and pasture to provide a local source of food, fiber, and fodder (Ransom 1966; Rutsch 1999). Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century agriculture in the Highlands region shared many similarities to agriculture elsewhere in the northeastern United States. By the early 1800s the initial “frontier” phase of clearing and subsistence agriculture was over, and commercial agriculture was on the rise (Schmidt 1973; Danhof 1969). Wheat was an important early crop; it was in high demand, transported well, and provided a comparatively good return in relation to the effort expended (Favretti 1976; Fletcher 1950; Gates 1960; Hedrick 1933). This bountiful harvest was often short-lived because wheat was hard on the land through a combination of soil erosion and nutrient depletion and was also susceptible to introduced diseases and pests. To keep their land productive, farmers soon realized the need to rotate crops as well as apply fertilizer and other amendments to replenish depleted soil nutrients (Danhof 1969; Stoll 2002). In addition to livestock manure and guano, the application of gypsum and lime became a standard farming practice by the 1830s (Fletcher 1950, 1955; Danhof 1969). Local deposits of gypsum and limestone were in ready supply in the valleys that bound the Highlands (Schmidt 1973; Danhof 1969). To improve its availability for plant uptake, limestone (calcium carbonate) was burned in special limekilns constructed for this purpose to form lime (calcium oxide...

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