Rosalie Edge, Hawk of Mercy: The Activist Who Saved Nature from the Conservationists

1. Noblest Girl

When Rosalie Edge spoke of her late start in conservation work, she mentioned Central Park, which she could see from her apartment on Fifth Avenue. In the 1850s landscape architects Fredrick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux had designed the beloved New York greensward to transform eight hundred acres of naked granite and marsh into pastoral woods, meadows, and ponds. For the last thirty years of Edge’s life, the tall Beaux Arts windows of her building refracted Central Park’s green relevance into her gracious rooms. Rosalie Edge—baptized Mabel Rosalie Barrow—had been brought up on Central Park’s engineered version of nature. By the time of her birth on November 3, 1877, millions of trees and shrubs, vines and flowers of more than one thousand botanical species had been planted in the red soil ferried over from New Jersey. Dirt by the ton had been transported to the chosen site, for “a crowbar thrust anywhere into the ground would meet rock,” Edge wrote. Her mother, Harriet Bowen Barrow, remembered the endless carts of earth drawn by draft horses lumbering up from the river dock to the future park. What Edge saw of Central Park’s virtuous beauty from her apartment could be deceptive. After heavy downpours, the New Jersey soil so laboriously excavated, transported, and deposited on Manhattan washed down the steep bank and entry drive on Central Park’s perimeter. The Fifth Avenue sidewalk across from Edge’s building would be caked in mud. She was piqued every [ chapter one Noblest Girl 10 ] chapter one time she saw men shovel the eroded soil into a truck, drive to the East River, and dump their wet load in. central park’s influence on Edge’s life, however, can be traced further into the territory of her memory, bounded on its far side by her childhood in the elegant carriage days of the early 1880s. This was long before she was drawn to wildness of either the manufactured variety or the natural type. The spectacle of New York’s ruling class on parade made a deeper impression. Central Park was the place she visited with her family when she was a pampered child called Mabel clothed in ermine and velvet, and the birds she loved were the stuffed ruby-throated hummingbirds that circled her white silk bonnet. The park was then “innocent of hard pavement. A good macadam was overlaid with earth—‘dirt’ as you say—and riders intermingled often with carriages on the drives—the little coupes, or heavy barouches drawn by big horses with silver-plated chains on their bridles, making music almost like bells. New York then was a proud city with a proud aristocracy.” Her British father, John Wylie Barrow, was a wealthy accountant, respected Orientalist, skilled horseman, and most wondrous of all, first cousin to Charles Dickens. With Mabel’s penetrating blue eyes and mass of wavy dark hair, she was said to bear a “wonderful likeness” to her father, who, judging from the oil portrait of him painted in 1864, resembled Dickens. According to Barrow family ritual, John Wylie, astride his favorite horse, Ottawa, arrived at the park ahead of the carriage that brought Harriet and the children. The groom followed a few paces behind Barrow leading Harriet ’s spirited white mare, Coquette. Mabel remembered how her mother, dressed in a slim black riding outfit, stepped down from the carriage and dramatically paused. Barrow did not permit her to mount her horse until, “imperious as a prince,” he ran his handkerchief over the mare’s neck and flanks to make sure she was clean and dry. Barrow scolded the groom if Coquette failed his inspection. Attentive little Mabel took mental note of her father’s confident exercise of authority. On one afternoon in April, the Barrows arrived at Central Park to see a procession heading to a statue of William Shakespeare in commemoration of the Bard’s birthday. Leading the way was Edwin Booth, renowned Shakespearean actor and despairing brother of the assassin John Wilkes. As the Barrow party neared the Shakespeare devotees, Harriet’s horse reared and pranced “like a ballerina” as though performing her old act in the circus that had previously owned her. noblest girl [ 11 The walkers scattered, and Edwin Booth turned to regard Harriet Barrow and her white mare. “His face lighted with genuine enjoyment, and he was applauding and saying ‘Brava! Brava!’” Harriet, however, was...