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chapter 1 From Public Playground to Private Preserve John W. Masury, a wealthy paint manufacturer from New York, recounted his 1889 southern journey to Thomasville, Georgia, as nothing less than an ascent into the heavens. On the train ride from New York, “rain was the order all the way . . . until Thomasville was almost in sight. An hour before we reached our destination the clouds broke away and revealed the sun’s face, and for sixty consecutive days ‘old Sol’ rose in splendor and set in glory.” His stay that winter was almost Edenic. In contrast to the grubby urban environs of New York, in the countryside between Thomasville and Tallahassee, Florida, an area known as the Red Hills, one “might ride or drive or walk in the pine forests, with entire comfort and without danger to health.” Masury considered these healthy jaunts possible because of the climate, which he described in spiritual terms: “There is ever about it a softness and sweetness which cannot be enjoyed elsewhere. To inhale the air there is equal to a drink of the ‘nectar of the gods.’”1 Just six years before Masury penned his flowery prose, another visitor, this one from Louisville, Kentucky, had a very different view of the Red Hills. He reported to his newspaper audience in 1883 that “the broad, roomy mansions under the liveoaks and magnolias have disappeared or fallen into decay.” Turning his attention from the landscape to the people, he described planter families who were “for the most part broken in spirit and ruined in purse by the war,” and African American tenants who struggled to engage a “simple and aboriginal style of farming without the most distant idea that there are other crops than cotton or that the progress of agricultural science has developed new methods and new implements. . . . He lightly scores the surface of the ground with a plow that is but a slight advance on the pointed stick figured upon the obelisks of the ancient Egyptians.”2 What accounts for 20 chapter one these ostensibly contradictory accounts? How could a landscape full of such obvious economic despair be the subject of Masury’s effusive praise? That Masury had just opened an eighty-room hotel in Thomasville partly explains his rhetoric, but he was not alone in singing the praises of the Red Hills. Simply put, the Red Hills environment had become healthy, at least in the eyes of wealthy travelers. During the last three decades of the 1800s, any place deemed healthy—first by the medical community, then by local commercial elites—was bound to attract the attention of an expanding class of health seekers. This new class of traveler, borne from America’s booming industrial economy, headed into particular natural spaces in search of cures for all sorts of physical and psychological maladies, including tuberculosis, hay fever, asthma, and what was then called neurasthenia. Along with mountainous , coastal, and hot spring regions, the piney woods of the South were considered by physicians and health seekers to be particularly salubrious. Turn-of-the-century Americans defined health broadly, and wealthy northerners soon began traveling south for a variety of reasons loosely affiliated with restoring healthy bodies. Many had an enthusiasm for outdoor recreation in the region’s fields, forests, and waterways, others a romantic penchant for the Old South and its social hierarchies. Some sought respite from cold northern winters and the emotional and physical rigors of urban life. The connecting thread to all of these motivations was the malleable notion of health. Wealthy travelers, whether suffering from bodily disease or not, wanted to find a healing landscape, one they could rely on to impart salubrity. Changing notions of health toward the end of the nineteenth century— and the prescriptions for travel that accompanied them—had a significant influence on the environments of healthy destinations like the Red Hills. Indeed, the environment was the object of a great deal of interest because it was an active medicinal ingredient. When post–Civil War travelers began their search for healthy places, they took with them well-established medical concepts that directly linked their bodies to the environment. As historian Conevery Bolton Valencius has shown, the world of nineteenth-century Americans was not one “in which the environment stopped at the seeming boundary of the skin,” and many experts and laypersons alike assessed particular environments in terms of bodily health.3 Those assessments often resulted in the alteration of “dangerous” environments such as...

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