Quentin P. Lewis

Building with History: Exploring the Relationship between Heritage and Energy in Institutionally Managed Buildings

Abstract Drawing on interdisciplinary research focusing on Durham University estate, we describe how buildings constructed as part of an eighteenth century transition to a high carbon coal-based economy, are used and understood by their current inhabitants. Applied heritage research has tended to focus on the thermal and energetic properties of historic buildings, as distinct from their social meaning and use. A similar separation between the physical building and its social use is inherent in methodologies such as energy audits that constitute key devices through which buildings are institutionally managed. We argue that these perspectives have overlooked how a significant element of energy use arises from the complex practical interactions between people and infrastructure. From this perspective we argue that better outcomes for energy and heritage would result if greater contextual consideration was given to the existing possibilities afforded by historic buildings and their users.

Improvement and Agriculture in Massachusetts at the Dawn of the Nineteenth Century

This chapter focuses on Massachusetts’ agriculture and rural life at the turn of the nineteenth century. I survey agriculture in the Connecticut River Valley at this time and show how it was articulated within broader social and economic relationships. Additionally, I explore the development of agricultural science through societies and publications and I highlight the transition from Improvement as an elite, specialized, and experimental activity in New England to Improvement as a middle-class, generalized, and productive activity. I argue that Improvement in New England manifested itself in the changing political-economy of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. I suggest that Improvement gained the prominence that it did in the early nineteenth century because of a dramatic economic and social break in New England between urban areas like Boston and rural areas like the Connecticut River Valley. Cultural, social, and economic mechanisms of hegemony began to fall apart at the end of the century, and Improvement emerged as a way to reassert the dominance of the market-oriented city over the more nebulous mixed economy of the countryside. I draw on primary and secondary literature on New England farming to paint a picture of the productive relations, social relations, and economic outputs of the region’s farms.

Rural New England in Time and Place

This chapter examines New England as a place, with a history that transcends its often timeless character. It takes apart the idea that rural New England is a place cut off from global processes and argues instead for a historically situated “stratigraphy” of New England landscapes, which were always connected to broader social processes. The earliest landscape is the Algonkian homeland, in which Native people of the northeast utilized a variety of hunting, gathering, and horticultural strategies in combination with fluid and dynamic settlement patterns. This landscape was “improved” by the landscape of the colonial encounter, in which European physical and symbolic violence re-shaped the Algonkian homeland into a military and economic space fit for colonial raw material extraction. Wealth production and class formation in the eighteenth century led to the development of the agricultural economy of the region, connected to the Atlantic world through material goods and shared ideological formations. This landscape culminated in the first wave of agricultural Improvement, undertaken by the region’s elite in the mid to late eighteenth century.

The Ebenezer Hinsdale and Anna Williams’ House: Materializing the Improver

This chapter elaborates and focuses on a specific site and family as a case study for understanding the manifestations of New England Improvement. I return to the E.H. and Anna Williams’ house in Deerfield, MA, described in the prologue to locate the Williamses in the time, place, and social reality of early nineteenth century New England. I situate the Williamses in relation to the political–economic structure of the Connecticut River Valley and trace the family’s connections with agriculture, economy, and power in colonial New England. I begin exploring the way in which Improvement was an organizing spatial principle at the house by examining the interior architecture and materiality of the Williams’ house. I show how the things in the Williams’ house, as visible in the Probate inventory, manifested a dialectic of visibility and invisibility, drawing social distances between work and leisure.

Rural Life and Historical Archaeology

In this introductory chapter, I argue that rural life in the modern world has been understood in a number of very narrow ways, as studied in archaeology and fields beyond. I locate this lack of dynamic analysis as a function of an easy ideological dialectic of urban progress and rural backwardness that has characterized social thought since the nineteenth century. As an alternative, I offer up an archaeology of Improvement, a global rural modernization movement that profoundly shaped the landscapes of colonial and rural spaces in the rise of the Atlantic world. The materiality of Improvement is visible in a wide variety of domains and at multiple scales from individual artifacts to landscapes. I argue for an archaeology of Improvement, precisely because so many of its practices and ideals were enacted through landscape changes and interactions with the prosaic materialities of rural life. I discuss the literature on the archaeology of Improvement in Britain and in North America and argue that understanding Improvement helps to counteract the idea that the great social changes of the nineteenth century only happened in cities. Further, a discussion of Improvement, as opposed to other terms that describe the modernization of farming, highlights the complex relationships between ideologies, social relations, and a diverse array of material culture forms. I also lay out the structure of the argument within the chapter.

The Logic of Improvement in the Williams’ Yard

In this chapter, I focus on yards. Yards are social-spatial formations that have been discussed many times in archaeological contexts, but rarely from the perspective of Improvement. However, an examination of the Improvement literature on yards reveals them to be key sites of social and material production, in the eyes of Massachusetts early nineteenth century agriculturalists. I survey the literature on yard organization in New England, paying particular attention to the social and economic roles of the front yard, dooryard, and barnyard in eighteenth and nineteenth century farm houses. I then show how, following their acquisition of the house in 1816, the Williamses substantially modified the yard. They terraced the south lawn, covering a work and disposal area with an aesthetic landscape. They also re-located work areas to the back of the house, in ways that made this work invisible from the street. In this, they were enacting contradictory principles of improvement that simultaneously advocated increased work and productivity and sought to make the evidence of that productivity invisible.

Manuring and the Political Economy of Improvement

In this chapter, I focus on the materiality of a subject featured prominently in early nineteenth century Improvement literature, but understudied archaeologically: manuring. After discussing the presence of a cobble platform found in the barnyard of the Williams’ house, I will show how this manure organizing stercorary relates to the changing political economy and ecology of early nineteenth century New England. This stercorary was part of a suite of manure management strategies advocated in the Improvement literature of early nineteenth century New England. Manure management was the primary practical activity advocated by Improvers, and the increasing regimentation and management of manure was part of an attempt to address a growing social and ecological dislocation in western European and American agriculture.

Excavating the Yeoman: Materializing the Idealized People and Landscapes of Improvement Literature

In this chapter, I focus on the material and spatial dimensions of the Yeoman, a discursively constructed subject within the pages of New England Improvement literature. I treat Massachusetts Improvement literature as a kind of symbolic landscape, to explore the subjects and social relations that manifest on it. The goal is to understand how Massachusetts Improvers saw the landscape they wanted to create, and the people they wanted on it, while identifying the social, economic, and political barriers that prevented that landscape from emerging. The figure of the Yeoman was moralized through the appropriate or inappropriate uses of material things and spaces, and I utilize depictions of farming as a means of probing this complex moralized framework. The Yeoman was also implicated and constituted within a symbolic regional geography that positioned New England as a free, White, market-oriented enclave, and against Southern slavery and decadence.

Improvement, Capitalism, and Landscape Change

In this chapter theorizes Improvement as a material and symbolic practice. Improvement manifested as a series of ideas about people, things, and spaces that emerged in the early modern period, as well as a set of practices that enacted those ideas. Rooted in the twin modern concepts of betterment and profit, Improvement was practiced across the Atlantic world as a means of aligning rural and colonial areas with global markets and manifested moralized ideas about the rationality of human beings and nature. This process was ecological as well as social and material, and I survey literature on historical ecology to show how Improvement was brought to bear to address ecological and economic problems plaguing capitalist agriculture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. To study this complex phenomenon, I utilize archaeological approaches to the study of landscapes in order to explore how the constellations of people, ideas, things, and places cohered into landscapes of improvement at given historical moments. I also utilize Marxian theories of space to explore how tension, contradiction, and struggle manifested as changing landscapes. I explore some of the literature on Improvement in the United Kingdom and North America, examining how studies of Improvement could benefit from this framework. I conclude by suggesting that archaeological theories of landscapes and Marxian theories of space can be fruitfully brought together, to see archaeological stratigraphy and changing landscapes as social relationships.