Speculative Landscapes: American Art and Real Estate in the Nineteenth Century 9780520975248

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THE PUBLISHER AND THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS FOUNDATION GRATEFULLY ACKNOWLEDGE THE GENEROUS SUPPORT OF THE AHMANSON • MURPHY IMPRINT IN FINE ARTS.

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SPECULATIVE LANDSCAPES

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SPECULATIVE LANDSCAPES American Art and Real Estate in the Nineteenth Century

Ross Barrett

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

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University of California Press Oakland, California © 2022 by Ross Barrett Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress. isbn 978-0-520-34391-7 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-520-97524-8 (ebook) Printed in China 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 10

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CONTENTS

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Introduction / 1 Land, Looking, and Futurity in the Hudson Valley / 13 Digging for Gold: Allegories of Speculation on the Illinois Frontier / 43 Picturing Land and Labor in the Old Northwest and New England / 75 Perilous Prospects: Speculation and Landscape Painting in Florida / 105 Painting and Property on Prouts Neck / 135 Conclusion / 171 Acknowledgments / 175 Notes / 177 Selected Bibliography / 217 List of Illustrations / 225 Index / 229

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INTRODUCTION

I find this vast network, which you call property, extended over the whole planet. I cannot occupy the bleakest crag of the White Hills or the Allegheny Range, but some man or corporation steps up to me to show me that it is his.

ralph waldo emerson, 1841

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as we now know it—a market-based system of property exchange imbricated in financial networks, powered by unsustainable speculation, bolstered by cultural representations, and intertwined with inequity—first began to take shape in the nineteenth century. In the hundred years that followed the Land Ordinance of 1785, the federal land system privatized huge swaths of U.S. terrain, a vast network of real estate institutions emerged to broker the sale and management of property, and the nation’s banking system developed an array of financial products to make real estate investment accessible to everyday consumers. By the end of the century, real estate was firmly established as a fixture of everyday economic life in the United States and an object of widespread cultural fascination and anxiety.1 Nineteenth-century American artists involved themselves in every aspect of the crystallizing real estate economy. Like many other members of the nation’s middle classes, fine artists used that system’s new forms of credit and financing to MERICAN REAL ESTATE CAPITALISM

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purchase family residences, vacation homes, and studio spaces that might otherwise have been out of reach. Artists with more substantial resources bought income properties, mineral rights, and shares in settlement schemes to safeguard their savings and build wealth for the future. Some speculated avidly on real estate, buying high-risk properties or infrastructure stocks with an eye toward quick and lucrative resale. Staking their fortunes and reputations on the success of these and other ventures, artists did their part to advance the real estate business’s transformation into a fully fledged economic system and a critical sector of modern American capitalism.2 Art historians have documented the land dealings of a handful of nineteenthcentury American artists and have made intermittent attempts to analyze the role that painting played in promoting tourism and development in particular locales.3 Very little work has been done, however, to understand how painters may have used their medium to contend creatively with their investment experiences or real estate enterprise more broadly. In recent years, Maggie Cao has studied Ralph Albert Blakelock’s paintings of New York shanties as creative reimaginings of urban real estate, and Spencer Wigmore has analyzed the ways that Albert Bierstadt’s landscapes evoked and affirmed land speculators’ financialized conceptions of Western terrain.4 Otherwise, scholars have tended to divorce nineteenth-century artists’ real estate activities from their creative work, insisting that the former unfolded in a discrete sector of existence “altogether different” or “absolutely apart” from the latter.5 Real estate investment was surely an afterthought, guilty pleasure, or ugly necessity for some painters, an instrumental chore carried out and then forgotten in the studio. As this book will demonstrate, however, real estate enterprise could also present its artistic practitioners with inspiration and provocation. Consider the landscapist Worthington Whittredge’s recollections of a land deal he contemplated while on an 1866 expedition to the Colorado Territory: [Denver] had the appearance of a spruced up mining camp. . . . We had seen in our march parts of costly machinery abandoned and lying by the roadside which had been brought thus far and had got stalled or perhaps the mine for which the machinery was intended had played out. Some pieces of this machinery were still to be seen in Denver. . . . An old man . . . squatted on the very piece of ground on which we were incamped [sic] . . . said he had lived there the full term necessary for preempting the land and that he had a clear title to 160 acres and he wanted to sell it . . . for $12.00. The sum struck me with peculiar force in as much as I had put aside just that amount to invest in some way in the west during our journey. I told the old man that I thought I would buy his land but I would like to consult with General Pope and find out if I could whether Denver was ever likely to become a big town or not. His countenance assumed a serious expression at once and he said ‘I know Denver is fifty miles away from any place but I have heard that there was a big rail road being built at Cheyenne and some day there will be a cross road from Cheyenne over to Denver and even if it is never built this is a nice place to live in for anybody who doesn’t want to travel.’6 2

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Recounting his negotiations with an “old man” who offered him the chance to buy a 160-acre parcel on the outskirts of Denver, Whittredge makes it clear that even the simplest of land exchanges could raise a host of stimulating insights and quandaries: gauging the worthwhileness of the proposed deal required Whittredge to consider the value of the “piece of ground” on offer and the prospects of a town (Denver) that still looked like “a spruced up mining camp,” to appraise the credibility of the old man’s prediction that there would “someday . . . be a cross road from Cheyenne over to Denver,” and to contemplate the ruin and waste left behind by a previous mining boom in the area (the “abandoned” bits of “machinery” left over from “played out” mines). Put differently, Whittredge’s account of the proposed deal (which he ultimately decided not to pursue) suggests that the practice of real estate dealing could spur the artistinvestor to think anew about property, land, nature, and time, to contend with novel but dubious promotional claims, and to reckon with the perils and effects of speculative endeavor. As I will show, a great many of Whittredge’s artistic contemporaries harnessed the insights and dilemmas they encountered in the land market to develop innovative paintings that grappled with the cultural forms and material currents of the real estate economy. To begin to recapture the ways that nineteenth-century American artists engaged this crystallizing system in their studio work, this book examines the business and creative undertakings of five painters—Daniel Huntington, John Quidor, Eastman Johnson, Martin Johnson Heade, and Winslow Homer—who participated actively in the real estate economy. By reconstructing the particular ventures and localized markets in which Huntington, Quidor, Johnson, Heade, and Homer were involved, the book will uncover the specific material problems and promotional gambits that real estate endeavor presented to these artists and trace the broader social, economic, and environmental forces that shaped their dealings. Analyzing a selection of contemporaneous paintings in this light, I will show that Huntington, Quidor, Johnson, Heade, and Homer tapped their experiences in the land market to work out innovative genre scenes, landscapes, and marine pictures that interrogated the real estate economy’s representational and spatial practices. Reworking the customary vocabularies of their respective genres, these works outline complicated accounts of soil and sea that contest land promoters’ imaginings of property; plumb the risks and uncertainties of speculation; explore the impact of development on workers, the poor, and the unpropertied; and imaginatively resist the real estate economy’s invasive spread. Advancing pointed critiques and dark parodies of the land business’s cultural forms and material dynamics, the paintings of these five artists gave voice to their makers’ private concerns and contributed to broader period debates about the expanding system of real estate capitalism. Speculative Landscapes proceeds chronologically, examining each of the artists’ participation in and creative responses to a succession of localized land booms—discrete episodes of intense speculation and rapid construction that erupted in outlying spaces Introduction

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newly “opened” to the market or in settled places that real estate operators seized on for redevelopment—that unfolded between 1820 and 1900. In so doing, the book traces nineteenth-century artists’ entanglements in several distinct phases of American real estate enterprise: early suburban development in the Northeast (chapter 1), antebellum town building on the Midwestern frontier (chapters 2 and 3), and mid- and late nineteenth-century resort development on the southern and northeastern coasts (chapters 3, 4, and 5). By tracking the shifting ways that American painters contended with land dealing over the course of the nineteenth century, this study demonstrates that painting was a significant and persistent inquisitor of the crystallizing real estate economy, a cultural form that reckoned with that system in every stage of its development and tapped into the concerns that the business provoked as it spread into the continent’s borderlands and reconfigured established communities in ever more intensively remunerative fashion. To set the stage for this endeavor, I will briefly trace the history of real estate enterprise in the United States, outline the cultural and material dynamics of land dealing in the nineteenth century, and describe the book’s structure and interventions. — The rise of the modern American real estate economy was made possible by a host of developments in nineteenth-century land policy, real estate marketing, and banking. In the decades after the Revolutionary War, early national leaders dismantled the colonial legal structures that had previously constrained the exchange of real estate— immovable property consisting of land and the buildings or natural resources on it— and formulated new conceptions of real property that stressed its character as an alienable good and a foundation for individual freedom.7 Republican thinkers redefined freely transferable real estate as a vehicle by which the virtuous yeoman could attain political independence (through the work of cultivation), while liberals emphasized alienable property’s status as a commodity and a means of creating private wealth.8 Drawing on these competing conceptions, late eighteenth-century congressional leaders passed a series of acts (including the 1785 Land Ordinance Act and 1789 Land Act) that created a national survey system to partition the interior lands “opened” by expansionism and Native American dispossession and established a network of federal offices to market the resulting properties to the public.9 Building on these early policies, nineteenth-century lawmakers enacted measures that expanded the reserve of marketable public land and the pool of potential buyers for these properties: between 1800 and 1862, Congress passed legislation that created vast “bounty tracts” of property available to military veterans, steadily lowered prices for public lands and eased payment terms for prospective purchasers, and transmitted huge swaths of inland terrain to railroad developers.10 Taken together, these policy initiatives helped create frenzied markets for interior and frontier lands. In the process, they effected an enormous transfer of territory once occupied by Native Americans 4

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into private hands: between 1800 and 1945 at least 1.5 billion acres of North American land was conveyed to settlers and investors.11 As the federal land system steadily privatized the continent, entrepreneurs repackaged the nation’s borderlands in a dizzying array of property types and development schemes (including frontier towns, prairie farms, Mississippi Valley plantations, and western railroad lots) and invented novel forms of real estate for settled locales (cooperative buildings, summer homes, speculative office buildings). Though their business would remain notoriously chaotic throughout the nineteenth century, real estate operators made certain efforts to rationalize the process of buying and selling property: at various moments, realty professionals established real estate boards and exchanges to monitor commercial practices and coordinate sales in local markets (late 1840s), developed title insurance to mitigate the legal risks of property acquisition (1870s), created multiple listing services to share information on pricing and values (1880s), and founded a national organization to standardize realty operations across regions (1891).12 New credit instruments and financial institutions made it possible, in turn, for an expanding range of American and foreign investors to snap up federal lands and purchase the novel properties that real estate brokers marketed in increasingly sophisticated fashion. Credit was a central element of the federal land system: government land offices allowed buyers to purchase properties on low-interest installment plans whose terms steadily improved during the antebellum period.13 As the demand for credit grew, entrepreneurs within the land business developed specialized forms of real estate financing. In the late 1840s, urban real estate operators organized the first building-and-loan associations and private mortgage firms to provide long-term, lowinterest mortgages to real estate buyers, and state-chartered banks began taking on mortgages in the decades that followed.14 As these loans became commonplace, banks and mortgage firms developed new types of financial products to mitigate the risks of real estate lending. In the 1880s, for example, western mortgage companies began packaging farm loans as bonds, which they then sold to East Coast investors.15 Spreading the risk that lending entailed to diffuse networks of speculators, these early mortgage-backed securities firmly tied real estate to the financial sector and worked to license audacious investment schemes and exploitative lending practices. As the nineteenth century unfolded, then, the workings of the federal land system, advances in marketing, and the development of realty finance gave rise to a real estate economy that spanned multiple regions and implicated a growing body of everyday investors. Many Americans, it should be noted, were discouraged from participating in this system. African Americans were dissuaded from buying real estate by property laws, discriminatory business practices, and white racial violence throughout the nineteenth century; Chinese immigrants were prohibited from owning real property by a series of anti-immigrant measures, known as alien land laws, that were passed by western states in the 1880s and 1890s; and married women were legally barred from Introduction

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buying real estate or maintaining their own landholdings in many locales until well after the Civil War.16 As various scholars have shown, however, women and people of color strove to circumvent these barriers and to find ways to exchange real estate and engineer remunerative property schemes; those who succeeded built lasting communities and established traditions of entrepreneurship and proprietorship that would expand in the decades that followed.17 As suggested above, much of the business conducted within the nineteenth-century real estate economy was speculative in character. Swooping in to newly enclosed and freshly redeveloped regions, experienced investors and novice speculators harnessed the era’s proliferating credit forms to buy up properties that they hoped to rent out or resell for a dramatic profit—gambling, in the process, that their new acquisitions would appreciate quickly or would at least appear promising enough after a short interval to attract other buyers. Eruptions of this sort of speculation (and the risky lending that enabled it) broke out wherever new property found its way to market; echoing reports made in countless other locales, literary travelers noted a “rage for speculation” in the Old Northwest in the 1830s (Harriet Martineau), “adventurers and speculators” flooding “unoccupied lands” in the Northeast in the 1840s (Charles Lyell), a “riot” of land dealing in Nevada in the 1870s (Mark Twain), and a wave of “land prospectors and land dealers” in Florida in the 1890s (Charles Edwards).18 Powered by speculative surges that intensified in periods of economic expansion, the nineteenth-century real estate economy developed in a spasmodic boom-and-bust rhythm, a cycle of delirium and decline that would continue to define business in the sector in the centuries to come.19 Dealings within this tumultuous system inspired myriad forms of creative cultural work and engendered far-reaching material hardship. Doing business in nineteenthcentury land markets was a deeply imaginative and culturally mediated endeavor. As noted above, investors bought and sold real estate on the basis of its remunerative potential; conducting these transactions with the idea that a property’s present worth derived from its possible future returns, market actors treated real estate as a manifestation of an abstract form of anticipatory value that David Harvey, Cédric Durand, and others have called “fictitious capital.”20 This entailed significant imaginative labor: assessing the anticipated value of a potential purchase required investors to “draw the future fully into the present,” to conjure up unrealized market conditions and divine the potential within enigmatic assets.21 Real estate marketers dreamed up all manner of divinatory techniques and prophetic representations to guide buyers as they undertook this prognosticative work. Land operators devised dubious forms of visual and visionary assessment—including “land looking” (discussed in chapter 1) and dowsing—to scrutinize the future potential embedded in enigmatic properties.22 And as new markets opened, real estate firms and pro-business boosters churned out alluring textual and visual representations of property—including guidebooks, newspaper advertisements and puff pieces, plats and plans, mortgage diagrams, town views, and 6

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postcards—that were designed to buttress investors’ confidence in the potential worth of specific schemes and the broader regions in which they took shape.23 As these representations proliferated, real estate investment became a kind of representational game: promoters strove to create signs compelling enough to attract investment, and investors strained to assess the credibility of innumerable market figurations. These semiotic games had profound social, economic, and environmental consequences.24 Even as they worked to transmute tangible parcels of earth or built property into immaterial vehicles of financial value, nineteenth-century land markets exerted violent pressures on particular bodies and places. Displacement and dispossession were thus preconditions for, and consequences of, much period land dealing. The real estate economy’s emergence and expansion was bound up with the massive dispossession and genocidal decimation of Native Americans; over the course of the century, land development displaced many other peoples who occupied newly marketable property in nonproprietary or insufficiently remunerative fashion (including squatters, itinerants, workers, immigrants, and the poor).25 As several chapters in the present study will show, the processes of enclosure, commodification, and gentrification closed off natural resources previously held in common and destroyed customary forms of life organized around these attributes. And the real estate business’s ever-intensifying profit motive squeezed workers inside and outside the land market: period development schemes were almost invariably realized by poorly paid or unremunerated laborers, and in many locales (as discussed in chapter 3), speculative development triggered dizzying land-value appreciations that incentivized property holders to exploit the workers who toiled on increasingly costly agricultural and industrial parcels.26 Real estate investment had the capacity, finally, to permanently alter the socioeconomic standing of its practitioners. As a number of scholars have shown, nineteenthcentury white consumers used real estate investment—a form of enterprise facilitated, as noted above, by interventionist federal policies—to build reservoirs of wealth that enabled their families to ascend to the middle class and maintain or improve their social standing across generations.27 Nineteenth-century lawmakers’ efforts to dissuade African Americans and other people of color from investing in real estate, conversely, established lasting material disparities that would underwrite racial inequality in the United States for decades to come.28 Buying and selling land could also bring financial ruin to its practitioners. Though few comprehensive records of the real estate sector exist before the 1880s, evidence suggests that foreclosures, insolvency, and homelessness increased dramatically during the downturns that followed the nineteenth century’s most dramatic booms in land speculation. The century’s many popular and widely reprinted stories of speculative failure make clear, moreover, that Americans of the period understood unsuccessful real estate investment to be a conduit to bankruptcy, vagrancy, and permanent dependency.29 —

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Over the course of the nineteenth century, then, the American real estate business gradually transformed from a localized and ad hoc pursuit into a fully fledged economic sector, a modern field of professionalized enterprise powered by proliferating forms of speculative investment and sustained by a vibrant promotional culture. As a first step toward understanding the contributions that artists made to this dynamic system—and the roles that property investment played in their creative processes— the following chapters examine the involvements of Huntington, Quidor, Johnson, Heade, and Homer in frenzied land markets that emerged in different corners of the nation at several distinct moments in the development of American real estate capitalism. Striking deals in booming locales that ranged from the Eastern Seaboard to the Upper Midwest, these artists bought and sold land, built and managed income properties, designed and developed resort communities, and contributed to the promotion of dubious real estate schemes. In so doing, each identified to some degree with the high-flying optimism and risk-taking climate of the markets in which they participated. Like many other Americans who got swept up by the emerging real estate economy, however, these artists also nurtured doubts about the efficacy and fairness of speculative land dealing. Though they occupied different stations and held varying political perspectives, they shared an interest in the social conditions of contemporary American life. As they worked to realize their real estate ventures, they spent time studying the places and people affected by their investments, and saw firsthand the transformations that real estate enterprise wrought on existing landscapes and lifestyles. As newcomers to or dabblers in the business, moreover, they took special note of the novelty and strangeness of the land market’s imaginative practices and cultural forms. As their ventures progressed and their perspectives on property shifted, I argue, these artists made creative efforts to reckon with the means and ends of real estate enterprise. Animated by a mix of misgivings—anxieties about their own solvency and standing, unease with the roles they played in the processes of enclosure and gentrification, and concerns about the moral and societal damage wrought by speculative development—Huntington, Quidor, Johnson, Heade, and Homer composed a handful of studies and finished works that contended evocatively with the cultural forms that mediated their dealings and the risks and perils their ventures posed. These works did not depict the land business or “illustrate” their makers’ real estate experiences in any straightforward way (were such representations even possible). By reworking customary pictorial conventions and incorporating overt and subtle evocations of real estate enterprise within their compositions, I argue, these artists worked out novel landscape, genre, and marine paintings that invoked and discredited the investment techniques, promotional imaginings of place and value, and conceptions of property that shaped land dealing in the specific regional markets they navigated. Repudiating the business practices and working fictions that made real estate exchange possible in particular locales, these pictures shape scenes of looking, land, habitation, and labor 8

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that dramatize the socioeconomic costs of speculative development, wishfully imagine spaces and lifeways beyond the land market’s reach, and direct the viewer to alternative perspectives on speculation and property. In so doing, the sketches and paintings of Huntington, Quidor, Johnson, Heade, and Homer advance evocative critiques of real estate that give refracted expression to their makers’ private concerns and echo claims made by a range of period thinkers—including evangelical ministers, literary satirists, abolitionists, investigative journalists, conservationists, and progressive reformers—who voiced concern about the privatization, partitioning, and financialization of North American land. Whether visualizing the folly and ruin of speculative development or reimagining the realty business’s scope and impact, their pictures made galvanizing contributions to the period’s ongoing efforts to reckon with, and rein in, the forces of American real estate capitalism. By addressing real estate as a fiscal and creative preoccupation of these five artists, this book takes a new approach to a problem—the relationship between finance and art—that has inspired a rich body of scholarship in recent years. My analyses draw inspiration from work in art history and literature that has examined intermediary cultural forms linking art, finance, and fiction in the United States and Europe; explored artistic and writerly engagements with the representational quandaries raised by money; surveyed visual and textual representations of financial subjects; analyzed art’s capacity to elucidate the structures of credit and debt; and theorized the art object’s capacity to function as an “economic actor.”30 Like much of this scholarship, my book addresses the market as a cultural space and art objects as vehicles of sophisticated economic critique. It does so, however, through a newly focused historical aperture: by centering its case studies on land-dealing artists, Speculative Landscapes takes a localized and grounded approach to analyzing art’s intertwinings with financial endeavor. Examining works by Huntington, Quidor, Johnson, Heade, and Homer as engagements with unique problems and possibilities encountered in historically and geographically specific land markets, the book advances a series of microhistorical accounts of art and real estate that aim to position these painters as conscientious interpreters of their own immediate economic milieus and insightful analysts of the nineteenth-century real estate economy’s regional instantiations. In so doing, these accounts also seek to open up new ways of understanding the historical significance and contemporary urgency of these artists’ works—and to move scholarship past the implausibly segmented accounts of their undertakings advanced by belletristic interpreters. Speculative Landscapes also engages the growing body of scholarship on the environmental implications of American art. A host of recent publications and exhibitions have analyzed the environmental beliefs encoded in nineteenth-century artworks, studied the extractive industries that produced artists’ materials, reconsidered artistic engagements with animals and climate, and contributed to broader ecocritical efforts to dislodge the ideology of anthropocentrism and reimagine human responsibilities to Introduction

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nonhuman nature.31 This book considers art’s environmental entanglements from an alternative perspective, one informed by recent work in literature and history on environing. Hannes Bergthaller, David Mazel, and other ecologically minded scholars have begun to use this term to describe the socio-spatial “processes through which human beings modify their surroundings as they make their living from the natural world” and “the symbolic transformations which configure ‘the environment’ as a space for human action.”32 In studying the engagements of Huntington, Quidor, Johnson, Heade, and Homer with real estate capitalism—the most dominant apparatus of environing at work in the United States in their period—I seek to understand the contributions that artists made to the concrete material processes that transformed the American environment in the nineteenth century and recapture the work they did to challenge or resist those processes. In so doing, I hope to illuminate threads of artistic and environmental history that have received less attention from ecocritical art historians and explore the insights that academic artworks offer about a socioeconomic system that has shaped everyday Americans’ relationship to nonhuman nature for more than two centuries. Each chapter begins by tracing the economic terms, material implications, and promotional underpinnings of a single artist’s real estate dealings. Each then examines one or more of that artist’s drawings, oil studies, or finished paintings—made during or after a foray in the land market—as conscientious and affectively charged efforts to reckon with the fantasies that shaped property investment in particular locales, to symbolically renounce or rectify the hardships inflicted by those ventures, and to imaginatively resolve their makers’ shifting attitudes toward real estate enterprise. By reading the paintings of Huntington, Quidor, Johnson, Heade, and Homer alongside contemporaneous commentaries on real estate, finally, each chapter explores the interventions that these deeply personal productions made in nineteenth-century dialogues about speculation, enclosure, gentrification, and private property. The book begins by examining a pair of artists who harnessed their disappointing experiences in two early land booms to compose incisive critiques of speculative development in the Northeast and Old Northwest. Chapter 1 analyzes Daniel Huntington’s Landscape (1837), Rondout Kill, Afternoon (1837), and Mercy’s Dream (1841) as creative repudiations of promotional narratives and investment techniques that the artist encountered while participating in an ill-conceived land scheme in the Hudson Valley. Chapter 2 examines three literary genre paintings by John Quidor that draw on a popular satire of speculation—Washington Irving’s 1824 short story “Money Diggers”—to allusively explore the ruinous potential and violent effects of risky land dealing in antebellum Illinois. Chapter 3 studies an artist who participated in two booms that broke out in the mid- and late nineteenth century. After tracing Eastman Johnson’s ventures in Wisconsin in the 1850s and Nantucket in the 1880s, the chapter examines the conflicting ways in which three of the artist’s pictures—Grand Portage (1857), Camp Scene, Grand 10

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Portage (1857), and The Cranberry Harvest, Island of Nantucket (1880)—envision land development’s impacts on the poor and unpropertied in these locales. The final chapters study two artists who contended creatively with development’s risks and costs during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Chapter 4 addresses Martin Johnson Heade’s On the San Sebastian River, Florida (1886–88) as an experimental view of Saint Augustine that gave voice to the artist’s darkening outlook on speculative development in Florida, and chapter 5 explores how Winslow Homer’s Bringing in the Nets (1887), A Summer Night (1890), and Eastern Point (1900) push back imaginatively against the privatization, development, and gentrification of the Maine coast. These case studies offer a preliminary account of the intersections between property dealing and art making in the nineteenth-century United States, an account that I hope will begin to establish academic painting’s importance as a cultural auditor of the real estate economy and shed new light on the medium’s capacity for incisive material critique. Several generations of scholars have studied the work that landscape, genre, and marine paintings did to justify the nation-state’s seizure and exploitation of territory, affirm dominant conceptions of proprietorship and improvement, and cast nonhuman nature as a malleable resource or a timelessly wild other.33 As they grappled with the instruments and consequences of their real estate dealings, Huntington, Quidor, Johnson, Heade, and Homer worked out alternative landscapes, figural scenes, and ocean views that contested the economic and environmental ideologies underpinning these pictorial forms and dramatized material realities (such as labor oppression, dispossession, and nonhuman nature’s resistance to development) typically mystified by mainstream representations of land and sea. Harnessing the period’s popular pictorial genres to reimagine property, landholding, labor, and nature, these artists contributed to a tradition of painterly critique that spanned the nineteenth century, resisted the hegemonic imperatives of mainstream painting, and creatively dissected the financial and spatial dynamics of American capitalism. By reconstructing this alternative painterly tradition, my book outlines a history of creative criticality that promises to enrich our understanding of nineteenth-century art making and offer resources for the interpretation of historical and contemporary American real estate enterprise. In the past thirty years, real estate has become even more thoroughly enmeshed in the U.S. financial sector and popular cultural imagination; as corporations and investors have dreamed up new forms of credit, novel investment structures, and newly abstruse derivatives to hasten the flow of finance capital into real estate, realty and media professionals have developed new cultural vehicles to market property in the digital age and inure consumers to the business’s abstracting financial logics.34 These processes have fueled patterns of speculation and development that have produced widespread economic crisis (the Great Recession of 2007– 09), steadily raised home prices and housing costs across the United States, intensified the debt burdens of everyday property owners, and deepened racial and class Introduction

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inequalities.35 Though composed in a very different societal context and animated by the particular concerns of their makers and moment, the paintings of Huntington, Quidor, Johnson, Heade, and Homer offer insights that might help us decipher the speculative dynamics and sociohistorical foundations of the contemporary real estate economy. Rejecting the promotional and financial mystifications they encountered in the course of their dealings, these artists made paintings that highlighted the obdurate materiality and geomorphic mutability of property, conjured up the deeper social and ecological histories of developing places, and evoked real estate’s impacts on specific bodies and ways of being. As they plumb the implications of their makers’ investments, that is, the pictures of Huntington, Quidor, Johnson, Heade, and Homer work to imaginatively reground real estate, to reassert the land business’s localized sociospatial conditions, historical imbrications, and iniquitous effects. In so doing, I suggest, these works model forms of creative inquiry that might help us contend with the twenty-first-century real estate economy, to see past the abstracting fictions of contemporary real estate culture and recapture the social, environmental, corporeal, and imaginative histories embedded in the properties on offer all around us.

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1 LAND, LOOKING, AND FUTURITY IN THE HUDSON VALLEY

W

HILE STILL A STUDENT ,

Daniel Huntington received an unusual commission that plunged him into the roiling Jacksonian real estate economy: in the summer of 1836, the artist was hired by a land company to paint the site of a proposed suburban development on Verplanck, a rustic promontory jutting into the Hudson River about forty miles north of New York City.1 Though it ended in disappointment—the Verplanck scheme unraveled in the credit crisis that inaugurated the Panic of 1837—Huntington’s foray into real estate enterprise deeply shaped his early painting. Indeed, in the years after his Verplanck project, Huntington composed a handful of landscapes and a major religious allegory that interrogated the promotional fictions and investment tactics the artist encountered in the Hudson Valley land market. Outlining alternative accounts of land, property, and vision that were keyed to the concerns of Panic-era audiences, I will argue, these works echoed and extended the claims made by popular writers, reformers, and evangelical ministers who sought to reassess the real estate market’s invasive spread, 13

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the role of speculation in everyday business, and the moral character of capitalism in the wake of the Jacksonian land bubble. Huntington came to Verplanck at the height of a wave of speculation and development in the lower Hudson Valley. Like countless other developers who drew up plans for grand river towns and waterfront subdivisions along the Hudson’s southern stretches, the backers of the Verplanck scheme—a consortium of investors calling themselves the Verplanck Point Association (VPA)—believed that their prospective suburb was ideally positioned to attract wealthy summer residents, river workers, and middle-class commuters. With this end in mind, company agents hired Huntington to study Verplanck’s terrain and prepare a group of paintings that would (in the words of one later reminiscence) “advertis[e] . . . the value” of the VPA property to potential investors.2 Although these works have been lost, surviving evidence suggests that Huntington produced a four-part cycle of landscapes that affirmed the credibility and potential of the suburban development scheme by highlighting its ties to the audacious ventures of the Revolutionary past and the cutting-edge forces of Jacksonian capitalism. Huntington’s outlook on real estate shifted dramatically after the collapse of the Verplanck project in early 1837. Stung by this embarrassing episode and attuned to the darkening economic outlook of the moment, Huntington developed several works in the late 1830s and early 1840s that creatively rebuked the booster tropes and visual techniques he had wielded in his earlier real estate dealings. At some point in 1837, he began painting scenes of backwater settlements seemingly untouched by the flow of time and the forces of improvement. Imagining corners of the Hudson watershed that languish in decay and stasis, works such as Rondout Kill, Afternoon (fig. 7, 1837) and Landscape (fig. 8, 1837) reject booster imaginings of the region and imaginatively delimit the land business’s infiltration of the valley—and, in so doing, echo the alternative imaginings of riverine real estate advanced by post-bubble chroniclers of Hudson Valley life. As he developed his first major Christian allegory, I will argue, Huntington chose a subject that would allow him to allusively engage another aspect of Jacksonian land dealing he had encountered at Verplanck’s Point. Inspired by a passage in the second part of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1684), Mercy’s Dream (fig. 12, 1841) outlines a scene of visionary experience that interrogates the contemporary speculative practice of “land looking,” a future-minded visual tactic that land investors used to divine the expected value of a given plot. Situating its eponymous visionary maiden in a Hudsonesque landscape that seems both to invoke and refuse market imaginings of valuable property, Mercy’s Dream worked to direct post-bubble audiences away from speculative looking and toward a spiritually driven mode of projective vision that evangelical thinkers of the time associated with righteous enterprise. By investigating Huntington’s involvements in and creative reckoning with the Hudson Valley land boom of the mid-1830s, this chapter will shed new light on the 14

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material and aesthetic concerns that shaped the formative years of the artist’s long career. In tracking Huntington’s youthful engagements with real estate, moreover, I examine the genesis of a competing set of commitments—a market-minded willingness to compose images that lionized the figures and practices of capitalism, and an evangelical devotion to art that served God by elevating viewers’ perspectives above the material realm—that scholars have examined in the artist’s mature portraits and allegories.3 In reconstructing his contributions to post-Panic religious dialogues about the economy, moreover, this chapter aims to position Huntington as an early spokesman for a mode of pro-business evangelical thought that would flourish over the course of the nineteenth century.4 Lastly, by analyzing Huntington’s early landscapes and figural works as nuanced expressions of his deepening disenchantments with speculative development, this chapter aims to establish the artist as a significant inquisitor of the nascent system of American real estate capitalism and an early and prescient contributor to an oppositional painterly tradition that took shape around nineteenth-century land markets, a body of painting that punctured the real estate business’s operative fictions, plumbed the dark material realities of property dealing, and pushed back against the forces of enclosure and commodification. BUILDING AND PAINTING “AIR CITIES ON THE HUDSON”

Daniel Huntington was in the last stages of his artistic training when he got involved in the booming Jacksonian real estate economy. At some point in the spring of 1836, as he was settling into an apprenticeship with the portraitist Frederick R. Spencer, Huntington was approached (as he later wrote) by a “builder of air cities on the Hudson” with an offer to paint “several views” of a prospective town on Verplanck, a rustic promontory in the northwestern corner of Westchester County.5 Composed geologically of Inwood marble, Manhattan schist, and surface deposits of clay, Verplanck was originally inhabited by Algonquin-speaking Kitchawank people, who harvested oysters in the shallow waters off the headland (which the Kitchawank called Meanagh). After acquiring the peninsula in the Dutch colonial period, members of the Verplanck family lived on and farmed it throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.6 Huntington’s patron, the New York businessman William Bleakley, organized the joint-stock Verplanck Point Association in April 1836 to purchase a portion of the headland from two Verplanck descendants and built a suburban community on the resulting parcel.7 Riverfront developments of this sort proliferated in the lower Hudson Valley in the early 1830s; seeking to capitalize on the expansion of steamboat service on the river and the surge in commercial shipping that followed the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, speculators of all sorts marketed factory towns, suburban subdivisions, and country retreats on the Hudson’s southern stretches.8 The Verplanck’s Point scheme was, nevertheless, unusually complicated and audacious: working with little capital, Bleakley and his associates used a mix of credit instruments to acquire an eleven-hundred-acre townsite for the astronomical sum of $360,000 (about Land, Looking, and Futurity

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$10.3 million in 2021 currency).9 Anxious to begin to service their enormous debt, the partners quickly hatched the idea of commissioning a landscape cycle to promote the Verplanck’s Point venture to prospective investors, and offered the commission to Huntington in May or early June of 1836. The real estate project must have been highly enticing to the youthful artist. Though it would require a significant expenditure of time and effort, decamping to Verplanck’s Point to paint landscapes would provide a welcome break from the tedium of studio work and give the artist a chance to try his hand at an increasingly popular and prestigious genre; as Huntington was no doubt aware, the dazzling success of Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire (1833–36) earlier that spring had established the landscape cycle as a preeminent painterly mode.10 Huntington’s upbringing may well have predisposed the youthful artist to join a bold enterprise like the Verplanck scheme: his father Benjamin was a prosperous grocer and stockbroker who speculated avidly on bank and railroad stocks, and several members of the Huntington family invested in real estate around New York.11 The artist may have followed suit and sunk some of his own capital in the Verplanck’s Point scheme, though surviving records make no mention of his fiscal involvement in the development project. Animated by artistic ambition and (perhaps) an inherited enthusiasm for audacious endeavor, Huntington relocated to a Hudson Valley boardinghouse on June 23 and spent the next seven weeks studying and painting the verdant terrain of Verplanck’s Point.12 It was a heady time on the rustic promontory. After finalizing the details of the townsite purchase and working out their own corporate structure, the VPA took their first concrete steps to build their planned community (which they dubbed Verplanck) in the summer and early fall of 1836: in a two-month burst of activity, the company erected a steamboat dock and station, put up several model cottages, dug wells and excavated one major street, began selling blocks and individual lots to investors, and organized steamboat trips to the fledgling development for potential buyers.13 The VPA vigorously publicized the new town in the same period, taking out advertisements in New York, Albany, and Hudson Valley newspapers and publishing a hand-colored promotional plan (fig. 1) and engraved view (see fig. 5) of the fledgling settlement.14 Huntington set to work on his landscape project in the midst of this flurry of activity, and his patrons hoped, no doubt, that he would work out a group of pictures that expressed the exhilarating optimism of the moment and abetted the bold projections that propelled the first round of planning, building, and dealing on Verplanck’s Point. Verifying the precise degree to which Huntington satisfied these demands is difficult, since the four paintings he ultimately produced for the VPA—View of Verplanck’s Point from Stony Point; Stony Point, by Moonlight; Sunset, at Verplanck’s Point; and View of Grassy Point, from Verplanck’s—are currently unlocated.15 Various bits of evidence suggest, however, that these pictures harnessed the prevailing themes and rhetorical tactics of local booster culture to advance an account of Verplanck and its environs that affirmed the legitimacy and potential of the town scheme. 16

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figure 1 Cyrus Latham, Map of Verplanck, 1836. Lithograph. Courtesy of the Westchester Historical Society.

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Huntington’s work on the Verplanck’s Point cycle was almost certainly guided by his patrons’ other promotional efforts and the booster discourses that circulated through the lower Hudson Valley in the early 1830s. VPA advertisements and puff pieces touted Verplanck as a future urban center, a “place of business . . . and retirement” that would soon be a metropolitan rival to “any other town on the river between New York and Albany.”16 To convince prospective investors that the fledgling development was well positioned to realize this grand future, company promotions simultaneously highlighted Verplanck’s historical grounding and cutting-edge contemporaneity. The association’s most elaborate visual promotion, Cyrus Latham’s hand-colored Map of Verplanck (fig. 1), neatly encapsulates these divergent impulses. The street plan delineated by Latham’s map immediately signals the settlement’s metropolitan potential: articulated as a grid of named avenues and numbered streets that includes a shoreline park dubbed “The Battery” and a central thoroughfare named “Broadway,” the plan projects a New York–like future for humble Verplanck. Various public spaces and place-names figure the town, in turn, as the extension of a heroic local past defined by adventure, daring, and triumph. Hudson and Beekman Squares, situated in the middle of the projected grid (fig. 2), reference the eponymous explorer and a local Dutch colonial landholder (William Beekman); the Battery marks the place of a Colonial Army fortification; and Washington Square and Putnam Place pay tribute to two Revolutionary heroes who fought on and around Verplanck’s Point.17 Still other features affirm Verplanck’s ties, lastly, to the modern networks of transportation and trade that revolutionized life in the Hudson Valley in the 1830s: the neatly delineated wharf at the left edge of the plan speaks to the town’s projected status as a regular stop on New York–Albany steamboat lines, and the thoroughfare Clinton Place invokes the politician who oversaw the development of the Erie Canal.18 Working simultaneously to evoke Verplanck’s grand future and register the historical legacies and contemporary conditions that would make that future attainable, Latham’s map affirms the credibility of the development scheme and the potential worth of its constitutive properties.19 In so doing, the map contributed to a broader body of booster representations that used the tropes of historicity, modern progress, and futurity to promote investment in the Hudson Valley. Regional guidebooks, for example, interwove historical passages with reports on area land dealings and prognostications about the region’s future. Freeman Hunt’s popular Letters about the Hudson River and Its Vicinity (1837) thus included retellings of the capture of British spy Major John Andre and the killing of American colonist Jane McCrea, dispatches on the rapid “progress of improvement” in Poughkeepsie and the “advance” of “building lots and farms” around Dobbs Ferry, and prophetic assurances that the region’s schemes “cannot fail of success.”20 And local financial institutions used the iconographies of Revolutionary history and contemporary commerce to signify the future worth of their speculative instruments. At some point in the mid-1830s, the Westchester County Bank of Peekskill began issuing notes that paired vignettes of the 1780 arrest 18

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figure 2 Detail, Hudson Square, from Cyrus Latham, Verplanck, 1836. Courtesy of the Westchester Historical Society. Hudson Square appears at center; Latham inscribed several proposed values in red ink below and around the square.

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figure 3 George Harvey, Sunnyside, 1838. Oil on wood panel, 17 ½ × 23 ¼ in. Private collection. Photograph courtesy of Hirschl & Adler Galleries, New York.

of the British spy John Andre with tiny scenes of contemporary shipping.21 While the former element underscored the trustworthiness of the note’s issuing institution (by aligning it with a vaunted Revolutionary episode in which patriotic truth won out over insidious dissimulation), the latter evoked the present-day economic conditions that secured the bank’s financial standing and, by extension, guaranteed the note’s current and future exchangeability. Taken together, the note’s temporally charged pictorial elements worked to inspire confidence in an enterprise that was widely understood to be tenuous: period financial reporting and state publications identified the Westchester County Bank as one of several upstate banks that issued notes in quantities that far outstripped their “respective capitals,” wildcat institutions that sprang up to supply speculators with easy credit and unbacked currency.22 Huntington worked out the details and structure of his Verplanck’s Point landscape group, then, in the midst of a regional publicity blitz that figured the Hudson Valley’s future-minded ventures as outgrowths of an imagined past and expressions of presentday progress. His work on the Verplanck cycle also coincided with a popular vogue for boosterish painted views of the Hudson that arose in the late 1830s. Like many other examples of the popular genre, George Harvey’s Sunnyside (fig. 3, 1838) and Robert 20

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figure 4 Robert Havell Jr., View of the Hudson River from Tarrytown Heights, c. 1842. Oil on canvas, 22 × 30 in. Gift of Harry Peck Havell, New-York Historical Society, 1946.179. Photography © New-York Historical Society.

Havell’s View of the Hudson River from Tarrytown Heights (fig. 4, c. 1842) use deep vistas across or down the Hudson to shape riverine scenes that incorporate suburban real estate (Irving’s eponymous estate in the former picture and a grand riverfront villa in the latter), evocations of modern shipping and commerce (steamboats and sloops in both works), and landmarks associated with the Revolutionary past (such as Mount Hook in the background of Havell’s painting).23 Huntington paid close attention to his peers’ interpretations of the Hudson Valley (as discussed below), and may well have drawn inspiration from popular river views as he developed his own promotional renderings of Verplanck’s Point. The titles of Huntington’s Verplanck pictures indicate that the painter chose subjects and compositional motifs that would have allowed him to advance an interpretation of the headland that was keyed to the claims made by local boosters, an interpretation that touted the VPA’s improvement efforts on the promontory, buttressed the tentative scheme with the legitimizing weight of history, and visualized that scheme’s relationship to the broader economic forces remaking the Hudson Valley in the moment. Judging from the titles, only one of the four pictures—Sunset, at Verplanck’s Point—focused entirely on the developing peninsula itself. Likely incorporating some Land, Looking, and Futurity

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figure 5 William Baker, Verplanck (from the Hudson), 1836. Lithograph. Courtesy of the Westchester County Historical Society.

treatment of the nascent edifices of Verplanck, this painting may have looked something like the promotional town views published by the VPA (fig. 5) and other Hudson Valley developers; the scene’s twilit setting may have also worked on some level to align the peninsula with the themes of transience and transformation. The other three landscapes of Huntington’s cycle engaged a pair of landmarks, situated across the Hudson from Verplanck’s Point, that viewers of the time would have associated with contemporary development and Revolutionary daring. View of Grassy Point, from Verplanck’s evidently pictured a small promontory that juts out into the 22

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figure 6 Detail from Wade & Croome’s Panorama of the Hudson River from New York to Waterford (New York: J. Disturnell, 1846; New York Public Library). Grassy Point is situated at the left edge of the detail; Stony Point is at center.

Hudson at the northern end of Haverstraw Bay. As period commentators frequently noted, Grassy Point (fig. 6) was a hot spot of real estate activity: in the mid-1830s the little headland was built up with “handsome residences,” a “fashionable resort” (the Grassy Point House), an iron foundry, and a steamboat wharf.24 By pairing a depiction of this developing site with a rendering of Verplanck, Huntington’s picture likely worked to figure the fledgling town as an extension of the construction boom unfolding around Haverstraw Bay—and in the process reaffirmed the concreteness, credibility, and promise of the incipient settlement. Finally, View of Verplanck’s Point from Stony Point and Stony Point, by Moonlight depicted another nearby landmark that carried a mix of historical and contemporary connotations. As local guidebooks unfailingly noted, Stony Point was the location of an important British fort that Continental officer Anthony Wayne captured during an intrepid nighttime raid on July 15, 1779; it was also the site of a widely publicized lighthouse that New York officials built in 1826 to guide the river’s expanding steam fleet.25 Thus, View of Verplanck’s Point from Stony Point and Stony Point, by Moonlight pictured a landscape element that many viewers would have associated with patriotic risk taking and technological and commercial advancement—associations likely intensified by the nocturnal format of the latter painting, which would have allowed the work to evoke the timing of Wayne’s raid and accentuate the point’s navigational importance. Although much remains unknown about the form of Huntington’s Verplanck pictures, it is clear that the artist chose to augment his renderings of the headland with depictions of a series of well-known and highly charged local landmarks, nearby features that registered the area’s rapid development and emblematized its dramatic past. In so doing, Huntington orchestrated juxtapositions—both within and across the Land, Looking, and Futurity

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contours of the group’s individual canvases—that must have worked to legitimize the Verplanck scheme for viewers. By pairing renderings of Verplanck with depictions of Grassy and Stony Points, Huntington’s landscapes encouraged onlookers to see the dubious venture as a credible extension of the Hudson Valley’s development and transportation revolution and a new chapter in a local history of patriotic adventure and risky enterprise. In this way, the group worked to affirm and amplify the fantasies advanced by the VPA and many other regional boosters. LOG CABINS AND FRAME SHANTIES: HUNTINGTON’S BACKWATER LANDSCAPES

After several weeks of study and preparation, Huntington seems to have completed his landscape cycle by the end of the summer and transferred the finished pictures to Bleakley and his colleagues in the early fall of 1836.26 Not long after, the Verplanck’s Point scheme took a turn that would affect Huntington’s nascent public image, reorient the artist’s outlook on speculation, and inspire him to return creatively to the subject of real estate culture in the years that followed. Although relatively little is known about what happened to Huntington’s cycle after it was completed, it seems likely that the VPA displayed the paintings in their Wall Street office or in one of several model cottages that the company built on Verplanck’s Point to show to prospective buyers.27 Bleakley and associates hoped, no doubt, that Huntington’s pictures would appeal to bourgeois visitors: hung in a professional office or tastefully furnished domestic interior, the painted cycle would have presented these cultured customers with an edifying spectacle that worked simultaneously to deliver the company’s pitch, affirm the VPA’s status as a respectable outfit, and distinguish Verplanck from the innumerable “paper town” schemes that local hustlers marketed with pedestrian print images. As they performed these functions, of course, the paintings would also have firmly bound Huntington’s emerging professional identity and artistic fortunes to the VPA and its development project. The artist must have been distressed to see the Verplanck scheme unravel in early 1837. As already noted, the project was on shaky foundations from the start. Unable to pay full price for the townsite up front, Bleakley and associates had entered into a structured sale agreement with the parcel’s owners that required the buyers to defer possession and rent the property for one year.28 During that term the company was expected to make three installment payments: two in cash and promissory notes (totaling $158,000) and a final payment that took the form of an enormous one-year mortgage (amounting to $202,000) to the owners.29 The partners evidently believed that they could raise enough through lot sales to cover the two initial payments, satisfy the final mortgage, and fund the development of Verplanck. Records indicate, however, that the company’s sales yielded only enough capital to satisfy a small fraction of their outstanding obligations.30 Episodes of mismanagement hurt the company’s financial standing further; for much of 1836 and early 1837, the VPA treasurer failed to system24

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atically record expenditures, plunging the company into a budgetary crisis.31 Strapped for cash, Bleakley and his associates began paying their suppliers and contractors with town lots, while other employees went unpaid.32 With dwindling capital and dimming prospects, the VPA decided to sell half of the townsite parcel back to its original owners in February 1837; this measure evidently failed to improve the company’s finances, and by summer word had spread in New York that the town development was “broke.”33 Although the VPA would make sporadic efforts to revive the town project in the years ahead, the company’s projected suburb never came to fruition; two of the group’s partners would eventually establish brickmaking operations on Verplanck’s Point instead.34 Huntington’s involvement in this highly publicized folly deeply affected his professional prospects, financial standing, and creative work. Verplanck’s dramatic failure undoubtedly sullied the reception of Huntington’s landscape cycle, converting what had been the artist’s most ambitious painterly undertaking to date into a cultural emblem of hubris and risible imprudence—associations that could only have deepened in the climate of economic anxiety and reformist critique (discussed at more length below) that took shape after the Panic of 1837. The Verplanck embarrassment evidently foreclosed any possibility that Huntington might devote himself full-time to landscape painting; it also seems to have derailed the fledgling artist’s efforts to establish himself as a painter of original subjects, thereby intensifying his financial precarity.35 Unable to count on a steady following for his early landscape and figural works, Huntington began making and exhibiting portraits in steadily increasing numbers in the late 1830s.36 The town scheme’s dramatic failure also seems to have decisively shifted Huntington’s perspective on business dealings. Abandoning his early enthusiasm for audacious enterprise, he adopted a more measured outlook on financial matters. His correspondence of the late 1830s and early 1840s suggest that he valued frugality, avidly guarded his meager finances, and disapproved of financial irresponsibility. In one letter to his father, for example, he explained his reluctance to lend money to a desperate acquaintance by noting that if he did so he would “certainly . . . never expect to see it again.”37 Huntington’s papers make clear, moreover, that he invested in bank shares and other securities but came to see real estate speculation as an imprudent and unremunerative endeavor; in an 1846 letter, for example, reflecting on his relatives’ land dealings, he noted that “unimproved property seems rather bad stock.”38 Eager to build an audience and reshape his nascent painterly identity, Huntington made a handful of landscape and figural works in the late 1830s and early 1840s that interrogated the cultural fictions and investment practices of Jacksonian real estate dealing and gave voice to his deepening antipathy toward speculative enterprise. In the wake of his Verplanck disappointment, the artist first began making idiosyncratic landscapes of the Hudson region that scrambled the conventions of popular river-view paintings and repudiated booster imaginings of the area (including his earlier VPA Land, Looking, and Futurity

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canvases). Rather than focusing on the river’s main stem, these new works pictured remote corners of the Hudson watershed that attracted few visitors and little investment in the period. As Huntington noted in a later catalogue essay, moreover, the post-Verplanck landscapes broke from prevailing painterly conventions in their rendering of space and nature in the valley: [My] Landscapes . . . are . . . hints and dreams of situation and effects, which the visitor is besought to look at lazily and listlessly, through the half-closed eye, and not to expect that truth and reality, which should be found in the works of the professed Landscape Painter. The admirers of Landscape will look among them in vain, for that marvelous force and brightness with which COLE would have riveted them—or the atmosphere and freshness in which lie before them the fertile meadows—far stretching distances—the sturdy oaks and beeches, with rich masses of foliage, in DURAND’s calm, expansive compositions—or the silvery lightness in moving clouds and transparent running brooks, which the veteran DOUGHTY would magically call into being on the canvass [sic].39

Eschewing the grand expanses (“far stretching distances”), thriving farmlands (“fertile meadows”), and dynamic environments (“running brooks” and “moving clouds”) conjured up in the works of Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, and Thomas Doughty, Huntington’s landscapes advanced suggestively enigmatic, dreamlike accounts of remote landmarks and overgrown waterways that highlighted the wildness, isolation, and torpidity of the Hudson watershed’s furthest reaches. As we will see, some of these works focused in turn on humble settlements that took root in the region’s distant backwaters, shaping scenes of tumbledown property and plebeian habitation that overturned local promoters’ temporally charged fantasies of remunerative riverine development. Although many of Huntington’s early landscapes are accessible only through period critical responses, two surviving pictures—Rondout Kill, Afternoon (fig. 7, 1837) and Landscape (fig. 8, 1837)—shed light on the ways that these works reimagine space, environment, and landholding in the Hudson watershed. Both pictures were likely conceived during a trip that Huntington took through northern New Jersey, the Catskills, and the upper Hudson Valley in the summer and fall of 1837; the artist sketched and painted a variety of remote places on this trip, including Shawangunk and Mohonk Lakes, ravines, and country roads.40 Rondout Kill, Afternoon and Landscape address another local subject that sparked Huntington’s interest on the trip: the many smaller rivers that crisscross the Hudson region. Rondout Kill, Afternoon evidently depicts a remote stretch of the waterway now known as Rondout Creek, a sixty-three-mile Hudson tributary that runs through Ulster and Sullivan Counties in southern New York; Landscape may picture the same stream or another in the Hudson region (Huntington is known to have painted the Passaic, Ramapo, and Mohawk Rivers on his 1837 trip).41 Whatever their exact point of reference, Huntington’s painted waterways display the 26

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figure 7 Daniel Huntington, Rondout Kill, Afternoon, 1837. Oil on canvas, 18 × 24 in. The Baltimore Museum of Art, purchased with funds provided by “Pictura: Adventures in Art,” BMA 1952.115. Photography by Mitro Hood.

aqueous and morphological qualities—narrow channels, sheltered bays, meandering bends—of the region’s smaller tributaries. Rondout Kill, Afternoon and Landscape work in turn to accentuate the wildness and seclusion of their fluvial subjects. Both paintings teem with gnarled waterfront trees, heavy undergrowth, weeds and river grasses, eroding banks and rock-strewn shores, wheeling birds, and other signs of untamed natural life. And both pictures incorporate elements—high banks and a thicket of trees in Rondout Kill, Afternoon and a towering, sky-filling elm in Landscape—that obstruct deep vistas, delimit the recessive space of their settings, and imbue their subjects with an air of far-off isolation. Huntington’s pictures also register the alternative forms of settlement that took shape in the wilder backwaters of the Hudson region. Period accounts suggest that some of the region’s poorest residents—including subsistence farmers, mill operators, and day laborers displaced by the Hudson Valley’s real estate boom—made their homes on cheap water lots and squatter campsites along local tributaries. Travel writers and newspaper editors, for example, noted the presence of squatters in “little nooks about Tappan and Esopus [Creeks],” “Irish shanties” on the “marshy flats” of Sparkill Creek, subsistence farmers “who dwell in log cabins and frame shanties along Land, Looking, and Futurity

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figure 8 Daniel Huntington, Landscape, 1837. Oil on canvas, 10 × 12 in. Gift of Mrs. Marjorie R. Reynolds, New-York Historical Society, 1942.261. Photography © New-York Historical Society.

the streams” of the Catskills, and “rude shanties . . . inhabited by a floating population of Irish laborers” on Rondout Creek.42 Impoverished wanderers also seem to have moved along, and settled temporarily on, the region’s tributaries. The region’s bestdocumented homeless traveler—a man widely known as the Leather Man (fig. 9) for his homemade hide clothing—thus maintained a cave shelter in the hills above the Saw Mill River in Westchester County. And other itinerants seem to have moved along, and found lodgings and food on, various nearby waterways.43 Rondout Kill, Afternoon and Landscape work in certain ways to evoke working-class forms of habitation and itinerancy. Both paintings depict the sorts of improvised waterfront dwellings put up by backcountry farmers and squatters: a loosely painted one-room cabin appears in the shadowy middle ground of Rondout Kill, Afternoon, and a crude timber dwelling looms over the foreground cove in Landscape. The small groups of free-grazing cattle that wander around these “log cabins and frame shanties” evoke the sort of small-scale subsistence farming practiced by backwater inhabitants; a minute fishing vignette that appears in the left background of Landscape (fig. 10) 28

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figure 9 James F. Rodgers, The Leatherman, 1885. Photograph. Courtesy of the Westchester County Historical Society.

registers another practice by which river dwellers procured sustenance in the Hudson Valley’s hinterlands. The latter painting also includes a suggestive evocation of plebeian transience: rendered with a white dab of pigment behind his left shoulder, the redvested figure at the base of the central elm appears to be carrying a stick and bundle (fig. 11), a makeshift means of conveying personal property associated with white vagabonds and runaway slaves in Jacksonian popular culture.44 Considered in isolation, these details might be read as veristic, even empathetic, signs of contemporary working-class experience. But Rondout Kill, Afternoon and Landscape weave these signs into broader riverine scenes that work to mystify the sociohistorical realities of backcountry life, to romanticize or exoticize river people, and to reimagine remote tributaries as fantastical refuges from modernity. As noted above, both paintings feature landforms that close off orienting vistas and hem in their Land, Looking, and Futurity

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figure 10 Detail from Daniel Huntington, Landscape, 1837. Oil on canvas, 10 × 12 in. Gift of Mrs. Marjorie R. Reynolds, New-York Historical Society, 1942.261. Photography © New-York Historical Society. figure 11 Detail from Daniel Huntington, Landscape, 1837. Oil on canvas, 10 × 12 in. Gift of Mrs. Marjorie R. Reynolds, New-York Historical Society, 1942.261. Photography © New-York Historical Society.

riverine settings spatially. In so doing, Huntington’s canvases eliminate the sorts of details that served as markers of periodicity in contemporaneous depictions of the Hudson region (figs. 3 and 4). No edifices other than the aforementioned cabins can be seen in the two paintings; no vessels appear on their waterways, and no readily legible landmarks can be glimpsed in their distant registers. Rondout Kill, Afternoon and Landscape are thus entirely devoid of the iconographic elements—Revolutionary sites, suburban homes, steamboats, bits of navigational infrastructure, and so on—that signified historicity and modernity in river-view paintings and promotional images of the region. Eschewing these elements and accentuating the geographic isolation of their settings, Huntington’s paintings figure their backwater settlements as wondrous 30

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outlands unmoored from the heroic past and boom-time present. By rendering these strangely timeless hinterlands in warm tones and sunny hues (Rondout Kill, Afternoon) or inky shadows and eerily unnatural colors (Landscape), the paintings invite us to see their imagined settlements, in turn, as charmingly picturesque or titillatingly foreboding manifestations of socio-spatial otherness. Certain details mark these imagined hinterlands as spaces outside the reach of, and perhaps even actively resistant to, the material forces transforming the Hudson Valley in the period. Rondout Kill, Afternoon and Landscape organize their foregrounds around sheltered bays of slack water, highly reflective and current-less pools that impart an air of unchanging quietude, even stagnation, to the riverine spaces around them. The dying trees that appear at the right edge of each composition (where they function as repoussoir devices) align the surrounding terrain, in turn, with the themes of decay, decrepitude, and expiration. Taken together, these details encourage us to see the backcountry dells pictured by Rondout Kill, Afternoon and Landscape as drowsy pockets of stasis and slow deterioration. Hemmed in spatially and steeped in languor and decay, Huntington’s upstream settlements appear far removed from, and entirely impervious to, the relentless, future-minded undertakings—speculative development, the steam-powered shipping boom, and the explosion of riverine commerce—that were remaking the terrain around the Hudson’s main stem. Conceived and composed in the wake of Huntington’s embarassing foray into real estate promotion, Rondout Kill, Afternoon and Landscape shape accounts of life and land in the Hudson Valley that diverge radically from booster interpretations of the region. Turning away from the Hudson’s developing banks to focus instead on the farflung tributaries where the region’s poorest residents settled, the paintings outline fantasies of backwater settlement that mystify the realities of working-class life and reject the bullish visions of waterfront development articulated in popular river views, guidebook narratives, and real estate advertisements. Against the booster fantasy of historically sanctioned and relentlessly progressive improvement articulated in those productions, Rondout Kill, Afternoon and Landscape imagine decrepit riverine spaces that are both outside time and inimical to modern development. In advancing these alternative accounts of riverine land and life, Huntington’s paintings made their own creative contributions to a broader reckoning with speculation and risky real estate dealing that was unfolding in the Hudson Valley and across the Northeast. As Jessica Lepler has shown, few observers of the time grasped the systemic forces that had produced the Panic of 1837 and sustained the long depression that followed.45 Drawing on older critiques of financial endeavor, alarmed commentators argued that the period’s economic turmoil was caused by a speculative “spirit” or “mania” that had infected the populace, turned virtuous citizens away from traditional forms of work and profit, and impelled everyday investors to sink their capital into dubious schemes promising large returns from minimal outlays.46 In an 1838 essay, for example, the business writer Benjamin F. Foster argued that during the recent boom, Land, Looking, and Futurity

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the spirit of speculation and adventure pervaded the entire community . . . crowds . . . of every description . . . hastened to venture some portion of their property in schemes of which scarcely anything was known except the name. All classes seemed ready to abandon the old beaten track of industry and frugality, for the delusive purpose of getting rich suddenly . . . railroads were projected out in every direction, new towns were built in the wilderness, and town plots everywhere exposed for sale. . . . Shadows were mistaken for substance and appearance for realities.47

Echoing many other observers, Foster decried the land bubble of the 1830s as a sort of epidemic, an outbreak of get-rich-quick feeling that led citizens of “all classes” to “abandon” traditional forms of accumulation and seek instant profit instead by dreaming up “new town” schemes for every last corner of the “wilderness” and “projecting out” infrastructure projects “in every direction”—and then selling those compelling fictions to still other investors gullible enough to mistake “appearance for realities.” Period commentators proposed a variety of remedies, in turn, to the infectious scourge of speculation. Economic traditionalists and Democratic partisans advocated monetary and fiscal reforms (a return to hard specie and tightened lending) and a renewed emphasis on “production” as a means of securing “solid capital”; as discussed below, religious thinkers and moral reformers called for a return to godly forms of business endeavor.48 Most commentators agreed that speculation—and especially the speculative dealing in “city lots, paper towns, [and] public lands” that “pervaded the land”— needed to be drastically curtailed.49 Local observers made similar efforts to reckon with the spread of speculative development through the Hudson Valley. Regional newspapers ran articles that critiqued local speculators and the loose-lending country banks that fueled the boom in riverine development.50 Other local commentators contended with real estate’s incursions in more creatively oblique fashion. Washington Irving’s three-part 1839 story “The Crayon Papers,” for example, humorously updated the author’s well-known earlier tale “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820) by imagining the impact of the Hudson Valley boom on that story’s eponymous hamlet. Reminiscing about his boyhood experiences of Sleepy Hollow, narrator Geoffrey Crayon describes the village as an isolated backwater: during his “youthful days,” Sleepy Hollow was a place suspended in “the slumber of past ages,” a remote community of “retired haunts” and “old, goblin-looking mill[s]” not yet “awaked to the spirit of improvement.”51 Upon revisiting the village, however, the adult Crayon gradually finds various signs of the “spirit of speculation and improvement” around the “once quiet and unambitious little dorp”—these include the replacement of an age-old “tavern” with an “ambitious hotel with cupola and verandas,” the establishment of a riverfront bank, and the appearance of “town lots” in the surrounding countryside—and concludes melancholically that the “fate of the neighborhood is sealed.”52 In dramatizing Crayon’s slow realization that real estate development has begun to creep into the fantastically remote space of Sleepy Hollow, 32

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Irving’s story humorously restages post-Panic anxieties about the land business’s invasiveness and spoofs the reformist ambition to rein in the infectious spread of “improvement.” Rondout Kill, Afternoon and Landscape take on new meaning when read alongside contemporaneous reassessments of speculation and the land business. In their efforts to imagine fantastical outlands of humble settlement and unmanaged wilderness, Huntington’s paintings affirm the hope—articulated in the writings of economic reporters and moral reformers, and parodied by Irving’s story—that some section of the Hudson Valley may continue to exist beyond the land developer’s grasp and, by extension, that the emerging, entirely unregulated, and deeply speculative real estate economy may yet obey certain hard limits. In the process, Rondout Kill, Afternoon and Landscape outline interpretations of the Hudson region that reject the projective logic of Huntington’s earlier VPA canvases and express the artist’s deepening, postVerplanck animus toward risky real estate endeavor. At the same time, they crystallize a landscape mode to which Huntington would regularly return in the decades to come. Indeed, though he would broaden his range of landscape subjects in the middle years of his career, he continued to be interested in the Hudson Valley’s remoter corners; echoing his landscapes of the late 1830s, works such as My Pleasure Ground (undated, private collection), Rapids (undated, private collection), Sunset, River Landscape (1850, private collection), and Figures in a Wooded Landscape (1867, Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art) picture backwoods waterways devoid of orienting spatiotemporal markers and unsullied by the forces of land development. FAITH AND FUTURITY IN MERCY’S DREAM

At some point in 1840, at the nadir of the post-Panic economic depression, Huntington began work on an innovative religious allegory that would engage another facet of Jacksonian real estate culture that he had confronted in the Hudson Valley. As Wendy Greenhouse has shown, Huntington’s travels through Europe in 1839–40 galvanized his interest in developing a new mode of Christian painting that reinvigorated the biblical subject matter and spiritual didacticism of Grand Manner religious art.53 The painter was well prepared to undertake this new line of work. Raised in the Congregationalist faith, Huntington inherited a fervent trust in God’s providential power, a strong sense of Christian duty, and respect for evangelization from his devout family. Leaving behind his free-spirited college experience, the artist embraced Episcopalianism in the late 1830s and developed a personal and painterly attachment to evangelically minded clergy within that denomination.54 It was in this phase of renewed religious commitment that Huntington began work on his first major Christian canvas. Depicting a previously unpainted passage from the second part of Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1684), a text that had long been important to American Protestant culture and that had begun to enjoy another revival in popularity in the late 1830s, Mercy’s Dream (fig. 12, 1841) advanced the sort of affirming spiritual lesson that critics Land, Looking, and Futurity

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figure 12 Daniel Huntington, Mercy’s Dream, 1841. Oil on canvas, 84 ½ × 66 ½ in. Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Bequest of Henry C. Carey (The Carey Collection), 1879.8.10.

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and clergy of the period associated with morally rigorous “ideal” painting.55 At the same time, as we will see, Huntington’s spiritual scene worked on other registers to grapple with the material concerns of its moment. Outlining an instance of futureminded looking that quietly engages a central visual tactic of Jacksonian land speculation, Mercy’s Dream intervened in Panic-era evangelical dialogues about speculation and the moral character of capitalist endeavor. Mercy’s Dream offers a creative rendition of a brief passage that appears near the midpoint of the second part of The Pilgrim’s Progress. Written as a sequel to Bunyan’s wildly popular 1678 text, which traced the difficult journey to salvation undertaken by an everyman believer (named Christian), the second part follows the original protagonist’s wife, Christiana, as she retraces her husband’s steps through a landscape rife with allegorized obstacles. Christiana is accompanied on her journey to the Celestial City by her youthful neighbor Mercy, her four children, the virtuous guide Greatheart, and various other wanderers she encounters on the road.56 As literary scholars Margaret Thickstun and Bethany Joy Bear have shown, prophetic dreams play a central role in the sequel: the story of Christiana and Mercy is presented to the reader as a tale told to the narrator in a dream, and the protagonist makes her decision to start her own trek only after she has a dream of “Christian her husband in a place of bliss among many immortals.”57 Huntington centered his painting on an episode of prophetic dreaming experienced by Mercy. After surmounting the Hill of Difficulty and enjoying a meal at a welcoming traveler’s lodge, the maiden dreams of her own heavenly rebirth. Recounting this vision to Christiana the next morning, Mercy declares: I was dreaming that I sat all alone in a solitary place, and was bemoaning the hardness of my heart. . . . I looked up, and saw one with wings coming toward me. So he came directly to me and said, Mercy, what aileth thee? Now when he had heard me make my complaint he said Peace be to thee; he also wiped mine eyes with his handkerchief, and clad me in silver and gold. . . . He put a chain about my neck, and ear-rings in mine ears, and a beautiful crown upon my head. Then he took me by the hand and said, Mercy, come after me; so we went up, and I followed, till we came at a golden gate. Then he knocked; and when they within had opened, the man went in, and I followed him up to a throne, upon which one sat; and he said to me, Welcome, daughter. The place looked bright and twinkling, like the stars, or rather like the sun; and I thought that I saw your husband there; so I awoke from my dream.58

Imagining redemption as a process in which the rigorously pious believer is comforted, wondrously refashioned, and finally welcomed by God, Mercy’s anticipatory dream cements the bond between the maiden and her similarly prophetic friend and strengthens the pilgrims’ commitment to their journey. Situated between dramatic episodes of struggle and triumph, the dream narrative presents the reader with an Land, Looking, and Futurity

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affirming vision of salvation’s rapturous effects and a didactic reminder that even the humblest believers might experience faith-sustaining visions.59 In translating this passage into paint, Huntington worked out a figural scene that neatly encapsulated several early moments in Mercy’s dream narrative. Reclining against a rocky bank in an attitude of blissful repose, Huntington’s Mercy (at the bottom of the painting) seems to both evoke the slumberous conditions of the maiden’s vision and visualize her restful wait in a “solitary place” for the arrival of the “one with wings.” The artist’s rendition of the latter creature seems, in turn, to invoke two subsequent moments in Mercy’s interactions with the heavenly being: stretching a glowing crown downward with his right hand while pointing skyward with his left, the angel models a complex pose that references his miraculous adornment of Mercy and his eventual transportation of the maiden to heaven. Taking note of these various references, viewers of the time praised Mercy’s Dream as a faithful and edifying adaptation of Bunyan’s text, an adaptation that believably conjured Mercy’s transcendent state and worked to elevate its beholder’s perspective. Applauding Mercy’s Dream as a “bold and pleasing attempt . . . to approach the ideal,” critics predicted that the painting’s viewers would “have their thoughts lifted above the smoke and stir of the workday world” and leave their encounters with it “much benefitted in heart and mind.”60 Even as it registers the central actors and dramatic episodes of Bunyan’s passage, Mercy’s Dream also expands creatively on its historical source text. As many viewers appreciatively noted at the time, Huntington’s painting dramatically reimagines the passage’s setting, transforming Bunyan’s abstract “solitary place” into a sublime wilderness studded with signs of geographic particularity.61 Stretching from Mercy’s foreground perch to a twilit mountain range at right center and filled with the sort of gnarled trees, rocky banks, tranquil waterways, and rounded peaks that appear throughout Huntington’s contemporaneous landscape paintings, the picture’s setting symbolically relocates Mercy’s visionary episode within the riverine terrain of the Hudson Valley. Delighting in this regionally coded assemblage of “trees, rocks, and river” and “distant mountains,” critics praised Huntington’s invented landscape as an expression of “imaginative power” and creative “genius” that worked to leaven the viewer’s experience of the didactic figural tableau within it; a critic for the New York Commercial Advertiser, for example, argued that the landscape “relieves the eye and amuses the fancy.”62 Huntington’s reimagining of Mercy’s rustic retreat imbues his painted maiden, in turn, with a new range of associations. Ensconced in a shadowy Hudsonesque setting and immersed in a vision of her future, Mercy quietly evokes another type of anticipatory visual practice associated with the developing region, a practice used by the investors, surveyors, and land agents who drove the real estate boom in the Hudson Valley and other locales across the country: land looking. To prepare for a potential land purchase or development venture, many investors and land agents would head out to “land look”—or conduct an in situ visual assessment of the relevant property— 36

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first.63 These assessments involved a mix of empirical observation and imaginative projection. As they examined a given parcel, land lookers scanned its terrain for extractable resources (minerals) and environmental conditions that would facilitate development (timber, water, and good soil) and traced the routes of boundary lines and potential partitions through its natural topography. They then used these evaluations and guesses about the trajectory of local land markets to calculate the “value” of the relevant tract and its theoretical subdivisions—a figure that represented the price that these properties might yield in future exchanges. Taking note of the practice’s uneasy melding of observed fact and projective fancy, skeptical observers spoofed land lookers as deluded fools or slick dissemblers. One editor thus chuckled that at the height of the recent “land fever,” the country had been filled with land lookers “searching . . . trees for town lines” and “ransacking . . . the woods for section corners, ranges . . . base lines . . . and spots possessing particular advantage.”64 Echoing this assessment, an 1840 Knickerbocker article noted that during the land bubble, land lookers . . . [met] you at every turn, ready to furnish ‘water power,’ ‘pine lots,’ ‘choice farming tracts,’ or anything else, at a moment’s notice. . . . It was impossible to mention any part of the country that they had not personally surveyed. They would tell you, with the gravity of astrologers, what sort of timber predominated on any given tract, drawing sage deductions as to the capabilities of the soil. Did you incline to city property? Lo! a splendid chart, setting forth the advantages of some unequalled site, and your confidential friend, the land looker, able to tell you more than all about it.65

Lampooning the dissimulation and puffery of the Jacksonian real estate business, the Knickerbocker article aligns land looking with astrology: like practitioners of that pseudoscience, land lookers used “personal” observations of general natural conditions to make elaborate prognostications about the future “capabilities” of a “pine lot,” “farming tract,” or choice “city property.” Though considered dubious by many outside the real estate market, land looking was a ubiquitous feature of Jacksonian land dealing. Huntington likely encountered several iterations of the practice during his foray into Hudson Valley real estate; as noted above, he had visited Verplanck’s Point at the very moment that the promontory was being surveyed, partitioned, developed, and sold off. During Huntington’s stay on the headland, the Poughkeepsie land agent Cyrus Latham surveyed Verplanck’s proposed site, calculated prices for the town’s various partitions, and inscribed his promotional plan with such conjectural values (see fig. 2). The painter’s visit to Verplanck’s Point also came at the high point of an advertising campaign, mounted in the pages of regional newspapers, that encouraged potential “purchasers . . . [to] view the premises [of Verplanck] for themselves”; as he worked up his pictures for the VPA, Huntington likely shared the promontory with daytripping land lookers from New York, Albany, and other Hudson Valley communities.66 Land, Looking, and Futurity

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figure 13 Detail from Daniel Huntington, Mercy’s Dream, 1841. Oil on canvas, 84 ½ × 66 ½ in. Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Bequest of Henry C. Carey (The Carey Collection), 1879.8.10.

By situating its sibylline subject in a verdant landscape that invokes the booming spaces of the Hudson Valley and features several foreground delineations of the kinds of natural attributes—soil, fieldstone, and timber—that served as markers of valuable property in the period (fig. 13), Mercy’s Dream shapes a scene of visionary experience that calls to mind the imaginative labors and material environs associated with land looking. Striving to apprehend the future in a rural space bristling with signs of prospective value, the painting’s titular maiden quietly invokes the speculators, land agents, and other would-be seers who attempted to divine the unknown in the countryside by scanning its topographies for indications of potential worth. Even as it conjures up the practices and contexts of land looking, however, Huntington’s painting works to discredit that endeavor and to advocate a spiritual mode of visionary apprehension grounded in a renunciation of mundane material concerns. If individual passages within the painting’s setting highlight natural attributes associated with market value, its broad swaths of shadow and dim tonalities work to differentiate the bulk of its terrain from the remunerative property sought out by land-looking developers. The setting’s most sensitively detailed renderings of natural topography and clearest evocations of valuable property appear within the narrow slice of warmly lit terrain where Mercy reclines (fig. 13). Much of the ground that lies between this 38

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attenuated spot and the twilit mountain peak on the horizon is cloaked in velvety shadows that obscure its topographical character and (by extension) its possible worth. Comprising a series of hazily delineated landforms (rock formation, waterway, wooded ridge, what may be a meadow beyond) that run together in a fluid topographical sequence, the setting’s expansive middle zone articulates a vision of land entirely antithetical to the market conception that underpinned the practice of land looking and real estate dealing more broadly. Against the speculative fantasy of readily decipherable, concretely developable, and innately valuable ground (a fantasy that the foreground allusively engages), the setting’s middle ground imagines a troublesome topography defined by illegibility, immateriality, absence, and uncertain worth. Huntington’s rendering of Mercy works, in turn, to advance an implicit critique of land looking’s sensory operations and sublunary orientation. Taken together, Mercy’s expression and pose insist on the transcendent character of her prophetic experience: closing her eyes and inclining her unseeing visage toward the angel hovering above her, the maiden models a spiritual and decidedly nonoptical form of visionary apprehension directed at the ethereal forms of heaven and the wondrous rewards of salvation. Considered in relation to the suggestively coded space around her, Mercy’s embrace of a stridently nonempirical form of apprehension can be read as an act of renunciation—a rejection of the speculative signs of the land business, of the projective visual practices associated with these markers of worth, and (by extension) of the broader realm of workaday material endeavor that encompassed real estate dealing and countless other forms of economic activity. Bathed in the lambent glow of heavenly light and pressing her left hand to her chest in a gesture of ecstatic feeling, the youthful figure attests, in turn, to the rapturous rewards that a turn away from worldly appearances and toward heaven’s celestial wonders would bring to the believer. Inspired by a lesser-known passage from the second part of The Pilgrim’s Progress, Mercy’s Dream outlines a scene of visionary apprehension that encapsulates the central narrative elements of its literary source, invokes and repudiates a form of projective looking associated with land dealing, and champions a return to Christian modes of faithful anticipation. In advancing this multilayered interrogation of speculative culture, Huntington’s painting contributed, in turn, to a broader reckoning with speculation and capitalism that (as noted above) took shape in evangelical circles in the late 1830s and early 1840s. As Stewart Davenport and others have shown, evangelical Protestant thinkers responded to the implosion of the Jacksonian boom and ensuing depression in varying ways: while some condemned all forms of capitalistic enterprise as a threat to the spiritual health of the individual believer and the nation, others attacked speculation as a sinful deviation from an economic system that was morally virtuous and divinely sanctioned.67 Mercy’s Dream resonates with arguments made by ministers on both sides of this debate. Some evangelical viewers seem to have understood the painting as an affirmation of the conservative position on worldly endeavor; for example, a reviewer for the New York Evangelist applauded Mercy’s Dream as “an Land, Looking, and Futurity

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illustration of the Christian warfare,” or a visualization of the bellicose struggle with the sinful world that had been understood as a central characteristic of Protestant faith since the seventeenth century.68 In championing a faithful attentiveness to heaven and disavowal of speculative forms of divination, however, Mercy’s Dream also seems to visualize a central argument made by religious writers who believed that modern capitalism was a godly system that had been led astray by “unrighteous” forms of speculation during the Jacksonian bubble.69 In gambling on the false futures and “visionary hopes” of profit promised by risky ventures, these writers argued, American businessmen neglected their Christian duty to “look to heaven” as the proper end goal of, and guiding lodestar for, their earthly endeavors.70 As minister Orville Dewey explained in an 1838 sermon, this entailed a drastic misallocation of the Christian businessman’s perceptual and imaginative energies: His views ought to stretch themselves to eternity—ought to seek an ever expanding good. . . . [But] to what is he looking? To the sublime mountain range, that spreads along the horizon of this world? To the glorious host of glittering stars, the majestic train of night, the infinite regions of heaven? No—his is no upward gaze, no wide vision of the world—to a speck of earthly dust he is looking. He might lift his eye, a philosophic eye, to the magnificence of the universe, for an object; and upon what is it fixed? Upon the molehill beneath his feet!71

Echoing claims made by other clerical commentators, Dewey condemns speculation as a practice that trained the entrepreneur’s attention on the most inconsequential of worldly matters (“earthly dust” and “molehills”) and short-circuited his inclination to peer beyond the horizons of individual interest and earthly existence, contemplate God’s mysterious eternality, and reach imaginatively for the wonders of heavenly rebirth (the “ever expanding good” of the afterlife). By looking to heaven in this way and reminding themselves of their own mortal insignificance and sinful need of redemption, evangelical writers argued, Christian businessmen would develop habits of discernment and self-restraint that would protect them from the lure of speculation’s false futures, guide them away from unethical forms of money making, and help them pursue profit in virtuous and sustainable ways.72 While readable as a conservative attack on worldly endeavor, then, Mercy’s Dream also seems to give dramatic visual form to a religious critique of speculation, formulated by neoteric ministerial commentators, that aimed to restore the righteousness of business endeavor and strengthen the American capitalist economy after the speculative mania of the 1830s. Shutting her eyes to the speculative enticements clustered around her and immersing herself in a contemplative look to heaven, the painting’s maiden embodies the meditative disposition championed by Dewey and other evan-

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gelical thinkers; with a “sublime mountain range that spreads along the horizon” and a velvety evocation of the “dark train of night” in its upper registers, the setting of Mercy’s Dream likewise evokes the stirring natural phenomena that ministerial commentators identified as conduits to “philosophical” engagements with God. Stretching her “view to eternity” in a space redolent of the “magnificence of the universe,” Huntington’s maiden may well have struck modern-minded evangelical viewers as an instructive example of the sort of spiritual vaticination that could protect the nation’s businessmen against the lures of risky investment and reinvigorate the flagging economy. Stung by his recent involvements in the Jacksonian real estate boom, Huntington organized his first major Christian painting around a religious subject—anticipatory imaginings of heavenly redemption—that would allow him to critically interrogate the projective tactics and alluring appearances of speculation, intervene in ongoing evangelical dialogues about risky enterprise and the moral character of American capitalism, and give voice to his own religious and economic ideals. Like many pro-business evangelical commentators of the period, Huntington was (as noted above) both increasingly wary of “unrighteous” speculation and an avid believer in the rectitude of market dealings and prudent investment. By advancing a striking visual lesson about virtuous and unvirtuous forms of anticipatory projection, Mercy’s Dream worked to engender the sort of righteous economic behavior the artist embraced. In championing spiritual foresight over the “unrighteous” projections of the speculator, the painting may also have vented anxieties about perceptual acuity that beset Huntington in the early 1840s. As Wendy Greenhouse has noted, he struggled with a crippling eye condition during the first three years of that decade; his correspondence suggests that he contracted an infection severe enough to make painting and other common tasks (such as reading) exceedingly painful.73 Though it remains uncertain when this illness began, Huntington’s reference to an “inflammation in one of my eyes” in an April 1842 letter suggests that it may have emerged in the previous year.74 As he completed Mercy’s Dream, the artist may well have begun to feel the effects of a condition that would have sharpened his sense of the frailties of optical perception and (likely) intensified his commitment to spiritual foresight. CONCLUSION

Taking up and creatively interrogating the promotional fictions and investment techniques that fueled the Hudson Valley land boom of the mid-1830s, Huntington’s early landscapes and figural scenes offered their depression-era audiences wishful reassurances that the real estate market could respect certain boundaries and that the wild economy could yet be reformed. Around the time that Huntington grappled with the cultural and material forces of New York’s suburban boom, another artist—John Quidor—was deepening his own fiscal and creative engagements with another sector of the Jacksonian real estate economy: the turbulent land markets of the West. As the

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next chapter will show, Quidor’s real estate dealings in Illinois would inspire him to compose a series of dark allegories of speculation entirely unlike Huntington’s fantastic and evangelizing works. Indeed, Quidor’s mordant literary paintings of hapless speculators and landless laborers dramatized the violence, ruin, and loss that accompanied land dealings on the midwestern frontier.

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2 DIGGING FOR GOLD Allegories of Speculation on the Illinois Frontier

I

genre painter John Quidor took fifty dollars of savings and purchased a 160-acre plot of land, sight unseen, in southwestern Illinois.1 This was not an uncommon financial maneuver among middling investors of the Jacksonian period: as white settlers pushed west and the national economy expanded in the 1820s and early 1830s, East Coast buyers of all stripes snapped up farms, lots in planned towns, and canal shares across the Old Northwest and Upper Mississippi Valley.2 But Quidor continued to pursue speculations on western properties long after the Jacksonian land bubble burst in 1837 and most northeastern investors abandoned frontier real estate. As we will see, the artist moved to Illinois in the late 1830s and devoted much of his twelve-year residence there to land dealings.3 Real estate was thus never far from Quidor’s mind during the two-decade stretch that comprised the most productive phase of his painterly career.4 At certain moments within this span, I will argue, he turned his creative attentions to land investment, shaping painterly accounts of speculation that grappled with the visual N JULY 1823, THE NEW YORK

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forms and booster constructs of the frontier land market, tapped into the dark material forces that underlay the creation and exchange of western property, and reflected on the artist’s own investment schemes. This chapter will examine three pictures that use the framework of Washington Irving’s popular short story “The Money Diggers”— a complicated satire of the speculative economy that appeared in the collection Tales of a Traveller (1824)—to explore the material and cultural implications of risky real estate investment: two paintings called Money Diggers (fig. 14, 1832, and fig. 26, 1856) and another called Wolfert’s Will (fig. 27, 1856). As we will see, the 1832 and 1856 versions of Money Diggers advance divergent interpretations of a climactic treasurehunting scene within Irving’s tale; Wolfert’s Will explores the miraculous shift of fortunes that the eponymous character enjoys in the story’s concluding pages. Inspired by a vignette in Irving’s story that spoofed the practice of land speculation, Quidor’s 1832 Money Diggers (fig. 14) advances a dark allegory of Jacksonian speculation that parodies the landscape representations employed by frontier land promoters, overturns the central economic tenets invoked by regional boosters, and punctures the racialized myths of western expansion that took shape in the Jacksonian land market. In so doing, I argue, Quidor’s first iteration of Money Diggers delves into the most unnerving quandaries that troubled the practice of western land speculation and the processes of market-driven settlement in the 1830s: the resistance of frontier land to profitable improvement, the unavoidable realities of risk and loss, the inscrutable character of financial value, and the intertwining of expansion with violent oppression. This mordant and multilayered vision sprang, in part, from Quidor’s troublemaking sensibility, his enduring interest in challenging the ideals and boundaries of polite culture. As we will see, it may also have had roots in the artist’s youthful encounters with speculation and oppression in the Palisades region of southern New York and northern New Jersey. A different set of motivations seems to have inspired Quidor to return to Irving’s story in the mid-1850s. Composed as Quidor struggled to rebound from a disastrous scheme that ended his real estate career, the pendant pictures Money Diggers (fig. 26, 1856) and Wolfert’s Will (fig. 27, 1856) outlined an absurd vision of financial ruin and redemption that elaborated on midcentury critiques of speculation and gave refracted expression to the artist’s conflicted midlife perspective on risky endeavor. In addressing Quidor’s “Money Diggers” paintings as sardonic accounts of speculation, this chapter builds on and diverges from Sarah Burns’s insightful examinations of Quidor’s “dark” imagination.5 Burns has argued convincingly that the artist’s transgressive sensibility arose from his persistent social and professional liminality; caught between the cultural realms of the urban working class and bourgeoisie, Burns asserts, Quidor made paintings of respectable literary subjects that “dredged up” the inflammatory anxieties, desires, and grotesqueries that were embedded (but never fully articulated) in the popular fiction of Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and others.6 This chapter will offer a slightly different account of the relationship between Quidor’s social experience and his raffish painterly work. By reexamining the artist’s paintings 44

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alongside his speculative dealings, I aim to reposition Quidor as a canny interpreter of economic forces that swept up a wide variety of antebellum Americans. Indeed, his real estate deals implicated the artist in a new financial culture that extended far beyond the land market, a high-flying climate of speculative risk taking and entrepreneurial audacity that (as discussed in chapter 1) remade dealings in many sectors of the antebellum economy and implicated economic actors of all sorts.7 As worried observers noted, the adventurist ethos and speculative practices of modern finance clashed dramatically with the traditional economic values—frugality, industriousness, diligence, and self-restraint—associated with social and moral order.8 Cognizant of the fear and fascination that financial endeavor inspired among middle-class audiences, I argue, Quidor composed multilayered painterly accounts of land speculation that tapped his own market experiences and explored the most explosively provocative social, economic, environmental, and semiotic connotations of risky real estate investment. By investigating three of Quidor’s manifestly “economic” paintings, this chapter thus aims to shed new light on the artist’s rich financial imagination and inspire scholars to seek out fiscal tropes in other corners of his broader painterly oeuvre. QUIDOR’S EARLY SPECULATIONS

John Quidor began painting and speculating in the 1820s, finding immediate success in the latter venture and disappointment in the former. From 1823 to 1826 he endured a miserable apprenticeship with portraitist John Wesley Jarvis, who was so inattentive that Quidor eventually sued him for negligence. Quidor ultimately won damages (in the amount of $200) from Jarvis, but the trial garnered embarrassing press coverage that hurt his public image and professional prospects.9 Even as his painterly career stalled, Quidor enjoyed success as an investor. He began speculating in 1823, using the winnings from his court case to buy 160 acres of land in July (as noted above) and another 160 acres in November.10 These two properties were located in the southwest corner of the Illinois Military Tract, a federal land reserve encompassing 3.5 million acres between the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers. The IMT was one of three reserves established by Congress to supply War of 1812 veterans with farmland as a reward for military service. The War Department’s disbursement of patents for IMT plots in 1817 and 1818 spawned a rabid secondary market in Illinois land that was dominated by absentee investors.11 Exploiting the easy credit offered by the modernizing banking system, East Coast speculators snapped up huge swaths of IMT lands. Very few of these purchases were made with an eye toward settlement. Most speculators sought to make money, instead, by trading land or shares in development schemes with other speculators. These deals converted frontier lands into abstract financial assets whose fluctuations of value often bore little relation to their actual material condition.12 Quidor had some guidance as he navigated this chaotic market. The artist’s father also speculated on Illinois land and maintained ties with a major player in western real Digging for Gold

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estate. In 1819 and 1823, Peter Quidor participated in two deals with the Berrian land agency, a family firm that dominated the sale of Illinois land in New York. Members of the Berrian family played a central role in the development of Adams County, Illinois, an early population center within the military tract.13 Following the Berrians’ lead, John and Peter Quidor speculated enthusiastically on Adams County land, and both made profits on most of their early wagers. John Quidor sold one of his 1823 purchases in 1831 for $200 (making a profit of $150), and the other in 1837 for $800 (for a profit of $750).14 At two separate auctions held in 1834 and 1835, the artist bought two halves of an Adams County plot for $4.77; he then resold the reconstituted property in 1837 for $175 (making a profit of $170.23).15 Quidor continued to buy and sell Illinois land after he moved to the state in the spring of 1837, but he failed to replicate the big gains he had made on earlier speculations. In September 1837, for example, Quidor sold a 255-acre tract for significantly less than he had paid for the same property earlier that year.16 The painter had more success with a multipart deal that he engineered in the early 1840s. After purchasing a farm (for $525) on credit from his mother-in-law, Letitia Hawkins, in 1840, Quidor convinced Hawkins to allow him to pay off his mortgage by performing farm labor for her in 1843 and then sold the still-mortgaged farm to an investor (for $600) in 1845.17 As we will see, however, these modest successes were obliterated by Quidor’s final venture in Illinois, a complex scheme the artist launched in 1844. WASHINGTON IRVING’S “THE MONEY DIGGERS”

In the middle of his first round of speculations, Quidor began work on a painterly interpretation of the period’s most pointed literary satire of land speculation: Washington Irving’s short story “The Money Diggers.” The story includes four nested narratives, each of which revolves around the theme of buried treasure—a trope that works to spoof the investor’s dream of riches locked in the land. After the story’s primary narrator recounts the legend of Captain Kidd’s treasure, characters in the first nested narrative (which describes the adventures of a fishing party) tell two separate tales—“The Devil and Tom Walker” and “Wolfert Webber, or Golden Dreams”—of earlier attempts to locate Kidd’s gold. Quidor’s painting focuses on a dramatic vignette within the latter tale, which follows the misadventures of the Dutch colonist Wolfert Webber. Unable to make a profit farming, Webber becomes obsessed with the possibility of finding treasure on Manhattan. After destroying his farm in a fruitless search for gold, Webber ventures out with a white doctor (Knipperhausen) and black fisherman (Mud Sam) to dig for treasure at a remote spot on the island. At the exact moment Sam’s shovel strikes something in the soil (which may or may not be buried gold), Webber catches sight of a ghost hovering above the party. Terrified by this specter, Webber, Knipperhausen, and Sam flee into the darkness. Though his search yields no treasure, Webber eventually finds fortune: in the story’s final scene (discussed at

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greater length below), the colonist secures a miraculous windfall by re-platting his farm as a neighborhood of rental properties.18 Irving’s tale unfolds a humorous caricature of land speculation that playfully engages period critiques of finance capitalism.19 Webber’s foolhardy search for improbable riches in the earth spoofs the speculator’s willingness to gamble on tenuous properties and questionable projections of profit; the farmer’s last-minute jackpot similarly pokes fun at the speculator’s reliance on chance, luck, and creative paperwork. Webber’s misadventures also seem to invoke and humorously exaggerate period conservative understandings of financial enterprise. Alarmed by the banking system’s expansion after the War of 1812, traditionalists decried finance capitalism as a dangerous deviation from an imagined economic past defined by the virtuous profit making of the small businessman or yeoman farmer. In an 1816 letter, for example, Thomas Jefferson famously lamented that “we are now taught to believe that legerdemain tricks upon paper can produce as solid wealth as hard labor in the earth.”20 Echoing other economic conservatives, Jefferson disparagingly contrasts the farmer’s “hard labor in the earth” with the financier’s trickery and, by extension, the “solid wealth” earned by the yeoman with a form of financial worth he implicitly figures as insubstantial. “The Money Diggers” draws on these arguments in various playful ways. The character Webber embodies in exaggerated form the transitions that alarmed traditionalists: he abandons agricultural “labor in the earth” for a foolhardy speculative venture (his quest for buried gold) before finally taking up a development scheme built from “legerdemain tricks upon paper.” And the character’s terrified encounter with a ghost at the money pit satirically invokes conservative imaginings of ethereal financial value. As he composed his first painterly interpretation of Irving’s tale (fig. 14), Quidor concentrated on the treasure-pit scene, choosing its comic climax as his subject: He struck his spade again. “ ’Tis a chest,” said Sam. “Full of gold, I’ll warrant it!” cried Wolfert, clasping his hands with rapture. Scarcely had he uttered the words when a sound from above caught his ear. He cast up his eyes, and lo! by the expiring light of the fire he beheld . . . what appeared to be the grim visage of the drowned buccaneer, grinning hideously down upon him. Wolfert gave a loud cry, and let fall the lantern. His panic communicated itself to his companions. The negro leaped out of the hole, the doctor dropped his book and basket. . . . All was horror and confusion. . . . They fancied a legion of hobgoblins let loose upon them.21

Quidor’s Money Diggers faithfully details the treasure seekers’ “horror and confusion” after the appearance of the pirate ghost (upper right): Webber appears at left in the midst of a shriek; relieved of his “book and basket,” Knipperhausen stands frozen at center; at right, Sam scrambles out of the treasure pit. Various elements seem, in turn, to evoke the terrifying visions that beset the panicked diggers. The tree at left thus

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figure 14 John Quidor, Money Diggers, 1832. Oil on canvas, 15 ¹⁵/₁₆ × 20 ¹⁵/₁₆ in. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Alastair Bradley Martin, 48.171.

takes on monstrous anthropomorphic form: with its arching trunk, mouth-like knot, and grasping limbs, the strange organism appears ready to unleash a frightening bellow and snatch Webber. And the rocky cliff at right features a number of shadowy voids and craggy surfaces that suggest ghoulish countenances. The bank just above Knipperhausen’s shoulder, for example, is suggestively skull-like in form: the bank includes a dark horizontal “mouth,” a triangular crevice that evokes a nasal cavity, an ovoid hole that looks like an eye socket, and a curving rock formation that suggests a cheekbone. The two dark crevices that appear above Sam are also socket-like in appearance; read together with the foreground pit, these voids seem to inscribe a large shrieking face on Quidor’s gloomy landscape. The folded coat at the base of the cliff suggests yet another unsettling visage, composed of brass-button “eyes” and an opened pocket. Taken together, these anthropomorphic vignettes evoke the diggers’ deluded and disoriented state in the moments after their ghostly encounter. MONEY DIGGERS AND RURAL BEAUTY

As we will see, Quidor’s 1832 Money Diggers elaborates on Irving’s parodic scene, shaping an allegorical vision of risky investment that dramatizes the perils of speculation 48

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and the enigmatic character of financial value. Before addressing the implications of the painting’s figural tableau, however, I want to first examine the scene’s battered setting. Marked by signs of fruitless and destructive labor, the setting of Money Diggers evokes and inverts the central tenets of a landscape aesthetic—rural beauty—that held sway in the early nineteenth-century art world and land market. These symbolic maneuvers yield an alternative landscape vision that rejects the objectifying logic that underlay beautiful painterly and promotional representations of land and dramatizes those qualities of western terrain that frustrated the project of settlement. Landscape writing of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries crystallized an aesthetic of rural beauty. Celebrating the settled rural landscape (which has also been called the “pastoral” or “middle” landscape) as a paradigmatic manifestation of the beautiful, period travel narratives, regional histories, and pioneering memoirs construed beauty as the end result of the settler’s efforts to convert the sublime wilderness into productive property.22 Agrarian ideas about the moral and political significance of the farm informed many of these accounts. In his popular Travels in New-England and New-York (1821), for example, Timothy Dwight imagined the beautiful New England farm as a realm in which the yeoman is “his own master and the master of all his possessions” and farmwork as a means by which the farmer “gratifies his reasons, his tastes, and his hopes.”23 Echoing other accounts, Dwight presents rural beauty as the product of the self-actualizing labor of the yeoman, an ideal republican figure who achieved political and economic independence by cultivating land. Attuned to these arguments, American painters soon developed a visual lexicon for rural beauty. Ralph Earl’s Looking East from Denny Hill (fig. 15, 1800) and Charles Willson Peale’s Landscape Looking toward Sellers Hall from Mill Bank (fig. 16, c. 1818) exemplify the new picture type that resulted from these efforts. Working to glorify the farmlands of Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, respectively, Earl and Peale’s canvases organize their pictorial space around symmetrical juxtapositions and balanced forms that translate the rational order of settlement into compositional terms, trace the geometries of improvement (property lines, infrastructure, and so on) across the landscapes they depict, employ softly lit skies to evoke the land’s golden promise, and use various strategies (repoussoir trees, open foregrounds, deep views) to frame commanding views that extend the “mastery” of property ownership to the spectator. Taken up by a wave of early farmscape paintings, these strategies organize a visual experience that confirms the rural landscape’s status as an object to be possessed, controlled, and acted upon.24 The aesthetic of rural beauty enjoyed an equally rich existence in the cultural discourses of the land market. As Edward Cahill has shown, land promoters frequently borrowed ideas, themes, and even whole passages from sophisticated landscape texts.25 Boosters found the construct of rural beauty especially useful because it allowed them to tout the aesthetic charms of frontier lands while underscoring the Digging for Gold

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figure 15 E Ralph Earl, Looking East from Denny Hill, 1800. Oil on canvas, 45 ¾ × 79 ³/₈ in. Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA, Museum Purchase 1916.97. Image ©Worcester Art Museum. figure 16 G Charles Willson Peale, Landscape Looking toward Sellers Hall from Mill Bank, c. 1818. Oil on canvas, 15 × 21 ¼ in. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Bayou Bend Collection, gift of Mrs. James W. Glanville, B.98.12.

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moral and political virtue of western development schemes. In an 1824 notice, for example, the settler Morris Birkbeck spun a glowing portrait of Illinois’s countryside: Here we are, about sixty thousand persons . . . possessing the portions of our choice in a rich and beautiful country, lately a wilderness, but under well-directed industry fast becoming a fertile field. We labor for ourselves and our children, and have nothing to pay but for our benefit.26

Birkbeck uses the framework of beauty to reimagine Illinois’s development as a civilizing process propelled by the labor of self-determining yeomen—as a project, in other words, perfectly aligned with agrarian notions of settlement. Puff pieces and advertisements, in turn, used the construct of rural beauty to promote specific ventures. To underscore the solid prospects of the fledgling town of Quincy (seat of Adams County), an 1832 Illinois Monthly Magazine article thus highlighted the “beautiful” quality of the “surrounding countryside” and the “moral and enterprising” character of its inhabitants.27 Promotional prints elaborated on the claims made by these texts. View of Kaskaskia (fig. 17, 1841), for example, celebrates the eponymous Illinois town as the prosperous center of a thriving agricultural settlement. Echoing period farmscape paintings, View of Kaskaskia offers a sweeping view of a developing landscape teeming with improvements. Organized into a linear sequence of temporally charged spaces—a foreground that evokes the prairie’s “wild” past (thick foliage and formidable bluff ), a middleground scene of trailblazing development (log cabin and humble farm), and a distant vision of advanced settlement—the landscape construes Kaskakia’s development as a steady process driven by the work of the virtuous pioneer.28 At the same time, View of Kaskaskia employs an elevated foreground and traditional repoussoir element (the ridge at right) to shape a commanding prospect of the prairie landscape that visualizes the objectifying outlook that propelled the commodification and settlement of the frontier.29 In his land dealings, Quidor undoubtedly encountered promotional imaginings of rural beauty; he was also likely familiar with painterly visions of the beautiful, having studied the landscape genre on his own while a student.30 Drawing on these experiences, the artist composed a setting for Money Diggers that parodically refigures the central theme associated with the beautiful: Quidor’s scene pictures a gloomy wasteland where human labor has produced destruction rather than improvement, nonexistence instead of generative productivity. The empty pit at center encapsulates these reversals. Even as it serves as the scene’s primary evocation of earthy labor, the murky pit underscores the fruitlessness of the diggers’ work. Rendered in pure black pigment, the pit inscribes a striking evocation of nothingness onto the terrain occupied by the treasure seekers, marking the setting of Money Diggers as an irredeemable ruinscape. Digging for Gold

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figure 17 John Caspar Wild, View of Kaskaskia, 1841. Lithograph. Reproduced from Lewis Foulk Thomas, ed., The Valley of the Mississippi: Illustrated in a Series of Views (St. Louis: Chambers and Knapp, 1841–42). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

At the same time, Money Diggers creatively recodes the characteristic formal elements associated with rural beauty. The picture incorporates several components of beautiful landscapes within its setting, including an open foreground, a deep central view (above Knipperhausen), and a pair of framing devices (the tree and rocky ridge). In so doing, Money Diggers modifies each so as to undercut its original symbolic function and deny the sort of commanding prospect offered by typical rural imagery: the painting’s open foreground leads to the plunging treasure pit; its repoussoir devices are enlivened by a weird animacy that disrupts the viewer’s mastery over the landscape; and the deep view leads only to inscrutable darkness. Money Diggers organizes an encounter with its landscape, then, that ultimately refuses the objectifying perspective central to beautiful farmscapes such as Looking East from Denny Hill or View of Kaskaskia. Inviting and rejecting efforts to imaginatively possess its murky terrain, Money Diggers shapes a visual experience that affirms the wild otherness of land, recasting the landscape as an intractable, elusive, and ungovernable entity. This vision of wracked and indomitable land echoed gloomy assessments of the developing frontier offered by concerned western observers. Early settlers in Illinois frequently associated frontier development with folly. The pioneer Richard Lee Mason, for example, described local town speculations thusly: Those mushroom towns in a short time will produce their own death. Although their lives are short they do mischief to the community. People in their neighborhood are unwise

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enough, for the sake of having a town lot, to give as much for a few feet of ground as would purchase a good farm. . . . They are then tied to the little town, where their property can never be of much value, nor can it produce a living.31

Echoing other observers, Mason condemns speculative town schemes as transient ventures that generate little permanent settlement but produce lasting economic injury. Appearing and disappearing quickly, the “mushroom town” seduced the “unwise” investor into sinking capital in barren lands that would never yield a profit or support agriculture. At other moments, western observers highlighted the difficulties and dangers of the prairie landscape. These concerns reveal themselves most palpably in the discussions of malaria—known to locals as the “Illinois shakes”—that unfolded in the frontier press. Reappearing in annual epidemics, malaria led many to question the viability of rural development in Illinois. Working without a scientific understanding of epidemiology, frontier writers portrayed the “Illinois shakes” as a scourge emitted by the state’s landscape itself. Some blamed the disease on local waterways; a Western Messenger article thus declared that the “fever and ague” purportedly emitted by the Illinois River “makes us almost fear to breathe in the evening.”32 Others identified the unimproved prairie as a source of sickness. In an 1819 travelogue, Henry Fearon warned that “the first settling of land . . . frequently produces bilious fevers and agues.”33 Struggling to make sense of the death and debilitation produced by malaria, local commentators recast the Illinois landscape as an alien entity that resisted settlement, an obdurate and animate thing whose most useful assets also posed dangerous threats. Unsettled by the tenuousness of frontier settlement, western commentators gave accounts of the prairie that diverged dramatically from the land agent’s cheery fantasies. Recasting the developing frontier as an inhospitable place defined by failure, ruin, and peril, these observers contributed to a counter discourse of land that resonates strikingly with the gothic setting of Money Diggers. Marked by signs of futility, absence, intransigent wildness, and inalienability, Quidor’s setting outlines a landscape vision that inverts the tenets of booster aesthetics and, in so doing, echoes and extends the interpretations advanced by worried western commentators. The figures that inhabit this setting seem to further link its space with the gloomy visions of frontier writers. Striking a tremulous, knock-kneed pose that evokes the “Illinois shakes,” Knipperhausen quietly aligns the landscape below with debilitation and sickness, heightening its dangerous and wild charge. DIRT, DEVILS, AND FINANCIAL VALUE

Even as it parodies the aesthetic language employed by boosters, Money Diggers advances a pictorial allegory of speculation that evokes and overturns the constructs of value and confidence informing antebellum promotions of frontier land. Quidor’s Digging for Gold

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painting, more specifically, upends a ubiquitous symbol—fertile soil—that land marketers employed to signify the solid worth of their ventures and bolster the confidence of their customers. Money Diggers also invokes a traditional allegorical figure, the money devil, long used to signify the enigmatic quality of financial value. Taken together, these spatial and figural elements contribute to an allegorical account of speculative endeavor that visualizes its most unsettling facets. Quidor’s canvas foregrounds a subject that engrossed antebellum land promoters: the bottom half of the picture is devoted to a detailed representation of soil, a natural entity and topographical asset that western boosters discussed at length in myriad texts. These accounts advanced an interpretation of western earth that worked to affirm the value of frontier schemes and inspire comfortable assurance in the speculator. Samuel Berrian outlined this interpretation in an 1818 letter, arguing: I have explored the western wilds . . . and am fully convinced, from the uncommon luxuriance of its soil, the great navigable waters with which it abounds and a genial climate . . . that it will ere long rival the Atlantic States in literature, the liberal arts, and all the refined amusements . . . and far surpass it in wealth and population. No cultivator of the soil whose eye once rests upon this fertile tract of earth ever turns it backward. . . . The people of the Atlantic States have no conception of the extreme fertility of the land . . . and the facilities of amassing immense wealth with moderate means.34

For Berrian and other boosters, the “uncommon luxuriance” of western earth guaranteed that “cultivator[s] of the soil” would relocate to the frontier, that an advanced civilization would soon arise, and that any scheme involving this “fertile tract of earth” would thus yield the investor “immense wealth.” Working from this perspective, land agents frequently employed the trope of rich soil to promote Illinois real estate. An 1818 Berrian company advertisement for the unbuilt town of Independence, for example, trumpeted its location in “the heart of fertile country” before predicting that the village would “in all probability . . . become the capital of Illinois.”35 Echoing other ads, the notice stresses the “fertile country” around Independence so as to underscore the development’s strong prospects. The image of fertile soil works here and elsewhere to imbue a tenuous venture with concrete value and promise, a familiar sense of worth rooted in the local landscape’s amenability to traditional modes of labor (cultivation) and profit making (agriculture) and, in turn, to intensive settlement. By drawing on this traditional notion of value, land advertisements worked paradoxically to heighten the credibility of their offerings as modern speculative assets, or vendible instruments purchased by the investor with an eye toward resale. In the process, they remade a natural asset customarily associated with use value into a sign of western property’s exchangeability. Banks, canal corporations, and railroad companies similarly employed the construct of fertile earth to underscore the solidity of western financial ventures. A 54

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figure 18 Danforth, Underwood & Co., Bank of Cairo Two Dollar Note, 1840. Engraving. Photograph provided by the author.

two-dollar note issued by the Bank of Cairo (fig. 18), for example, features an allegorical vignette of prairie fertility that pairs a Madonna-like mother and child with a distant harvest scene. Positioned just above the town name on the note, this vignette works to affirm the value of the certificate and the credibility of its issuing institution by aligning Cairo with rich natural assets, profitable cultivation, and population growth. This fantasy bore little relation to the actual character of life in Cairo or the economic objectives of its banking institution. By 1840 two schemes to develop the town had failed, and Cairo remained a motley collection of crude buildings. The Bank of Cairo was organized in 1836, meanwhile, as a “wildcat” bank, an unregulated institution that served the needs of speculators by offering easy credit and issuing unbacked notes (like this one) for use in land transactions.36 In practice, then, the Bank of Cairo vignette worked to bolster the confidence of the note recipient in a tenuous institution by affirming the capacity of the local landscape to support a future—defined by traditional agriculture and stable settlement—that was nowhere present in Cairo. In so doing, the note used the image of customary prosperity to smooth its function within a speculative economy radically divorced from the economic mode pictured by the vignette.37 Other western institutions employed the construct of prairie fertility to similar ends, using images of dark loam and bounteous harvests to affirm the value of scrip notes (fig. 19), stock certificates, and other tradable paper issued to fund infrastructure schemes. By the 1830s, then, fertile soil had become a central symbol employed by land agents, developers, and financiers to signify the rock-solid value of a given venture and bolster the confidence of potential investors. The image of fecund earth presented the prospective client with a sign of those natural assets and economic capacities of the frontier landscape that purportedly guaranteed the success of any investment venture, however tenuous or abstract. Linked to customary notions of honest farmwork and Digging for Gold

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figure 19 Unknown artist, Illinois and Michigan Canal Five Dollar Scrip Note, State Bank at Chicago, 1839. Engraving. Photograph provided by the author.

steady profit making, the trope of rich soil worked to obscure the uncertainty, risk, and mystery associated with frontier ventures and to move the aspiring investor toward an ideal state of unshakable assurance. Money Diggers unfolds a detailed depiction of soil that upends promotional interpretations of western earth. Rendered in frenetic dabs of peach, gray, brown, and black paint, the ground under the diggers palpably conveys the weight and texture of soggy, well-trodden, and lifeless mud. Read together with the central pit, this sodden surface marks the painting’s setting as a barren tract devoid of organic life (the frog is a lone exception) and an unstable foundation for the activities above—and, as such, as a dramatic inversion of booster fantasies of soil as a richly fertile substance, an ideal platform for intensive development, and an embodiment of rock-solid worth. Dramatizing the futility of the diggers’ speculative venture, the earthy setting of Money Diggers recasts soil as a sign of worthlessness and financial loss. The two figures that stand above this valueless ground (Mud Sam will be discussed below) similarly overturn the booster paradigm of confidence: shrieking, staring, and gesticulating wildly, Webber and Knipperhausen appear in a state of terrified confusion. Taken together, the setting and figures contribute to an allegorical vision of speculation that dramatizes the quandaries and hardships of market experience, difficulties papered over by the impossible dreams of sure value and perfect assurance. Perched on the rim of the empty pit and struggling to comprehend the mystifying turn their venture has taken, Webber and Knipperhausen reframe speculation as an unnerving confrontation with valuelessness, failure, and uncertainty. The third member of the digging party intensifies this dark allegory by invoking another difficulty associated with speculation: the cryptic character of financial value. Diverging from Irving’s narrative (which tells us that the fisherman “leaps” up after spotting the ghost), Money Diggers pictures Mud Sam (fig. 20) in the midst of an awk56

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figure 20 Detail from John Quidor, Money Diggers, 1832. Oil on canvas, 15 ¹⁵/₁₆ × 20 ¹⁵/₁₆ in. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Alastair Bradley Martin, 48.171.

ward climb out of the treasure pit. Locked in an ungainly pose and composed of grotesquely contorted features, the fisherman appears less as a believably human actor than as a weird chimera issuing from the murky depths. Sarah Burns has shown that this monstrous figure encapsulates fraught antebellum discourses of blackness that aligned the nonwhite body with alien otherness and gave voice to white audiences’ deepest fears about the tenuousness of racial hierarchies.38 Building on this reading, I would suggest that Sam can also be understood as a racialized reimagining of an allegorical creature—the money devil—long employed to satirize the enigmatic character of finance. As Marc Shell has shown, money devils first appeared in Christian medieval culture as symbols of cupidity; eighteenth-century printmakers later reinvigorated the medieval beast to satirize the strange new forces of capitalism.39 Restyled as otherDigging for Gold

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figure 21 Unknown artist, Le Grande Diable d’Argent Patron de la Finance, 1798. Hand-colored etching, 10 × 13 ¾ in. Kress Collection, Baker Library, Harvard Business School.

worldly monsters that issue coins from all orifices, the money devils that appear in Le Grande Diable d’Argent Patron de la Finance (fig. 21, 1798) and other period prints reimagine financial value as an unnatural, abstract, and unintelligible quality that can be produced at will from nothing and affixed to anything (even the body’s lowest excretions). Alarmed by the growth of the American financial system, early nineteenthcentury U.S. commentators renewed the money devil tradition yet again, producing images and texts that used monsters, fiends, and hybrid creatures to spoof the institutions and instruments of finance. Democratic printmakers used the hydra (fig. 22) to evoke the otherworldly dynamism of the national bank; working-class activists used the term mammoth bank, freighted with connotations of primordial mystery and alienness, to condemn the same institution.40 Whiggish cartoonists, lastly, employed weird human-animal monsters (fig. 23) to render the strange new forms of value produced by wildcat banks. Quidor’s grotesque digger resonates with these discourses of monstrosity. Like the money devils of past and present, the fisherman is a strange pastiche of mismatched bodily forms: two flexing legs that throw weight backward, an elongated vertical abdomen, a torso pressed flat against the ground, and a head that swivels around over the left shoulder. Details of physiognomy and costume intensify the digger’s hybridity. While his brutally caricatured countenance and excrementally stained pants align the figure with abject animality, the fisherman’s fine striped shirt suggests respectability. 58

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figure 22 E Henry R. Robinson, General Jackson Slaying the Many Headed Monster, 1832. Lithograph, 11 ⁷/₈ × 14 ³/₈ in. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-USZ62–1566. figure 23 G David Claypoole Johnston, Great Locofoco Juggernaut, c. 1837. Engraving, 4 ¹/₈ × 5 ¹/₃ in. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

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The digger’s liminal spatial position simultaneously imbues the hybrid figure with complicated economic resonances. Though Sam has pulled his upper body and right leg out of the pit and into the landscape above, his rump and faintly rendered left leg dissolve in the darkness of the hole. Simultaneously ethereal (below) and solid (above), Sam’s body appears as an apparition that materializes from the depths of the pit, a strange emanation that exists in ambiguous physical and symbolic relation to the gold purportedly buried below. Indeed, as a being that combines concreteness and insubstantiality, the clambering creature seems both to emblematize and elude the sort of solid worth long associated with precious metal. Combining odd physical hybridity with evocations of enigmatic economic value, Mud Sam can be read as a modern money devil, an updated iteration of the traditional emblem that capitalizes on period constructs of black otherness to advance a racialized vision of the unsettlingly mysterious character of financial worth.41 Positioned alongside striking evocations of worthlessness, uncertainty, and failure, Quidor’s hybrid creature contributes to a gloomy allegory of speculation that dramatizes the troubling quandaries raised by financial endeavor. MONEY DIGGERS AND THE VIOLENT FORCES OF EXPANSION

The curious fisherman opens on to still another, darker set of meanings. The title of Quidor’s painting points us toward these implications: referring to the overall narrative that contains “Wolfert Webber,” the title invites us to reconsider the fraught figure (and larger scene) in light of Irving’s broader text. Various pictorial elements seem, in turn, to subtly link Mud Sam to the creature at the heart of “The Devil and Tom Walker,” a character tied to two subjugated frontier populations—African American slaves and dispossessed Native Americans—whose oppression accompanied the commodification of the western landscape. This creative citation dramatically complicates the meanings of the treasure-pit scene. Inscribed with signs of toil and oblivion, Quidor’s dark tableau subtly alludes to the histories of enslavement and dispossession that unfolded on the frontier. In so doing, the scene echoes and amplifies the deeply fraught cultural interpretations that arose around these histories in the period. Irving’s tale “The Devil and Tom Walker” follows the escapades of the greedy colonist Tom, who pledges his soul to the devil in exchange for Captain Kidd’s treasure. Before any of this occurs, however, the devil presents himself to Tom in a complicated guise. Having paused while on a walk in a forest, Tom kicks over a “skull with an Indian tomahawk buried deep in it,” an action that triggers the appearance of a figure described as “neither negro nor Indian . . . neither black nor copper-colored, but swarthy and dingy.” Informed by Tom that he is trespassing on land owned by the white minister Deacon Peabody, the creature replies, “This woodland belonged to me long before your white-faced race put foot upon the soil,” and then introduces himself by declaring, “I go by various names. I am the wild huntsman in some countries; the 60

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black miner in others.” Once Tom realizes that the stranger is “Old Scratch,” the devil makes his pitch and dramatically exits by going “down into the earth . . . until he disappeared.”42 This opening encounter establishes a complex identity for the devil. Characterized by the narrator as a “swarthy” figure “neither negro nor Indian,” the creature describes himself as a racial hybrid whose ambiguous appearance accommodates multiple identities (the “black miner” and the native “wild huntsman”) simultaneously. In so doing, the beast emphasizes his status as a first claimant on the “woodland,” an original owner who occupied the forest before “white-faced” colonists and who has remained long after the dispersal of the landscape’s initial occupants. Taken together, these characterizations link the infernal being to the racial dynamics of national expansion, dynamics the English author Harriet Martineau would later succinctly describe as an effort to “drive out the red man, and drive in the black man.”43 In the same moment that “The Money Diggers” appeared, military, political, and economic forces were combining to push Native Americans out of the Old Southwest and Old Northwest and to implant a vast slave economy in the Mississippi River Valley (an economy built on existing forms of enslavement established during the colonial era). The gothic charge of Irving’s devil derives, in part, from the character’s invocation, and disruption, of this broad project and the deep-rooted forces of white settlement, native dispossession, and black subjugation: lingering on in the woods, the mixed-race creature encapsulates the titillating and terrifying possibility of irrepressible nonwhite resistance to expansion. Quidor seems to have been particularly intrigued by the infernal character at the heart of “The Devil and Tom Walker.” Later in his career, the artist would compose two paintings—The Devil and Tom Walker (1856, Cleveland Museum of Art) and Tom Walker’s Flight (c. 1856, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco)—that depict the devil’s various encounters with Tom.44 And Quidor incorporated several details within Money Diggers (fig. 20) that link the scene’s black figure to the demonic forest-dweller. Positioned at the rim of the gold pit with one leg planted in its depths, the figure invokes the subterranean movements of the devil, who disappears “down into the earth” at the end of the forest scene. The fisherman also appears alongside two signs of mining: a pick and a dark cleft in the background ridge that can be interpreted as a cave or crude mine shaft. Readable as Irving’s “black miner,” the multivalent creature of Money Diggers quietly recodes the painting’s excavation scene as a suggestive vision of slave-run extractive industry. Reconsidered from this perspective, the treasure-pit tableau seems to evoke certain manifestations of enslaved extraction that were deeply rooted in the West and in frontier Illinois more specifically. Slavery’s history in Illinois began in 1719, when the explorer Philippe Renault brought dozens of Haitian slaves to the French settlement Fort de Chartres on the Mississippi River. In the succeeding decades, slavery spread up the river and across southern Illinois. Although the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 barred slavery from the Digging for Gold

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figure 24 John Caspar Wild, View of Galena, Illinois, 1845. Hand-colored lithograph, 20 ¼ × 30 ¼ in. I. N. Phelps Stokes Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints, and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

new U.S. territory of Illinois, proslavery settlers used various strategies to preserve the institution’s presence on the prairie. Those efforts culminated in a contentious campaign, undertaken in 1823–24, to amend the 1818 state constitution to legalize slavery permanently. Although that venture failed, the institution enjoyed quasi-legal status in Illinois into the 1840s.45 Throughout its history, Illinois slavery was intertwined with mining. Most of the slaves imported by Renault were put to work in French lead mines that remained in operation until at least 1744. The most significant extractive industry of early Illinois— salt mining—was likewise powered by slave labor.46 Salt producers began importing slaves to the saline region in southeastern Illinois at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and by 1820 an expansive slave-run salt industry had taken shape in the region. The “lead rush” that developed around Galena in northwest Illinois in the 1820s, lastly, was also driven by slave labor.47 Poised between a gaping pit and a dark cleft in the rocky ridge, Sam subtly conjures both forms of enslaved “money digging” that flourished on the frontier. Together with the nearby pick, the pit and the dark cleft quietly evoke period practices of lead mining: in the 1820s and 1830s, Illinois miners used horizontal tunnels and vertical shafts (fig. 24) to extract lead from the bluffs around Galena.48 The pit also calls to mind the 62

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infrastructure of salt mining. Salt-works operations were organized around naturally occurring saline springs that bubbled up through the topsoil. After a spring was discovered, slave laborers dug wells around the water source; the brine that collected in these crude reservoirs was then piped to kettles set in slave-built fire pits and boiled until it was reduced to pure salt.49 Paired with Knipperhausen’s fire, the central trench echoes the hand-dug wells and fire pits that were crucial to the operation of Illinois salt works. Even as it makes iconographic allusions to western slave-driven industries, Money Diggers echoes the grim accounts of frontier slavery that appeared in the 1820s as partisans battled over the institution’s fate in Illinois. This struggle had significant implications: if Illinois became a slave state, it would significantly expand slavery’s footprint and destroy the balance of power established by the Missouri Compromise. Horrified by this prospect, abolitionists forecast a bleak future for Illinois under slavery. In an impassioned letter to the Illinois Gazetteer, for example, local leader George Flower argued: There are some persons, who . . . are still hankering for slavery. Men, under the dominion of passion, cannot hearken to reason. . . . Avarice is an overbearing passion . . . urged by this demon, on they rush. I can compare them to nothing but the herd of swine we read of in the Testament, which, ‘being possessed by a devil, ran furiously down a steep place into the sea’; and a sea of trouble it would be. . . . Suppose twenty thousand negroes to be in the State . . . then begins a war to which there will be neither truce nor treaty.50

Castigating proslavery advocates as irrational men driven by the “demon” of “avarice,” Flower predicted that the establishment of slavery in Illinois would lead to unending race “war.” The popular pamphlet The Injurious Effects of Slave Labor (1824) aligned the proslavery movement with similarly dark origins and effects. Echoing Flower’s letter, the pamphlet argued that the proslavery campaign was driven by the “cupidity of interested speculators” who sought to gain “some thousands” from “a temporary increase in the price of lands” in those “sections of the State” dominated by slave-run enterprise. In exchange for these gains, the pamphlet predicted, the “fair territory of Illinois is to be cursed with barrenness, and blackened with a servile population.”51 Intermingling signs of racial identity and deathly infertility, the text imagines the landscape produced by the maneuvers of speculation-minded proslavery activists as a “barren” and “blackened” wasteland. In their efforts to defeat the proslavery movement, activists outlined a gothic account of the enslaved frontier that resonates strikingly with the dark vision organized by Money Diggers. Picturing a landscape that is barren and infertile, animated by the “devilish” forces of greed and speculation, and inscribed with suggestive evocations of slave labor, Quidor’s multivalent scene gives dramatic visual form to the central tropes structuring abolitionists’ jeremiadical accounts of the slaveholding frontier. Even as it Digging for Gold

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grapples allegorically with speculation, then, Money Diggers seems to offer a refracted glimpse of one oppressive force that shaped land values and real estate marketing in the West. Quidor’s scene may also quietly allude to the other violent process that accompanied the commodification of western land (and which Irving’s “black miner” character invoked). As the artist composed Money Diggers, the effort to remove native peoples from the upper Mississippi River Valley was entering a newly bloody phase. In 1832, white troops fought a series of battles with Sauk and Fox warriors in northern Illinois; these skirmishes culminated with the Battle of Bad Axe, in which white soldiers massacred a band of Sauks and Foxes on the banks of the Mississippi.52 This campaign (dubbed the Black Hawk War) effectively ended native resistance to white settlement in Illinois. The final displacement of natives from the state inspired a variety of cultural responses, including triumphalist histories of Indian removal and respectful tributes to native resistance.53 William Cullen Bryant’s poem “The Prairies” (1832–33) epitomizes a more ambivalent thread of interpretation. After an opening stanza celebrating the prairie’s “unshorn fields, boundless and beautiful,” the poem shifts to consider the frontier’s past. Describing a trek across the prairie, the narrator avers, As o’er the verdant waste I guide my steed, Among the high rank grass that sweeps his sides The hollow beating of his footstep seems A sacrilegious sound. I think of those Upon whose rest he tramples. Are they here— The dead of other days?—and did the dust Of these fair solitudes once stir with life And burn with passion?54

Though “The Prairies” ultimately affirms the nation’s westward push, this passage employs a metaphor to envision the fading presence of native life on the prairie— entombment—that injects some ambivalence into the poem’s account of expansion.55 Recasting the prairie as a cemeterial space that held the “dead of other days” and the white settler’s journey west as a “sacrilegious” intrusion on consecrated ground, the passage reimagines white expansion as an unholy encroachment, and native declension as a loss worthy of mourning.56 Introducing a measure of doubt and unease into the historical narrative traced by “The Prairies,” this vignette gives voice to misgivings that complicated other popular depictions of western settlement, including frontier novels, political speeches, and melodramatic Indian plays.57 Composed in the same fraught climate as Bryant’s poem, Quidor’s Money Diggers gives pictorial form to the charged metaphor that “The Prairies” employs to represent

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the disappearance of native life on the frontier. While readable as an allegorical emblem of financial loss and a sign of slave labor, the painting’s dark pit also echoes the form of a grave: oblong in shape, steeped in funereal gloom, and complete with its own “headstone” (the foreground outcropping), the hole can be read as a freshly dug tomb. The skull-like forms of the anthropomorphized cliff (discussed above) subtly affirm the sepulchral character of the pit. Positioned at the center of the scene, the tomblike trench situates death and oblivion at the heart of the speculative venture. In so doing, the pit seems to quietly allude to the intertwining of land investment with the forces of expropriation and eradication and, in turn, to give pictorial expression to the unease, guilt, and distress that these forces engendered. Money Diggers organizes a pictorial allegory of speculation, then, that visualizes the intertwining of market endeavor with the forces of racial oppression and evokes the disquieting effects that concerned observers associated with the expansion of western slavery and Indian removal. In so doing, the painting pushes even further in its challenge to booster fantasy, uncovering dark histories that promotional culture worked to obscure. Indeed, booster accounts invariably construed the frontier as a realm of whiteness. Land promoters employed the white yeoman (rather than the planter or slave-driving industrialist) as a model settler in their narratives of western development.58 Most booster accounts, moreover, drew on the construct of the “virgin” frontier—the fantasy that the West was an unoccupied Eden awaiting the white settler—when touting western ventures.59 And market discourse typically figured the structures through which land was obtained and exchanged as a self-contained system of white actors. An allegorical vignette (fig. 25) that appeared on a popular Illinois Military Tract map encapsulates all of these tropes. Picturing a veteran-turned-yeoman receiving a land deed from the goddess Liberty, the vignette imagines the exchange of Illinois land as a process unfolding between white parties; untouched by any trace of habitation, the wild background frames Illinois as a blank slate awaiting the white pioneer.60 Considered alongside such images, Money Diggers offers a bold refutation of the racial myths that structured land promotions, a symbolic rejoinder that delves unrestrainedly into the dark forms of appropriation and moneymaking that flourished on the frontier. Money Diggers unfolds a multilayered assault on the dreams and delusions that shaped the practice of land speculation and propelled the broader real estate market in the Jacksonian period. Working through the symbolic framework established by its literary source, the painting parodies the landscape aesthetic that informed booster representations of real estate, allegorically undercuts the central thematic constructs of real estate promotion, dramatizes the unsettling quandaries that defined many market experiences, and foregrounds the distressing forms that accumulation took on the frontier. Although it advances a boldly alternative, even transgressive, account of speculative endeavor, Money Diggers does not pursue a radical political critique of existing

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figure 25 Detail from Nicholas Van Zandt, A General Plat of the Military Lands between the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers, 1818. Engraving, reproduced from Van Zandt, A Full Description of the Soil, Water, Timber, and Prairies of Each Lot, or Quarter Section of the Military Lands between the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers (Washington, DC: P. Force, 1818). Image courtesy of the Newberry Library, Chicago, call no. Graff 4464.

structures—the picture’s blithe rehashing of a pejorative racial type makes this much clear. The painting can perhaps best be understood as an expression of Quidor’s irreverent penchant for flouting polite decorum, disrupting convention, and stirring up the most incendiary issues of his day—a dark parody of real estate culture that echoed and extended the artist’s mordant engagements with other sectors of antebellum life.61 But Quidor’s caustic pictorial allegory may also tap another, more personal set of associations. By the time he began speculating on Illinois land, he was already well acquainted with real estate’s dark material entanglements. As various researchers have noted, Quidor’s family had deep roots in the slaveholding Palisades region of southern New York and northern New Jersey.62 The artist spent the first nine years of his life on his father’s farm in Tappan, New York (a village in southern Rockland County); Quidor’s grandfather Pierre had settled on a farm in the same community in 1776.63 During the first decade of the nineteenth century, moreover, Pierre and Peter speculated on land in northern Bergen County; in 1804, for example, both men purchased lots in an old New Jersey estate that had recently been partitioned and platted.64 As they 66

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undertook these domestic and speculative ventures, Pierre and Peter Quidor involved themselves in a borderland economy powered by slave labor: during the Quidors’ time in the region, slaves worked on farms, in copper mines, in mills and quarries, and at various other worksites owned by the area’s Dutch and Huguenot families (slavery persisted in Rockland and Bergen Counties long after the passage of emancipation acts in New York in 1799 and New Jersey in 1804).65 Though neither Pierre nor Peter Quidor seems to have owned slaves themselves, their dealings were linked to and dependent on the work of enslaved people. Slaves erected many of the characteristic sandstone structures that dot the Pallisades region, and may well have labored on lands traded by the Quidors; even if that was not the case, the perceived value of the family’s unimproved parcels was underwritten by the presence of these capable builders in the region.66 During his youthful years in Tappan and his subsequent visits to the area, then, Quidor was afforded an early and intimate glimpse of the symbiotic relationships that took shape between speculation and subjugation in slaveholding locales. As he worked out his ghoulish vision of western land and labor, the artist may have drawn, in some way, on his memories of the socioeconomic milieu in which he grew up, a localized economy in which real estate investment was intertwined with oppression and property values were inseparable from pain. Quidor’s viewers were likely receptive to this dark account of frontier real estate enterprise. The audiences who encountered Money Diggers at the American Academy of Fine Arts in 1833 or in the artist’s studio thereafter were thoroughly familiar with the practices of speculation and the dynamics of western land markets. As noted above, New York was a central hub for the exchange of western real estate, and of Illinois property more specifically.67 And New Yorkers had a taste for creative interpretations of the high-flying speculative culture in which they were immersed. In the 1830s, city dwellers enjoyed portrayals of speculation in local art galleries, theaters, and sophisticated periodicals.68 Although evidence of Quidor’s reception is scant, surviving reviews suggest that Jacksonian viewers were indeed eager to read the artist’s early works in economic terms.69 The most complete surviving review of Money Diggers thus suggests that Quidor’s market-minded viewers attended thoughtfully to the speculative connotations of the 1832 painting. An 1833 review in the American Monthly Magazine accordingly declared, “The negro scrambling out of the hole, is extremely well done; the light is ably managed, and the general effect is got up so skillfully as to give us the most pleasing anticipations for the future.”70 Reading Money Diggers as a propitious sign, the review aligns Quidor’s painting with the cultural instruments of the land market: like the banknote or town plat, the picture appears here as a credible representation that inspires belief in an as-yet-unproven venture. In this way, the American Monthly Magazine review suggests that Money Diggers prompted its original viewers to think speculatively, to bring the concerns of real estate investment (including foresight and futurity) to bear on its complicated tableau. Digging for Gold

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figure 26 John Quidor, Money Diggers, 1856. Oil on canvas, 27 × 34 in. Private collection. Photo: SuperStock/Alamy.

MONEY DIGGERS AND MIDCENTURY SPECULATION

The 1832 iteration of Money Diggers was not Quidor’s final word on real estate chicanery and the misadventures of Wolfert Webber. In 1856, the painter began work on a new round of pictures devoted to Irving’s story, which included a pair of pendant paintings inspired by key passages within the nested narrative “Wolfert Webber”: Money Diggers (fig. 26, 1856) and Wolfert’s Will (fig. 27, 1856).71 While hewing closely to their literary source, these paired works outlined pithy scenes of speculative folly and fortune that registered the economic concerns of midcentury viewers and gave quiet expression to the conflicted perspective that Quidor came to hold on real estate speculation after his dealings in Illinois came to an end. At first glance, Quidor’s 1856 Money Diggers seems to closely replicate his identically titled 1832 picture. The painting again depicts Webber, Knipperhausen, and Sam’s encounter with the pirate ghost, and it similarly arranges the diggers in a triangular grouping around a centralized treasure pit. But various revisions differentiate the 1856 canvas from the original: the later work is less tenebristic and painterly than the earlier picture, and it downplays or omits many of the 1832 painting’s most suggestive iconographic details (anthropomorphic tree and bank, miry soil, tomb-like pit, mining pick, 68

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figure 27 John Quidor, Wolfert’s Will, 1856. Oil on canvas, 26 ¾ × 33 ⁷/₈ in. Brooklyn Museum, Dick S. Ramsay Fund, 42.46.

and rock cleft). Sam’s countenance is again grotesquely caricatured in the 1856 canvas, but his body rests on the rim of the pit in a more plausible pose; devoid of the disjointed hybridity of the earlier fisherman figure, Sam appears less as a mismatched money devil than as a pejorative embodiment of “humorous” terror in line with the racist caricatures of African Americans that appeared throughout antebellum visual culture.72 Lastly, the 1856 Money Diggers grants more importance to the treasure hunters’ fire than the earlier canvas. Expanded in scale and resituated to the right edge of the scene (where the anthropomorphic bank once stood), the little blaze has become a dazzling vertical plume of flame and smoke that leads the eye to the pirate ghost above. Taken together, these various alterations yield an abridged scene that eschews the 1832 picture’s pointed engagements with the cultural fictions and material undercurrents of the land market and works instead to highlight the folly, failure, and delusion of Irving’s treasure hunters. Wolfert’s Will (fig. 27) bookends this mordant scene of ruin with a ridiculous vision of dumb luck and unearned riches. As noted above, Webber’s foolhardy search for wealth takes a miraculous turn after the treasure-pit debacle. After receiving a “notice . . . that the corporation were about to run a new street through the very center Digging for Gold

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figure 28 Detail from John Quidor, Wolfert’s Will, 1856. Oil on canvas, 26 ¾ × 33 ⁷/₈ in. Brooklyn Museum, Dick S. Ramsay Fund, 42.46.

of his cabbage garden,” the farmer comes to believe that he will be ruined and prepares to die; Webber revives, however, when he learns from the lawyer who has come to prepare his will (Rollebuck) that the presence of the new thoroughfare will allow the farmer to redevelop the property as a residential neighborhood.73 In the closing section of Irving’s nested narrative, Webber works with Rollebuck to generate “deeds, plans of streets, and building lots,” carve up his “paternal lands into building lots . . . rented out to safe tenants,” and finally harvest the “golden produce of the soil.”74 Wolfert’s Will depicts the moment that Webber revives and begins to comprehend his sudden change in fortune. Surrounded by details that evoke his recent convalescence (bedimmed interior, blanketed bed, the knitting figure of “Dame Webber,” and a cat “playing with the good dame’s ball of worsted”), the farmer sits bolt upright in bed, swings a stockinged leg toward the floor, and gawks at the bedside figure of Rollebuck.75 Various details allude to the broader forces that enable Webber’s final enrichment. A crumpled copy of the commissioners’ notice (fig. 28) appears on the plank floor below Webber’s dangling foot. Situated half in and half out of an angling shadow cast by Rollebuck, the document quietly attests to the processes—urban growth, municipal expropriation, and legal redesignation—that have combined to make the farmer’s cabbage plot newly valuable. And, while referencing his work on Webber’s will, Rollebuck’s writerly pose also evokes the many forms of paperwork (the preparation of “deeds” and “plans”) that lawyer and client will soon undertake to capitalize on that value and develop the plot. Taken together, Quidor’s 1856 pendant pictures outline a humorous tale of financial ruin and redemption that visualizes the central themes of Irving’s comic critique of land speculation: Money Diggers pictures a foolhardy prospector whose deluded pursuit of unlikely returns is undone by his own lack of nerve, and Wolfert’s Will depicts the same undeserving rube stumbling into a lucky windfall created by broader eco70

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nomic forces and the crafty use of paper representations. At the same time, Money Diggers and Wolfert’s Will seem to register the fraught fiscal climate of their moment. In the mid-1850s, American perspectives on the booming economy were torn between high-flying exuberance and anxious foreboding.76 A new wave of land and securities speculation reached a peak in the middle of the decade; alarmed by the ubiquity and intensity of risky investment, economic commentators warned of a “spirit of speculation” running “riot over the land,” and predicted ominously that the “rich man of today” would become “the bankrupt of tomorrow.”77 Outlining funny scenes of folly, ruin, and reversals of fortune, Money Diggers and Wolfert’s Will were perfectly keyed to the unsettled economic atmosphere of the moment. Although no published commentary on the works survives, there is some evidence that the paintings’ account of speculative vicissitudes struck a chord with period audiences. Quidor’s pendant paintings quickly attracted a buyer—Philadelphia industrialist Joseph Harrison Jr.—who was implicated in the midcentury land boom.78 As it happens, Harrison was immersed in a particularly risky undertaking when he purchased Money Diggers and Wolfert’s Will, an undertaking that shared striking parallels with Wolfert Webber’s fictional ventures: in 1856, Harrison subdivided his home estate on Rittenhouse Square and began construction of a block of townhomes (later named Harrison’s Row), next to his mansion, that he intended to let out to bourgeois tenants.79 Money Diggers and Wolfert’s Will shaped humorous accounts of economic issues, then, that preoccupied their original owner and many other midcentury Americans. In so doing, these works may have also registered Quidor’s own conflicted outlook on real estate endeavor. Despite its promising start, the artist’s speculative career had recently come to a disastrous end. In 1844, Quidor entered into a complicated land scheme with Raphael E. Smith, a Saint Louis clerk and small-time speculator in Illinois real estate who had a checkered professional life.80 On December 11, 1844, Quidor agreed to purchase a 520-acre farm in Adams County from Smith for the sizable sum of $8,000 (about $282,000 in 2021 currency), which was to be remitted via an initial down payment and three subsequent installments spread out over eight years.81 Quidor had no liquid capital at the time of purchase, so he and Smith agreed that the artist would pay for the farm with eight monumental paintings. Quidor submitted Christ Healing the Sick at the Temple (1844, unlocated) to Smith as a down payment and promised to present a second large picture by March 11, 1846, another two by December 11, 1847, and a final group of four by December 11, 1852.82 This arrangement constituted a two-sided speculation. Quidor’s farm was located just outside the newly platted town of Columbus, Illinois, and the artist likely anticipated that his property would rise in value with that settlement’s growth.83 Smith saw similar potential in Quidor’s paintings: the contract the two men drew up makes clear that the speculator intended to take the pictures on the road in a traveling fee exhibition.84 In September 1847, Quidor and Smith did just that, organizing a show of three of the artist’s payment paintings— Christ Healing the Sick, Christ Raising Lazarus from the Dead (c. 1844–47, unlocated), and Digging for Gold

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Death on a Pale Horse (c. 1844–47, unlocated)—at the National Academy of Design in New York.85 Quidor and Smith’s scheme unraveled in the years that followed. Period accounts suggest that the 1847 exhibition was a financial failure that led to some form of litigation between artist and patron.86 Quidor nevertheless fulfilled his original obligations and completed the eight paintings by the spring of 1849; when Quidor attempted to claim title for his land, however, Smith cheated him in dastardly fashion. As the artist recalled in a later letter, Smith resold the farm to another investor before Quidor could claim it and then dramatically rejected the painter’s request for redress: When I was ready to take up all of my notes and demand a deed, he—Smith—objected or delayed. [A]t last I found that he had sold the farm to one Livingston of St. Louis after selling it to me. Being discouraged I sent for him to make some sort of settlement. He came and we talked about throwing up the trade. He took my bond and the one that he held and threw them both into the fire and left without giving me the notes he held against me of $5000.87

Having evidently lost his claim on the farm and any chance at remuneration for years of agricultural and painterly work, Quidor left Illinois impoverished. Composed as the artist struggled to regain his footing back in New York, Money Diggers and Wolfert’s Will may somehow speak to Quidor’s outlook on real estate dealing in the wake of his ruinous farm speculation. On the one hand, the pendant pictures’ overarching vision of fortune lost and regained seems to quietly register the artist’s enduring optimism about real estate endeavor. Though chastened by the failure of the Columbus farm speculation, Quidor held out hope that his fortunes might be reversed. In 1868, he wrote a letter to Saint Louis lawyer Stewart Woodford to ask for help in ascertaining legal ownership of the Columbus farm; noting that “the bond he gave me was recorded in Quincy [Illinois],” Quidor evidently hoped that Woodford would discover official documentation of his agreement with Smith (the recorder’s transcription of his original bond for title) that could be used to prove the artist’s claim on the property and invalidate its later resale.88 Conjuring up a scenario in which a disastrous loss is redeemed by the arrival of a legal document (the commissioner’s notice) that remakes a forsaken holding into a valuable possession, Money Diggers and Wolfert’s Will seem to articulate and affirm the enduring hopefulness that Quidor privately maintained about his own investments and the broader possibility of attaining wealth speculatively. On the other hand, the two paintings also seem to register Quidor’s keen sense of the perils of real estate dealing and the tenuousness of “paper” fortunes. It is suggestive that two of the most important revisions he made in composing his pendant literary paintings involve the theme of fire. As noted above, he remade the treasure hunters’ small campfire into a wild blaze in Money Diggers; the roaring hearth that appears 72

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at the left edge of Wolfert’s Will represents a similar deviation from Irving’s text, which does not mention a fireplace in its detailed description of Webber’s home.89 Considered in light of Quidor’s own destructive experience of fiery loss (the burning of his bond for title by Smith), these elements can be read as foreboding signs of peril, allusive evocations of the potential for disastrous ruin that attended foolhardy ventures and clouded even the sunniest of speculative schemes. The commissioner’s notice (fig. 28) in Wolfert’s Will subtly extends these evocations of dangerous uncertainty. Even as it signals the possibility of redemption, the threadbare document also quietly signifies the precariousness of the future that it promises. Tattered and torn, the fragmentary notice raises the themes of disintegration and disappearance, and in so doing alludes to the fundamental insecurity of Webber’s ventures, and indeed of all such endeavors built on projections, assurances, and pledges—a reality of speculative enterprise that Quidor knew all too well. CONCLUSION

Perhaps more than any other artist of his era, John Quidor was intimately familiar with the dissimulations and depredations of speculative land dealing in the antebellum period. Tapping into his real estate experiences, he composed an intermittent series of paintings after Washington Irving’s “The Money Diggers” that outlined trenchant accounts of speculative folly and fortune, accounts that pierced the booster myths circulating through antebellum land markets, delved into the ruinous material forces unleashed by risky financial endeavor, and reflected on his own inglorious fiscal legacy. While offering unique insights into the high-flying financial culture of the painter’s moment, Quidor’s speculative pictures also anticipated the complicated interpretations of risky investment advanced by artists of subsequent generations. As the next chapter will show, the genre painter Eastman Johnson used a very different painterly lexicon to explore some of the same facets of real estate enterprise—the intertwining of speculative development and semiotic play, promoters’ financial valorization of quotidian environmental phenomena, and the iniquitous effects of land investment on workaday spaces and subaltern bodies—that captivated Quidor.

Digging for Gold

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3 PICTURING LAND AND LABOR IN THE OLD NORTHWEST AND NEW ENGLAND

E

in real estate’s entrepreneurial and creative potential. As we will see, he bought and sold land and helped promote real estate investment in two locales—the Lake Superior region and the island of Nantucket—where he lived and worked. Stimulated by these experiences, I will argue, Johnson undertook a pair of innovative painterly projects that reckoned with the social, environmental, and economic consequences of speculative development. An early letter of Johnson’s sheds light on the divergent impulses that would shape these projects. In the spring of 1851, while immersed in his studies at the Düsseldorf Academy, he wrote a lengthy note to longtime friend Charlotte Child that described the landscape and labor routines of the German winegrowing region: ASTMAN JOHNSON WAS DEEPLY INTERESTED

The peasantry were all at work, men & women, & it was my habit to give each party a call. Now & then a pretty girl would emerge from the vines with her tub of grapes on her head & I would help

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her to plunge them into the great cask that always stood by the roadside for the bruising of them, which was an excellent commencement to a nice little flirtation. . . . In the cultivation of the grape especially the labor is often excessively hard—The finest grows on the banks of the Rhine where the course of the river for a great way admits on one side of a southern aspect, rising abruptly and often to a great height . . . the favorable quality and position of the soil is too precious to be lost & every inch is tended and improved with the greatest care. Here the women & girls may be seen descending the steep & rocky declivity where it looks almost impossible to climb, with a brimming tub balanced on their heads, as severe a labor as could possibly be. Also a great quantity of earth is carried up to add to the dearth of soils in some sunny crevice.1

In recounting his observations of the spring grape harvest, Johnson presents two seemingly contradictory interpretations of land and work in German wineries. The bulk of the passage advances a sober account of grape planting that registers the environmental changes wrought by intensive agricultural development (the moving of earth into previously unimproved “declivities”) and details the painful pressures that such development exerted on the wineries’ laborers (the German “peasantry” charged with harvesting the wineries’ sloping land). The passage frames this matter-of-fact account, however, with a picturesque description of grape harvesting that reimagines hillside picking as a charming episode of fun and “flirtation.” Shuttling between empathetic realism and exoticizing romanticism, Johnson advances a conflicted account of land development’s social and spatial impacts in the Rhine Valley, a multivalent interpretation that found parallels in his subsequent painterly engagements with American real estate. Indeed, Johnson composed similarly complicated pictorial responses to the development booms that he navigated in the Lake Superior region and the island of Nantucket. Drawing on his own real estate experiences in these locales and his careful observations of the material and cultural forces propelling their land markets, the artist developed multivalent works that addressed the impact of speculative development on spaces and communities on the margins of the real estate economy. As we will see, these pictures advanced multifaceted accounts of development’s environmental and human effects, accounts that navigated between sober reportage and booster romanticism. A complex mix of convictions shaped Johnson’s artistic engagements with real estate. He inherited a zeal for land investment and a belief in speculation’s remunerative benefits from his father: during Eastman’s youth, Philip C. Johnson expanded his fortunes by launching a house-building venture in Lovell, Maine, and participating in the development of the Cumberland and Oxford Canal at the southern end of that state.2 The artist’s mixed ideological commitments seem, in turn, to have both encouraged and tempered his enthusiasm for real estate endeavor. On the one hand, Johnson identified with the pro-business wing of the Republican Party for much of 76

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his adult life, a faction committed to the tenets of laissez-faire liberalism; the artist’s affiliation with this increasingly strident political group surely strengthened his embrace of market culture and property rights. On the other hand, the painter maintained an abiding concern about injustice and the plight of the marginalized; this attitude underlay his support of abolitionism during the Civil War and his opposition to the anti-immigrant policies of the Democratic Party in the 1880s.3 Drawing on these conflicting beliefs and a similarly divergent set of aesthetic inclinations—as Patricia Hills has demonstrated, Johnson was both highly responsive to market tastes and inclined toward experimentation—the artist shaped complex and open-ended painterly accounts of speculative development in the Lake Superior region and Nantucket.4 In the late 1850s, Johnson invested in and made promotional images for the town of Superior, Wisconsin, a fledgling frontier settlement championed by several of the artist’s relatives and patrons. At the height of this scheme, he traveled to the newly created Grand Portage Reservation in northern Minnesota to make studies of Ojibwe people displaced by white settlement and real estate speculation, evidently in preparation for one or more outdoor genre scenes that he never completed. As we will see, the most finished of these Grand Portage studies—the twin oil sketches Camp Scene at Grand Portage (fig. 31) and Grand Portage (fig. 32)—render the Minnesota reservation as a hybrid space caught between customary forms of indigenous land occupancy and encroaching Euro-American property relations. Johnson’s discrepant responses to the development of the Lake Superior region would find echoes in his later engagements with Nantucket real estate. After setting down roots on Nantucket in 1871, he threw himself into the real estate and tourism boom that had just gotten under way on the island. As his creative and financial investments in Nantucket’s real estate economy deepened, I will argue, the artist inscribed his best known and most complicated painting of island life—The Cranberry Harvest, Island of Nantucket (fig. 34)—with a multifarious meditation on the material transformations wrought by the local land business. Picturing a mixed group of berry pickers at work within an economically coded coastal landscape, The Cranberry Harvest outlines a picturesquely anachronizing scene of land and labor that quietly explores the implication of local agriculture in Nantucket’s real estate economy, grapples allusively with the strange new forms of value generated by speculation, and plumbs the gap between the island’s speculative present and past. Aimed at the sorts of viewers who vacationed on Nantucket and snapped up its proliferating properties, The Cranberry Harvest presents a densely layered vision of the transforming island that works simultaneously to underwrite and critique its real estate economy. By tracing Johnson’s creative engagements with speculative development, this chapter extends existing scholarship on the artist’s land dealings (which has largely ignored his pictorial responses to real estate) and the social foundations of his genre oeuvre more generally.5 Patricia Hills, John Davis, Lacey Baradel, and others have Picturing Land and Labor

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shown that Johnson expanded and revitalized his genre corpus at various points by painting disempowered communities (including urban slaves and indigent itinerants) on the margins of modern industrial society.6 By examining early and later pictures by Johnson that address real estate enterprise’s effects on the poor and unpropertied, I hope to bring to light another important thread of his long-standing project of creative social inquiry. I also aim to position Johnson as a significant and unusually steadfast interpreter of American real estate enterprise, a figure who grappled creatively with speculative development during two distinct phases in the evolution of the nation’s real estate economy. In his efforts to picture development’s effects in the Lake Superior region, as we will see, Johnson extended the work of John Quidor and other antebellum painters who contended with the dislocation and devastation produced by land booms on the midwestern frontier. As he grappled with speculative development on Nantucket, Johnson joined his contemporaries Martin Johnson Heade and Winslow Homer (discussed in chapters 4 and 5, respectively) in contending with the wave of resort development that swept the underbuilt corners of the Eastern Seaboard in the decades after the Civil War—a surge of coastal speculation, enclosure, and construction fueled by the growth of seaside vacationing. “SKETCHES OF FRONTIER LIFE”: JOHNSON IN SUPERIOR

After six years of study in Europe, Eastman Johnson began his career in Washington, D.C., in November 1855. Eight months later, he made the first of two trips to the Lake Superior region, an extended sojourn that stretched from July or August 1856 to January 1857; after returning to Washington in the spring of 1857, he traveled back to the northwestern frontier in June and stayed there until late November 1857. He had two primary motivations in making these treks: he wanted to spend time (as he put it in a letter to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) in “the new town of ‘Superior’ + its vicinity . . . making sketches of frontier life,” and he hoped to involve himself in the real estate markets that had begun to develop on Lake Superior’s shores.7 As we will see, these endeavors intersected in varying ways. Johnson visited the Old Northwest during a period of economic ferment and sociopolitical transformation. For centuries, Ojibwe (Anishinaabe) people had hunted, fished, gathered rice, and maintained seasonal settlements across northern Wisconsin and eastern Minnesota.8 The 1854 Treaty of La Pointe brought widespread Ojibwe occupation of the region to a close; born of a long process of coercive diplomacy and military intimidation, this agreement transferred millions of acres of Ojibwe territory to the federal land system, instituted annuity payments to displaced Indian bands, and established reservations in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.9 In the aftermath of the treaty, white speculators, settlers, and mineral prospectors poured into Wisconsin and Minnesota, engineering a wave of land schemes and infrastructure projects around Lake Superior’s western shores.10 78

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Several of Johnson’s family members were involved in one of these schemes: the speculative town of Superior, Wisconsin. Situated on the Lake Superior shore near the mouth of the Saint Louis River, Superior was developed by a syndicate of Washington, D.C., investors who believed that a northern transcontinental railroad route would soon be built through Wisconsin.11 After having the town surveyed and platted in the summer of 1854, the syndicate began offering town lots and shares in their land company (the Proprietors of Superior) to investors the same year.12 Johnson’s brother Reuben bought sixty-five lots from the company in late 1855; by the summer of 1856, he had settled in town and begun operating a sawmill on its waterfront.13 The artist’s sister Sarah moved to Superior in the spring of 1856 with her new husband, William H. Newton, who had served as the Proprietors’ field agent and chief promoter since 1854.14 Newton’s marketing efforts were wildly successful: in the two years following Superior’s founding, sales of town lots and company shares boomed and local land values skyrocketed.15 Reflecting on these trends, a January 1857 Superior Chronicle editorial giddily predicted that land formerly “had by squatters at $1.25 per acre” would “ere long bring five hundred and one thousand dollars per acre.”16 Superior’s surging values far surpassed this rosy prognostication: by the summer of 1857, standard town lots were fetching $2,000 apiece.17 Johnson visited Superior as its land market began to take off, and he did his part to sustain the boom. Between January and December 1857, he made four real estate purchases around Superior.18 Several of these deals involved properties that were removed from Superior’s settled downtown but close to the corridor for a proposed rail line (the St. Croix and Lake Superior Railroad) that would have linked the town to Minneapolis and points west. Superior’s backers foresaw that the remote town’s future hinged on the completion of this line, and they made a series of unsuccessful efforts in 1856 and 1857 to realize the perpetually stalled project.19 In January and October 1857, Johnson bought sixteen lots that were situated near the planned terminus of the St. Croix line; in June of the same year, he purchased a 160-acre farm tract south of town that was about three miles from the railroad’s projected right-of-way.20 As his financial stake in Superior deepened, Johnson got involved (likely with the guidance of his brother-in-law) in the promotion of the fledgling settlement. During his second western visit, the artist composed a charcoal drawing of Superior (fig. 29) that served as the basis for an illustration (fig. 30) in James Ritchie’s booster publication Wisconsin and Its Resources (1857). Employing conventions that shaped countless town views of the period (as discussed in chapter 2), Johnson’s drawing outlines a temporally charged vista of Superior that visualizes the town’s rapid progress and remunerative potential. The drawing proceeds from a vantage point associated with the past: Johnson’s townscape looks toward Superior from Minnesota Point, a sand spit that was the site of a long-standing Ojibwe settlement and a rudimentary pier erected in 1853 by the white trader George Stuntz.21 Signs of these forms of occupation—land-bound and canoeing Ojibwe figures at left, an inverted birch-bark canoe at center, and white Picturing Land and Labor

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figure 29 E Eastman Johnson, Landscape of Superior, 1857. Charcoal, chalk, and gouache on paper, 16 × 22 in. St. Louis County Historical Society Collection, Gift of Richard Teller Crane, 62.181.21. figure 30 G “View of the City of Superior,” from James Ritchie, Wisconsin and Its Resources (Philadelphia: C. DeSilver, 1857).

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laborers loading a ferryboat at right—appear across the drawing’s foreground. The drawing’s middle ground and background testify, in turn, to Superior’s recent development and future promise. Steamships and ferryboats ply the waters of Superior Bay in the drawing’s middle register; in the distance, a detailed rendering of Superior’s bristling waterfront (which includes Reuben Johnson’s sawmill, Quebec Pier, and other identifiable structures) registers the town’s commercial and industrial growth.22 Juxtaposing signs of rusticity with evocations of modern shipping and settlement, Johnson’s scene envisions Superior’s steady march toward a glorious future of dense urban development and boundless commercial growth; in so doing, the drawing affirms the claim, made by James Ritchie and other local boosters, that the town was destined to become a “second Chicago.”23 By employing Ojibwe bodies and vessels as signs of the historical past eclipsed by Superior’s urban transformation, moreover, Johnson’s scene echoes local booster narratives that cast the town’s development as a racialized process in which the “white man began to redeem this place from its native wildness.”24 Johnson thus channeled significant capital and creative energy into northern Wisconsin’s land boom during his visits to the area. As his involvements in local real estate intensified, however, he developed a creative interest in spaces and people on the margins of the frontier land economy. Toward the end of his first stay in the region, he spent several weeks exploring northwestern Wisconsin and eastern Minnesota with Stephen Bonga (sometimes spelled Bungo), a mixed-race African American and Native American voyageur who lived in the Saint Louis River valley and affiliated with the Fond du Lac Ojibwe.25 Paddling along Lake Superior’s sparsely developed western shores, Johnson and Bonga encountered a backcountry landscape that was only beginning to be remade by modern real estate enterprise. During their stay, Johnson and Bonga shared a sturdy log cabin that they built somewhere on the surveyed, but still unsold, lands around Pokegama Bay, a marshy section of the Saint Louis River estuary.26 Occupying terrain they did not own, Johnson and Bonga enacted a form of frontier land possession—squatting—that was at odds with the primary modes of proprietorship engendered by the local real estate market (sustained settlement and absentee investment). The artist seems to have cherished his stint as a squatter. At some point during his backcountry sojourn, Johnson made two warmly evocative sketches of the Pokegama cabin that carefully delineate its idiosyncratic architecture, record its domestic bric-a-brac, and, perhaps, memorialize his own sustained presence in the structure—the pensive figure who appears in one of the drawings may be a likeness of the artist himself.27 During his second western trip, Johnson turned his creative attentions to another locale on the borders of the land boom: the newly established Grand Portage Indian Reservation in northeastern Minnesota. In late July or early August 1857, he sailed for Grand Portage in the company of Hugh McCullough, a white businessman in Superior who operated a large-scale fishing operation at the reservation. Johnson likely saw Grand Portage for the first time on one of his 1856 expeditions with Bonga, and he Picturing Land and Labor

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seems to have been eager to paint the reservation’s spaces and people. Diary entries kept by Jesuit missionary Dominique du Ranquet (another contemporaneous visitor to Grand Portage) suggest that these endeavors met with some initial resistance. On August 19, Ranquet noted the recent arrival of “M. McCullough . . . with a painter who has difficulty finding subjects”; three days later, the priest recorded that this painter (who was almost certainly Johnson) had “completed some portraits” by paying “his subjects” for their time.28 Johnson evidently had ironed out a working relationship with local Ojibwe people by late August 1857, when he began making dated charcoal sketches of indigenous sitters; he spent the next two and a half months producing portraits, group scenes, and landscape studies at various sites around the reservation.29 In so doing, he engaged a deeply rooted community that was grappling with new modes of existence imposed by reservation life and frontier capitalism. Grand Portage (Gichi-Onigaming in the Anishinaabe language) had long been an important warm-weather migration site for northern Minnesota’s Ojibwe people; for centuries, indigenous bands had come to the area in the summer and fall to hold political meetings and fish along the Superior shoreline.30 The development of the reservation threatened this long-standing custom. The Treaty of La Pointe established the seventy-four-square-mile tract as a permanent residence for the Grand Portage band of Ojibwe; to encourage indigenous people to live year round on the reservation, federal officials platted and developed a village near the Superior shoreline.31 Real estate activity around the reservation simultaneously threatened other sites on local Ojibwe migratory circuits; in the mid-1850s, white land agents, lumbermen, and mineral prospectors staked claims and launched new developments that infringed on the community’s cold-weather hunting grounds across northern Minnesota.32 New industries in the vicinity of Grand Portage likewise undercut the customary modes of work and exchange that had long shaped Ojibwe life in the region. By employing Ojibwe men and women as contract workers, for example, Hugh McCullough’s fishing operation worked to inure the local indigenous community to wage labor and the cash nexus.33 As he studied and sketched the Ojibwe community at Grand Portage, Johnson took note of the customary practices that endured on the reservation and the disruptive forces that threatened them. He accordingly made studies of wigwam encampments, Ojibwe fishing parties, and other aspects of seasonal communal life that he encountered in the area.34 He also composed detailed scenes of Grand Portage’s newly constructed village that delineated the divergent modes of habitation and work that existed on the reservation.35 Two of these studies, Camp Scene at Grand Portage (fig. 31) and Grand Portage (fig. 32), offer particularly rich accounts of the shifting socio-spatial conditions in Grand Portage. Likely intended to serve as source material for future outdoor genre scenes, these loosely painted (and possibly pendant) works picture different sectors of the village: Camp Scene at Grand Portage depicts the settlement’s western fringe and the soaring form of Mount Rose (a hill, nine hundred feet tall, 82

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figure 31 E Eastman Johnson, Camp Scene at Grand Portage, 1857. Oil on canvas, 4 × 13 in. St. Louis County Historical Society Collection, Gift of Richard Teller Crane, 62.181.01. figure 32 G Eastman Johnson, Grand Portage, 1857. Oil on canvas, 9 × 19 in. St. Louis County Historical Society Collection, Gift of Richard Teller Crane, 62.181.05.

located due west of the village), and Grand Portage looks east toward the center of the village and the foothills of Mount Josephine (a peak in the nearby Sawtooth Range).36 In so doing, the two works offer differing accounts of village life. Camp Scene at Grand Portage highlights the settlement’s accommodation of seasonal Ojibwe residents and traditional coastal labor. Centered on an expansive wigwam encampment and filled with tiny Ojibwe figures, Johnson’s view figures the village as a home to a lively temporary community; two canoe-carrying figures within this fictive gathering suggest, in turn, that traditional forms of waterborne work and mobility endure on the reservation. Picturing Land and Labor

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figure 33 Detail from George H. Cannon, Map of Indian Reservation (Grand Portage), 1858. Ink on paper, 30 × 22 in. Minnesota Historical Society. The village of Grand Portage appears at left center.

Grand Portage, by contrast, figures the village as an arena of development and assimilation. Focusing on the hamlet’s built-up core, Johnson’s study pictures five frame structures and a handful of wigwams in an angling configuration of rows that evokes the rectilinear form of the village’s street plan (fig. 33). Scattered Ojibwe figures occupy the open spaces between these structures; locked in immobile sedentary and standing poses, these figures appear disconnected from the traditional labor practices or migratory habits documented in Johnson’s other studies. At the same time, Grand Portage quietly highlights the new edifices that were rising in the reservation village in the moment. Larger and more carefully rendered than the seasonal habitations that appear scattered around them, these solid timber structures testify to the progress of government-backed development in Grand Portage. In so doing, they also allude to the material and ideological transformations that the village’s construction effected. Four of the five wooden buildings that comprise the townscape in Grand Portage appear to be dwellings: two structures at the left edge of the scene and two at the right center share the standard form (plastered timber walls and pitched roof) and typical details (gable end, chimney, doors, unglassed windows) of well-made frontier cabins.37 These four buildings most likely represent some of the fifteen or twenty “comfortable houses” that travelers observed in the village in 1856 and 1857, well-appointed timber 84

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cabins that were erected for individual Ojibwe proprietors who agreed (in exchange for a “free” building lot and various domestic goods supplied by the government) to live permanently in their new houses and adopt small-scale sedentary farming.38 As such, the four structures register the incursion of private property and Euro-American home ownership (both fundamental precepts of the frontier real estate economy) into the everyday existence of Grand Portage’s Ojibwe inhabitants. The scene’s fifth wooden building testifies to a parallel incorporative force at work on the reservation. Capped by a shingled roof bearing a tiny crucifix, the building at left center is probably the modest chapel that the Jesuit priest Frederic Baraga erected in the village in 1855, a structure that was (as various scholars have shown) vitally important to the Jesuit missionary project in northeastern Minnesota.39 Situated at the heart of Johnson’s study, the little chapel aligns the village with proselytization and cultural colonization.40 Read together, Camp Scene at Grand Portage and Grand Portage figure the reservation village as a space of resistance and assimilation, a space in which northern Minnesota’s Ojibwe people maintained customary lifeways and adopted new modes of habitation, land occupancy, and belief imposed by the Euro-American outsiders (government officials, businessmen, speculators, and missionaries) who spearheaded the region’s transformation after the La Pointe Treaty. In so doing, the two studies offer a nuanced account of the uneven effects of real estate development on land, labor, and life in a community on the borders of the frontier real estate economy. As we have seen, Johnson was an enthusiastic participant in, and significant advocate for, the same economic and spatial processes that he interrogated so sensitively at Grand Portage. But his multifarious engagements with frontier development bore little fruit, and he left the Superior region after the Panic of 1857 gutted local land values and eradicated his meager savings—and he kept his Grand Portage studies hidden away in his studio for most of his career.41 But the artist’s western sojourn stoked inclinations—a taste for speculative risk taking, an understanding of booster rhetoric, and an abiding concern about development’s impacts—that would reemerge later in his career and deeply shape the creation of his most significant mature genre painting. CRANBERRIES AND “COTTAGE CITIES”

After two decades spent in Washington, D.C., and New York, Johnson found his way to another remote outpost caught up in a real estate boom. In 1869 or 1870, the artist made his first visit to Nantucket, a hub of the antebellum whaling industry that was transforming itself into a bourgeois vacation destination and haven for real estate investment.42 He threw himself into Nantucket’s roiling land market in the years that followed, buying and selling properties of all kinds across the island. In the middle of this burst of activity, he began work on a multivalent scene of land and labor on Nantucket— The Cranberry Harvest, Island of Nantucket (fig. 34)—that would contend allusively with Picturing Land and Labor

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figure 34 Eastman Johnson, The Cranberry Harvest, Island of Nantucket, 1880. Oil on canvas, 27 ³/₈ × 54 ½ in. Putnam Foundation, Timken Museum of Art.

the speculative forces remaking the island and the impact of development on its working-class residents. Nantucket was in the midst of drastic social and economic upheaval when Johnson set down roots on the island in the early 1870s. Nantucket had experienced two decades of decline and outmigration after the midcentury collapse of the American whaling industry; desperate to develop new foundations for the island’s economy, local leaders began to tout Nantucket’s amenability to seasonal tourism and real estate development in the late 1860s. Enterprising Nantucketers modernized local ferry operations, put up new hotels (including the Atlantic and Ocean View Houses), and published a wave of texts (such as the 1865 pamphlet Nantucket as a Watering Place and Summer Residence) promoting their island’s rustic culture, salubrious climate, and remunerative investment opportunities. As tourists started to make their way to Nantucket in the early 1870s, old-money islanders and off-island investors formed land companies, laid out “cottage cities” and new subdivisions (including Great Neck, Surfside, Nauticon, Smooth Hummocks, and Sunset Heights), and began selling properties to speculators and summer residents.43 In so doing, these operators carved up the island’s still extant common lands, enclosing sheep pastures and wetlands that had been collectively owned since the eighteenth century.44 Johnson participated avidly in this real estate boom. In April 1871, he purchased a tract of land in the new Cliff neighborhood just north of the town of Nantucket.45 After fitting up a summer home and studio, he spent the next sixteen summers on his seaside estate; during this period, the painter renovated his cottage several times, expanded his lot by buying adjacent parcels, and snapped up landholdings of various 86

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figure 35 J. H. Bufford, Plan of Sherburne Bluffs, Nantucket, Mass., c. 1879. Lithograph, 12 ½ × 22 ¹/₃ in. Norman B. Leventhal Map Center, Boston Public Library.

kinds across the island.46 In dozens of transactions carried out between 1881 and 1887, for example, he bought and sold lots in the planned neighborhoods of Sherburne Bluffs (fig. 35), Clifton Springs, Wannacomet, and Trott’s Hills, shares of sheep commons, several rights of way, and properties on North Street near his home.47 All the while, Johnson closely followed the movements of the local land market and the progress of building projects around the island. His correspondence from these years is peppered with commentary on local real estate matters; in letters to fellow painter Jervis McEntee, for example, Johnson recorded home purchases, described ongoing construction ventures, and noted a fevered burst of “land speculation” that broke out in the summer of 1881.48 Johnson also contributed in various ways to the marketing of Nantucket as an appealing investment and vacation destination. The painter allowed guidebooks and promotional texts to trumpet his status as a seasonal resident and to highlight his Cliff estate as an appealing attraction for visitors.49 He also made picturesque additions to his tract that heightened its touristic charm; in the mid-1870s, for example, he built a windmill on the land.50 All the while, he churned out paintings of Nantucket subjects that visualized the romantic fantasies of island life advanced by local boosters. As Dona Brown and others have shown, Nantucket developers and businessmen Picturing Land and Labor

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figure 36 Eastman Johnson, Husking Bee, Island of Nantucket, 1876. Oil on canvas, 27 ¼ × 54 ³/₁₆ in. Gift of Honore and Potter Palmer, 1922.444. The Art Institute of Chicago/Art Resource, NY.

promoted their island as a picturesque refuge from modernity, a “quaint old place” that was home to “ancient” architecture, “primitive” Yankees, charming eccentrics, and age-old social rituals such as “squantums” (clambakes) and sheep-shearing parties.51 Johnson socialized with and painted portraits for Nantucket’s business leaders, and he seems to have internalized their promotional vision of the island.52 In the 1870s, he accordingly painted genre pictures of old and young Nantucketers that allegorized the island’s historicity (What the Shell Says, 1875), character studies of whalingera mariners (Old Captain of 1875 and Embers of 1880), outdoor views of lingering agrarian rituals (Husking Bee, Island of Nantucket, fig. 36), and interior scenes of moldering antique homes (Susan Ray’s Kitchen—Nantucket, 1875).53 He also composed many pictures of bourgeois tourists exploring the island’s residual common lands and admiring Nantucket sheep.54 Figuring the island as a picturesque vacationscape of charming social types and consumable spectacles of rusticity, Johnson’s romanticizing Nantucket paintings underwrote the booster fictions that drove the island’s surging real estate economy. At some point during his first few summers on Nantucket, Johnson became interested in developing a grand-scale genre painting of a local agricultural enterprise that developed concurrently with, and was deeply shaped by, the island’s real estate economy: cranberry growing. The subject of cranberry farming seems to have held various attractions for the artist. Several cranberry bogs were located around the Cliff neighborhood, giving him ample opportunity to study the enterprise firsthand. Berry growing was also an appealingly novel topic for creative treatment, as previous interpreters 88

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of island life had largely ignored the practice.55 Perhaps most significantly, the subject offered the artist an opportunity to contend creatively with speculation’s effects on Nantucket’s landscape and workers. Indeed, though often construed by present-day interpreters as an old-time Nantucket tradition, cranberry farming was a modern form of agricultural enterprise that was thoroughly enmeshed in the local real estate economy.56 Early experiments with berry growing began on the island in the 1840s, but it was not until the boom era of the 1860s and 1870s that the practice became widely popular.57 Many of the landowners who developed bogs on Nantucket in this period were major players in the island’s real estate market; indeed, in the 1870s and 1880s, local farms attracted capital from the developers of the Surfside and Nauticon neighborhoods (Henry Coffin and William Easton), from old whaling families that bankrolled significant subdivision and infrastructure projects (the Folger, Macy, and Starbuck clans), and from absentee speculators who amassed large portfolios of island property (such as Needham, Massachusetts, manufacturer Galen Orr).58 Coverage of the cranberry industry in the business-friendly newspapers of Nantucket and the Cape suggests, in turn, that these owners brought a speculative perspective to bear on their berry operations. Reporting in area papers, including Nantucket’s Journal, Inquirer, and Mirror, consistently treated berry farming as a form of risky land dealing. Countless editorials and harvest reports thus used property values to measure the success of local berry operations; echoing other texts, an 1885 Nantucket Inquirer article noted that “the cranberry industry in the vicinity of Cape Cod has more than doubled the value of swamp land there.”59 And local commentators continually aligned berry farming with the miraculous windfalls and ruinous losses of speculation: area papers were filled with editorials that trumpeted the booster belief that all “unsightly bogs can . . . be turned into gold” and admonitory reports on the financial “embarassments” that followed “unwise speculations in cranberries.”60 Working within this speculative mindset, bog owners used various tactics to boost their harvests and maximize the return on their investments. To perform the timesensitive and labor-intensive work of picking, Nantucket growers hired gangs of men, women, and children every September and October (cranberries were typically ready for picking by early fall); in the 1870s, these gangs comprised underemployed locals and migrant laborers who moved between bogs on the island, Cape Cod, and the mainland.61 To minimize their own capital outlay and compel higher productivity from their workers, Nantucket bog owners paid pickers with shares of the fruit that each gathered—an arrangement that fostered, in the words of one period account, “quite a little rivalry” among workers harvesting the finite produce of a bog.62 To encourage systematic picking, growers used stakes and lines to organize their bogs into neat grids and assigned pickers to specific sections (fig. 37); overseers supervised workers’ progress and used various coercive methods to encourage steady picking.63 Bog owners also developed new systems of measurement and record keeping to track their Picturing Land and Labor

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figure 37 Unknown photographer, Cranberry Bog on Robbins Homestead, 1890. Courtesy of the Harwich Historical Society, Harwich, MA.

workers’ outputs and assess the overall yields of their lands. In most bogs, pickers gathered berries in standardized six-quart pails known as “measures”; supervisors weighed the filled vessels at packing stations around the bog and recorded pickers’ totals in specialized tally books.64 Thus, by the time Johnson became interested in the creative possibilities of cranberry farming, the business had developed into a largescale and capital-intensive agricultural enterprise, a form of agribusiness whose speculative profit motive and semi-industrial systems of organization exerted significant pressures on the island’s landscapes and farmworkers. As Marc Simpson and others have shown, Johnson spent the latter half of the 1870s studying local bogs and trying out various compositions for a large multi-figure scene of an unfolding berry harvest.65 Between 1875 and 1879, he made at least fifteen sketches documenting the equipment, rationalized order, and enervating impacts of berry picking in Nantucket bogs. Measures, packing barrels, and screening racks appear throughout these studies; several works include vignettes of measurement and tallying (fig. 38) or subtle evocations of the grid systems (fig. 39) that organized the labor of picking. The studies also recorded the physical and mental hardships endured 90

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figure 38 E Eastman Johnson, Cranberry Pickers, c. 1878–79. Oil on canvas, 27 × 54 ¹/₈ in. Bequest of Christian A. Zabriskey, Yale University Art Gallery. figure 39 G Eastman Johnson, Cranberry Pickers, c. 1879. Oil on cardboard, 13 ¹⁵/₁₆ × 17 ½ in. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Arthur U. Crosby, 1974, 1974–229–1.

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figure 40 Eastman Johnson, At the Closing of the Day, c. 1878–80. Oil on board, 18 × 27 ¼ in. Private collection. Photo: Christie’s Images/Bridgeman Images.

by pickers.66 As local observers often noted, picking was a “back breaking” undertaking that strained the muscles and dulled the mind; some even likened it to the oppressive work undertaken in the “southern cotton field or diamond mine.”67 Johnson’s sketches registered the protracted length of the workday in Nantucket’s bogs (by representing harvesters working at dusk) and explored the fatigue induced by prolonged picking. A twilit study now called At the Closing of the Day (fig. 40, c. 1878–80), for example, centers on a weary harvester whose downcast gaze and slumped posture suggest mental and physical exhaustion; other sketches (fig. 41) include figures in dramatic stretching poses that speak to picking’s taxing muscular demands.68 After several years of study and compositional experimentation, Johnson began work on the final iteration of his cranberry project—The Cranberry Harvest, Island of Nantucket (fig. 34)—in September or October of 1879. As he worked out the painting’s composition and constitutive passages in the months that followed, he seems to have drawn both on his local bog studies and on earlier engagements with agricultural subjects. As noted above, he had painted at least one other scene of collective farmwork during his first few summers on the island: Husking Bee, Island of Nantucket (fig. 36) pictured a merry autumnal ritual of communal labor that had long marked the close of Nantucket’s corn season.69 He had also contended with the theme of agrarian work in the decade before he came to Nantucket. In 1865, he made a copy of Jules Breton’s The Departure for the Fields (Santa Barbara Museum of Art); centered on a little family that 92

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figure 41 Eastman Johnson, The Cranberry Pickers (A Study), 1876. Oil on academy board, 12 ½ × 22 ⁷/₈ in. Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis. University purchase, Parsons Fund, 1963.

trades flowers and makes music as they amble along the edge of a sunlit field, the painting casts agricultural work as a whimsical endeavor.70 In the mid-1860s, Johnson also undertook a series of studies of sugar harvesters at work around Fryeburg, Maine, evidently in preparation for a planned, but never realized, multi-figure canvas. Many of these works picture the festive “sugaring off” gatherings that took shape as harvesters boiled accumulated maple sap in the early spring; interweaving vignettes of storytelling, music making, and children playing with evocations of work, these pictures figure sugar processing as a joyous communal undertaking.71 Other studies addressed the material dynamics of sugar-camp labor; picturing a pair of harvesters tending a boiling kettle in a snowy camp, for example, the study The Sugar Camp (1861–66, Yale University Art Gallery) registers the localized work routines and environmental conditions that shaped maple sugar production in western Maine. Weaving together motifs from his earlier visions of rural labor and his careful observations of island bog work, Johnson developed a multivalent interpretation of berry picking that both denied and engaged the hard material realities of berry farming on Nantucket, an interpretation that recoded the fall cranberry harvest as a “quaint” seasonal custom while registering the industrialized hardships of farmwork, evoking the material precarity of local pickers, and conjuring up the broader economic forces that buffeted cranberry operations and their workforces. The Cranberry Harvest depicts a heterogeneous group of pickers laboring in a scruffy coastal plain bordered by a sandy ridge. Though the landscape setting includes a variety of imaginative topographic details (discussed at more length below), two distant elements—the Brant Point Lighthouse and a minute view of the town of Nantucket Picturing Land and Labor

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figure 42 Detail from Eastman Johnson, The Cranberry Harvest, Island of Nantucket, 1880. Oil on canvas, 27 ³/₈ × 54 ½ in. Putnam Foundation, Timken Museum of Art.

(fig. 42)—suggest that it is set somewhere on Nantucket’s north shore; one local critic honed in on a specific location, arguing that The Cranberry Harvest depicted a “strip of swamp land some thirty feet below the plateau” where Johnson’s home and studio sat.72 The harvest that unfolds in this setting seems, at first glance, to be far removed from the sort of labor that was performed in Nantucket’s north-shore bogs in the period. Indeed, a variety of details encourage us to read the depicted harvest as a bucolic communal undertaking marked by fellowship and fun. The painting’s lambent sky and crackling white highlights evoke the pleasant light conditions of midafternoon, and work thereby to deny berry picking’s climactic discomforts and wearyingly prolonged duration. Bristling with wildflowers and weeds and devoid of grid lines, the meandering bog that fills the foreground and middle ground of The Cranberry Harvest seems entirely unlike the regimented topographies of period farms. This bog is worked, in turn, by a picturesque cross-class mix of people that includes humble workers, smartly dressed bourgeois women, rosy-cheeked children, and a top-hatted old-sea-captain type seated on a Windsor chair. Taken together, these aspects of the work’s setting and figural tableau depict the harvest as a traditional seasonal ritual undertaken for pleasure by the diverse members of a harmonious rural community, a joyous endeavor akin to the collective undertakings pictured in Johnson’s earlier canvases of island husking bees, Maine sugar camps, and French farm fields. Some critics understood the painting in these terms, interpreting The Cranberry Harvest as a “cheerful companion piece to 94

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figure 43 Detail from Eastman Johnson, The Cranberry Harvest, Island of Nantucket, 1880. Oil on canvas, 27 ³/₈ × 54 ½ in. Putnam Foundation, Timken Museum of Art.

[Johnson’s] Corn Husking,” a “picturesque” scene of “lasses and laddies . . . stealing a few delightful hours from maritime and domestic pursuits” that evoked the “freedom, air, and light associated with simple rustic labors” and approached “Jules Breton . . . in rendering the dignity and poetry” of rural workers.73 But viewers also detected the traces of a more sober and complicated account of berry picking embedded within Johnson’s sunlit scene. Proceeding in this vein, some interpreters read The Cranberry Harvest as an unflinching “study of life in the fields” that captures the bleak conditions and dire atmosphere of bog work, a vision of hard labor in an “uninviting swamp” performed by pickers “of all ages and conditions” for whom “life is too real and earnest . . . to break forth at any time into music or dancing.”74 Johnson’s painting is peppered with details that invite readings of this sort, details that allude to the physical hardships, organizational structures, and calculative imperatives of bog work. The picture’s sprawling figural tableau thus includes two workers straining to carry heavy sacks (in the right middle ground) and three standing pickers (in the left middle ground) who bend from the waist to gather berries at their feet, a taxing and dizzyingly unsustainable posture that attests to the discomforts of sustained picking. A standing figure near the center of the scene (fig. 43), moreover, Picturing Land and Labor

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evokes the managerial hierarchies of bog work: positioned at the edge of the picking group and observing the goings-on around him, the pipe-smoking figure appears to perform the work of a field supervisor. The five loosely rendered figures clustered around a horse cart at right appear, lastly, to be engaged in measuring and packing the yield of the berry harvest. Johnson’s figural tableau also seems to quietly allude to the socioeconomic precariousness of Nantucket’s berry pickers, the conditions of desperation and insecurity that made harvesting such a “real and earnest” affair for most bog workers.75 As local commentators noted, Nantucket pickers were members of a larger class of island laborers whose fortunes were devastated by the collapse of the whaling industry and who stood to gain nothing from the real estate boom.76 Though most pickers left sparse documentary trails behind—farmworkers were often mobile and unpropertied, and typically went unnamed in news accounts and farm tally books—the life of part-time harvester Mason Morse sheds some light on these laborers’ experiences. Hired by farmer-developer Albert Swain to harvest berries from a north-shore bog in 1875, Morse was a member of a once prosperous Nantucket farm family that lost most of its wealth and property in the 1860s. Morse worked as a farmhand during his adult years, never achieving financial independence, and spent his later life working as a common laborer in locales across New England.77 For working-class Nantucketers like Morse, cranberry picking offered a much-needed but temporary reprieve from privation, a means by which to briefly shore up one’s finances and forestall disaster for another season. Two vignettes within The Cranberry Harvest speak to the marginal class status and tenuous material standing of these workers. Firstly, the most prominent figure in the foreground group is a female laborer who has stood up to acknowledge the approach of a boy (at right) carrying a bundled infant; evidently a mother who has brought her youngest to the bog, this figure registers the pressing importance of harvesting work to its practitioners (picking has superseded all other priorities for her) and points allusively to the conditions of deprivation that pushed island laborers into Nantucket’s bogs. Secondly, a suggestively ambiguous passage nearby (fig. 44) speaks evocatively to local pickers’ material precarity. Just above the wavering line of shrubs that angles through the middle ground is a configuration of peach, black, and red pigment that can be read as vegetation or the faintly delineated forms of two pickers in bending postures similar to those struck by various foreground workers. Wavering and indistinct, these spectral figures seem to emblematize the tenuous material existence of the farmworkers around them, the shaky hold these laborers had on financial substance, and the transient role they played in the local berry economy. Alienated from the land on which they worked and the fruit they gathered, anonymized in popular accounts of island farming, and reduced to numerical outputs in the records kept by bog owners, Nantucket’s pickers left few lasting marks on the thriving enterprise for which they worked, sweated, and bled.78 96

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figure 44 Detail from Eastman Johnson, The Cranberry Harvest, Island of Nantucket, 1880. Oil on canvas, 27 ³/₈ × 54 ½ in. Putnam Foundation, Timken Museum of Art. The two spectral figures appear at the center of this detail.

The figural composition at the heart of The Cranberry Harvest advances an account of berry farming, then, that alternatingly evades and confronts the spatial, economic, and corporeal dimensions of modern bog work, an account that renders picking as an old-time communal ritual and points allusively to its development into an enervating semi-industrial form of labor performed by a transient force of alienated workers. As we will see, the landscape that unfurls around this multivalent imagining of farm labor works in various ways to conjure up the broader economic forces—enclosure and development, speculative abstraction, and Nantucket’s deep-rooted culture of financial adventurism—that pressured the cranberry industry and its workforce. SPECULATION AND SIGNIFICATION

Johnson’s sandy setting incorporates three evocative signs of real estate endeavor and speculative enterprise, signs that imaginatively link the fictive space to the postwar property boom and Nantucket’s economic past. The first of these is positioned prominently in the left foreground of The Cranberry Harvest: at the edge of the picking group, a teetering, rough-cut pole (fig. 42) bears a simple wooden placard inscribed with a message (“no pass over this cranberry lot”) that viewers of the time read as a Picturing Land and Labor

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colloquial “warning to trespassers.”79 Evidently a late addition to Johnson’s composition—none of his studies include a signboard—the admonitory placard works to recode the picturesque cranberry bog as private land and a speculative space. As an admonitory assertion of property rights, the signboard’s inscription marks Johnson’s bog as a bounded possession, casts the broader landscape around that plot as a matrix of similar real estate holdings, and points to a particular form of struggle unfolding around Nantucket’s berry farms in the moment.80 In the late 1870s, a string of cranberry thefts swept the island’s bogs; reports in local papers (such as an 1875 story attributing one theft to “a woman nearly a century old”) make it clear that these crimes were perpetrated by impoverished islanders desperate for income and sustenance.81 Bog owners responded to the rash of thefts by setting traps in their fields and taking out newspaper advertisements that reprinted the Massachusetts statute barring unlawful entry into “any orchard, nursery, garden, or cranberry meadow” and the theft or destruction of “any fruit or flower” therein; one group of owners, for example, placed an ad of this kind in every issue of the Nantucket Island Review published between August and December 1877.82 Employing cruder terms to articulate a similar warning, the battered signpost at the left edge of The Cranberry Harvest casts the depicted landscape around it as a contested possession, a unit of property implicated in the broader conflicts swirling around Nantucket’s bogs—conflicts between speculators and foragers, ascendant land investors and struggling local workers.83 At the same time, Johnson’s rustic signboard figures the surrounding landscape as a developing space caught up in the material and cultural forces of Nantucket’s land boom. The sign’s textual inscription quietly invokes a major development scheme taking shape in the moment: in the fall of 1879, the newly formed Nantucket Railroad Company surveyed a route for a line connecting Nantucket’s north and south shores and spent several months lobbying the island’s selectmen for a right-of-way for the resulting corridor (which ran by the Cliff neighborhood before turning southward). The rail project inspired intense debate. While business leaders argued that the railroad would spur development and bring “mutual and universal benefit,” everyday islanders worried that the line would benefit “outside parties” and destroy the “character” of locals’ “summer life.”84 Johnson seems to have been sympathetic to the latter argument; after the line was completed in 1881 (following a slightly different corridor), the artist lamented to McEntee, “The place is losing all its old quiet and solitude. There is a railroad in operation.”85 Introduced to the composition of The Cranberry Harvest at the very moment that debates around the railroad intensified, Johnson’s foreground placard speaks to the issue on which the project’s future hinged: the phrase “pass over” was used in period legal writing to describe sanctioned forms of movement across private land associated with rights of way.86 By employing this charged phrase, then, Johnson’s weathered placard invokes the railroad debate and figures the landscape setting of The Cranberry Harvest as an arena for the sort of radical material transformations—dramatic (and often unwelcome) shifts in land’s form, use, owner98

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ship, and experience—that observers associated with that project and many other speculative ventures on the island. The foreground sign simultaneously evokes the disorienting semiotic shifts engendered by speculative endeavor. As a representational form that interrupts the naturalistic contours of Johnson’s landscape composition with an ambiguous message rendered in an alternative mode of signification (fig. 42), the placard performs a symbolic operation not unlike the confusing semiotic gambits undertaken by Nantucket’s developers. For these operators, land speculation was largely a representational game: to build interest in their real estate schemes, developers invented alluring new names for old locales and used dazzling images and texts to represent the investment potential of seemingly worthless holdings. As Boston author Jane G. Austin noted in her 1882 travelogue Nantucket Scraps, for example, decrepit fishing shacks were rechristened with charming names (such as “Miacomet Lodge, or Sans Souci, or Ric-Rac Refuge”) and rented out at exorbitant rates for the summer.87 In a similar vein, major developers commissioned fanciful tract plans that projected unbuilt subdivisions onto Nantucket’s barren terrain, sometimes in literal fashion; the backers of the Surfside subdivision promoted their scheme, for example, by bringing buyers to the site and using a “map laid upon the ground” to identify “the different objects of interest.”88 These tactics confounded longtime Nantucketers. Some satirized the laughable unreality of promotional representations; an 1877 comic poem thus averred, “There’s a city, too, at Madaket, if it ever gets a start / You’d think ’twas big as London to see it on the chart.”89 Others reflected melancholically on the island’s dizzying revaluations. Considering the Surfside scheme, an 1883 Nantucket Inquirer editorial noted that “in the days of our youth . . . no dream ever came to us of those acres subdivided into house lots, measured in feet and inches, and valued in dollars and cents.”90 Johnson’s placard speaks in some small way to the speculative transfigurations that confounded the Inquirer correspondent and many other local observers: overlaying the agrarian setting of The Cranberry Harvest with an ambiguous sign of property rights and risky real estate dealing, the signboard invokes and enacts the disorienting representational maneuvers pursued by local speculators. A second element of Johnson’s landscape setting seems to expand on the foreground placard’s evocation of speculative transformation. The wooden windmill (fig. 45) that appears on the sandy bluff in the background of The Cranberry Harvest works, on one level, to abet the painting’s figuration of berry picking as a pastoral custom: the trapezoidal tower and lattice sails of the painted structure correspond to the features of a surviving eighteenth-century mill (the “Old Mill”) that promoters celebrated as a living vestige of Nantucket’s “quaint” past.91 But Johnson’s rendition of the antique structure also speaks to the shifts and recodings at work during the island’s postwar land boom. Attuned viewers likely recognized that the painted windmill performed its own act of imaginative transposition: as Marc Simpson has shown, the Old Mill occupied a site south of downtown Nantucket that would have been outside the parameters of the coastal view limned Picturing Land and Labor

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figure 45 Detail from Eastman Johnson, The Cranberry Harvest, Island of Nantucket, 1880. Oil on canvas, 27 ³/₈ × 54 ½ in. Putnam Foundation, Timken Museum of Art.

by The Cranberry Harvest.92 Even as it functions as an evocative sign of creative reinscription, moreover, the windmill passage refers to a structure that developers creatively appropriated during Nantucket’s development blitz. Indeed, in the 1870s and 1880s, island real estate agencies sometimes featured the colonial-era mill in their promotional materials. In a particularly dramatic instance of speculative reinscription, for example, the short-lived Brant Point Land Company used engravings of the Old Mill as a promotional image (fig. 46) for a proposed ten-lot cottage subdivision. Likely intended to boost the credibility and appeal of the cottage scheme (by aligning the tenuous development with historicity and permanence), the company’s marketing ploy refashioned the colonial building into a sign of modern speculative enterprise. In so doing, the ad campaign played on local associations between wind and speculative endeavor: reviving a rhetorical tradition that stretched back to the early eighteenth century, real estate commentators regularly employed the tropes of wind or sea breeze to metaphorize the rhythms of development on Nantucket, the flows of speculative capital across the island, and the strangely immaterial property values engendered by the land boom.93 Johnson’s painted windmill works with the foreground placard, then, to quietly mark the agricultural setting of The Cranberry Harvest as a tract of private property and 100

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figure 46 Brant Point Land Company advertisement in The Nantucket (Nantucket, 1885), Library of Congress.

an arena of speculative development, a collection of real estate holdings awash in the financial, spatial, and semiotic currents of Nantucket’s land boom. A third element within Johnson’s setting seems to speak to the historical underpinnings of that boom. Though small in scale and loosely rendered, the townscape that appears between the Old Mill and the jutting pole of the signboard (fig. 42) includes several recognizable traces of Nantucket’s whaling heyday: the tall masts of full-rigged ships along the waterfront, a towering church steeple (possibly that of South Church, built 1809–10), a monumental and elevated structure that may be the Academy Hill High School (opened 1856), various white-washed buildings, and the blue waters of the Atlantic. As period viewers seem to have recognized, this passage dramatically expands the historical scope of Johnson’s scene. By pairing its central tableau of contemporary Nantucket enterprise with an evocation of the island’s antebellum prosperity, The Cranberry Harvest encourages consideration of the overarching trajectory of local economic development; responding to these cues, a widely reprinted 1882 Magazine of Art essay read the painting as a “reminiscence of Nantucket” that spoke to the island’s transition from “one of three great whaling ports of the United States” to “a waste of decaying wharves and crumbling mansions” and its reinvention as a modern “sanitary resort.”94 Picturing Land and Labor

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And the painting’s historically charged harborscape points, in turn, to the linkages (real and imagined) that tied Nantucket’s economic past and present. As many commentators noted, the island’s real estate boom was engineered by many of the same families (the Coffins, Folgers, Starbucks, and Macys) that oversaw the whaling trade and propelled by capital stockpiled during that business’s antebellum glory days.95 Nantucket’s whaling and real estate economies were driven, moreover, by common speculative practices; reflecting on these parallels, an 1882 Nantucket Inquirer article noted: We can remember as t’were but yesterday, when every Nantucketer . . . sought an opportunity to put his little capital into a ship, and send it off to take the chances of a long voyage in the Pacific Ocean . . . but the day for that particular kind of speculation has gone by. . . . Some few shrewd and patient men have made good investments by purchasing and holding lands upon our own shores, and are now developing wealth from a source where the ordinary observer saw least reason to expect it.96

Linking the speculative “chances” taken by whaling investors to the “good investments” made by present-day landowners, this and other accounts figured the postwar real estate mania as an extension of a deep-rooted speculative economy that was defined, from the start, by audacity and adventurism. The Cranberry Harvest gives visual form to this understanding of Nantucket’s economic past and present: situating evocations of antebellum and contemporary enterprise within a shared coastal setting, Johnson’s painting figures the present-day practices of berry farming and real estate speculation as continuations of a deep-rooted local history of risky endeavor. CONCLUSION

At the height of his involvements in Nantucket’s boisterous real estate economy, Eastman Johnson made his last and most complicated attempt to contend with speculation and land development in paint. Like his earlier studies in the Lake Superior region, the artist’s work on The Cranberry Harvest was shaped by a contradictory set of commitments: an attentiveness to the tastes of his audiences and a desire to experiment visually, an enthusiasm for speculative endeavor and an abiding concern about development’s socio-spatial effects, a fealty to free-trade Republicanism and a deep empathy toward social outsiders. Navigating between these divergent investments, Johnson developed a genre scene of cranberry farming that alternately denies and engages that business’s implication in Nantucket’s development boom. Reimagining the modern enterprise as a seasonal communal ritual, The Cranberry Harvest advances a pastoral account of berry farming that echoes and extends local boosters’ imaginings of the island. Employing tactics drawn from his earlier imaginings of farmwork, the painting outlines a picturesque scene of outdoor work studded with motifs and details—lambent light, hale children, fashionable clothing, meandering fields—that 102

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invite us to see picking as a charming communal ritual and an occasion for fun. As we have seen, however, The Cranberry Harvest is also embedded with formal contrasts and suggestive details that evoke the broader economic forces (enclosure, development, and speculation) that pressured cranberry growing on Nantucket. Other passages speak, in turn, to the disconcerting effects that these forces had on local landscapes and bodies: drastic transitions in land’s uses, ownership, and meanings; the intensification of agricultural work; and the alienation of workers from the landscapes they traversed and the fruit they gathered. Taken together, these various dynamics yield an open-ended vision of land and labor that works both to underwrite and critique the forces of speculative development on Nantucket. Conceived and composed just as Nantucket’s real estate and vacation boom got under way, The Cranberry Harvest articulated a vision of the transforming island that navigated between competing accounts of local life. Even as it affirmed the nostalgic fantasies that entrepreneurs used to sell Nantucket to investors and tourists, Johnson’s multifarious picture tapped into currents of skepticism, ambivalence, and unease that animated local dialogues about the development boom. In the 1870s and early 1880s, everyday Nantucketers and off-island vacationers frequently questioned the wisdom and fairness of reorganizing the local economy around land speculation. As suggested above, these observers responded to the surge in risky land dealing by publishing letters, editorials, and poems that decried specific developments and protested the island’s rapid transformation. Lamenting the pervasiveness of poverty and the dearth of business opportunities on Nantucket, local writers challenged promoters’ claims that real estate endeavor would “prove a real and lasting benefit” to “the people of Nantucket” and warned that speculation would further “break up the business” of local tradesmen.97 Working in various ways to conjure up the bewildering spatial transformations, pointed material conflicts, and corporeal tribulations engendered by real estate enterprise, The Cranberry Harvest quietly affirms the dawning sense— shared by a range of local observers—that speculative development posed real and unsettling threats to the island’s landscapes and lifeways. Outlining a scene of agricultural work and property that mystified and allusively engaged the problems raised by real estate dealing on Nantucket—the relationship between development and agriculture on the Massachusetts seaboard, and the effects that resort construction had on coastal farmworkers—The Cranberry Harvest made its own creative but convoluted contribution to a larger cultural effort to reckon with the wave of coastal construction and speculation that had begun to sweep across the Eastern Seaboard in the decade after the Civil War. The following chapter examines Martin Johnson Heade’s contemporaneous efforts to grapple with the risks and folly that attended resort development in another seaside locale—Saint Augustine, Florida— that drew bourgeois developers and tourists at the end of the nineteenth century.

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4 PERILOUS PROSPECTS Speculation and Landscape Painting in Florida

W

Martin Johnson Heade settled permanently in Saint Augustine, Florida, in the spring of 1883, he encountered a community in the midst of drastic social, spatial, and economic transformations. Once occupied by the Mocama people of northern Florida, Saint Augustine had been a Spanish and English colonial outpost for three and a half centuries before it (and the rest of the Florida Territory) was absorbed into the United States in 1821; isolated geographically and difficult to reach by overland travelers, the old town languished as a minor military outpost and invalids’ resort in the decades that followed.1 The town’s prospects changed dramatically after the Civil War, when state leaders used policy and publicity to rebuild Florida’s economy around tourism and real estate. As these enterprises began to take root in northern Florida in the 1870s, investors local and distant channeled capital into the redevelopment of Saint Augustine as a modern seasonal resort. Martin Johnson Heade arrived in town just as this boom got under way, and he immediately threw himself into it. During his first few years HEN THE PERIPATETIC ARTIST

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of residence there, he invested heavily in land, remade his new home into an attraction for northern visitors, championed local development in the press, painted Floridian souvenir pictures for tourist audiences, and took a studio in Saint Augustine’s most lavish hotel. In the course of these activities, Heade became intimately familiar with the cultural tactics of Floridian boosterism, and came to know the dangers and costs of local speculation firsthand. As we will see, he made creative use of these insights. Focusing on an inventive landscape that Heade made just as his land ventures in Saint Augustine (and corresponding financial exposure) reached a crescendo, this chapter will show that the fraught experience of speculation inspired the artist to work out a complicated painterly account of Floridian real estate that interrogated local promotional representations and gave voice to his own racialized class anxieties. Heade was well acquainted with real estate dealings by the time he moved to Florida.2 In the 1850s, he bought lots in Chicago and scouted land in Madison, Wisconsin; in the 1870s and 1880s, he purchased property in Newport, Rhode Island, and actively sought out potential acquisitions in Washington, D.C.3 Heade undertook his most daring ventures yet in Saint Augustine, borrowing heavily to buy and subsequently develop a large suburban tract on the town’s outskirts. In the midst of this heady undertaking, the artist began work on an idiosyncratic view of Saint Augustine—entitled On the San Sebastian River, Florida (fig. 47)—that explored the quandaries and pressures of his new financial situation. Breaking from the placeless sunscapes delineated in Heade’s other Florida landscapes, On the San Sebastian River, Florida outlines a stormily dramatic landscape that refutes the booster myths that propelled local land investment and explores the economic dangers that attended Floridian speculations. Taking up and reworking three pictorial tropes—the sunny sky, the prospect, and the marsh—that commentators of the time used to signify the present and future value of Florida’s landscape, the painting reimagines Saint Augustine’s developing terrain as an uncanny realm of risk, uncertainty, failure, and loss. Setting this vision of peril and ruin in a liminal space associated locally with Saint Augustine’s working-class African American and Minorcan communities, the painting outlines an alternative account of land, property, and real estate value that echoed and extended critiques made by suspicious observers of Florida’s late nineteenth-century land boom, tapped into Heade’s racial antipathies, and worked both to express and imaginatively defuse the artist’s deepening financial unease. By examining On the San Sebastian River, Florida as a complicated meditation on the perils and perplexities of land speculation, this chapter aims to open up new perspectives on Heade’s expansive painterly oeuvre. As a darkly inventive critique of Floridian booster culture, the painting encourages us to reexamine Heade’s seemingly formulaic late works for similar instances of experimentation and insight. At the same time, On the San Sebastian River, Florida invites us to reconsider the sociocultural moorings of Heade’s consistently unconventional landscape practice. Working to explain the idiosyncratic compositions, otherworldly drama, and “expressive strangeness” of 106

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figure 47 Martin Johnson Heade, On the San Sebastian River, Florida, c. 1886–88. Oil on canvas, 17 ¼ × 36 in. Museum of Arts & Sciences, Daytona, Florida.

Heade’s marine and marsh pictures, historians have made reference to a wide array of cultural phenomena that purportedly influenced the artist, including Transcendentalist philosophy, lyrical poetry, and spiritualism.4 Others have located the roots of Heade’s unorthodox aesthetic disposition in his complex relationship with Frederic Church, or read the painter’s curious sensibility as an expression of a romantically individualistic and ineluctably “enigmatic self.”5 The case of On the San Sebastian River, Florida suggests, however, that Heade’s frequent experimental reworkings of landscape convention also drew energy from his sustained involvements in the land market—an everyday sociocultural arena that (as we have seen) revolved around semiotic play, imaginative projection, and enigmatic materiality. Heade’s richly unconventional Florida picture challenges us, in turn, to seek out other occasions when the artist channeled his iconoclastic impulses into the creation of works that contended directly with the material forces and cultural forms of real estate capitalism. HEADE AND THE “FLORIDA FEVER”

On December 12, 1882, Martin Johnson Heade jokingly reported to his friend Eben Loomis that he “had a case of the Florida fever.”6 The artist had felt the lure of many other locales during the first three decades of his long career, having painted and speculated in many spots across the United States, in Central and South America, and in the Caribbean. But Florida’s prospects must have seemed especially sunny to Heade: the state was a virtually untapped aesthetic resource (few artists had visited in the preceding decades) and a hotbed of tourism, real estate development, and land speculation in the decades after the Civil War. Intrigued by Florida’s potential, Heade Perilous Prospects

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boarded a steamship bound for Jacksonville in late January 1883. As we will see, he threw himself wholeheartedly into the state’s booming economy in the years that followed. Northern Florida was in the early stages of a radical transfiguration when Heade relocated to the state. Like many other areas in the Deep South, Florida had attracted relatively few travelers from the Northeast during the antebellum period; the state’s fortunes began to change in the late 1860s and early 1870s, as bourgeois northerners became increasingly interested in warm-weather vacationing along the nation’s southern coastlines.7 Eager to attract intersectional tourists, state boosters, hotel entrepreneurs, and land companies began promoting Jacksonville, Saint Augustine, and other northern Florida communities as winter retreats and havens for investment. As Henry Knight has shown, the novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe played a central role in this publicity blitz.8 After purchasing a winter home near Jacksonville in 1867, Stowe wrote dozens of articles about Florida for northern newspapers and magazines; eventually republished in the collection Palmetto Leaves (1873), these essays reimagined the state as a “semi-tropical” Eden graced by healthful “outdoorness,” teeming citrus orchards and flower gardens, and temperate weather.9 A wave of promotional texts and images elaborated on this myth in the following decades. Popular guidebooks touted Florida as “the land of sunshine, oranges, and health” and Saint Augustine as “the most desirable winter resort in this country.” Land companies flooded northern newspapers with ads that cast Florida’s isolated and underdeveloped terrain as a “shrewd and popular investment” or a “safe speculation” with “no chance to lose.”10 Local histories wove together selective chronicles of northern Florida’s deep past (almost always focused on the Spanish colonial period), breathless accounts of the state’s post–Civil War development, and sunny projections of its future as an “Elysium of constantly renewed bliss of youth and beauty.”11 And a steady stream of town plats, bird’s-eye-view lithographs, and engraved landscapes offered detailed pictorial accounts of the choice properties, salubrious clime, easy lifestyle, and bustling social life purportedly on offer in Florida. As boosters worked out a salable myth of Florida, speculators poured money into new town schemes, resort communities, hotels, and other forms of vacation infrastructure across the northern reaches of the state. Land companies broke ground on resort towns with enticing names (such as Citra or Gardena) but dubious prospects; hotel builders and local investors concentrated on expanding accommodations within existing communities.12 In Saint Augustine, small-scale investors and large concerns put up a wave of second homes, rental cottages, and lavish hotels in the 1870s and 1880s. This boom took on new dimensions in the late 1880s, when Standard Oil executive Henry Flagler oversaw the construction of a first-class railroad line from Jacksonville and two ultra-luxurious Spanish Revival hotels—the Ponce de Leon (1885–88) and Alcazar (1887–88)—in downtown Saint Augustine.13 Heade settled in Saint Augustine just as this boom was getting under way, and he quickly took steps to insinuate himself in northern Florida’s dynamic tourist and real 108

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figure 48 “The Late Mr. Martin J. Heade in the Window of His Vine-Embowered Cottage on San Marco Avenue,” The Tatler of Society in Florida 14 (March 4, 1905). Courtesy of the St. Augustine Historical Society Research Library.

estate economies. He had some help in this regard: in late January 1883, he paid a visit to Stowe, who no doubt bent his ear about promising local ventures.14 Drawing on this intelligence, Heade made his first investment in Saint Augustine real estate a few days after arriving in town. On March 3, 1883, he used a loan to purchase half of a four-lot tract on Saint Augustine’s northern border for $5,000 (about $132,000 in 2021 currency); after paying off his initial mortgage, he purchased the other half for another $5,000 and completed the tract on June 14, 1884.15 It seems clear that Heade made these acquisitions in an effort to capitalize on Saint Augustine’s ongoing redevelopment. Both purchases were fairly risky, since much of Saint Augustine’s northern fringe was undeveloped in the period. But Heade’s tract also had certain advantages. The property was on the main road linking Saint Augustine and Jacksonville (the coquina-paved “Shell Road,” now called San Marco Avenue), down the street from the soon-to-be-opened San Marco Hotel, and next to the ruined chapel of Our Lady of La Leche, a picturesque structure frequented by tourists.16 And the tract also came with its own established attraction—a carpenter gothic cottage (fig. 48), built by Brigadier General Frederick T. Dent, that had hosted many fashionable gatherings in the preceding decades.17 Heade took several steps to augment the place of his new home within Saint Augustine’s vacationscape. He improved the property to heighten its appeal to potential visitors, adding new studio and reception spaces to the old Dent cottage and relandscaping the tract’s grounds to improve the estate’s visibility from the Shell Road.18 Heade then made sure that his renovated cottage was regularly mentioned as a place Perilous Prospects

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figure 49 Detail from H. J. Ritchie, Bird’s Eye View of Saint Augustine, 1895. Lithograph. Courtesy of Saint Augustine Historical Society. Heade’s home is situated at the left center of this detail; the artist’s three rental cottages are located on Ocean Avenue, just right of his home.

of interest in area newspapers; for example, an 1893 article in the Saint Augustine Tatler (a local society newspaper for seasonal residents) described the artist’s home as “a perfect bower of beauty without, while within the gracious mistress welcomes the visitor with a gentle charm all her own.”19 And the painter used his property, lastly, to make a foray into the hospitality business: in 1886–87, he took out loans to fund the construction of three large rental cottages—two single-family frame dwellings and a duplex—in a corner of his tract bracketed by Ocean Avenue and the Shell Road (fig. 49).20 Surviving evidence suggests that Heade erected these dwellings with well-heeled vacationers in mind. Articles in the Tatler mention fashionable seasonal tenants in “the pretty cottage[s] on San Marco avenue, adjoining Mr. Heade’s home,” and a 1910 Outlook ad attests to the cottages’ upscale features (“nine rooms and bath, modern conveniences, lovely water view”) and pricey rent (“700/season,” or about $19,400 in 2021 currency).21 110

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figure 50 Martin Johnson Heade, Oranges and Orange Blossoms, c. 1883–95. Oil on canvas, 12 ¹/₈ × 20 ¼ in. Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska-Lincoln; in loving memory of Beatrice D. Rohman by Carl H. and Jane Rohman through the University of Nebraska Foundation.

As he channeled his finances into Saint Augustine’s redevelopment, Heade lent his name, pen, and brush to the promotion of Florida. The artist contributed to subscription drives for local infrastructure projects and allowed city leaders to use his name to publicize these undertakings.22 Heade also touted the prospects of Saint Augustine and northern Florida in private and public writings. Many of his letters included confident predictions about Saint Augustine’s future. In May 1884, he informed Eben Loomis that “next year we expect a boom in lots”; three years later, he assured his friend that when Saint Augustine’s redevelopment was complete, “Washington [D.C.] will be a cheap sort of place in comparison.”23 The painter adopted a similar tone in a series of “Florida letters” that he wrote for the sporting journal Forest and Stream. In a letter dated May 24, 1883, for example, Heade celebrated Saint Augustine as a “a fascinating, quaint old place” that was “bound to be the winter Newport of this country.”24 At the same time, Heade began painting souvenir canvases—modest views of local waterways and still-life scenes of orange blossoms (fig. 50), magnolias, and other southern flora—for the tourists who visited his home and (after 1886) a studio that he occupied in the Ponce de Leon Hotel.25 Small in scale and often formulaic in composition, these popular works cast Florida as an exotic land of health, pleasure, and plenty. Heade painted several similarly toned landscapes for display in the Ponce de Leon’s public spaces.26 Teeming with details of local plant and animal life and glowing with light, grand works such as The Great Florida Marsh (1886, private collection) and The Perilous Prospects

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Great Florida Sunset (1887, private collection) reimagined the state as a lushly fertile Eden. Glimpsed in the resplendent halls of the Ponce de Leon or enjoyed privately by tourist purchasers, Heade’s Florida pictures offered credibly concrete expressions of the multifaceted myths that promoters sold to vacationers and speculators. PAINTING WEATHER AND WORTH

By the late 1880s, then, Heade had much riding on Saint Augustine’s successful development as a modern resort. Risking his reputation and professional standing, the artist had become a leading advocate for the town in print and paint. And as we have seen, Heade wagered significant capital on Saint Augustine’s land boom, using savings and financing to buy and develop a tract on the outskirts of the resort. At the height of this heady phase, and right around the time that Heade finalized a second round of mortgages on his property, he began work on an experimental painting of his hometown. This new picture—On the San Sebastian River, Florida—departed from Heade’s Saint Augustine oeuvre in several ways. As observers of the time noted, the painting delineates a topographically specific view unlike the dreamily placeless scenes outlined by Heade’s other Florida landscapes.27 Adopting a vantage point on the eastern bank of the San Sebastian River (near a marshy section of the river the artist frequented), the painting looks southward across the waterway toward a minute rendering of Saint Augustine’s urban fabric (fig. 51) on the horizon.28 Recognizable landmarks— including the Spanish Colonial Revival towers and smokestack of the Ponce de Leon Hotel and the bell tower of the nearby Grace United Methodist Church (1886–87)— dot this miniature cityscape. On the San Sebastian River, Florida also offers a much more dramatic and complicated account of Floridian weather than Heade’s other local pictures, filling its upper register with a wild thunderstorm that enlivens the sky with intense coloristic contrasts and shrouds much of the landscape below in shadow. Heade may have conceived this complicated and apparently uncommissioned work as a kind of demonstration piece.29 Displayed prominently in his Ponce de Leon studio, On the San Sebastian River, Florida presented visitors with a localized vision of romantic sublimity that recalled Heade’s ambitious midcentury coastal pictures (such as Thunder Storm on Narragansett Bay) and surpassed the pleasantly undemanding works of the painter’s competitors (fig. 52). If the complex work demonstrated Heade’s aesthetic sophistication, however, it likely also confounded his tourist patrons. As noted above, Heade’s Floridian followers came to his studio seeking souvenirs that gave vivid form to the regional fantasies that abetted their touristic experiences of, and risky investments in, Florida. On the San Sebastian River, Florida offered them something else entirely. Dark in tone and dramatic in tenor, Heade’s idiosyncratic picture outlines an unsettling account of Florida’s landscape and climate that contests the central promotional myths that boosters used to explain the touristic appeal and investment potential of the state, evokes the uncanny effects and unnerving hazards 112

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figure 51 E Detail from Martin Johnson Heade, On the San Sebastian River, Florida, c. 1886–88. Oil on canvas, 17 ¼ × 36 in. Museum of Arts & Sciences, Daytona, Florida. figure 52G Frank Shapleigh, Panorama of the City of Saint Augustine, 1886. Oil on canvas, 22 × 36 in. Museum of Arts & Sciences, Daytona, Florida. 

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of speculative development, and expands on the dim accounts of Florida real estate offered by skeptical commentators. Heade’s patrons were likely surprised to encounter a Floridian landscape that devoted so much of its composition to the delineation of a foreboding thunderstorm. This rendition of local weather was wildly out of step with the prevailing booster claim that Florida’s climate was genially placid.30 Heade’s expansive storm screens out specific environmental conditions, moreover, that promoters highlighted when touting the state’s idyllic weather: cloudless skies and bright unfiltered sun. Period guidebooks, pamphlets, and advertisements continually celebrated the pure light purportedly on offer in Florida; echoing other accounts, an 1885 hotel pamphlet thus averred that Saint Augustine’s skies were “made up of some heavenly alchemy—a tissue of golden glory and shimmer of silver sheen.”31 Expanding on this theme, a local steamship poster (fig. 53) construed Florida’s resort coast as a “paradise” bathed in pure celestial light (emanating from a cloudy backdrop) and set apart from an otherwise dim and turbulent universe. In this and other reckonings, pure sunshine was the primary attraction that drew vacationers to Florida, guided local development, and ultimately underwrote the state’s economic boom. Reflecting on the importance of Florida sun to the state’s economy, an 1884 booster essay thus argued “climate alone, so beautiful and salubrious, is enough to make Florida a rich and prosperous state.”32 Many promoters saw Floridian sunlight as the primary guarantor of real estate values in the state; an 1885 Belmore Florida Land Company pamphlet thus declared: So genial and balmy is it that in winter . . . even invalids can live an outdoor life . . . and bask in the warm sunshine. Say, if you please, that her soil is not worth five dollars an acre; her climate is worth five hundred, and that without any discount, for it is here to stay.33

Striving to persuade potential investors about the credibility of its speculative developments, the Belmore Company pamphlet identifies Florida’s “genial and balmy” climate and “warm sunshine”—and not the quality of the state’s “soil”—as dependable foundations for local real estate values, monetizable assets that would back even the shakiest of construction ventures. In blotting out Florida’s bright skies with a sweeping thunderhead, then, On the San Sebastian River, Florida shapes a scene that upends booster imaginings of the local climate and begins to call into question the economic viability of the landscape that it depicts. The storm scene’s dramatic coloristic effects further problematize Saint Augustine’s developing terrain. Framed by glimpses of sickly green light and rendered in dark brown, black, and bubble-gum pink pigment, the thunderstorm inscribes the skies and the reflective riverine setting below with an otherworldly mix of discordant tones and unnatural hues. Imbued with an air of hallucinatory unreality, the resulting view seems to give quiet voice to an understanding of the booming resort that took hold among more ambivalent observers of Florida’s postwar land craze. Staggered by 114

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figure 53 Florida East Coast Steamship Co., The East Coast of Florida Is Paradise Regained, 1898. Lithograph, 26 ¾ × 23 ¼ in. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.

the accelerating pace of speculative construction and the drastic transformations that it wrought, many commentators came to see Saint Augustine as a kind of unreal dreamscape where “prices suddenly leaped . . . to fictitious values,” the “old has been supplanted by the new,” and “old visitors find themselves strangely at a loss to identify localities.”34 The rapid erection of the enormous, lavish, and exceedingly expensive Ponce de Leon and Alcazar hotels in Saint Augustine’s once modest downtown was particularly confounding for many onlookers; in an 1887 letter, Heade himself Perilous Prospects

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described these developments as “something astounding.”35 Elaborating on this sentiment, a popular guidebook described Henry Flagler’s Ponce de Leon project as a beautiful dream . . . perhaps not undreamt before; but if it had come to others, it was only as the baseless fabric of a castle in the air, whose lovely vision had flushed in the rosy light of imagination and then dissolved into unreality, as the glory of the Southern sunset so quickly merges into night. It was the happy fortune of this dreamer to transform the shadowy pleasure dome of fancy into substantial, concrete reality.36

Working to convey the magnitude of Flagler’s achievement in completing the Ponce de Leon, the guidebook casts the hotel as a “beautiful dream,” an architectural fantasy that began as a speculative “castle in the air” or a “shadowy” projection of the hotelier’s “fancy” and ended, improbably, as a “concrete” presence in downtown Saint Augustine. Though it seeks ultimately to applaud Flagler’s realization of the hotel project, the guidebook passage expends much more imaginative energy conjuring up the ethereal “unreality” of the venture—and it does so in terms that resonate strikingly with Heade’s stormy view of the resort and its landmark hotel. Pairing muddy shadows and bilious middle tones with searingly bright hues that suggest the transient “glory of the Southern sunset” and, perhaps, the “rosy light of imagination,” On the San Sebastian River, Florida shapes an uncanny vista of Saint Augustine that echoes bewildered local accounts of the resort’s wondrous urban “fabric,” a vista that figures the fast-developing town as a chimerical dreamscape poised somewhere between “fancy” and “concrete reality.” As we will see, the painting’s idiosyncratic long-view composition and marshy middle ground work to further complicate our sense of the solidity, security, worth, and promise of Saint Augustine’s terrain. PERILOUS PROSPECTS

Delineating a long view of Saint Augustine that moves from a “wild” foreground toward a distant rendering of the resort on the horizon, On the San Sebastian River, Florida incorporates the basic structural elements of a traditional prospect, an economically coded genre of landscape representation that had deep roots in American landscape and real estate culture. Patriotic poets and agrarian thinkers began composing prospect accounts of the nation’s landscapes in the late eighteenth century; setting the terms for later iterations, these narratives used the long view to represent the sustained development of a given stretch of the continent’s interior and envision its steady movement toward a profitable future.37 Building on these early precedents, antebellum writers embraced the prospect as a mode of looking at and thinking about land that embodied the nation’s territorial and economic ambitions. In his popular guidebook American Scenery (1840), for example, Nathaniel Parker Willis declared: 116

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The American . . . tracks the broad rivers of his own country, [and] is perpetually reaching forward . . . he sees a valley laden down . . . with a virgin vegetation, untrodden and luxuriant, and his first thought is of the villages that will soon sparkle on the hill-sides, the axes that will ring from the woodlands, and the mills, bridges, canals, and railroads that will span and border the stream that now runs through sedge and wild-flowers . . . he sits over the fire with his paper and pencil, and calculates what the population will be in ten years . . . what the value of the neighboring land will become, and whether the stock of some canal or railroad that seems more visionary than [John Cleves] Symmes’ expedition to the centre [sic] of the earth, will in consequence, be a good investment.38

Echoing other accounts, Willis’s passage casts the prospect as a national habit of eye and mind that is deeply speculative (imaginative, forward looking, and financial) in character: gazing at the “untrodden” wilderness leads “the American” to dream about its industrialized settlement, calculate its potential market value, and project the worth of financial derivatives (“the stock of some canal or railroad”) tied to the development of its terrain. American landscape painters soon worked out a long-view format that visualized the temporal and imaginative leaps performed by prospect texts. 39 Like other early prospects, Thomas Cole’s View of L’Esperance on the Schoharie River (fig. 54, 1826–28) pictures a deep view across a landscape divided into bands that suggest a steady process of intensifying development: a foreground scene of pioneering struggle (woodsman and “wild” gorge), a middle ground of “improved” farmland, and a rural village (curling smoke plumes and steeples) on the horizon.40 Midcentury artists used this spatiotemporal configuration, in turn, to outline grand expansionist fantasies. Setting a “wild” foreground occupied by two Native Americans (at left) alongside a deeply receding landscape (at right) inscribed with vignettes that evoke sequential phases of development, Asher B. Durand’s Progress (The Advance of Civilization) (fig. 55, 1853) employs the prospect format to shape an exultant prophecy of native displacement and inexorable Anglo-American modernization.41 Deeply rooted in American landscape culture, the prospect was also a fixture within the promotional discourses of U.S. land markets.42 As a rhetorical construct, the prospect fit the needs of land marketers perfectly: deep-view representations, after all, strove to make audiences see and believe in the potential of a landscape whose future was uncertain. Capitalizing on the trope’s persuasive utility, nineteenth-century land companies incorporated prospect narratives in innumerable promotional texts and (as discussed in chapter 3) published deep-view prints of development schemes in all corners of the nation.43 Florida boosters were no exception. Harriet Beecher Stowe used a prospect vignette, for example, to forecast the development of the Saint Johns River valley. Musing on the landscape around her riverfront home, she declared: “Already around us a pretty group of winter houses is rising[,] and we look forward to the time . . . when, all along the shore of the St. John’s [sic], cottages and villas shall Perilous Prospects

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figure 54 Thomas Cole, View of L’Esperance on the Schoharie River, 1826–28. Oil on canvas, 24 ½ × 35 in. Private collection, image in public domain.

figure 55 Asher B. Durand, Progress (The Advance of Civilization), 1853. Oil on canvas, 58 ⁷/₁₆ × 82 ¼ in. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Gift of an anonymous donor. Photo: Travis Fullerton, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

look out from the green trees.”44 A steady stream of prospect imagery similarly strove to “look forward” to Florida’s prosperous future. Local hotels and land companies commissioned an array of deep-view prints and photographs of Saint Augustine, for example, in the decades after the Civil War. Typically composed from vantages on the town’s northern border, these images used suggestive architectural juxtapositions 118

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figure 56 Frederick Heppenheimer and Louis Maurer, Old Spanish Fort, St. Augustine, 1885. Lithograph. Courtesy of the Touchton Map Library, Tampa Bay History Center.

to evoke the resort’s movement away from its colonial past and toward a modern touristic future. Frederick Heppenheimer and Louis Maurer’s Old Spanish Fort, St. Augustine (fig. 56, 1885) and William Henry Jackson’s multi-image Panorama from Fort Marion (fig. 57, 1898) thus set proximate renderings of Saint Augustine’s Spanish colonial fort (the Castillo de San Marcos) against distant scenes of its downtown that include signs of development (new cottages and hotels) and tourism (passenger steamships).45 The prospect was, in short, a well-established trope in American landscape painting and local real estate culture by the time that Heade began working on his own deep view of Saint Augustine. The artist was familiar with both threads of the prospect’s cultural history, and he was well aware of the economic associations the trope carried. Like many other landscapists, Heade composed conventional prospect paintings at certain points in his career.46 And he drew on the promotional trope of the anticipatory view when composing his own booster writings about Florida. In an 1883 contribution to Forest and Stream, Heade confidently predicted: A new railroad has just been opened direct from Jacksonville, and the same company that built the splendid house at Magnolia has just purchased twenty acres on the shell road nearly opposite the old fort and before another season opens will have a hotel worthy of that beautiful old place . . . and what is more, there is a fortune in it of no ordinary size. Several efforts have been made to push the city out in that direction, and now that this

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figure 57 William Henry Jackson, “St. Augustine from Ft. Marion,” from Panorama from Fort Marion, 1898. Print from dry plate negative, 8 × 10 in. Detroit Publishing Company Photograph Collection, Library of Congress.

enterprise is started by a wealthy company[,] property along there will go up with a rush. A great deal has already been bought up with a view to speculation, and when the rush begins next season not a foot will be left, at present prices. Everything is now nicely arranged to make St. Augustine by far the most attractive winter resort in Florida.47

Heade outlines a prospect narrative here of inexorable growth and surging land values that culminates with a sunny prediction about Saint Augustine’s glittering future. Focusing (like other promoters) on the town’s northern fringe, Heade argues that the construction of a “worthy” hotel on the Shell Road would accelerate local construction, spur demand for property, send land values skyward, and solidify Saint Augustine’s position as “the most attractive winter resort in Florida.” To explain the motivations propelling this predicted boom, the artist offhandedly invokes a financial mode of looking and thinking (“a view to speculation”) that recalls the prospect habit of mind posited by Willis and others. Composed just four years after Heade penned this buoyant passage, On the San Sebastian River, Florida shapes a deep view of Saint Augustine’s northern borderlands 120

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that creatively manipulates the visual codes of prospect imagery and turns local booster accounts (including his own) on their head. Like customary deep-view scenes, Heade’s picture sets a far-reaching vista of a distant settlement above a landscape partitioned into distinct bands. But On the San Sebastian River, Florida works in various ways to frustrate imaginative explorations of this view and undercut the landscape’s evocation of steady development. The orientation of Heade’s prospect complicates matters immediately. Prospect pictures typically set their deep views perpendicular to the picture plane (see figs. 54–57) so as to maximize the frictionless accessibility of distant registers. Heade’s picture, by contrast, traces a deep vista that proceeds diagonally from an implied central starting point toward an objective (Saint Augustine’s downtown skyline) near the left edge of the horizon—an angled path that slows visual entry into the painting’s far spaces. Heade’s arresting thunderstorm works, in turn, to delimit this angled vista. Although they often included high clouds or distant storms, conventional prospects (figs. 54 and 55) usually featured expansive skies and open swaths of clear air at the horizon—elements that invite the spectator to imagine the long gaze proceeding unencumbered into the infinitely receding distance, toward unseen spatial and temporal horizons. Heade’s expansive storm frustrates imaginative projections of this kind. Hovering low and enshrouding Saint Augustine in murky precipitation, the sweeping thunderhead constricts the prospect’s visual path, stops the long view at the horizon, and occludes any potential allusion to spaces (or future moments) beyond that boundary. Even as it constrains the visual arc of its prospect, On the San Sebastian River, Florida freely reworks the spatial structure of traditional deep-view settings. Breaking from the more regular tripartite scheme of earlier paintings (figs. 54 and 55), Heade reduces the foreground and background to narrow slices of space and instead devotes the majority of this landscape composition to an expansive middle-ground depiction of the San Sebastian’s estuarial marshes. The resulting setting bears little resemblance to the neatly sequenced topographies that unfold below customary prospects. Picturing a liminal space comprising thick sea grass, meandering channels of dark water, and few obvious signs of human occupancy (other than the two figures in dories), Heade’s expansive middle ground is not immediately readable as the sort of improved intermediate zone—a middle step in the path from wilderness to urbanity—that appeared in many traditional prospects. Empty, dimly lit, and forebodingly vast, the marshy middle ground instead inserts a formidable visual gap, a challenging pictorial and narrative barrier that uncouples the “wild” foreground from the urban background. Creatively reworking the conventions of the deep-view representation, On the San Sebastian River, Florida shapes an alternative prospect of Saint Augustine that subtly imbues the resort’s landscape with bleak economic associations. Typical prospects, as we have seen, used seamlessly receding views, neat spatiotemporal sequences, and Perilous Prospects

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subtly allusive distances to evoke the inexorable development and lucrative future of their subjects. Dismantling the neat spatial and narrative order of these representations, On the San Sebastian River, Florida pictures a murkily ambiguous landscape in which the passage from wilderness to urbanity is unclear and potentially dangerous, development proceeds unevenly, past and present coexist uneasily, and the future appears out of reach. Put in economic terms, Heade’s idiosyncratic view casts Saint Augustine’s developing landscape as a realm of uncertainty, risk, and peril. As we will see, the terrestrial setting below Heade’s obstructed view likely intensified these associations for contemporary viewers. Indeed, On the San Sebastian River, Florida highlights a form of terrain—the salt marsh—that observers local and distant came to see as a dramatic foil to booster constructs of lucrative Floridian real estate.48 MARSHES AND MONEY

In promotional imaginings, Florida’s landscape was an expansive inventory of readily developable, easily exchangeable, and unfailingly profitable properties. This is the fantasy that underwrote, for example, an 1886 advertisement for a prospective town that urged readers: “Buy a lot or two for yourself, your wife, and each of your children. Club together with your relatives and friends and buy a whole block. . . . A small investment . . . will return double the money invested.”49 But Florida’s copious wetlands complicated such promises of good, cheap, easily improvable, and effortlessly profitable land. As some insightful observers noted, the difficult terrain of marshes and swamps resisted all but the most capital-intensive efforts at development.50 And Florida’s wetlands continually troubled local legal definitions of real property. Riverine marshes proved especially vexing: though Florida’s 1856 Riparian Act affirmed landholders’ right to claim, improve, and “prevent encroachments . . . upon” any “lands covered by water” that bordered “navigable” waterways, the dynamic topographies of riverine wetlands continually threw this and other definitions of riparian rights (and the underlying conception of the marsh as potential property on which they depended) into question.51 Florida courts accordingly heard myriad property rights cases centered on riparian marshes; one prominent case (Garnett v. Dumas, 1893) arose out of a dispute between two parties claiming ownership of the marshy grasslands along Maria Sanchez Creek, an estuary just south of downtown Saint Augustine.52 Understood increasingly as a problematic form of property, the marsh became a central symbolic element in critical accounts of Florida’s land boom. As the state’s real estate craze intensified in the 1870s and 1880s, skeptical observers began to question the sustainability of the boom, the veracity of Florida boosters’ claims, and the credibility of local development schemes. Florida’s marshes are a constant presence in their accounts. In the winter of 1886, for example, the New York Herald responded to the mass marketing of a prospective Floridian resort (“Crystal City”) with an article series that used the trope of the wetlands to puncture the claims of the town’s developers. For example, on January 30, the Herald reporter 122

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found . . . there was no comparison between . . . the lurid descriptions of the advertisements and the actual lots sold. . . . He went to the points designated only to find that the lovely lawns were swamps. . . . Great wastes of sand were the tracts which bore . . . tempting titles, malarious marshes were the orange groves . . . so glowingly painted for Northern dupes.53

Echoing other articles in the series, the Herald report uses the “malarious” marsh to affirm the deceptiveness of booster representations, evoke the valuelessness of Florida lands, and suggest the resistance of the state’s obdurately wild (even virulent) terrain to development.54 The marsh played a similar role in critical assessments of Saint Augustine real estate. Contemplating the resort’s spiraling land values, an 1886 Atlantic Monthly essay noted that “the Augustines are laying back on their oars, waiting to sell their marshes and sand lots at fabulous prices, and thinking all improvements worse than wasted, meanwhile.”55 To illustrate the meteoric rise of Saint Augustine’s real estate “prices” and dramatize the detachment of those “fabulous” figures from actual conditions in town, the Atlantic essay uses the marsh as a handy example of marginal land, held by shiftless speculators, that would soon attain bewilderingly unreal values. These accounts drew on deep cultural traditions. American humorists had long used marshes and swamps as symbols for unwise real estate investments and the trickery of land agents. Satirical observers, for example, used the trope of the wetlands to lampoon the nation’s first large-scale speculative scheme—the building of Washington, D.C. An 1817 Port Folio essay thus laughingly recounted a hapless investor’s discovery that the capital lot he had purchased sight unseen was in fact “half covered with water, and producing nothing but bullfrogs.”56 Appropriating this theme to spoof later real estate manias, midcentury cartoons (fig. 58) frequently pictured gullible speculators discovering that the “valuable city lot” or “splendid tract of land” they had purchased from a distance were actually swamps or marshes. These humorous but admonitory texts and images drew on older moral and religious imaginings of the marsh as a wasteland of temptation, sin, damnation, and despair—a rhetorical tradition exemplified by John Milton’s account of hell as “rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death” in Paradise Lost (1667) and by the perilous “slough of despond” in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678).57 Heade was likely aware of the connotations that the marsh held in the cultural imagination of the period. As many scholars have shown, he was an inveterate explorer of eastern wetlands who appreciated the pastoral beauty, rich biodiversity, and venatic sport he found in salt marshes.58 Heade also seems to have been interested in the marsh’s capacity to beguile, deceive, and confound. In the early 1870s, he painted two identically formatted comic works, Gremlin in the Studio I (private collection) and Gremlin in the Studio II (fig. 59), that depict fictive marsh pictures in what appear to be shadowy interiors.59 Stretching to the edges of the actual canvas, the marsh scene in Perilous Prospects

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figure 58 “Land Speculation,” Yankee Notions 2 (June 1853). New York Public Library, image in public domain.

each can be read initially as a straightforward example of Heade’s wetlands oeuvre; this understanding is complicated, however, by the sawhorses that appear below the marsh view, which encourage us to understand that view as a fictive element in an illusionistically rendered interior. The curious elements that occupy this space—a dancing gremlin and a waterfall plunging out of the marsh “painting”—resituate the depicted wetlands image again in the terrain of fantastic absurdity. Heade’s Gremlin in the Studio pictures implicate the marsh in a humorous visual scenario, then, that slides from mimetic realism to dreamlike fantasy, a scenario that underscores the artifice and untrustworthiness of representation. These works also seem to quietly evoke period-specific imaginings of the marsh as a realm of dubious value and economic trickery. Composed of a circular head and attenuated limbs, Heade’s gremlins echo the money devils that appear in cartoons 124

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figure 59 Martin Johnson Heade, Gremlin in the Studio II, c. 1871–75. Oil on canvas, 9 ¼ × 13 in., Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut. The Dorothy Clark Archibald and Thomas L. Archibald Fund, 1997.29.1. Allen Phillips/Wadsworth Atheneum.

lampooning postwar monetary debates.60 Thomas Nast’s “A Shadow Is Not a Substance” (fig. 60, 1876), for example, juxtaposes a limbed coin labeled “specie” and a shadow labeled “greenbacks” to spoof the competing understandings of value (and value signification) at the center of these debates: the former element evokes the “solid” worth and reliable signification of metal coinage, and the latter the ethereal value and dubious representations of unbacked paper currency. Reread as money devils akin to Nast’s, Heade’s prancing gremlins seem to subtly cast the tricky marsh view above as an embodiment (like Nast’s “greenbacks” shadow) of questionable worth and untrustworthy economic signification. By organizing its pictorial space around a sweeping delineation of estuarial wetlands, On the San Sebastian River, Florida highlights a form of land that troubled local definitions of real property, conjured up deep-rooted notions of wickedness, deception, and economic trickery, and emblematized the perils of speculation in popular accounts of the Florida land boom and many other nineteenth-century real estate crazes. Various formal details within the painting seem to quietly confirm the marshy setting’s status as difficult, untrustworthy, and unremunerative land. The setting shares certain broad parallels with the tricky wetlands landscape in Gremlin in the Perilous Prospects

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figure 60 Thomas Nast, “A Shadow Is Not a Substance,” from David Wells, Robinson Crusoe’s Money, or the Remarkable Financial Fortunes and Misfortunes of a Remote Island Community (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1876). Image courtesy of Getty Research Institute.

Studio II, which seems to have been displayed in Heade’s Ponce de Leon studio in the 1880s: both picture a low and wide expanse of grass traversed by an angling waterway that moves toward a stand of trees at the left.61 Working within this shared format, the later painting outlines an enigmatic and disorienting view of Saint Augustine’s marshy fringe that is hard to enter visually, inscribed with few reliable markers of scale or spatial recession, and murkily dark. On the San Sebastian River, Florida insists, moreover, on the topographical liminality of the marsh. Composed of low masses of clumped vegetation, a wide band of water, and minimal suggestions of bank, Heade’s marsh is a decidedly interstitial space poised between estuarial liquidity and terra firma, a space entirely unlike the straightforwardly static, solid, buildable, and lucrative property idealized by Florida promoters. CLASS, RACE, AND REAL ESTATE

Creatively appropriating three metonymic tropes that boosters, journalists, and artists used to convey the present value (high or low) and financial potential (remunerative or ruinous) of Floridian real estate—the sunny sky, prospect, and marsh—On the 126

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San Sebastian River, Florida shapes an allusive account of Saint Augustine’s developing landscape that upends the confident prognostications local promoters made about the booming resort. Interpreted economically, the painting’s stormy view and troublesome setting cast Saint Augustine as a fantastic realm of uncertainty, risk, volatility, and ruin—a disorienting space where financial futures were inscrutable, values were alarmingly fluid and bewilderingly abstract, development unfolded in fits and starts, property was trickily unreliable, and the possibility of loss was palpably present. As we have seen, the various elements of this unusual landscape—so discordant with Heade’s other Floridian canvases and the booster climate of Saint Augustine—engage ideas raised by writers and artists who were skeptical of real estate speculation generally and of Florida’s post–Civil War land boom in particular. Drawing these themes together to advance a strikingly iconoclastic vision of its subject, On the San Sebastian River, Florida helped set the terms for a much broader cultural discourse that arose in response to Florida’s manic real estate market of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Indeed, Heade’s disenchanted reimagining of Saint Augustine presaged a wide field of creative productions that arose in the coming decades and grappled with the uncanny strangeness of Floridian development and the ridiculous audacity of local real estate promotion, a field that included Henry James’s bemused meditations on the Ponce de Leon Hotel’s “illusion of romance” in The American Scene (1907) and the Marx Brothers’ sendup of Floridian land swindles in The Cocoanuts (1925/29).62 If On the San Sebastian River, Florida sheds light on the creative counter-discourses that had begun to arise around Florida’s modern real estate market, it also seems to offer a rare glimpse at the private economic preoccupations of its maker. Conjuring up a fictive world that evokes the risks and hazards that gripped Heade in the moment, On the San Sebastian River, Florida explores facets of the artist’s economic outlook and speculative experiences that went otherwise unarticulated in his public promotional and creative work. Despite his public posture of booster optimism, Heade spent his first few years in Florida in dire financial straits. He had little luck selling paintings between 1882 and 1886; the economic downturn of 1882–85 hurt business for Heade’s dealers in Boston and Washington, D.C., and it took the painter some time to build a reliable market in Saint Augustine.63 This meant, in turn, that Heade’s first round of real estate ventures (his purchase of the four-lot tract and renovation of the Dent cottage) effectively depleted whatever savings he had when he moved to Florida. He confessed to Eben Loomis in January 1884 that “I have to squeeze hard to get money enough for current expenses, for I’ve had to spend so much in fitting up our house and grounds.”64 Heade apparently hoped to stabilize his finances by selling off some property. As he explained to a family friend, however, that plan came to naught: When we went to St. Gus we were sure that everything was going smoothly ahead from that time & that we could sell property at a great advance & have lots of friends with us nearly Perilous Prospects

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all the time, but we’ve been sadly disappointed. Not a foot of property can be sold yet, & taxes are up tremendously. Beside [sic] insurance & half a thousand other expenses keep us on the rough edge of despair all the time.65

Heade’s letters suggest that he lived, anxiously, on the “rough edge of despair” until the second half of 1886, when he sold a large batch of pictures and began cultivating Flagler’s patronage.66 Almost as soon as he began to reestablish himself financially, however, Heade decided to undertake his (above-noted) cottage construction project, a venture that would entail his riskiest speculation yet. To pay for the construction of these rental structures, Heade took out three mortgages on his tract in August 1886 and January 1887.67 These loans were sizable (he borrowed $6,000 total, or about $168,000 in 2021 currency) and disadvantageously structured: like most mortgages of the time, Heade’s loans carried a three-year repayment term (two years of interest payments at a rate of 6 percent, followed by a balloon payment of the loan’s principal in the final year).68 In agreeing to these conditions and building his cottages with financing, Heade made an audacious wager—he gambled that his undetermined future painterly income and the returns yielded by the vacation houses (in the form of rent) would be substantial enough to repay his mortgages with interest in short order. Ultimately, he seems to have lost this bet: two of the three mortgages had outstanding balances at the artist’s death in 1905.69 Thus, as he composed On the San Sebastian River, Florida, Heade was immersed in a heady speculation, the latest in a series of rash ventures that threw his economic standing and financial future in doubt. The stakes of this speculation were high, the strain of the situation was likely intense, and Heade’s previous real estate misadventures no doubt added further pressure. In the preceding decades, he had lost money on dubious properties in Chicago, tried and failed to get in on a land boom in Wisconsin, and bought a lot in Newport, Rhode Island, just before the Panic of 1873 gutted the real estate market (and most other sectors of the economy). Considering the last of these missteps, the painter noted to his friend John Russell Bartlett, “I confess to making the same mistake that hundreds of others did, in supposing the times would be better.”70 At the same time, Heade’s confidence in the Florida boom was beginning to waver. In his private correspondence, he expressed growing concern that tourists would abandon Florida for better-promoted, more easily accessible, and more effectively managed Sun Belt competitors. In a letter dated December 4, 1887, he complained: “California is too smart for us + we are suffering for it. The railroads . . . take people there for nearly nothing, while the idiots who control ours will not abate one [cent] in their prices.”71 And the artist fretted privately over local events—including the unusually severe freezes of 1884 and 1886 and the Yellow Fever epidemic that swept across northern Florida in 1888—that might repel tourists seeking a mythic Florida of warm weather, good health, and natural fecundity.72 128

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figure 61 St. Johns County Abstract Company, Inc., “Abstract of Title to Lands in City of St. Augustine, Lying in Heade Tract, St. Johns County, Florida,” 1919. Courtesy of Saint Augustine Historical Society. The mortgaged section of Heade’s property is outlined in the broken red line at left center.

Conceived and executed even as Heade undertook a particularly risky speculation and wrangled privately with the tenuous fragility of Florida’s tourism boom, On the San Sebastian River, Florida outlines a landscape vision that speaks allusively to the financial dilemmas and shifting outlook of its maker. Conjuring up a cryptic realm of dubious values and uncertain futurity, the painting engages the risks and quandaries that confronted Heade in the moment, evokes the artist’s enduringly precarious economic status in Florida (where he had not yet found solid fiduciary footing or divined a clear path to prosperity), and gives painterly form to his darkening perspective on local real estate. The idiosyncratic painting may even engage the specific financial dynamics of the new real estate venture in which Heade was immersed. In casting Saint Augustine’s developing terrain as an enigmatic dreamscape, on the one hand, On the San Sebastian River, Florida may contend in some way with the disorienting financial abstractions at the heart of Heade’s own dealings. As a later land-title diagram of the artist’s property makes clear (fig. 61), Heade’s 1886–87 mortgages were secured by Perilous Prospects

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a triangular section of his broader tract. In working out his loan agreement, Heade carved out a new and abstract financial asset from his property, a collateralized partition whose pure geometric form derived entirely from calculations about the potential future value of various divisions of the holding: incorporating frontages along two streets (the Shell Road and Ocean Avenue), the triangular section contained the most visible, accessible, and buildable fraction of Heade’s property and, as such, carried an entirely theoretical or “fictitious” worth rooted in its potential appeal to developers. On the other hand, the dim prospect traced by On the San Sebastian River, Florida may also speak to the daunting temporal structure of Heade’s cottage scheme. It bears noting here that the structure of the traditional pictorial prospect relates homologously to the structure of the typical nineteenth-century mortgage: both involve a measured progression through regular, benchmarked intervals and toward a final culminating objective. With its uncertain spatial progression and seemingly unreachable pictorial “payoff,” Heade’s alternative prospect may, in turn, allude in some way to the artist’s worried sense of the dim promise of his contemporaneous, loan-backed speculation. While making an important contribution to the period’s counter-discourses of Florida real estate, then, On the San Sebastian River, Florida also seems to give painterly form to its maker’s increasingly anxious outlook on the longevity of the state’s economic boom, the fate of Heade’s Saint Augustine speculations, the confounding abstractions at the heart of these dealings, and the tenuousness of the artist’s own economic standing. This anxious vision is imbued, in turn, with subtle but significant racial connotations. In training its sights on Saint Augustine’s marshy borderlands, On the San Sebastian River, Florida scrambled the racial logic that governed booster representations of the resort’s deeply segregated landscape. As Reiko Hillyer has shown, modern Saint Augustine comprised two separate topographies: a white vacationscape of hotels, tourist attractions, and the downtown core, and a half-hidden landscape of worksites and outlying neighborhoods traversed by the resort’s predominantly African American service workers.73 Promotional images of Saint Augustine concentrated almost exclusively on the former landscape. Reaffirming the town’s fundamental bifurcation, photographic views and guidebook illustrations (fig. 62) cast Saint Augustine’s hotels, streets, and landmarks as arenas of white bourgeois leisure that were almost entirely devoid of laboring and nonwhite bodies.74 Breaking from these accounts, On the San Sebastian River, Florida focuses on a fringe landscape that was deeply associated in the period with nonwhite labor, working-class African American settlement, and exoticized blackness. Saint Augustine’s African American and Minorcan residents fished and harvested hay, marsh grasses, and palm fronds in the wetlands on their town’s borders.75 The two loosely rendered boatmen who drift through the middle ground of On the San Sebastian River, Florida may reference these practices: both wear laborers’ straw hats, and the rightmost figure (fig. 63) hunches over what appears to be a green mound of marsh grass.76 African Americans 130

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figure 62 “Ladies’ Entrance, Hotel Ponce de Leon,” in Charles B. Reynolds, The Standard Guide: St. Augustine (St. Augustine, FL: E. H. Reynolds, 1894). Library of Congress.

also lived in isolated cabins and broader neighborhoods on the town’s borderlands; the largest of these communities (known locally as “Africa” until 1878, when it was renamed Lincolnville) was located on marshy land between Maria Sanchez Creek and the San Sebastian River south of downtown.77 Period travel writing, lastly, cast Saint Augustine’s outlying lands as a racially othered environment, an exotically foreign Perilous Prospects

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figure 63 Detail from Martin Johnson Heade, On the San Sebastian River, Florida, c. 1886–88. Oil on canvas, 17 ¼ × 36 in. Museum of Arts & Sciences, Daytona, Florida.

space where the adventurous white visitor might encounter picturesque African American characters, dilapidated nonwhite habitations, and titillating traces of slavery and colonial violence.78 These tropes received their most dramatic expression in the writings of novelist and seasonal resident Constance Fenimore Woolson, who mined the town’s racial history in a series of postwar poems and stories for the northern press.79 Woolson’s writings frequently cast Saint Augustine’s outlying waterways and wetlands as African spaces, romantically alien terrain that somehow paralleled or served as a conduit to the African continent. Woolson’s 1874 story “The Ancient City” thus noted that “Africa [the Saint Augustine neighborhood] was a long, straggling suburb, situated on a peninsula in shape not unlike the real Africa”; a later poem imagined a dialogue unfolding across the waterways of Saint Augustine and Egypt—“We call across to Africa / The waves from mile to mile / Bear on the hail from Florida / And the answering sigh of the Nile.”80 In picturing the marshland around the San Sebastian River, then, Heade’s painting highlighted a space outside the white landscape traced by promoters, a space deeply associated with nonwhite work, African American property, and exotic racial otherness. It may be tempting to read this choice of setting as a transgressive symbolic gesture of some kind. But such a reading would be hard to square with Heade’s life in segregated Saint Augustine and his broader outlook on race. The artist’s leisured existence in Florida was dependent on the labor of African Americans he hired to renovate 132

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his home, run errands, and perform other tasks. His private descriptions of these relationships make it clear that Heade unhesitatingly embraced the hierarchies, social roles, and demeaning language of segregation. In an April 9, 1883, postcard describing the renovation of his property, he noted: I’m working grounds [sic] around my place. I’ve dug up all the big oleanders in front of the house—also live oak. . . . I have a pair of darkies at work, and they are no 1. Fellows, and I treat them accordingly. My carpenter has arriv [sic] and now I’m going to work at the house studio. My paint has also come, + I’ve found a painter. (I might paint it myself, but I’m afraid I’d cover it with landscapes.)81

In this complicated passage, Heade affirms his authority over and distance from his African American employees by using first-person phrases that assert his ownership of the labor those workers perform (“I’m working grounds” and “I’ve dug up”), racist and paternalistic terms that demean these laborers (“darkies” and “no. 1 Fellows”), and a parenthetical joke that confirms the stark opposition of his own creative existence to their practical toil (“I might paint it myself, but I’m afraid I’d cover it with landscapes”).82 Heade’s other public and private writings, moreover, are peppered with racial stereotypes and virulently racist jokes; one 1882 letter, for example, includes a marginal cartoon of a lynching.83 Rather than as a subversive tactic, Heade’s engagement with the nonwhite space of the marsh can instead be understood, I suggest, as an expression of the artist’s racialized outlook on economic matters. Heade’s letters demonstrate that he understood class, and more specifically the economic tribulations of poverty, in racial terms. In an 1883 letter lamenting his own economic constraints, for example, he noted: “I don’t do much work here, + a man cant [sic] live somewhat cheap—unless he can live in ‘cracker’ style.”84 In expressing his own financial anxieties, Heade here invokes a worse-off type (the “Florida cracker”) who served as a figurehead of economic ruin and racial otherness in many period imaginings. Indeed, late nineteenth-century popular writers used the complicated term cracker—which originated in the colonial period as a term of disparagement for poor white backcountry pioneers—to describe an imagined community of isolated, destitute, animalistic, and ambiguously raced Floridians who existed outside the realm of respectable whiteness.85 Drawing on these associations, Heade uses the racialized figure of the cracker as a soothing foil in his 1883 letter: having alluded to his own frustrating inability to support himself in increasingly expensive Florida, he immediately displaces his anxious precariousness onto the imaginary subordinate (and, in so doing, symbolically buttresses his own class position). As he composed On the San Sebastian River, Florida, Heade seems to have performed a similar triangulation. Implicated in an audacious local venture and facing the real and anxious possibility of impending ruin, the artist shaped an alternative account of Saint Augustine that harnessed the multivalent connotations of a borderland space Perilous Prospects

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associated with local workers of color to reimagine the resort as a landscape of risk, loss, disorientation, and danger—an account that gave dramatic expression to, while simultaneously displacing, Heade’s deepening financial concerns and racialized class anxieties. CONCLUSION

As an enthusiastic participant in Saint Augustine’s late nineteenth-century land boom, Martin Johnson Heade came to know the cultural dynamics, economic dangers, and environmental effects of speculative development very well. During one especially fraught phase in his dealings, I contend, the artist composed an idiosyncratic view of Saint Augustine that drew on this accumulated wisdom and engaged the promotional dreamwork and fiscal perils that shaped his own (and many other) ventures in the Florida land market. Advancing a creative critique of Floridian real estate that vibrates with economic disquiet and racial animus, On the San Sebastian River, Florida laid the symbolic groundwork for a wave of similarly anxious cultural responses to the state’s land markets that would appear in the coming decades. As the next chapter will show, other late nineteenth-century artists engaged the cultural and material forces of modern resort development in similarly complicated fashion. Animated by a different set of priorities—including an empathetic identification with laboring communities outside the real estate market and a deep attachment to the inalienable space of the commons—Winslow Homer composed scenes of land and labor at Prouts Neck, Maine, that made their own attempts to refute the semiotic techniques of the real estate operator and reckon with the socio-spatial effects of speculative construction. As imaginative efforts to preserve environments and working traditions threatened by the modern American real estate economy, Homer’s paintings offer socially minded rejoinders to Heade’s dark vision of failure and ruin.

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5 PAINTING AND PROPERTY ON PROUTS NECK

D

on Prouts Neck (1883–1910), a rocky promontory on Maine’s southern coast, Winslow Homer channeled his energies into two abiding pursuits. As is well known, he devoted himself to the production of innovative marine pictures that dramatized the rigors of coastal life and visualized the enduring rhythms and sublime power of North Atlantic surf.1 When not painting the shore, Homer worked with his father (Charles Homer Sr.) and two brothers (Charles and Arthur) to develop and market an exclusive summer resort on Prouts Neck (sometimes spelled Prout’s Neck), a hotel and cottage community of the sort taking shape contemporaneously at York, Mount Desert, and various other points along the Maine coast.2 Scholars have studied both of these lines of activity in detail but have typically presented them as parallel phenomena; some have rejected the possibility that the artist’s elemental and often enigmatic imaginings of Maine’s coast could have had anything to do with the prosaic business ventures that engrossed the Homer family on Prouts Neck, or indeed any other URING HIS TWENTY-SEVEN-YEAR RESIDENCE

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figure 64 Winslow Homer, “W. Homer,” detail from Seven Sketches (Bachelor Homes), 1897–98. Ink on paper, 5 ¹¹/₁₆ × 8 ¹³/₁₆ in. Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Gift of the Homer Family.

aspects of social life on the promontory in the period.3 Breaking from these approaches, this chapter makes the case that Homer made regular attempts to creatively interrogate the specific real estate concerns and promotional fictions that guided his land dealings in Maine. I will argue that Homer—drawing on his practical experiences with land and a deepening sense of disenchantment with the resort community he was helping build—produced alternative painterly accounts of seaside development and littoral landholdings that countered the booster fantasies of coastal real estate advanced by Maine developers, extended local critiques of shoreline enclosure and gentrification, and made their own contributions to a broader popular and intellectual reckoning with real property that unfolded at the end of the nineteenth century. Homer’s participation in his family’s resort venture sparked his interest in a fundamental aspect of real estate enterprise that would take on new significance in Maine during the state’s coastal construction boom. As a humorous self-portrait he included in a broader cartoon sheet of 1897–98 (fig. 64) suggests, Homer became fascinated with the contours of property on Prouts Neck: picturing a stick-figure artist turning toward a sizable fence and addressing a miniature canvas that mirrors the barrier’s rectangular form, the little drawing figures its subject as an attentive observer and pictorial interpreter of property lines. In his guise as landowner and manager of his family’s tracts, Homer did indeed devote himself to monitoring, measuring, establishing, and defending property lines. When the artist was not checking the perimeters of lots or building fences and walls, he churned out drawings and diagrams of local prop136

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erties that traced the lines of these holdings and assessed the impact of real estate deals on existing parcels. Homer played a central role in a process of partitioning and enclosure that made it possible, in turn, for builders to transform Prouts Neck’s mixed community of workers and vacationers into an exclusive enclave of wealthy summerers and, in so doing, to convert its rugged coast from a common space of labor and leisure into a privately held amenity accessible only to a select few. As the development of the Neck proceeded, however, Homer came to have significant qualms about the socio-spatial effects of the promontory’s enclosure and gentrification. As we will see, the artist seems to have embraced the expansive understandings of public shore rights that had customarily held sway along Maine’s coast. And Homer nurtured an empathetic interest in a group of local workers who were threatened by coastline privatization, white male fishermen and farmers who scratched out an existence on the margins of the promontory’s vacationscape and whose lives and labor depended on the openness and accessibility of the shore. Animated by a mix of inclinations—a preoccupation with property’s boundaries, a lingering attachment to customary notions of coastal accessibility, and a deepening identification with the workers of the tidewater commons—Homer made a host of marine pictures around Prouts Neck that focused on the interstitial zone of the shoreline, the belt of upland earth, intertidal shore, and coastal waters where the promontory’s private landscape met the ocean’s commonly held spaces and resources. Focusing on three of these pictures, this chapter will show that Homer’s coastal scenes and seascapes frequently reimagine the relationship between private property and the marine commons on the shorelines around Prouts Neck and, in so doing, advance accounts of these liminal spaces that contested promotional representations of the Maine seaboard. Addressing the 1887 watercolor Bringing in the Nets as a case study (fig. 77), I first consider the ways that Homer’s scenes of fishermen contended with the relationship between working spaces and resort property on Maine’s developing coast. Picturing a herring fisherman at work in a tidal flat ringed by resort developments, Bringing in the Nets counters booster visions of a homogeneous and exclusive coast with a wishful vision of enduring social, economic, and spatial hybridity on the shore. The chapter’s remaining sections will examine the ways that Homer’s scenes of summer vacationers and figureless seascapes engage the contradictions and ambiguities that structured promotional imaginings of coastal real estate. Refiguring the waterfront resort as a space in which vacation property and oceanic wilderness exist in a discordant and unstable relationship, Homer’s figural scene A Summer Night (fig. 79, 1890) evokes and exacerbates the contradictions within local developers’ accounts of seaside construction. Finally, in figuring a seaside lot owned by the Homer family as a troublesome holding defined by dynamic terrain and fluid contours, the late seascape Eastern Point Painting and Property

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(fig. 82, 1900) articulates a vision of littoral land that explores the geographical and representational quandaries posed by coastal property in Maine and that counters market imaginings of waterfront holdings as enduringly fixed, securely bounded, and placelessly abstract entities. As they traced the edges of the owned landscape on and around Prouts Neck, Homer’s marine paintings shaped interpretations of the Maine shoreline that worked to imaginatively preserve its social complexity, reassert its inalienable wildness, and push back symbolically against the forces of development and enclosure. In working out these alternative accounts of the shore, Homer may have found some form of recompense for the drastic transformations that privatization and gentrification were wreaking on the coasts around Prouts Neck, transformations that he and his family were helping engineer. Whatever their personal appeal, Homer’s painterly critiques of coastal development took up charged issues—the limits of the claims that nonowners could make on the shore, the proper relationship between private property and the commonweal, and so on—that were the subject of vigorous public debate in Maine and the national cultural sphere. Homer’s painterly efforts to envision an enduringly open shoreline echoed the arguments made in local conservationist writings that decried the fencing off of Maine’s shorelines by developers and called for the preservation of coastal land for public use. And the artist’s interrogations of seaside landholdings resonated, I will suggest, with the claims made by a growing body of popular economic writing that sought to dismantle familiar laissez-faire conceptions of real property by redefining its relation to the common good, reconceiving ownership rights, and reimagining the character of boundary lines. By tracking the ways that three of Homer’s Prouts Neck pictures grapple with shoreline property, this chapter offers one approach toward understanding the localized material entanglements of, and historically specific cultural work performed by, a corpus of paintings that often seem to reach for meanings that transcend the interests of any particular place or time. By addressing Bringing in the Nets, A Summer Night, and Eastern Point as sensitive interrogations of seaside development and contributions to fin de siècle debates about property and ownership, I hope simultaneously to establish Homer as a significant cultural inquisitor of American real estate capitalism during its final stages of crystallization, a creative but critical interpreter whose work helped advance a generational effort to reassess the benefits and costs of land dealing after the business had infiltrated the last corners of the continent and begun to coalesce into an orderly and fully modern economic sector. THE GENTRIFICATION OF PROUTS NECK

Prouts Neck was poised on the cusp of a dramatic transformation when the Homer family became interested in the rocky headland in the late 1870s. A bedrock headland overlaid with thin glacial till, Prouts Neck was originally settled by the Wabanaki people of southern Maine; Euro-American endeavors on the promontory began in 1631, 138

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when English sea captain Thomas Cammock received a patent for Black Point (as Prouts was then known) and a vast tract of surrounding land. During the first three quarters of the nineteenth century, the Neck was owned by the family of the farmer and sea captain Thomas Libby; for much of this period, Libby family members raised crops and livestock on the promontory’s thin soil and local anglers caught fish, harvested kelp and shellfish, and processed their catches on its coasts.4 After local hikers and daytrippers discovered Prouts Neck in the 1830s, the promontory’s microeconomy began to slowly reorient itself around tourism. Eager to accommodate the local excursionists who came to the Neck to amble, fish, and beachcomb along its shores, the Libby family built several boardinghouses on the headland and began hosting regular Sunday picnics for visitors. These efforts bore fruit: by the 1860s, Prouts Neck had become a rustic getaway for regional tourists seeking unfussy accommodations and unfiltered encounters with (in the words of one period account) the “grand and beautiful in nature.”5 The Homers found their way to Prouts Neck just as a second and more dramatic program of development was getting under way on the promontory. Maine’s coast became a popular summer destination for bourgeois travelers in the decade after the Civil War; as rail links between the state and various northern cities improved, wealthy urbanites flocked to picturesque beaches (such as Old Orchard Beach) and old fishing towns (York and Bar Harbor) along Maine’s rugged shore and established a string of hotel-and-cottage enclaves.6 Inspired by this boom in resort development, the Libbys began to market Prouts Neck as a potential summer colony in the mid-1870s. To this end, family members platted the promontory as a matrix of 521 cottage lots (fig. 65) ringed by a semi-public “marginal way” and began selling property to associates, outside investors, and hotel developers; as these sales proceeded, entrepreneurs erected an array of stylish inns and cottages on the headland, and the Neck’s modern resort landscape gradually took shape.7 It was in this charged period of investment and construction that Arthur Homer first brought his family’s attention to the remote outpost: after honeymooning on the Neck in 1875, Arthur and Alice (Patch) Homer returned to the headland the following year and brought Charles Sr., Charles Jr., and Winslow with them.8 At some point after this visit, the Homers decided to set down roots on Prouts Neck and get involved in the marketing and development of the promontory. After buying a pair of lots in 1882, Charles Sr. and Charles Jr. purchased two large tracts of oceanfront property on the southern and western shorelines of Prouts Neck in 1883 and 1884. Over the next two and a half decades, Charles Sr. and his three sons would buy and sell blocks of land on the promontory, build two family homes and several rental properties, have a former carriage house converted into Winslow’s studio home, donate land for a wildlife sanctuary and Catholic chapel, and participate in the founding of an Episcopal chapel for summer residents.9 As they undertook these myriad ventures, the Homers contributed to a broader process of material transformation, social segregation, and promotional Painting and Property

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figure 65 E. C. Jordan, “Plan of Libby’s Neck,” 1893 (copy of original 1879 plat). Winslow Homer and Homer Family Papers, private collection, Washington, D.C.

repackaging that would remake the formerly modest vacation spot and working community into an exclusive haven of wealthy summerers. At least three luxurious hotels and sixty well-appointed cottages were built on Prouts Neck during the Homers’ residency; as Kenyon Bolton, Patricia Junker, and others have shown, the family played a central role in this boom in high-end development.10 The Homers’ construction projects created a nucleus of expensive real estate that upmarket builders could work around; by hiring Shingle Style proponent John Calvin Stevens to design their residences (fig. 66) and rental structures, moreover, the family established a fashionable architectural vocabulary for subsequent cottage and hotel projects on the promontory.11 The Neck’s architectural transformation coincided with, and helped to spur, a drastic recalibration of its social life. As development proceeded, a tony social scene quickly took shape within the promontory’s vacationscape. Eschewing the modest entertainments enjoyed by midcentury visitors, the Neck’s new summer residents organized elaborate tennis tournaments, cricket matches, and benefit performances 140

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figure 66 Unknown artist, The ‘Ark’ and W.H.’s Studio, c. 1884. Photograph, 6 ⁵/₈ × 9 ¹/₁₆ in. Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Gift of the Homer Family.

for charity organizations such as the Tribune Fresh Air Fund Aid Society. Society reporters for major northeastern papers covered these events in detail, lavishing attention on the dress of participants and the social alliances they forged in the music hall or ball field.12 As this stylish scene crystallized, developers and residents took active steps to exclude the nonwealthy and nonwhite. In advertisements and other promotional materials, hoteliers and cottage owners made clear that their properties were available (in the words of one 1892 ad) to “first class parties exclusively” and strictly barred visitors who were not members of the white Protestant elite; a 1907 hotel pamphlet thus concluded with the admonition that “Hebrews will please not apply.”13 Summer residents also carefully policed the use of the Marginal Way, which had been defined in the Libbys’ original right-of-way agreements as an easement for the use of “family, boarders, and guests” only; in 1898, for example, cottage owners asked the Scarborough sheriff to break up “Sunday gatherings” held by local daytrippers on the shoreline path.14 And wealthy summerers undertook certain development projects to block potential incursions by the hoi polloi; in 1906, for example, a group of residents bought a large tract just north of the Neck with the aim of establishing a country club and thereby preventing (as one resident put it) “the possibility of its becoming a terminal for a trolley line.”15 Painting and Property

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The development and gentrification of Prouts Neck were underwritten by a promotional campaign that reimagined the rustic outpost as a posh retreat, an exclusive getaway that was at once sublimely wild and luxuriously modern. Highlighting the promontory’s “rocky and precipitous” shorelines and dramatic surf, boosters figured the Neck as a space where the visitor might gaze at the “grand spectacle” of storm-tossed seas or absorbedly contemplate the unceasing tidal clash between water and land.16 In so doing, they insisted on the socially restricted character of such encounters; an 1893 booster text thus declared that the promontory’s elevated mass and isolated position ensured that the well-heeled visitor could enjoy a “magnificent view of ocean, island, valley and hills” without interference from “cheap excursions or objectionable parties of any kind.”17 At the same time, boosters reassured prospective visitors that their privileged encounters with the sublime sea would unfold in a resort setting that was both indulgently comfortable and socially stimulating. Hotel proprietors and realty agencies stressed that their accommodations were “absolutely modern” and “furnished with all the conveniences that make life pleasurable,” including fine cuisine, libraries, “sanitary plumbing,” laundry rooms, “servants quarters,” and “stables”; and guidebook writers and advertisers touted the Neck’s placement within a “succession of . . . cooling off places” that lined the shores south of Portland, a continuous landscape of social pleasure “where orchestras, hops, and fashionable doings are the order of the day and night.”18 FENCES AND FISH HOUSES

Winslow Homer participated actively in the campaign to establish a modern summer resort on Prouts Neck. Throughout his time on the promontory, the artist advised his family on real estate dealings and managed their properties, undertook his own improvement projects, and contributed physically and imaginatively to the partitioning of the headland. As the gentrification of Prouts Neck proceeded, however, Homer distanced himself in certain ways from the exclusive community he was helping build. As we will see, he seems to have held on to customary notions of shoreline access even as he helped carve up and privatize the Neck, and he forged complicated bonds with local residents most threatened by resort development. Homer played a significant role in his family’s real estate campaigns, advised his father and brothers on land deals, and maintained their properties in the off-season. Over the years, the artist oversaw various repairs to family structures and kept unimproved tracts pristine by burning brush and clearing thickets.19 Homer also put significant capital and energy into building up the promontory. In addition to his Stevens-designed studio home (fig. 66), he improved his own land with tasteful buildings and useful infrastructure, putting up a rental cottage at Kettle Cove (also designed by the architect), hand building a stone wall on that property, and erecting fences on various parcels.20 He also lent a hand to larger infrastructure projects around the Neck; in an October 1895 letter to Louis Prang, for example, Homer reported that “I am working with a gang of men on a road I am building—I shall blast tomorrow.”21 142

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In the course of his maintenance and construction activities, Homer developed a deep interest in observing and interpreting property lines. The artist’s father and brothers relied on him to monitor the perimeters of their land and negotiate boundary disputes on their behalf. For example, when a plan to develop a street alongside lots owned by Charles Sr. fell through, Winslow worked out an agreement with nearby owners that his father could “gobble up the extra land” to the “middle of the proposed street.”22 As time went on and Homer’s landholdings multiplied, moreover, he attended to his own lot lines with growing avidity. Stories of the artist’s vigilance against trespassing appeared regularly in the period press. In an 1893 Corcoran Art Journal article recounting a recent visit to Prouts Neck, for example, Daisy B. King recalled that Homer responded to her appearance at his door by “informing” her that “his was a private dwelling” and ushering her off of his land.23 Philip Beam has argued, moreover, that Homer used a curious signboard, scrawled with the warning “snakes! snakes! mice,” to scare visitors away from his home when he was out painting.24 Associates of Homer’s recalled, lastly, that the artist quarreled over property lines with the owners (George and Agnes Hall Putnam) of a plot adjacent to his lots at Kettle Cove; on one occasion, when the Putnams erroneously began construction of a fence on his land, Homer “returned to the field of battle with a surveyor’s map of the whole Neck” and convinced his neighbors to take the barrier down.25 In his correspondence with family and friends, moreover, Homer delighted in chronicling the effects of recent sales and construction on the contours of local property. When updating his brother Charles and sister-in-law Martha (Mattie) Homer on new construction projects, he invariably included a description or sketch of the structure’s impact on nearby parcels. In an undated letter on the expansion of Saint James Chapel (which seems to have been undertaken in the 1890s), for example, he reported that the church is going forward on the road up to the line with the door . . . on the side next to Burditt. Burditt cannot see his friend Stephenson & Remsen can no longer see about 50 feet of Ocean line, but it is a great improvement to the place.26

In his efforts to convey the spatial consequences of the chapel’s larger footprint, the painter notes its new frontage on a nearby road (B street, now called Winslow Homer Way), its obstruction of the view between the cottages of Charles A. Burditt (on B street) and Franklin Stephenson (on A street), and its partial blockage of the ocean view enjoyed by neighbor Ira Remsen.27 An accompanying sketch, in turn, visualized the building’s proximity “to the line” of the road. A 1907 letter describing the construction of a grand summer home for the merchant Curwen Stoddart similarly included a sketch (fig. 67) that delineated the rising structure’s nearness to the curving contours of A street and a nearby cottage owned by Charles Jr. (marked with a manicule).28 Homer regularly composed detailed property diagrams—to propose resolutions to boundary dilemmas, explain how recent sales affected lot lines, and predict the effects Painting and Property

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figure 67 Detail from Winslow Homer, Letter to Charles S. Homer Jr. (Brother), 12/7/1907. Ink on paper. Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Gift of the Homer Family.

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figure 68 Detail from Winslow Homer, Letter to Arthur B. Homer (Brother), 4/20/1909. Ink on paper. Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Gift of the Homer Family.

of potential development schemes on existing parcels. On one occasion, for example, the artist used a crude map (fig. 68) to explain how his brother Arthur might situate a planned road (K street) in relation to a rental cottage (named Walnuts) and outbuilding that he owned. Tracing a line of arrows between a rectangle labeled “Walnuts” and a square marked “barn,” the map visualizes the painter’s suggestion that Arthur “draw it as it is & put the road in front of it on the line.”29 In 1895 or 1896, Homer made a diagram (fig. 69) to explain to his brother Charles how his acquisition of a triangular partition of lot 492 (marked “half a lot” on the plan) affected the boundaries of his land around Kettle Cove. As the diagram makes clear, the partial lot allowed Homer to create a larger rectangular holding facing the cove at a bend in the Marginal Way. The rest of the diagram records other property perimeters around the eastern end of Prouts, including the fenced line of Charles Sr.’s land at Eastern Point and the curving boundaries created by a recently completed public road (marked “New Road”). In late 1899, finally, the artist made yet another plan (fig. 70) of a large tract that he and his brother Arthur had recently inherited from their father; as Bolton has shown, the Painting and Property

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figure 69 Detail from Winslow Homer, Letter to Charles S. Homer Jr. (Brother), 1895 or 1896. Ink on paper. Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Gift of the Homer Family. Homer’s Kettle Cove lot is marked “W.H.”; the triangular half lot forms the upper corner of the parcel. The fenced border of Homer’s father’s property on Eastern Point appears at the upper left of the drawing; it is labeled “Father’s Gate.”

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figure 70 Winslow Homer, Outline Sketch of Lots to Be Divided, 1899. Ink on paper, 9 ¹/₈ × 5 ⁵/₈ in. Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Gift of the Homer Family. The Homers’ inherited lands are bisected by the vertical street at center; Winslow Homer’s proposed access road cuts perpendicularly across the street, and his cranberry lot on Eastern Point appears at lower right.

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figure 71 Unknown artist, Homer Fishing for Tautog from Rocks at Prouts, 1883–1910. Photograph, 3 ¹¹/₁₆ × 4 ⁵/₈ in. Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Gift of the Homer Family.

brothers agreed to divide the land equally, with the shorefront tract going to the winner of a coin toss.30 Winslow’s plan delineates his proposal for the creation of a private right-of-way that might allow the eventual holder of the interior tract to access the shore, and in so doing articulates a new relationship between the two large parcels created by the brothers’ wager. In his efforts to maintain barriers between private holdings, creatively resolve boundary disputes, and document the changing relationships between the Neck’s proliferating properties, Homer helped facilitate the privatization and partitioning of the promontory’s terrain—and in this way worked to create the material and imaginative conditions necessary for the headland’s continued development and gentrification. As this process accelerated and Prouts Neck was transformed into an expensive enclave, however, Homer struggled with the spatial and social consequences of his property dealings. Various bits of evidence suggest that he embraced the customary local belief that the shore was (and ought to remain) a common space—a deep-rooted but technically unlawful notion that had underwritten generations of hikes and clambakes on the Neck’s rocky coasts.31 Recorded anecdotes, letters, and photographs (fig. 71) make it 148

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figure 72 Unknown artist, Bath Houses, Prouts Neck, 1883–1910. Photograph, 3 ⁷/₁₆ × 5 ½ in. Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Gift of the Homer Family.

clear that Homer used the cliffs and rocks that formed the waterfront edges of the Neck’s private lots for daily walks, beachcombing trips, impromptu dinners, and tautog fishing—just as local Mainers had done for ages.32 And Homer took certain steps to open his own waterfront holdings to public use. In the 1890s, he built a row of public bathhouses on his land fronting Surf Beach (fig. 72), an improvement that augmented the popular watering spot’s accessibility to summerers and nonresidents alike.33 Homer also seems to have felt increasingly alienated from the privileged social world taking shape at Prouts Neck. Reminiscences by friends and acquaintances suggest that the artist gradually disengaged from the social circles of the emerging summer community; as time passed, moreover, he began to complain more frequently in his letters about the intrusions of and distractions created by vacationers.34 As his estrangement from the wealthy summer community grew, he developed an empathetic interest in—and eventually a kind of fraught identification with—the white male coastal workers who lived and labored on the margins of the Neck’s private landscape, members of a vestigial marine community whose tenuous existence depended on access to the coast. Homer’s attraction to seaside laborers had deeper roots: as Helen Cooper, William Cross, and others have shown, the artist painted and befriended fishermen and women in York, Maine, Gloucester, Massachusetts, and the English village of Cullercoats in the decade before he came to Prouts Neck.35 As he settled into his new life on the promontory, Homer once again sought inspiration and Painting and Property

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figure 73 Winslow Homer, Seven Sketches (Bachelor Homes), 1897–98. Ink on paper, 5 ¹¹/₁₆ × 8 ¹³/₁₆ in. Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Gift of the Homer Family.

companionship from local marine workers. In the 1880s, he began to draw and paint fishermen, lobstermen, and clammers who lived and worked on the Neck’s upland shores and around the nearby Scarborough River inlet (a water body discussed at more length below). At the same time, he formed friendships with a motley group of anglers, fishmongers, small farmers, and day laborers.36 The artist’s earliest biographers report that he made a habit of eating, smoking, and drinking with marine workers, regularly gave odd jobs and monetary assistance to locals who were down on their luck, and asked his working-class friends to pose for and comment on his paintings.37 As suggested above, these relationships appear to have been primarily homosocial and intraracial in character; Homer does not seem to have allied himself socially with local workers of color (such as Lewis Wright, an African American man who worked as a servant for the artist’s father) or the working-class women who labored on the coast and in local hotels.38 Homer’s humorous 1897–98 cartoon sheet (discussed briefly above) documents his friendships with a handful of coastal laborers and speaks to the affection and rapport that structured his relationships with these and other local workingmen. Entitled Bachelor Homes, the sheet (fig. 73) arranges six humorous vignettes of local life around the cartoon of Homer’s studio at top center; three of these picture working-class associates of the artist in or near the ramshackle coastal structures where they made a 150

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figure 74 “Brown,” detail from Winslow Homer, Seven Sketches (Bachelor Homes), 1897–98. Ink on paper, 5 ¹¹/₁₆ × 8 ¹³/₁₆ in. Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Gift of the Homer Family. figure 75 “J. Gatchell,” detail from Winslow Homer, Seven Sketches (Bachelor Homes), 1897–98. Ink on paper, 5 ¹¹/₁₆ × 8 ¹³/₁₆ in. Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Gift of the Homer Family.

living. The drawing at left center (fig. 74) depicts Alvin Brown waving from the door of a shoreline fish house—a utilitarian building used to store bait and tackle, repair equipment, and salt and smoke fish—that the laborer maintained (on a coastal plot he did not own) just north of Prouts Neck; lobster traps and a fishing dory appear on either side of the simple plank structure.39 Before relocating to Portland to work on that city’s waterfront, Brown made a tenuous living by fishing, lobstering, and pursuing other coastal trades around the promontory.40 The cartoon at the bottom left of Homer’s sheet (fig. 75) pictures the angler John Gatchell (sometimes spelled Getchell) chopping wood outside what appears to be a shoreline squatter shack. Gatchell owned a small farm on the outskirts of Scarborough but struggled to make a living from it; after surviving for a time by fishing and doing odd jobs for vacationers, he seems to have succumbed to alcoholism.41 Finally, the sketch at the right center of Homer’s Painting and Property

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figure 76 Detail from Winslow Homer, Seven Sketches (Bachelor Homes), 1897–98. Ink on paper, 5 ¹¹/₁₆ × 8 ¹³/₁₆ in. Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Gift of the Homer Family.

sheet (fig. 76) portrays the barefooted figure of John Wiggin springing out of the tumbledown shop (known as the Hotel de Wiggin) that he operated on a waterfront tract owned by his brother.42 An eccentric figure beloved by summer visitors, Wiggin made ends meet by fishing and lobstering, selling seafood and dry goods from his store, and renting dories to tourists.43 Homer socialized frequently with Brown, Gatchell, and Wiggin and assisted them whenever he could; he hired all three men to model or do odd jobs in moments of privation, and raised money for the reconstruction of Brown’s home after a disastrous fire.44 The cartoon sheet attests to the strong sense of camaraderie that Homer felt with these men: incorporating the artist’s home and self-portrait in its array of vignettes, Bachelor Homes casts the studio as a utilitarian structure akin to the squatter shanties and fish houses of the artist’s friends, and figures Homer as an equal member of the community of independent and undomesticated workingmen the sheet conjures up. Spurred on by this sense of affinity, Homer crafted a mode of living on the Neck that echoed the plebeian lifestyles of his working-class friends in certain ways. In 1890, for example, he purchased a coastal shed (probably a fish house) previously occupied by Wiggin and converted it into a warm-weather waterfront studio.45 He also took steps to perform a toiler’s existence in and around his primary residence. Homer insisted on doing intensive physical labor (such as clearing brush) while hosting gallerists and other art-world visitors; in the off-season, he harvested ice from a marshy lot he owned on the Neck’s interior, grew corn and tobacco on his home plot, and occasionally showed his produce at local agricultural fairs.46 As observers often noted, Homer furnished and used his primary studio as if it were a fish house or work shed—displaying tools, guns, and fish152

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ing equipment around the space—and scrawled sums and other memoranda directly on its walls.47 These various proletarian affectations did not stop the artist from enjoying the comforts of bourgeois life. As visitors and early chroniclers regularly noted, Homer took meals at his relatives’ sumptuous homes, ordered gourmet provisions and fine liquor from Boston, and commandeered the labor of family servants.48 In summary, as he became ever more intensively involved in the remaking of Prouts Neck, Homer developed a keen interest in the borders of property, a growing aversion to the exclusive community he was helping build, and a charged sense of camaraderie with working people who subsisted on the margins of the increasingly partitioned coastal landscape. As he navigated these varying sentiments, Homer focused his creative attentions on the shorelines on and around Prouts Neck, composing myriad figural scenes and seascapes of the waterfront spaces where discordant cultures of leisure and labor met and new assertions of private control clashed with lingering traditions of common use. In so doing, Homer made a handful of paintings that take up and creatively recalibrate the relationship between resort property and the working and wild spaces of the marine commons, paintings that counter promotional repackagings of the Maine seaboard and push back imaginatively against the enclosure and gentrification of the coast. WORK ON THE WATER

Homer sketched and painted coastal laborers with some frequency in the 1880s and 1890s. Sensitively delineating the physical routines, specialized equipment, and littoral environments of local marine labor, these drawings and paintings—which include the charcoal study Fishermen on Shore (1884, Montclair Art Museum), the watercolors Clamming (1887, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) and Spearing Eels (c. 1885, Cleveland Museum of Art), and oils such as Rocky Coast (c. 1882–1900, Wadsworth Atheneum)—pay quiet (and perhaps elegiac) tribute to lifeways threatened by coastal gentrification.49 Some of these works contend, in turn, with the real estate forces impinging on the agents and spaces of coastal labor. As we will see, Homer’s 1887 watercolor Bringing in the Nets (fig. 77) shapes a complex account of a working waterscape near Prouts Neck—the Scarborough River inlet—that reckons with, and works to imaginatively delimit, resort development’s creeping advance into shoreline spaces of common use and customary labor. Bringing in the Nets engages an old form of inshore fishing that had recently been revived in the waters around Prouts Neck. The watercolor’s working tableau is centered on an oilskin-clad fisherman who appears to be striding away from an anchored dory and toward a grassy bank in the foreground. Clutching a tangled mass of netting and gazing out to the open sea at left, the figure can be read as a herring fisherman returning home to repair a gill net during Saco Bay’s short but intense fall blueback season. As Wayne O’ Leary, Colin Woodard, and others have shown, the gradual decline of Maine’s deep-sea fisheries spurred the state’s fishermen to take up inshore angling in growing numbers after the Civil War, and many of these new coastal or Painting and Property

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figure 77 Winslow Homer, Bringing in the Nets, 1887. Watercolor on paper, 13 ¾ × 21 ¼ in. Portland Museum of Art, Maine. Bequest of Charles Shipman Payson, 1988.55.12. Image courtesy of Meyersphoto.com © Trustees of the Portland Museum of Art, Maine.

“boat” anglers made a living by shifting seasonally between fishing, clamming, and lobstering.50 The growth of the inshore sector revived Maine’s age-old herring fishery, and Saco Bay quickly became an important site for fishermen targeting the anadromous species. Huge schools of herring gathered on spawning grounds at the southern end of the bay for two or three weeks every September; by the mid-1880s, hundreds of local fishermen and interstate fishing ships flocked to the bay every fall to capitalize on this “strike.”51 Capturing the schooled fish was a lucrative but difficult endeavor: landing a profitable catch required fishermen to divine the presence of mobile herring and then successfully set, haul up, harvest, and reposition massive gill nets in dynamic waters roiled by strong winds, complicated currents, and unpredictable weather.52 Reminiscences by contemporaries suggest that Homer became interested in the Saco Bay herring fishery in 1884. In September of that year, he apparently paid a local teenager (Roswell Googins) to row him out to the bay’s fishing grounds so that he could study the operations of the out-of-state fishing ships firsthand. Based on these observations, Homer made a series of drawings and paintings in the following months that depicted anglers hauling in laden nets and transferring their catches to herring schooners.53 Bringing in the Nets sprang from these earlier works, but the watercolor focuses on one of the hundreds of local coastal anglers who worked alongside, and often competed with, the ships of the interstate fleet. In so doing, the watercolor 154

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works in various ways to evoke the difficulties and pressures that structured the work of these small operators whose livelihood depended on their ability to capitalize on the short herring season without the capital, manpower, or mobility of the out-of-state fishing outfits. The unruly mass of netting carried by the watercolor’s central figure attests to the fragility of angling equipment and, by extension, to the tenuousness of the coastal angler’s business. Unusually compact in form (period gill nets were typically 10–12 feet high and 125 feet long) and beginning to unravel (the net’s cork line appears to be detached from its rope webbing), the mass evidently represents a tattered portion of a larger net damaged by overuse, mishandling, or environmental forces; as period observers noted, gill nets frequently tore, sank, or disappeared entirely in the turbulent waters of Saco Bay.54 Bringing in the Nets also evokes the environmental contingencies that complicated inshore angling: viewers read the scene’s cloudy sky and implied offshore wind (registered by the bending marsh grass and fluttering corner of the angler’s net) as signs of “a coming storm,” a weather phenomenon that would frustrate any effort by the central figure to locate herring, manage his nets, or haul up a catch.55 The three square-rigged fishing schooners that appear on the horizon at left attest, lastly, to the nonlocal operations that continually encroached on, and threatened to swallow up, local anglers’ business. Surrounding its statuesque fisherman with these various signs of precariousness and struggle, Bringing in the Nets outlines a vivid account of coastal angling that visualizes the hazards of the trade and the heroic steadfastness of its local practitioners. Homer’s watercolor sets this account in a particular waterscape that was a significant resource for area workers and a site of accelerating coastal development: comprising a marshy foreground bank, a middle-ground body of shallow water that opens out to the sea at left, and a distant built-up shoreline, the littoral setting evokes the aqueous and terrestrial features of the Scarborough River inlet, an estuarial channel that pierces the Saco Bay shore just north of Prouts Neck (fig. 78). Homer was deeply familiar with this body of water; he painted the inlet frequently, hiked its meandering tributaries, kept a small sloop moored in its waters, and eventually (as noted above) established his summer studio on its southwestern shore.56 As Homer well knew, the inlet had long been an important hub within the local marine economy. Workers had harvested sea grasses from the inlet’s marshes, gathered kelp and extracted mud on its shores, and dug clams from its expansive tidal flats for generations. Area fishermen had long tied up their boats in a common anchorage in the western corner of the inlet (behind the Pine Point promontory) and used public wharves and informal landings on its beaches.57 And the inlet’s shores were lined with infrastructure and businesses tied to the fishing economy, including fish houses, lobster pounds, canneries, and shipbuilding operations.58 Real estate enterprise had begun to reshape the Scarborough River inlet, however, when Homer worked out his painterly interpretation of the waterway. As early as the 1850s, local landowners had made efforts to privatize common spaces within the inlet and close off access points to its abundant biotic resources. In the middle of that Painting and Property

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figure 78 Detail from J. H. Stuart & Co., “Prouts Neck, Scarborough & Higgins Beaches with Part of Greenville, Picataquis Co. Me.,” in Stuart’s Atlas of the State of Maine (F. Bourquin, 1894). David Rumsey Map Collection, David Rumsey Map Center, Stanford Libraries. The Scarborough River inlet appears at left, above Prouts Neck.

decade, for example, Silas Libby sued the town of Scarborough in an effort to establish his family’s exclusive right to clam flats in the waters near the Cammock House hotel and around the mouth of the inlet.59 In the decades that followed, resort development steadily encroached on the waterway’s shorelines and flats. In the 1870s and 1880s, for example, Pine Point—the rocky promontory that forms the inlet’s mouth (see fig. 78)— was built up with three major hotels and (as one guidebook put it) a “settlement of red roofed and gaily painted summer cottages” marketed to bourgeois vacationers.60 As hotel and cottage construction enclosed swaths of the inlet’s coasts, other contemporaneous development schemes hurt its abundant shellfishing grounds: as alarmed residents noted, the construction of a railroad causeway through the inlet’s marshes and the diking of nearby wetlands discharged tons of sand into the inlet, which soon “destroyed . . . acres of clam flats” along its various branches.61 Unabashed, local promoters cheered on the development and gentrification of the inlet; echoing other accounts, one booster predicted that “within two years it will be difficult to purchase . . . a cottage lot at a reasonable price” on Pine Point and delighted in the idea that the promontory’s summer “visitors . . . [had become] owners of all the beach, the birds, the sea-fish, and the clams” in and around the waterway.62 The setting of Bringing in the Nets registers the divergent economic and spatial cultures that existed around the Scarborough River inlet at the end of the nineteenth 156

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century. Read together, the grassy but navigable foreground and middle-ground anchorage figure the setting’s proximate spaces as a working commons dotted with natural resources and customary entry points. Set against these evocations of marine labor and common shore is a horizon-line vision of waterfront development: articulated as a long wedge of paint studded with low cottages (at left) and what appear to be grand hotels (at right), the background landform resembles the built-up profile of the Pine Point promontory. The setting’s conjunction of common and private land is quietly accentuated by a curving band of white-toned water that interrupts the soft blue expanse of the waterscape’s middle registers; running from the lower right corner of the setting to the right edge of the horizon line, the band traces a flattened arc that links the grass, fisherman, tied-up dory, and looming hotels. Even as it figures the estuarial inlet as a space in which the real estate and marine economies meet, Bringing in the Nets quietly reimagines the relationship between these two systems. Rendering the inlet’s growing resort landscape as a hazy horizon-line arrangement of evanescent silhouettes, Homer’s watercolor downplays the scope and impact of waterfront development on the waterway. Outlining an expansive scene of working water and coastal angling that evokes the heroic tenacity of local fishermen, the painting’s foreground and middle ground simultaneously visualize the enduringly vital presence of marine lifeways on the inlet. Taken together, the near and distant spatial registers of Bringing in the Nets reimagine the developing Scarborough River inlet as a mixed social and economic space in which resort construction and coastal labor coexist in a kind of equilibrium, a space where real estate forces obey certain hard limits, age-old trades continue to flourish, and littoral resources remain accessible to all. In so doing, Homer’s watercolor advances a quiet rejoinder to booster prophecies of inexorable development and relentless privatization and works to imaginatively reconcile the artist’s increasingly divergent interests in the spaces and people of the coast. As an imaginative effort to reassert the working and common character of the shoreline, Homer’s 1887 watercolor paved the way for a variety of mature paintings that would reinscribe the exclusive coasts around Prouts Neck with signs of marine labor, waterfront travel, and other public or nonproprietary land uses, including Winter Coast (1890, Philadelphia Museum of Art), Sleigh Ride (1890–95, Clark Art Institute), High Cliff, Coast of Maine (1894, Smithsonian American Art Museum), The Wreck (1896, Carnegie Museum of Art), A Light on the Sea (1897, National Gallery of Art), Saco Bay (1896, Clark Art Institute), and Driftwood (1909, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). A SUMMER NIGHT AND THE “POSITIVE DISCORD” OF VACATION PROPERTY

After painting anglers and other coastal workers for several years, Homer turned his attentions to the transforming shorelines of Prouts Neck. During the last two decades of his life, the artist composed dozens of paintings of the waterfront fringe of the Painting and Property

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figure 79 Winslow Homer, A Summer Night, 1890. Oil on canvas, 30 ¹/₅ × 40 ¹/₈ in. Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France. ©RMNGrand Palais/Art Resource, NY.

Neck’s resort landscape, figural scenes and marine views that depict the liminal zone where the promontory’s private holdings met the common waters of Saco Bay. Homer focused these works on the shoreline around certain landmarks (including Ferry Beach, Cannon Rock, Spouting Rock, High Cliff, and Kettle Cove) that were located on or near his family’s tracts. In so doing, he made a handful of paintings of waterfront structures and parcels that plumbed the relationship between vacation property and wild tidewater on the Neck’s transforming seaboard; these include Homer’s oftstudied The Artist’s Studio in an Afternoon Fog (1894, Memorial Art Gallery) and Winter, Prout’s Neck, Maine (1890, private collection). As we will see, however, his 1890 oil A Summer Night (fig. 79) offers a particularly complicated account of property and nature on the Neck’s shorelines, outlining a scene of one stretch of waterfront building that takes up and quietly upends the fantasies of oceanfront real estate peddled by developers and hoteliers at the turn of the century. A Summer Night depicts two groups of bourgeois vacationers enjoying themselves on the shore at night: a softly illuminated pair of young women dancing on a wooden platform in the immediate foreground and a cluster of five silhouetted figures looking out at the expressively painted surf that fills the picture’s middle registers. Homer’s biographers have connected this complex scene to particular experiences the artist 158

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had on the shore; while Downes claims that the painting records a gathering of “young people belonging to the summer colony” that “Homer saw in front of his . . . studio,” Beam has argued that A Summer Night was inspired by an evening spent gazing at the ocean with his family.63 Whatever its exact sources of inspiration, Homer’s painting struck its original viewers as an evocative but enigmatic scene of summer vacationers recreating on the perimeters of a waterfront vacation property. Keying in on the dancing couple at center, critics read the painting’s figural tableau as a gathering held just outside a seaside cottage or hotel in the dim glow of unseen lighting. Echoing other reviews, a New York Herald critic described A Summer Night as a “scene looking seaward from the back piazza of a hotel” and illuminated by “house light,” and a New York Times contributor identified the central figures as “two young women dancing” on “the floor of a piazza, lit by lights that are supposed to exist in a house this side of the piazza.”64 Declaring that A Summer Night “shows a couple of young women dancing on the piazza of a cottage in the light that issues from the window through which spectator is supposed to be looking,” a reviewer for The Critic read Homer’s figural scene as an evocation of a sight glimpsed from within a comfortable summer house—a representational scenario that would cast the viewer as a vacationer linked to the depicted group.65 These and other reviews tied A Summer Night to two types of local resort property that had begun to proliferate and generate much publicity: the shoreline hotel and the waterfront cottage. As Patricia Junker and others have shown, it was not until the 1880s that local developers began to develop the Neck’s southern, ocean-facing shoreline with resort infrastructure. During the middle decades of the century, the Libbys had sited their homes and hotels on the promontory’s northern uplands, away from the ocean.66 The construction in 1873 of the Checkley House hotel on a rocky parcel facing the Atlantic ushered in a new phase of oceanfront construction on the Neck; in the decades that followed, a variety of investors (including Homer and his brother Arthur) and summer residents (such as George Putnam and Phineas Sprague) lined the shore east of the Checkley with summer cottages.67 As this waterfront building boom accelerated, promoters touted the Neck’s developing coast in differing ways. Advertisements and guidebooks trumpeting the luxurious “appointments” and “on water” sites of the new Atlantic-facing cottages and hotels figured the promontory’s shoreline as a bulwark of comfortable property; visualizing this trope, an 1893 guidebook image (fig. 80) reimagined the headland’s rocky and unevenly developed western (at center) and southern (at right) shores as a builtup perimeter of exaggeratedly grand edifices.68 As noted above, other boosters simultaneously described the Neck’s Atlantic shore as a rugged space that offered thrilling encounters with sublimely wild surf, a “dangerous” zone of “rocky fangs” and “high, rugged, surf swept cliffs” that was “beaten continuously by boisterous breakers,” shrieking winds, and “spouting horns” of spray.69 Taken together, these two threads of promotion figured the Neck’s developing seaboard as a landscape defined by both Painting and Property

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figure 80 “Prouts Neck, Cliffs and Beaches,” in George H. Haynes, The State of Maine in 1893 (Moss Engraving Company, 1893). Photo provided by the author.

contiguity and contradiction, an intermediary space in which lavish real estate existed in close but secure proximity to wild nature. Working within this framework, some real estate operators touted their waterfront properties as ideal venues for bracing encounters with the sublime sea. The guidebook illustration “Shore View from Piazza of the Checkley” (fig. 81), for example, presented potential hotel guests with a pictorial approximation of the water-skimming prospect purportedly available from the establishment’s comfortable (and oft-publicized) veranda. Shaping a close-range scene of craggy rocks and rushing surf from a waterside vantage free of intervening architectural forms (such as railings or columns), the photograph dramatizes the Checkley’s nearness to the Atlantic and figures the luxurious waterside establishment as a conduit for unmediated experiences of the oceanic wild. In so doing, the image implicitly casts the thrilling “shore view” as an amenity on offer at the hotel—an idea spelled out in the accompanying text, which identifies the “extensive view of sea and shore” as one of many “comforts and conveniences” available to guests of the Checkley.70 At first glance, A Summer Night might be read as a vivid aesthetic articulation of the promotional fantasy of “on water” development advanced by “Shore View” and other booster representations. Compressing its scene of touristic leisure and vacation infrastructure into a narrow band of foreground space and juxtaposing this attenuated tableau with an expansive middle-ground view of the “boisterous breakers” and flying spray of the Atlantic (no repoussoir forms mediate between these spatial registers), 160

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figure 81 “Shore View from Piazza of the Checkley,” in The Checkley (Portland, ME: Ira C. Foss, 1907). Photo provided by the author.

Homer’s painting casts the shoreline as space in which resort property closely abuts an oceanic wilderness. Certain details work, in turn, to heighten the contiguity of the painting’s developed and aqueous zones: the flattened forms of the sightseers and tipped-up plane of the central piazza both seem to press visually against the silver blue surf of the middle ground (the former element overlays tidewater at right center, the latter projects out over surf in the lower right corner). Though figured as closely conterminous, however, the painting’s foreground and middle ground also seem to strain against one another in various ways. A Summer Night renders its proximate and distant registers in discordant painterly lexica: articulated with soft brushwork, light penciling, and muddled hues, the dancing vignette seems to exist in an entirely different pictorial realm from the thickly painted and dramatically toned seascape behind it. At the same time, the painting’s near and distant spaces evoke dichotomous states of matter, forms of illumination, and patterns of movement: the hard edges and geometric form of the piazza are juxtaposed with the aqueous fluidity of surf and vaporous ephemerality of spray, the dull glow of porch lights contrasts with the bright glare of the moon, and the circumscribed circuits of the depicted dance contrast implicitly with the rhythmic convolutions of the rolling tide. Seizing on these dichotomies, critics read A Summer Night as a bifurcated and Painting and Property

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deeply discordant vision of the seashore. While a New York Times critic read the painting as a “bizarre” juxtaposition of “mundane . . . enjoyment” with the “grandeur and mystery of the ocean,” a reviewer for the Art Amateur asserted that the “commonplace forms and commonplace action” of the foreground exist “in positive discord with the sublime quiet of the night.”71 Declaring “we almost wish” that the painting’s foreground vignette were “out of the way that we might enjoy . . . [Homer’s] beautiful sea,” a New York Sun reviewer makes explicit an idea that underpinned many responses (including the two cited above)—that A Summer Night casts vacation leisure and real estate as incongruous and unwelcome intrusions on the oceanic waterscape beyond.72 Taking up and upending the shoreline representations worked out by real estate operators, A Summer Night uses suggestive formal contrasts and iconographic juxtapositions to reimagine the waterfront resort as a dissonant presence on the Neck’s rugged seaboard, a strangely inapposite encroachment on the space and life of the wild Atlantic. In so doing, the marine picture shapes a charged interpretation of property and nature that quietly interrogates the propriety of oceanfront building on the promontory, an interpretation that diverges from Homer’s other renderings of the Neck’s vacation landscape (such as The Artist’s Studio in an Afternoon Fog, which figures the Homer family compound as a harmonious extension of the promontory’s shoreline environment), gives voice to Homer’s ambivalences about the building up of the Neck, and taps into broader concerns about seaside privatization and construction in Maine—concerns that found voice, as we will see, in an expanding body of antidevelopment and conservationist writing that took shape in the state at the end of the nineteenth century. EASTERN POINT AND INTERTIDAL PROPERTY

Though they have often been interpreted as transcendent productions somehow untouched by localized material concerns, Homer’s figureless seascapes also reckoned with real estate’s presence on the shores of Prouts Neck.73 Employing vantages situated on the oceanfront fringe of the Neck’s privatized topography, the late seascapes use fluid brushwork, vividly hued impasto passages, and undiluted pigments to conjure up the dynamic interplay of tidewater, spray, foam, and rock within the promontory’s intertidal zone. Working within this general format, Eastern Point (fig. 82, 1900) outlines a complex view of a particular Homer family tract that allusively explores the confounding spatial dynamism and environmental contingency of waterfront property. In so doing, I will suggest, the 1900 seascape advances an alternative account of oceanfront real estate that challenges the land market’s conception of littoral property as a timelessly coherent and securely bounded entity—a fiction that underwrote the development boom on Prouts Neck and countless other locales on the Maine coast. Eastern Point engages a specific bit of Homer family property that had become a source of vexation for the artist. The painting depicts the eponymous surf-battered 162

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figure 82 Winslow Homer, Eastern Point, 1900. Oil on canvas, 30 ¼ × 48 ½ in. The Clark Art Institute, 1955.6.

outcropping that jutted out from a triangular lot, situated at the southeast corner of Prouts Neck, that Charles Homer Sr. had acquired from Hannah Googins in 1884 (fig. 83).74 Winslow Homer devoted significant energy to the maintenance and improvement of this lot in the 1880s and 1890s; his letters make clear that he regularly cleared brush from the parcel and raised cranberries in a bog on its interior boundary.75 Nevertheless, the artist had no certain claim to it when he painted Eastern Point. The triangular lot was part of the large inherited tract that Winslow and Arthur Homer had decided to divvy up with a coin flip; as the above-cited diagram of the tract (fig. 70) indicates, the brothers agreed to leave “the Cranberry Point to be settled after” the wager concluded and the primary block of property had been subdivided.76 Homer composed Eastern Point after he lost the coin flip to Arthur and before the brothers decided what to do with the triangular parcel (they elected to split it in half in 1901)— a moment in which the artist was likely both uncertain and discouraged about the property’s fate. Centered on a particular shoreline parcel whose ownership and proprietary rights were ambiguously unresolved, Eastern Point employs various means to figure its subject as a troublesome and perhaps unpossessable bit of property, a holding defined by dynamic terrain and fluid contours. The painting’s carefully orchestrated vantage works, firstly, to downplay the lot’s status as owned land. By picturing the parcel from a spot amid the boulders and tidepools of its rocky fringe, Eastern Point outlines an intimate in situ view that occludes the undeveloped lot’s most obvious sign of Painting and Property

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figure 83 Detail from Arthur Homer, Blueprint Map of Prouts Neck, 1901. Cyanotpe blueprint. Winslow Homer and Homer Family Papers, private collection, Washington, D.C. The low-water boundaries of the Homer family’s Eastern Point lot are indicated by the wavering line at left center and the curving horizontal line at top left; the sinuous line framing the triangular lot represents the parcel’s high-water boundary.

possession and improvement in the period: a prominent gate that Homer’s father had erected on the upland boundary of the holding (see fig. 69). Viewers associated the painting’s close-up vista, in turn, with a form of looking that was divorced from proprietorship. Declaring that the painting was “quite the next thing to a brisk tramp along shore on a stormy day,” a critic for the New York Evening Post read Eastern Point as a visualization of the gaze of the coastal walker, a customary seaside figure long associated (as we have seen) with movement across land that she or he did not own— and with a corresponding disregard for the boundaries of property.77 Working within this suggestive visual frame, Homer’s painting delineates what would have been the most morphologically and legally confounding portion of the promontory lot for many onlookers: its tidewater boundary. Coastal property statutes in Maine were (and are) grounded in the Massachusetts Bay Colony Ordinance of 1647, which established the low tide mark as the seaside boundary of waterfront lots (diverging from the high-water rule employed by most coastal states) and recognized a public right to use the intertidal sector of shoreline properties for the specific purposes of “fishing, fowling, and navigation.”78 This doctrine created a host of legal and representational dilemmas for nineteenth-century landowners, courts, and surveyors. Unlike properties that ended 164

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at the high tide line, low-water landholdings are subject to the dynamic environmental and biotic forces (erosion, avulsion, and accretion) of the intertidal zone and, as such, highly mutable in contour and dimension. During the nineteenth century, Maine’s courts grappled with the implications of this mutability in a steady stream of cases over boundary lines, the limits of private claims on the sea, and public access rights to owned waters (these included the Silas Libby case cited above). Various decisions affirmed the principle that intertidal property lines were fundamentally fugitive and that coastal proprietorship was, as such, “a shifting, ambulatory, dependent, or conditional [form of] ownership.”79 The Homer property at Eastern Point was itself implicated in the period’s legal struggles over intertidal possession; by incorporating a clause conveying a supposed “right, title, and interest to the products of the sea” on the original deed for the parcel, the lot’s prior owners had attempted to codify an expansive and unlawful claim on the intertidal waterscape adjoining the property.80 As Donald Richards and Knud Hermansen have shown, moreover, Maine’s legal conception of intertidal property has consistently frustrated attempts to survey the state’s waterfront tracts.81 The difficulties associated with delineating a submerged and often mobile boundary led many nineteenth-century mapmakers to simply elide the low-tide edges of coastal holdings. The Homer lot at Eastern Point was no exception. Indeed, period surveys of the Neck, including a plat Arthur Homer drew in 1901 (fig. 83), invariably omit or fudge the seaside edge of the parcel: even as it delineates the high-water mark around Eastern Point (as a pair of serpentine lines that bracket the two seaward sides of the lot), Arthur’s map renders the tract’s low-water boundary as a wavering line headed ambiguously out to sea.82 In delineating the ambiguous tidewater fringe of Eastern Point, Homer’s seascape works in various ways to evoke the mutability and transience of intertidal property in Maine. The painting’s rendering of the rocky outcropping seems to both evoke and refigure the geometric boundaries of the Homer family plot. The prow-like rock at the right center of the scene and the angling masses of stone that flank it seem to describe a foreshortened triangle reminiscent of the tract’s borders; rendered with thick strokes of brown and umber paint, the apex of this formation reads as a solid rampart of rock. The outcropping’s hard-edged and subtly triangular contours give way, however, in the left middle ground, where a sheet of tidal water infiltrates the perimeter of the rock formation (fig. 84). Articulated in fluid gestures of pigment and veering between referentiality and abstraction, this passage counters the representational evocations of rocky solidity that appear elsewhere in the seascape with a vision of fluid interchange that renders water and stones as ambiguously intermingled entities. Read together with the plume of spray at right center (which seems both substantial and ephemeral), this passage figures Homer’s jutting outcropping as a fluidly bounded space poised ambiguously between obdurate materiality and dynamic flux. Other elements attest, in turn, to the larger environmental forces that molded and remolded the contours of Eastern Point. As period critics invariably noted, the Painting and Property

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figure 84 Detail from Winslow Homer, Eastern Point, 1900. Oil on canvas, 30 ¼ × 48 ½ in. The Clark Art Institute, 1955.6.

painting’s swelling waves, “crash[ing] . . . foam,” and “seething . . . white spume” testify immediately to the erosive “violence” of the Northwest Atlantic’s tides.83 The scene’s slate sky evokes the atmospheric conditions that accompanied the region’s frequent nor’easters, and several bits of foreground dross speak, in turn, to the cataclysmic scouring power of local storm surges: the sandy band at the bottom of the composition is littered with plant and animal species normally found in sublittoral waters or submerged sediment, including horsetail kelp (the ochre finger-like forms at left center), softshell clams (the white and peach dabs at bottom center), and blue mussels (the black strokes that sit atop the white patch).84 Lastly, the orange patches that appear across the middle reaches of the rocky formation seem to evoke the color and form of a common lichen found on Maine’s shorelines (Xanthoria elegans) and thereby allude to the slower processes of biotic accretion that worked to remake the state’s seaboard over time.85 Figuring Eastern Point as a dynamic land mass molded and remolded by the forces of coastal water and aquatic life, Homer’s seascape advances an account of littoral 166

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figure 85 Detail from E. C. Jordan, “Plan of Libby’s Neck,” 1893 (copy of original 1879 plat). Diazotype. Winslow Homer and Homer Family Papers, private collection, Washington, D.C.

property that challenges the abstracting conception of waterfront real estate that informed promotional imaginings of the Maine seashore and underwrote the building up of the state’s coastlines. In their efforts to sell the investment potential of littoral land and explain the appeal of seaside vacationing, promoters drew on and advanced the notion that shoreline real estate was, like any other variety of real property exchanged in American land markets, a fixed capsule of space, built form, or value somehow impervious to the pressures of time and nature. This fantasy found explicit voice in tract plans—such as the Libby plat of Prouts Neck (fig. 85)—that recast mutable seafront lots as neatly bounded polygons set against empty oceanic spaces, and in booster texts that assured investors that a dynamic littoral landscape would be developed on a “permanent basis” with “no chance” that “anything . . . will detract from the comfort and pleasure of the residents.”86 And the fantasy quietly informed other booster representations of waterfront real estate, including pamphlets that encouraged patrons to “annually make a pilgrimage” to cliff-hugging inns and land company ads promising that their “beautifully situated seashore lot[s]” on “high and dry land” Painting and Property

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would steadily “boom” in value.”87 Figuring seaside property as an unchanging quantum of space, an engine of unceasing profit, a platform for “permanent” construction, and an unendingly reliable source of touristic pleasure, these and other promotional representations denied the morphological dynamism and environmental contingency of shoreline landholdings—qualities recognized in property law of the period, in the imperfect plans that surveyors made of intertidal tracts, and in popular responses to the nor’easters that battered Maine’s coasts and periodically devastated waterfront properties in the state.88 Plumbing the characteristics of littoral real estate that boosters sought to mystify, Eastern Point outlines a view of a shoreline landholding that reasserts the wildness of the Neck’s developing intertidal zone and troubles the very idea of waterfront property—the operative fiction, wielded by innumerable developers and boosters, that the imaginary lines of the plat map or the built contours of vacation property could somehow hold back the ocean’s tidal flows and organic rhythms in perpetuity. In so doing, Eastern Point taps into a set of connotations that period audiences divined in many of Homer’s late seascapes. Indeed, reviews and anecdotes suggest that the artist’s marines regularly inspired turn-of-the century viewers to reflect on the ocean’s capacity to overrun property’s flimsy ramparts. Thus, while artist Kenyon Cox noted that the seascapes “have none of the amenities of the drawing room, and you might almost as well let the sea itself into your house as one of Homer’s transcriptions of it,” the painter John W. Beatty reported that Homer’s On the Lee Shore (1900, RISD Museum) gave its original owner “the feeling that he might be washed out of his home at any moment.”89 CONCLUSION

Cognizant of the threat that enclosure and construction posed to customary coastal spaces and marine lifeways, Homer made paintings of the Neck’s shorelines that imaginatively rebuffed the material forces of littoral development and creatively interrogated the cultural fictions that underwrote Maine’s seaside real estate boom. As we have seen, the artist’s Prouts Neck figural scenes and seascapes envision the endurance of customary labor practices and common spaces on the Maine seaboard, imaginatively delimit the scope of seaside development, trouble booster representations of the shoreline, interrogate market conceptions of littoral property, and reassert the wildness of intertidal waters. In so doing, these works articulate alternative interpretations of coastal real estate that echoed the new accounts of property advanced contemporaneously by local conservationists and progressive economic thinkers across the nation. In their efforts to reassert the common, unownable, and wild character of Maine’s coast, Homer’s Prouts Neck pictures extended the arguments made by local editors and popular intellectuals who were alarmed by the intensifying privatization and development of the state’s rocky shores. In the 1880s and 1890s, regional newspapers 168

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were filled with editorials that decried the “selfishness” of summer residents who used “barbed wire fence[s]” and “no trespassing signs” to “deprive visitors of the pleasures of walking along the shore,” and called on local officials to “see to it that the . . . most attractive places be purchased and reserved for the people.”90 Prominent New England writers expanded on these local appeals. In an influential 1890 article for Garden and Forest, for example, landscape architect Charles Eliot decried developers’ efforts to partition the shoreline into “rectangular lots whose lines bear no relation to the forms of the ground” and line majestic “sea cliff[s]” with “cheap,” “vulgarly ornamented,” and “absurdly pretentious” cottages; warning his readers that heedless development would “rob” the seacoast of “that flavor of wildness and remoteness” that “constitutes its refreshing charm,” Eliot urged authorities to “preserve for the use and enjoyment of the . . . common people some fine parts . . . of this seaside wilderness.”91 By figuring the shoreline as an enduringly common and wild space and real estate as a discordant presence therein, Homer’s marine paintings gave striking visual form to the coastal sensibility espoused by Eliot and local conservation-minded writers in the period. Homer’s painterly interrogations of littoral real estate made their own creative contributions, in turn, to a broader intellectual reckoning with property that emerged in various sectors of the public sphere after the Civil War. Outraged by the deepening inequalities of the moment, intellectuals and activists began to critique the tenets of laissez-faire liberalism, and especially that system’s absolutist conception of private property—that is, the notion that property ownership was a natural right that could not be justly regulated by a government.92 Pushing back against this deep-rooted conception, progressive thinkers proposed regulatory frameworks that would allow the state (in the words of reformer Walter Rauschenbusch) to “spread the blessings of property” to the masses and thereby make private holdings serve the common good.93 In an 1894 lecture, for example, economist Richard T. Ely proposed the leasing of public lands as a means of extending property’s benefits further.94 Convinced that the profits landowners made via rent and speculation were unearned benefits that created class disparities, Henry George famously argued that the state should levy a land value tax on every private parcel equivalent to that holding’s rental or speculative value. George believed that this assessment would enable governments to weaken speculators’ grip on land, open private holdings to common uses (such as farming), invalidate property boundaries, and create the conditions for collective land ownership; as he put it in a well-known metaphorical passage in Progress and Poverty (1879), “Let them buy and sell, and bequeath and divide it. We may safely leave them the shell, if we take the kernel.”95 Homer’s paintings work in their own way to recalibrate property’s public and private valences: as we have seen, his coastal scenes and seascapes recast owned land as public working space, reimagine the relation between the privatized landscape and common resources, and refigure the property line as a tenuous and even inconsequential boundary (not unlike the insignificant “shell” left to the Painting and Property

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kernel-less landowner in George’s account). As they pursued these imperatives, I suggest, Homer’s marines worked in some small way to advance the broader progressive effort to reconceive property’s relationship to the commonweal. Motivated by a disparate body of experiences and commitments, Homer composed a handful of marine pictures on Prouts Neck that participated in local and national dialogues about property, about the effects of heedless development on natural spaces and customary ways of life, and about the scope of real estate dealing—dialogues that unfolded as that volatile business transformed into a full-fledged sector of the modern U.S. economy. As we have seen, Homer participated actively in that economic realm; his letters and drawings attest to an enthusiasm for real estate that the artist shared with a growing body of Americans who sank their capital into landholdings, put up spec homes for resale, took out mortgages, invested in real estate–backed securities, followed the business in the popular press and new periodicals (such as the Real Estate Record), and took weekend excursions to see suburban model homes for fun. Homer’s Prouts Neck paintings also give voice, however, to the growing sense—espoused by conservationists and progressive economic thinkers but also many other everyday Americans—that U.S. real estate capitalism needed to be restrained, that the market forces of partitioning, privatization, and gentrification should not be allowed to remake every last inch of the continent or annihilate any and all alternative forms of occupying land. Considered together, Homer’s material and creative activities on Prouts Neck encapsulate a set of attitudes about real estate—entrepreneurial fervor and reformist concern—that percolated at the turn of the century and intensified in the decades that followed, as real estate dealing became an ever more ubiquitous economic practice, a primary determinant of twentieth-century Americans’ financial standing, a fixture of popular cultural imagination, a vehicle for limitless speculative innovation, and an object of governmental regulation and interventionist federal and state policy.

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R

in the private and professional lives of Daniel Huntington, John Quidor, Eastman Johnson, Martin Johnson Heade, and Winslow Homer. Like many middle-class Americans of their era, these artists participated actively in the nascent real estate economy; and like a good number of their peers, they had significant misgivings about the financial implications, moral character, and social consequences of the deals they struck in that arena. At certain moments, Huntington, Quidor, Johnson, Heade, and Homer took up these concerns in paint. Drawing on an array of social, economic, religious, and reformist convictions, they worked out novel genre, landscape, and marine paintings that interrogated the cultural discourses and material practices of the land market and challenged some of the real estate business’s central tenets: that a sufficiently astute investor could apprehend the future in the cryptic surfaces of the present; that dynamic sectors of earth, air, and water could be transmuted into timelessly static vessels of financial worth; and EAL ESTATE WAS A FIXTURE

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that places molded by generations of work and etched with lifetimes of feeling should be as effortlessly tradable as any other good or security. Composed in a range of moments and locales, the works of these five painters suggest that real estate was an abiding source of inspiration for nineteenth-century artists. More work is needed, however, before we can gain a fuller sense of the property business’s place within the period’s artistic imagination. It remains unclear how many nineteenth-century artists speculated on land or contributed to the promotion of development schemes; by delving back into painters’ and sculptors’ fiscal lives and reexamining artworks that represent developing regions or property ventures (such as Sanford Gifford’s 1862 View from Eagle Rock, which depicts the nascent suburb of Llewellyn Park), scholars might expand on the initial roster studied by this book.1 By reconsidering the encounters artists had with the real estate economy when buying, selling, renting, squatting in, letting out, or financing properties, moreover, art historians might identify an even wider range of painters and sculptors who grappled with the business in their creative work—including those who were barred or dissuaded from owning land. Consider a property transaction the African American artist Robert Duncanson helped facilitate in the fall of 1858: in early October, the painter bought a lot in downtown Detroit from a laborer, Benjamin Chappee, for a nominal fee and then promptly transferred it to Chappee’s wife, Martha.2 By serving as an intermediary in this transaction, Duncanson likely enabled the African American couple to solidify their financial standing and establish Martha as a property owner in her own right. As various scholars have shown, married couples used third-party transfers to protect familial property from creditors (who could not legally seize assets held by wives) and to enable married women to amass their own real estate holdings (which was otherwise prohibited by property law).3 As a creative effort to circumvent legal strictures and realize a more equitable form of familial proprietorship, Duncanson’s participation in the 1858 transfer exposed the artist to (or strengthened his prior investment in) conceptions of land, habitation, and ownership that clashed dramatically with the constructs of mainstream property culture, conceptions that may well have shaped his contemporaneous landscape practice. Investigating ventures like Duncanson’s would equip scholars to assess the myriad stimulations that real estate dealing presented to nineteenth-century artists and to discover insights about the property business in the works of a broader spectrum of the period’s painters, sculptors, and popular image makers. The paintings of Huntington, Quidor, Johnson, Heade, and Homer shed light on one of many potential threads of creative activity that arose from the everyday experience of real estate dealing in the nineteenth century. Inspired by their vexing ventures in property investment, these artists developed painterly accounts of real estate enterprise that expanded the representational capacities and social purview of their medium, challenged the ideological bent of mainstream landscape and seascape painting, and set the terms for a wide range of modern and contemporary artistic productions. Indeed, in their efforts to trouble the land business’s operative fictions 172

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and plumb its dark material effects, the paintings of Huntington, Quidor, Johnson, Heade, and Homer worked out forms of imaginative inquiry and artful opposition that would be taken up by a host of artistic projects in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—including Conceptualist installations that exposed the ruthless dealings of urban slumlords (Hans Haacke’s Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Dealings of 1971), performance works that laid bare the absurdity of property boundaries (Gordon Matta Clark’s Reality Properties, Fake Estates of 1973), guerrilla exhibitions that critiqued gentrification (the artist collective Colab’s Real Estate Show of 1980), outdoor art projects that contested postindustrial urban redevelopment (Tyree Guyton’s Heidelberg Project, 1986–present) and visualized the struggles of foreclosed homeowners (John Hulsey’s 72 Hours, 2011–12), and activist performances mounted against transnational infrastructure development (Cannupa Hanska Luger’s Mirror Shield Project, 2016–present).4 The real estate paintings of Huntington, Quidor, Johnson, Heade, and Homer hold valuable insights, in turn, for those interested in reckoning with the abstractions and inequities of contemporary real estate capitalism. As they navigated the more rudimentary land markets of the nineteenth century, these five artists confronted financial attitudes, speculative techniques, constructs of property and proprietorship, modes of representation and looking, and invidious forms of displacement and dispossession that remain central to twenty-first-century real estate enterprise.5 In their efforts to contend with these cultural forms and material practices, of course, nineteenthcentury artists drew on the traditional belief systems and retrogressive ideologies of their period. But they also developed prescient forms of creative inquiry and environmental imagining that remain urgently relevant today. Rejecting the slick fictions and confident projections of popular property culture, the paintings of Huntington, Quidor, Johnson, Heade, and Homer dramatize the risks and wreckage of speculation, conjure up the social and ecological histories of commodified landholdings, and envision spaces and communities that resist the market’s invasive spread. In so doing, I suggest, these works open up alternative perspectives on speculation and property that might help us look past the bewildering abstractions of today’s real estate economy, uncover the legacies of life and labor embedded in financialized property, apprehend the multiplying harms wrought by contemporary real estate investment, and begin to envision a more equitable apparatus for the exchange of land and provision of housing.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am deeply grateful to the institutions, colleagues, friends, and family members that helped make this book a reality. Research funding from the University of South Carolina and Boston University made it possible for me to take trips to archives and museums across the country and obtain illustrations for the project. A faculty fellowship at the Boston University Center for the Humanities (BUCH) provided much-needed time and support as I wrote the fourth chapter. My research was assisted by librarians, curators, and researchers at a host of institutions. I thank Patrick Raftery at the Westchester County Historical Society for helping me reconstruct the history of the Verplanck Point Association, and Charles Tingley and Bob Nawrocki at the Saint Augustine Historical Society for answering my many queries about Martin Johnson Heade and the development of Saint Augustine. Diana Greenwold at the Portland Museum of Art graciously arranged a private visit to the Homer Studio at Prouts Neck. I thank Roy Piovesana at the Roman Catholic Diocese of Thunder Bay for translating entries in the diary of French-Canadian priest Dominque Ranquet, and Scott Nielsen for sharing his research into Eastman Johnson’s real estate dealings around Superior. I am indebted to the librarians at the Houghton 175

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Library, Sterling Memorial Library, John Hay Library, and Archives of American Art who helped me study the papers of Homer, Heade, and Huntington firsthand, and to the archivists at the Nantucket Historical Association, Minnesota Historical Society, and St. Louis County Historical Society who scanned critical documents for me. I’d also like to thank the many colleagues who have shared research tips, suggested key revisions, and helped me rethink art and real estate these past few years. Catherine Holochwost, Patricia Hills, and Abigael MacGibney pointed me to important texts documenting the real estate activities of Daniel Huntington and Eastman Johnson. Alan Wallach and Robert Alexander Boyle helped me track down reproductions of significant works in private collections. I thank Matthew C. Hunter for inviting me to present portions of the book to the Art and Actuarial Imagination workshop at McGill University, and I’m grateful to the members of that group (Sophie Cras, Nina Dubin, Avigail Moss, and Oliver Wunsch), participants in the Value workshop at the Clark Art Institute (especially Jennifer Greenhill and Jennifer Jane Marshall), and staff and fellows at BUCH (especially Susan Mizruchi and Deanna Klepper) for their thoughtful comments on the third and fourth chapters. William R. Cross and the organizers of the “Winslow Homer: New Insights” symposium kindly offered me an opportunity to test out my ideas for the fifth chapter, and I thank the many attendees who shared their wisdom. Many other colleagues offered key insights as I developed the project; I am especially grateful to John Ott, Nick Yablon, Sarah Luria, Rachael Delue, Maggie Cao, Bruce Redford, Joy Kasson, Alfred Brophy, and Jennifer Baker for their suggestions. It has been a great pleasure working with the editors at UC Press. I thank Nadine Little for her early support and Archna Patel for her advice and encouragement as I completed the project. The anonymous readers at the press provided invaluable guidance as I worked out the book’s central arguments and refined its case studies. Richard Earles helped me sharpen and clarify the final manuscript. I thank my Boston University colleagues Daniel Abramson, Cynthia Becker, Emine Fetvaci, Hunt Howell, Rebecca Martin, Will Moore, Anita Patterson, Ana-María Reyes, Kim Sichel, Alice Tseng, Greg Williams, and Michael Zell for their support and camaraderie as I undertook this project. I feel very lucky to count Aaron Lecklider, Kevin Leonard, Gabriel Gomez, Sari Edelstein, and Holly Jackson as friends; their humor and wisdom sustained me throughout my research and writing. This book would have remained a mere speculation without the love and support of my family. I am deeply grateful to my parents, Buckley Barrett and Nannette BrickerBarrett, who shared good food, political humor, and a steady stream of real estate listings as I researched and wrote the manuscript. William Barrett danced into my life right around the time I began work on this project, and his joy and whimsicality kept me afloat throughout its development. I could never have pulled this off without Danielle Coriale: her sacrifices made it possible for me to undertake this book, her insights strengthened its arguments, and her support helped me finish the manuscript in what was otherwise a very difficult time. 176

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NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. For overviews of the real estate economy’s development, see A. M. Sakolski, The Great American Land Bubble (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1932); and Pearl Davies, Real Estate in American History (Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press, 1958). 2. Other nineteenth-century artists who invested in real estate include Elihu Vedder, Thomas Cole, Alvan Fisher, and Robert Duncanson. Vedder’s land dealings are documented in the Elihu Vedder papers, 1804– 1969, Series 1, Box 1, Archives of American Art; the Thomas Cole papers (New York State Library) include a receipt for a parcel the artist bought in New Jersey. On Alvan Fisher’s real estate dealings, see Fred Adelson, “Alvan Fisher: Pioneer in American Landscape Painting” (PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 1982), 554–56. Duncanson’s real estate dealings are discussed in the conclusion. 3. See, for example, David Sokol, “John Quidor, Literary Painter,” American Art Journal 2 (Spring 1970): 60–73; Marc Simpson, “Taken with a Cranberry Fit: Eastman Johnson on Nantucket,” in The Cranberry Harvest, Island of Nantucket, ed. Marc Simpson, Sally Mills, and Patricia Hills (San Diego, CA: Timken Art Gallery, 1990), 36–42; Roberta Smith Favis, Martin Johnson Heade in Florida (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003), 41–47; Theodore Stebbins, The Life and Work of Martin Johnson Heade (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 145–48; Kenyon Bolton, “ ‘The Right Place’: Winslow Homer and the Development of

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4.

5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

17.

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Prouts Neck,” in Weatherbeaten: Winslow Homer and Maine, ed. Thomas Denenberg (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 32–40. For an excellent analysis of one nineteenth-century painterly interpretation of land speculation, see Peter John Brownlee, “Francis Edmonds and the Speculative Economy of Painting,” American Art 31 (June 1017): 30–53. See Maggie Cao, The End of Landscape in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018), 124–32; and Spencer Wigmore, “Albert Bierstadt and the Speculative Terrain of American Landscape Painting, 1866–1877” (PhD dissertation, University of Delaware, 2020). Marc Simpson, “ ‘You Must Wait, and Wait Patiently’: Winslow Homer’s Prouts Neck Marines,” in Denenberg, Weatherbeaten, 109; Alexander Nemerov, “Art Is Not the Archive,” Archives of American Art Journal 56 (Fall 2017): 80. Worthington Whittredge, Manuscript of Autobography, c. 1905, Worthington Whittredge Papers, Archives of American Art, Series 1: Biographical Materials, 1849–circa 1940s, Box 1, Folder 8, frames 29–31. I thank Abigael MacGibeny for calling my attention to this passage. Gregory Alexander, Commodity and Propriety: Competing Visions of Property in American Legal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 38–78. See also Lisi Krall, Proving Up: Domesticating Land in U.S. History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011), 9–27. Alexander, Commodity and Propriety, 31–42, 72–79. Krall, Proving Up, 31–41. See also Malcolm Rohrbough, The Land Office Business: The Settlement and Administration of American Public Lands, 1789–1837 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968). Davies, Real Estate in American History, 8–29. Ibid., 16–17. Ibid., 20–23, 34–37, 43–46. Rohrbough, Land Office Business, 143–51. Davies, Real Estate in American History, 21–26, 30–32. On western farm loans, see Jonathan Levy, “The Mortgage Worked the Hardest,” in Capitalism Takes Command: The Social Transformation of Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Michael Zakim and Gary Kornblith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 39–68. See William J. Collins and Robert A. Margo, “Race and Home Ownership from the End of the Civil War to the Present,” American Economic Review 101 (May 2011): 355–59; Roy W. Copeland, “ ‘In the Beginning’: Origins of African American Real Property Ownership in the United States,” Journal of Black Studies (2013): 646–64; Huping Ling, Surviving on the Gold Mountain: A History of Chinese American Women and Their Lives (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 75–76; Richard Chused, “Late Nineteenth Century Married Women’s Property Law: Reception of the Early Married Women’s Property Acts by Courts and Legislatures,” American Journal of Legal History 29 (1985): 3–35; Joseph Custer, “The Three Waves of Married Women’s Property Acts in the Nineteenth Century, with a Focus on Mississippi, New York, and Oregon,” Saint Louis University Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2013–21 (2013), available at https://papers.ssrn .com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2316990. For scholarship on real estate ventures undertaken by women and people of color in the nineteenth century, see Paul A. Shackel, New Philadelphia: An Archaeology of Race in the Heartland (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); Janet Sharp Hermann, The Pursuit of a Dream (Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 2011); Charlotte Hinger, Nicodemus: Post-reconstruction Politics and Racial Justice in Western Kansas (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016). For a study of a significant Black female real estate investor, see Lynn Hudson, The Making of “Mammy” Pleasant: A Black Entrepreneur in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco (UrbanaChampaign: University of Illinois Press, 2013).

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18. Harriet Martineau, Society in America, vol. 1 (New York: Saunders & Otley, 1837), 350; Charles Lyell, Travels in North America, vol. 1 (New York: Wiley & Putnam, 1845), 181; Mark Twain, Roughing It (Hartford, CT: American Publishing, 1873), 376; Charles Edwards, “Christmas Time in Florida,” Chambers Journal (January 7, 1893): 5. 19. Using available evidence, the twentieth-century statistician Roy Wenzlick proposed that the real estate economy followed a regular eighteen-year cycle; although subsequent studies have proposed shorter or longer cycles, most scholars and professionals have come to accept the idea that real estate has followed a regular boom-and-bust pattern since the eighteenth century. See Roy Wenzlick, “The Problem of Analyzing Local Real Estate Cycles,” Journal of the American Statistical Association 28 (March 1933): 201–6. 20. See David Harvey, The Limits to Capital (New York: Verso, 2006), 266–70; Cédric Durand, Fictitious Capital: How Finance Is Appropriating Our Future (New York: Verso, 2017). 21. Uncertain Commons, Speculate This! (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 2. 22. On dowsing, see Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 229–30. 23. For scholarly studies of some of the promotional images associated with real estate dealing, see William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 31–41; Stephen V. Ward, Selling Places: The Marketing and Promotion of Towns and Cities, 1850–2000 (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2005), 9–32; John Reps, Bird’s Eye Vies: Historic Lithographs of North American Cities (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998). 24. In addressing land investment as a visionary practice intertwined with material oppression, I take up recent theoretical accounts of speculation advanced by the activist Heidi Hoechst and the scholarly collaborative Uncertain Commons. See Heidi Hoechst, Life in and against the Odds: Debts of Freedom and the Speculative Roots of U.S. Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015) and Uncertain Commons, Speculate This! 25. On the federal land system and Native American dispossession, see Stuart Banner, How the Indians Lost Their Land: Law and Power on the Frontier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Alan Greer, Property and Dispossession: Natives, Empire, and Land in Early Modern North America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 389–436. For studies of communities displaced and dispossessed by the land market, see Elizabeth Blackmar and Roy Rosenzweig, The Park and the People: A History of Central Park (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 59–94; Andrew W. Kahrl, This Land Was Ours: How Black Beaches Became White Wealth in the Coastal South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); David Correia, Properties of Violence: Law and Land Grant Struggle in Northern New Mexico (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013), 28–46. 26. Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 132–34; Carol Sheriff, The Artificial River: The Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress, 1817–1862 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996), 27–51; John J. Zaborney, Slaves for Hire: Renting Enslaved Laborers in Antebellum Virginia (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2012), 125, 147; Ryan Dearinger, The Filth of Progress: Immigrants, Americans, and the Building of Canals and Railroads in the West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016); A Day in the Life of an American Worker, ed. Nancy Quam-Wickham and Ben Tyler Elliott (New York: ABC-Clio, 2019), 326–30. 27. See, for example, Joseph Ferrie, “The Wealth Accumulation of Antebellum European Immigrants to the U.S., 1840–60,” Journal of Economic History (March 1994): 1–33; Livio di Matteo, The Evolution and Determinants of Wealth Inequality in the North-Atlantic Anglo-Sphere, 1668–2013 (New York: Springer, 2018), 48–49. NOTES

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28. Patricia Fernandez-Kelly, “Land, Race, and Property Rights in American Development,” in Race and Real Estate, ed. Adrienne Brown and Valerie Smith (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 64–86. See also Barbara Robles, Betsy Lender-Wright, and Rose Brewer, The Color of Wealth: The Story behind the U.S. Racial Wealth Divide (New York: The New Press, 2006), 81–87; Charles Lewis Nier III, “The Shadow of Credit: The Historical Origins of Racial Predatory Lending and Its Impact upon African-American Wealth Accumulation,” University of Pennsylvania Journal of Law and Social Change 11 (2007–2008): 131–94. 29. On foreclosures and bankruptcy, see Wenzlick, “Problem of Analyzing Local Real Estate Cycles”; John R. Riggleman, “Building Cycles in the United States, 1875–1932,” Journal of the American Statistical Association 28 (1933): 174–83; Homer Hoyt, One Hundred Years of Land Values in Chicago: The Relationship of the Growth of Chicago to the Rise of Its Land Value, 1830–1933 [1933] (Washington, DC: Beard Books, 2000), 399–402. Nineteenth-century periodicals were filled with tales of speculative folly, and journalists and popular writers delighted in telling and retelling the stories of especially audacious investors who came to ruin. The early national speculator Robert Morris was an especially popular subject of these moralizing stories. See, for example, “Robert Morris’s Mansion,” Atkinson’s Casket (February 1832): 2–3; “Robert Morris in Jail,” American Historical Record 2 (July 1873): 305. 30. For work on literature and finance, see Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Jennifer J. Baker, Securing the Commonwealth: Debt, Speculation, and Writing in the Making of Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); Mary Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Anna Kornbluh, Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018). For cultural analyses of finance, see Marieke de Goede, Virtue, Fortune, and Faith: A Genealogy of Finance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Arjun Appadurai, Banking on Words: The Failure of Language in the Age of Derivative Finance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Peter Knight, Reading the Market: Genres of Financial Capitalism in Gilded-Age America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018). For studies of art, money, and finance, see Marc Shell, Art & Money (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Leo Mazow and Kevin Murphy, Taxing Visions: Financial Episodes in NineteenthCentury American Art (State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010); Jennifer Roberts, Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 117–60; Maggie Cao, The End of Landscape in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018), 113–52. For an excellent study of eighteenthcentury French artistic engagements with speculative development, see Nina Dubin, Futures and Ruins: Eighteenth-Century Paris and the Art of Hubert Robert (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2010). For work on artistic and photographic engagements with cotemporary structures of credit and debt, see Annie McClanahan, Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First-Century Culture (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016). On the art object as an economic actor, see Maggie Cao, Sophie Cras, and Alex J. Taylor, “Art and Economics beyond the Market,” American Art 33 (Fall 2019): 20–26. This study also draws inspiration from recent work that has traced the connections between fine art and other sectors of nineteenth-century American capitalism; this scholarship includes John Ott, Manufacturing the Modern Patron in Victorian California: Cultural Philanthropy, Industrial Capital, and Social Authority (New York: Ashgate, 2014), and Peter John Brownlee, The Commerce of Vision (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). 31. One major contribution to his body of work was the Princeton University Art Museum Exhibition “Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment” (2018–19), which yielded the catalogue 180

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32.

33.

34.

35.

Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment, ed. Alan Braddock and Karl Kusserow (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018). For recent ecocritical publications, see A Keener Perception: Ecocritical Studies in American Art History, ed. Alan Braddock and Christoph Irmscher (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009); A Greene Country Towne: Philadelphia’s Ecology in the Cultural Imagination, ed. Alan Braddock and Laura Turner Igoe (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016); Ecocriticism and the Anthropocene in Nineteenth-Century Art and Visual Culture, ed. Maura Coughlin and Emily Gephart (New York: Routledge 2019); Picture Ecology: Art and Ecocriticism in Planetary Perspective ed. Karl Kusserow (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021). Hannes Bergthaller, “Mapping Common Ground: Ecocriticism, Environmental History, and the Environmental Humanities,” Environmental Humanities 5 (2014): 267. See also David Mazel, American Literary Environmentalism (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000), 35–58; Sverker Sorlin and Paul Warde, “Making the Environment Historical: An Introduction,” in Nature’s End: History and Environment, ed. Sverker Sorlin and Paul Warde (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 8–9. On landscape, expansionism, and imperialism, see Denis Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 161–88; Albert Boime, The Magisterial Gaze (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991); W. J. T. Mitchell, “The Imperial Landscape,” in Landscape and Power, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 1–34; Alan Wallach, “Making a Picture of the View from Mount Holyoke,” in American Iconology: New Approaches to Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature, ed. David C. Miller (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 80–91; Angela Miller, The Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825–1875 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996). On painting and proprietorship, see Sarah Burns, Pastoral Inventions: Rural Life in American Life and Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989); Elizabeth Johns, American Genre Painting: The Politics of Everyday Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 12–14; Martin Berger, Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 35–40. On landscapes’ and seascapes’ tendency to figure nature as a malleable or wild other, see Roger Stein, The Seascape in American Imagination (New York: Clark N. Potter, 1975), 35–51; David Brigham, “Painting Stories in the Land,” Common-Place (March 2001); Alfred Brophy, “Property and Progress: Antebellum Landscape Art and Property Law,” McGeorge Law Review 40 (2008): 603–59; Philip E. Steinberg, The Social Construction of the Ocean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 118–24; Sophie Lévy, “Mastering the Elements: Prout’s Neck, Maine” in Winslow Homer: Poet of the Sea, ed. Sophie Lévy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 91–93. Manuel Aalbers, The Financialization of Housing: A Political Economy Approach (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2016), 40–63; Raquel Rolnik, Urban Warfare: Housing under the Empire of Finance (New York: Verso Press, 2019); Manuel Aalbers, Rodrigo Fernandez, and Gertjan Wijburg, “The Financialization of Real Estate,” in The Routledge International Handbook of Financialization, ed. Daniel Mertens and Natascha van der Zwan (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2020), 200–12. On contemporary property culture, see Robert Hardaway, The Great American Housing Bubble: The Road to Collapse (New York: Praeger, 2011), 70–72; Shawn Shimpach, “Realty Reality: HGTV and the Subprime Crisis,” American Quarterly (September 2012): 515–42; Mimi White, “Gender Territories: House Hunting on American Real Estate TV,” Television and New Media 14 (May 2013): 228–43. Melissa Garcia-Lamarca, “ ‘Mortgaged Lives’: the Biopolitics of Debt and Housing Financialization,” Transactions 41 (July 2016): 313–27; Josh Ryan-Collins, Why Can’t You Afford a Home? (New York: Wiley, 2018); Ken Hou Lin and Maegan Tobias Neely, Divested: Inequality in the Age of Finance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 111–36. NOTES

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1. LAND, LOOKING, AND FUTURITY IN THE HUDSON VALLEY

1. I am indebted to Catherine Holochwost for calling my attention to Huntington’s participation in this development scheme. 2. American Art and American Art Collections (Boston: E. W. Walker, 1889), 22. 3. On Huntington’s commitment to spiritual didacticism, see Wendy Greenhouse, “Daniel Huntington and the Ideal of Christian Art,” Winterthur Portfolio 31 (Summer/Autumn, 1996): 103–40. On his pro-business portraiture, see Karl Kusserow, “Technology and Ideology in Daniel Huntington’s Atlantic Cable Projectors,” American Art 24 (Spring 2010): 94–113. See also William Gerdts, “Daniel Huntington’s Mercy’s Dream: A Pilgrimage through Bunyanesque Imagery,” Winterthur Portfolio 14 (Summer 1979): 171–94. 4. On the pro-business intellectual tradition among nineteenth-century evangelicals, see Ira Mandelker, Religion, Society, and Utopia in Nineteenth-Century America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984), 23–37; Stewart Davenport, Friends of the Unrighteous Mammon: Northern Christians and Market Capitalism, 1815–1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Eugene McCarraher, The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019), 111–24. 5. Daniel Huntington, “Preface,” in Catalogue of Paintings by Daniel Huntington, N. A. (New York: Snowden, 1850), 8. 6. On Verplanck’s geological composition, see Sidney Paige, “Cambro-Ordovician Age of the Inwood Limestone and Manhattan Schist near Peekskill, New York,” Geological Society of America Bulletin 67 (1956): 391–94. On the Kitchawank and Verplanck, see Reginald Pelham Bolton, “New York City in Indian Possession” in Indian Notes and Monographs 2 (New York: Museum of the American Indian, 1920), 267–68; Timothy Lloyd, T. Arron Kotlensky, and Joel Klein, Phase 1A Cultural Resources Survey, West Point Transmission Project (Croton-on-Hudson, NY: John Milner Associates, 2013), 5–6. 7. On the founding of the Verplanck Point Association, see Verplanck Point Association articles of association, April 29, 1836, Verplanck Collection, Box 1, Folder 1.04, Westchester Historical Society, Westchester, Elmsford, New York (hereafter WCHS). On the development of Verplanck Point, see Robert Bolton, The History of the Several Towns, Manors, and Patents of the County of Westchester, vol. 1 (New York: C. F. Roper, 1881), 164–65; Tema Harnik, “Temperament, Temperance, and Tolerance,” in The Old Croton Aqueduct: Rural Resources Meet Urban Needs (Yonkers, NY: Hudson River Museum of Westchester, 1992), 34–35. 8. On the development of the lower Hudson, see Tom Lewis, The Hudson: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 152–85, 213–24; Rohit Aggarwala, “The Hudson River Railroad and the Development of Irvington, New York 1849–1860,” in America’s First River: The History and Culture of the Hudson River Valley, ed. James Johnson, Christopher Pryslopski, and Thomas Weymouth (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009), 51–77; Maura D’Amore, “Close Remoteness along the Hudson,” Early American Studies 7 (Fall 2009): 366–83; Vernon Benjamin, The History of the Hudson River Valley, from Wilderness to the Civil War (New York: Overlook Press, 2014), 401–18; Robert Marchant, Westchester, History of an Iconic Suburb (New York: McFarland, 2018), 41–49. For period references to lower Hudson development ventures, see “Building Lots for Sale,” New York Evening Post, December 3, 1836, 4; “New Sing Sing,” Westchester Herald, October 4, 1836, 3. 9. Phillip Verplanck to John Henry, Enoch Wiswall, Philologus Holly, William Bleakley Jr., Henry B. Greenwood, and Allen W. Hardie, April 29, 1836, Verplanck Collection, Box 1, Folder 1.01; Verplanck Point Association articles of association, April 29, 1836, Verplanck Collection Box 1, Folder 1.04, WCHS. 10. On Cole’s series, see Alan Wallach, “Thomas Cole and the Aristocracy,” in Reading American Art, ed. Marianne Doezema and Elizabeth Milroy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 182

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11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

79–108; Angela Miller, “Thomas Cole and Jacksonian America: The Course of Empire as Political Allegory,” Prospects 14 (1989), reprinted in Critical Issues in American Art: A Book of Readings, ed. Mary Ann Calo (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998), 59–76; Ross Barrett, “Violent Prophecies: Thomas Cole, Republican Aesthetics, and the Political Jeremiad,” American Art 27 (Spring 2013): 24–49. Huntington later described his work in Spencer’s studio as “forwarding back-grounds . . . and occasionally touching-in an original curtain, column, or table-cover.” See Catalogue of Paintings by Daniel Huntington, N. A. (1849), 7–8. Daniel Huntington’s father owned an office building in New York’s financial district, and his uncle Henry (1766–1846) bought up empty lots along the corridor of the not-yet-opened Pacific Street in Brooklyn early in the century. On Benjamin Huntington’s enthusiasm for risky investment, see Jedediah Huntington to Benjamin Huntington, August 15, 1814, Huntington Family Papers, 1792–1901, Archives of American Art, Reel 4857. On his Wall Street property, see Henry O. Dusenberry to Benjamin Huntington, January 16, 1832 [deed], Huntington Family Papers; on Henry Huntington’s land, see Daniel Huntington to Benjamin Huntington, January 24, 1846, and June 2, 1846, Huntington Family Papers. The dates of Huntington’s boardinghouse stay are recorded on an expense notation in the Verplanck Point Association papers; the relevant inscription reads “1836 June 23–Aug 15, To Board for his friend Mr. Huntington at 4 dollars per week for 7 weeks.” See Bill against William Bleakley, Jr. for board for himself and others, July 9, 1836, VPA papers, Box 1, folder 1.16, WCHS. For references to the Association’s formation and internal organization, see Henry Greenwood to Enoch Wiswall, May 24, July 18, 1836, Verplanck Papers, Box 1, Folder 1.03. On the steamboat wharf and station, see Appraisal of Steamboat House built on the dock at Verplanck by Philologus Holly, for the Verplanck Association [undated], Verplanck Papers, Box 1, 1.11; Ellery Ketchum to Philologus Holley, May 31, 1836, Box 1, Folder 1.11. The Association’s model cottages are depicted in William Baker, Verplanck from the Hudson, 1836 (Westchester County Historical Society). A VPA ledger references costs for well digging and street cutting; see entries for October 15 and November 17, 1836, in Verplanck Point Association statement of expenditures May 1836–May 1837, VP, Box 1, Folder 1.17. For references to the Association’s land sales, see Sale of lots at Verplanck by John Henry, Verplanck Papers, Box 1, Folder 1.06. See also John Henry to Cornelius Allison, November 10, 1836, Verplanck Papers, Box 3, Folder 3.06, John Henry to John Chapman Cooke, November 10, 1836, Folder 3.07, John Henry to Hiram Tuthill, November 10, 1836, Folder 3.08, John Henry to James Vandenburgh, November 10, 1836, Folder 3.09. Advertisements for Verplanck appeared in the Albany Argus, Albany Daily Advertiser, Albany Evening Journal, (Haverstraw, NY) North River Times, New York Transcript, New York Commercial Advertiser, New York Herald, New York Evening Post, New York Evening Star, New York American, New York Gazette, New York Express, New York Journal of Commerce, New York Sun, New York Times, and Westchester Spy. Expenses for these advertisements are noted in a VPA ledger; see Folio 9, Verplanck Point Association Real Estate Ledger, Box 2, Verplanck Papers, WCHS. The VPA hired Poughkeepsie land agent Cyrus Latham to survey Verplanck’s site and create a plat for the town in June; the New York lithographer William Baker published a hand-colored promotional town plan in July, and a smaller plan and view in August. See VPA covenant, March 13, 1837, Verplanck Papers Box 3, folder 3.01 and folio 11, Real Estate Ledger, box 2. Huntington’s four Verplanck Point paintings were last exhibited in a comprehensive 1850 show of the artist’s work, held in the American Art Union Galleries; their subsequent fate is obscure. Huntington wrote a midcareer reflection on his early work for that show’s catalogue, which includes a lengthy discussion of his work on Verplanck Point (discussed below). See Catalogue of Paintings by Daniel Huntington, N. A. (1850), 6–9. NOTES

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16. “The Verplanck Point Association,” New York Evening Post, August 13, 1836, 3. 17. For a period reference to Verplanck Point’s revolutionary history, see The Tourist or Pocket Manual for Travelers on the Hudson River (Albany: J. & J. Harper, 1830), 16–17. 18. Many VPA advertisements speak to the town’s future incorporation in Hudson River steam routes; see, for example, “The Verplanck Point Association,” New York Evening Post, August 13, 1836, 3. 19. Many other VPA promotions used the themes of historicity and modern progress to similar ends. Alfred Baker’s promotional engraving Verplanck (1836, Westchester County Historical Society) similarly encodes its projective scene of bustling life and dense development with prominent evocations of Jacksonian technological and economic progress (steamboat) and the Revolutionary past (the Battery). 20. Freeman Hunt, Letters about the Hudson River and Its Vicinity (New York: Freeman Hunt, 1837), 14, 22–23, 30, 32, 52–59, 96–102, 151. 21. For a period reference to these notes, see ibid., 57. For an illustration of this banknote, see Numismatic & Antiquarian Service Corporation of America, The Jack Guevrekian Collection, January 21 & 22, 1977 (New York: NASCA, 1977): cat. no. 957. 22. On the bank’s chartering, see “Legislative Acts,” New York Evening Post, May 3, 1833, 2; on its overleveraged lending practices, see “Report of the committee on banking and insurance companies,” Documents of the Senate of the State of New York 27 (1835): 15. 23. Other examples include John V. Cornell, View of the Hudson Highlands from Ruggles House, Newburgh, N.Y. (1838, New York Historical Society); Robert Havell, Sunset Near Sing Sing (before 1843, private collection); Thomas Doughty, Hudson River from Fishkill Landing (1840, Currier Museum of Art). 24. William H. Colyer, Sketches of the North River (New York: William H. Colyer, 1838), 53; “Grassy Point House,” Boston Traveler, June 2, 1835, 3; “Public Sales,” New York Commercial Advertiser, March 9, 1840, 3; advertisement for Sloop James Osborn, New York Evening Star, January 7, 1835, 3; Frank Bertangue Green, The History of Rockland County (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1886), 431–33. 25. See, for example, Theodore Dwight, The Northern Traveller and Northern Tour (New York: J. & J. Harper, 1831), 20–21; Fanny Kemble, Journal of a Residence in America (Paris: A. & W. Galignani, 1835), 145; Colyer, Sketches of the North River, 55–56. 26. Huntington makes no mention of the landscape project in the otherwise detailed account of his doings that he included in an August 20, 1836, letter to his friend Charles Loring Elliott; this omission suggests that the artist had turned his attentions from the project. See Daniel Huntington to Charles Loring Elliott, August 20, 1836, Daniel Huntington Letters, mss 69584a, Connecticut Historical Society. 27. The land agents Allen W. Hardie and William Valentine (who were also members of the VPA) hosted meetings of VPA trustees and marketed the company’s properties from their office at 11 Wall Street. See “The Verplanck Point Association,” New York Evening Post, August 13, 1836, 3; Henry Greenwood, John Henry, and William Bleakley to Enoch Wiswall (undated), Verplanck Papers, Box 1, Folder 1.03, WCHS. 28. See Phillip Verplanck to John Henry, Enoch Wiswall, Philologus Holly, William Bleakley Jr., Henry B. Greenwood, and Allen W. Hardie, April 29, 1836, Verplanck Papers, Box 1, Folder 1.01, WCHS. 29. VPA Articles of association, April 29, 1836, Verplabck Papers, Box 1, Folder 1.01, WCHS. 30. VPA records indicate that the company’s lot sales between November 1, 1836, and April 15, 1837, brought in only $30,985. See Sales of Lots at Verplanck by John Henry, Verplanck Papers, Box 1, Folder 1.06, WCHS. 31. See Report by the committee appointed Oct 2 1837, Verplanck Papers, Box 1, Folder 1.22. 184

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32. Nearly all of the dry goods and furnishings dealers that the VPA patronized are listed as lot owners in the VPA account book; see VPA Real Estate Ledger, Verplanck Papers, Box 2, WCHS. Cyrus Latham seems to have gone unpaid for at least one surveying project on Verplanck Point. See Cyrus Latham to Colonel Enoch Wiswell, June 27, 1837, Verplanck Papers, Box 1, Folder 1.20, WCHS. 33. The VPA took out advertisments in spring 1837 in an attempt to dispel rumors that the company was bankrupt. See untitled advertisement, New York Herald, May 31, 1837, 3. 34. Bolton, History of the Several Towns, 164–65. 35. For references to the artist’s precarious financial situation, see Daniel Huntington (phial) to Benjamin Huntington, date unknown; Daniel Huntington to Benjamin Huntington, November 30, 1842; Daniel Huntington to Benjamin Huntington, December 28, 1842; Daniel Huntington Papers, Reel 4857, AAA. 36. In 1836, Huntington’s submission to the National Academy of Design annual exhibition included one portrait (out of four pictures); he submitted two portraits (out of five) in the following year, six (out of twelve) in 1838, three (out of four) in 1839, two (out of four) in 1840, and three (out of four) in 1841. See Mary Cowdrey, National Academy of Design Exhibition Record, 1826–1860, vol. 1 (New York: New-York Historical Society, 1943), 245–46. 37. Daniel Huntington to Benjamin Huntington, June 21, 1846, Daniel Huntington Papers, Reel 4857, AAA. 38. Daniel Huntington to Benjamin Huntington January 24, 1846, Daniel Huntington Papers. For references to Huntington’s investments in stocks and shares, see Daniel Huntington to Benjamin Huntington, December 22, 1846, and Daniel Huntington to Benjamin Huntington, July 16, 1847, Daniel Huntington Papers. 39. Catalogue of Paintings by Daniel Huntington, N. A. (1849), 8. 40. For references to Huntington’s 1837 trip, see “D. Huntington Dead,” New York Tribune, April 20, 1906, 7; Greenhouse, “Daniel Huntington and the Ideal of Christian Art,” 107. For a list of works produced on that excursion, see Catalogue of Paintings by Daniel Huntington, N. A. (1850), 17–20. 41. Catalogue of Paintings by Daniel Huntington, N. A. (1850), 19. 42. “Critical Notices,” American Monthly Magazine (1836): 319; William Macleod, Harper’s New York and Erie Railroad Guide Book (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1856), 24; “Notes of the Catskill Range,” Forest and Stream, December 14, 1876, 289; J. H. French, Gazetteer of the State of New York (New York: R. P. Smith, 1861), 664. 43. On the Leather Man, see Dan W. De Luca, The Old Leather Man (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008). For an account of an itinerant family moving along Peekskill Creek, see “An Affecting Scene,” Newark Daily Advertiser, May 5, 1840, 2. 44. For a reference to white travelers carrying a stick and bundle, see “Yankee Obstinancy,” Newburyport Herald, April 1, 1834, 2. The stick and bundle was also a standard element of fugitive slave images in the period. See David Waldstreicher, “Reading the Runaways: Self-Fashioning, Print Culture, and Confidence in Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century Mid Atlantic,” William and Mary Quarterly 56 (April 1999): 243–72; Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America (New York: Routledge, 2000), 78–92. 45. Jessica Lepler, The Many Panics of 1837: People, Politics, and the Creation of a Transatlantic Financial Crisis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 123–56. 46. See, for example, “Speculation! Speculation!! Speculation!!!,” National Gazette, reprinted in Niles Weekly Register 48 (May 9, 1835): 167; George Putnam, The Signs of the Times: A Sermon Preached on Sunday, March 6, 1836 (Boston: Charles J. Hendee, 1836), 14. For a scholarly analysis of the period tendency to read speculation as a mania or spirit, see Ann Fabian, “Speculation on NOTES

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47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55.

56.

57. 58. 59. 60.

186

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Distress: The Popular Discourses of the Panics of 1837 and 1857,” Yale Journal of Criticism 3 (Fall 1989): 127–42. Benjamin Foster, The Merchant’s Manual (Boston: Perkins & Marvin, 1838), 32. “A Chapter on the Times,” Columbian Register, September 16, 1837, 4. “Close Questions,” Augusta Age, September 6, 1837, 3. See, for example, “For the Chronicle,” Hudson River Chronicle, September 18, 1838, 2; and untitled article, New York Evening Post, April 30, 1839, 2. Geoffrey Crayon [Washington Irving], “Sleepy Hollow,” Knickerbocker (May 1839): 408–9. Ibid., 410–11. Greenhouse, “Daniel Huntington and the Ideal of Christian Art,” 107–8. On Huntington’s upbringing, see ibid., 105–7. For correspondence that speaks to his family’s piety, see Jedediah Huntington to Benjamin Huntington, January 7, 1814, Huntington papers, Reel 4857, AAA. The artist alludes to the carefree character of his college years in an 1836 letter to his friend Charles Loring Elliott; see Huntington to Elliot, August 20, 1836, Connecticut Historical Society. For letters that speak to his piety and sense of duty, see Daniel Huntington to Gurdon Huntington, January 16, 1844; Daniel Huntington to Gurdon Huntington, May 24, 1844; Daniel Huntington to Benjamin Huntington, June 21, 1846; Daniel Huntington to Gurdon Huntington, May 30, 1875; Daniel Huntington to Channing Huntington, January 20, 1876, Huntington papers. The artist painted portraits of several evangelical ministers and went to listen to others, including Henry Boardman (who was also a pro-business economist); see Daniel Huntington to Benjamin Huntington, date unknown; Daniel Huntington to Benjamin Huntington, December 28, 1842; Daniel Huntington to Gurdon Huntington December 28, 1845, Huntington papers. For period aesthetic accounts of ideal, moralizing painting, see “Institution for the Fine Arts,” North American Review 2 (January 1816): 163; untitled article, Analectic (March 9, 1818): 225; Giulian C. Verplanck, “An Address Delivered at the Opening of the Tenth Exhibition of the American Academy of the Fine Arts,” reprinted in Giulian Verplanck, Discourses and Addresses (New York: J & J Harper, 1833), 121–52; Edward Otheman, “The Moral Influence of the Fine Arts,” Methodist Magazine and Quarterly Review (July 1, 1835): 318–30; Charles Fraser, “An Essay on the Condition and Prospects of the Art of Painting in the United States of America,” American Monthly Magazine (November 1835): 213–20; Orville Dewey, “Introductory Lecture before the Apollo Association in New York,” New World 1 (July 4, 1840): 65; DeWitt Clinton, “Address to the American Academy of Fine Arts” (1816), reprinted in Thomas Seir Cummings, Historical Annals of the National Academy of Design (Philadelphia: George W. Childs, 1865), 8–17. For analyses of Bunyan’s second part, see Margaret Thickstun, “From Christiana to Stand-Fast: Subsuming the Feminine in The Pilgrim’s Progress,” Studies in English Language 26 (Summer 1986): 439–53; Bethany Joy Bear, “Fantastical Faith: John Bunyan and the Sanctification of Fancy,” Studies in Philology (Fall 2012): 671–701; Margaret Olofson, “The Pilgrim’s Progress, Part II,” in The Oxford Handbook of John Bunyan, ed. Michael Davies and W. R. Owens (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 308–24. John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress: Part II [1684] (London: H. Mozley, 1805), 149; Thickstun, “From Christiana to Stand-Fast,” 439–40; Bear, “Fantastical Faith,” 684–98. Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress: Part II, 185. Reaffirming this idea, Christiana replies to Mercy’s story by quoting a passage in Job on God’s propensity to visit the faithful in their dreams. See Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress: Part II, 185. “National Academy of Design,” New York Commercial Advertiser, August 13, 1841, 1; “Huntington’s Paintings,” New York Evening Post, March 18, 1843, 2; “Huntington’s Pictures,” New World, March 18, 1843, 336.

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61. For critical appreciations of Huntington’s landscape setting, see “National Academy of Design,” Iris (June 1841): 402; “National Academy of Design,” Knickerbocker (July 1841): 86; “Exhibition of the Artist’s Fund Society,” Philadelphia Saturday Courier, May 21, 1842, 2; “The Gift,” Boston Traveler, October 11, 1842, 2; “Mercy’s Dream,” New York Commercial Advertiser, March 25, 1843, 2; “Huntington’s Pictures from Pilgrim’s Progress,” New York Evangelist, April 20, 1843, 2; “Exhibition of Paintings,” Philadelphia North American, January 1, 1844, 2; “The Huntington Gallery,” New York Commercial Advertiser, February 28, 1850, 2. 62. “The Gift,” Boston Traveler, October 11, 1842, 2; “The Huntington Gallery,” New York Commercial Advertiser, February 28, 1850, 2; “Huntington’s Pictures from Pilgrim’s Progress,” New York Evangelist, April 20, 1843, 2; “Mercy’s Dream,” New York Commercial Advertiser, March 25, 1843, 2. 63. On land looking, see Denis Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 165; Donald Dickmann, The Forests of Michigan (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016), 126–29. 64. “The Land Fever,” Nantucket Inquirer, September 21, 1840, 1. 65. “Recollections of the Land-Fever,” Knickerbocker (September 1840): 205. 66. “The Verplanck Point Association,” New York Evening Post, August 13, 1836, 3. The same advertisement appeared in the New York Evening Star, New York Commercial Advertiser, New York American, and Westchester Herald in August and September of 1836. 67. Stewart Davenport, Friends of the Unrighteous Mammon: Northern Christians and Market Capitalism, 1815–1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2008), 1–15, 191–207. See also Mandelker, Religion, Society, and Utopia in Nineteenth-Century America, 23–36; Fabian, “Speculation on Distress,” 129–32; McCarraher, The Enchantments of Mammon, 125–36. 68. “Huntington’s Pictures from Pilgrim’s Progress,” New York Evangelist, April 20, 1843, 2. This phrase comes from the title of the Puritan thinker Robert Downame’s 1633 tract The Christian Warfare against the Devil, the World, and the Flesh. 69. For examples of evangelical writings that decried speculation as a deviation from an otherwise virtuous economic system, see Samuel J. May, These Bad Times the Product of Bad Morals (Boston: I. Knapp, 1837); Henry Vethake, The Principles of Political Economy (Philadelphia: P. H. Nicklin & T. Johnson, 1838), 178–79, 232–33; Orville Dewey, “On the Moral End of Business” [1838], in The Works of the Rev. Orville Dewey (London: Simms & McIntyre, 1844), 176–88; Amos Blanchard, A Sermon in Reference to the State of the Times (Concord, MA: Observer Press, 1838). 70. Dewey, “On the Moral End of Business,” 181. For another ministerial thinker who associated speculation with an abandonment of future-minded contemplations of heaven and the afterlife, see Vethake, Principles of Political Economy, 115–16. 71. Dewey, “On the Moral End of Business,” 182. 72. See, for example, George Ripley, The Temptations of the Times (Boston: Hilliard, Gray, 1837); Nathan Frothingham, The Duties of Hard Times (Boston: Munroe & Francis, 1837). 73. Greenhouse, “Daniel Huntington and the Ideal of Christian Art,” 108; Daniel Huntington to Benjamin Huntington, May 19, 1842. The artist frequently mentioned his eye malady in his letters. See, for example, Daniel Huntington to Benjamin Huntington, November 23, 1842; Daniel Huntington to Benjamin Huntington, November 30, 1842; Daniel Huntington to Benjamin Huntington, December 28, 1842; Daniel Huntington to Benjamin Huntington January 20, 1843; and Daniel Huntington to Bejamin Huntington, August 22, 1843, Huntington papers, AAA. See also Daniel Huntington to Charles Loring Elliott, April 8, 1842, Connecticut Historical Society. On the implications of impaired vision for art making in the antebellum period, see Peter John Brownlee, The Commerce of Vision: Optical Culture and Perception in Antebellum America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 17–73. 74. Huntington to Elliott, April 8, 1842. NOTES

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2. DIGGING FOR GOLD

1. “Bedean to Quidor,” Adams County Deed Record Book A, Deed 158, p. 142, Adams County Recorder of Deeds, Quincy, Illinois. 2. On the Illinois land rush, see Theodore L. Carlson, The Illinois Military Tract: A Study of Land Occupation, Utilization, and Tenure (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press 1951), 1–65; A. M. Sakolski, The Great American Land Bubble (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1932), 169–91. 3. For a recounting of Quidor’s land dealings, see Christopher Kent Wilson, “The Life and Work of John Quidor” (PhD dissertation, Yale University, 1982), 95–148. 4. The great bulk of Quidor research has presented the artist’s real estate dealings as an interesting sideline to his painterly work; see, for example, David Sokol, “John Quidor, Literary Painter,” American Art Journal 2 (Spring 1970): 60–73. Sharpening this line of analysis, Alexander Nemerov has recently suggested that Quidor’s artistic and speculative pursuits were essentially antithetical in character; arguing that Quidor’s painting entailed an imaginative reach for worlds “absolutely apart” from the banal concerns of material reality, Nemerov casts the artist’s real estate investments as workaday obligations that faded from consideration once he took up brush and palette. See Alexander Nemerov, “Art Is Not the Archive,” Archives of American Art Journal 56 (Fall 2017): 80. For the most insightful previous analyses of Quidor’s 1832 iteration of Money Diggers, see Sarah Burns, Painting the Dark Side: Art and the Gothic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 101–27; and Bryan Jay Wolf, Romantic Re-vision: Culture and Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century American Painting and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 119–30. 5. In so doing, I take up a specific thread of interpretation that Burns identifies in her study but does not follow out; she notes that “at one level Money Diggers satirizes the new market conditions of Jacksonian America,” but concentrates on the work’s exploration of antebellum racial anxieties. See Burns, Painting the Dark Side, 108. 6. Ibid., 106–8. 7. On the pervasiveness of speculation and the financial boom of the 1830s, see Robert Sobel, Panic on Wall Street: A History of America’s Financial Disasters (New York: Beard Books, 1999), 33–76; Stephen Mihm, A Nation of Counterfeiters (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 103–56; Edward E. Baptist, “Toxic Debt, Liar Loans, Collateralized and Securitized Human Beings, and the Panic of 1837,” in Capitalism Takes Command: The Social Transformation of Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Gary Kornblith and Michael Zakim (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 69–92; Joshua Rothman, Flush Times and Fever Dreams: A Story of Capitalism and Slavery (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012); Jessica Lepler, The Many Panics of 1837: People, Politics, and the Creation of a Transatlantic Financial Crisis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 1–72. 8. On popular concern about speculation, see Ann Fabian, “Speculation on Distress: The Popular Discourse of the Panics of 1837 and 1857,” Yale Journal of Criticism 3 (Fall 1989): 127–42; Lepler, Many Panics of 1837, 70–81. 9. See, for example, “Law Case—Common Pleas: Quidor vs. Jarvis,” National Advocate, May 28, 1823, 2. 10. “Halsey to Quidor,” Adams County Deed Record Book A, deed 159, p. 143. 11. On the formation of the IMT, see Carlson, Illinois Military Tract, 1–9. 12. I draw here on David Harvey’s well-known analysis of nineteenth-century land markets in The Limits to Capital; demonstrating that in buying land speculators sought to obtain “a claim upon anticipated future revenues” (rather than the proceeds from some established productive use of the land), Harvey shows that speculative transactions remade land into a form of “fictitious 188

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13.

14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

20.

21. 22.

23.

capital,” or a tradable asset whose value was based entirely on an expected but unrealized future return. See David Harvey, The Limits to Capital (New York: Verso, 2006), 266–70, 367–72. On Peter Quidor’s dealings with the Berrians, see “Peter Quidor to GW Berrian,” Adams County Deed Record Book A, deed 171, p. 153. After amassing a large holding of IMT lots (at least 140,000 acres worth), the brothers Richard and Samuel Berrian founded a land agency on Wall Street in 1818; Richard’s nephew George W. Berrian joined the firm in 1819 and oversaw its sales and development activities in Quincy until at least 1848. See “Important to the Purchasers of Military Bounty Lands,” New York Columbian, March 11, 1818, 3; David Wilcox, Quincy and Adams County History and Representative Men I (Chicago: Lewis, 1919), 152–53; David F. Wilcox, Representative Men and Homes, Quincy, Illinois (Quincy: Volk, Jones, and McMein, 1899), 122; Paul Wallace Gates, The Illinois Central Railroad and Its Colonization Work (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934), 38; George Washington Berrian letters, Dan Weed Correspondence, Folder 1, Letters 34–63, Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. “Quidor to Smithwaite,” Adams County Deed Record Book E, deed 2127, p. 179; “Quidor to Wells and Smith,” Book H, deed 3487, p. 297. “Commissioner to Quidor,” Book H, deed 3702, pp. 625–26; “Commissioner to Quidor,” Book H, deed 3703, pp. 626–27; “Quidor to Roe and Wells,” Book H, deed 3704, p. 628. On May 1, 1837, Quidor bought three parcels of land (totaling 255 acres) for $318.35 at a public auction; see Illinois Public Land Tract Sales Database: https://www.ilsos.gov/isa/landSalesSearch.do. He then sold these parcels to Basil Stevenson on September 25, 1837; see Adams County Deed Record Book J, No. 3917, pp. 347–48. See “Harkins to Quidor,” Book Q, deed 957, p. 6; “Quidor to Harkins,” Book U, deed 3658, p. 418; “Quidor to Seaton,” Book W, deed 5096, pp. 662–63. Washington Irving, “The Money Diggers,” in Tales of a Traveller (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1889), 517–46. Many scholarly interpretations of “Wolfert Webber” have focused on its conclusion; stressing the eponymous colonist’s final windfall, Jennifer Baker and David Anthony have argued that “Wolfert Webber” ultimately sanctions speculative dealing as a form of creative “headwork” or a means of reconsolidating gender identities unsettled by capitalism. While helpfully analyzing one thread of the narrative’s engagement with real estate chicanery, these studies obscure the account of land speculation offered by the story’s main body. See Jennifer Baker, Securing the Commonwealth: Debt, Speculation, and Writing in the Making of Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 157–67; David Anthony, “Gone Distracted: Sleepy Hollow, Gothic Masculinity, and the Panic of 1819,” Early American Literature 40 (2005): 137–39. Thomas Jefferson to Colonel Charles Yancey, January 6, 1816, reprinted in The Works of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 11, ed. Paul Ford (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904): 494. On economic modernization, see Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 104–36; Anthony, “Gone Distracted,” 118–25. Irving, “Money Diggers,” 536–37. On beauty and settlement, see Edward Cahill, Liberty of the Imagination: Aesthetic Theory, Literary Form, and Politics in the Early United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 100–24; Robert Clark, “The Absent Landscape of America’s Eighteenth Century,” in Views of American Landscapes, ed. Mick Gidley and Robert Lawson-Peebles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 88–95; Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), 86–128; Denis Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 175–80. Timothy Dwight, Travels in New-England and New-York I (London: William Baynes and Son, 1823): 183. On agrarian celebrations of the farm, see Marx, Machine in the Garden, 114–28; NOTES

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24.

25. 26.

27.

28.

29. 30. 31.

32. 33.

34.

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Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape, 175–79. For other period treatments of beauty, see “From a letter of M. St Jean de Crevecouer, dated August 26, 1784,” reprinted in Historical Collections of the Essex Institute 25 (July–September, 1888): 173; Celadon, A Golden Age (unknown publisher, 1785), 10; John Filson, The Discovery, Settlement, and Present State of Kentucky (London: John Stockdale, 1793), 32; Philip Stansbury, A Pedestrian Tour of Two Thousand Three Hundred Miles in North America (New York: J. D. Myers, 1822), 55–56; Nathaniel Parker Willis, American Scenery I (London: George Virtue, 1840), 1–2. On painterly representations of agrarian beauty, see Angela Miller, “The Fate of Wilderness in American Landscape Art: The Dilemmas of ‘Nature’s Nation,’ ” in A Keener Perception: Ecocritical Studies in American Art History, ed. Alan Braddock and Christoph Irmscher (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009), 94–100; Edward Nygren, Views and Visions: American Landscape before 1830 (Washington, DC: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1986), 32–37. On Earl’s landscape, see American Encounters: Art, History, and Cultural Identity, ed. Angela Miller, Janet Berlo, Bryan Wolf, and Jennifer Roberts (New York: Pearson, 2008), 243; David Brigham, “Painting Stories in the Land,” Common-Place 1 (April 2001), http://www.common-place.org/vol-01/no-03/lessons/. On Peale’s canvas, see Nygren, Views and Visions, 128, 278–80. Thomas Doughty, Thomas Burch, Jonathan Fisher, and Alvan Fisher all regularly painted beautiful farmscapes in this period. Cahill, Liberty of the Imagination, 99–104. Jonathan Freeman [Morris Birkbeck], “To the Editor of the Illinois Gazette,” reprinted in George Flower, History of the English Settlement in Edwards County, Illinois (Albion, IL: Fergus Printing Company, 1882), 231. “Quincy,” Illinois Monthly Magazine (February 2, 1832): 212. For other examples, see John Mason Peck, A Gazetteer of Illinois (Philadelphia: Grigg & Elliot, 1837), 132–33; “Pittsfield,” Bounty Land Register, August 28, 1835, 1. For other prints that use a similar composition, see George Harley, “Maysville, on the Ohio,” in Adlard Welby, A Visit to North America and the English Settlements in Illinois (1821); C. G. Childs, “View of Pittsburgh” and “View of Frankfort,” in James Hall, The Western Souvenir (Cincinnati: N. & G. Guilford, 1828); Samuel M. Lee, “Cincinnati, Ohio,” in Samuel Cumings, The Western Pilot (Cincinnati: N. & G. Guilford, 1829): 58; Hermann Meyer, “Kaskaskia,” in Meyer’s Universum, vol. 18 (Hildburghausen: Verlag des bibliographischen Instituts, 1857), following page 157. On the objectifying forces of the land market, see Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 33–41. On Quidor’s command of the landscape genre, see “Law Case-Common Pleas: Quidor vs. Jarvis,” National Advocate, May 28, 1823, 2. Richard Lee Mason, Narrative of Richard Lee Mason in the Pioneer West [1819] (New York: Charles Frederick Heartman, 1915), 66–67. For other period accounts of speculative developments, see William Oliver, Eight Months in Illinois [1843] (Chicago: Walter M. Hill, 1924), 41, 54; John Woods, Two-Year Residence in the Settlement on the English Prairie in the Illinois Country (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown, 1822), 329. “A Prairie Voyage,” Western Messenger 4 (October 1837): 103. Henry Fearon, Sketches of America (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown, 1818): 265. For another source that questioned the viability of western settlement, see “Some of the Blessings of Emigrating to the North-West States,” Farmers’ Register 6 (December 1, 1838): 522. Samuel G. Berrian, St. Louis, to Dr. I. M. Francis, New York, March 26, 1818, reprinted in Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 2 (April 1918): 62–63. The most extensive discussion (and celebration) of Illinois soil appears in Nicholas Van Zandt, A Full Description of the Soil, Water, Timber, and Prairies of Each Lot, or Quarter Section of the Military Lands between the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers (Washington, DC: P. Force, 1818).

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35. “Lots for Sale,” New York Columbian, May 8, 1818, 3. For other examples, see “Pittsfield,” Illinois Bounty Land Register, August 28, 1835, 1; “The Town of Columbus,” Illinois Bounty Land Register, February 5, 1836, 1. 36. On Cairo, see Nick Yablon, Untimely Ruins: An Archaeology of American Urban Modernity, 1819– 1919 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 63–79, 95–97; Charles Garnett, State Banks of Issue in Illinois (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois, 1898), 5–9. 37. On the symbolic function of banknotes, see Jennifer Roberts, Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 119–26. 38. Burns, Painting the Dark Side, 106–20. 39. Marc Shell, Art & Money (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 60–79. 40. See, for example, “The Mammoth Bank,” Workingman’s Advocate, June 1, 1833, 4. On American reinvigorations of the money devil, see Shell, Art & Money, 54–77. 41. Quidor’s figure seems to echo and extend deep-rooted cultural and legal discourses that linked blackness with the objecthood and alienability of the commodity (and, in some instances, explicitly equated the black body with money). On these discourses, see Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106 (1993): 1716–20. 42. Washington Irving, “The Devil and Tom Walker,” in Tales of a Traveller (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1889), 453–56. 43. Harriet Martineau, Society in America I (Paris: Baudry’s European Library, 1837), 109. On Irving’s imaginative engagements with expansion, see Peter Antelyes, Tales of Adventurous Enterprise: Washington Irving and the Poetics of Western Expansion (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 4–54. On the racial dynamics of expansion, see Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 1–7, 21–44. 44. On Quidor’s later interpretations of Irving’s devil, see Burns, Painting the Dark Side, 120–23. 45. See Winstanley Briggs, “Le Pays des Illinois,” William and Mary Quarterly 47 (1990): 30–56; Winstanley Briggs, “A Most Peculiar Institution: Slavery in French Colonial Illinois,” Chicago History 18 (1989–90): 61–81; John Hammond, Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion in the Early American West (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007), 96–123; Kurt E. Leichte and Bruce Carveth, Crusade against Slavery: Edward Coles, Pioneer of Freedom (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2011), 71–129. 46. George W. Smith, “The Salines of Southern Illinois,” Transactions of the Illinois State Historical Society 9 (1904): 245–58; Leichte and Carveth; Leichte and Carveth, Crusade against Slavery, 75–77. 47. Christopher Lehman, Slavery in the Upper Mississippi Valley, 1787–1865: A History of Human Bondage in Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin (New York: McFarland, 2011), 38–56. 48. On lead-mining techniques, see The History of Jo Daviess County (Chicago: H. F. Kett, 1878), 835–36. 49. On salt-mining techniques, see Smith, “Salines of Southern Illinois,” 252–58. 50. “To the Editor of the Illinois Gazette” (1823), reprinted in George Flower, History of the English Settlement in Edwards County, Illinois, vol. 1 (Chicago: Fergus Printing Company, 1882), 217. On the struggle over slavery in Illinois, see Eugene Berwanger, The Frontier against Slavery: Western Anti-Negro Prejudice and the Slavery Extension Controversy (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 4–17. 51. The Injurious Effects of Slave Labor (Philadelphia, 1824), 15–16; this pamphlet was reprinted in London by Ellerton and Henderson in 1824. The pamphlet is accessible at https://archive.org /details/injuriouseffects00phil. For another antislavery pamphlet inspired by the Illinois controversy, see Remarks to the Citizens of Illinois on the Proposed Introduction of Slavery (Vandalia, IL, 1824), which is accessible at https://archive.org/details/remarksaddressed00coff /mode/2up?ref=ol&view=theater. NOTES

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52. On the Black Hawk War, see Patrick Jung, The Black Hawk War of 1832 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007). 53. For a triumphalist account of the removal of Illinois natives, see Timothy Flint, Indian Wars of the West (Cincinnati, OH: E. H. Flint, 1833), 230–38. George Catlin’s portrait Múk-a-tah-mish-okáh-kaik, Black Hawk, Prominent Sac Chief (1832, Smithsonian American Art Museum) offers a more respectful interpretation of the primary warrior associated with the 1832 campaign (though it was also underwritten by expansionist ideology). 54. William Cullen Bryant, “The Prairies” [1833] in Poems (London: William Smith, 1841), 10, 11. 55. On the poem’s affirmation of expansion, see James Hurt, Writing Illinois: The Prairie, Lincoln, and Chicago (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 18–24; Antelyes, Tales of Adventurous Enterprise, 19, 125. 56. The theme of entombment also calls into question promotional imaginings of western earth, refiguring the “verdant” soil of the frontier as a matrix composed of the “dust” of past generations. 57. Many scholars have insightfully analyzed the intense misgivings that freighted nineteenthcentury cultural representations of native removal and “extinction.” See, for example, Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 101–30; Eric Sundquist, Empire and Slavery in American Literature, 1820–1865 (Oxford: University of Mississippi Press, 1995), 71–77; Gordon Sayre, Indian Chief as Tragic Hero: Native Resistance and the Literatures of America, from Moctezuma to Tecumseh (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Andy Doolen, Territories of Empire: U.S. Writing from the Louisiana Purchase to Mexican Independence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 151–57. 58. See, for example, “Western Scenery,” Western Monthly Magazine 3 (July 1834): 354–56. 59. On the “empty” frontier myth, see Richard Slotkin, Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996), 51–55, 78–80; Donald Pease, “Between the Homeland and Abu Ghraib: Dwelling in Bush’s Biopolitical Settlement,” in Exceptional State: Contemporary U.S. Culture and the New Imperialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 63–65; Walter Hixson, American Settler Colonialism: A History (New York: Palgrave, 2013), 11–12, 63–65. 60. This allegorical cut had an extended cultural life. From 1835–36, the Illinois Bounty Land Register employed it as a central element of its masthead; it also appeared in the upper left corner of some Illinois Military Tract land patents. See, for example, James Oneal Land Deed, record group 49, Military Bounty-Land Warrants Under the Act of 1812, no. 1–28085 (NAID 4923870), National Archives, Washington, DC; and Amasa Turner Land Deed, SPECCOL SMS 1980–22, Regional History Collection, Western Illinois University Archives and Special Collections. 61. Sarah Burns has insightfully analyzed Quidor’s inclination toward irreverence and provocation; see Burns, Painting the Dark Side, 103–6. 62. Wilson, “Life and Work of John Quidor,” 15–16; Alice Munro Haagensen, Palisades & Snedens Landing, ed. Alice Gerard (Palisades, NY: Alice Gerard, 2014), 203–4. 63. Wilson, “Life and Work of John Quidor,” 15–16. 64. Walter J. Persil to Peter Quidor, January 5, 1804, Bergen County Recorder of Deeds, Deed Book S, p. 28, retrieved from http://files.usgwarchives.net/nj/bergen/land/deed-s.txt. For another Quidor family transaction, see Peter Quidore [sic] to John Parsel, September 29, 1801, Bergen County Recorder of Deeds, Deed Book Z, p. 183, retrieved from http://files.usgwarchives.net/nj /bergen/land/deed-z.txt. 65. On the history of slavery in Rockland and Bergen Counties, see Frank Bertangue Green, The History of Rockland County (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1886), 279–82; Carl Nordstrom, “Slavery in a New York County: Rockland 1686–1827,” Afro Americans in New York Life and History 1 (July 192

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66.

67.

68.

69.

70. 71.

72.

73. 74. 75. 76.

1977): 145–66; Graham Russell Hodges, Slavery, Freedom & Culture among Early American Workers (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1998), 28–58. Joan Cook, “Sandstone Houses of Old Go on View,” New York Times, October 16, 1983; Paul Mattingly, Suburban Landscapes: Culture and Politics in a New York Metropolitan Community (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 26–28; Rebecca Ginsburg, Slavery in the City: Architecture and Landscapes of Urban Slavery in North America (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017), 59–60. On New York’s role as hub of western land investment, see John D. Haeger, The Investment Frontier: New York Businessmen and the Economic Development of the Old Northwest (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981). For scholarly accounts of speculating New Yorkers, see Mentor Williams, “Philip Hone, Wisconsin Land Speculator,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 33 (June 1950): 479–84; David Baxter, “William Cullen Bryant: Illinois Landowner,” Western Illinois Regional Studies 1 (1978): 1–14; Edward Balleisin, Navigating Failure: Bankruptcy and Commercial Society in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 63–64; Christine T. Robinson, “Thomas Cole: Drawn to Nature,” in Thomas Cole: Drawn to Nature, ed. Christine T. Robinson (Albany, NY: Albany Institute of History and Art, 1993), 71–72. A variety of creative cultural interpretations of speculation and the land market could be found in New York in the 1830s; these include William Sidney Mount’s The Raffle (shown at the National Academy in 1837), Richard Carlson’s play “Western Waters” (which appeared at the Hudson Theater in 1837), and Frederick Shelton’s short story “The Kushow Property” (which appeared in The Knickerbocker in 1838). Looking back at Quidor’s Rip Van Winkle (1829, Art Institute of Chicago), an 1833 New York Mirror notice argued that the painting was “worth a dozen of ” the artist’s more recent productions. A New York Morning Courier review used more pointed economic language to evaluate Young Artist (1828, Newark Museum), noting that “we . . . will not suffer him [Quidor] to palm upon us specimens, unworthy of his name, without reproof.” Echoing other notices, these reviews employ the rhetoric of market dealing to evaluate Quidor’s paintings: the Mirror critic uses the criterion of exchange value to explain the relative achievements of the artist’s works, while the Courier reviewer invokes a period idiom for commercial swindling (“palming” referred to the disposal of worthless articles by deceptive means) to encapsulate the shortcomings of other pictures. See “American Academy of the Fine Arts,” New York Mirror, June 15, 1833, 398; “Middle-Tint on the Works of Living Artists at the the National Academy of Design,” New York Morning Courier, June 18, 1828, reprinted in Wilson, “Life and Work of John Quidor,” 49. “Miscellaneous Notices of Literature, Fine Arts, Sciences, the Drama: American Academy of Fine Arts,” American Monthly Magazine (July 1, 1833): 329. Christopher Wilson rediscovered the pendant character of these works; see Wilson, “Life and Work of John Quidor,” 176–82. For other treatments of these pictures, see Roger Panetta, Dutch New York: The Roots of Hudson Valley Culture (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 234–36; Wendy Ikemoto, Antebellum American Pendant Paintings: New Ways of Looking (New York: Routledge, 2017), 36. For examples of pejorative depictions of black terror, see Henry Robinson, Abolition Frowned Down, 1839 (Library of Congress); Nathaniel Currier, The Blessings of Liberty, 1851 (Library of Congress). Irving, “Money Diggers,” 542. Ibid., 545, 546. Ibid., 543. On these conflicting attitudes, see Kenneth Stampp, America in 1857: A Nation on the Brink (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 313–24. NOTES

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77. “Lotteries, Gambling,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, February 21, 1855, 2; “False Pride,” Philadelphia Pennsylvanian, June 17, 1856, 4. For similar period assessments, see untitled article, Cadiz Democratic Sentinel, January 17, 1855, 3; “The Spirit of Speculation,” California Farmer and Journal of Useful Sciences, March 16, 1856, 146; “Money Matters,” Boston Herald, November 1, 1856, 4. 78. For documentation of Harrison’s ownership of Money Diggers and Wolfert’s Will, see Catalogue of Pictures, Statuary, and Bronzes in the Gallery of Joseph Harrison, Jr., Rittenhouse Square, Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1870), nos. 63 and 64. On Harrison’s patronage, see Carolyn Sue Himelick Nutty, “Joseph Harrison, Jr.” (PhD dissertation, University of Delaware, 1993): 142–245, 579; “Obituary of Harrison,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society (February 19, 1875): 350. 79. On the Harrison’s Row venture, see Nutty, “Joseph Harrison, Jr.,” 131–33. See also “A Splendid Improvement—A Novel Plan,” Philadelphia Public Ledger, July 9, 1857, 1; “Improvements in the City,” Philadelphia Public Ledger, December 10, 1857, 2; Charles Cohen, Rittenhouse Square, Past and Present (Philadelphia, private printing, 1922), 261–63; Elizabeth Yarnell, Addison Hutton: Quaker Architect 1834–1916 (Philadelphia: Art Alliance Press, 1974), 27. 80. In 1860, for example, Smith stood trial for embezzling $27,000 (about $856,000 in 2021 currency). See “Embezzlement,” New York Commercial Advertiser, May 21, 1860, 3; “Another Heavy Embezzlement,” Albany Evening Journal, May 22, 1860, 2; “Continued,” Daily Missouri Democrat, May 30, 1860, 2; “The Trial of Raphael E. Smith, for Embezzlement,” Daily Missouri Democrat, September 20, 1860, 2; “The Case of Raphael E. Smith,” New York Evening Post, September 21, 1860, 1. For other references to Smith, see untitled article, Quincy Whig, July 18, 1853, 2; advertisement, (St. Louis) Daily Missouri Democrat, July 2, 1860, 5. 81. Adams County Deed Book W, No. 4986, pp. 555–56; Book W, No. 4987, pp. 556–57. 82. For scholarly accounts of this arrangement, see John Baur, John Quidor 1801–81 (New York: Brooklyn Institute, 2942), 12–14, 21; Wilson, “Life and Work of John Quidor,” 125–31; Burns, Painting the Dark Side, 102. 83. Wilson, “Life and Work of John Quidor,” 127. 84. Adams County Deed Book W, No. 4987, pp. 556–57. 85. For period references to this exhibition, see “The Quidor Collection of Paintings,” New York Evening Post, September 23, 1847, 2; “The Quidor Collection” [advertisement], New York Herald, October 22, 1847, 4. 86. For a period reference to this litigation, see Thomas Seir Cummings, Historical Annals of the National Academy of Design (Philadelphia: George W. Childs, 1865), 202. 87. John Quidor (New York) to Stewart L. Woodford (St. Louis), July 13, 1868, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. For a brief discussion of this letter, see Wilson, “Life and Work,” 130; see also Nemerov, “Art Is Not the Archive,” 77. 88. Quidor to Woodford, July 13, 1868. 89. See Irving, “Money Diggers,” 543. 3. PICTURING LAND AND LABOR IN THE OLD NORTHWEST AND NEW ENGLAND

1. Eastman Johnson to Charlotte Child, March 25, 1851, in Teresa Carbone and Patricia Hills [et al.], Eastman Johnson: Painting America (Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Museum of Art, 1999), 238. 2. On houses, see Teresa Carbone, “From Crayon to Brush: The Education of Eastman Johnson, 1840–1858,” in Carbone and Hills, Eastman Johnson: Painting America, 11; on the canal project, see “Cumberland & Oxford Canal,” Portland Independent Statesman, March 22, 1823, 3. 3. On Johnson’s midcentury affiliation and Civil War era with the Republican Party, see Suzaan Boettger, “Eastman Johnson’s ‘Blodgett Family’ and Domestic Values during the Civil War Era,” American Art 6 (Fall 1992): 50–67; Alan Hirsch, “Eastman Johnson’s Guilt,” Sources: Notes in the History of Art 34 (Spring 2015): 36–43. For a window on his late-life commitments to pro-business 194

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4. 5.

6.

7. 8.

9. 10.

11.

12. 13.

Republicanism and his opposition to Democratic anti-immigration ideology, see Eastman Johnson to Jervis McEntee, December 2, 1880, in Carbone and Hills, Eastman Johnson: Painting America, 253–54. On the ideological commitments of the nineteenth-century Republican Party, see Heather Cox, To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party (New York: Basic Books, 2014), 109–38; Quentin R. Skrabec, The Ohio Presidents (New York: McFarland, 2018), 80–86. See Patricia Hills, “Painting Race: Eastman Johnson’s Pictures of Slaves, Ex-Slaves, and Freedman,” in Carbone and Hills, Eastman Johnson: Painting America, 121–66. For previous scholarly studies that have noted and documented Johnson’s real estate activities, see Patricia Hills, Eastman Johnson (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1972), 21–22, 91–100; Patricia Hills, The Genre Painting of Eastman Johnson (New York: Garland, 1977), 46–51; Patricia Condon Johnston, Eastman Johnson’s Lake Superior Indians (Afton, MN: Johnston, 1983); Marc Simpson, “Taken with a Cranberry Fit: Eastman Johnson on Nantucket,” in Marc Simpson, Sally Mills, and Patricia Hills, Eastman Johnson: The Cranberry Harvest, Island of Nantucket (San Diego, CA: Timken Art Gallery, 1990), 31–52; Teresa Carbone, “From Crayon to Brush: The Education of Eastman Johnson, 1840–1858” and “The Genius of the Hour: Eastman Johnson in New York, 1860–80,” in Carbone and Hills, Eastman Johnson: Painting America, 32–43, 78–105. A rich body of scholarship has explored Johnson’s artistic and political interest in African Americans, workers, and the poor. See John Davis, “Eastman Johnson’s Negro Life at the South and Urban Slavery in Washington, D.C.,” Art Bulletin 80 (March 1998): 67–92; Patricia Hills, “Painting Race,” 121–66; Patricia Hills, “Cultural Racism: Resistance and Accommodation in the Civil War Art of Eastman Johnson,” in Seeing High and Low: Representing Social Conflict in American Visual Culture, ed. Patricia Johnston (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 103–21; Lacey Baradel, “Geographic Mobility and Domesticity in Eastman Johnson’s The Tramp,” American Art 28 (Summer 2014): 26–49. Eastman Johnson to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, June 3, 1857 [letter 2], Letters to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, MS AM 1340.2 (3044), Houghton Library, Harvard University. For studies of Ojibwe history in the Lake Superior region, see Anton Treuer, Ojibwe in Minnesota (Minneapolis: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2010); Patty Loew, Indian Nations of Wisconsin: Histories of Endurance and Renewal (Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2013), 60–70. Loew, Indian Nations of Wisconsin, 68–70. See Carolyn Gilman, The Grand Portage Story (Minneapolis: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1992), 107–12; Melissa Lee Mayer, The White Earth Tragedy: Ethnicity and Disposession at a Minnesota Anishanaabe Reservation (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 37–42; Mary Lethert Wingerd and Kirsten Delegard, North Country: The Making of Minnesota (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 199–224. On the development of Superior and speculators’ anticipations of a northern transcontinental railroad line, see Helen Marie Wolner, “The History of Superior, Wisconsin to 1900” (MA thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1939); Louise Kellogg, “The Rise and Fall of Old Superior,” Wisconsin Magazine of History (September 1940): 3–19; Philip Cloutier, “John C. Breckenridge, Superior City Land Speculator,” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 57 (January 1959): 12–19; William Davis, Breckinridge: Statesman, Soldier, Symbol (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2010), 97–122; Alice Malavasic, The F Street Mess: How Southern Senators Rewrote the KansasNebraska Act (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 81–110. See Wolner, “History of Superior,” 10–17; Cloutier, “John C. Breckenridge,” 12–15. Bertha Heilbron, “A Pioneer Artist on Lake Superior,” Minnesota History 21 (1940): 149–57; Johnston, Eastman Johnson’s Lake Superior Indians, 13; Hills, Genre Painting of Eastman Johnson, 46–51; Carbone, “From Crayon to Brush,” 32–34. For a local account of the Johnson family’s NOTES

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14.



15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

21.

22. 23.

24.

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activities in Superior, see Hiram Hayes, “Memories of the ’50s: Recalled by Yuletide,” Superior Evening Telegram, December 12, 1906. I am indebted to Patricia Hills and Abigael MacGibeney for pointing me to local references to Johnson’s land dealings, and to Scott Nielsen (an ancestor of Johnson’s) for generously sharing his research into the artist’s land acquisitions in Superior. On Newton’s activities, see Wolner, “History of Superior,” 8–30; Kellogg, “Rise and Fall of Old Superior,” 10–19. Newton undertook a publicity campaign for the scheme; see, for example, “Superior, Douglass County Wisconsin,” St. Paul Daily Pioneer, January 1, 1856, 1. Wolner, “History of Superior,” 22–37. “City of Superior,” Superior Chronicle, January 6, 1857, 2. Cloutier, “John C. Breckinridge,” 24. For records of these transactions, see William Newton to Eastman Johnson, November 24, 1856, Deed Record Book 6, p. 295, Douglas County Register of Deeds; William Corcoran to Eastman Johnson, January 14, 1857, Deed Record Book D, pp. 96–98, Douglas County Register of Deeds; George Perry to Eastman Johnson, October 3, 1857, Deed Record Book F, pp. 386–87; William H. Newton to Eastman Johnson, December 5, 1857, Deed Record Book E, p. 497. Wolner, “History of Superior,” 23–37; Kellogg, “Rise and Fall of Old Superior,” 8–9. The sixteen lots that Johnson bought in January and October were located on either side of the Nemadji River and were close to a forty-three-acre parcel that the Proprietors set aside for the railroad’s train yards and engine house. For records of these purchases, see Eastman Johnson, January 14, 1857, Deed Record Book D, pp. 96–98, Douglas County Register of Deeds; George Perry to Eastman Johnson, October 3, 1857, Deed Record Book F, pp. 386–87. For a plan that documents the proximity of these lots to the railroad yards, see W. H. Newton, Superior, Douglas County, Wisconsin (1855), New York Public Library. For documentation of Johnson’s June 1857 land purchase, see Hiram Hayes, “Memories of the ’50s: Recalled by Yuletide,” Superior Evening Telegram, December 12, 1906, 3. For local reminiscences that describe the varying uses of Minnesota Point in the 1850s, see Charles Lord, “Indian Experiences in Superior Fifty Years Ago,” Superior Evening Telegram, April 23, 1904, 7; Walter Van Brunt, Duluth and St. Louis County: Their Story and People (Chicago: American Historical Society, 1921), 126–27. On the buildings depicted within Johnson’s drawing, see Johnston, Eastman Johnson’s Lake Superior Indians, 13. James Ritchie, Wisconsin and Its Resources (Philadelphia: C. DeSilver, 1857), 225. For another, similarly rosy account of Superior’s future, see “City of Superior,” Superior Chronicle, January 6, 1857, 2. “The Far North-West,” Pennsylvania School Journal 4 (January 1856): 303. Certain ambivalences also seem to cloud Johnson’s effort at pictorial promotion. It bears noting that the publishers of Wisconsin and Its Resources altered Johnson’s composition in significant ways when they converted the drawing into a wood engraving: the final illustration compressed the space between the scene’s foreground and background, added a third steamship to the bay and enlarged the scale of the vessels at left and right, refigured the Ojibwe canoe at left as a generic dory with racially ambiguous occupants, and augmented the expanse and density of Superior’s townscape. When considered against this engraved fantasy of dense urbanity and booming trade, Johnson’s Superior appears relatively isolated, raw, and tenuous, a remote frontier outpost whose future holds promise but remains undetermined. The artist’s rendering of local Ojibwe likewise seems to take on additional meaning when read against the final engraving. Even as it employs native figures as racialized embodiments of the historical past, Johnson’s fuller rendering of Ojibwe activities around Minnesota Point does more to register the continuing presence of native peoples in and around Superior than Ritchie’s eventual illustration.

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25. On Stephen Bonga, see Mattie Harper, “French Africans in Ojibwe Country: Negotiating Marriage, Identity, and Race” (PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2012), 77–96. See also “Bungo Family,” Superior Chronicle, May 5, 1857, 2. 26. Pokegama Bay is partitioned on the original federal plat; see Public Land Survey System Map, Wisconsin Township 49 North, Range 14 West, 1832–66, University of Wisconsin, https://digital. library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/OBJY3ZJ5S67748B. For references to Johnson and Bonga’s stay on the waterway, see Johnston, Eastman Johnson’s Lake Superior Indians, 15; Carbone, “From Crayon to Brush,” 32–34. 27. Teresa Carbone has proposed that the figure in the sketch may be a depiction of Stephen Bonga; see Carbone, “From Crayon to Brush,” 32. 28. Dominique Ranquet, August 19 and August 22, Fort William Mission Diary, 50, Vol. 11, files 10–11, Catholic Diocese of Thunder Bay Archives. I am indebted to Roy Piovesana for his assistance in locating and transcribing these entries in the archive. 29. Carbone, “From Crayon to Brush,” 36–38. 30. Gilman, Grand Portage Story, 93–99. 31. Nancy L. Woolworth, “The Grand Portage Mission: 1731–1965,” Minnesota History (Winter 1965): 310–11; Gilman, Grand Portage Story, 110–11; Alan Woolworth, “A Historical Study of the Grand Portage” (typewritten manuscript, Minnesota Historical Society, 1993), 71. 32. Gilman, Grand Portage Story, 112–13. 33. On McCullough’s operation, see ibid., 11–12; Timothy Cochrane, A Good Boat Speaks for Itself: Isle Royale Fisherman and Their Boats (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 11–12; Timothy Cochrane, Minong—The Good Place Ojibwe and Isle Royale (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2009), 102–5. 34. These works include Canoe of Indians (1856–57, St. Louis County Historical Society), Ojibwe Wigwam at Grand Portage (1856–57, St. Louis County Historical Society), Indian Family (1857, private collection), Portrait of an Indian Family (c. 1857, Gilcrease Museum), and Ojibwe Encampment (c. 1857, private collection). 35. Johnson explored this theme in a pair of nearly identical works—Portrait of an Indian Family (1857, Gilcrease Museum) and Indian Family (1857, private collection)—that picture a seated Ojibwe man and an indigenous child in a shadowy space between a square-framed timber structure at right (possibly a cabin or storehouse) and a birch-bark wigwam in the middle ground at left. Together with the various indigenous cultural productions (wigwam and cradleboard) and bits of Euro-American material culture (captain’s chair, clay pipe, barrel) that appear in these scenes, the two structures function as signs of the divergent modes of existence—seasonal occupancy and government-enforced permanent residency—in evidence at Grand Portage. 36. Johnston, Eastman Johnson’s Lake Superior Indians, 16–17; Gilman, Grand Portage Story, 93. 37. George S. Pabis, Daily Life along the Mississippi (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2007), 77–78; Roger G. Kennedy, Historic Homes of Minnesota (Minneapolis: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2006), 10–12. The cabin at right center seems to be under construction: dashes of red, black, and beige paint on its sloping roof appear to delineate a party of builders at work. 38. Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs (Washington, DC: William A. Harris, 1858), 47. See also Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs (Washington, DC: A. O. P. Nicholson, 1857): 32. 39. On Baraga’s chapel and Jesuit missionary work in the region, see Edwin Thompson, “Grand Portage: A History of the Sites, People, and Fur Trade” (Washington, DC: National Park Service, 1969), 132; Gilman, Grand Portage Story, 304–7. 40. Ranquet and other area priests used the chapel to baptize, confirm, marry, and minister to area Ojibwe congregants into the 1860s (when it was replaced by a more substantial church). See Woolworth, “Grand Portage Mission: 1731–1965,” 307–10. NOTES

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41. Heilbron, “Pioneer Artist on Lake Superior,” 153–54; Johnston, Eastman Johnson’s Lake Superior Indians, 31–32; Carbone, “From Crayon to Brush,” 40–43. 42. For scholarship on Johnson’s paintings of Nantucket, see Hills, Eastman Johnson (1972), 87–106; Simpson et al., Eastman Johnson: The Cranberry Harvest; Carbone, “Genius of the Hour,” 98–113. On Nantucket’s transforming economy, see Henry Barnard Worth, Nantucket Lands and Landowners (Nantucket, MA: Nantucket Historical Society, 1901), 213–16; Dona Brown, Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 105–34. 43. Simpson, “Taken with a Cranberry Fit,” 35–36; Brown, Inventing New England, 109–13; Worth, Nantucket Lands and Landowners, 213–16. 44. Worth, Nantucket Lands and Landowners, 199–204; R. A. Douglas Lithgow, Nantucket: A History (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1914), 81–84; Edwin P. Hoyt, Nantucket: The Life of an Island (New York: Penguin, 1985), 8–12. 45. On Johnson’s land dealings, see Simpson et al., Eastman Johnson: The Cranberry Harvest, appendix 3, 102–5. 46. Simpson,“Taken with a Cranberry Fit,” 35–36. Johnson periodically described his renovation efforts in his letters. See, for example, Eastman Johnson to Jervis McEntee, October 30, 1875, and September 23, 1884, Jervis McEntee Papers, Box 1, Folder 24, Archives of American Art. 47. Simpson et al., Eastman Johnson: The Cranberry Harvest, appendix 3, 102–5. The Nantucket Historical Association collection includes plats and diagrams of Johnson’s Sherburn Bluffs purchases. See Sherburn Bluffs sold to Eastman Johnson, Drawer 6, Folder 1, no. 8, Map and Chart Collection, Nantucket Historical Association; Records of Land Sales in Sherburne Bluffs, Sherburne Bluffs Collection, 1878–83, MS 217, NHA. 48. Eastman Johnston to Jervis McEntee, September 22, 1881, reprinted in Carbone and Hills, Eastman Johnson: Painting America, 254–55. 49. Simpson, “Taken with a Cranberry Fit,” 35–36. For period references to Johnson’s renovations, see untitled article, Nantucket Island Review, October 31, 1874, 2; untitled article, Nantucket Journal, July 30, 1879, 2. For examples of guidebooks that mention Johnson, see Ansel Northrup, ’Sconset Cottage Life (New York: Baker, Pratt, 1881), 92; Edward Godfrey, ed., The Island of Nantucket: What It Was and What It Is (Boston: Lee & Shepherd, 1882), 17, 79. 50. For a period reference to Johnson’s windmill addition, see untitled article, Nantucket Island Review, July 29, 1875, 2. 51. Brown, Inventing New England, 117–22. 52. Johnson painted portraits, for example, of Henry Coleman (1815–94) and Frederick Sanford (1809–90); the former was a wealthy whaling captain who participated in several development schemes, and the latter was a shipowner and president of the Pacific National Bank of Nantucket. 53. Marc Simpson has discussed Johnson’s exploration of the lingering tradition of the husking bee; see Simpson, “Taken with a Cranberry Fit,” 41–43. For an overview of Johnson’s early Nantucket subjects, see Carbone, “Genius of the Hour,” 78–87; for a period reference to husking, see “Husking,” Nantucket Island Review, October 13, 1875, 2. 54. These works include Feeding the Lamb (1875, private collection); The Pet Lamb (1873, Hirschl & Adler Galleries); Girl in Landscape with Two Lambs (1875, Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts). I thank Patricia Hills for directing me to Johnson’s lamb paintings. 55. There is some evidence that the Nantucket photographer Josiah Freeman made pictures of the island’s cranberry workers in the mid-1870s. A September 29, 1875, Nantucket Island Review article thus noted: “The cranberry pickers bid fair to become subjects of historical interest. Eastman Johnson has placed them on canvas [and] Freeman has photographed them.” See 198

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56.

57.

58.

59.

untitled article, Nantucket Island Review, September 29, 1875, 2. I have not been able to locate any of Freeman’s cranberry photographs; the Nantucket Historical Association collection includes many other examples of his work. Sally Mills, for example, has read The Cranberry Harvest, Island of Nantucket as a depiction of an “agrarian ritual.” See Mills, “ ‘Right Feeling and Sound Technique’: French Art and the Development of Eastman Johnson’s Outdoor Genre Paintings,” in Simpson et al., Eastman Johnson: The Cranberry Harvest, 66. Rejecting previous readings of The Cranberry Harvest as a sentimentalizing vision of traditional farmwork, Marc Simpson has interpreted the painting as a truthful representation of contemporary islanders “enjoying themselves as they earn extra money on a warm autumn afternoon.” See Simpson, “Taken with a Cranberry Fit,” 43–44. No comprehensive history of Nantucket’s cranberry industry has yet been written. Period accounts suggest that the farmer John Gardner introduced cranberry growing to the island in the 1840s; see “Cultivation of the Cranberry,” Trumpet and Universalist Magazine (February 26, 1848): 148; “Profits of Fruit Growing—No. 2,” Horticulturist and Journal of Rural Art and Rural Taste 2 (April 1848): 465. Local newspapers began tracking the business’s development in the 1850s and 1860s; for articles that register cranberry farming’s growth, see “The Fishing Business,” Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror, December 30, 1865, 2; “The Cranberry Crop,” Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror, October 12, 1867, 2; “Review Scraps,” Nantucket Island Review, September 15, 1877, 1; “Review Scraps,” Nantucket Island Review, September 26, 1877, 1; “Home Industry,” Nantucket Journal, October 3, 1878, 2; “General News,” Nantucket Journal, December 13, 1883, 3. For scholarship on the history of cranberry framing in Massachusetts more broadly, see Paul Eck, The American Cranberry (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 7–13; Joseph Thomas, ed., Cranberry Harvest: A History of Cranberry Growing in Massachusetts (New Bedford, MA: Spinner, 1990). Various bits of evidence make clear that many local bogs were owned by Nantucketers and off-islanders who were involved in the island’s real estate boom. In August and September of 1874, for example, a collective of Nantucket owners took out advertisements in the Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror warning against the theft of berries from their bogs. The signatories included George W. Macy, a hardware store owner and real estate agent who participated in the Nauticon subdivision scheme; Henry Coleman, a former sailor who was involved in the development of the Cliff and Brant Point neighborhoods; Alfred Swain, a boatbuilder and politician who participated in the Clifton Springs and Surfside developments; and Henry Coffin, a major ship owner and developer who spearheaded the development of the Surfside subdivision. An 1875 article describing later thefts in local bogs mentions the berry operations of Galen Orr, an offisland factory owner from Needham who purchased large swaths of island land in the 1870s and 1880s. See “Special Notices,” Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror, August 22, 1874, 3; “Cranberry Thieves,” Nantucket Island Review, October 9, 1875, 2. On Macy, see Nauticon Development Corporation Records, 1873–1904, MS194, Nantucket Historical Association. On Coleman, see Henry Willard, A Memorial to Henry Augustus Willard and Sarah Bradley Willard (Andover, MA: privately printed, 1925), 303. On Swain, see Map of Surfside—The Property of the Nantucket Surfside Development Company, 1873, Map and Chart Collection, Drawer 5 Folder 3 no. 11, Nantucket Historical Association. On Coffin, see Wilson Heflin, Herman Melville’s Whaling Years (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004), 179; Map of Surfside—The Property of the Nantucket Surfside Development Company (1873). On Orr, see George Kuhn Clarke, History of Needham, Massachusetts, 1711–1911 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1912), 396–98. Untitled article, Inquirer and Mirror, February 14, 1885, 4. For other articles that link cranberry growing and property values, see “The Cranberry Crop,” Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror, October 12, 1867, 2; “Cranberry Thieves,” Nantucket Island Review, October 9, 1875, 2; “General News,” NOTES

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60.

61.

62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

67.

68.

69. 70.

71.

200

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Nantucket Journal, December 13, 1883, 3; untitled article, Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror, February 14, 1885, 4. “Cape Cod Cranberries,” Youth’s Companion, October 24, 1889, 519; “Financial Embarrassment,” Nantucket Journal, October 28, 1880, 2. For other articles that figure cranberry growing as a financial endeavor, see “Cranberry Bogs,” Massachusetts Ploughman, September 25, 1869, 1; “Cranberry Culture,” Massachusetts Ploughman, October 10, 1874, 1; “Drawbacks of the Cranberry,” Massachusetts Ploughman, August 11, 1877, 1; “Cranberry Culture,” Massachusetts Ploughman, August 2, 1879, 1; “The Cranberry,” Massachusetts Ploughman, September 4, 1880, 1; “Cranberry Growing in New England,” New England Farmer, November 24, 1883, 1. Joseph Thomas has discussed the reorganization of berry workforces around mobile workingclass labor; see Cranberry Harvest, 85–88. Nantucket bog owners often placed advertisements in local newspapers when they needed contract pickers; see, for example, “To Cranberry Pickers,” Nantucket Journal, September 30, 1880, 2. For period references to migrant and immigrant workers in Massachusetts bogs, see untitled article, Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror, October 24, 1874, 2; “Matter O’Fact,” Macon Telegraph, December 26, 1885, 7; “The Champion Cranberry Picker,” Nantucket Journal, November 24, 1887, 2; “Cranberry Picking,” Boston Journal, September 7, 1889, Supplement p. 2; “Here and There,” Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror, September 13, 1890, 1; “A Cranberry Bog,” Friends Review, January 21, 1892, 413; “Cranberry Picking: How the People on the Bogs of Cape Cod Harvest the Little Red Berry, and the Wages They Receive,” American Farmer, November 15, 1892, 8. “Cranberry Thieves,” Nantucket Island Review, October 9, 1875, 2. On the piecework pay system in Massachusetts bogs, see Thomas, Cranberry Harvest, 61–71. Thomas, Cranberry Harvest, 62–68. Ibid., 68–77. Simpson, “Taken with a Cranberry Fit,” 38–39; Mills, “Right Feeling and Sound Technique,” 58–68; Carbone, “Genius of the Hour,” 98–105. Many of Johnson’s studies also record the protective garments (wide-brimmed hats, shawls, gloves) that harvesters improvised to shield their bodies from sun, insects, and abrasions in the bogs. These include Study of a Young Girl for the Cranberry Pickers (c. 1870–75, Westmoreland Museum of American Art); Cranberry Pickers (1870–75, Ackland Art Museum); Cranberry Pickers (1878–79, Yale University Art Gallery); In the Fields (1878–80, Detroit Institute of Arts); and Cranberry Picking (1879, Philadelphia Museum of Art). “Cape Cod Cranberries,” Youth’s Companion, October 24, 1889, 519; “Cranberry Pickers,” Council Bluffs Daily Nonpareil, November 19, 1887, 2. For another account of picking’s enervating character, see Augusta Moore, “Captain Oliver’s Cranberry Swamp,” New York Evangelist, November 6, 1879, 2. For local reports that speak to the difficult conditions in Nantucket bogs, see untitled article, Nantucket Island Review, September 16, 1876, 2; “Review Scraps,” Nantucket Island Review, September 22, 1877, 1; “Here and There,” Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror, October 15, 1881, 2. A similar, stretching figure appears in the right middle ground of Cranberry Pickers (1875–80, Ackland Art Museum), which suggests that Johnson was considering incorporating a picker in an arcing pose in his final composition. On Husking Bee, see Carbone, “Genius of the Hour,” 87–92. For an insightful discussion of the resonances between The Cranberry Harvest, Johnson’s earlier agricultural pictures, and the peasant paintings of Jules Breton, see Mills, “Right Feeling and Sound Technique.” On Johnson’s maple sugaring studies, see Hills, Eastman Johnson (1972), 49–50; Carbone, “Genius of the Hour,” 53–54, 59–66; Anne C. Rose, “Eastman Johnson and the Culture of American

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72. 73. 74.

75.

76.

77.

78.

79. 80.

Individualism,” in Carbone and Hills, Eastman Johnson: Painting America, 215–17; Brian Allen, Sugaring Off: The Maple Sugar Paintings of Eastman Johnson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004). Charles H. Botsford, “Quaint Old Nantucket,” Nantucket Journal, November 12, 1879, 1. “Here and There,” Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror, April 24, 1880, 2; S. G. W. Benjamin, “National Academy of Design,” American Art Review I (1879–80): 309; “Art Notes,” Art Journal (1881): 377. “Gossip about Art,” New York Press, February 16, 1890, 9; “National Academy of Design,” New York Commercial Advertiser, March 27, 1880, reprinted in Eastman Johnson, Cranberry Harvest, 99; “The Academy Exhibition,” New York Times, March 27, 1880, 5; “Cranberries on Canvas,” Nantucket Journal, November 12, 1879, 1. My account of the tenuousness of pickers’ lives draws inspiration from recent work on contemporary precarity in cultural anthropology, sociology, economics, and other fields. See, for example, “Precarity,” Cultural Anthropology (2016), accessible at https://culanth.org/curated _collections/21-precarity/discussions/26-precarity-commentary-by-anne-allison; Guy Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016). Even as they worked to promote the island’s tourism and real estate economies, local editors occasionally acknowledged the grim prospects facing Nantucket’s workers after the collapse of the whaling business. Lamenting the “business depression” that hung over the island in the late 1870s, for example, an 1878 Nantucket Journal article admitted that many local workers were unemployed and that “the young of the poorer classes” had few opportunities to improve their station by learning a trade; the article proceeds to identify berry picking as one important way to “furnish employment for a season” for these desperate workers. See “Home Industry,” Nantucket Journal, October 3, 1878, 2. The Swain Family papers at the Nantucket Historical Association include an account notebook that records the expenses associated with two years of berry harvesting on a bog “situated north of the Division known as Trotts Hills.” A list of expenses for September 1875 indicates that Swain paid a man named “Morse” sixty-four quarts of berries for four days of picking on the bog. See Cranberry Account for Alfred Swain, Swain notebook, Swain Family Papers, 1750–1962, Nantucket Historical Association. “Morse” is almost certainly Mason L. Morse; Mason was the son of Arnold Morse, a farmer who raised cattle and grew wheat on a farm on the southern side of the island. See “Nantucket Farms,” Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror, August 9, 1947, 4. Mason is listed as a thirteen-year-old student in his father’s household in the 1860 census; he was still living in his parents’ home in 1870. According to these censuses, Arnold’s estate was worth $800 in 1860 and $300 in 1870. In 1880, Mason was a thirty-two-year-old laborer living with his aunt Elizabeth Morey at 480 Mill Street. Local town and vital records identify Mason as a farmer and Nantucket town resident between 1879 and 1881. See Massachusetts, Town and Vital Records, 1620–1988 [database online] (Provo, UT: Ancestry.com Operations, 2011). Mason died in 1900 in Canada, New Hampshire; the death record identifies his occupation as laborer. In 1875, Mason was named a complainant and a defendant, respectively, in two cases of assault and battery; see untitled article, Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror, November 6, 1875, 2; untitled article, Nantucket Island Review, September 18, 1875, 2. As Joseph Thomas has noted, bog owners typically assigned numbers to the pickers they employed, and field managers used these numbers (rather than proper names) to record the fruit each worker harvested in their tally books; see Cranberry Harvest, 71. See, for example, “Fine Arts,” Nation (April 15, 1880): 295. The signboard’s form further highlights the partitioned character of the setting around it: the horizontal placard rhymes with (leads the eye to) a series of subtle horizontal lines of gray-green

NOTES

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81.

82. 83.

84. 85.

86.

87. 88.

89. 90. 91. 92. 93.

94. 95.

96. 97.

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pigment that stretch across the distant stretches of the coastal plain, wavering striations that seem to indicate property boundaries. “Cranberry Thieves,” Nantucket Island Review, October 9, 1875, 2. For other accounts of berry theft, see untitled article, Nantucket Island Review, August 26, 1876, 2; untitled article, Nantucket Island Review, September 27, 1876, 2; “Fruit Thieves,” Nantucket Island Review, August 8, 1877, 2. See “Fruit Thieves,” Nantucket Island Review, August 8, 1877, 2. This ad was reprinted in twentyseven issues of the Nantucket Island Review. In so doing, the sign may invoke a specific tract enmeshed in these struggles. As it happens, one of the signees of the admonitory advertisement discussed above, Galen Orr, owned a bog at North Beach, not far from Johnson’s home; the posted bog may well have conjured up this vigorously defended tract for attuned local viewers. “The Railroad,” Nantucket Journal, September 10, 1879, 2; “The Railroad Project,” Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror, August 30, 1879, 2. Eastman Johnson to Jervis McEntee, August 9, 1881, Jervis McEntee Papers, Archives of American Art. The artist may have been one of several landowners in the Cliff neighborhood who attempted to block the project by refusing to cede lands for the rail corridor along North Beach Street unless the development company purchased a “strip off the lots bordering on said road, equivalent to that used by them . . . [for] an exorbitant price.” See “Annual Meeting,” Nantucket Journal, February 19, 1880, 2. For legal uses of this term to describe forms of movement associated with rights of way, see George Crabb, The Law of Real Property, in Its Present State I (Philadelphia: T. & J. W. Johnson, 1846), 64; Emory Washburn, A Treatise on the American Law of Real Property, vol. 2 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1876), 299–303. Jane G. Austin, Nantucket Scraps: Being the Experiences of an Off-Islander in Season and out of Season (Boston: J. R. Osgood, 1883), 154–55. “Surf-Side: A New Watering Place,” Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror, July 5, 1873, 2. Other companies seem to have used superimposable images to promote their properties; for example, the backers of the Great Neck neighborhood drew up a plan of their unbuilt project on tracing paper, which they evidently used as an overlay on existing maps. See Plan of Great Neck, c. 1870s, Drawer 5 folder 3, no. 17, Map and Chart Collection, Nantucket Historical Association. “Then and Now: A Ballad of Nantucket,” Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror, February 15, 1879, 1. “Land O!,” Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror, May 19, 1883, 2. Brown, Inventing New England, 119. For promotional accounts of the Old Mill, see Godfrey, Island of Nantucket: What It Was and What It Is, 236; Austin, Nantucket Scraps, 83–89. Simpson, “Taken with a Cranberry Fit,” 32. For promotional accounts that associate wind or sea breezes with value and futurity, see “SurfSide: A New Watering Place,” Nantucket Inquirer, July 5, 1873, 2; A Guide to Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket (Boston: Rockwell & Churchill, 1876), 58; “The Boom in Lands,” Nantucket Inquirer, August 5, 1882, 2. “A Representative American,” Magazine of Art 5 (November 1882): 488. For period reports that register the involvement of the island’s whaling families in real estate dealings, see “Great Neck,” Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror, June 21, 1873, 2; “Surf-Side: A New Watering Place,” Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror, July 5, 1873, 2; untitled article, Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror, August 16, 1873, 2; “The Railroad,” Nantucket Journal, September 19, 1879, 2. “The Boom in Lands,” Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror, August 5, 1882, 2. “Roxbury,” Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror, August 30, 1879, 2; “That Railroad,” Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror, September 20, 1879, 2.

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4. PERILOUS PROSPECTS

1. On Saint Augustine’s postwar transformation, see Reiko Hillyer, Designing Dixie: Tourism, Memory, and Urban Space in the New South (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014), 44–87. 2. On Heade’s real estate ventures, see Robert McIntyre, Martin Johnson Heade (New York: Pantheon Press, 1948), 9–10; Theodore Stebbins, The Life and Work of Martin Johnson Heade (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 13, 141–46; Roberta Smith Favis, Martin Johnson Heade in Florida (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003), 41–68. 3. Considering these deals in broad terms, scholars have shown that Heade’s speculative proclivities unsettled the artist’s financial status and often frayed his nerves. No work has yet been done, however, to investigate whether Heade contended creatively with real estate. Longstanding understandings of the artist as a figure who somehow resisted or rose above the material realm and its commodifying forces have likely discouraged inquiries along these lines. Heade’s earliest interpreters read his landscapes as pictorial expressions of faith or feeling that echo lyrical poetry, mid-nineteenth-century spiritualism, and Transcendentalist philosophy. Other scholars have used the artist’s writings on natural history and hunting to construe Heade’s coastal views as proto-conservationist “gospels” against irresponsible development. See Theodore Stebbins, Martin Johnson Heade: His Life and Works (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975), 165–67; John Baur, “Introduction,” Commemorative Exhibition from the Private Collection of Maxim Karolik (New York: Knoedler Gallery, 1954); Barbara Novak, American Painting of the Nineteenth Century Realism, Idealism, and the American Experience [1969] (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 103–14; Nancy Frazier, “Mute Gospel: The Salt Marshes of Martin Johnson Heade,” Prospects 23 (October 1998): 193–207. 4. Barbara Novak, “Martin Johnson Heade: The Enigmatic Self,” in Martin Johnson Heade: A Survey 1840–1900, ed. Timothy Eaton (Austin, TX: Eaton Fine Arts, 1998), 14. For studies that invoke Transcendentalism, lyrical poetry, and spiritualism, see Baur, “Introduction”; Earl Powell, “Luminism and the American Sublime,” in John Wilmerding [et al.], American Light: The Luminist Movement, 1850–1875 (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1980), 81–82; Novak, American Painting of the Nineteenth Century, 103–5. 5. I borrow the phrase from Novak, “Martin Johnson Heade: The Enigmatic Self.” See also Maggie Cao, The End of Landscape (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018), 68–112. 6. Martin Johnson Heade to Eben J. Loomis, December 12, 1882, Loomis-Wilder Papers (MS 496A) Series II Box 6, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University. 7. On the Florida land and tourism boom, see Eugene Rachlis and John E. Marqusee, The Landlords (New York: Random House, 1963), 87–131; Tracy Revels, Sunshine Paradise: A History of Florida Tourism (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011); Henry Knight, Tropic of Hopes: California, Florida, and the Selling of American Paradise, 1869–1929 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2015). 8. Knight, Tropic of Hopes, 36–41. See also Diane Roberts, “Harriet Beecher Stowe and Florida Tourism,” in Literary Tourism and Nineteenth-Century Culture, ed. Nicola J. Watson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 196–209; Kathryn Dolan, Beyond the Fruited Plain: Food and Agriculture in U.S. Literature, 1850–1905 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014), 102–38. 9. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Palmetto Leaves (Boston: J. R. Osgood, 1873), 28, 37. 10. Florida: The Land of Sunshine, Oranges, and Health (Chicago: Belmore Florida Land Company, 1885); Charles B. Reynolds, The Standard Guide: St. Augustine (St. Augustine, FL: E. H. Reynolds, 1890), 84; “Florida Lots $15,” Peterson’s Magazine 90 (1885): 371; “Florida,” Poultry Keeper 2 (August 1885): 95. NOTES

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11. Florida, The American Riviera; St. Augustine, the Winter Newport (New York: Carrère & Hastings, 1887), 8. For local histories that combine narratives of Florida’s Spanish past with projections of the state’s future, see William Dewhurst, The History of Saint Augustine, Florida (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1881); Reynolds, Standard Guide. 12. On Florida’s late nineteenth-century land boom, see Robert Sobel, The Money Manias: The Eras of Great Speculation in America, 1770–1970 [1973] (Washington, DC: Beard Books, 2000), 150–65; Kelly Reynolds, Henry Plant: Pioneer Empire Builder (Cocoa: Florida Historical Society Press, 2003), 97–140; Michael Grunwald, The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), 81–94; William Stronge, The Sunshine Economy: An Economic History of Florida since the Civil War (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008), 21–54; Knight, Tropic of Hopes, 33–80. 13. On Flagler and St. Augustine’s postbellum boom, see Thomas Graham, Flagler’s St. Augustine Hotels: The Ponce de Leon, the Alcazar, and the Casa Monica (Sarasota, FL: Pineapple Press, 2003); Hillyer, Designing Dixie, 44–87; Thomas Graham, Mr. Flagler’s St. Augustine (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014). 14. Stebbins, Life and Work of Martin Johnson Heade, 143. For Heade’s description of this visit, see Martin Johnson Heade to Eben Loomis, February 12, 1883, Loomis-Wilder Papers (MS 496A) Series II Box 6, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University. 15. For records of these transactions, see Helen L. Dent and Frederick S. Dent to Martin J. Heade, St. Johns County Deed Book AAA, pp. 447–49; Helen L. Dent to Martin Johnson Heade, St. Johns County Mortgage Book C, p. 348; B. A. Marten to Martin Johnson Heade, St. Johns County Mortgage Book C, p. 507; Martin J. Heade and Elizabeth S. Heade to Henry C. Lockwood, St. Johns County Deed Book BB, pp. 254–55; Henry C. Lockwood to Elizabeth S. Heade, St. Johns County Deed Book BB, p. 257; William Butler Beck and Bertha Beck to Elizabeth S. Heade, St. Johns County Deed Book CC, p. 295; Elizabeth Heade to Ingersoll Lockwood, St. Johns County Deed Book DD, p. 366; Ingersoll Lockwood to Martin Johnson Heade, St. Johns County Deed Book DD, p. 368. 16. On the San Marco Hotel, see Hillyer, Designing Dixie, 121. On Our Lady of La Leche Chapel, see George Fairbanks, The Spaniards in Florida (Jacksonville, FL: C. Drew, 1868), 67; Dewhurst, History of Saint Augustine, 75; Michael Gannon, Rebel Bishop: Augustine Verot, Florida’s Civil War Prelate (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1964). 17. Ulysses S. Grant attended a reception at the Dent Cottage, for example, while on an 1880 visit to St. Augustine. See Graham, Mr. Flagler’s St. Augustine, 8–9; Jessica May, “Ulysses S. Grant’s Visit to St. Augustine,” El Escribano 46 (2009): 1–30. 18. For references to Heade’s improvements to the estate, see “Among the Cottages,” (Saint Augustine) Tatler. January 21, 1893, 6; Martin Johnson Heade to Eben Loomis, April 9, December 3, 1883; January 15, January 30, 1884; Loomis-Wilder Papers. 19. “Among the Cottages,” (Saint Augustine) Tatler, 6. For other references to Heade’s home studio, see “Art Reception,” Saint Augustine News, February 15, 1891, 12; “The Artist at Home,” Palatka Daily News, February 19, 1888, 1. 20. For records of these transactions (and Heade’s construction objectives), see William G. Warden to Martin Johnson Heade, August 25, 1886, St. Johns County Mortgage Book E, pp. 275–76; William G. Warden to Elizabeth Heade and Martin Johnson Heade, January 6, 1887, Mortgage Book E, pp. 278–79; William G. Warden to Elizabeth Heade and Martin Johnson Heade, Mortgage Book E, p. 74. Heade also describes his cottage building plans in his correspondence; see Martin Johnson Heade to Eben Loomis, June 19, 1885, Loomis-Wilder Papers. 21. “Among the Cottages,” (Saint Augustine) Tatler, 7; “Saint Augustine” [advertisement], New Outlook 26 (December 31, 1910): 1050 [advertising extra]. 204

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22. See, for example, “Shell Road,” Palatka Daily News, February 3, 1888, 3. 23. Martin Johnson Heade to Eben Loomis, May 4, 1884, and April 11, 1887, Wilder-Loomis Papers. For other, similar expressions of confidence, see Heade’s letters of November 23, 1884, June 6, 1886, and June 16, 1887, to Loomis. 24. Didymus [Martin Johnson Heade], “Notes of Floridian Experience,” Forest and Stream (May 24, 1883): 324. 25. On Heade’s tourist pictures and studio at the Ponce de Leon, see Favis, Martin Johnson Heade in Florida, 52–57, 60–68, 74–86. 26. Ibid., 52–56. 27. For a period review that highlights the painting’s topographical specificity, see “Ponce de Leon Studios,” Jacksonville News-Herald, February 26, 1888, 6. 28. Period accounts suggest that Heade painted and sketched in the riparian marshes north of town, around the Mill Creek Road (now State Route 16) bridge. See transcription, Deforest/Taves Diary, p. 24, Jean Parker Waterbury Collection, Box 4, folder 31, Saint Augustine Historical Society. 29. On the San Sebastian River, Florida is one of several works mentioned in an 1888 article that describes the paintings on offer at Heade’s Ponce de Leon studio; see “Ponce de Leon Studios,” Jacksonville News-Herald, February 26, 1888, 6. 30. Travel writers, real estate promoters, and hotel devleopers continually highlighted the tranquility and “geniality” of Florida’s climate. See, for example, E. M. Cheney, Florida: Its Climate, Soil, and Productions (Jacksonville, FL: Edward M. Cheney, 1869), 36; Stowe, Palmetto-Leaves, 107, 175–76; D. Eagan, The Florida Settler (Tallahassee: The Floridian, 1873), 12; Edward King, The Great South: A Record of Journeys (New York: Scribner’s, 1875), 393–94; Florida, The Land of Sunshine, Oranges, and Health (Chicago: Belmore Florida Land Company, c. 1885), 22, 23, 26. 31. Florida, The American Riviera; St. Augustine, the Winter Newport (New York: Carrère & Hastings, 1887), 16. For other, similar imaginings of Floridian sunlight, see King, The Great South (1875), 394; Sidney Lanier, Florida: Its Scenery, Its Climate, Its History (1875), 39; Reynolds, Standard Guide, 26. 32. David Moore, “Florida: A Glimpse of an Elysian Land,” in The Key Line (New York: South Publishing, 1884), xxv. 33. Florida, The Land of Sunshine, Oranges, and Health (Chicago: Belmore Florida Land Company, c. 1885), 26. 34. Dewhurst, History of Saint Augustine, 179; Reynolds, Standard Guide, 25. 35. Martin Johnson Heade to Eben Loomis, June 16, 1887, Loomis-Wilder Papers (MS 496A) Series II Box 6. 36. Reynolds, Standard Guide, 28. 37. Well-known early American prospect texts include John Trumbull, “Prospect of the Future Glory of America” (1770); Philip Freneau and Henry Breckenridge, “The Rising Glory of America” (1771); Joel Barlow, “The Prospect of Peace” (1778); Celadon, “The Golden Age, or Future Glory of North America Discovered by an Angel to Celadon” (1785); Timothy Dwight, “Greenfield Hill: A Poem in Seven Parts” (1794). For important prospect passages in early American landscape writing, see “From a letter of M. St Jean de Crevecouer, dated August 26, 1784,” Historical Collections of the Essex Institute 25 (July–September, 1888): 173; John Filson, The Discovery, Settlement, and Present State of Kentucky (London: John Stockdale, 1793), 32; Timothy Dwight, Travels in New England and New York, vol. 3 (New Haven, CT: Timothy Dwight, 1822), 126–29, 530–31; Philip Stansbury, A Pedestrian Tour of Two Thousand Three Hundred Miles in North America (New York: J. D. Myers & W. Smith, 1822), 55–56. For scholarship on prospect poems and narratives, see Joseph J. Ellis, After the Revolution: Profiles of Early American Culture (New NOTES

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38. 39.

40. 41.

42. 43.

44. 45.

46. 47. 48.

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York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 4–21; John McWilliams, “Poetry in the Early Republic,” in The Columbia Literary History of the United States, ed. Emory Elliott (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 159–65; Edward Cahill, Liberty of the Imagination: Aesthetic Theory, Literary Form, and Politics in the Early United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennyslvania Press, 2012), 99–124. On early visual iterations of the prospect, see Denis Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 161–88. On the prospect’s imperial connotations, see W. J. T. Mitchell, “Imperial Landscape,” Landscape and Power, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 5–34. Nathaniel Parker Willis, American Scenery, or Land, Lake, and River, vol. I (London: George Virtue, 1840), 2. On antebellum painterly prospects, see Albert Boime, The Magisterial Gaze: Manifest Destiny and American Landscape Painting (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 26–56; Angela Miller, Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825– 1875 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 11–13; Robert Adams, Landscape and Ideology in American Renaissance Lierature: Topographies of Skepticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 75–81. On Cole’s prospect, see Alan Wallach, “Thomas Cole’s River in the Catskills as Antipastoral,” Art Bulletin 84 (June 2002): 343–44. On Progress and the prospect, see Kenneth Maddox, “Asher B. Durand’s Progress: The Advance of Civilization and the Vanishing American,” in The Railroad in American Art, ed. Susan Danly and Leo Marx (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 51–69; Linda S. Ferber, Kindred Spirits: Asher B. Durand and the American Landscape (Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Museum 2007), 168–70; Angela Miller, “The Fate of Wilderness in American Landscape Art,” in A Keener Perception: Ecocritical Studies in American Art History, ed. Alan Braddock and Christoph Irmscher (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009), 98–104; Nick Yablon, Untimely Ruins: An Archaeology of American Urban Modernity, 1819–1919 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 50–52. As Edward Cahill has shown, land promoters regularly raided sophisticated landscape writing and imagery for themes, ideas, and subjects. See Cahill, Liberty of the Imagination, 99–102. For examples of promotional prospect images, see Thomas Doughty, The Capitol, Washington D.C., West Front from City Hall (1832); William Strickland, Prospective View of the City of Cairo (1838); Hermann Meyer, View of Kaskaskia (1850). For examples of promotional prospect narratives, see J. M. Peck, A Gazetteer of Illinois (Philadelphia: Grigg & Elliott, 1837), 130–33; “Annual Address,” Transactions of the California State Agricultural Society (Sacramento: California State Agricultural Society, 1889), 458; Alice Edwards Pratt, The Sleeping Princess, California (San Francisco: William Doxey, 1892). Stowe, Palmetto Leaves, 39. For similar examples, see Eunice Beecher, Letters from Florida (New York: D. Appleton, 1879), 22, 24; Florida, The Land of Sunshine, Oranges, and Health (c. 1885), 3. Jackson’s panorama is composed of three views—Saint Augustine from Fort Marion, Fort Marion, and Hotel San Marco—that juxtapose the fort with the tourist infrastructure of Saint Augustine’s downtown. On Jackson’s photographic views of Saint Augustine, see Favis, Martin Johnson Heade in Florida, 57–60. See, for example, The Harbor at Rio de Janeiro (1864, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art). Didymus [Martin Johnson Heade], “Notes of Floridian Experience,” Forest and Stream (May 24, 1883): 324. At the same time, the artist’s dim prospect also seems to give painterly form to a perspective associated with bad or unwise investments in Florida. As the state’s land boom intensified, commentators in the popular press urged prospective investors to “not leap in the dark” when considering potential purchases, to “buy and colonize [the state] . . . with your eyes open,” and

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49. 50.

51. 52.

53. 54.

55. 56. 57.

58. 59. 60. 61.

62.

to study “Florida land with intelligent eyes.” In harnessing various spectatorial idioms to champion conscientious investing, these writers implicitly or explicitly aligned unjudicious investment with unseeing or impaired vision: plunging ahead in the darkness of ignorance and credulity, the unwise speculator saw the potential of Floridian land ventures poorly or not at all. Imbued with murky ambiguity and resistant to imaginative exploration, Heade’s bedimmed prospect calls to mind this marred perspective. See “Give Us the Facts,” New York Herald, January 22, 1886, 4; “The Florida Land Craze,” New York Herald, January 23, 1886, 4; “Eden in Florida: How Investors Are Beguiled by Flowery and Fruity Pictures,” New York Herald, January 25, 1886, 5. “A House Lot,” Good Housekeeping 2 (January 9, 1886), viii. See “Another Letter from Florida,” Massachusetts Ploughman, April 16, 1870, 29; “Reclaiming the Everglades,” Friends Intelligencer, April 2, 1881, 108; “Smitten Florida,” Christian Union, February 11, 1886, 33. Benjamin Liddon, ed., The General Statutes of the State of Florida (Saint Augustine, FL: Record Company, 1906), 354. To decide the case, the court had to determine how much of the changing marsh was submerged at various moments of its history, the relationship between these flooded sectors and recent and past property demarcations, and whether the marsh’s intertidal spaces conferred riparian rights. On this case, see “Dumas v. Garnett,” Southern Reporter: Containing All the Decisions of the Supreme Courts of Alabama, Louisiana, Florida, Mississippi 14 (St. Paul, MN: West Publishing, 1894), 464–67; The Compiled Laws of the State of Florida I (annotated) (St. Paul, MN: West Publishing, 1914), 343. “Facts about Florida,” New York Herald, January 30, 1886, 5. For other critical accounts of the boom that highlight Florida’s “malarious” wetlands, see “Not All Paradise,” New York Herald, January 8, 1886, 5; “Eden in Florida: How Investors Are Beguiled by Flowery and Fruity Pictures,” New York Herald, January 25, 1886, 5; “The Herald and the Florida Land Frauds,” New York Herald, February 26, 1886, 4; untitled poem, Puck, January 20, 1886, 322; “In the Orange Groves of Florida,” Ballou’s Monthly Magazine (February 1886): 124. “Six Visions of St. Augustine,” Atlantic Monthly (August 1886): 194. “Letters from the South” [1817], reprinted in The Port Folio (February 1818): 131. On this tradition, see David Miller, Dark Eden: The Swamp in American Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 7; Sue Ellen Campbell, The Face of the Earth: Natural Landscapes, Science, and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 162–63. I thank Bruce Redford for pointing me to the wetlands’ long-standing associations with moral waywardness. Stebbins, Life and Work of Martin Johnson Heade, 40–47; Frazier, “Mute Gospel.” On the Gremlin in the Studio pictures, see Maggie Cao, “Heade’s Hummingbirds and the Ungrounding of Landscape,” American Art 25 (Fall 2011): 70–72. On visual representations of the money devil, see Marc Shell, Art & Money (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 60–72. The 1888 Jacksonville News Herald article that discusses the works on display in Heade’s Ponce de Leon studio mentions a “laughable” picture, a “bit of a landscape representing a grassy valley with a lake in the center,” with “a wide margin of canvas . . . at the bottom of the picture” featuring “two saw-horses which gave the painting the appearance of having been raised on a scaffolding.” See “Ponce de Leon Studios,” Jacksonville News-Herald, February 26, 1888, 6. Henry James, The American Scene (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1907), 442. On The Cocoanuts, see Stuart Banner, Speculation: A History of the Elusive Line between Gambling and Investment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 218–19; Steven Neale, Screening the Stage: Case Studies of NOTES

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63.

64. 65. 66. 67.

68.

69.

70.

71. 72. 73. 74.

75.

208

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Film Adaptations of Stage Plays and Musicals of the Classical Hollywood Era, 1914–1956 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 87–100. Heade’s letters are filled with complaints about his dealers, slow sales, and requests for help marketing his pictures. See, for example, Heade to Loomis, December 3, 1883; January 15, 22, 30; February 1, 19, 26; April 13; May 4, 1884; Loomis-Wilder Papers. Martin Johnson Heade to Eben Loomis, January 30, 1884. See Stebbins, Martin Johnson Heade: His Life and Works, 165. On Heade’s 1886 sale, see Heade to Loomis, June 6, 1886. Heade’s intended use of these mortgages for development is recorded in the original text of the mortgage agreement, which notes that “it is hereby agreed that said grantors . . . shall pay all taxes and assessments on the granted premises and shall keep the buildings which it [is] proposed to be erected on said premises insured against fire.” See Elizabeth and Martin Johnson Heade to William Warden, August 25, 1886, St. Johns County Mortgage Book E, pp. 275–76. For the loan terms, see Elizabeth Heade and Martin Johnson Heade to William Warden, August 25, 1886, St. Johns County Mortgage Book E, pp. 275–76; Elizabeth Heade and Martin Johnson Heade to William Warden, January 6, 1887, St. Johns County Mortgage Book E, pp. 278–79; Elizabeth Heade and Martin Johnson Heade to William Warden, January 6, 1897, St. Johns County Mortgage Book E, p. 74. Records suggest that the mortgages were finally repaid in full in 1913. See Abstract of Title to Lands in City of St. Augustine, Lying in Heade Tract as per Caption; St. Johns County, Florida (Saint Augustine, FL: St. Johns County Abstract Company, c. 1920): 4, 5, 7; Box 355, Folder 54, Saint Augustine Historical Society Manuscript Collection. Martin Johnson Heade to John Russell Bartlett, December 26, 1875, John Russell Bartlett Papers, Box 13: January 1873–December 1875, John Carter Brown Library. For records of Heade’s Newport purchase, see “City’s Collector’s Notice,” Newport Mercury, December 11, 1875, 3; “Buildings,” Newport Mercury, January 29, 1876, 2; City Atlas of Newport, Rhode Island (Philadelphia: G. M. Hopkins, 1876), plate T. On Heade’s Chicago purchases, see Horatio Stone to Martin Johnson Heade, May 9, 1853; William S. Johnston and wife to Martin Johnson Heade, June 22, 1853; Edwin and Frances Larned and John and Elizabeth Woodbridge to Marton Johnson Heade, February 27, 1854; Horatio Stone to Martin Johnson Heade, December 26, 1854; Martin Johnson Heade to Julius Rosenthal, September 11, 1876; Martin Johnson Heade Papers, Box 1, Folder 10: Deeds 1853–55, 1876, Archives of American Art. For Heade’s losses from these purchases, see Heade to Eben Loomis, April 13 and May 4, 1884, Loomis-Wilder Papers. On Heade’s misadventures in Madison, see Didymus [Heade], “In Old Time Wisconsin,” Forest and Stream (September 3, 1898): 185. Heade to Loomis, December 4, 1887, Loomis-Wilder Papers. See, for example, Heade to Loomis, October 22, 1888. Hillyer, Designing Dixie, 51–53, 70–74. See also Geoffrey Mohlman, “Lincolnville: An Anthropological History of Black St. Augustine” (BA thesis, University of South Florida, 1991), 130–39. Postbellum print images of St. Augustine sometimes wove “picturesque” representations of local African American workers into romantic treatments of the town that highlighted its quaint foreignness; these figures disappeared from local promotional visual culture after the 1870s. See, for example, “St. George Street,” Lippincott’s Magazine (November 1875): 541. African American Saint Augustinians harvested sea grasses as feed for livestock and as raw material for souvenirs (hats and baskets) that they sold to white tourists. For references to the latter practice, see Sarah Stuart Robbins, One Happy Winter: Or, A Visit to Florida (Boston: Lockwood, Brooks, 1878), 176–79; DeWitt Webb, “Down Matanzas Way,” Forest and Stream 66 (1906): 986. I thank Charles Tingley, senior research librarian at the Saint Augustine Historical

NOTES

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76.

77.

78. 79.

80.

81. 82.

83. 84. 85.

Society, for pointing me to the importance of hay gathering in the marshes. Saint Augustine’s Minorcan residents were almost always cast as exotic nonwhite others in period travel and promotional writing about Florida. See, for example, “The St. John’s Region in Florida,” Outing and The Wheelman 3 (February 1884): 324; Reynolds, Standard Guide, 16–20. The two figures resonate, for example, with the picturesque (and pejorative) narrative of Minorcan riparian labor offered by Constance Fenimore Woolson’s poem “Matanzas River”: “Oh! floating on the sea-river’s brine, / Where, noting each ripple of the line, / The old Minorcan fishermen, swarthy and slow, / Sit watching for the drum fish, drumming down below; / Now and then along shore their dusky dug-outs pass; / Coming home laden down with clams and marsh grass.” See Woolson, “Matanzas River,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (December 1874): 24. On Lincolnville, see Mohlman, “Lincolnville”; David Colburn, Racial Change and Community Crisis: St. Augustine, Florida 1877–1980 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). Romanticized and often pejorative accounts of African American cabin settlements appear in regional fiction and travel writing from the period. See, for example, Constance Fenimore Woolson, “The Ancient City, part II,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (December 1874): 178; Nina L. Smith, Tales of St. Augustine (Cambridge: W. H. Wheeler, 1891), 37–47. The white Southern genre painter William Aiken Walker also painted the cabin homes of African American Saint Augustinians. See, for example, Walker, Cabin, St. Augustine, Florida (1897, private collection), reprinted in American & European Works of Art Online (Skinner, 2005), accessible at https://www.skinnerinc. com/auctions/2269/lots/290. See, for example, Smith, Tales of St. Augustine (1891), 102–4; “From Florida,” Zion’s Herald, March 7, 1878, 7. On Woolson’s racialized accounts of Saint Augustine, see Sharon Kennedy Nolle, Writing Reconstruction: Race, Gender, and Citizenship in the Postwar South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 25–75. Constance Fenimore Woolson, “The Ancient City, part I,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 50 (December 1874): 14; Constance Fenimore Woolson, “Black Point,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (June 1879): 92. Heade to Loomis, April 9, 1883, Loomis-Wilder Papers. For another reference to Heade’s African American employees, see Heade to Loomis, February 1, 1884. The “painter” and “carpenter” that Heade mentions in the 1883 postcard were almost certainly African American; as Geoffrey Mohlman has shown, African American Saint Augustinians performed much of the skilled and unskilled labor that propelled the local real estate and tourism booms. See Mohlman, “Linconville,” 93, 129–30. See Heade to Loomis, June 29, 1882. Heade to Loomis, February 12, 1883. For another, similar invocation of the “cracker” by the artist, see Heade, “Notes of Floridian Experience,” Forest and Stream (May 24, 1883): 324. For period accounts of the Florida cracker that reaffirm the figure’s racial ambiguity and deviation from respectable whiteness, see John Whipple Potter Jenks, Hunting in Florida (Providence, RI: J. W. P. Jerks, 1884), 12–27, 52–53; Margaret Wade Campbell, Florida Days (Boston: Little, Brown, 1889), 172–86; “Days in Sub-Tropical Florida,” Friends’ Intelligencer, April 19, 1890, 250–51; Clarence Moore, “At the Home of a Florida Cracker,” Demorest’s Family Magazine (February 1892): 195–200.

5. PAINTING AND PROPERTY ON PROUTS NECK

1. The scholarly literature on Homer’s Prouts Neck period is extensive. For classic chronicles of the artist’s time on the promontory, see William Henry Downes, The Life and Works of Winslow Homer (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1911), 109–271; Lloyd Goodrich, Winslow Homer (New NOTES

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2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

210

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York: Macmillan, 1944), 91–225; Philip C. Beam, Winslow Homer at Prout’s Neck [1966] (Lanham, MD: Down East Books, 2014). For more recent analyses of Homer’s Prouts Neck period, see essays by Philip Beam, Patricia Junker, and David Tatham in Winslow Homer in the 1890s: Prout’s Neck Observed, ed. Philip C. Beam (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1990); Nicolai Cikovsky Jr. and Franklin Kelly, Winslow Homer (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1995), 223–38, 301–38, 358–89; Elizabeth Johns, Winslow Homer: The Nature of Observation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Thomas Denenberg, ed., Weatherbeaten: Winslow Homer and Maine (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012). For studies of particular themes and works within Homer’s Prouts Neck oeuvre, see Sarah Burns, Inventing the Modern Artist: Art & Culture in Gilded Age America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 187–220; Sophie Lévy, ed., Winslow Homer: Poet of the Sea (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Kathleen A. Foster, Shipwreck! Winslow Homer and The Life Line (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2012); Frank H. Goodyear III, “A Good Thing When He Sees It,” in Dana E. Byrd and Frank H. Goodyear III, Winslow Homer and the Camera: Photography and the Art of Painting (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), 1–68. For thoughtful reconstructions of the Homer family’s real estate undertakings, see Patricia Junker, “Expressions of Art and Life in The Artist’s Studio in an Afternoon Fog,” in Winslow Homer in the 1890s: Prout’s Neck Observed (1990), 34–65; Kenneth Bolton, “ ‘The Right Place’: Winslow Homer and the Development of Prout’s Neck,” in Denenberg, Weatherbeaten, 29–48. See, for example, Sophie Lévy, “Mastering the Elements: Prout’s Neck, Maine,” in Winslow Homer: Poet of the Sea, 92; Marc Simpson, “ ‘You Must Wait, and Wait Patiently’: Winslow Homer’s Prout’s Neck Marines,” in Denenberg, Weatherbeaten, 108–9. Breaking from the tendency to separate Homer’s real estate and painterly activities, Patricia Junker has analyzed The Artist’s Studio in an Afternoon Fog (1894, Memorial Art Gallery) as an expression of the painter’s affection for his newly built studio-home and a visualization of the aesthetic ideal (harmony between building and setting) that shaped the design of the family’s residences and rental cottages on Prouts Neck. See Junker, “Expressions of Art and Life.” On the Libby family and Prouts Neck in the antebellum period, see Rupert S. Holland, The Story of Prouts Neck (Prouts Neck, ME: Prouts Neck Association, 1924), 35–46; Augustus F. Moulton, Old Prouts Neck (Portland, ME: Marks Printing House, 1924), 99–104; John J. Cromie, “Prout’s Neck: From Farm to Resort” (Scarborough Historical Society website, 2016), retrieved from http://scarboroughhistoricalsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Prouts-Neck-Part-1-Context.pdf. For period texts that refer to agricultural and marine work around Prouts Neck, see “A Farm for Sale,” Eastern Farmer, February 17, 1842, 8; see James B. Thornton v. Loring Foss (1847), in Maine Reports: Cases Argued and Determined in the Supreme Judicial Court of the State of Maine, vol. 13 (Augusta, ME: Daily Kennebec Journal, 1848), 402–5; Joshua A. Carnes, A Trip to Portland (Portland, ME: Hall & Libbey, 1858), 82. Daniel C. Colesworthy, The Old Bureau, and Other Tales (Boston: Antique Book Store, 1871), 358. On the Libby family’s entry into the hospitality business, see Holland, Story of Prouts Neck (1924), 35; Moulton, Old Prouts Neck, 104–7. For period references to picnicking and early recreation on Prouts Neck, see “The Ocean and the Country,” Portland Daily Advertiser, June 29, 1836, 2; “Pleasure Resorts about Portland,” Portland Weekly Advertiser, August 1, 1843, 1; “Prout’s Neck,” Portland Weekly Advertiser, August 12, 1845, 2; “Portland Thirty Years Ago,” Portland Weekly Advertiser, September 2, 1851, 1; William Willis, Guidebook for Portland and Vicinity (Portland, ME: B. Thurston & J. F. Richardson, 1859), 42–43; “Portland,” Portland Weekly Advertiser, August 16, 1859, 1; “Prout’s Neck,” Portland Daily Eastern Argus, August 21, 1869, 3. On the development and gentrification of Maine’s coast, see Richard W. Judd, “Reshaping Maine’s Landscape: Rural Culture, Tourism, and Conservation 1890–1920,” Journal of Forest

NOTES

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7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18.

19.

20.

21. 22.

History 32 (October 1988): 180–90; Dona Brown, Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 169–200; Colin Woodard, The Lobster Coast: Rebels, Rusticators, and the Struggle for a Forgotten Frontier (New York: Penguin Press, 2005), 162–66; Richard Westcott, “Tourism in Maine,” in Maine: The Pine Tree State from Prehistory to the Present, ed. Richard W. Judd, Edwin Churchill, and Joel W. Eastman (Orono: University of Maine Press, 2011), 431–38. Moulton, Old Prouts Neck, 105–7; Holland, Story of Prouts Neck, 36–40, 46–48; Beam, Winslow Homer at Prout’s Neck, 28–32; John J. Cromie, “Prout’s Neck: From Farm to Resort”; “Selling Begins,” online essay (Scarborough Historical Society 2016), retrieved from http://scarborough historicalsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Prouts-Neck-Part-2-Selling-Begins.pdf. For the legal instrument that created the Marginal Way, see Minerva Libby to Elmira Kaler, November 25, 1876, Deed Book 434, p. 421, Cumberland County Register of Deeds. The reproduction of the Libby Plat was uploaded to the Prouts Neck Historical Society website in 2014 by Caroline Willauer. Bolton, “Right Place,” 30; Beam, Winslow Homer at Prout’s Neck, 27–28. Junker, “Expressions of Art and Life,” 39–52; Bolton, “Right Place,” 32–45. Junker, “Expressions of Art and Life,” 39–52; Bolton, “Right Place,” 32–45; Beam, Winslow Homer at Prout’s Neck, 29–44. On Homer’s work with Stevens, see Junker and Bolton, op. cit.; James F. O’Gorman, “The Architecture of Homer’s Studio,” in Denenberg, Weatherbeaten, 49–67. For period articles chronicling the sporting events and social life at Prouts Neck, see “On the Maine Coast,” Brattleboro Phoenix, August 2, 1889, 3; “A Portland Girl,” Portland Daily Press, August 3, 1891, 2; “The Tribune Fresh Air Fund,” New York Tribune, August 18, 1897, 7. “Prout’s Neck, Maine” [advertisement], New York Herald, June 26, 1892, 3; The Checkley (Portland, ME: Ira C. Foss, 1907), 15. See Minerva Libby to Elmira Kaler, November 25, 1876, Deed Book 434, p. 421, and untitled article, Portland Daily Press, August 3, 1898, 9. Frank Moss, Historical Sketch of Prouts Neck (Portland, ME: privately published, 1912), 5, retrieved from https://digitalmaine.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1023&context=scarborough_books. “Prout’s Neck,” St. Johnsbury Caledonian, July 24, 1884, 2. For other promotional texts touting the wild surf and rocky sublimity of the Neck, see Edward Elwell, Portland and Vicinity (Portland, ME: Loring, Short, Harmon & W. S. Jones, 1880), 112; John S. Locke, Historical Sketches of Old Orchard and the Shores of Saco Bay (Boston: C. H. Woodman, 1884), 88. “Prout’s Neck,” St. Johnsbury Caledonian (July 24, 1884, 2; George Henry Hayes, The State of Maine in 1893 (New York: Moss Engraving Company, 1893), 21. Advertisement, (Washington, DC) Evening Star, April 9, 1905, 14; Checkley, 6; advertisement, Boston Herald, June 7, 1903, 24; advertisement, Philadelphia Inquirer, May 3, 1903, 10; The Sea Coast Resorts of Eastern Maine (Boston: International Steamship Company, 1890), 11. Homer referenced these upkeep activities in his correspondence. See Winslow Homer to Arthur Homer, undated, Winslow Homer papers, Bowdoin College Museum of Art, 1964.69.85; Winslow Homer to Charles Homer, March 21, 1896, Homer papers, 1964.69.60 a-c. See also Goodrich, Winslow Homer, 194. On Homer’s studio, rental cottage, and stone wall, see O’Gorman, “Architecture of Homer’s Studio”; Bolton, “Right Place,” 40. On Homer’s construction of fences, see Beam, Winslow Homer at Prout’s Neck, 200. Winslow Homer to Louis Prang, October 1895, cited in Goodrich, Winslow Homer, 111. Undated letter Winslow Homer to Charles Homer Jr., before 1899, Homer papers, BCMA, 1964.69.55. NOTES

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23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31.

32.

33. 34.

35.

36.

37. 38.

39.

212

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See Beam, Winslow Homer at Prout’s Neck, 176. Ibid., 196. Ibid., 200. Undated letter, Winslow Homer to Charles Homer, Homer Papers, 1964.69.37 a-d letter. Burditt’s cottage appears on a map included in Rupert Holland’s history of the promontory; see Holland, Story of Prouts Neck, 67, 69. For documentation of the Stephenson cottage, see Benjamin Cotting to Josephine Fisk and Rosalie Stephenson, December 28, 1891, Cumberland County Register of Deeds, Deed Book 587, p. 84; for documentation of Remsen’s cottage, see Annie Shoemaker to Ira Remsen, January 12, 1907, Cuberland County Recorded of Deeds, Deed Book 802, p. 82. For documentation of Stoddart’s property, see Winslow Homer to Curwen Stoddart December 21, 1906, Cumberland County Register of Deeds, Deed Book 798, p. 213. Winslow Homer to Arthur Homer, April 20, 1909, Homer Papers, BCMA, 1964.69.145. See Bolton, “Right Place,” 39. As Alyson Flournoy, Thomas T. Ankersen, and Sasha Alvarenga have shown, Maine courts and legislators have long hesitated to endorse the notion that public easements may be created on the state’s overwhelmingly private shore lands by customary use. See Alyson Flournoy, Thomas T. Ankersen, and Sasha Alvarenga, “Recreational Rights to the Dry Sand Beach in Florida: Property, Custom, and Controversy” (2019), 11, note 44, retrieved from https://scholarship.law.ufl .edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1847&context=facultypub. Homer’s seaside dinners are documented in a photograph entitled Corn Roast, Prout’s Neck (1880, Bowdoin College Museum of Art); see also Goodrich, Winslow Homer, 211. For a period reference to his beachcombing, see “Letter Box,” St. Nicholas 28 (January 1901): 286. See Downes, Life and Works of Winslow Homer, 114; Bolton, “Right Place,” 40; Beam, Winslow Homer at Prout’s Neck, 202. See Winslow Homer to George Briggs, August 1900, reprinted in Cikovsky and Kelly, Winslow Homer, 402. See also Beam, Winslow Homer at Prout’s Neck, 186–88, 190; Goodrich, Winslow Homer, 187–89. Helen A. Cooper, Winslow Homer Watercolors (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 66, 85–120; William R. Cross, Homer at the Beach: A Marine Painter’s Journey, 1869–80 (Gloucester, MA: Cape Ann Historical Association, 2019). Homer’s pictures of local workers include Gathering Shrimps (1884), Clamming (1887, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), and Baiting the Lobster Pot (before 1889); for references to these works, see Cikovsky and Kelly, Winslow Homer, 410. See Downes, Life and Works of Winslow Homer, 254–55; Goodrich, Winslow Homer, 194, 211, 218; Beam, Winslow Homer at Prout’s Neck, 56, 64–69, 80, 89, 101, 109, 158, 190. Lewis Wright also worked in Homer’s studio after the death of the artist’s father; Homer caricatured Wright in at least one drawing, and does not seem to have associated with him socially. On Wright, see Beam, Winslow Homer at Prout’s Neck, 133–39. Biographies of the artist suggest that Homer was friendly with young, working-class women and older female workers but did not socialize with them. See Beam, Winslow Homer at Prout’s Neck, 53–55. On Alvin Brown’s fish house, see Beam, Winslow Homer at Prout’s Neck, 69, 154. Property records indicate that Brown owned only one piece of real estate around Prouts Neck, an inland lot with house near Great Pond—which suggests that his fish house was a squatter structure. See Thomas Libby to Alvin Brown, April 30, 1870, Deed Book 377, p. 108, Cumberland County Register of Deeds. On fish houses, see Charles W. Smythe, “Traditional Uses of Fish Houses in Otter Cove” (2008), retrieved from http://www.npshistory.com/publications/acad/fish_house .pdf.

NOTES

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40. For details of Brown’s life, see “Alvin Brown Drowned,” Portland Daily Press, July 31, 1899, 4; see also the 1891, 1894, and 1896 editions of S. B. Beckett’s Portland Directory, retrieved from Ancestry. com, U.S. City Directories, 1822–1995 [database online] (Provo, UT: Ancestry.com Operations, 2011). 41. Local records speak to Gatchell’s precarious financial state; see Scarborough Taxation Value Book (1875), 6, Scarborough Historical Society, retrieved from https://digitalmaine.com/scarborough_books/2/. See also Goodrich, Winslow Homer, 142; Beam, Winslow Homer at Prout’s Neck, 103, 204. For references to Gatchell’s employment history, see U.S. federal censuses for 1880 and 1900, retrieved from Ancestry.com, U.S. City Directories, 1822–1995 [database online] (Provo, UT: Ancestry.com Operations, 2011). 42. Wiggin’s store was located on the upland section of the Neck, along the main road to the promontory; see Moss, “Historical Sketch of Prouts Neck,” 2. 43. Holland, Story of Prouts Neck, 46–47; Beam, Winslow Homer at Prout’s Neck, 154–55; Goodrich, Winslow Homer, 194. Wiggin’s death notice identifies him as a fisherman; see Record of a Death, November 25, 1901, Vital Records 1892–1907, Roll 61, Maine State Archives, Augusta. 44. See Beam, Winslow Homer at Prout’s Neck, 56, 80, 101, 149, 155, 195. 45. See Bolton, “Right Place,” 37. 46. I thank Diana Greenwold for suggesting that Homer’s farmwork had a performative character. On the artist’s chores, see Downes, Life and Works of Winslow Homer, 248; for a reference to his ice harvesting, see Winslow Homer to Charles S. Homer, December 10, 1890, Homer Papers, BCMA, 1964.69.42; for a reference to his cultivation of corn, see “Scarboro Fair,” Portland Daily Press, October 5, 1889, 9. On Homer’s cultivation of tobacco, see Downes, Life and Works of Winslow Homer, 111. 47. See Downes, Life and Works of Winslow Homer, 112. 48. See Beam, Winslow Homer at Prout’s Neck, 184–86. 49. Other examples of these works include Baiting the Lobster Pot (before 1889, unlocated); Boats along a Schooner (Fishing Pinky) (undated, private collection); Catching Mackerel (1884, unlocated); The Smuggler of Prout’s Neck (1884, private collection); After the Rain, Prout’s Neck (1887, private collection). Homer also painted interstate fishermen at work in pictures such as Herring Net (1885, Art Institute of Chicago). Other works rehash tropes that Homer worked out in England; see, for example, A Light on the Sea (1897, National Gallery of Art). 50. Wayne O’Leary, Maine Sea Fisheries: The Rise and Fall of a Native Industry, 1830–1890 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996), 252–92; Woodard, Lobster Coast, 150–61; Nathan Lipfert, “The Shore Fisheries, 1865–1930,” in Judd et al., Maine: The Pine Tree State, 420–30. 51. George Brown Goode, The Fisheries and Fishery Industries of the United States, section III (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1887), 97–99; Joseph Smith, Winter Talk on Summer Pastimes: A Landman’s Log (Methuen, MA: Charles E. Trow, 1883), 42–44. 52. On the difficulty of this process, see Smith, Winter Talk on Summer Pastimes, 43–44. 53. Cikovsky and Kelly, Winslow Homer, 227; Marc Simpson, Winslow Homer: The Clark Collection (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 84–85; Beam, Winslow Homer at Prout’s Neck, 66. 54. Smith, Winter Talk on Summer Pastimes (1883), 43. 55. “Watercolors at the Eden Musee,” Art Amateur (July 1890): 24 56. Beam, Winslow Homer at Prout’s Neck, 33, 121, 224. 57. On the harvesting of grass and mud, see James B. Thornton v. Loring Foss. For a reference to coastal kelp gathering, see Carnes, Trip to Portland, 82. On clam digging and processing around the inlet, see Goode, Fisheries and Fishery Industries of the United States, 96–97. For a reference to the inlet’s anchorage, see advertisement, Portland Daily Eastern Argus, March 2, 1864, 2; for references to the wharf and landing, see Holland, Story of Prouts Neck, 1924, 42–46; Moulton, Old Prouts Neck, 111–12. NOTES

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58. For a reference to the presence of fishing houses around the inlet, see Herbert Sylvester, Maine Pioneer Settlements, vol. 3 (Boston: W. B. Clarke, 1909), 379; on local canning, see Goode, Fisheries and Fishery Industries of the United States, 96–97; Locke, Historical Sketches, 87–88. For a period reference to the local shipbuilding industry, see advertisement, Portland Weekly Advertiser, December 28, 1847, 3. 59. See Moulton v. Libbey [sic] (37 Me., 1854), reprinted in A. C. Freeman, The American Decisions Containing the Cases of General Value and Authority Decided in the Courts of the Several States, vol. LIX (San Francisco: Bancroft-Whitney, 1886), 57–66. For another case in which a local landowner asserted a private claim on customarily common littoral resources, see James B. Thornton v. Loring Foss. 60. John T. Hull, Hand Book of Portland, Old Orchard, Cape Elizabeth, and Casco Bay (Portland, ME: Southworth Brothers, 1888), 224. 61. “The Scarboro Clam,” Portland Daily Press, January 14, 1892, 6. 62. “Summer Resorts,” Portland Daily Press, October 16, 1873, 2. 63. Downes, Life and Works of Winslow Homer, 161; Beam, Winslow Homer at Prout’s Neck, 89–92. 64. “For the Benefit of American Art,” New York Herald, January 26, 1891, 5; “Four Paintings by Homer,” New York Times, January 16, 1891, 4. 65. “Four Paintings by Winslow Homer,” Critic (January 24, 1891): 47 66. Junker, “Expressions of Art and Life,” 40. 67. These homes appear on a map included in Rupert Holland’s 1924 study of Prouts Neck; see Holland, Story of Prouts Neck, 66–67 and map thereafter; see also “A New Cottage at Prout’s Neck,” Portland Daily Press, April 1, 1899, 9; Beam, Winslow Homer at Prout’s Neck, 198–99. 68. Advertisement, (Washington, DC) Evening Star, April 9, 1905, 14. See also advertisement, Boston Herald, June 7, 1903, 24; advertisement, Worcester Daily Spy, April 12, 1903, 11. 69. Moses F. Sweetser, Summer Days Down East (Portland, ME: Chisholm Brothers, 1883), 1–2; Scenic Gems of Maine (Portland, ME: George W. Morris, 1898), 41; Locke, Historical Sketches, 88; Elwell, Portland and Vicinity, 107–8. 70. Checkley, 3 71. “Four Paintings by Homer,” New York Times, January 16, 1891, 4; “The Winslow Homer Pictures,” Art Amateur, February 1891, 55. 72. “Some Questions of Art,” New York Sun, January 25, 1891, 15. 73. For analyses in this vein, see Kelly, “Time and Narrative Erased,” in Cikovsky and Kelly, Winslow Homer, 101–13; Simpson, “You Must Wait”; Thomas Denenberg, “Weatherbeaten,” in Denenberg, Weatherbeaten, 1–28. 74. Hannah Googins to Charles Homer Sr., November 26, 1884, Cumberland County Register of Deeds, Deed Book 514, p. 241. 75. Winslow Homer to Charles Homer, March 21, 1896, Homer papers BCMA, 1964.69.60 a-c. A map that Homer drew of his father’s property includes a “cranberry pond” near the inland border of the Eastern Point lot; see Winslow Homer, “Outline Sketch of Lots to Be Divided,” undated, Homer papers, BCMA, 1964.69.93. 76. Homer, “Outline Sketch of Lots to Be Divided.” 77. “Pictures at the Union League Club,” New York Evening Post, January 11, 1901, 2. 78. On the legal definitions of littoral property in Maine, see Eaton v. Town of Wells, 760 A2d232 (Me. 2000); Orlando E. Delogu, “Eaton v. Town of Wells: A Critical Comment,” Ocean and Coastal Law Journal 6 (2001): 225–32; John Duff, “Public Shoreline Access in Maine: A Citizen’s Guide to Ocean and Coastal Law” (Orono: University of Maine Press, 1990); Evan Parrott, “Maine’s Public Trust Doctrine Continues to Evolve,” Sand Bar 10 (October 2011): 4–5; Donald 214

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79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86.

87. 88. 89. 90.

91.

92.

93. 94.

95.

Richards and Knud Hermansen, “Maine Principles of Ownership along Water Bodies,” Maine Law Review 47 (April 2018): 36–68. Babson v. Tainter 79 (Me. 368, 1887) reprinted in The Atlantic Reporter, vol. 9 (St. Paul, MN: West Publishing, 1887), 65. Hannah Googins to Charles Homer, November 26, 1884, Cumberland County Register of Deeds, book 514, p. 241. Richards and Hermansen, “Maine Principles of Ownership,” 36–37. The Arthur Homer plat is part of a private collection of Homer family papers; Caroline Willauer uploaded an image of this plat to the Prouts Neck Historical Society website in 2014. Charles Caffin, “American Painters of the Sea,” Critic (December 1903): 548. For a period reference to the stranding of horsetail kelp on the Maine coast after storms, see Joseph Warren Smith, Gleanings from the Sea (Andover, ME: Joseph Warren Smith, 1887), 189. On the range of Xanthoria elegans in Maine, see James W. Hinds and Patricia L. Hinds, “The Lichen Genus Xanthoria in Maine,” Maine Naturalist 1 (1993): 1–16. Gouldsboro Land Improvement Company, A Description of Its Property upon Grindstone Neck (Gouldsboro, ME: Gouldsboro Land Improvement Company, 1890), 8; “Spruce Point,” Portland Board of Trade Journal 3 (1890): 279. Checkley, 11; “Big Investment in Real Estate,” (Ellsworth, ME) American, June 4, 1896, 3. For a period report on one storm’s destructive effects on local property, see “Winter Breezes,” Portland Daily Press, January 10, 1884, 5. Kenyon Cox, “The Art of Winslow Homer,” Scribner’s Magazine 56 (September 1914): 377; John W. Beatty, “Recollections of an Intimate Friendship,” in Goodrich, Winslow Homer, 225. “A Shore Line Road,” Bar Harbor Mount Desert Herald, May 6, 1882, 2; “Our Summer Resorts,” Bangor Republican Journal, August 16, 1883, 3; untitled article, Bar Harbor Record, September 6, 1888, 1. For similar critiques of fencing and privatization, see “Fencing in the Sea Shore,” Portland Daily Press, August 15, 1885, 2; “Fencing in the Seashore,” Camden Herald, September 4, 1885, 4; “Preservation of Natural Scenery,” Boston Herald, May 15, 1890, 6; Samuel Drake, The Pine Tree Coast (Boston: Estes & Lauriat, 1891), 313. Charles Eliot, “The Coast of Maine,” Garden and Forest 3 (February 19, 1890): 86–87. Inspired by this article, Eliot’s father, Charles W. Eliot, led a campaign to purchase and preserve undeveloped sectors of coastal land around Mt. Desert in the decades that followed—an undertaking that led eventually to the creation of Acadia National Park. See Pamela J. Belanger, Inventing Acadia: Artists and Tourists at Mount Desert (Lebanon, NH: UPNE, 1999), 118–27; Woodard, Lobster Coast, 163–66. On progressive reckonings with laissez-faire capitalism and private property, see Barbara Fried, The Progressive Assault on Laissez Faire: Robert Hale and the First Law and Economics Movement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 72–76; Jeffrey Hornstein, A Nation of Realtors: A Cultural History of the Twentieth-Century American Middle Class (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 86–87; William J. Novak, “Law and the Social Control of American Capitalism,” Emory Law Journal 60 (2010): 391–99; George Klosko, The Transformation of American Liberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 65–70. Walter Rauschenbusch, The Social Principles of Jesus (New York: Association Press, 1916), 116. Richard T. Ely, “The Future Development of Private Property,” in A History of Real Estate, Building, Architecture in New York City, 1868–1893 (New York: Real Estate Record and Builders’ Guide, 1894), 380. Henry George, Progress and Poverty (New York: Sterling, 1879), 364. On George’s work and contribution to progressive critiques of property, see Edward O’Donnell, Henry George and the Crisis of Inequality (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 42–63. NOTES

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CONCLUSION

1. See Magazine Antiques 166 (2004): 40. On Llewellyn Park, see Richard Guy Wilson, “Idealism and the Origin of the First American Suburb: Lllewellyn Park, New Jersey,” American Art Journal 11 (October 1979): 79–90. Excellent new work on nineteenth-century art and real estate began to appear as this book neared completion; for one exciting example of this emerging body of research, see Spencer Wigmore, “Albert Bierstadt and the Speculative Terrain of American Landscape Painting, 1866–1877” (PhD dissertation, University of Delaware, 2020). 2. For records of this transaction, see Early Land Transfers, Detroit and Wayne County, Michigan, vol. 37, County and City, 1811–1858 (Lansing: Michigan State Library, 1938), 31, 61. For a scholarly reference to Duncanson’s real estate transaction in Detroit, see Romare Bearden and Harry Henderson, A History of African American Artists from 1792 to the Present (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993), 482. 3. For a study of the restrictions on female property ownership in Michigan, see Ellen Dannin, “Marriage and Law Reform: Lessons from the Nineteenth-Century Michigan Married Women’s Property Acts,” Legal Studies Research Paper No. 19–2010 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 2010), retrieved from https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1591844. The passage of Married Women’s Property Acts in many states made it possible for married women to receive property by “gift, grant, devise, or bequest”; see Joseph A. Custer, “The Three Waves of Married Women’s Property Acts in the Nineteenth Century, with a Focus on Mississippi, New York, and Oregon,” Ohio Northern University Law Review 40 (2014): 410. 4. Rosalyn Deutsche, “Property Values: Hans Haacke, Real Estate, and the Museum,” in Hans Haacke: Unfinished Business, ed. Brian Wallis (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 20–37; Frances Richard, Gordon Matta-Clark: Physical Poetics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019), 222–35; Alan Moore and Job Cornwell, “Local History: The Art of Battle for Bohemia in New York,” in Alternative Art New York 1965–1985, ed. Julie Ault (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 321–25; Judith Hamera, Unfinished Business: Michael Jackson, Detroit, and the Figural Economy of American Deindustrialization (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 145–88; Lillian M. Ortiz, “Exploring Foreclosure through Art,” Shelterforce (January 9, 2017), https://shelterforce.org/2017/01/09/exploring-foreclosure-through-art/; Mindy N. Beast, Candice Hopkins, and Manuela Well-Off-Man, Art for a New Understanding: Native Voices, 1950s to Now (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2018), 174. 5. In the past two decades the forces of deregulation, financial innovation, popular property culture, and asymmetrical development have firmly entrenched a real estate system defined by speculative abstraction and insidious inequality, a system in which corporations manage huge portfolios of rental units and luxury properties as financial assets, home prices move in trajectories that seem entirely detached from everyday reality, and finding suitable housing has become a burdensome proposition for all but a shrinking few. The U.S. housing market’s performance during the global COVID-19 pandemic (2019–22) speaks to the bizarre unreality and speculative abstraction of contemporary real estate enterprise; during the first eleven months of the pandemic, the median listing price for homes in the Los Angeles, New York, and Atlanta metropolitan areas rose by 14, 13, and 11 percent, respectively. See Andrew Khouri, “The Housing Market Is Red Hot. How Long Can It Last?,” Los Angeles Times, December 22, 2020, https:// www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-12-22/housing-market-red-hot-how-long-can-it-last; and Sabrina Speianu, “December 2020 Monthly Housing Market Trends Report,” Realtor.com (January 7, 2021), https://www.realtor.com/research/december-2020-data.

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ILLUSTRATIONS



1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

Cyrus Latham, Map of Verplanck, 1836  /  17 Detail, Hudson Square, from Cyrus Latham, Verplanck, 1836  /  19 George Harvey, Sunnyside, 1838  /  20 Robert Havell Jr., View of the Hudson River from Tarrytown Heights, c. 1842  / �� 21 William Baker, Verplanck (from the Hudson), 1836  /  22 Detail from Wade & Croome’s Panorama of the Hudson River from New 23 York to Waterford, 1846  / �� Daniel Huntington, Rondout Kill, Afternoon, 1837  / �� 27 Daniel Huntington, Landscape, 1837  / �� 28 James F. Rodgers, The Leatherman, 1885  / �� 29 Detail from Daniel Huntington, Landscape, 1837  / �� 30 Detail from Daniel Huntington, Landscape, 1837  / �� 30 Daniel Huntington, Mercy’s Dream, 1841  / �� 34 Detail from Daniel Huntington, Mercy’s Dream, 1841  / �� 38 John Quidor, Money Diggers, 1832  / �� 48 Ralph Earl, Looking East from Denny Hill, 1800  / �� 50 Charles Willson Peale, Landscape Looking toward Sellers Hall from Mill 50 Bank, c. 1818  / �� John Caspar Wild, View of Kaskaskia, 1841  /  52 Danforth, Underwood & Co., Bank of Cairo Two Dollar Note, 1840  /  55 Unknown artist, Illinois and Michigan Canal Five Dollar Scrip Note, 1839  / �� 56 Detail from John Quidor, Money Diggers, 1832  /  57 225

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21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

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Unknown artist, Le Grande Diable d’Argent Patron de la Finance, 1798  /  58 Henry R. Robinson, General Jackson Slaying the Many Headed Monster, 1832  / �� 59 David Claypoole Johnston, Great Locofoco Juggernaut, c. 1837  /  59 John Caspar Wild, View of Galena, Illinois, 1845  /  62 �� Detail from Nicholas Van Zandt, A General Plat of the Military Lands between the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers, 1818  /  66 John Quidor, Money Diggers, 1856  /  68 John Quidor, Wolfert’s Will, 1856  /  69 Detail from John Quidor, Wolfert’s Will, 1856  /  70 Eastman Johnson, Landscape of Superior, 1857  /  80 “View of the City of Superior,” from James Ritchie, Wisconsin and Its Resources, 1857  /  80 Eastman Johnson, Camp Scene at Grand Portage, 1857  /  83 Eastman Johnson, Grand Portage, 1857  /  83 Detail from George H. Cannon, Map of Indian Reservation (Grand Portage), 1858  /  84 Eastman Johnson, The Cranberry Harvest, Island of Nantucket, 1880  /  86 J. H. Bufford, Plan of Sherburne Bluffs, Nantucket, Mass., c. 1879  /  87 Eastman Johnson, Husking Bee, Island of Nantucket, 1876  /  88 Unknown photographer, Cranberry Bog on Robbins Homestead, 1890  /  90 Eastman Johnson, Cranberry Pickers, c. 1878–79  /  91 Eastman Johnson, Cranberry Pickers, c. 1879  /  91 Eastman Johnson, At the Closing of the Day, c. 1878–80  /  92 Eastman Johnson, The Cranberry Pickers (A Study), 1876  /  93 Detail from Eastman Johnson, The Cranberry Harvest, Island of Nantucket, 1880  /  94 Detail from Eastman Johnson, The Cranberry Harvest, Island of Nantucket, 1880  /  95 Detail from Eastman Johnson, The Cranberry Harvest, Island of Nantucket, 1880  /  97 Detail from Eastman Johnson, The Cranberry Harvest, Island of Nantucket, 1880  /  100 Brant Point Land Company advertisement in The Nantucket, 1885  /  101 Martin Johnson Heade, On the San Sebastian River, Florida, c. 1886–88  /  107 “The Late Mr. Martin J. Heade in the Window of His Vine-Embowered Cottage on San Marco Avenue,” The Tatler of Society in Florida 14 (March 4, 1905)  /  109 Detail from H. J. Ritchie, Bird’s Eye View of Saint Augustine, 1895  /  110 Martin Johnson Heade, Oranges and Orange Blossoms, c. 1883–95  /  111 Detail from Martin Johnson Heade, On the San Sebastian River, Florida, c. 1886–88  /  113 Frank Shapleigh, Panorama of the City of Saint Augustine, 1886  /  113 Florida East Coast Steamship Co., The East Coast of Florida Is Paradise Regained, 1898  /  115 Thomas Cole, View of L’Esperance on the Schoharie River, 1826–28  /  118 Asher B. Durand, Progress (The Advance of Civilization), 1853  /  118 Frederick Heppenheimer and Louis Mauer, Old Spanish Fort, St. Augustine, 1885  /  119 William Henry Jackson, “St. Augustine from Ft. Marion,” from Panorama from Fort Marion, 1898  /  120 “Land Speculation,” Yankee Notions 2 (June 1853)  /  124 Martin Johnson Heade, Gremlin in the Studio II, c. 1871–75  /  125 Thomas Nast, “A Shadow Is Not a Substance,” from David Wells, Robinson Crusoe’s Money, 1876  /  126 St. Johns County Abstract Company, “Abstract of Title to Lands in City of St. Augustine, Lying in Heade Tract, St. Johns County, Florida,” 1919  /  129 “Ladies’ Entrance, Hotel Ponce de Leon,” in Charles B. Reynolds, The Standard Guide: Saint Augustine, 1894  /  131

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63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

Detail from Martin Johnson Heade, On the San Sebastian River, Florida, c. 1886–88  /  132 Winslow Homer, “W. Homer,” detail from Seven Sketches (Bachelor Homes), 1897–98  /  136 E. C. Jordan, “Plan of Libby’s Neck,” 1893  /  140 Unknown artist, The ‘Ark’ and W.H.’s Studio, c. 1884  /  141 Detail from Winslow Homer, Letter to Charles S. Homer Jr. (Brother), 12/7/1907  /  144 Detail from Winslow Homer, Letter to Arthur B. Homer (Brother), 4/20/1909  /  145 Detail from Winslow Homer, Letter to Charles S. Homer Jr. (Brother), 1895 or 1896  /  146 Winslow Homer, Outline Sketch of Lots to Be Divided, 1899  /  147 Unknown artist, Homer Fishing for Tautog from Rocks at Prouts, 1883–1910  /  148 Unknown artist, Bath Houses, Prouts Neck, 1883–1910  /  149 Winslow Homer, Seven Sketches (Bachelor Homes), 1897–98  /  150 “Brown,” detail from Winslow Homer, Seven Sketches (Bachelor Homes), 1897–98  /  151 “J. Gatchell,” detail from Winslow Homer, Seven Sketches (Bachelor Homes), 1897–98  /  151 Detail from Winslow Homer, Seven Sketches (Bachelor Homes), 1897–98  /  152 Winslow Homer, Bringing in the Nets, 1887  /  154 Detail from J. H. Stuart & Co., “Prouts Neck, Scarborough & Higgins Beaches with Part of Greenville, Picataquis Co. Me.,” in Stuart’s Atlas of the State of Maine, 1894  /  156 Winslow Homer, A Summer Night, 1890  /  158 “Prouts Neck, Cliffs and Beaches,” in George H. Haynes, The State of Maine in 1893, 1893  /  160 “Shore View from Piazza of the Checkley,” in The Checkley, 1907  /  161 Winslow Homer, Eastern Point, 1900  /  163 Detail from Arthur Homer, Blueprint Map of Prouts Neck, 1901  /  164 Detail from Winslow Homer, Eastern Point, 1900  /  166 Detail from E. C. Jordan, “Plan of Libby’s Neck,” 1893  /  167

Illustrations

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INDEX

Page references in italics refer to illustrations. Acadia National Park (Maine), 215n91 African Americans, property discrimination against, 5, 7 African Americans, Saint Augustinian, 130–34; borderland spaces of, 133–34; cabin settlements of, 209nn76–77; employed by Heade, 132–33; harvesting of sea grasses, 155, 208n75; in prints, 208n74; role in real estate boom, 209n82; service workers, 130 Alcazar Hotel (Saint Augustine), 108, 115 Alvarenga, Sasha, 212n31 American Monthly Magazine, on Money Diggers, 67 Andre, Major John, 18, 20 animals, artistic engagement with, 9 Ankersen, Thomas T., 212n31 Anthony, David, 189n19 anthropocentrism, artistic engagement with, 9 art, American: as economic actor, 9; environmental implications of, 9–10;

extractive industries producing, 9; nineteenth-century capitalism and, 180n30; religious, 13, 14, 33; as vehicle of economic critique, 9. See also creativity, artistic; genre scenes; landscape painting; paintings; prospect paintings Art Amateur, on A Summer Night, 162 artists, nineteenth-century American: elucidation of credit/debt, 9; insight into property ownership, 173; inspiration by real estate, 172–73; interpretations of risk, 73; interrogation of real estate economy, 1–4, 11, 171; real estate ventures of, 1–2, 171, 177n2; speculation by, 8, 172; uneasiness with real estate enterprise, 8, 171 artists, twenty-first century: depiction of development, 173 Atlantic Monthly, on Saint Augustine development, 123 Austin, Jane G.: Nantucket Scraps, 99

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Bad Axe, Battle of (1832), 64 Baker, Alfred: Verplanck, 184n19 Baker, Jennifer, 189n19 Baker, William: Verplanck (from the Hudson), 22 banking: expansion of, 47; hydra symbolism of, 58, 59; wildcat, 55. See also finance, realty bank notes, pictorial, 18, 20; fertile soil on, 55, 55, 56 bankruptcy, following speculative failure, 7 Baradel, Lacey, 77–78 Baraga, Frederic, 84–85 Bar Harbor (Maine), urban visitors to, 139 Bath Houses, Prouts Neck (photograph), 149 Beam, Philip C., 143, 159 Bear, Bethany Joy, 35 Beatty, John W., 168 beauty, rural: aesthetic of, 49; developers’ selling of, 51; promoters’ imagining of, 51; Quidor’s Money Diggers and, 48–49, 51–53; rational order of, 49; visual lexicon for, 49 Beekman, William, 18 Belmore Florida Land Company, on Florida climate, 114 Bergthaller, Hannes, 10 Berrian, Samuel, 54 Berrian land agency (Illinois), 46, 189n13 Bierstadt, Albert: evocation of land speculation, 2 Birbeck, Morris, 51 Black Hawk War, 64 blackness: antebellum discourses of, 57; commodification of, 191n41; exoticization of, 130 Blakelock, Ralph Albert: shanty paintings of, 2 Bleakley, William: Verplanck Point Association of, 15–16, 24–25 Boardman, Henry, 186n54 Bolton, Kenyon, 140, 145 Bonga, Stephen, 81, 197n27 boosterism: fantasies of, 56, 136, 167–68; in Florida, 106–7, 114, 123, 127; of frontier land markets, 44, 56, 65; Johnson’s, 76; Money Diggers‘ inversion of, 53; in Nantucket land boom, 77, 88, 99, 102, 103; On the San Sebastian River and, 106–7. See also land markets; promoters; real estate; speculation Breton, Jules, 95; The Departure for the Fields, 92–93 Brown, Alvin, 152; fish house of, 212n39; Homer’s sketch of, 151, 151 Bryant, William Cullen: “The Prairies,” 64 Bufford, J. H.: Plan of Sherburne Bluffs, Nantucket, Mass., 87 building-and-loan associations, origins of, 5 Bunyan, John: Pilgrim’s Progress: in Protestant culture, 33; “slough of despond” in, 123

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—second part: divine visitation in, 186n59; dream narrative of, 35–36; imagining of redemption in, 35–36; Mercy in, 35; in Mercy’s Dream, 14, 33–35, 39 Burditt, Charles A., 143 Burns, Sarah, 188n5, 192n61; on discourses of blackness, 57; on Quidor, 44 Cahill, Edward, 49, 206n42 Cairo (Illinois), development schemes of, 55 Cairo, Bank of: Two Dollar Note, 55, 55 Cammock, Thomas: Prouts Neck holdings of, 139 Cannon, George H.: Map of Indian Reservation (Grand Portage), 84 Cao, Maggie, 1–2 capital: fictitious, 6, 188n12; flow into real estate, 11 capitalism, nineteenth-century American: evangelical view of, 39–41; fine art and, 180n30; Homer’s interrogation of, 138; satires of, 57–58 capitalism, real estate: in American economy, 2; development, 8; Heade’s engagement with, 107; progressive thought on, 170; systems supporting, 1 capitalism, twenty-first century: artists’ insights into, 173 Carbone, Teresa, 197n27 Carlson, Richard: “Western Waters,” 193n68 Chappee, Bejamin, 172 Chappee, Martha: property ownership by, 172 The Checkley, “Shore View from Piazza of the Checkley,” 160, 161 Child, Charlotte, 75 Church, Frederic, 107 Clark, Gordon Matta: Reality Properties, Fake Estates, 173 The Cocoanuts (Marx Brothers, 1925/29), Florida land swindles in, 127 Coffin, Henry, 89, 199n58 coinage, metal: versus paper currency, 125 Colab (artist collective), Real Estate Show, 173 Cole, Thomas, 26; The Course of Empire, 16; real estate investment of, 177n2; View of L’Esperance on the Schoharie River, 117, 118 Coleman, Henry, 199n58; Johnson’s portrait of, 198n52 commodification: of blackness, 191n41; Huntington on, 15; in real estate business, 7, 64 common spaces: Homer’s depiction of, 157, 168, 169; of Maine, 148–49; regulation of, 169. See also littoral land Conceptualists, installations on slumlords, 173

INDEX

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construction booms, at Haverstraw Bay (Hudson Valley), 23 construction booms, coastal (Maine): booster fantasy of, 136, 167–68; contradictions in, 137; effect on shellfishing, 156; spatial/social consequences of, 148–49. See also land booms; littoral land; Maine seacoast Cooper, Helen, 149 Cooper, James Fenimore, 44 COVID-19 pandemic, housing market during, 216n5 “crackers,” Florida: racialized figure of, 133 cranberry growing, Homer’s, 163 cranberry growing (Nantucket), 88–90, 92; bog owners, 89, 98, 201n78; capital for, 89, 90; coercive methods in, 89; communal ritual in, 97; corporeal dimension of, 97; development of, 199n57; expenses of, 201n77; Johnson’s interest in, 88–90; newspaper coverage of, 89; as pastoral custom, 99; property rights in, 98; property values and, 89; speculation in, 97; theft in, 98, 199n58; transience in, 96. See also Nantucket cranberry pickers (Nantucket): alienation from land, 103; contract, 200n61; hardships of, 90, 92; Johnson’s studies of, 82–97, 91–92; payment for, 89; precarity of, 96, 201n75; protective garments of, 200n66; volume picked by, 89–90 creativity, artistic: criticality in, 11; reckoning with speculation, 31, 173; role of real estate enterprise in, 2–3, 8, 11, 171, 172 credit: antebellum, 5; artists’ elucidation of, 9; bank notes for, 20; in real estate economy, 1–2; for speculation, 6. See also banking; finance, realty Davenport, Stewart, 39 Davis, John, 77–78 Denver, land speculation in, 2–3 development: of Cairo, 55; capital for, 8; early suburban, 4; of Eastern Seaboard resorts, 78; entrepreneurs’ schemes for, 5; in Grand Portage Indian Reservation, 84; of Hudson Valley, 13–14, 32; Johnson’s advocacy of, 85; of Maine seacoast, 135, 139, 167; of Massachusetts seaboard, 103; modes of looking in, 116; myths of, 112; in Old Northeast, 10; of Prouts Neck, 135–36, 139, 140, 149, 163; in Rhine Valley, 76; social/ecological implications of, 12; twentyfirst century artists on, 173. See also boosterism; land booms; land markets; real estate; speculation development, Florida: cartoons depicting, 123, 124; class/race issues in, 126–34; cultural anxieties

concerning, 134; cultural discourses of, 127; Flagler’s, 108; Heade’s creative critique of, 134; of marshes, 122–26; myths of, 112; New York Herald on, 122–23; popular press on, 206n48; promotion of climate in, 114, 205n30; racial logic of, 130; railroad in, 108, 119–20; of Saint Augustine, 103, 105, 106, 108–11, 115–16; skepticism concerning, 127; unwise investment in, 206n48; vision metaphors for, 207n48. See also Saint Augustine Dewey, Orville: on speculation, 40 discrimination, legal: in property ownership, 5–6 displacement, in real estate economy, 7 dispossession, native, 4–5, 7, 61, 64–65; cultural representations of, 192n56; of Ojibwe people, 77, 78 Doughty, Thomas, 26 Downes, William Henry, 159 “dowsing,” 6 Duncanson, Robert: real estate investment of, 172, 177n2 Durand, Asher B., 26; Progress (The Advance of Civilization), 117, 118 Durand, Cédric, 6 Dwight, Timothy: Travels in New-England and New-York, 49 Earl, Ralph: Looking East from Denny Hill, 49, 50, 52 Eastern Point (Prouts Neck, Maine): Charles Homer Sr.’s property at, 145, 163–65, 164; as dynamic land mass, 166; environmental forces of, 165–66; tidewater fringe of, 163–65 Eastern Seaboard: resort development of, 78; speculation in, 103 Easton, William, 89 economy, nineteenth-century: adventurist ethos of, 45; conservative understandings of, 47; effects on antebellum Americans, 45; slave, 61. See also real estate economy Edwards, Charles, 6 Eliot, Charles: Garden and Forest, 169 Eliot, Charles W., 215n91 Elliott, Charles Loring, 184n26 enclosure: Homer’s resistance to, 153; Huntington on, 15; nineteenth-century dialogues about, 10; of Prouts Neck, 137; in real estate business, 7; socio-spatial effects of, 137. See also common spaces entrepreneurs, real estate: barriers for, 6; development schemes of, 5; of Jacksonian economy, 13. See also boosterism; promoters; speculation

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environmental phenomena, promoters’ valorization of, 73 evangelicals: Huntington’s portraits of, 186n54; response to Jacksonian land bubble, 39–40; view of American capitalism, 39–41 expansion, national: land policies of, 4; as unholy encroachment, 64; violent forces of, 44, 60–67. See also frontier, Midwestern the farm, moral/political significance of, 49 farmscapes, 51 Fearson, Henry, 53 fiction, nineteenth-century: anxieties expressed in, 44 fictions, promotional: in Nantucket land boom, 77, 88, 99, 102, 103; of real estate, 9, 15, 41; in realty finance, 6, 9, 188n12. See also promoters finance, realty: critics of, 9; cultural intermediation with, 9; development of, 5; fiction in, 6, 9, 188n12; relationship to art, 9. See also banking; credit Fisher, Alvan: real estate investment of, 177n2 fishermen, Maine: inshore fishing by, 153–54; local anglers, 154–55 Flagler, Henry, 116; Florida developments of, 108; Heade’s cultivation of, 128 Florida: boosterism in, 106–7, 114, 123, 127; freezes in, 128; guidebooks to, 108, 116; land promoters on, 122, 127, 205n30, 209n75; newspapers accounts of investment, 108; promotion of weather, 114, 205n30; prospect imagery of, 118–19, 126; railroad development in, 108, 119–20; real estate speculation in, 6, 105–12, 114; tourism in, 107–8; Yellow Fever epidemic (1888), 128. See also development, Florida; Saint Augustine Florida East Coast Steamship Co., The East Coast of Florida Is Paradise Regained, 115 Flournoy, Alyson, 212n31 Flower, George, 63 foreclosure, artists’ visualization of, 173 Forest and Stream, Heade’s contributions to, 111, 119–20 Foster, Benjamin F.: on boom/bust cycles, 31–32 freedom, individual: through property, 4 Freeman, Josiah, 198n55 frontier, Midwestern: antebellum town building in, 4; dispossession in, 60, 78; economic capacities of, 55; moneymaking in, 65; as realm of whiteness, 65; slavery in, 61–64; soil of, 54; speculation in, 42, 44. See also prairie; settlement

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Galena (Illinois), 62; salt mining in, 62–63 Garnett v. Dumas (Florida, 1893), marsh rights in, 122, 207n52 Gatchell, John, 152; finances of, 213n41; Homer’s sketch of, 151, 151 genre scenes: dramatization of speculation, 9; environmental ideologies underpinning, 11; interrogation of real estate economy, 3, 8 gentrification: guerilla exhibitions’ critique of, 173; nineteenth-century dialogues about, 10; progressive thought on, 170; of Prouts Neck, 138–42; in real estate business, 7; of Scarborough River inlet, 156 George, Henry: Progress and Poverty, 169–70 Gifford, Sanford: View from Eagle Rock, 172 Googins, Hannah, 163 Googins, Roswell, 154 Le Grande Diable d’Argent Patron de la Finance (etching, 1798), 58, 58 Grand Portage Indian Reservation (Minnesota), 77; government development in, 84; Johnson’s visit to, 81–82; material/ideological transformations to, 84; modes of habitation at, 82; Ojibwe residence at, 82, 83, 85 Grant, Ulysses S.: Dent Cottage visit, 204n17 Great Recession (2007–09), effect on racial/class inequalities, 11–12 Greenhouse, Wendy, 33, 41 Guyton, Tyree: Heidelberg Project, 173 Haacke, Hans: Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Dealings, 173 Hardie, Allen W., 184n27 Harrison, Joseph, Jr.: purchase of Quidor’s paintings, 71 Harvey, David, 6; The Limits to Capital, 188n12 Harvey, George: Sunnyside, 20, 20 Havell, Robert, Jr.: View of Hudson River from Tarrytown Heights, 20–21, 21 Haverstraw Bay (Hudson Valley), construction boom at, 23 Hawkins, Letitia, 46 Haynes, George H.: “Prouts Neck, Cliffs and Beaches,” 159, 160 Heade, Martin Johnson, 78; African American employees of, 132–33; alternative landscapes of, 11; Chicago properties of, 128; on “crackers,” 133; cultivation of Flagler, 128; Dent cottage of, 109, 109–10, 204n17; Dent cottage renovation, 127–28, 133; and development risks, 11; doubts concerning land boom, 128; earliest interpreters of, 203n3; engagement with real estate

INDEX

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ventures, 3, 8–10, 12, 106–11, 127–28, 171, 203n3; exploration of wetlands, 123; financial problems of, 127–30, 133, 134; “Florida letters,” 111; Forest and Stream contributions, 111, 119–20; and Frederic Church, 107; interpretation of economic milieu, 9, 103; landscape practices of, 106–7; marketing of paintings, 208n63; marsh paintings of, 111, 123–24, 130, 205n28; material realm and, 203n3; mortgages of, 128, 129–30, 208nn67–69; natural history writings, 203n3; paintings for Ponce de Leon Hotel, 111; patrons of, 114; Ponce de Leon studio of, 112, 126, 205n28; prospect paintings of, 119; as proto-conservationist, 203n3; racialized class anxieties of, 134; racist writings of, 133; romantic individualism of, 107; on Saint Augustine development, 115–16, 120; Saint Augustine residence of, 105–6, 108–9; Saint Augustine speculations of, 106, 108–11, 128–30; sale of pictures, 128; souvenir paintings of, 106, 111–12; speculative proclivities of, 203n3; theoretical worth of property, 130; Transcendentalism and, 203n3; understanding of poverty, 133; vacation rentals of, 110, 128–30 —The Great Florida Marsh, 111 —The Great Florida Sunset, 111–12 —Gremlin in the Studio I-II, 125; economic trickery in, 124; marsh scene of, 123–24; wetland landscape of, 125–26 —On the San Sebastian River, Florida, 11, 107, 113, 132, 205n29; African American labor in, 130; allusions to finance, 129; as alternative prospect of Saint Augustine, 121–22; ambiguity of, 122; borderland space of, 133–34; critique of Floridian real estate, 134; deep vista of, 121; as demonstration piece, 112; dreamscape of, 116, 129; estuarial wetlands of, 125; expression of anxiety, 130; Heade’s experiences in, 127; interstitial space of, 126; landmarks in, 112; liminality in, 126; long-view composition of, 116; manipulation of prospect imagery, 120–21; marsh grass in, 130; metonymic tropes of, 126–27; middle ground of, 116, 121; nonwhite landscape of, 132; refutation of boosterism, 106–7, 114; risk in, 122, 125; sea grasses of, 121; structural elements of, 116; uncertainty in, 122, 125, 129, 130, 206n48; upending of confidence, 127; vantage point of, 112; visual arc of, 121; weather in, 112, 114 —Oranges and Orange Blossoms, 111 —Thunder Storm on Narragansett Bay, 112 Heppenheimer, Frederick: Old Spanish Fort, St. Augustine, 119, 119

Hermansen, Knud, 165 Hills, Patricia, 77–78 Hillyer, Reiko, 130 Hoechst, Heidi, 179n24 Holland, Rupert: Story of Prouts Neck, 212n27, 214n67 Homer, Alice (Patch), 139 Homer, Arthur: Blueprint Map of Prouts Neck, 163, 164, 165; Prouts Neck developments, 135–36, 163; rental cottage of, 145 Homer, Charles, Jr.: construction projects of, 143; Homer’s correspondence with, 143, 144, 145, 146; Prouts Neck developments, 135–36 Homer, Charles, Sr., 143; Eastern Point property of, 145, 163–65, 164, 214n75; Prouts Neck developments, 135–36 Homer, Winslow, 78; alternative landscapes of, 11; bourgeois lifestyle of, 153; capital expenditures of, 142; coastal labor depictions, 150–57, 168, 212n36; cranberry growing by, 163; depiction of common spaces, 157, 168, 169; depiction of open shoreline, 138; depiction of social complexity, 138; depiction of wild spaces, 153, 157–62; on enclosure, 137, 153; engagement with development, 136, 161, 162; engagement with real estate economy, 3, 8–10, 12, 128, 135, 142, 168–70, 171; facilitation of privatization, 148; farmwork by, 152, 213n46; figural scenes, 153, 158, 159, 168; friendship with coast laborers, 149–53, 212n38; on gentrification, 137; infrastructure projects of, 142; interest in property borders, 153; interpretation of economic milieu, 9; Letters to Charles S. Homer, Jr., 143, 144, 145, 146; Letter to Arthur B. Homer, 145, 145; liminal zone depictions, 158; littoral settings of, 136, 137–38, 153, 155, 157–58, 162, 166–67, 168; management of family property, 136–37, 142–43, 163; marine paintings of, 137, 153, 157; paintings of waterfront fringe, 157–58; period audiences of, 168; property diagrams, 143, 144, 145, 145, 146, 147, 148, 214n75; Prouts Neck developments, 135–36, 149, 149; Prouts Neck works of, 134, 139, 142, 143, 168, 209n1; rental cottages of, 142; resorts versus wild spaces and, 153; seaside dinners of, 149, 212n32; social concerns of, 134; studios of, 141, 152–53, 210n3; on trespassing, 143; waterfront travel pictures, 157 —After the Rain, Prouts Neck, 213n49 —The Artist’s Studio in an Afternoon Fog, 158, 210n3; Homer family compound in, 162 —Baiting the Lobster Pot, 213n49 —Boats along a Schooner, 213n49

INDEX

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Homer, Winslow (continued) —Bringing in the Nets, 137, 138, 153–57, 154; coming storm of, 155; common/private land in, 157; economic/spatial cultures of, 156–57; littoral setting of, 155; local anglers in, 154–55; marine lifeways in, 157; precariousness in, 155; as rejoinder to boosters, 157; schooners of, 155 —Catching Mackerel, 213n49 —Driftwood, 157 —Eastern Point, 163, 166; critics on, 164; dynamism of, 166, 168; fluidity/solidity in, 165; Homer family tract in, 162–63; intertidal property in, 162–68; littoral land in, 137–38, 162, 166–67, 168; possession in, 163–64; spatial dynamism of, 162; tidewater boundary in, 164; vantage point of, 163 —Fishermen on Shore, 153 —High Cliff, Coast of Maine, 157 —A Light on the Sea, 157, 213n49 —Outline Sketch of Lots to Be Divided, 145, 147 —Rocky Coast, 153 —Seven Sketches (Bachelor Homes), 150, 150–52, 152; “Brown,” 151, 151; “J. Gatchell,” 151, 151; John Wiggin, 152, 152 —Sleigh Ride, 157 —The Smuggler of Prouts Neck, 213n49 —Spearing Eels, 153 —A Summer Night, 138, 158; ambivalence about development in, 162; bourgeois vacationers of, 158–59; critics on, 159, 161–62; developed/ aqueous zones of, 161; dichotomies of, 161–62; figural tableau of, 159; inspirations for, 159; movement patterns of, 161; property/nature in, 158; resorts versus wild spaces and, 153, 157–62; spatial registers of, 160–61 —Winter, Prouts Neck, Maine, 158 —Winter Coast, 157 —The Wreck, 157 Homer family: development of Prouts Neck, 135–36, 139, 140; Prouts Neck residences, 139, 162–63 housing market, during COVID-19 pandemic, 216n5 Hudson River, tributaries of, 26, 31 Hudson Valley: “air cities” of, 15–24; British fort at, 23; Huntington’s paintings of, 26–33; Irish laborers of, 28; land looking in, 37; landmarks of, 22–24; narratives of future, 18, 20; post-bubble chroniclers of, 14; Revolutionary past of, 18, 20, 21, 23, 184n19; riverine development of, 32; riverine scenes of, 21, 25; shanties of, 27–28; subsistence farmers of, 27–28; transportation network of, 18. See also land markets, Hudson Valley

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Hulsey, John: 72 Hours, 173 Hunt, Freeman: Letters about the Hudson River and Its Vicinity, 18 Huntington, Benjamin, 25, 183n11; speculation by, 16 Huntington, Daniel: alternative landscapes of, 11; artistic ambition of, 16; artistic training of, 15, 183n10; Christian allegory of, 13, 14, 33; college years of, 186n54; Congregationalist faith of, 33; correspondence of, 25, 184n26; critique of speculation, 40–41; engagement with Hudson Valley land market, 14–15; engagement with real estate economy, 3, 8–10, 12, 14–15, 25, 32, 171; European travel of, 33; eye inflammation of, 41, 187n73; figural scenes of, 41; frugality of, 25; Hudson watershed paintings of, 26–33; interpretation of economic milieu, 9; investments of, 25; on landscape painting, 26; material/aesthetic concerns of, 15; painterly identity of, 25; papers of, 25; portraits by, 25, 186n54; professional identity of, 24; on speculation, 15, 24, 25; submissions to National Academy of Design, 185n36; upbringing of, 33; views on capitalism, 15 —Figures in a Wooded Landscape, 33 —Landscape (1837), 10, 28, 30; fishing vignette, 28–29; isolation in, 27, 30–31; palette of, 31; quietude in, 31; refuge from modernity in, 29; shanties of, 28; site of, 26; spatiality of, 27, 30, 31, 33; stasis in, 14, 31; temporality of, 30–31, 33; transience in, 29; wilderness in, 27; workingclass habitation in, 28–29, 31 —Mercy’s Dream, 10, 33–41, 34, 38; angel of, 36, 39; anticipation of redemption, 41; disavowal of divination, 30, 40; evangelicals’ understanding of, 39–40; interrogation of speculative culture, 39–41; land looking in, 36, 38–39; landscape setting of, 36, 38–39, 41; Mercy figure of, 36, 38, 39, 41; New York Evangelist on, 39–40; prognostication in, 39; prophetic dreaming in, 35, 36; religious allegory in, 33; renunciation of material concerns, 38; salvation in, 39; “solitary place” of, 36; spiritual lesson of, 33, 35; use of Pilgrims Progress, 14, 33–35, 39; visionary experience in, 38 —My Pleasure Ground, 33 —Rapids, 33 —Rondout Kill, Afternoon, 10, 27; isolation in, 27, 30–31; palette of, 31; quietude in, 31; refuge from modernity in, 29; shanties of, 28; site of, 26; spatiality of, 27, 30, 31, 33; stasis in, 14, 31; temporality of, 30–31, 33; wilderness in, 27; working-class habitation in, 28–29, 31

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—Sunset, River Landscape, 33 —Verplanck commission, 13–16, 18, 20–24, 33; boardinghouse stay during, 16, 183n12; effect on his reputation, 25; encouragement of investors, 24; exhibition of paintings, 183n15; loss of paintings, 16, 24, 183n15; patriotism in, 23; Stony Point, by Moonlight, 16, 23; Sunset, at Verplanck’s Point, 16, 21–22; technological advancement in, 23; View of Grassy Point, from Verplanck’s, 16, 22–23; View of Verplanck’s Point from Stony Point, 16, 23 Huntington, Henry, 183n11 hydras, symbolizing national banking, 58, 59 Illinois: land market in, 42, 45–46, 54; malaria in, 53; Quidor’s real estate dealings in, 42, 46, 66, 189n16; salt mining in, 62–63; slavery in, 61–63; soil of, 190n34; state constitution (1818), 62 Illinois Bounty Land Register, masthead of, 192n60 Illinois Military Tract (land reserve), 45, 65, 192n60 immigrants, Chinese: property discrimination against, 5 The Injurious Effects of Slave Labor (pamphlet, 1824), 63, 191n51 institutions, real estate, 1; antebellum, 5; wildcat, 20 intertidal property: in Eastern Point, 162–68; Homer family’s, 163–65; legal struggles over, 164–65. See also littoral land investment, real estate, 2–3; artists’, 8; credibility in, 7; effect on socioeconomic standing, 7; fantasies of, 10; in Florida, 108, 206n48; foreign investors in, 5; in Hudson Valley, 13; in Jacksonian economy, 25; material oppression in, 179n24; in Prouts Neck, 159; as visionary practice, 179n24; white consumers of, 7. See also banking; real estate economy Irving, Washington: estate of, 21 —“The Crayon Papers,” 32–33 —“The Money Diggers,” 10, 73; “The Devil and Tom Walker,” 46, 60–61; hybridity in, 61; land speculation satire in, 44, 46–47, 70, 188n5, 189n19; “Wolfert Webber,” 46–47, 60, 68, 70, 189n19 Jackson, William Henry: Panorama from Fort Marion, 119, 120, 206n45; “St. Augustine from Ft. Marion,” 120 Jacksonville News Herald, on Heade’s landscapes, 207n61 James, Henry: The American Scene, 127 Jarvis, John Wesley, 45 Jefferson, Thomas: on speculation, 47 Jesuits, in northeastern Minnesota, 85

J. H. Stuart & Co.: “Prouts Neck, Scarborough & Higgins Beaches,” 156 Johnson, Eastman: advocacy of development, 85; alternative landscapes of, 11; booster romanticism of, 76; Cliff estate of, 86, 87, 98; concern over development impacts, 85; correspondence with Longfellow, 78; creative social enquiry of, 78; embrace of market culture, 77; engagement with real estate economy, 3, 8–10, 12, 75, 76, 77, 171; genre paintings of, 78, 85, 198n54; on German grape harvest, 75–76; interest in frontier spaces, 81; interpretation of economic milieu, 9, 78; in Lake Superior region, 78–85; in Nantucket, 85–103; Nantucket ventures of, 10, 75, 102; painterly lexicon of, 73; in Panic of 1857, 85; portraits by, 198n52; pro-business Republican affiliations of, 76–77; relations with Ojibwe, 82; risk-taking by, 85; romanticization of Nantucket, 87–88; Sherburne Bluffs purchase, 87, 198n47; social justice interests, 78, 195n6; squatter experiences, 81; studies at Düsseldorf, 75–76; studies of cranberry pickers, 82–97, 91–92; sugar harvest studies, 93; Superior land purchases, 79, 196n20; support of abolitionism, 77; understanding of booster rhetoric, 85; visit to Grand Portage Reservation, 81–82; Wisconsin ventures of, 10 —At the Closing of the Day, 92, 92 —Camp Scene at Grand Portage, 10–11, 77, 82–83, 83; Ojibwe in, 83; village life in, 83 —Canoe of Indians, 197n34 —The Cranberry Harvest, Island of Nantucket (1880), 11, 86, 94, 97; agrarian ritual in, 199n56; agricultural setting of, 100; coastal landscape of, 77, 99–100; critique of real estate economy, 77; economic forces in, 102–3; figural tableau of, 94, 95–97; harborscape of, 101, 102; land and labor in, 77, 85–86; location of, 93–94; marginal class status in, 96; material transformations in, 98–99; no trespassing placard of, 97–99, 201n80, 202n83; Old Mill of, 99–101, 100; pastoralism of, 102–3; physical hardship in, 95; property rights in, 99, 100–101; “reminiscence of Nantucket” in, 101; as scene of rural dignity, 94–95; sentimental interpretation of, 199n56; structures of, 99; town of Nantucket in, 93; transformation of land in, 103 —Cranberry Pickers (1875–80), 200n68 —Cranberry Pickers (c. 1878–79), 91 —Cranberry Pickers (c. 1879), 91 —The Cranberry Pickers (A Study), 1876, 93 —Embers, 88

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Johnson, Eastman (continued) —Feeding the Lamb, 198n54 —Girl in Landscape with Two Lambs, 198n54 —Grand Portage, 11, 82, 83, 83; buildings of, 84–85; chapel of, 85; hybridity in, 77; Ojibwe in, 84; townscape of, 84 —Husking Bee, Island of Nantucket, 88, 88; autumn ritual in, 92 —Indian Family, 197n34 —Landscape of Superior, 80; Ojibwe in, 79, 81, 196n24; publishers’ alterations to, 196n24 —Ojibwe Encampment, 197n34 —Ojibwe Wigwam at Grand Portage, 197n34 —Old Captain, 88 —Portrait of an Indian Family, 197n34 —Susan Ray’s Kitchen–Nantucket, 88 —“View of the City of Superior,” 79, 80 —What the Shell Says, 88 Johnson, Philip C.: land development by, 76 Johnson, Reuben, 79, 80 Johnson, Sarah, 79 Johnson family: land speculation by, 79 Johnston, David Claypoole: Great Locofoco Juggernaut, 59 Jordan, E. C.: “Plan of Libby’s Neck,” 140, 167, 167 Junker, Patricia, 140, 159, 210n3 Kettle Cove (Prouts Neck, Maine), Homer’s property at, 142, 143, 145, 146 Kidd, Captain: treasure of, 46 King, Daisy B., 143 Kitchawank people, of Verplanck Point, 15 Knickerbocker, on land lookers, 37 Knight, Henry, 108 Lake Superior region: Eastman’s land dealings at, 75, 76; infrastructure projects, 78; Johnson in, 78–85; land boom in, 76–78 Land Act (1789), 4 land booms: causes of, 31–32; creative responses to, 3; in Lake Superior region, 76–78. See also construction booms; development; land markets; speculation land booms, Nantucket: booster fictions in, 77, 88, 99, 102, 103; historical underpinnings of, 101–2; links to whaling industry, 102; material/cultural forces of, 98; pastoral imagery of, 102; risk in, 103; satirization of, 99; socio-spatial effects of, 102; speculation in, 97–102 land looking, 6; astrology and, 37; components of, 37; fancy in, 37; in Huntington’s work, 14, 36, 38–39; sensory operations of, 39

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land markets: cultural mediation of, 6, 8; as cultural spaces, 9, 193n68; cultural vehicles for, 11; in Johnson’s works, 76; localized, 3; material practices of, 171; prognostication in, 6–7, 37; promotional discourses of, 117; regional, 8. See also construction boom; property, real; property ownership; real estate; speculation land markets, frontier: booster constructs of, 44, 56, 65; effect on village life, 85; of Illinois, 42, 45–46, 54; Quidor’s speculation in, 42–46, 66, 71–72, 73, 188n4; racial oppression and, 65; role of slavery in, 63–64 land markets, Hudson Valley: Huntington’s engagement with, 14–15; investment tactics for, 13; promotional fictions of, 9, 15, 41; riverine paintings of, 25; speculation in, 14–15, 32–33. See also Verplanck Point Association (VPA) Land Ordinance Act (1785), 1, 4 landscape painting: boosterism in, 20–21; depiction of development, 51; dramatization of speculation, 9; environmental ideologies underpinning, 11; interrogation of real estate economy, 3, 8; prospect imagery in, 117–22; representational capacities of, 172; rural beauty aesthetic of, 49. See also prospect paintings landscapes: antebellum modes of looking at, 116; patriotic accounts of, 116; prospect narratives of, 116–22 landscapes, rural: settlement of, 49; traditional modes of labor in, 54 landscape writing: aesthetic of rural beauty, 49; promoters use of, 49, 51, 206n42; prospect narratives, 116–22 “Land Speculation,” Yankee Notions 2, 124 land system, federal, 1, 4–5, 7; expansion under, 4; Ojibwe land in, 78 La Pointe, Treaty of (1854), 78, 82; transformation following, 85 “The Late Mr. Martin J. Heade in the Window of His Vine-Embowered Cottage on San Marco Avenue,” 109 Latham, Cyrus: Map of Verplanck, 17, 18; survey of Verplanck Point, 37, 183n14; Verplanck, 19 laws, discriminatory, 5–6, 7 Leather Man (homeless traveler), 28, 29 legal structures, colonial: dismantling of, 4 Lepler, Jessica, 31 Libby family: marketing of Prouts Neck, 139; right-of-way agreements of, 141; upland constructions of, 159 liberalism, laissez-faire: privatization under, 169

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littoral land (Maine): booster fantasies of, 136, 167–68; as bounded entity, 162; fixed conception of, 167; legal/representational dilemmas of, 164–65. See also construction booms, coastal; Maine seacoast littoral land, Prouts Neck, 142; enclosure of, 137; Homer’s depictions of, 136, 137–38, 153, 155, 157, 162, 166–67, 168; partitioning of, 137 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 78 Loomis, Eben, 111, 127 Lyell, Charles, 6 Maine: coastal property statues in, 164; deep-sea fisheries of, 153; herring fishery, 154; preservation activities in, 215n91 Maine seacoast: common spaces of, 148–49; development of, 135, 139, 167; Homer’s interrogation of, 138, 139; morphological dynamism of, 168; nor’easters of, 168; promotional representations of, 137, 138, 167; proprietorship issues, 164–65; public shore rights of, 137; representational quandaries of, 138; spatial hybridity of, 137; as unchanging space, 167–68; Xanthoria elegans lichen of, 166. See also littoral land (Maine) malaria, prairie epidemics, 53 marine pictures: dramatization of speculation, 9; environmental ideologies underpinning, 11; interrogation of real estate economy, 3, 8 Married Women’s Property Acts, 216n3 marshes, association with moral waywardness, 207n57 marshes, Florida, 121; American humorists on, 123; deceptive quality of, 123; development of, 122–26; difficulty of development, 122–26; nonwhite spaces of, 133; property rights to, 122, 125, 207n52; of San Sebastian River, 132; symbolizing land boom, 122; as symbol of risk, 125 Martineau, Harriet, 6; on dispossession, 61 Marx Brothers, The Cocoanuts, 127 Mason, Richard Lee: on town speculations, 52–53 Massachusetts Bay Colony, Ordinance of 1647, 164 Massachusetts seaboard, development in, 103 Maurer, Louis: Old Spanish Fort, St. Augustine, 119, 119 Mazel, David, 10 McCrea, Jane, 18 McCullough, Hugh: fishing operation of, 81, 82 McEntee, Jervis, 87, 98 Mills, Sally, 199n56 Milton, John: Paradise Lost, 123

Minnesota Point (Wisconsin), Ojibwe settlement at, 79, 196n24 Minorcan people, of Saint Augustine, 209nn76–77 Mississippi River Valley: displacement of Native Americans from, 64; in Jacksonian economy, 43; slave economy of, 61 Missouri Compromise, 63 Mocama people (Florida), 105 Mohlman, Geoffrey, 209n82 money devils, 54; cartoons of, 124–25; in medieval culture, 57; in nineteenth-century commentaries, 58; satirization of capitalism, 57–58 Morris, Robert, 180n29 Morse, Arnold, 201n77 Morse, Mason L., 96, 201n77 mortgage firms, private, 5. See also finance, realty Mount Josephine (Minnesota), 83 Nantucket: Academy Hill High School, 101; agrarian rituals of, 88; Brant Point Land Company, 100, 101; Brant Point Lighthouse, 93; Cliff neighborhood, 98, 199n58; “cottage cities” of, 86; economic past, 97; enclosure in, 103; financial adventurism in, 97–102; Great Neck neighborhood, 202n88; Johnson’s land dealings at, 10, 75; Johnson’s residence in, 85–103; Johnson’s romanticization of, 87–88; laborers of, 90, 92–97, 198n55, 200n61; land and labor on, 85, 103; marketing of, 87; north-shore bogs, 94; Old Mill of, 99–101, 100, 101; real estate agencies of, 100; rights of way in, 98; social outsides of, 102; socioeconomic upheaval in, 86; superimposable images of, 202n88; Surfside development, 199n58; topographies of, 94; tourism in, 86, 88, 99, 201n76; Trott’s Hills Division, 201n77; windmill of, 87. See also cranberry growing (Nantucket), land booms, Nantucket The Nantucket, advertisement in, 101 Nantucket as a Watering Place and Summer Residence (pamphlet, 1865), 86 Nantucket Inquirer: on cranberry industry, 89; on development, 99 Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror, on cranberry theft, 199n58 Nantucket Island Review, on cranberry theft, 98 Nantucket Railroad Company, 98, 202n85 Nast, Thomas: “A Shadow Is Not a Substance,” 125, 126 Native Americans: displacement from Mississippi River Valley, 64; dispossession of, 4–5, 7, 61, 64–65, 192n57. See also Ojibwe (Anishinaabe) people

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nature, nonhuman: human responsibilities for, 9–10 Nemerov, Alexander, 188n4 Nevada, land speculation in, 6 New Jersey, emancipation act (1804), 67 Newton, William H., 79, 196n14 New York: emancipation act (1799), 67; slave labor in, 66–67; speculative culture of, 67 New York Evangelist, on Mercy’s Dream, 39–40 New York Herald, on Florida development, 122–23 New York Mirror, on Quidor, 193n69 New York Morning Courier, on Quidor, 193n69 New York Times, on A Summer Night, 162 Northeast: early suburban development in, 4; speculative development in, 10 Northwest, Old: in Jacksonian economy, 43; Johnson’s visit to, 78; speculation in, 6 Northwest Ordinance (1787), barring of slavery, 61–62 Ojibwe (Anishinaabe) people: assimilation of, 85; displacement of, 77, 78; Grand Portage Reservation residence, 82, 83, 85; Johnson’s relations with, 82; Johnson’s studies of, 79, 81, 83, 84, 197nn34–35; in Landscape of Superior, 79, 81; Minnesota Point settlement, 79, 196n24; resistance by, 85; transfer of land from, 78; wage labor by, 82 Old Orchard Beach (Maine), 139 O’Leary, Wayne, 153 Orr, Galen, 89, 199n58, 202n83 Our Lady of La Leche chapel (Saint Augustine), 109 paintings: as cultural auditor of real estate economy, 11; morally rigorous “ideal,” 35. See also landscape painting; prospect paintings Panic of 1837, 13; Johnson’s losses during, 85 paper currency, versus metal coinage, 125 partitioning, land: critics of, 9; of Prouts Neck, 137, 142, 148. See also privatization, land Peale, Charles Willson: Landscape Looking toward Sellers Hall from Mill Bank, 49, 50 Pine Point (Prouts Neck), hotels and cottages of, 156 Pokegama Bay (Wisconsin), 197n26; Johnson at, 81 Ponce de Leon Hotel (Saint Augustine), 108, 115–16; Heade’s paintings for, 111; Ladies’ Entrance, 131 Port Folio, on marshland development, 123 prairie: as cemeterial space, 64; difficulties of, 53. See also frontier, Midwestern Prang, Louis, 142

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Princeton Art Museum, “Nature’s Nation” exhibition, 180n31 prints: of African Americans, 208n74; promotional, 51, 52 privatization, land: critics of, 9; in laissez-faire liberalism, 169; marine commons and, 137; New England opposition to, 168–69; nineteenthcentury dialogues about, 10; of Prouts Neck, 148, 153, 155, 157–58, 162, 168; of Scarborough River inlet, 155 promoters, land: fertile soil narratives, 54–56; fictions of, 9, 15, 41; on Florida, 122, 127, 205n30, 209n75; on frontier settlement, 53; imaginings of property, 3; imaginings of rural beauty, 51; of Maine seacoast, 137, 138, 167; objectifying logic of, 49; of Prouts Neck, 139–42, 159; romanticization of Nantucket, 88; use of landscape writing, 49, 51; use of prints, 51; use of traditional values, 54; of Verplanck Point Association (VPA), 16, 18, 20, 37, 183n14, 184nn19,27. See also boosterism; speculation property, real: corporeal histories of, 12; creation and exchange of, 44; discrimination in, 5–6; environmental histories of, 12; exchangeability of, 54; imaginative histories of, 12; as inalienable good, 4; mainstream culture of, 172, 173; in Panic era, 13–14; pictorial reimagining of, 11; promoters’ imagining of, 3; social histories of, 12; worthiness of, 3. See also real estate property ownership: artists’ insights into, 173; barriers to, 5–6; exploitation of workers through, 7; fin de siècle debates about, 138; “mastery” of, 49; regulation following Civil War, 169; risk in, 5, 7; women’s, 173, 216n3 property rights: in cranberry growing, 98; to Florida marshes, 122, 125, 207n52. See also common spaces Proprietors of Superior (land company), 79 prospect narratives, 205n37; of landscapes, 116–22; rhetoric of, 117 prospect paintings: of American landscapes, 117–22; deep views of, 121–22; evocation of future, 122; Heade’s, 119; homology to mortgages, 130; spatiotemporal sequences of, 121; visual codes of, 121 Prouts Neck (Maine): bath houses, 149; chapels of, 139, 143; Checkley House hotel, 159; class/racial distinctions in, 141, 149; coastal laborers of, 137, 149–53; common spaces of, 148–49; contiguity/ contradiction in, 159–60; Euro-American settlement of, 138–39; gentrification of, 138–42; guidebook images of, 159, 160; Homer’s

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development of, 135–36, 139, 140; Homer’s residence at, 134, 135, 209n1; hotels of, 140, 156, 159 ; investors in, 159; landmarks of, 158; liminal spaces of, 157–58; Marginal Way, 141, 145; owned landscape of, 138; partitioning of, 137, 142, 148; privatization of land, 148, 153, 155, 157–58, 162, 168; promotion of, 139–42, 159; rail links to, 139; right-of-way agreements, 141; scenery of, 142; seascape scenery of, 142; Shingle-Style buildings of, 140; shoreline access to, 142; social changes to, 140–41; social segregation of, 139; summer resort of, 135, 143; Wabanaki people of, 138; waterfront cottages of, 159, 214n67; wildlife sanctuary, 139 Putnam, Agnes Hall, 143 Putnam, George, 143, 159 Quidor, John, 56, 73, 78; Adams County (Illinois) speculation, 46; alternative landscapes of, 11; apprenticeship of, 45; engagement with real estate economy, 3, 8–10, 12, 41–44, 171; exhibition of 1847, 71–72; farm labor by, 46; fiscal tropes of, 45; genre paintings of, 10; interpretation of economic milieu, 9; land speculations of, 42–46, 66, 71–72; marketminded viewers of, 67; painterly accounts of speculation, 43–44, 45; pendant pictures of, 44, 61, 68, 71, 193n71; reception of works, 67, 193n69; transgressive sensibility of, 44, 66, 192n61; venture with R. Smith, 71–72 —Christ Healing the Sick at the Temple, 71 —Christ Raising Lazarus from the Dead, 71 —Death on a Pale Horse, 72 —The Devil and Tom Walker, 61 —Money Diggers (1832), 44, 48, 57; allegory of speculation, 56, 65; anthropomorphic elements, 47–48, 65; blackness in, 191n41; black otherness in, 60; buried treasure scene, 46, 47–48; depiction of soil, 56; exhibition of, 67; exploration of race, 65–66, 188n5; figural tableau of, 49; framing devices of, 52; grave symbolism of, 65; infertility in, 63; inversion of booster aesthetics, 53; Knipperhausen figure, 47, 53, 56, 63; landscape of, 48; money devil figure of, 54, 61; monstrosity in, 58, 60; Mud Sam figure, 47, 56–57, 57, 58, 60, 191n41; as parody of real estate culture, 66; physical hybridity in, 60, 69; pirate ghost of, 47, 56; review of, 67; ruinscape of, 51, 52; rural beauty and, 48–49, 51–53; slavery allusions in, 63–67; soil in, 54; treasure pit scene, 57, 60; violence expansion and, 60–67; Webber figure, 47–48, 56; wild otherness of, 52

—Money Diggers (1856), 44, 61, 68; fire in, 69, 72–73; fiscal climate in, 71; lost fortune in, 72; midcentury speculation in, 68–73; Mud Sam figure, 69; optimism of, 72; treasure pit scene, 68–69 —Rip Van Winkle, 193n69 —Wolferts Will, 44, 68, 69; commissioners’ note, 69, 69, 73; disintegration in, 73; fire in, 72–73; fiscal climate in, 71; lost fortune in, 72; optimism of, 72; unearned riches in, 69–71 Quidor, Peter: land speculations, 45–46, 66–67 Quidor, Pierre: land speculations, 66–67 Quincy (Ill.), promoters description of, 51 Ranquet, Dominique du, 82, 197n40 Rauschenbusch, Walter, 169 Real Estate Record, 170 real estate, nineteenth-century: antebellum legislation for, 4; anticipatory value of, 6; anxiety over, 1–2; commodification of land in, 7, 64; contemporaneous commentaries on, 10; discriminatory laws, 5–6, 7; fictitious capital in, 6, 188n12; foreign investors in, 5; future potential of, 6–7, 35; inspiration of artists, 172–73; newly “opened,” 4; in popular cultural imagination, 11; role in artistic creativity, 2–3; sale of, 1; self-restraint in, 40. See also construction boom; land markets; property, real; property ownership; speculation real estate economy: absentee investment in, 81; artists’ interrogation of, 1–4, 11, 171; boom/bust cycles in, 6, 7, 31–32, 179n19; credit and financing in, 1–2; cultural forms of, 3; cultural mediation of, 6, 8; displacement in, 7; Eastman’s engagement with, 3, 8–10, 12, 75, 76, 77, 171; effect on working traditions, 134; Heade’s engagement with, 3, 8–10, 12, 106–11, 127–28, 171; Homer’s engagement with, 3, 8–10, 12, 135, 138, 142, 168–70, 171; Johnson’s engagement with, 3, 8–10, 12, 75, 76, 77; material problems of, 3, 173; moral character of, 171; paintings’ interrogation of, 3, 11; post-Panic anxieties about, 33; professionalization of, 8; reformist concerns over, 170; rise of, 4; threat to environment, 134; of twenty-first century, 11–12, 173, 216n5. See also economy, nineteenthcentury; finance, realty; investment, real estate real estate economy, Jacksonian, 13; dissimulation in, 37; entrepreneurs of, 13; evangelicals’ response to, 39–40; Huntington’s engagement with, 3, 8–10, 12, 14–15, 25, 32, 171; investment practices of, 25; middling investors in, 43;

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real estate economy, Jacksonian (continued) Quidor’s engagement with, 3, 8–10, 12, 41–44, 171; reform of, 41; respective capital in, 20; righteous behavior during, 41; speculation during, 40, 43, 65 real estate enterprise: artists’ reckoning with, 2–3, 8, 11, 171, 172; colonial, 4; cultural/material dynamics of, 4; development of standards for, 5; effect on existing landscapes, 8; entrepreneurs in, 5, 13; inspiration of creative activity, 2–3, 172; Johnson’s interpretation of, 78; localized socio-spatial conditions of, 12; monitoring of practices in, 5; profit motive in, 7. See also entrepreneurs; promoters Remsen, Ira, 143 Renault, Philippe: Haitian slaves of, 61, 62 Republican Party, laissez-faire liberalism of, 77, 102 Rhine Valley, land development in, 76 Richards, Donald, 165 Ritchie, H. J.: Bird’s Eye View of Saint Augustine, 110 Ritchie, James: Wisconsin and Its Resources, 79, 196n24 Robinson, Henry R.: General Jackson Slaying the Many Headed Monster, 59 Rodgers, James F.: The Leatherman, 28, 29 Rondout Creek (Hudson Valley), 26 Saco Bay (Prouts Neck): blueback season at, 153; herring fishing at, 154; private/common areas of, 158 Saint Augustine (Florida): African Americans of, 130–33; booster climate of, 127; development of, 103, 105, 106, 108–11, 115–16; Flagler’s development of, 108; following Civil War, 105, 118; Grant’s visit to, 204n17; guidebooks for, 116; Heade’s residence in, 105–6, 108–9; landmarks of, 112; Lincolnville community of, 131; Minorcan residents of, 209nn76–77; as modern resort, 112; as place of uncertainty, 127; property prices in, 123; prospect images of, 118–19; racial segregation in, 130–32; railroad to, 119–20; riparian marshes of, 205n28; Shell Road, 109, 120; socioeconomic change in, 105; Spanish Revival hotels of, 108, 115–16; speculative construction in, 115–16; Stowe’s promotion of, 108; white vacationscape of, 130. See also development, Florida Saint Augustine Tatler, on Heade’s properties, 110 Saint Johns River valley (Florida), Stowe’s promotion of, 117–18 Sanford, Frederick: Johnson’s portrait of, 198n52 San Sebastian (Florida), estuarial marshes of, 121

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San Sebastian River, marshland of, 132 Scarborough (Maine): Cammock House hotel, 156; Libby’s suing of, 156 Scarborough River inlet (Maine): common anchorage of, 155; gentrification of, 156; Homer’s depictions of, 150, 155; infrastructure of, 155; mixed social/economic space of, 157; privatization of, 155; resort landscape of, 157; working waterscape of, 153 scrip notes, fertile land imagery of, 55, 56 settlement, western: difficulties of, 53; marketdriven, 44; moral/political virtue of, 51; popular depictions of, 64; promoters’ vision of, 53; rational order of, 49. See also frontier, Midwestern; prairie Shapleigh, Frank: Panorama of the City of Saint Augustine, 113 Shelton, Frederick: “The Kushow Property,” 193n68 Simpson, Marc, 90, 198n53 slavery: in Illinois, 61–63; in Midwestern frontier, 61–64; in New York, 66–67; in nineteenth-century economy, 61; Northwest Ordinance on, 61–62; in Palisades region (New York), 66–67; speculators interests in, 63–64, 67; in Money Diggers (1832), 63–67 slaves, fugitive: imagery of, 185n44 slumlords, Conceptualist installations on, 173 Smith, Raphael E.: embezzlement trial, 194n80; Quidor’s venture with, 71–72 soil, entombment in, 192n56 soil, fertile, 190n34; association with honest work, 55; booster fantasies of, 56; depiction on bank notes, 55, 55, 56; in promotional narratives, 54–56 speculation, real estate, 10; by artists, 8, 172; bank notes for, 20; consequences of failure, 7; contemporaneous reassessments of, 33; in cranberry growing, 97; creative reckoning with, 31, 173; credit in, 6; cultural interpretations of, 193n68; in Denver, 2–3; dependency following, 7; environmental effects of, 134; evangelical dialogues about, 35, 39–40; in Florida, 6, 105–12, 114; in Hudson Valley, 14–15, 32–33; Huntington on, 15, 24, 25; as infectious epidemic, 32; Irving’s satire on, 10, 44, 46–47, 70, 188n5, 189n19; during Jacksonian bubble, 40, 43, 65; Jefferson on, 47; journalistic accounts of, 180n29; in Midwestern frontier, 42, 44; Money Diggers allegory of, 56, 65; Money Diggers of 1856 and, 68–73; moralizing stories of, 180n29; “mushroom towns” of, 52–53; in Nantucket, 97–102; in national character, 116; nineteenth-century

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dialogues about, 10; in Old Northwest, 6; paintings’ dramatization of, 9, 178n3; proslavery interests in, 63–64, 67; Quidor’s, 42–46, 66, 71–72, 73, 188n4; reliance on chance, 47; risky, 3, 5, 6, 7, 71, 73; semiotic play and, 73; socioeconomic costs of, 9; socio-spatial effects of, 134; unsustainable, 1; vagrancy following, 7. See also boosterism; entrepreneurs; investment; promoters Spencer, Frederick R.: Huntington’s apprenticeship with, 15, 183n10 State Bank at Chicago, Illinois and Michigan Canal Five Dollar Scrip Note, 56 Stephenson, Franklin, 143 Stevens, John Calvin, 140 Stevenson, Basil, 189n16 St. Johns County Abstract Company, Inc.: “Abstract of Title to Lands in City of St. Augustine, Lying in Heade Tract, St. Johns County, Florida,” 129, 129 Stoddart, Curwen, 143 Stowe, Harriet Beecher: Palmetto Leaves, 108; promotion of Florida, 108, 117–18 Stuntz, George, 79 sunshine, importance for Florida economy, 114, 126 Superior (Wisconsin): booster narratives of, 81; Johnson’s promotional images for, 77; Johnson’s purchases at, 79, 196n20 Superior Chronicle, on land speculation, 79 Swain, Alfred, 199n58 “The Ark and W.H.’s Studio” (photograph, 1884), 141 Thickstun, Margaret, 35 Thomas, Joseph, 200n61, 201n78 tourism: in Florida, 107–8; in Nantucket, 86, 88, 99, 201n76 town schemes, 52; transient, 53 Transcendentalism, Heade and, 203n3 Tribune Fresh Air Fund Aid Society, 141 Twain, Mark, 6 United States, national survey system, 4 vagrancy, following speculative failure, 7 Valentine, William, 184n27 Van Zandt, Nicholas: A General Plat of the Military Lands between the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers, 65, 66, 192n60

Vedder, Elihu: real estate investment of, 177n2 Verplanck Point (Hudson Valley), 16, 22–23; brickmaking at, 25; constitutive properties of, 18; Kitchawank people of, 15; suburban development for, 13–14 Verplanck Point Association (VPA): business partners of, 185n32; collapse of, 14; construction by, 16; failure of, 24–25, 185n33; fantasies of, 24; improvement effects by, 21; metropolitan features of, 18; model cottages of, 16, 183n13; organization of, 15; promotional town views, 22, 22; prospective investors, 18; publicity for, 16, 18, 20, 37, 183n14, 184nn19,27; as symbol of imprudence, 25; themes of historicity, 184n27; trustees of, 184n27 veterans, military: “bounty tracts” for, 4 Wabanaki people, of Prouts Neck, 138 Wade & Croome’s Panorama of the Hudson River from New York to Waterford, 23 Walker, William Aiken: paintings of African American cabins, 209n77 Wayne, Anthony, 23 Wenzlick, Roy, 179n19 Westchester County Bank of Peekskill, pictorial notes of, 18, 20 Western Messenger, on malaria, 53 Western terrain, American: financialized conceptions of, 2; promoters’ dramatization of, 49. See also frontier, Midwestern; prairie whaling industry (Nantucket), 101; decline of, 86, 201n76; links to land boom, 102; speculation in, 102 Whittredge, Worthington: on land investment, 2–3 Wiggin, John: Homer’s sketch of, 152, 152; store of, 213n42 Wigmore, Spencer, 2 Wild, John Caspar: View of Galena, Illinois, 62; View of Kaskaskia, 51, 52, 52 Wilson, Christopher, 193n71 wineries, German: land and work of, 76 Woodard, Colin, 153 Woodford, Stewart, 72 Woolson, Constance Fenimore: “The Ancient City,” 132; “Matanzas River,” 209n76 Wright, Lewis, 150, 212n38 York (Maine), urban visitors to, 139

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