1. Siry, Joseph V., Marshes of the Ocean Shore: Development of an Ecological Ethic (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1984), 3–4Google Scholar. Siry quotes W. M. Cameron and Donald Pritchard (The Sea [New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1963], 306) for a definition of estuary: “a semi-encolosed body of water having connection to the open sea, within which sea water is measurably diluted with fresh water deriving from land drainage.”

2. For example, in 1793, Philadelphia suffered a ravaging yellow fever epidemic that Dr. Benjamin Rush (mistakenly) blamed on the nearby marshes (Siry, , Marshes, 30).Google Scholar

3. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Emerson, Edward Waldo and Forbes, Waldo Emerson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1909–1914), 4: 321Google Scholar; quoted in Huth, Hans, Nature and the American: Three Centuries of Changing Attitudes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), 89.Google Scholar

4. Siry, , Marshes, 90.Google Scholar

5. Davis, John, “Frederic Church's ‘Sacred Geography,’” Smithsonian Studies in American Art 1, no. 1 (Spring 1987): 79–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Davis, 's The Landscape of Belief (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).Google Scholar

6. See note 31.

7. Stebbins, Theodore E. Jr., The Life and Works of Martin Johnson Heade (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 42. On page 55, Stebbins writes,Google Scholar

One wonders what precise meaning the marsh had for Heade.… superficially, he painted it as a masculine place, populated with hunters, fishermen and farmers. Yet it is possible that, consciously or subconsciously, he conceived it also as Mother Earth, as men had done from the earliest times. Certainly the marsh was comforting; warm, wet, abundant; it was very beautiful to his eyes; and it was subject to sudden changes of mood. It may be that his fascination with the haystack implies a fascination with (and perhaps fear of) the feminine.

Stebbins also posits a homosexual reading in suggesting a link with Whitman's homoerotic Calamus poems that were first published together in 1860, the same time Heade started his marsh series. However, Calamus, though a wetland reed, is not a salt-marsh plant, so that connection is dubious. It is true that during the 1970s, when Stebbins's book was published, “the role of American sexual attitudes in the field of art [was] only beginning to receive the attention it deserves” (ibid., 55), but over the intervening decades the balance has often been tipped in the other direction.

8. Fitz Hugh Lane and Heade are often connected because of a similarity in their styles of painting, defined as luminist. Luminism has been much discussed, especially by Novak, Barbara, American Painting of the Nineteenth Century (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), and Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980)Google Scholar. I believe a mistake is made in equating the intentions of the so-called “luminist” painters, for while a few of their marine settings are similar, their cultural agendas are not. For example, Heade did not ever paint the sort of harbor scene, implying trade and prosperity, that Lane was so fond of.

9. Marx, Leo, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), 87.Google Scholar

10. Novak, (Nature and Culture, 190)Google Scholar observes that the men seem to “maintain a distance from nature … a middle phase of reconciliation between man and nature.” She relates this to Leo Marx's idea of America as a garden and adds, “the Garden is already acculturated to the point where it presents fewer problems to its human inhabitants.” Yet, compared with Heade's farmers, those painted by Frederic Church are in active synchrony with nature's energy and movement.

11. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, “Nature,” in The Norton Anthology of American Literature, ed. Baym, Nina et al. , 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), 1: 842.Google Scholar

12. Teal, John and Teal, Mildred, Life and Death of the Salt Marsh (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969), 84.Google Scholar

13. Ibid., 101.

14. Ibid., 22–23. Also see Cronon, William, Changes in the Land (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), 161.Google Scholar

15. Smith, David et al. , “Salt Marshes as a Factor in the Agriculture of Northeastern North America,” Agricultural History 63, no. 2 (Spring 1989): 289 n. 43Google Scholar. It is here explained that cattle unaccustomed to salt hay were broken in to its strong taste with a mix of salt and meadow hay.

16. Ibid., 272, 292:

It seems likely that the methods found on the northeastern coast came originally from the Norfolk area of England, the use of special words in the diaries, deeds, and other evidence, especially in recent interviews suggest these sources. Many words which are obsolescent in England today remain in usage in downeast Maine, as relict words in the vernacular. Methods of farm work also reflect folk methods used in England.

Also in Colman, HenryFirst Report on the Agriculture Commissioner for the Agricultural Survey of Massachusetts State (Boston: Dutton and Wentworth, 1838), 18–19.Google Scholar

17. Storer, F. H., Agriculture in Some of Its Relations with Chemistry (New York: Chas. Schribner and Sons, 1897), 3: 439.Google Scholar

18. Letter from Peel, C. in the Maine Farmer, 06 11, 1863Google Scholar, in Smith, et al. , “Salt Marshes,” 289.Google Scholar

19. Ibid., 277.

20. Colman, , First Report, 74Google Scholar. Although Heade painted only the salt-marsh fields, these farms were not uniquely marshland. Farm V in the appended statements in Colman's report, for one example (84), covered 100 acres altogether. Of this, 50 were in pasture, 24 woodland, 10 in salt marsh, and 10 in “English mowing,” plus 4 in tillage and 2 in wet meadow. The livestock on the farm was 6 cows, 4 oxen, 2 pigs, and 4 horses “kept mainly for the purpose of carting hay to market on commission.” The benefit of the salt marsh is in the numbers: The 10 acres given to English mowing produced 12 tons of English hay, whereas the 10 acres in marsh produced 30 tons. Colman editorializes, “The extraordinary crop of salt hay stated above, of which I have unquestionable testimony, is to be attributed to superior management of the salt marsh, and its particularly excellent character. It has been carefully drained, so that the water is immediately, as the tide falls, taken from its surface.”

21. Copland, Samuel, Agriculture Ancient and Modern: A Historical Account of Its Principles and Practice, Exemplified in Their Rise, Progress, and Development (London: Virtue, 1866), 195.Google Scholar

22. Ibid.

23. Quoted in Copland, , Agriculture, 204Google Scholar. The British perspective was understandably different. The writer stated as his position that “defects in the character of American agriculture arise from a want of that attachment to the soil on the part of the occupiers or owners which in older countries renders the permanent possession of a property an object of anxious desire and effort” (199). Poor practices on the part of American farmers are cited along with a common saying among the British that “an English practical farmer, on going to America to farm, must leave behind him his preconceived ideas of good husbandry” (197).

24. Rasmussen, Wayne D., ed., Agriculture in the United States: A Documentary History (New York: Random House, 1975), 689.Google Scholar

25. Danhof, Clarence H., Change in Agriculture: The Northern United States, 1820–1870 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969), 257Google Scholar. Also see Stilgoe, John R., Alongshore (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), esp. 101–30.Google Scholar

26. Sanford, Albert H., The Story of Agriculture in the United States (Boston: D. C. Heath, 1916), 206–7.Google Scholar

27. Teal, , and Teal, , Life and Death, 43.Google Scholar

28. Salt-marsh farming during its decline is the background of Jewett, Sarah Orne's novel A Marsh Island (Boston: Houghton, 1885)Google Scholar. Curiously, she presents a painter as one of the main characters. Jewett's artist is portrayed as inept regarding marsh know-how, especially in contrast to the marsh-farmer's daughter, who is in full command of her environment.

29. Mclntyre, Robert G., Martin Johnson Heade: 1819–1904 (New York: Pantheon, 1948).Google Scholar

30. Teal, , and Teal, , Life and Death, 45.Google Scholar

31. Heade, 's letter to Forest and Stream, 07 7, 1881, 453Google Scholar. Heade signed his contributions to Forest and Stream with the pen name Didymus, which suggests some interesting associations: The Apostle St. Thomas was called Didymus, which means twin. He was also popularly known as doubting Thomas, since he was not present when the crucified Christ first reappeared, and refused to believe in the reincarnation until Christ later appeared before him, and Thomas touched his wound. Further, Thomas himself died a martyr, killed by pagan spears.

32. Heade, 's letter to Forest and Stream, 09 15, 1881, 128.Google Scholar

33. For example, Worster, Donald, ed., American Environmentalism: The Formative Period, 1860–1915 (New York: John Wiley, 1973)Google Scholar; and Marsh, George Perkins, The Earth as Modified by Human Action (New York: Scribner, Armstrong, 1874).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

34. Ecclesiastes, chapter 1, verses 2–7.

35. Stebbins, , Life and Works, 259Google Scholar; see cat. nos. 240 and 241 (image reproductions).