Village Life Lesson: Changes in the Land

Lesson: Changes in the Land

Overview: Vermont’s sheep boom led to deforestation as thousands of sheep were put to pasture in the hills. Upon seeing the environmental impact, George Perkins Marsh wrote Man and Nature (1862), a warning about the impacts of clear-cutting the land. This lesson combines informational text and visual images that help students understand how agriculture changes the environment.

Focusing Question

How did sheep farming change the land?

Topical Understandings

William Jarvis imported merino sheep to Vermont and New Hampshire, which were highly profitable because of their hardy nature and fine wool.

Sheep require lots of pasture, which led to the gradual deforestation of Vermont. By the time the sheep boom ended in the 1850s, 70% of Vermont land had been cleared.

George Perkins Marsh was an important environmentalist who warned of the environmental consequences of deforestation.

Materials:

Informational Text

Excerpts from Reading the Forested Landscape by Tom Wessels

Excerpts from Man and Nature by George Perkins Marsh

Note-taking worksheets

Primary Sources

Painting: An Early Settler Clears a Forest 

Painting: Height of Forest Clearing and Agriculture   

Photograph: Montpelier in the late nineteenth century   

Procedures:

1. As a class use visual thinking strategies to analyze the Early Settler and Height of Forest Clearing and Agriculture dioramas. Summarize the two eras of farming and create a list of questions or hypothesize about why the land might look so different in the second image. You could use this set of scaffolded questions that begin with descriptive questions and end with analytical thinking:

• What is the title of this image?
• List what you see in this image.
• What season do you think this is? What details make you say that?
• How long do you think the farmer has been on the land? What details make you say that?
• What percent of the landscape do you think is cleared?
• How do you think the landscape came to look the way it does?

2. Provide students with these excerpts from Reading the Forested Landscape and the accompanying scaffolded note-taking charts:

• Excerpt 1 "The European settlement of Vermont brought change to the landscape. Upland areas where forests were less dense were cleared and then settled. Men would usually prepare a homestead over a period of two to four summers and then be joined by their families. The men cleared land by ax—up to three acres a summer—built log cabins, and prepared fencing for animals."

• The Text:

  Answer the question in your own words and underline the text which gave you the information:

  The European settlement of Vermont brought change to the landscape. Upland areas where forests were less dense were cleared and then settled.	The main idea of this paragraph is:
  Men would usually prepare a homestead over a period of two to four summers and then be joined by their families.	It took _____________________ for the men to prepare a home for their families.
  The men cleared land by ax—up to three acres a summer—built log cabins, and prepared fencing for animals.	If it took four summers to prepare a homestead, how much land did they clear for their farm?                         _____________________

• 
  
• Excerpt 2 "In 1810 William Jarvis, American Consul to Portugal, imported 400 merino sheep to his Weathersfield, Vermont, farm. Merino sheep produce very soft, high-quality wool and a lot of it. A wool craze swept the region. By 1840 there were 1.7 million sheep in Vermont and more than 600,000 in New Hampshire.  To support all these sheep, the landscape changed. The countryside was cleared of forest to create pastures. Stone fencing, designed to keep the sheep in their pastures, crisscrossed the landscape."

• The Text:	Answer the question in your own words and underline the text which gave you the information:
  In 1810 William Jarvis, American Consul to Portugal, imported 400 merino sheep to his Weathersfield, Vermont, farm.	What did William Jarvis do?
  Merino sheep produce very soft, high-quality wool and a lot of it.	Why would William Jarvis do this?
  By 1840 there were 1.7 million sheep in Vermont and more than 600,000 in New Hampshire.	How long did it take for the sheep herd in Vermont to get very big?
  To support all these sheep, the landscape changed. The countryside was cleared of forest to create pastures. Stone fencing, designed to keep the sheep in their pastures, crisscrossed the landscape.	How did the landscape change?

3. Discuss their answers and summarize farming during early settlement as compared to the time of the sheep boom.  What were some pros and cons to the sheep boom? For farmers? For the land?

4.  Project Montpelier in the late nineteenth century and use the same visual thinking strategies and scaffolded questions to describe the image.

5.  Provide students with the following quote from George Perkins Marsh and the accompanying note-taking worksheet.  

Read the quote out loud to the group

“Steep hillsides and rocky ledges are well suited to the permanent growth of wood, but when in the rage of improvement they are improvidently stripped of this protection, the action of sun and wind and rain soon deprives them of their vegetable mould….they remain thereafter barren producing neither grain nor grass.”             George Perkins Marsh

Translate the Quote:

George Perkins Marsh’s words	Your Translation
Steep hillsides and rocky ledges are well suited to the permanent growth of wood,
but when in the rage for improvement they are improvidently stripped of this protection,
the action of sun and wind and rain soon deprives them of their vegetable mould . . .
They remain thereafter barren . . . producing neither grain nor grass."

Take notes about the quote:

What have farmers done to the hillsides of Vermont?
What will be the impact on nature?

6. Discuss the quote as a class. Ask how students might change their list of pros and cons about the impact of the sheep boom.

Teaching Village Life: Bibliography and Links

Teaching Village Life: Bibliography and Links

Bibliography

Background History Books

Jan Albers, Hands on the Land (2002)
Rebecca Brown, Editor, Where the Great River Rises (2009)

Richard Ewald, Proud to Live Here: In the Connecticut River Valley of Vermont and New Hampshire (2003)

David Foster, New England Forests through Time (2000) See also the online link

Children’s Books:

·       Charlie Needs a Cloak by Tomie dePaola

·       The Ox-Cart Man, by Donald Hall

·       Lyddie; Jip: His Story, by Katherine Paterson

Links

Background Information

Freedom and Unity
This exhibit provides good contextual information.

Landscape History of Central New England
This is the website for the book New England Forests Through Time

The Debit Economyof 1830s New England

Vermont History Explorer: Maps

Vermont History Explorer: Geography

New Hampshire History Slideshows

Maps

Old Maps
Here is where you can find copies of old maps such as the Beers Atlas maps

Village Quest

This standards-based unit is a series of eight lessons, whereby a class uses historical maps, field trips, primary and secondary resources, and interviews with community elders to create a Quest capturing "hidden stories" in their town. Suitable for 4th - 8th grade

Primary Sources

The Diaries of Sally and Pamela Brown1832-1838, ed. Blanche Bryant andGertrude Baker (Springfield, Vt.: The William L. Bryant Foundation, 1970).

Letters of Mary Paul, aVermont mill girl in Lowell

What is History?

What do young students know about history? Find out by first providing each student with an index card and asking them to complete the sentence, "History is...." Read the cards together and create a list of their ideas.

Virginia Lee Burton's, The Little House, is a picture book that works well to introduce the concept of history. It tells the story of a house built on a hill far out in the country. Eventually a road is built in front of a house and, bit by bit, the far away city expands to encompass the house. 

Read the book to the students then hand out to pairs of students photocopies of the major illustrations in the book. Create a picture viewer for each pair by cutting a 1" square in the center of a piece of paper. Have students slide their viewer over the picture and create a list of details in the picture.  Once finished, have students come up to the front of the room and put the pictures in order. Have someone narrate the story based on the pictures on the wall.

As a class discuss what they think the main ideas of the book might be. What specific details illustrate these ideas?

What information did they need to tell the story of the house? They needed to activate their prior knowledge of the story and they needed lots of details from the pictures. From a literacy perspective they have just worked on understanding the narrative structure of the book and summarizing the main idea. We have also just modeled how closely historians look at evidence.

For our larger question about what is history we now add to our list. Some new ideas about history might be: Chronology, change over time, landscape changes, technology changes landscape, historians tell stories, and historians use details to tell stories.

Now--go to your local antique mall and buy some old postcards, preferably postcards that have been mailed and have stamps and postmarks.  Using old postcards gives students the opportunity to actually handle "old stuff."  Create a graphic organizer that asks them to list what they see on the front of the postcard. They should be good at this because they just did it with The Little House. 

They should make a map of the back of the postcard. By doing this, they will notice everything from the address to the postmark to the publisher. Finish by having students list at least 3 questions.

Postcards like this force students to identify some of the first details any historian asks of a primary source--who wrote it? who was the audience? when was it written?

Share the postcards. If you're lucky, you've found a collection written/sent by the same person and that tells a bit of a story.

Now add more to their definitions of history. They might add that history is about real people and places, it can be personal, it is interpretive, and it is about asking questions.

If you're really lucky, you now have a crowd of kids who are desperate to be historians and to find out more!

Here's a book where you can find some answers to all those questions your students now have about postcards:

  Allen Davis, Postcards from Vermont: A Social History 1905 - 1945 (2002)