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.

Using Maps to Learn about Early Village Life

What was village life like in Vermont after settlement? What did they do for food, clothing, and shelter? How and where did they travel? The James Whitelaw maps of 1796 and 1810 provide a window into that world.  These maps show the major buildings in each Vermont community.

Begin by providing your students with a visual image of life at settlement. One possible image is
Thomas Cole's painting, A Home in the Woods. While it is romanticized, it still provides the types of details that students need to "enter" into the Whitelaw maps. Use visual thinking strategies to gather details students see in the picture. Categorize those details into "food," "clothing," and "shelter."

Now find your own town on the Whitelaw map and have students do the following:

Check off any of the following that appear on the map--the key is at the top of this post and is also located on the bottom right of the map. Hopefully they will have some questions about these terms and will want to do a bit of research.

_________ Meeting Houses         _________ Grist Mills       _________ Swamps

_________ Forts                           _________ Saw Mills        _________ Dwelling Houses

_________ Falls                           _________ Fulling Mills    _________ Grammar Schools

_________ Ferries                        _________ Iron Works

_________ Bridges                      _________ Mountains

Now answer these questions:

Where are the churches and other large public buildings located?

Where are the mills and factories located?

What can you see on this map that would help settlers in your town make their cloths?

What can you see on this map that would help settlers in your town build their homes?

What can you see on this map that would help settlers in your town bake their bread?

Where do the roads go?

What might you conclude about your town from this map?

What questions do you now have?

Two Veterans

Winslow Homer's painting, The Veteran in a New Field (1865) depicts a hopeful image for America. The bountiful fields of grain seem to stretch on and on while the farmer's uniform jacket has been cast aside.  For a full analysis of this painting see the National Endowment for the Humanities Picturing America site and this Edsitement lesson which includes a "map" to the painting highlighting the many symbols and their meanings.

While there were numerous veterans who returned to their northern farms and picked up their scythes, there were many other veterans who returned to very different fields--fields they didn't own and crops they couldn't sell.  Natasha Trethewey responds to Homer's painting in a poem called Again, The Fields. The poem is a reminder that many African-American veterans returned from the Civil War only to become bound into the sharecropping system.

AGAIN, THE FIELDS

After Winslow Homer

No more muskets, the bone-drag

weariness of marching, the trampled

grass, soaked earth red as the wine

of sacrament. Now, the veteran

turns toward a new field, bright 

as domes of the republic. Here,

he has shrugged off the past--his jacket

and canteen flung down in the corner.

At the center of the painting, he anchors

the trinity, joining earth and sky.

The wheat falls beneath his scythe--

a language of bounty --the swaths

like scripture on the field's open page.

Boundless, the wheat stretches beyond

the frame, as if toward a distant field--

the white canvas where sky and cotton

meet, where another veteran toils,

his hands the color of dark soil.

Have your students read this poem aloud.

What images do they envision in the first stanza? Could they find a Civil War painting or photograph that might illustrate that bone-drag weariness of marching?

Show Homer's painting. Which stanzas describe Homer's painting? What is the mood of those stanzas?

What happens in the last stanza? Who is the poet describing? What is the mood of this stanza? 

See if they can find an image that depicts this other veteran.  

                                                                                              Mississippi Dept. of Archives and History

This exercise might be an interesting transition from the Civil War to Reconstruction and the New South.