Jack Temple Kirby - Poquosin : a study of rural landscape & society

FOR SUSAN FORREST KIRBY

Dismal Swamp Canal, northern terminus

Dismal Swamp Canal, southern terminus

Richard Blow monument

Jericho Ditch, facing north

Ruin of lock connecting Shingleyard Creek with Jericho Ditch

Shingle Creek, meandering southward

Cypresses with Spanish moss on Perquimans River

Appomattox Manor

Richard Eppes, ca. 1848

Richard Eppes in Turkish costume, ca. 1849

Edmund Ruffin with four of his children

Edmund Ruffin in South Carolina militia uniform

Grainfields of Brandon (southern view)

Richard Eppes at Appomattox Manor, ca. 1890

Porte Crayon, The White Canoe

Porte Crayon, Lake Drummond

Merchants Millpond

Riddicks Folly, Main Street, Suffolk

Porte Crayon, The Barge

Porte Crayon, Jim Pierce

Porte Crayon, Joe Skeeters

Porte Crayon, Carting Shingles

Porte Crayon, Cart-Boy

Porte Crayon, Osman

Porte Crayon, Horse Camp

Nat Turner

Porte Crayon, Uncle Alick

Three-hundred-year-old red oak behind Bacons Castle

Mixed-pine forest, with longleafs

Grass-stage longleaf pine

Weyerhaeuser papermill, Plymouth, North Carolina

Small sawmill near Windsor, North Carolina

Logging in Dismal Swamp

Union Camp sawmill/pulpmill/papermill, Franklin, Virginia

Corporate loblolly nursery, New Kent County, Virginia

Loblolly plantation, Sussex County, Virginia

Winton wharf on the Chowan

Urban Elizabeth riverfront

1. Farming in the James-Albemarle subregion, 18501970

2. Swine in the James-Albemarle subregion, 18601930

3. Tenancy among farmers, 18901930

1. Drainage in southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina

2. James-Albemarle subregion

3. Railroads, 1860

4. Southampton County, Virginia, 1863 (detail)

5. Bertie County, North Carolina, 1863 (detail)

6. Pocosins of Runnymede, Virginia (detail)

7. Northeastern North Carolina

8. Dismal Swamp ditch/canal system, ca. 1950s

9. Realtors map of Hampton Roads, 1993

Prefaces are skipped at comprehensions peril when a work is so odd and mysteriously titled as this one. Poquosin is an environmental historya narrative of human-landscape interrelationships in the low country between the James River in Virginia and Albemarle Sound in adjacent northeastern North Carolina, from the arrival of Europeans and Africans until the present. The nineteenth century is disproportionately represented because it witnessed the principal human conflicts over the landscapes destiny. As subregions go, this one coheres rather well, in terms both physical and historical. (These terms are detailed in the Prologue and Chapter 4.) Coherence, however, includes a bifurcation of the country and its settlers into unreconciled partsthe cosmopolitan and hinterlandwhich, I believe, drove the subregions history and must drive this book. A bifurcation so profoundly geographical implicates more than rivers and markets; it demands attention to the slippery matter of agency in historythat is, the power and initiative that amount to causation.

Environmental history seems always a narrative of pathos. The erect animals possessed of the largest brains and a capacity for sin act badly upon the rest of nature. They conceive of water, soil, forests, plants, and other animals as potential commodities, then manipulate them to optimize production; they extract, trade, degrade. This has been true in the Western Hemisphere, of course, for about five hundred years; but it is not all of the truth. Nature, too, has agency, beyond the spectacles of lightning, fire, storm, flood, and earthquake. Climate and geologic morphology are more persistent actors both in natural and human (unnatural?) history. They forbid, discourage, or invite human settlement; and invitation is seldom unlimited. The James-Albemarle low country has been mostly inviting. Aborigines made a Neolithic revolution of sorts there. Europeans and Africans incorporated much of Indian culture, but the landscape encouraged many British settlers to try to remake it in the image of Europe. This was truest among those who settled by the banks of Virginias tidal rivers and Carolinas northern sounds. They had easiest access to the worlds markets, to wealth and political power. Most of the subregion, however, remained remote from the market world for a very long time, in spite of its being subsumed, in outsiders minds, under the Tidewater, presumably a thriving commercial place. Dense swampy forests forbade transport of bulky commodities; rivers either were not navigable or, if they were, led to more wilderness. Here, in the hinterland, a culture barely commercial, one almost as Indian as European, endured until technological ingenuity overcame the inconveniences of natures shape. Even then, even today, the hinterlands susceptibility to the cultivation of corn, peanuts, cotton, and especially the loblolly pine, renders it different from and subservient to the cosmopolitan sector. It has been the interaction of natures and humans agencies that made this so.

Partly because human agency has seemed so overweening in this countryside, and because my version of the saga features a variety of humans with memorable names and faces, I have chosen a compensatory title for this history. Poquosin was the spelling Englishmen devised early in the seventeenth century for the Algonquian word meaning swamp-on-a-hill. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, John Lawson thought he heard percourson or perkosan. Poquosin prevailed, however, until the twentieth century, when pocosin became standard. In my text I employ the most recent spelling, unless quoting the old usage. The antique spelling survives in the title out of respect for the deadthis is history, after alland an eccentric affection for qs, which grow scarcer in our world.

Real swamps, the English understood, are low, with water moving through them most of the year. Swamps-on-hills are sometimes covered with water, but the water stands still, gradually seeping downward; and of course they are higher than swamps. Pocosins, then, are the middle landscape between swamps and the higher ridges on which humans build farms and towns. As such, they have several important aspects. Among themthis the compensatory metaphoris a vast capacity for the storage of carbon, the element of power.