January 2011

The troops digging in on the heights above Boston Harbor in 1775 used shovels manufactured by a neighbor named John Ames in nearby North Easton. A hundred and seventy years and many wars later the Ames Shovel and Tool Works sent upward of eleven million entrenching shovels to Allied troops in the Second World War. Today the Ames company, now in Parkersburg, West Virginia, is still prospering. With a two-hundred-year history behind it Ames is America’s oldest hardware manufacturing company still producing its original product.

On August 26, 1883, Krakatoa, a small island between Java and Sumatra in western Indonesia, erupted with a violence perhaps unprecedented in geological history. Nearly five cubic miles of material were blown into the atmosphere. A 120-foot tidal wave swept the coasts of nearby islands, destroying 295 villages and drowning 36,000 people. The fine dust from the volcano reached an altitude of 120,000 feet, causing brilliant sunsets around the world for more than a year, reducing the amount of sunlight reaching the earth’s surface by 12 per cent, and effecting a marked cooling of the world’s weather.

The order of Ancient Free and Accepted Masons can trace its beginnings back to the fourteenth century and the golden age of cathedral building, when the art of masonry flourished as the most demanded of the skilled trades. After the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, however, cathedral building fell from grace, the demand for stonemasons declined, and the order became less a guild than a social fraternity to which almost anyone could belong—and thousands did: over the centuries, lodges blossomed throughout Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Boston got its first lodge in 1730; Philadelphia in 1733; and by the end of the eighteenth century, Freemasonry had swept into its fold such men as Dr. Joseph Warren, James Otis, George Washington, John Hancock, Benjamin Franklin, and Paul Revere. The order’s popularity slipped badly for more than ten years, however, when in 1826 one William Morgan—a member who had threatened to publish a book about it all—was kidnaped in Batavia, New York, and vanished.

One of the most illustrious of these benevolent despots was the Reverend Endicott Peabody, who founded Groton School in 1884 and served it with all his might and main for over half a century. By the time he finally turned over his task to younger hands in 1940, at the age of eighty-three, he had become an American version of the legendary Dr. Arnold of Rugby. And his zealously guarded little kingdom of several hundred sylvan acres, some forty miles northwest of Boston, had achieved national renown as a preserve of wealth and privilege.

Peabody’s personal fame was largely confined to his own small world, except for one disquieting spell in the 1930’s when one of his “old boys” went to the White House and another to Sing Sing. But within the realm of the fashionable boarding school, vibrations from his formidable presence can still be felt, and his fervently simplistic ideals, however anachronistic, continue to influence the education of sons of the rich and well connected, at Groton as well as at similar schools.

Between his arrival in Fresno in 1911 and his death there fifty-five years later, Claude “Pop” Laval devoted all his energy, every day, to photographing the people, places, events, industries, and farms of Fresno and the surrounding San Joaquin Valley. The result was a remarkable pictorial record, one of the most extensive ever produced by a single man—approximately one hundred thousand negatives and more than one hundred and twenty thousand prints. What is even more remarkable is the fact that most of them have survived.

Laval’s beginnings were a long way from the land he recorded and came to love. He was born in New York City in 1882, the son of an inventor/engineer. In 1896 the family moved to Braddock, Pennsylvania, where, at age fourteen, Claude took his first job as an architect and civil engineer—this without even a high school diploma. Two years later, he became foreman at the Cochocton Iron Works in Monongahela.

One Saturday evening early in March, 1842, a twenty-two-year-old journalist named Walter Whitman came to the reading room of the New-York Society Library on Broadway, a few blocks north of City Hall, to hear a public lecture on “The Poet.” He had just been appointed chief editor of the Aurora , a daily paper that aspired to be the court circular of the beau monde, and he dressed the part of a man about town—he wore a flower in the lapel of his frock coat and carried a polished walking stick. The lecturer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, was already, at thirty-eight, the most influential and eloquent general thinker of his era. An address he had delivered five years earlier to the Harvard chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, “The American Scholar,” had been “our intellectual Declaration of Independence,” according to his friend Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. In ringing tones Emerson had exhorted Americans to stop listening to the courtly muses of Europe and begin to walk on their own feet, work with their own hands, speak their own minds.

There is something almost atavistic in the appeal of an archeological dig. For most people, to hold in the hands a pottery sherd, a flint arrowhead, a piece of bone, or any other artifact of known prehistoric origin is to feel for one quick moment both the excitement and the melancholy suggested by Alfred Lord Tennyson’s phrase, “So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.” Such remnants are all we have and all we will ever know of those shadowy people who came before us; yet, knowing that, we also know that they are as much a part of us as the genes which determine the color of our skin.

However appealing, the experience of digging in and finding such splinters of the past is not, for most of us, easily come by, a fact which makes all the more intriguing a program instituted in the state of Arkansas thirteen years ago. It is called the Arkansas Archeological Survey, and its goal is not merely to locate and examine as many of the state’s archeological sites as possible, but to do so with the cooperation and, whenever feasible, the participation of the citizenry.