The Depression - of 1837
I grew up in New Jersey. Not the New Jersey you are thinking about with the belching pollution from the refineries along the New Jersey Turnpike. No, I grew up in the country of North Jersey, just below the Kittatenny Ridge. We liked to go up on the Appalachian Trail on Sundays to hike along in solitude. We knew to be careful where we walked, however. The woods were full of old stone walls and foundations that could be unsafe to the uninitiated. Even more unsafe were all the old, abandoned wells that spotted the back country. You didn't want to fall in an abandoned well, especially if you were all by yourself. The New Jersey I grew in looked like it was all original growth that had been there forever. Actually, that wasn't the case. New Jersey had been fully populated during Colonial times, the hills denuded, and farms created even on the steeper slopes. The industry of the times, the farms didn't retreat until the 1830s and 40s. Sullivan (Sullivan, 125) makes the case that the population of the east evacuated because of economic conditions. The completion of the Erie Canal and the beginning of the railroad era allowed for farming in the "Northwest," in the valleys of western New York and Ohio and their environs. The land was cheaper, flatter, less rocky, and more fertile. Crops were more profitable, and, because of the new railroads and canals, cheap to bring to market. This disrupted the farming communities along the East Coast. Greeley's classic "Go West young man" wasn't really a romantic call to wander. Rather, it was a wholly realistic call to survive starvation; you couldn't make a living in the east. You had to go west to find your fortune. It wasn't a cool thing to do, it was survival (Sullivan, 128). The Grapes of Wrath was about the Depression. Thoreau's writings about Walden were about the depression of 1837. He hoped to survive not by the materialism of industrial farming and manufacturing communities but were a call to survive using a simpler life style like that that had existed before the failure of eastern communities. The interesting parallels between the depressions of the 1930s and the 1830s and 40s point to solutions for today. While we probably won't end up calling our time a depression (I'm hearing Great Recession ocsasionally) the suggestions for success make sense. Thoreau actually was an industrialist himself. His family manufactured pencils and were widely recognized for their quality. He innovated, especially during the period when German imports largely supplanted American pencil manufacturers and ended up abandoning pencils for graphite manufacturing. His powdered lead became a staple of a new industry that used lead in a mechanical process that was a precursor to Xerox processes a century later.
Sullivan, Robert. The Thoreau You Didn't Know. What the Prophet of Environmentalis Really Meant. Collins. 2009.