Final Heritage Montgomery update!

The cemetery at Pleasant View with the surrounding Quince Orchard community in the background

Here we are at my final internship blog update!
In my Civil War class we went on a field trip to the Pleasant View Historic Site in the
Quince Orchard area. This was super exciting for me, as a few months prior I had done
research on the site through Heritage Montgomery. I came to learn that the site is run by the
Pleasant View Historical Association, and that this site is rich in local African American history.
After the end of the Civil War African American communities began to form and flourish thanks to
government Reconstruction measures (like the Freedmen’s Bureau) and the self-determination of
the people involved. Pleasant View stands as a physical presence of one of these such communities.

A teacher named Nina Honemond Clarke wrote a history of black public schools in Montgomery
County and began serving as a teacher at the Quince Orchard Schoolhouse at Pleasant View in 1937.
It is resources like her writing, the preservation of the buildings in Pleasant View
(in addition to the robust cemetery on the property that is still in use today), and the continued
dedication to and connection with these community landscapes that really exemplifies the core idea of
public history. The dialogue between those who research and make available artifacts, buildings, and
material culture for public consumption are essentially fostering a connection between individuals and
their communities, either on a local level or a global level.

My time at Heritage Montgomery showed me that so much behind the scenes work goes into
presenting history to the public, no matter how large or small the scale of the information being
presented is. It takes a huge team of dedicated individuals who are intent on getting the information
right and informing the public in the most genuine way possible to really build that connection between
individuals and their overlooked local history. Now that the future African American Heritage Trail that
Heritage Montgomery is creating has an organized backbone of resources and future interns and
historians can bring to life Montgomery County’s local history in a way that the public will surely
connect with.

A view of one corner of Pleasant View's property

The narrative of rheas historic realationship with humans #2

This is Francis Patrick Fowler again.  After reading William Cronon’s  article “A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative” in the Journal of American History, I realized the importance and potential danger of narration in a conservation history.   Narration’s goal is to make something mannered seem natural.  It is to connect different pieces of information rather then simply place them in a chronicle.  While this is good, it is a problem in conservation history where the natural and artificial are supposed to be honestly defined. 

Suppose I was to craft a story about the relationship of humans and Rheas through a typical beginning, conflict, climax and end format: the story could become very human-centrist and omit certain facts.  Rheas would, not surprisingly, be very silent on their opinion on the nature of their relationship to humans.  For example, I wanted the narrative I am working on for my internship to explain how Rheas influenced Charles Darwin’s On the Origins of Species, but I wound up talking more about Darwin.  I wanted to talk about Rheas survived the plumage trade, but I ended up writing more about early members of the Audubon society. 

How was I to create an engaging story while staying truthful and giving Rheas their fair time?  I realized that connecting legacies to the past and the various people that helped conserve the species would be secondary to the task of balancing conservation history and wildlife history.  And the point of conserving history along with wildlife is to reveal an equally authentic and dependent relationship between people and Rheas.  

It is for this reason that I chose to use a narrative that stated that people and Rheas were equally dependent on each other, using mythology, the theory of evolution and the plumage trade as my major themes.  I did this by organizing raw data, then narrating and mediating that data, and then ending with my conclusion.  For mythology, I mentioned the various insults in Brazil for the way a Rhea ran, but then showed that there were indigenous tribes that revered the Rhea.  For the theory of evolution, I used Darwin’s notes on two different Rhea species to demonstrate how Rheas influenced the beginnings of the Darwin’s ideas.  Yet, I showed how these notes at their beginning were disjointed and barley coherent until Rheas were studied again and again.  For the plumage trade, I highlighted the amount of Rheas killed to make dusters and brooms.  But I used an analogy from one of my key sources, Birds and People, that the destruction of Rheas by the undisciplined use of technology ended up being equally destructive to humans in World War One.  It is not a coincidence that much legislation protecting bird species were created right before and after this second carnage.  I finally concluded by tying these themes together with the turn-of-the-century event of the first two Rheas entering the Philadelphia Zoo. 

This natural history of Rheas was limited in how much it explained.  I did not want to distract from the intention of the studbook to give reliable data.  However, I hopefully made the topic more reachable to the human mind while at the same time I did not loose sight that this project was about Rheas more so than humans.

 

A Scene in South America with Rheas and Patagonian Cavies.,” NYPL Digital Collections, accessed May 13, 2019, http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47d9-7a67-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99.