Down to Earth_Nature's Role in American History

by Ted Steinberg

  WALKING SEWERS

  When Europeans visualized America in the nineteenth century, they thought of Native Americans, a strange new group of people unknown on their continent. But when they pictured American cities, it was not Indians and buffaloes but pigs that came to mind. No animal loomed larger in their image of U.S. urban areas. “I have not yet found any city, county, or town where I have not seen these lovable animals wandering about peacefully in huge herds,” wrote Ole Munch Ræder, a Norwegian lawyer on a visit to America in 1847. Swine, he observed, kept the streets clean by “eating up all kinds of refuse. And then, when these walking sewers are properly filled up they are butchered and provide a real treat for the dinner-table.”3

  Working-class women, who depended on pigs to supply food for the table, allowed them to scavenge the urban commons for garbage. While rural hogs fed on the forest’s acorns, city pigs fed on the waste people threw away, converting it into protein for the working poor. But a food source to some proved a nuisance to others. So many pigs wandered the streets of Little Rock, Arkansas, at mid-century that, according to one newspaper report, they had come “to dispute the side walks with other persons.”4 These creatures were not the sedate porkers one encounters today at the zoo; they were wild animals that injured and occasionally killed children. A nasty and brutish lot, the urban pigs copulated in public and had the annoying habit of defecating on people.

  The authorities in New York City had sought to ban swine from the streets as early as the 1810s. But public outcry led to the prohibition’s repeal. In 1818, however, a grand jury indicted two men for the misdemeanor of “keeping and permitting to run hogs at large in the city of New York.” The first of the accused was convicted, after failing to mount a defense of his actions, and forced to pay a small fee. The second man, a butcher named Christian Harriet, decided to fight the charge. “The dandies, who are too delicate to endure the sight, or even the idea of so odious a creature,” might welcome a conviction, Harriet’s lawyers argued. “But many poor families might experience far different sensations, and be driven to beggary or the Alms House for a portion of that subsistence of which a conviction in this case would deprive them.” Closing the urban commons, in other words, would take food out of the mouths of the poor.5

  “It is said, that if we restrain swine from running in the street, we shall injure the poor,” Mayor Cadwallader Colden observed. “Why, gentlemen! must we feed the poor at the expense of human flesh,” he asked? Eliminate the commons and the poor would be forced to find jobs to pay for food, instead of taking their meals at the expense of the city’s more refined residents. As for the fact that swine played a useful part in cleaning up the city’s streets, Colden intoned, “I think our corporation will not employ brutal agency for that object when men can be got to do it.”6

  In the end, Harriet was convicted. As of 1819, setting pigs free became a crime, but that did not deter people. In 1821, city authorities went to war against the pigs, taking many into custody as Irish and black women banded together to defend the animals. Other significant pig-related conflicts erupted in 1825, 1826, 1830, and 1832. Pigs played a central role in the lives of the poor, who were willing to do what they could to save them.7

  PIG ROUND-UP

  On August 13, 1859, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper published this picture of police pursuing hogs. The animals were banished from the area below 86th Street in Manhattan by the following decade. (Kelvin Smith Library, Case Western Reserve University)

  In 1849, however, the urban commons experienced a fatal blow. Cholera broke out in New York, and health officials linked the outbreak to the city’s filthy conditions. No animal symbolized dirt more clearly than the pig. Police, armed with clubs, drove thousands of swine out of cellars and garrets, banishing them uptown. By 1860, the area below 86th Street had been secured as a pig-free zone. But in the uptown wards, the pigs still ruled. So many hogs roamed the area around 125th Street in Harlem at mid-century that the area came to be known as Pig’s Alley. City authorities in New York and other urban areas, meanwhile, continued to tolerate pigsties as late as the 1870s, with some tenement residents even boarding them in their rooms, demonstrating the importance the poor attached to the animal.8

  By the last decades of the nineteenth century, the urban commons drew to a close not just in New York, but in cities throughout America. Mayor Colden’s wish for a pig-free city, one where women could walk the streets “without encountering the most disgusting spectacles of these animals indulging the propensities of nature,” seemed well within reach.9 The urban pig was ultimately exiled to the farmyard, where, to this day, it perpetuates for people the division between the country and the city.

  CITY AS MANURE FACTORY

  Like the pig, the horse also played an important, if somewhat hidden, role in urban ecology, one overshadowed by its far more obvious place at the heart of economic life. No animal, with the possible exception of the mule (important only in the South), did more to serve the transportation needs of urban areas.

  In the early days of cities, horse-drawn buses (omnibuses) operated on cobblestone streets at speeds hardly faster than a walking pace. In the period just before the Civil War, however, the horse car spread to cities across the nation. Faster and more efficient than the older omnibuses, teams of horses hitched to passenger cars transported people and goods up and down iron tracks. By 1890, more than 32 million passengers climbed aboard New York City’s horse car lines.

  The number of urban horses nearly doubled to a little under three million over the course of the last third of the nineteenth century. The adoption of the horse car contributed to the rise, as did the expansion of railroad transportation. As trains shipped more goods from point to point, horses were needed to haul the freight from terminals to the ultimate destination.

  The horses’ importance to urban life was made amply apparent in 1872 when a fire scorched Boston’s business district. Normally used to pull fire equipment, the horses, struck down by a flulike disease, were either dead or ill and thus unable to answer the call for help. The fire charred over 700 buildings as a result. Equines in other cities ultimately felt the effect of the outbreak (in Detroit, delivery companies made do with hand carts), which killed somewhere on the order of five percent of all the urban horses in the Northeast and Canada.10

  Horses generated power for transportation (and manufacturing too), but they also produced staggering amounts of manure, somewhere between 15 and 30 pounds per animal every day. In Milwaukee, this translated daily into 133 tons of horse droppings. In 1900, one health officer in Rochester, New York (apparently with nothing better to do), calculated that the city’s 15,000 horses contributed enough dung each year to completely cover an acre to a height of 175 feet. Worse still, the stinking piles bred countless numbers of flies, which harbored disease, including typhoid fever. Then there was the dust to contend with. Horse turds dried up in the heat, only to be pulverized by the creatures themselves as their hoofs made contact with the pavement. Ground horse excrement was the nineteenth-century equivalent of auto pollution—and was just as irritating to people’s respiratory systems.11

  The problems created by horse dung would have been even worse were it not for an ingenious ecological move on the part of farmers living on the outskirts of cities. They purchased the horse manure and used it to fertilize their hay and vegetable crops. The hay then went to feed the urban horse population and the vegetables to enhance the dinner tables of the city’s better-off residents. As a truck farmer from New Jersey explained: “In our large commercial and manufacturing cities where wealth has concentrated, and where abound families who live regardless of expenditures, fabulous prices are freely paid for vegetables and fruits to please the palate or adorn the table.” By the mid-nineteenth century, a reciprocal system, with manure passing one way and vegetables and hay the other, had grown up in New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Boston.12

  New Yorkers perfected the system. The opening of the Erie Canal in
1825 propelled the city’s rise to commercial dominance and spurred farmers near the waterway to give up grain production in favor of potatoes, cucumbers, cabbages, onions, and sweet corn, all of which commanded good prices in the city’s market. In 1879, Brooklyn and Queens, New York, now the very essence of urbanity, even led the nation in market gardening. Brooklyn was described by one source as an “immense garden” serving the “vast and increasing demand of the city of New York for vegetables and fruits of a perishable nature.”13

  The soil in Brooklyn and Queens is shallow, limiting the ability of roots to spread, and is not particularly adapted to storing moisture. Normally a farmer would need to keep plenty of hay on hand to feed the livestock that produced the soil-fortifying manure. But with Manhattan dairies and stables located nearby, it made economic sense for farmers to sell their hay and purchase horse manure in return. Manure from all over the New York City area formed the ecological lifeblood of Brooklyn and Queens farming. Brooklynites, one newspaper noted, “are, no doubt, glad to get rid of their filth (and the Board of Health will compel them to do so) [but] our farmers are glad to obtain means with which to enrich their lands, and to pay a fair price for such materials.” Horse manure was so critical to farming that one King’s County landowner even made a provision in his will that his son receive “all manure on the farm at the time of my decease.”14

  This ingenious early effort at recycling, however, proved short-lived. By the end of the nineteenth century, improvements in refrigeration and railroad transportation allowed farms in the South and California to outcompete Brooklyn and Queens for New York City’s booming vegetable and fruit trade. Meanwhile, in the late 1880s, the advent of electrified streetcars drove the horse and its manure out of cities all across the nation. In 1912, a traffic count revealed, for the first time, more cars than horses in New York. By the following year, so little evidence remained of the manure-based truck farms that the Brooklyn Botanic Garden found itself weighing the educational potential of putting vegetables on exhibit. It was the museum’s sense that “innumerable children and young people … have never seen … beans and peas growing on the plants that produce them.”15 Vegetables and horse manure now joined pigs on distant farms, further reinforcing the division between urban and rural life and contributing to the illusion of the city as somehow existing outside of nature.

  FLUSH AND FORGET

  Before the rise of the “flush and forget” mentality, human waste actually served a purpose in life. But to understand its role we must put aside all squeamishness and, as it were, follow the shit. Generally speaking, mid-nineteenth-century city dwellers relieved themselves in outhouses or privies. From that point, the excrement found its way into privy vaults and cesspools, which were little more than holes in the ground. Some waste seeped into the surrounding soil. Some of it invariably drained into the street when the vaults backed up and overflowed. And some fell to so-called necessary tubmen (a “necessary” being another name for a privy) to deal with. The tubmen—a job often filled by African Americans—used buckets, casks, and ultimately carts to haul away the night soil, referred to as such because the men did their dirty work after people had gone to sleep. Predictably, some of the slop wound up spilled in the streets. Some was dumped into nearby rivers and lakes. But a good deal of it, at least by the late nineteenth century (when reliable figures are available), journeyed in good biblical fashion back onto the earth.

  PRIVY

  Night soil from privies such as this one on Thompson Street in New York City was often shipped to the countryside for use on farms or sold to dealers who made it into fertilizer. (Library of Congress)

  In 1880, nearly half of the more than 200 U.S. cities surveyed deposited night soil on the land or sold it to dealers who made it into fertilizer. As late as 1912, tubmen in Baltimore, still without a sewer system, cleaned out roughly 70,000 privy vaults and cesspools. Barges then shipped the waste to the outskirts of town, where it was sold in 1,000-gallon quantities to farmers. They used it to grow tomatoes, cabbages, and other vegetables for urban consumption.16

  Of course the vast majority of human excrement produced in cities did not resurface on farms. But that said, a viable system for recycling human waste existed in nineteenth-century America. What forces combined to cause its downfall? How did urban populations across the nation find themselves cut off from the soil and bereft of the role they once played in maintaining it?

  CREATIVE DESTRUCTION

  East Main Street, West Boylston, Massachusetts, pictured here in 1896, was flooded and destroyed to make way for the Wachusett Reservoir, which supplied the city of Boston with water. (Metropolitan District Commission Archives, Boston, MA)

  The story begins with water. In the early nineteenth century, most urbanites depended on cisterns and wells; those who could afford to purchased water from petty proprietors who went from door to door. As urban populations surged, and leaking privies contaminated the underground supply, however, the demand for fresh water rose. In response, cities established public water systems. Philadelphia led the way, and New York, Boston, Detroit, and Cincinnati soon fell into step. On the eve of the Civil War, the nation’s 16 largest cities all had municipal waterworks in operation. By 1880, nearly 600 public water systems were in use across the country, complex networks that often brought water from lakes, at times miles and miles away, to serve the needs of urban areas.17

  In 1842, New York City, for instance, opened its Croton Aqueduct, which transported water over 40 miles from Westchester County. The city would eventually draw on the Catskill watershed, some 100 miles north. In 1848, Boston tapped Lake Cochituate, 15 miles to the west, and early the following century went even further afield to dam the waters of the Nashua River to create the Wachusett Reservoir. The water brought life to the city, but death to parts of the rural towns of West Boylston and Clinton, Massachusetts, which were inundated, its residents sent packing, to support population growth in a faraway urban land. Meanwhile, clear across the continent, Los Angeles was concocting its own imperial plan for draining off the natural wealth of the countryside. In 1906, the city obtained the necessary rights of way from the federal government to build a 235-mile aqueduct that would bring water from the Owens River directly into the metropolis. In perfecting their plan, city officials secured the help of the nation’s foremost conservationist, President Theodore Roosevelt. “It is a hundred or thousandfold more important to the State and more valuable to the people as a whole,” he remarked, “if [this water is] used by the city than if used by the people of the Owens Valley.”18

  As supply increased, demand boomed in cities across the nation, especially as the rich installed water closets, the forerunner of the modern toilet. A mere seven years after completion of the Cochituate Aqueduct in 1848, some 18,000 Boston households had water connections. Further west, Cleveland commandeered Lake Erie in 1856. One year later, Clevelanders used eight gallons of water per person each day; in 1872 they were using 55. There was only one problem: The cesspools and privy vaults could not handle all the waste. Although an alternative existed in the earth closet (a device consisting of a seat placed over a container of dirt, which “flushed” dirt over the excrement and thereby produced fertilizer), waste removal by water eventually ruled the day. Persuaded by the convenience of water, residents in some cities lobbied their governments to allow them to hook their drains up directly to existing sewers. But these sewers were designed with a grade steep enough only to handle free-flowing rainwater, and broke down when used to transport glutinous torrents of human waste. As sewers backed up and cesspools oozed, cities across the nation began to drown in their own filth.

  To deal with the problem, engineers, city officials, and sanitary experts rallied around the idea of more underground plumbing. Eventually, thousands of miles of sewer pipe were laid, as human waste went flushing into rivers, lakes, and harbors. Common wisdom at the time held that running water purified itself, which is true as long as the amount of waste does not exceed
the ability of bacteria in the water to break it down into harmless substances. Unaware of the fine points involved in wastewater disposal but attracted to its convenience, major cities built nearly 25,000 miles of sewer lines by 1909. But whereas water supplies tended to be paid for out of public monies, sewers went in only at the request of property owners, who were assessed accordingly. In other words, only those who could afford better public health received it. In 1857, New York City had installed just 138 miles of sewers along its 500 miles of paved streets, circumnavigating the city’s poorest sections. One New York landlord, desperate to hold down his expenses, protested having to pay a sewer assessment. Sewers, he remarked, “are an unhealthy arrangement and should be avoided at all times if possible.”19

  Others, however, seemed less driven by mercenary motives than by practicality in opposing the transformation of the underground into a huge wastewater superhighway. In 1853, one farmer from Ulster County, situated along the Hudson River, lamented that New York City was annually wasting enough human excrement to grow 180 million pounds of wheat. Engineer and sewer expert George Waring, Jr., believed New Yorkers were flushing away some five million dollars’ worth of valuable fertilizer each year. Prominent New Yorker and journalist Horace Greeley, meanwhile, labeled the city’s wasteful practice an “inexplicable stupidity” and observed that ancient societies had been undermined by “the exhaustion of the soil through the loss of such manures in their capitals.” It was ridiculous, he wrote in 1871, to pay for guano when New York “annually poisons its own atmosphere and adjacent waters with excretions which science and capital might combine to utilize at less than half the cost.”20