This is a first-person commentary by Rebecca Harding Davis on life at the Iron Mills of West Virginia. I paste it below for your reading.
Incidentally, it's from 1861.
A cloudy day: do you know what that is in a town of iron works? The sky sank down before dawn, muddy, flat, immovable. The air is thick, clammy with the breath of crowded human beings. It stifles me. I open the window, and, looking out, can scarcely see through the rain the grocer's shop opposite, where a crowd of drunken Irishmen are puffing Lynchburg tobacco in their pipes. I can detect the scent through all the foul smells ranging loose in the air.
The idiosyncrasy of this town is smoke. It rolls sullenly in slow folds from the great chimneys of the iron foundries, and settles down in black, slimy pools on the muddy streets. Smoke on the wharves, smoke on the dingy boats, on the yellow river, --clinging in a coating of greasy soot to the house front, the two faded poplars, the faces of the passers by. The long train of mules, dragging [p. 190] masses of pig iron through the narrow street, have a foul vapor hanging to their reeking sides. Here, inside, is a little broken figure of an angel pointing upward from the mantel shelf; but even its wings are covered with smoke, clotted and black. Smoke everywhere! A dirty canary chirps desolately in a cage beside me. Its dream of green fields and sunshine is a very old dream, --almost worn out, I think.
From the back window I can see a narrow brick yard sloping down to the river side, strewed with rain butts and tubs. The river, dull and tawny colored, (la belle riviere!) drags itself sluggishly along, tired of the heavy weight of boats and coal barges. What wonder? When I was a child, I used to fancy a look of weary, dumb appeal upon the face of the negro like river slavishly bearing its burden day after day. Something of the same idle notion comes to me today, when from the street window I look on the slow stream of human life creeping past, night and morning, to the great mills. Masses of men, with dull, besotted faces bent to the ground, sharpened here and there by pain or cunning; skin and muscle and flesh begrimed with smoke and ashes; stooping all night over boiling caldrons of metal, laired by day in dens of drunkenness and infamy; breathing from infancy to death an air saturated with fog and grease and soot, vileness for soul and body. What do you make of a case like that, amateur psychologist? You call it an altogether serious thing to be alive: to these men it is a drunken jest, a joke, --horrible to angels perhaps, to them commonplace enough. My fancy about the river was an idle one: it is no type of such a life. What if it be stagnant and slimy here? It knows that beyond there waits for it odorous sunlight, --quaint old gardens, dusky with soft, green foliage of apple trees, and flushing crimson with roses, --air, and fields, and mountains. The future of the Welsh puddler passing just now is not so pleasant. To be stowed away, after his grimy work is done, in a hole in the muddy graveyard, and after that, --not air, nor green fields, nor curious roses.
If you could go into this mill where Deborah lay, and drag out from the hearts of these men the terrible tragedy of their lives, taking it as a symptom of the disease of their class, no ghost Horror would terrify you more. A reality of soul starvation, of living death, that meets you every day under the besotted faces on the street, --I can paint nothing of this, only give you the outside outlines of a night, a crisis in the life of one man: whatever muddy depth of soul history lies beneath you can read according to the eyes God has given you.*
I thought of Davis's historical perspective after this previous post, and some of the earlier mountaintop removal posts, each of which (with differing degrees of abstraction) spoke to environmental justice issues that are not new.
*From: Major Problems in American Environmental History, ed. Carolyn Merchant (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1993)
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