Durham,
North Carolina
Katie
Cavanaugh
Durham,
North Carolina is a medium-sized city situated in the middle of the state. As
of the 2010 census, it had a population of just fewer than 230,000 people. Not
only is Durham famously the home of Duke University, it is also an important vertex
of the Research Triangle (which also consists of Raleigh and Chapel Hill),
demonstrating the high level of academics and intellect in the city. The Durham
that I knew when I was growing up has changed significantly even in just the
last decade. What were tobacco factories when I was five years old have now
been converted into popular restaurants and stores. Going back even further,
the change from the grasslands and mountains of the Piedmont region is
astronomical. We think of cities of being unchanging; maps prove this
perception wrong. People tend to assume what they see is what was always there.
This essay attempts to illustrate how Durham is a “lost ecology” through this
change, based on “the fundamental premise that human culture is connected to
the physical world, affecting it and affected by it” (Glotfelty). Moreover, in
re-discovering this reformation, one “cannot do the reforming, of course, but…can
help with the understanding” (Glotfelty). Looking back over time, you can get
to the point to what was there before the city even existed.
Looking
back over time, we try to recover what was lost: to picture it in our minds, to
understand life before us. We go back to the earliest point we can find, like
this hand drawn map of Durham in 1863. The simplicity of this map alludes to
the simplicity of the time and the little development of the city at the time. The
amount of blank space of this map encourages the imagination. What was there?
Yes, there are roads and rivers, but what about the people? The houses? The
office buildings? The real part of what Durham looked like then is lost and up
to the reader to decide.
Figure
1. Before Durham. We cannot recover this, and it has not been documented in
ways that we recognize today. Everything else is left to the imagination.
Figure
2. Lewis Blount. This Map of Durham as I Remember in 1867-1868. Drawn from
Memory Entirely and No Attempt Made at Correct Angles or Measurements.
It’s amazing, frankly, at how
drastic the change is from then to now. Obviously Durham has developed, but
simply wrap your brain around the difference between the map in Figure 2 and
Figure 3, what we have today. In the map in Figure 2, Durham seems almost like
a fairy tale. No one today really knows what it was like back then. It’s based
on imagination. Now, with the technology used in Figure 3, you can find your
own street, your own house, and recognize that place where you walk your dog or
where you went to high school. Trace it back and really understand the change. We
go from this satellite picture of Durham back to European settlers, and then
back to the photograph of the tree in the Piedmont. Every time there was
development, some of the natural landscape was lost.
Figure
3. Google map.
Works
Cited
Figure 1. Pardue,
Donald L. Fields of Gold. 2009.
Photograph. NCPedia, Chatham County, NC.
Figure 2. Blount,
Lewis. "This Map of Durham as I Remember in 1867-1868. Drawn from Memory
Entirely and No Attempt Made at Correct Angles or Measurements." 1923.
Photograph. Digital Durham, Durham, NC.
Figure 3.
"Google Map Maker." Google Map
Maker. Google, 25 Oct. 2012. Web. 25 Oct. 2012.
<https://www.google.com/mapmaker?ll=35.984118,-78.865356>.
Glotfelty, Cheryll.
"What Is Ecocriticism?" The Association for the Study of
Literature and the Environment. The Association for the Study of Literature
and the Environment, n.d. Web. 25 Oct. 2012.
<http://www.asle.org/site/resources/ecocritical-library/intro/defining/glotfelty/>.
No comments:
Post a Comment