Agricultural Wetland Use and Management in the Dutch-Settled Northeast, 1620 to 1800

Abstract

Agricultural Wetland Use and Management in the Dutch-Settled Northeast, 1620 to 1800 Chelsea Teale (bio) Research on historic North American agriculture tends to emphasize terrestrial systems within a framework of economic transitions, primarily from indigenous hunting, gathering, and subsistence farming to colonial mixed-husbandry, and later, market-driven specialization.1 Natural resource use and management often changed during these transitions because of new demands and public perceptions of resource value. Among the resources that have been inconsistently valued, used, and managed in eastern North America are wetlands, though agricultural historians rarely consider them as often or as specifically as they do upland resources—even wetland types that are known to have been globally important sources of hay and pasture.2 In contrast, European historians and geographers have incorporated wetlands into a long tradition of cultural landscape analysis.3 Despite sharing similar wetland types and historical farming practices with Europe, and having that continent as a model for incorporating agricultural history with contemporary conservation, North Americans have not reflected on their wetlands to nearly the same degree. Rather, focus on this side of the Atlantic has been on the nineteenth-century devaluation of [End Page 177] wetlands as disease-ridden wastelands or the mid-twentieth-century shift toward positive perceptions as ecosystem services were recognized.4 Identifying the early agricultural use and management of wetlands in North America is integral to understanding their role in regional landscapes and livelihoods, as well as developing new ways to promote their conservation in the modern day. This is especially relevant in the United States, where over half of the original wetland acreage has been lost to so-called "improvement" practices since the onset of European settlement.5 Public awareness and stewardship of wetlands may be increased, for example, by communicating the pre-nineteenth-century importance of wetlands to the Northeast's mixed-husbandry agricultural system because livestock required over-winter provisioning but grasslands were limited to areas with high water tables, poor soils, or where native peoples had cleared land. Wetlands supporting grassy vegetation—in French traditionally called prairies, in English meadows, and in Dutch vlys—filled the Northeast's forage deficit until exotic upland grasses and legumes were introduced beginning in the late eighteenth century.6 There is every reason to believe that wetlands, from coastal salt marshes to inland beaver meadows, influenced the settlement patterns of agriculturally minded colonists from the Gulf of Saint Lawrence to the Delaware River. The French and English, for example, managed Northeastern wetlands in order to provide mowing and pasture grounds, most notably in the form of diked salt marshes along the Bay of Fundy and Saint Lawrence River, but also in the maintenance of freshwater wetlands along streams like Thoreau's Sudbury River. 7 Colonists brought wetland management [End Page 178] techniques to North America from Europe, where Dutch engineers and financiers enabled large-scale reclamation beginning in the late sixteenth century; the extensive diking projects found in some northeastern tidal marshes are direct descendants of this tradition. However, despite Dutch contributions to trans-Atlantic wetland reclamation, wetland use and management in the Dutch-settled Northeast is unknown.8 This oversight is no doubt related to a broader lack of research on Dutch colonial agriculture, which has been treated substantially only once.9 New Netherland was initially comprised of West India Company (WIC) fur trade entrepôts on the Hudson (Noort, or North) River, the Connecticut (Versche, or Fresh) River, and the Delaware (Suyt, or South) River. Like most scholarly assessments of New Netherland, however, the focus here is on Dutch settlements within the Hudson River corridor and around the New York-New Jersey Harbor, where efforts were made to settle farming families beginning in the 1620s (Figure 1). Although approximately half of the settlers were not Dutch (e.g., German, Scandinavian, French, English, and some slaves brought directly from Africa), farmers in the colony tended to emigrate from the eastern Dutch Republic.10 English settlers were the majority in several Long Island towns by the time New Netherland became the Province of New York in 1664, but elsewhere in the colony the Dutch maintained their religion, education system, architectural styles, and farming after the...