Porte Crayon’s Pleasure Excursions and the Making of the Mountain South

Abstract

Porte Crayon’s Pleasure Excursions and the Making of the Mountain South Melanie Scriptunas In October 1835, David Hunter Strother and his friend James Ranson set off from Martinsburg on a five-hundred-mile hike up to the Natural Bridge, across the Blue Ridge, and into the Virginia Piedmont.1 Strother recounted his adolescent adventure over twenty years later in Virginia Illustrated (1857), recalling the reckless abandon with which he plunged into the roaring Shenandoah River, dangled over a gaping chasm at Natural Bridge, and dropped by a swiftly unraveling rope into the splendorous depths of Weyer’s Cave.2 This pedestrian voyage marked the beginning of Strother’s lifelong love affair with the Shenandoah Valley and its surrounding mountains. Though his experiences carried him to New England, the Deep South, the Rocky Mountains, Mexico, and across Europe, he always returned to rural Virginia: “Within a twenty-five-mile radius of Martinsburg he was born, lived and died,” wrote his biographer, Cecil Eby. “He adapted to other places, but was at home nowhere else.”3 Perhaps spurred by the encroaching forces of civilization, Strother sought out new adventures in the wilderness of the Allegheny Mountains in the summers of 1851 and 1852, when he embarked on sporting expeditions to the Blackwater region, otherwise known as the “Virginian Canaan.” Reflecting back on these trips two decades later in his last major work, The Mountains, he seemed troubled by the shortsighted industrialism and rampant materialism facilitated by the age of steam. Strother protested the degradation of the land on one hand and encouraged the flow of capital into the region on the other: this ambivalence highlights the tension between progress and preservation that engendered the Appalachian literary tradition in the years following the Civil War. Best known for his illustrations in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, Strother (pseud. Porte Crayon) elaborated several motifs that would resonate throughout writings about the mountain South and would ultimately serve as defining characteristics of Appalachian literature: an eco-conscious [End Page 1] voice that contends with the demands of industrialization; the negotiation, often through humor, of the cultural confrontations that arise as a result of an ever-shifting frontier line; and the utilization of romantic aesthetics in the expression of American nationalism. Strother was perhaps the first writer to present a fluid portrait of the southern mountains that reflected the intricacies of the American experience. He adopted a multifaceted narrative perspective that set him apart from contemporary writers like William Wallace Harney, who viewed the region with a sense of condescending curiosity or detachment.4 Strother emphasized the unique and sacred qualities of the scenic Allegheny Mountains, while avoiding any generalized suggestion of aberrance in his characterizations of the people who lived there. Ironically, it was not through an emphasis on Appalachian “otherness,” but rather through the downplaying of differences between mountaineers and cosmopolitan tourists that Strother was able to bring the region into focus on a national scale. By stressing the similarities between the highlanders of West Virginia and the lowlanders who ventured there on sporting expeditions, Strother paradoxically gave definition to the very region he sought to inculcate in a broader conception of postbellum, national identity. By the time the first installment of The Mountains appeared in Harper’s in 1872, commercial ventures in West Virginia were thriving as a result of an expanding railway system and the promotion of industrial development in the local and national press. The extension of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in 1853—a momentous achievement regarded by many as the official opening of the West—not only provided access to northwestern Virginia’s plentiful timber resources and coal deposits but also allowed passengers to reach Wheeling from Baltimore in a mere sixteen hours.5 In 1873, the completion of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad from Newport News, Virginia, to Huntington, West Virginia, hastened development in the southern part of the state and further improved accessibility to and from the urban centers of the Eastern Seaboard.6 Newspapers and magazines encouraged industry and tourism in Southern Appalachia and other rural areas by touting railroads as “the life giving currents of modern civilization without which prosperity and progress are solecisms...