Rebecca's Interview with Diana Muir

Author of Reflections in Bullough's Pond

Rebecca :
How did you come to write such a vast history of your region? Tell me a little of how this work came about & its process.

Diana :
New England looks very different from the mid-Atlantic states or the upper Midwest, although the geology and climate are not very different. Bullough's Pond began as a much simpler project, a landscape history that would ask how the villages and countryside of New England came to look the way they do. Alas, when I start to examine an issue one question leads to another and I cannot stop until I arrive at some sort of ultimate cause. In the case of Bullough's Pond it was necessary to trace the root causes of New England's development far back in time to answer such apparently simple questions as: why is there an imposing but abandoned United States Customs House in the tiny village of Wiscasset, Maine?

Rebecca :
How long did it take you & did you expect it to have such scope? Was it something in your background that inspired you?

Diana :
I worked on this book for seven years. It is the outcome of a fascination with history, a love of nature, and the coincidence of having lived in New England for most of my life.

Rebecca :
In your Introduction you insist that Reflections is not a jeremiad. With the load of guilt we carry re: our care of this planet, won't most of us take as scolding the rises & demises of communities of people, flora & fauna you explain?

Diana :
I do not believe that many people get out of bed in the morning thinking: how can I despoil the planetary ecosystem today? Most of us simply go about the business of life neither intending nor realizing that the simple act of driving to Home Depot, picking up cod fish for dinner, or flushing the toilet will have the unintended side effect of making our planet less able to sustain human life. Writing this book helped me to understand that it is not evil corporations, but the combined impact of millions of ordinary people simply trying to make a living that is threatening the stability of life on earth.

Rebecca :
Have you seen or touched one of those oyster shells that measured up to 20 inches?

Diana :
Only in the pages of dry scientific reports of archaeological digs, where the investigator sometimes lays one down beside a ruler and snaps a blurry, black and white photo.

Rebecca :
When I was a youngster in & around Notting Hill Gate in London, there was a Cobbler's shop to which I'd take the family's shoes to be repaired. I'd watch them cut & fit the soles & heels & then, with a mouthful of tacks, they'd hammer it all together. Your chapter: “Cobbling a Living” brought that all back & gave me a fascinating insight into an industry to which I'd not given much thought. When you were researching for Reflections did you sometimes lose yourself in all the details? Did you work to a strict schedule?

Diana :
I worked not to a schedule but to a tea bag. Sometime early in the process of writing this book I fixed myself a cup of tea and read the snippet of wisdom printed on the tag. It said: The surest way to be boring is to tell everything. I taped that tea tag to the desk over my computer where I had to look at it every day. One of the hardest parts of writing is that so much wonderful detail has to be ruthlessly cut out in order to keep the story line moving. The tea bag reminded me of this every day.

Rebecca :
Coming up in an island nation, even in cities, fish was a major part of our food; it must have been exciting to explore all the records of an industry that was so pervasive. What was the unlikeliest place you ever found important clues? What made you think of the history of your region in the terms of the ebb & flow of communities?

Diana :
All clues are found in the most prosaic of places: libraries. I sometimes checked out books that, I could tell from the card, had not been checked out since Andy Jackson was living in the White House. I often dug through boxes of papers that had sat so long unexamined that I emerged from the stacks looking like a soot-streaked chimney sweep. More often, I read hundreds of pages of arcane journal articles, doctoral thesis typed on onion skin in the days before the invention of the Xerox, obscure autobiographies, and quirky local histories, along with the many masterful works by established scholars on particular aspects of the history of New England. The most pertinent works are carefully referred to in the footnotes.

Last year a Caravaggio was discovered hanging on the wall of a small church near Lowell, Massachusetts. The Caravaggio had been hanging there for over a century as worshipers filed past it into the pews. Then, one day, television crews descended, an expert from Sotheby's was on the evening news, and the small parish was suddenly wealthy. Nothing about the Caravaggio had changed, but someone had happened to come into that small church able to recognize it for what it was.

The clues that make books of nonfiction exciting to read are all right there in the library waiting for a storyteller to come along and put them into the right canvas.

Rebecca :
I am a devoted library attendee. A week without a visit to the library is like a week without sun. Even though your writing is far from dry & statistical, I am so glad you included photographs, graphs & maps. How hard was it to come by some of those early photos? Is New England replete with repositories of the past & how are they stored?

Diana :
I worked with a wonderful mapmaker, Eliza McClennan of Mapworks, she was able to take my data and ideas and turn them into wonderful visuals.

The other images were somewhat more difficult. I started with a wish list and a requirement. My wish list was a scribbled tally of all of the things that I wanted to have pictures of, my requirement was that all of the images must be original, there are no artist's conceptions of what an eighteenth century shipyard might have looked like in this book. Every image was drawn or photographed by an artist working at that place at that moment in history.

New England is replete with wonderful repositories of historic images. The premier library of the sort is the American Antiquarian Society. It was founded by Isaiah Thomas, (no, not that Isaiah Thomas) a newspaper printer who smuggled his press out of Boston under the noses of the British occupation troops in 1774 and went on not only to publish his treasonous journal, but to amass America's finest collection of revolutionary era newspapers, pamphlets and broadsides. He wished to make certain that they would be preserved for posterity, so he located his great library in Worcester. Why Worcester? Because it was out of range of British naval cannon. Wise man. The British, after all, bombarded Baltimore, Stonington and other American ports in 1812.

The limitation of most of our collections of historic images is cataloging. Sometimes the old photos are in boxes according to the artist who took the photograph, or the donor who left them to the library. But often they have been catalogued, usually long ago, in the pre-computer day. Say you have, for example, an 1849 daguerreotype of a German-American butcher standing beside a display of passenger pigeons for sale at his meat market located on Elm Street, Salem, in a building that was erected in 1798. The librarian who catalogued this image decades ago had to decide whether to file it under German immigrant community, eighteenth century buildings, early daguerreotypes, or some other classification. Rarely did libraries have the resources to cross index. One collection at the great research library of the Peabody Museum in Salem, for example, is filed according to street addresses.

Some of the images that I wanted probably do not exist. It is likely that nobody ever sketched a mast pine being drawn though the forest by a twenty-ox team or the working interior of a seventeenth-century rum distillery. Others, however, I feel certain are out there if only I could find the right file folder. Someone, surely, must have sketched or photographed one of the numerous markets where the migratory birds shot by nineteenth century market hunters were offered for sale. If anyone reading this knows of such an image, please share it with me.

Most of our libraries are endeavoring to use the capability of computers to re-index their graphics collections so that images will be cross indexed. All it takes is money. Meanwhile, others in my position will have to do as I did and rely on the generosity of our archival librarians whose remarkable memories and generosity of spirit often produce wonderful images from even the most oddly indexed collections.

Rebecca :
After you decided to write Reflections did you keep a journal?

Diana :
No. Just thousands of index cards and hundreds of file folders.

Rebecca :
There's a paragraph on page 155 about the abandonment of the Yankee farms in the late 1840s that is stunning in its implication. Your finicky cows being instruments that encouraged the growth of great white pine forests, scenery we take as “natural” today or in our grandparents' memories; I've not thought about the living land that way before, how is it you have?

Diana :
I think like that, I just can't help myself. When my youngest was not more than five we were walking in the woods one day and came upon a place where a brook was cascading over a jumble of square-dressed granite blocks. I said something like “Look at that...” and before I could finish the thought she sighed deeply and completed the sentence, “We think that in the olden days a mill must have been built here to grind corn for the farmers, now can we please keep walking?”

Rebecca :
My chickadees would respond with: “Just give us the facts, Mom, not an essay?” Do you have any projects in the works?

Diana :
Certainly. The new one is in the form of a fast accumulating mass of file cards and papers stuffed into file folders, but I like to allow a project to take shape before I discuss it. I'm looking forward to seeing this on your website.


Thank you, Diana, I relished reading your book & enjoyed getting to know you a little.
Rebecca
(Published October 01, 2000)