Secret Histories of the Virginia–North Carolina State Line: A Template for Literary Interventions into Property

Abstract

This article tests the value of using William Byrd’s Secret History of the Line (c. 1730s), which chronicles the running of the Virginia–North Carolina boundary, as a guide to the state line today. Byrd’s Secret History belongs to a special genre of literature instrumental to land survey projects and property making. Byrd wrote both to entertain and to promote settlement. That Byrd’s account is so well-written—witty, bawdy, and vividly descriptive—contributes to its lasting influence over the region. Thus Byrd offers a valuable field guide not only to the history but to the entanglement of culture and nature that continues to make this place. Furthermore, Byrd’s text inspired Susan Howe’s long poem “Secret History of the Dividing Line” ([1978] 1996), which critiques the legacy of Byrd’s colonialist landscapes. Both Byrd and Howe expand our understanding of property as a literary genre, shaped by storytelling and graphic representation, and so open up more imaginative and concrete ground for our own intervention into the places where we live.

本文检验使用威廉．伯德的“州界的秘密历史”（公元1730年代）作为今日州界指引的价值，该作品编年记载了维吉尼亚—北卡罗来纳州界的划分。伯德的“州界的秘密历史”属于土地调查计画与财产打造的特殊工具性文学类别。伯德的写作同时作为娱乐之用并提倡迁佔。伯德的说明是如此地写作精良——慧黠、大胆且描写得生动逼真——因此对该区域产生持续的影响。伯德因此不仅对历史而言，也是对持续打造该地的文化与自然的纠缠而言，提供了可贵的田野指引。此外，伯德的作品，启发了苏珊．豪的长篇诗“分隔线的秘密历史”（[1978]1996），该作品批判伯德的殖民主义地景遗绪。伯德与豪同时将我们对于财产的理解扩张为文学类别，由说故事与绘图再现所形塑，并且为我们介入自身居住之地，开啓了更具想像力与坚实的基础。

Este artículo pone a prueba el valor de usar la Secret History of the Line [La historia secreta de la línea] de William Byrd (ca. 1730s), que relata el corrido del límite entre Virginia y Carolina del Norte, como guía de la actual línea estatal. La Historia secreta de Byrd pertenece a un género especial de la literatura instrumental para los proyectos de prospección de la tierra y definición de la propiedad. Byrd escribió tanto para entretener como para promover el poblamiento. Que el relato de Byrd esté tan bien escrito––ingenioso, crudo y vistosamente descriptivo––contribuye a su influencia duradera sobre la región. Entonces, Byrd nos presenta una valiosa guía de campo no solamente para la historia sino para el entrelazamiento de la cultura y la naturaleza con el que se sigue construyendo lugar. Más todavía, el texto de Byrd sirvió de inspiración al largo poema de Susan Howe titulado “La historia secreta de una línea divisoria” ([1978] 1996), que critica el legado de los paisajes colonialistas de Byrd. Tanto Byrd como Howe amplían nuestro entendimiento de la pertenencia como género literario, configurado por la narrativa y la representación gráfica, y de ese modo abre un terreno más imaginativo y concreto para nuestra propia intervención en los lugares donde vivimos.

Key Words:

• poetry
• property
• surveying
• Susan Howe
• William Byrd

• 诗
• 财产
• 调查
• 苏珊．豪
• 威廉．伯德

• poesía
• pertenencia
• prospección
• Susan Howe
• William Byrd

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many people read earlier versions of this article and provided generous and helpful feedback: Christine Coch, Catherine Gudis, Nicolas C. Howe, Betsy Klimasmith, Neil M. Maher, Kathryn Morse, Cindy Ott, Aaron Sachs, Thomas L. Schwarz, Sarah Stanbury, and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney. Very special thanks go to Charlotte R. Murphy, who accompanied me on my Byrd tour and served as photographer and inspiring interlocutor all along the way. Thanks, too, to the editors and anonymous reviewers for GeoHumanities who provided helpful suggestions for revisions, and to the private collections that gave permission to reproduce their images.

FUNDING

The College of the Holy Cross provided research funds for my travels along the Virginia–North Carolina boundary and figure production.

Notes

1. The 1967 Dover edition of Byrd’s Histories (Boyd 1967) publishes the pages of Byrd’s two versions of his histories side by side and includes a facsimile of the boundary survey at the end.

2. On the relation of Byrd’s Histories to his correspondence and the Commissioners’ Journal see Berland (2013, 49–52).

3. On Byrd’s landholdings see Boyd (1967, ix) and Royster (1999, 46). In addition to the Histories, Byrd wrote two more travel narratives, A Journey to the Land of Eden and A Progress to the Mines, that included vivid descriptions of the landscape’s attractiveness and its resources (Wright 1966). Although neither these nor the Histories were published in Byrd’s lifetime, they were circulated among his friends and after his death. They influenced both Thomas Jefferson and George Washington in schemes for Virginia’s development (Royster 1999, 82, 300). Today Byrd’s oeuvre exists in print and attracts much scholarly interest.

4. The most extensive study of the relationship of Byrd’s work to geographical theory and the practice of land surveying is Brückner (2006, Chapter 1). Byrd’s Histories can be seen as a predecessor of Pynchon’s survey novel and intellectual masterpiece Mason & Dixon, which mentions Byrd’s text by name (Pynchon 1997, 396).

5. The most extensive study of Howe’s work in relation to Byrd’s survey, geographical theory, and the practice of land surveying is Joyce (2010; see especially 58–67).

6. Today’s state line is “about 550 feet south of the original boundary in 1728” (Beamon 2010). The 1728 Boundary line at the first Dan River crossing point was at about 36°32.′ Standing at Route 62 I was a few yards from where Byrd and his party likely stood (Stephen C. Ausband, personal communication, 27 May 2017).

7. All quotes from Byrd’s Histories are from Berland’s (2013) authoritative edition.

8. I was helped on my trip by Henry H. Mitchell’s (n.d.) self-guided tour guide (“Col. William Byrd’s Observations, 1728–33”). Local schools have brought their classes there to learn about Byrd and the survey (Mitchell 1989).

9. Byrd acquired his patent for the 20,000-acre parcel on 9 December 1728. See Johnston (1942, 168–72) and Tinling (1977, 2:449).

10. See Editorial Board (2015) and “Colonel William Byrd” (n.d.).

11. See Ingold’s (1993) description of the landscape as a “story” of ongoing nature and human “interactivity” (152–53, 163).

12. Byrd argued that the boundary should be extended far westward so “that the King’s Lands … may be taken up the faster” (Wright 1966, 333). For the importance of the boundary line to the development of colonial Virginia see Hughes (1979, 1–4, 84–87, 141–43, 155).

13. See Note 11.

14. For a persuasive analysis of how Byrd’s colonial, “creole” status makes him need to prove himself equal to native Britons and how Byrd can also be read to satirize the imperialist confidence of eighteenth-century scientific discourse, see Parrish (2009).

15. The U.S. Forest Service confirms the use of cane for grazing: “Extensive monotypic stands of cane known as canebrakes were a dominant landscape feature in the southeastern United States at the time of European settlement. Historical accounts indicated that hundreds of thousands of acres were characterized by this ecosystem. Canebrakes disappeared rapidly following European settlement because of a combination of overgrazing, altered burning regimes, and agricultural land clearing [7,73,74,88]” (Taylor 2006).

On the importance of free fodder as a condition for the successful establishment of European-style husbandry in the colonies, see Donahue (2004, 54–59, 171).

16. I am grateful to Christine Coch for pointing out this possible connection to Mesopotamia. Byrd, who loved puns, might have also been playing here on the name of Governor Charles Eden (1673–1722), who served as the second governor to North Carolina (1714–1722). Governor Eden cosigned a proposal with Virginia Governor Colonel Alexander Spotswood in 1716 to settle the long-disputed boundary between their two colonies (Berland 2013, 76, 255, note 32). See also http://northcarolinahistory.org/encyclopedia/charles-eden-1673–1722/ (last accessed 13 May 2017).

17. In “Frame Structures,” Howe recalls growing up in Cambridge Massachusetts, near Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s house. Her childlike imagination moves seamlessly between the propertied landscape and Longfellow’s poem “Evangeline”: “there were footpaths we used as shortcuts going from home to school and home again. ‘This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks …,’ half-forgotten neighboring backlands recover breaks and zigzags, ranges of feeling, little maneuvers in distance perception” (Howe 1996, 10).

18. My reading in this paragraph of these first two verses draws on Selby (2005, 56–57) and Joyce (2010, 65–70).

19. I am indebted to Back’s (2002) reading here and concur with her point that “the poet’s positioning of herself within the telling and within the tale is an ethical stand”: “Howe collapses the time spectrum and places herself among the conquering forces, enjoying none of the distance of self-righteousness of [William Carlos] Williams’ narrator,” whose American Grain Howe draws from in her poem (28–31).

20. See Joyce and Selby for interpretations of the way Howe exposes the “failure” of surveying and the fantasy of solidifying control over land (Selby 2005, 59; Joyce 2010, 65, 69).

21. Howe (1996) cited her father’s text as a source for her poem in the copyright page of Frame Structures.

22. I draw here from Lott’s (1995) well-known study of minstrel culture.

23. Given the length and complexity of Howe’s poem, and work in general, she eludes summation. Joyce (2010) argued in a more deconstructionist vein that Howe rejects dualism for “third” “interstitial spaces” (23–24).

24. I am grateful to Aaron Sachs (2017), leading me to Mumford’s ([1938] 1970) vision of citizen surveying, which strikes me as very resonant with more recent calls for similar engagement (see, e.g., Ingold 1993; Stilgoe 1998).

Additional information

Funding

The College of the Holy Cross provided research funds for my travels along the Virginia–North Carolina boundary and figure production.

Notes on contributors

Sarah Luria

SARAH LURIA is an Associate Professor in the English Department at the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA 01610. E-mail: [email protected]. Her current book project, The Art of Surveying, studies writers and photographers who have been instrumental to land survey projects and the creation of property.