The dirt on the Adirondacks

Soils have always interested me. As a child playing in my mother's garden, I probably ingested more dirt than was healthy. As a geology major at Hamilton, I probably still ingest more soil than most (Soil scientists usually taste a dab of the soil they're dealing with in order to determine texture-I promise). And so, it was with great interest that I read Briggs' chapter on Adirondack soil. We've discussed how the poor quality of Adirondack soil played a major role in discouraging agriculture in the area. In general, river valleys with their finer-textured soils are the most viable areas for agriculture. It is no accident that the Champlain Valley proved one of the few agricultural success stories of early settlement in the Adirondacks. And no wonder! Briggs outlines the many characteristics of soil that contributes to its ability to support plant life, which range from its parent material (helps determine mineral content) to topography (influences the amount of drainage) to texture (coarser soils are more tough to farm in than finer soils). Most of the Adirondacks are host to coarser, poorly-drained and poorly-sorted soil deposited by receding glaciers, making farming a difficult endeavor for even the most experienced of farmers (which many early settlers were not). To make matters worse, “the complex nature of glacial deposits, coupled with topography, translates to a high degree of variability for soils within the Adirondack region” (Briggs 54). So, while we can agree that Adirondack soil is, in general, a farmer’s worst nightmare, we should also realize that some areas were more agriculturally viable than others. In fact, Briggs writes that topography could vary so much in a small area that a certain plot of soil might be able to support crops, while a plot 50 feet away would not be able to. And, soil science not being as developed in the 1800’s as it is today (although I’ll bet the 19^th century farmers would take a chomp of dirt to test its texture, who knows), settlers had little way of knowing which plot was which, or even that such variability existed.

 This conundrum reminded me of the difficulty presented to early Adirondack settlers looking for iron deposits. Though the park is host to a large amount of iron ore, a lot of it is tainted with impurities that made early extraction a tasking and expensive process. To make matters worse, miners had no way of determining ore quality until they had mined it, making each choice to mine in a certain area a gamble. Similarly, many Adirondack farmers didn’t realize the difficulty of their situation until the land had been cleared and tilled and crops planted only to later fail. Early settlers were already making a gamble by moving into the Adirondacks and trying to make it living. The variability of the soil and iron quality only made the gamble that much more likely to fail.

PS: an interesting side note/tie in between one of my geology courses and this course. One of our earlier readings (a Godine essay, I think) mentions how, in the summer of 1816, the vast majority of Adirondack crops failed due to frost and snow in June! This year has become known as “The Year Without a Summer” and was due to a huge volcanic eruption in Indonesia the previous year. The immense amount of sulfuric dioxide spewed into the air by the eruption blocked up to 2 percent of incoming solar radiation, effectively lowering temperatures around the globe! Pretty crazy how an event half a world away so deeply affected Adirondack settlers.