"Chargeable Ground" and "Shaking Meadows": New Models of Land Cultivation in Eighteenth-Century New England

This talk examines Connecticut minister Jared Eliot's An Essay Upon Field-Husbandry in New England as It Is or May Be Ordered (1748), with a particular focus on Eliot's identification of different landscapes (forested, boggy, meadowed) as entailing different proportions of effort, investment, and delay in their cultivation. I compare Eliot's discussion to contemporary engravings of New England landscapes in order to suggest that textual and pictorial descriptions of land in the colonies exhibit a complementary, vexed understanding of the relationship between labor and development. This research is taken from my dissertation, "The Chargeable Surface: Investment, Interval, and Yield in Early America (1760-1820)," which investigates artistic experiments with surfaces as sites of transformation in four areas of visual and material culture: the decorative arts, print, painting, and the book arts.