Of all the great names from the generation of the DVOC‘s founders, that of Samuel N. Rhoads may be heard the least.
Even in this year of the sesquicentennial of his birth, Rhoads remains for most of us a dimly remembered name, encountered once or twice, perhaps, in Witmer Stone’s Old Cape May and then forgotten. A leading light a century ago in North and Central American ornithology, Rhoads now seems to be little more than a subject for local historians and eccentric “bloggers” who really should be working on something else.
Ironically, Rhoads may be better known today in the west than here in his native mid-Atlantic. His collecting tours of Texas and Arizona in the 1890s resulted in a number of records still cited today, and his pioneering trip to Washington and British Columbia was, until recently, commemorated each year by the late-summer “Rhoads Count” conducted by the Kootenay Naturalists.
In addition to his attainments as a naturalist, Rhoads was a devoted historian of his field. Writes William Evans Bacon in the Cassinia obituary illustrated by the photograph above
Except for his labors, numerous records of great interest, particularly those pertaining to pioneer days, would have been irretrievably lost …. Rhoads amassed his information by extensive search through the literature, by the examination of museum specimens, … and by personal interviews with naturalists, trappers, trappers, old pioneers, and frontiersmen.
That historical interest was accompanied, inevitably, by the usual bibliophily, and in the first two decades of the last century, Rhoads owned a small Philadelphia bookshop and publishing house, its most notable productions facsimiles and reprints of such regionally important titles as the botanist William Young’s Catalogueand Ord’sAmerican Zoology. In 1903, Rhoads printed his own most important work, The Mammals of Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
Given these predilections and pre-occupations, it’s no surprise to find that Rhoads’s own library was carefully assembled and, more remarkably, apparently curated with an eye to posterity. I don’t know where the collection ended up after his death, but one of the most interesting volumes, his copy of Witmer Stone’s Birds of Eastern Pennsylvania and New Jersey, is now in Firestone Library.
Rhoads was a member of the DVOC committee charged with overseeing the production of this work, and, as he wrote on the second flyleaf in September 1924, he saw his copy as a repository of documents bearing on the history of the Club and its most ambitious publication to date:
Samuel N. Rhoads: / His private copy, / with insertions appropriate / to the history and make-up / of the book. / Bound up Sept. 1924.
Among the documents inserted into Rhoads’s scrapbook are appeals for phenological information about the birds of the region, directed to the general public
and, no doubt more profitably, to “gunners and sportsmen” who might be able to furnish unusual records.
There are also more personal bits of history, including Rhoads’s collecting permit — “license to kill or take said song or wild birds and game mammals” —
and a delightful letter in pale purple ink from his step-cousin George Morris, full of news of egg collecting and boating mishaps:
The general history of the DVOC is represented by a fine photo of this January 1898 meeting — taken exactly 85 years before the first women were admitted to membership:
Rhoads is number 23, his cousin Morris number 24; Stone, number 28, is seated at the table with the open book. In his handwritten key, Rhoads tells us that this self-same photo was used as “proof” for his 1902 Bird-Lore article and afterwards returned to him by Frank Chapman.
There are postcards and field lists, too, but the most wondrous of the ephemera preserved here is an invitation to a party for Witmer Stone on the occasion of his having “committed Matrimony”:
Two years after Rhoads had his little archive bound, there was an explosion and fire in his Haddonfield house. The books, obviously, survived, but Rhoads’s spirit did not: “conflicting currents of emotion” overwhelmed him, in Evans’s discreet phrase, and he spent the last quarter century of his life in seclusion, sometimes in confinement, until he died, sixty years ago today, leaving us this unique record of the early days of a venerable institution.
Our insatiable hordes of gobbling Pine Siskins have pretty much moved on, greatly to the relief of our savings account, but we’re still enjoying the sweet little Red-breasted Nuthatches that seem to have settled in for the season. They’re no less ravenous than the streaky finches, and every bit as tame. I can hardly rehang the feeder before one of the little tooters lights on it, and it’s just a matter of time before they start landing on me, too.
Lots of backyard birders in the east have been taking advantage of the birds’ tameness this fall to train them to take food from the hand. I disapprove, in my puritanically strict hands-offitude, but the dozens upon dozens of accounts of hand-feeding I’ve read over the past couple of months got me to wondering: who first figured out that you could coax wild birds to take sunflower seed directly from a human?
There’s probably no answer to that, at least not until we’ve identified the original domesticator of the chicken. Meanwhile, though, let me introduce you to young Harriet Kinsley of McGregor, Iowa.
Wilson Bulletin 27.2 (1912): 314.
Exactly a hundred years ago this fall, Harriet and her mother discovered a new bird in their yard, one that
took it for granted that he was the sole owner of the feeding table, and it took a great deal of his time trying to keep the other birds away,
among them the numerous “chickadees, downy, hairy and red-bellied woodpeckers, juncoes, a pair of cardinals, blue jays and the white-breasted nuthatches.” Neither Harriet nor her mother had seen the species before, but they took careful note of the bird’s plumage characters:
a bluish slate-colored back with black stripes running back above each eye and the breast tinged with rufous.
Harriet looked the stranger up in her bird book, and correctly identified it as a Red-breasted Nuthatch. It was her mother’s idea to teach the bird, which was soon burdened with the inevitable nickname “Hatchie,” to eat from her hand:
One day my mother thought she would put a nut meat on her hand and see how near he would come to it. He wanted the nut very much, but was a little shy about coming down to get it ; he scolded, cocking his head first on one side and then on the other. The temptation was too great; he would risk his life: he made a swoop, lighting on her hand, and away he went with the nut. The next day we all tried the same thing and found he would take them after a great deal of scolding. We fed him every day and he gradually grew less timid.
“Less timid” indeed: Harriet’s account, published in the Wilson Bulletin, makes it sound like the family was terrorized by the sharp-billed little beast. He started to demand to be fed — and only butternuts, if you please, no black walnuts — perching on doors and window sills to look into the house.
We had to keep little piles of nuts by several of the windows so we would not have to go so far.
The Kinsley family’s servitude lasted all through the winter, ending only on March 31, 1913, when their importunate guest finally flew north.
And what about Harriet? Even in those more relaxed days a century ago, when the Wilson Ornithological Club was still pronouncedly regional and midwestern in its “flavor,” it was remarkable to find a Campfire Girl publishing in the pages of the Wilson Bulletin. She is still listed as a member of the Club in 1917, but disappears from the rolls by 1920. No doubt the responsibilities of adulthood had set in by then, taking up the time that she had spent as a girl watching the bird tables.
Before life caught up with her (she married Roy Neff, the principal of McGregor High School in 1929), though, Harriet had almost certainly had contact with two of twentieth-century Iowa’s prominent ornithological observers — both of them fellow members of the Wilson Club.
Mary E. Hatch of McGregor was an assiduous collector of migration records and the author of (fairly vapid) articles in the Wilson Bulletin on the Northern Cardinal and the House Wren in northeastern Iowa. In that same cold winter of 1912 when Harriet Kinsley was feeding birds from her hand, Mary (no relation, I’m sure, to Hatchie) also noted several unusual birds — among them Red-bellied Woodpeckers, a Carolina Wren, a Winter Wren, and three “Kentucky Cardinals” — among “the large number of pensioners” visiting her family’s “well-filled table.”
I don’t know whether Mary Hatch was also a Campfire Girl, but both young women must have found inspiration in the bird studies of their famous neighbor in National (she received her mail in McGregor), Althea Sherman.
whose habitat is in deep, wooded ravines, [and is] very rarely … seen upon the prairie. To have one come in mid-winter, find food, even to visit the feeding-stick and linger around for three weeks, was as pleasant as it was unexpected.
Sherman’s mention of “many experiments … made to learn the winter bird boarders’ choice in foods” recalls — and may well have inspired — Harriet Kinsley’s offering her tame nuthatch a choice between butternuts and walnuts. I am still in search of the missing link (nowadays I think we’d call it the missing url) to establish the connection between Harriet, Mary, and Althea Sherman, but their experiences and their writings suggest that McGregor, Iowa, a little town on the Mississippi, was the place to be a hundred years ago, in the nuthatch winter of 1912.
I’m a big animal lover myself, perhaps even more than that. I understand your interest in the waxwing and that you want to document these numbers with all your gigantic telephoto lenses. But you aren’t entirely seeing the other side. Meanwhile an average of about twenty people are standing here in front of my door from sunrise to sunset. You’re going up and down past all our new cars, with scratches as a result, you’re taking up parking spaces, parking bikes right up against the cars, and so on. All in all you’re creating a big nuisance for the neighbors…. You’ve had a whole week to document the birds and I sincerely hope that both the waxwings and the neighborhood will get some peace now. [my translation]
And you can imagine how the discussion continues: it’s photographers, not birders; it’s just a few bad apples; it’s a public right of way; your car isn’t all that new, and it isn’t scratched, and it was already scratched when I got there. And on and on in tones familiar from every e-brouhaha to have ever erupted in any birding community.
The situation is even more resonant, though, given the Dutch name of these beautiful birds. “Pestvogel” means “plague bird,” and the association of these winter nomads with the equally unpredictable visitations of pestilence seems to have been historically widespread in western Europe. Suolahti writes of the species’ former German name:
Furthermore, the unexpected occurrence of certain birds in the vicinity of houses or their sudden appearance in a given region inspires uncanny notions. In particular, the occurrence of northern species that travel in great flocks, such as waxwings, bramblings, and redwings, is considered a bad omen, and so they are called “death birds,” “plague birds,” or “war birds.” [my translation]
Suolahti finds the German name “Pestvogel” — plague bird — attested from Austria, Swabia, Switzerland, and Westfalia; he quotes Aitinger‘s 1631 tract on bird catching to the effect that these birds are seen in some areas no oftener than every fourteen years, and that many people are of the “remarkable opinion” that when they do appear, they bring with them “war, pestilence, hunger, and inflation” (watch out, Euro Zone).
it was not until the very end of the sixteenth century that Ulisse Aldrovandi first drew the connection between the waxwing’s appearance in unexpected localities and a biological cause for such displacement, even though the concept of certain species’ migrations during the harsher season was already beginning to be perceived, thanks largely to wintertime trips to the southern Mediterranean, on which observers recognized some of the birds present in Europe during the summer. But the mental horizon in which that discovery is rooted means that several different interpretations can still co-exist for one single fact. And for a long time the occurrences of waxwings were related to other exceptional phenomena, among them meteorological or cosmic phenomena, still interpreted as signs or warnings of divine origin. [my translation]
Myself, I would observe that for many of us l’horizon intellectuel hasn’t lifted that much: Who doesn’t shiver when suddenly the feeders are aswarm with a tightly packed, ferociously gobbling flock of Dark-eyed Juncos — or should I say snowbirds?
Autographs don’t thrill me the way I think they’re supposed to.
This copy of Stiles and Skutch was a gift from our friend Ruth, who on a visit to Costa Rica in February 1994 had the title page signed by the 90-year-old author and — a neat touch — his wife. I cherish the book for that simple association, of course, but even more for the photos Ruth pasted in.
Here Ruth and Skutch examine plate 46. Her handwritten annotations on the facing key indicate that on that day, she and the ornithologist had seen the Shining Honeycreeper, the Green Honeycreeper, and the Speckled Tanager, among many other species.
And here:
Alexander Skutch autographs the very book into which Ruth, just visible, I think, in the background, inserted this photo.
I saw these pictures when Ruth gave me the book, and asked whether she didn’t want to keep them. No, she said, they belong to the book. She was right, and I’m glad.
It’s a bad habit left over from my days as an academic, I confess, but I still find myself turning eagerly to the acknowledgments when I first open a bird book. Who gets thanked, who doesn’t? Can we distinguish between genuine gratitude, flattery, and bread-and-butter thank you’s? And if we can rise above the level of mere gossip, what do the lists of names tell us about long-vanished communities of birders and ornithologists?
Every birder in this part of the world, and most, I suspect, in other parts, too, know Ludlow Griscom’s Birds of the New York City Region, published by the American Museum in 1923. Replacing Frank Chapman’s 1906 pamphlet, originally published in the AMNH Journal, Griscom’s book quickly became the status and distribution “bible” for an entire important generation of American birders; Roger Peterson and the rest of the Bronx County Bird Club famously “could recite chapter and verse” from their great mentor’s work. But the book is a monument of far more than local importance: it marks the first time in the history of birding that the author of a regional avifauna systematically confronted sight records on a massive, modern scale: “the grand total” of such reports Griscom evaluated for the book “easily passes the enormous sum of one hundred thousand.”
eBirders may be unimpressed by that figure, but remember that those records trickled and poured and washed in on slips of paper — paper! Fortunately, Griscom had time:
…Dr. F.A. Lucas, director of the American Museum … instructed me to prepare a handbook as soon as possible, it having become evident that publication by the Linnaean Society would be unduly protracted …. I should devote my whole time to the preparation of the Handbook….
Ralph W. Tower and Frank Chapman, great names in the history of the Museum, offered their support, as did “all but one of the active members of the Linnaean Society” — I wish I could figure out who was the target of that typically snide Griscomianism. The Linnaean made Griscom Chairman of its Local Avifauna Committee, to which were also named J.T. Nichols (“who,” wrote Griscom, “knows more about Long Island birds than anyone living”), Edmund Janvrin (a young physician who had treated Booker T. Washington in New York), and L.N. Nichols. Roy Latham and Eugene Bicknell (of Catharus renown, and an early champion of the field glass method of birding) contributed important records, as did from New Jersey Waldron Miller, Griscom’s colleague on the Nicaragua journey of 1917. Another of his frequent field companions, Maunsell Crosby, proofread the manuscript; Crosby had been the personal assistant to the great Jonathan Dwight, the owner of a collection of New York area birds that Griscom described as “the best in existence” and which furnished a number of important records for the book.
Put all the names together and you have a fantastic tapestry of relationships, a lively picture of who was who in New York and New Jersey birding in the first quarter of the last century. But here’s a surprising name, one not many of us have heard of:
… my brother, the Rev. Acton Griscom, rendered invaluable service in critically reading the entire book in both galley and page proof.
Ludlow’s brother? Ludlow’s brother the Reverend?
Passport photo, Clement Acton Griscom III. From “puzzlemaster” at flickr.com
The Griscoms and the Ludlows were wealthy and well-connected, famous members of America’s nineteenth-century gilded upper class. The children’s generation — Ludlow was born in 1890, Acton in 1891, and their sister Joyce, who died in a horrific accident at the age of three, in 1898 — continued to enjoy the wealth, but as if they were characters in a Thomas Mann novel, the industrial vigor and financial assertiveness of their ancestors seemed to drain right out of them. Ludlow became an ornithologist, and Acton — well, it’s not easy to figure out just what Acton did with his life.
The best (and virtually the only) comprehensive source to the life of Ludlow Griscom is William E. Davis, Jr.’s Dean of the Birdwatchers, an excellent history of Griscom the birder and (probably no fault of the author’s) a slender biography of Griscom the human being. Acton, the younger brother, appears a grand total of two times in the book. Davis calls him “something of a black sheep in the family,” noting that he “could never achieve stability,” and quotes at length a 1952 letter from the older brother to Frederick R. Goff :
My brother’s life has been a tragic and unfortunate one, and in recent years has been mostly spent in New Mexico and Venezuela. I know that he has had serious financial reverses and I would be surprised if he had not been forced to sell his library and his manuscripts for whatever sum of money he could obtain.
I haven’t seen the letter, which resides in the collections of Cornell University, but the excerpt here, taken together with the addressee, points us in a very interesting direction. Frederick Goff was one of the greatest of American historians of the book, the Goff of Incunabula in American Libraries and Head of the Rare Book Collection at the Library of Congress. And it turns out that Acton Griscom was an important collector and amateur scholar of the early book.
Acton studied at Columbia, and around 1920, he made a significant gift — not a sale “for whatever sum of money he could obtain” — to his alma mater of nearly two thousand volumes treating of Joan of Arc, among them several fine manuscripts from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Fancy stuff, and there was evidently much more. The catalogue of Acton’s private library, published in 1931 (thus after his donation of the Joan of Arc materials to Columbia), runs to 51 printed pages, covering titles in
early printing, chivalry, mysticism and occult, Jeanne d’Arc, English and Romance literatures, etc.; part II general literature including a garner of old, rare and unusual books, early American juveniles, criminology, etcetera.
Catholic tastes indeed. But we know that “chivalry” and “mysticism” combined to form Acton’s principal area of inquiry. His 1917 Columbia M.A. thesis was titled “An Introduction to the Study of Mysticism,” and his scholarly publications dealt with the textual history of the matière de Bretagne — the stories of King Arthur and the Round Table — in high medieval Wales and England.
His serious work reached its high point in 1929 with the publication of an edition of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae, one of the foundational texts in the Arthurian tradition, to which Griscom appears to have contributed the Latin text and a historical essay. The reviews were not unanimously kind, several critics noting a naivete both philological and historiographic, but all the same, it was decades before this edition was superseded.
Davis, in his biography of the elder Griscom brother, connects the “immense library on Joan of Arc” to the Griscom parents’ “rather bizarre” “strong belief in reincarnation,” hinting that they considered themselves latter-day versions of the fifteenth-century French heroine and of Napoleon. Acton certainly shared his parents’ commitment to theosophy, an interest that seems to have annoyed Ludlow no end. In 1919, Acton presided over his father’s funeral at New York’s Chapel of the Comforter, an institution dedicated to the reconciliation of Christianity and theosophy. Following his father’s death, Acton continued as a frequent contributor to The Theosophical Quarterly, writing articles and reviews and taking an active part in conventions and committee meetings. (Unsurprisingly, the name of Ludlow Griscom appears in the Quarterly precisely never.)
Unlike his older brother, Acton was also interested in politics. In keeping with long family tradition, he was a vocal supporter of women’s rights. In the months after the conclusion of World War I, he spoke and wrote vigorously about the evils of Bolshevism, the intrinsic Frenchness of the Rhineland, and the deceptive wickedness of the German people.
German dishonor is a byword …. the outwardly clean streets of German cities but whited the rottenness within …. “Kultur” was a myth, and … the German people and the German civilization were notably inferior…. Immorality in Germany is literally appalling…. Does the American citizen wish to be friends with such people?
Here speaks, obviously, the Francophilia of America’s upper classes at the turn of the last century, the same small still voice that was heard in 1935 when Acton Griscom married Blanche B. Miller, who had four years earlier taken a graduate degree at Clermont-Ferrand. Ludlow was not in attendance. The wedding announcement describes Acton as “a noted collector of medieval manuscripts … an investment specialist in government bonds with Farrell, Brown, & Co.”
The couple was divorced in Florida in 1943, after which Acton becomes much harder to trace. Just before the divorce, he registered for the draft at the outbreak of World War II, and by the late 1940s, he is in Venezuela, flying once a year to New York for an autumn visit. Thanks to Davis, we know that he was still living in 1959, “when Ludlow’s wayward brother, Acton, knelt before the coffin” at his elder brother’s burial in Mount Auburn.
The negative characterization of Acton Griscom is understandable, I suppose, in a biography necessarily related from the dour older brother’s point of view. But the facts seem to be richer and more complex than the story Davis tells. Even these first, sketchy bits of evidence that good old google reveals are enough to suggest that the story could be told very differently: the story of an older brother who dismissed his parent’s religious explorations, an older brother who married without his mother’s approval, an older brother who spent his talents and his advantages on birds. And Acton? A man of the cloth, the avatar of filial piety, a scholar and a businessman. Who’s the black sheep, the wayward brother now?
Drop me a note in the Comments below if you know more about Acton Griscom.
