Johnson Sam Patch Response Essay

"Art" and the Language of Progress in Early-Industrial Paterson: Sam Patch at Clinton Bridge Author(s): Paul Johnson Source: American Quarterly, Vol. 40, No. 4 (Dec., 1988), pp. 433-449 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2712996 Accessed: 20-10-2017 14:03 UTC

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"Art" and the Language of Progress in Early-Industrial Paterson: Sam Patch at Clinton Bridge

PAUL JOHNSON

University of Utah

IN 1827 A PATERSON, NEW JERSEY, ENTREPRENEUR NAMED TIMOTHY B. CRANE

bought the north bank of Passaic Falls and turned it into a commercial pleasure

garden. The Forest Garden, as the place was called, was a combined exercise

in romanticism and commerce. Crane expected to make money. But he also

expected to improve the landscape of his town and the moral sensibilities of

his neighbors, a large portion of whom were first-generation American mill-

workers.

The Forest Garden was one of a number of such places-public and private

gardens, rural cemeteries, even fully landscaped factory towns-built in and

near northern cities beginning in the late 1820s. They offered new wage

earners and new entrepreneurs chances to forget their ambitions and resent-

ments and to contemplate the eternal truths of nature-not disorderly wil-

derness but nature presented to them by the civilizing hand of art.' Timothy Crane lacked the wealth, the cultivation, and the doubts about materialism

that led the Boston elite to build places like Mount Auburn Cemetery and the

utopian town of Lowell, and his romantic vision was filled with silliness and

bad taste. But he was an American romantic capitalist nonetheless: he would

subdue a wilderness, smooth its rough edges and decorate it, and thus create

a balance of nature and art that would provide profits for himself and spiritual

improvement for the residents of industrial Paterson.

Paul Johnson is an associate professor of history at the University of Utah. He is the author of A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1915-1937 (1978), and is currently at work on two books: a biography of Sam Patch and (with Sean Wilentz) a study of the Prophet Matthias and his followers in Jacksonian New York City.

Research for this article was supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society, and by a grant from the New Jersey Historical Commission. The author also wishes to thank Sean Wilentz, Richard White, and Janice Radway for their comments on earlier drafts.

433

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434 AMERICAN QUARTERLY

Crane cleared his land in the late summer of 1827, announcing that he

would reshape the forest in the name of material and moral-progress: "although

Nature has done more for this spot of earth, than perhaps any other of its

size, to render it beautiful and interesting to the visitor, it is nevertheless

susceptible of very great embellishments, from the hand of ART," and with

that he improved the ground with gravel walkways, imported bushes and trees,

and a combination ice cream parlor and saloon. During the next few summers,

crowds gathered nightly for ice cream and conversation, and there were periodic circuses, Indian war dances, and displays of fireworks as well. The

latter became Crane's specialty; local legend has it that Fourth of July fireworks

originated at the Forest Garden.2

The Forest Garden was a bar and outdoor restaurant with facilities for putting

on shows. But Crane and his supporters advertised it as something more. The

Paterson Intelligencer praised it as a retreat where "the refinements of taste

and art [are] combined with the varied and romantic beauties of nature," and

later congratulated Crane on his gardens and fireworks: "this rude spot, where

the lonely visitor once heard nought but the wild roar of the noble Passaic

. . .is now become the brilliant scene of science, added to the sublimity of

nature." A satisfied customer agreed, "[Crane] has so far domesticated the

wilderness of nature, and blended with it the improvements of art, that Passaic

Falls is no longer a place for the melancholy retirement of the horror stricken

wanderer . . . but is now become the delightful scene of social gaiety and

interesting contemplation." The editor gave this advice to tired clerks and

workingmen: Cross the river and "greet the smiles of your friends amid the

enchanting groves of the Forest Garden", "bid dull cares begone"; "lounge

at your pleasure under the illuminated Cedars of Lebanon"; and, on the way home, "take a peep at the awful chasm below-listen for a moment to the

tremendous roar of the troubled Passaic, [and] contrast the scene with your

own quietude of mind."3 Social gaiety, sublimity, quietude of mind, scenes of science-and all of it across the river from the factories of Paterson, New Jersey.

Before receiving guests, Crane had to bridge the falls chasm that separated

Paterson from his property. Of the improvements that he made about the falls,

he was proudest of his bridge. Designed by Crane himself, the bridge was

made of wood and covered, and its arched bottom sat with heavy grace above

the falls. The sides were open with latticed railings, affording a full view of

the falls and chasm. One nature-loving tourist called it "a feeble bridge thrown

across the precipice by the hand of man...." But others pronounced it

"handsome" and "substantial," and everyone agreed that it was a well-made

span.4

Crane called it Clinton Bridge, after Governor DeWitt Clinton of New York.

Few of his fellow citizens could have missed the reason why, for in the late

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"ART" AND THE LANGUAGE OF PROGRESS 435

1820s Clinton was a hero to improvers everywhere. He had promoted and

then presided over the construction of the Erie Canal, a stupendous triumph

of engineering that was opening the whole Great Lakes frontier to settlement

and commerce. The Erie Canal stood as a magnificent symbol of the accel-

erating triumph of American civilization over wilderness, and in the years

after its completion a lot of people named taverns, ferry boats, hotels, steam

locomotives, and babies after DeWitt Clinton. (In Portland, Maine lived an

improver named Neal Dow. Dow was a man who loved progress: he owned

a tannery that was as fully automated as such things could be, and his was

among the first houses in Portland to have a bathroom with running water

and a hot air furnace. In 1825 Dow toured the recently completed Erie Canal,

returned home, and named his horse Governor Clinton.)5 Crane's men spent September 1827 clearing land, planting bushes and trees,

and assembling Clinton Bridge beside the falls. They finished at the end of

the month, and Crane announced that he would supervise his men as they

pulled the bridge across the chasm and set it into place. He advertised his

exhibition for the afternoon of Saturday, September 30. The factories would

be closed; the whole town could come out and watch Clinton Bridge conquer Passaic Falls. It would be a big day for progress, and a bigger day for Timothy

Crane.

Across the river in Paterson, a twenty-eight-year-old factory hand named

Sam Patch watched Timothy Crane's improvements take shape. Patch was a

pioneer member of America's industrial working class. His family, after

repeated humiliations and failures in the Massachusetts countryside, had

moved to Pawtucket, Rhode Island in 1807, and Sam had gone to work in

Samuel Slater's White Mill at the age of eight. Young Patch spent his childhood

in the mills, and by 1827 he was boss spinner in Paterson's Hamilton Mills

and one of a handful of adult Americans who had grown up in manufacturing

towns. He was also a solitary alcoholic who beat the children who worked

under him. Trying to escape the working class, Patch was working in the

Hamilton Mills only because his small candlewick mill-apparently his second

petty and abortive attempt at proprietorship-had failed the previous year.

Sam Patch, in short, was an angry and not particularly admirable victim of

the huge social process that was creating places like Pawtucket and Paterson and granting money and respect to people like Timothy Crane.6 As he watched

Crane boss his gardeners and bridge builders, an unhappy constellation of

class consciousness and alcoholic resentment took shape in Patch's mind. Patch let it be known that he would spoil Crane's day.

That Saturday all of Paterson turned out to watch Crane pull his bridge over

the chasm. Constables patrolled the crowd looking for Sam Patch. They had locked him into a basement for safekeeping, but someone had let him out.7

Timothy Crane swaggered through the afternoon, tugging at his whiskers

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436 AMERICAN QUARTERLY

and shouting instructions to his men, always with an eye on the crowd. Clinton

Bridge rested on log rollers on the bluff. Cables stretched across the chasm, and ropes and tackles waited to edge the bridge over the precipice and along

the cables and into place. At last the workmen took their stations and pulled at the ropes, and Clinton Bridge edged proudly across Crane's fairy tale landscape, moved by sweating men and by what the Intelligencer called "the exercise of a good deal of ingenuity and mechanical skill" on the part of Timothy Crane. The bridge reached the cliff and began riding out over the cables, and then things went briefly wrong: one of the log rollers slipped and

dropped end over end into the pool at the base of the falls. The bridge lurched dangerously, but Crane's men regained control and set it safely into place. Crane looked up for applause, but the cheering was broken by shouts from the opposite bank. For there was Sam Patch, standing erect on a rock at the edge of the cliff. Patch spoke to the people near him. Then he stepped off.

It was a straight seventy-foot drop, and Patch took it in fine feet-first style. At the end he brought up his knees, then snapped them straight, drew his

arms to his sides, and went into the water like an arrow. Crane and his kidnapped audience stared into the chasm, certain that Patch was dead. But in three or four seconds Patch shot to the surface. Women smiled and waved white handkerchiefs, and the men cheered wildly as Patch sported in the water,

paddled over to Crane's log roller, took the trail rope between his teeth, and towed it slowly and triumphantly to shore.

Before stepping off, Patch told the people on his side of the chasm that "Crane had done a great thing, and he meant to do another."8

* * *

At its simplest level, the leap at Clinton Bridge was an act of vandalism: Timothy Crane was an enterprising and successful man, and Sam Patch was

a sullen failure who risked his life to ruin Crane's celebration. We might label

the jump an act of drunken resentment and leave it at that. So it may have been. But we must note that the crowd applauded Sam Patch's leap; indeed, it was their reaction as much as the leap itself that took the day away from

Timothy Crane and gave it to Sam Patch. We must ask, then, what had

prepared the people of Paterson to enjoy the humiliation of Timothy Crane.

A look into the past and future of Passaic Falls reveals the reason why: Timothy Crane's Forest Garden sat on land that had been a free public play-

ground. Many of Crane's neighbors resented what they considered the theft

of public space, and in subsequent months and years they launched violent assaults on Crane and his north-bank improvements. The leap of Sam Patch,

it turns out, was no isolated event. It was the opening shot in a twelve-year

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"ART" AND THE LANGUAGE OF PROGRESS 437

war for control of the north bank -a war that ultimately drove Timothy Crane into bankruptcy and off the falls ground.

Crane and his friends insisted that the falls ground had been a useless and forbidding wilderness, fit only for "the melancholy retirement of the horror-

stricken wanderer." But people in Paterson knew better: before Crane enclosed the land and improved it, the north bank had been free and unorganized recreational space. While the woods had been privately owned for many years,

no proprietor had ever tampered with the landscape or tried to exclude the public. There had been a small house of entertainment above the falls since

1770. But the north-bank woods had remained an undeveloped retreat for

Patersonians who hiked beside the river and, after crossing a bridge upstream,

entered the ancient oak and evergreen forest that brooded over the falls. They threw stones into the chasm, carved their names on trees and rocks, fished

at the base of the falls (there were legends of two-hundred-pound sturgeon),

or just found quiet places to sit. It was a place the people of Paterson valued highly, a wild and beautiful spot that belonged to everyone and no one,

unimproved private property open to free public use. A boy who witnessed Patch's leap later recalled that "the Falls have always been looked upon with

pride by the citizen, and they expected it would always remain so. Some

folks . . . even demanded that free access should be had by all."9

Timothy Crane's improvements transformed the north bank and took it out

of public hands. The Forest Garden was "a place of rational amusement" and a "scene of science," and it was not for everyone. Crane invited "the poet and the painter" and the "man of leisure"; he hoped that refined out-of-

towners would patronize his gardens, and he was particularly proud of a visit

from the Catholic bishop of New York. He also went out of his way to offer "the man of labor and industry a relaxation from the toils of his occupation."

But he insisted that customers behave themselves, and he reserved the right to exclude those who did not. Welcome guests included "decent people," "ladies and gentlemen," "good society," those who were "respectable and

orderly," those who maintained "good order and decorum." In short, the Forest Garden was reserved for sober, decorous people who stayed on the walkways and out of the bushes, who conversed politely over brandy and never got drunk, and who contemplated trees without wanting to climb them. 10

Crane's transformation of the old pleasure ground, along with his talk about art, nature, and DeWitt Clinton, would have caused trouble in any event. But

he compounded his crimes by charging a toll at Clinton Bridge. The toll was

only a penny, but Crane insisted that it be paid. Some of the neighbors responded with violence. Even Crane's friends thought the toll "impolitic,"

and in 1831 Crane took space in the newspaper to justify the toll. First, he pleaded that he had risked everything he owned in his north-bank improve-

ments; he would survive only if he turned a profit. Second, and closely tied

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438 AMERICAN QUARTERLY

to the first, the toll was his one means of keeping the place decent and safe.

Crane knew what happened when he let just anyone cross Clinton Bridge:

" 1st. If the bridge were thrown open, the Garden would be occupied with a

set of lazy, idle, rascally, drunken vagabounds. 2d. This would drive away

all decent people. 3d. We should thereby lose all our income; and 4th. Our

little ornaments and improvements would be defaced, ruined, and in fact,

destroyed. "1 I

Crane spoke from experience, for since opening the Forest Garden he had been under violent attack. In his first season he installed spring guns to

discourage "Night Poachers" who defaced his tollgate and entered the grounds

to steal liquor. During business hours, drunken, foul-mouthed men insulted

respectable customers and threw firecrackers at the feet of ladies. Others cut

down Crane's trees, broke his imported bushes, smashed his glassware, stole

his lanterns, and hurled his tables and benches over the falls. Rowdiness and vandalism escalated into physical assaults on Crane and his family and em-

ployees. Crane's boys were kicked and beaten when they worked the tollgate;

some attackers threatened to throw them into the chasm. The boys found

trouble whenever they ran errands into town, and Crane himself could not

walk safely in Paterson. At night, musket balls and doses of buckshot slammed

into the walls and through the windows of buildings on the old pleasure

ground. 12

These were violent and potentially lethal assaults, and through it all, Crane

knew who his tormentors were. Some were well-dressed sports who might

have passed as gentlemen. Others were men "from whom we might expect

better things," who condoned the violence. But most were workingmen, and

Crane singled out the English weavers and spinners (the latter were Sam

Patch's direct peers in the mills) as the worst: "They come into my gardens,

and cut down my young trees, and mutilate my seats and tables and bridge,

and get drunk, and curse and swear," and scare off respectable women and

men.'3 The attack on the Forest Garden was an early round in the contest over

recreational space in industrializing America, a contest that consistently pitted

the noise and physicality of working-class recreations against the privatized,

contemplative leisure pursuits of the middle class.14 In Paterson, however, the contest took on a particularly personal and violent edge, for many of Crane's attackers were men who had been his friends. Crane had been in

Paterson since 1812, and as an architect, builder, speculator, and sawmill-

owner he had watched his fortune grow with the town. His work, his public

services, and his membership in the Episcopal Church brought him into

cooperation with Paterson's leading families. His joviality and love of talk

won him entry into other circles as well: between 1815 and 1823 he was an

elected chief in Paterson's volunteer fire companies, and he was widely known

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"ART" AND THE LANGUAGE OF PROGRESS 439

as a storyteller, a genial braggart, and a friend to traveling acrobats and circus

riders. One of the boys from the mills recalled that people had liked Timothy Crane. A lot of them called him Uncle Tim. '5

Crane seems to have retained the goodwill of the community until 1827,

when he bought a public playground and turned it into a romantic retreat for

ladies and gentlemen. The decision transformed his relations with society.

Crane's old associations-the fire companies, the sawmill and construction

workers, the storytelling groups-were with a democracy of males that ex-

cluded women. The Forest Garden, on the other hand, catered to respectable

women and their male escorts, and pointedly excluded the working-class men

who had made up much of Crane's old social world. The reasons for Crane's

decision must remain a mystery. But we should note that the purchase of the

north bank was the second big event in Crane's year. In February 1827 he

had married Maria Ryerson, daughter of an old Knickerbocker family of New

York City. He was a fifty-four-year-old widower. She was twenty-four, and

when Crane bought his land in August she was pregnant with their first child. 16

Crane's marriage to a young and sophisticated woman, coupled with his

withdrawal from the old male democracy and his new interest in exclusivity

and romantic sentimentalism, suggest that he had determined to change his

whole way of life. Timothy Crane was no longer one of the boys; he had

become a pioneer of American bourgeois culture.

Viewed from the factories and tenements of Paterson, Crane's north bank

was a vast provocation. It violated customary use rights to the falls ground,

and that alone would have started a fight. But Crane's personal transformation

made it worse. Timothy Crane had been a successful businessman who enjoyed

the informal, democratic society of other men. Now he broke those ties and

surrounded his own and the north-bank's transformation with redefinitions of

respectability and right behavior that included middle-class contemplatives

and excluded nearly everyone else. The Forest Garden, in short, translated

the familiar hierarchy of wealth into a new, undemocratic, and utterly un-

acceptable formula for the distribution of respect, and that is when Paterson

changed its mind about Timothy Crane.

We begin to understand why Patersonians greeted Sam Patch's leap at Clinton Bridge with laughter and applause. They seem to have admired Clinton

Bridge; it was a straightforward conquest of nature and a fine feat of engi-

neering. But at the end of the bridge there were tree stumps, gravel walkways,

and orderly bushes and shrubs where their pleasure ground had been, and

Uncle Tim was talking in strange new ways. The bridge-raising was a truly

ambivalent celebration. Sam Patch resolved the ambivalence with a little

speech about the democracy of worth and a spectacular reassertion of the

freedom and physicality of the old north bank. As it turned out, Patch's leap

was the first in a continuous series of assaults that destroyed Timothy Crane.

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440 AMERICAN QUARTERLY

The Forest Garden never made money, and Crane's creditors seized the land

in June 1830. Crane stayed on as manager, dodging rocks and demanding

tolls all the way, until 1839. Then he abandoned his vandalized and neglected

gardens and retired to a log cabin in a forested corner of the north bank. He

died there, broken and alone, in 1845.17 It was the end to a long and ugly war with the neighbors, a war that began the day Sam Patch sneaked past the

constables and joined the crowd that came to see Timothy Crane conquer Passaic Falls.

* * *

Months after the episode at Clinton Bridge, when Sam Patch had begun to

jump professionally, he offered an explanation of his leaps. Crane and other friends of progress had been spreading rumors. Some said the jump at Clinton

Bridge had been the act of a madman. Others insisted that Patch was merely

drunk, and Timothy Crane himself would concoct the best story of all: Sam Patch had leaped for love. Patch was enamored of a young woman, you see,

and she had turned him down. He had leaped not to humiliate Timothy Crane, but to kill himself. Patch countered with his own explantation. "It is no

melancholy event," he insisted. "I am perfectly sober and in possession of

my proper faculties, and [leaping waterfalls] is nothing more than an art which I have knowledge of and courage to perform," -"an art," he went on, "which

I have practised from my youth.""8

Art. It was an important word in the vocabularies of Sam Patch and Timothy

Crane, but it had different meanings for the two. Crane used the word as a crucial component in what might be called the language of progress, a language that described and legitimized what he was doing at Passaic Falls. Patch's

use of the word derived from plebian-democratic sensibilities that called

Timothy Crane and his works into serious question. With little exaggeration,

we might see the episode at Clinton Bridge as a confrontation between the art of Sam Patch and the art of Timothy Crane.19

When Sam Patch said that leaping waterfalls was an art he tied his jumps to familiar notions of Anglo-American manhood. In Patch's world a man's art was his identity-defining skill. There was the shoemaker's art, the car-

penter's art, the multiform arts of husbandry-the whole range of combined

mental and manual performances through which trained men provided the

wants and needs of their communities. The word affirmed the intelligence, learning, and dexterity that went into building a house, making a shoe, or raising a field of wheat. It also affirmed the worth of men who performed

those tasks. It was the combination of knowledge (not speculative imagination but mastery of a "system of rules" that was learned from childhood under the guidance of a father or master) and skilled hands that made ordinary work

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"ART" AND THE LANGUAGE OF PROGRESS 441

an art. And it was the possession of an art that made a man independent and

useful and therefore the sovereign equal of any other man.20

Patch's use of the word art called up the yeoman-artisan republic and the

ideals of manhood and individual worth that it sustained-ideals that Sam

Patch and other workingmen reformulated and extended into the industrial

world of the nineteenth century. His "art" was tied to an ethos that his father

had lost and that he had regained. The father of Sam Patch had been a landless

farmer-turned cottage shoemaker, and in his proudest days he may have

claimed possession of an art. But skilled shoemakers knew better. The elder

Patch performed clumsy work and sold it to merchants who then put it onto

world markets. His rented farm and his misshapen shoes were tied less to the

neighborhood bases of occupational arts than to the wider commercial rela-

tionships that were dissolving them. Patch's dimmest childhood memories

were of his father's expulsion from even that dubious artisanship, and then

there was Pawtucket and a childhood in the mills.2'

By 1827, however, Sam Patch was himself master of an art. He had practiced

the operation of spinning machinery since childhood, and his elders on the

job had recruited and trained him as one of the first American-born boss

spinners. If he was anything like the other mule spinners, he talked axnd acted like a man who possessed an art: he was the master of machinery that his

employers did not fully understand, he hired, managed, and disciplined his

own helpers, and he demanded respect from lowlier workers and from the

owners themselves.22

The mule spinners pioneered the effort to reshape old standards of male

autonomy and to establish them within factory walls, and Patch's leap at

Clinton Bridge-indirectly but unmistakably-was tied to that effort. For Patch's leaping ability was a kind of occupational skill. Like most textile

villages, Pawtucket was built around a waterfall, and during their off-hours boys from the mills went to the falls and dared each other to do dangerous

things. They began with jumps from the bridge into the pool below the

waterfall. Some carried their dangerous games further than others, and young

Sam Patch established a kind of primacy over the other boys with one of the

most extraordinary feats in Pawtucket memory: a running leap from the roof

of a four-story mill, across an embankment, and into the pool. Jumping at

waterfalls was indeed an art, and Patch's feet-first, knees-bent position in the

air was in accordance with the system of rules governing that art that Pawtucket

boys had developed over the years. Throughout his jumping career, Sam Patch

never deviated from the formal Pawtucket style. (Each mill town, apparently,

developed local variations. In 1885, when a man named Odlum killed himself

trying to leap from Brooklyn Bridge, Sheriff McKee of Paterson said that as a boy in the 1850s he had known at least twenty young men who could have

made the leap safely. Paterson boys, explained the sheriff, knew the secret:

the jumper must keep his mouth shut and hold his breath.)23

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442 AMERICAN QUARTERLY

Falls jumping was indeed an art. It was also an art that was tied closely to

work in textile mills, and Sam Patch seems to have known that. No one

recorded what Patch wore when he jumped at Clinton Bridge. But he made

his subsequent leaps in a close-fitting shirt and pants of white cotton. It was

neat and highly visible, a good outfit for jumping waterfalls. It was also the

parade uniform of the Paterson Association of Spinners.24

Patch's insistence that leaping waterfalls was an art called up ideals of male

usefulness and rough male equality that his father had lost and that he and

his workmates had reconstructed in the mills. Patch's membership in that

world was hard-won and vital, and he repeatedly talked about his jumping

abilities in ways that referred back to it. His speech at Clinton Bridge (Crane

had done a great thing, and he meant to do another) called up a world in

which things competently done established a democracy of respect among the

doers. The following summer Patch jumped on the Fourth of July (the day

of Crane's fabled fireworks display) "merely . . . to show that some things

can be done as well as others," referring once more to the same democracy

of arts.25 By insisting that falls jumping was an art-a truly traditional art, one that required knowledge and a lifetime of practice-Sam Patch spoke to

the one world in which he could imagine his own worth, the world he rep-

resented when he confronted Timothy Crane at Clinton Bridge.

* * *

Timothy Crane may have been puzzled by Patch's use of the word art. For

when Crane used the word (and he used it often) he did not mean things like

shoemaking, mule spinning, or leaping waterfalls. Timothy Crane and other

improvers were shaping the yeoman-artisan republic into new landscapes,

new social hierarchies, and new uses for key English words, and in their

vocabulary "art" was one word that stood for all the works of humankind.

In particular, it referred to the works of technology and entrepreneurial vision

that were transforming nature and the social order in their generation. Art

was the Erie Canal, a man-made river that turned a wilderness into new farms

and towns. It was water-powered factories and mills. It was bridges and roads

and steamboats. It was the whole range of projects by which civilization was

conquering nature and putting it to human use, and it had little to do with

the skills practiced by ordinary men.

Timothy Crane used art as a near-synonym for civilization, and he coupled

it with its ancient opposite, "nature," in two ways. The first-the one rep-

resented by Clinton Bridge-reiterated understandings that had come to North

America with the first settlers: art was opposed to hostile natural forces, and

civilization, as Keith Thomas has reminded us, was "virtually synonymous

with the conquest of nature." Timothy Crane, however, inflated "art" and

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"ART" AND THE LANGUAGE OF PROGRESS 443

used it in newly aggressive and grandiose ways, for he and others had come

to believe that civilization was winning its age-old war with wilderness.26 As

early as the 1790s, Crane's hero DeWitt Clinton had predicted that "the hand

of art will change the face of the universe. Mountains, deserts, and oceans

will feel its mighty force. It will not then be debated whether the hills shall

be prostrated, but whether the Alps and Andes shall be levelled; nor whether

sterile fields shall be fertilized, but whether the deserts of Africa shall feel

the power of cultivation."27 In the 1790s such language was self-consciously

prophetic. By the time Timothy Crane built his bridge, it seemed that Clinton's

prophecy was coming true: art was conquering nature on a broad front and

with unprecedented success; man's long-sought dominion over nature was

being realized. Timothy Crane offered Clinton Bridge as a step in that di-

rection.

The Forest Garden represented a second, newer, juxtaposition of nature

and art. With the final triumph of civilization at hand, educated northerners

began a massive and complex conversation about humankind's relation to a

retreating natural world. They had always seen wilderness as primordial,

threatening chaos, and many continued to do so. But others began to perceive

a new divinity in nature: a benign and irresistible cycle of birth, death, and

renewal that could be counterposed to the transitory, the selfish, and the

artificial in their own increasingly civilized world. Among the results of that

revolution in perception were attempts to provide access to nature through

art: landscape paintings, nature books, half-wild gardens, rural cemeteries

and urban parks, and journeys to a Niagara Falls that was surrounded by new

hotels.28 By the 1830s the northeast was dotted with intentional landscapes

that domesticated wilderness just enough to rob it of its terrors and reveal its

moral lessons-combinations of art and nature that educated, renewed, and

uplifted citizens of the world that progress was making. The Forest Garden,

which, as Crane's happy customer testified, "domesticated the wilderness of

nature, and blended with it the improvements of art," was among the first of

those landscapes.

Thus the art of Timothy Crane's north bank had both utilitarian and spiritual

connotations. It linked developmentalism and romanticism, material progress

and spiritual improvement, prosperity and uplift. Simply put, it linked the

material accomplishments and the spiritual possibilities of people like Timothy

Crane. There were other places in the northeast that juxtaposed those meanings in powerful ways. Cultivated Europeans often visited Mount Auburn Cemetery

and the factory town at Lowell within a day or two of each other-possibly

because their guides were wealthy Bostonians who admired both places.

Tourists on the Erie Canal experienced that triumph of utilitarian art, knowing

all the while that it carried them to a tamed and uplifting Niagara Falls.29 But seldom were the twin promises of utility and moral uplift linked as dramatically

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444 AMERICAN QUARTERLY

as they were at Passaic Falls. Clinton Bridge spanned the falls chasm with

technological ease, then delivered visitors into the Forest Garden, a spiritu-

alized landscape whose very name combined nature and art. Passing through

a new factory town, over a noble bridge, and into the confines of the Forest

Garden, Crane's customers witnessed triumphs of art and combinations of art

and nature that represented big pieces of the material and moral agenda of

an emerging entrepreneurial class. It was an agenda, we must note, that left

little room for Sam Patch and his idea of art.

The art of Timothy Crane and the art of Sam Patch were opposed in many

ways. That opposition was clearest at the Forest Garden: Crane simply ex-

cluded workingmen becuase they did not "understand" the new falls ground.

The art of Clinton Bridge, however, posed subtler and deeper threats to

ordinary men, for it assumed forms of social organization that diminished the

arts that they practiced. In earlier centuries the struggle with nature was carried

out by the occupational arts: people turned woodlands into farms, trees into

furniture and houses, rocks into chimneys and fences, cattle into food and

shoes. The progress of "art" was thus little more than the sum of what the

arts had made, and the arts of Timothy Crane and Sam Patch were parts of

one vocabulary. The new language of progress, however, dissolved the skills of individuals into a larger, more interdependent, and more abstract art. A

newsman learned what Sam Patch did for a living, for instance, and described

him as "a mechanic connected with one of the factories in Paterson."30 It was not an insult. Most skilled workmen called themselves mechanics, had

done so for a long time, and would continue to do so for at least a generation.

In their usage, a mechanic was the possessor of an art. But in the language

of progress, mechanics were more often, like the newsman's Sam Patch,

"connected" with the grander designs of art.

Crane's friend on the Intelligencer provided a set-piece example of how the language of progress dealt with Sam Patch and his fellow mechanics. In

1828 he described the millwrights of Paterson as "a useful class of mechanics

which enables the manufacturer to render the natural elements so immanently

subservient to the comfort and prosperity of this town." 31 He did not mean that millwrights had lost their skills. Indeed the mills of Paterson were among

the most complicated and demanding examples of the millwrights' art in all

of North America. The abilities of millwrights were not diluted but devalued-

devalued because cognitive and manual responsibilities were no longer lodged

in the same men, and because capital and entrepreneurial imagination were

assuming primacy over ancient knowledge. With that mill-building lost some

of its status, and the balance of respect shifted toward the "manufacturer."

For it was he who thought up projects and financed them, then organized the

various "classes of mechanics" (that is, the occupational arts) in ways that

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"ART" AND THE LANGUAGE OF PROGRESS 445

turned unruly nature into "comfort and prosperity" for the whole town-all

of it accomplished through a process and with results that people like Timothy

Crane called art.

Within all of that, the word art took on a peculiarly abstract and collective

character. Timothy Crane's art did not refer to the knowledge and skills of

any individual; it was one word that stood for everything that human beings

made. When Crane advertised in newspapers he seldom talked about himself

in the first person. He was the "subscriber" or the "proprietor," and Clinton

Bridge and the Forest Garden were made not by him but by "the hand of

ART." (Sam Patch, remember, claimed his art for himself: I have the knowl-

edge and courage to perform it, I have practiced it from my youth.) Crane's

disembodied "hand of ART" was an abstraction not only for his gardens and

bridge but for the things that such projects demanded. In order for art to

conquer Passaic Falls, Crane had to imagine his bridge and gardens, buy the

land on which they would sit, and exclude other users from the property.

Then he had to hire scores of laborers, carpenters, and gardeners and supervise them as they assembled the parts of his scheme. And then (here is where

"art" was put to new uses) he had to convince the people of Paterson that

the project embodied not his own capital and aspirations but the hand of art.

The project and the process of realizing it belonged not to him but to hu-

mankind. Everyone would profit from it, everyone could be proud of it.

The world that Timothy Crane's art would make was taking visible shape

in the landscape of Paterson. The men who owned mills and foundries along

the millrace shared Crane's sensibilities, and they planted flower gardens

between the raceway and the lower Passaic River. The result was a striking

vision of nature improved by art. At the head of town stood a majestic waterfall, surrounded on one side by Crane's gardens and bridge, on the other by a line

of factories and flower beds that sloped unevenly down into the tenements

and little houses of Paterson-narrow, unpaved streets filled with pigs and

dirty children, with emigre English factory hands, and with the wage-earning

daughters and sons of American yeomen. A traveler walked through Paterson

in 1832 and counted "thirty cotton-mills [and] iron and brass foundries, in

the upper part of it, with gardens so tastefully laid out, and the banks of the

river kept so neat, and ornamented with weeping willows, as to compensate

for the broken bridges and dirt of the lower part of town."32 It was a picture- book balance of art, nature, and early-industrial squalor. It was what American

romantic capitalism had made in Paterson, New Jersey.

Clinton Bridge was the linchpin in that landscape. And when Timothy

Crane invited the neighbors to walk out of their part of the picture and into his and to watch art conquer Passaic Falls, he wanted more than applause.

He wanted factory hands and foundry workers to participate in meanings that

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446 AMERICAN QUARTERLY

he and other entrepreneurs and their friends were inventing. In oblique but

profound ways, he wanted them to ratify their own places within the language and landscape of progress.

Crane's spectacle almost worked. He drew a huge crowd, and when the bridge was in place most of them had to admit that Timothy Crane had done

an impressive thing. But Sam Patch, with an anarchic leap and a mock rescue

of a piece of failed engineering, stole the day; in a split second the applause

went from the art of Timothy Crane to the art of Sam Patch. It was what

some scholars would call a silly gesture, existential rebellion at its most

juvenile and dangerous. But Sam Patch inhabited a world where "art" was a vehicle of self-expression within a system of recognized equalities and

reciprocities, and he wanted to show Timothy Crane how an American man

conquers a waterfall.

NOTES

1. Thomas Bender, Toward an Urban Vision: Ideas and Institutions in Nineteenth-Century America (Lexington, Ky., 1975), 73-93; Neil Harris, The Artist in American Society: The Formative Years, 1790-1860 (New York, 1966), esp. 188-216; Stanley French, "The Cemetery as Cultural Institution: The Establishment of Mount Auburn and the 'Rural Cemetery' Movement," American Quarterly 26 (Mar. 1974): 37-55; John F. Kasson, Civilizing the Machine: Technology and Republican Values in America, 1776-1900 (New York, 1976), 55-106. The grandest of civilized nature parks is the subject of Elizabeth McKinsey, Niagara Falls: Icon of the American Sublime (New York, 1985). On early nineteenth-century conceptions of nature and art generally, see Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825-1875 (New

York, 1980); John R. Stilgoe, Common Landscape of America, 1580-1845 (New Haven, 1982), esp. 3-29; and Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York, 1964).

2. Paterson Intelligencer, 12 Dec. 1872 (quote); 28 July 1830 (war dance); 12 Aug. 1829 (circus); 18 June 1828, 30 Sept. 1829, 11 Aug. 1830, 21 July 1830, 9 July 1828, 15 Sept. 1830, 29 June 1831, 27 July 1831, 10 Aug. 1831, 27 June 1832, 1 Aug. 1832, 26 June 1833, 24 July 1833, 5 Aug. 1835, 18 May 1836, 31 May 1836, 28 June 1837, 6 June 1838 (fireworks). Norman F. Brydon, The Passaic River (New Brunswick, 1974), 113, states that Fourth of July fireworks originated at the Forest Garden in 1829. In fact, Crane put on his first Independence Day display in 1828, but there were similar exhibitions in New York that year at the Cold Spring Garden, Niblo's Garden, and Old Vauxhall Gardens. New York Post, 28 June 1828, 30 June 1828, and 2 July 1828.

3. Paterson Intelligencer, 30 June 1830, 30 Sept. 1829, 21 July 1830, 9 July 1828. 4. C. D. Arfwedson, The United States and Canada, in 1832, 1833, and 1834, 3 vols.

(London, 1834), 1:236; Rev. Isaac Fidler, Observations on Professions, Literature, Manners, and Emigration in the United States and Canada, Made during a Residence there in 1832 (New York, 1833), 96; Paterson Intelligencer, 10 Oct. 1827.

5. E. M. Graf, "Passaic Falls Bridges," Bulletin of the Passaic County Historical Society 3 (Oct. 1944): 14; Frank L. Byrne, Prophet of Prohibition: Neal Dow and his Crusade (Madison, Wisc., 1961), 7, 10, 18.

6. On Patch and his family, see Paul Johnson, "The Modernization of Mayo Greenleaf Patch: Land, Family, and Marginality in New England, 1766-1818," New England Quarterly 55 (Dec.

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"ART" AND THE LANGUAGE OF PROGRESS 447

1982): 488-516, and Richard M. Dorson, "Sam Patch: Jumping Hero," New York Folklore

Quarterly 1 (Aug. 1945): 133-51. On Patch and child workers, Charles Pitman Longwell, A Little Story of Old Paterson, as Told by an Old man (n.p., 1901), 37; on Patch's candlewick mill, Paterson Intelligencer, 19 July 1826.

7. The lock up story is told in Longwell, A Little Story, 37-38, and idem., Historic Totowa Falls (Paterson, n.d.), 37, and corroborated in the Connecticut Courant, 15 July 1828.

8. New York Post, 1 Oct. 1827; Boston Patriot, 5 Oct. 1827; Paterson Intelligencer, 10 Oct. 1827 (quote). Longwell, A Little Story, 37-41, and Historic Totowa Falls, 36-39, reminiscing

at a distance of over seventy years, differs in some details from the story in the New York Post, which was the most widely reprinted account. In Longwell's story the bridge sways dangerously

after the fall of the log roller, and this near-disaster provides the backdrop for Patch's leap. Longwell has Patch's pre-jump speech as "Now, old Tim Crane thinks he has done something

great; but I can beat him." Given the many decades that intervened between the two accounts,

they are remarkably similar; when they differ, this essay follows the account in the Post.

9. Longwell, Historic Totowa Falls, 40 (quote). Adlard Welby, A Visit to North America and the English Settlements in Illinois, with a Winter Residence in Philadelphia (London, 1821),

23-24; P. Stansbury, A Pedestrian Tour of Two Thousand Three Hundred Miles, in North America . . .Performed in the Autumn of 1821 (New York, 1822), 15-16; Leo A. Bressler, "Passaic

Falls: Eighteenth-Century Natural Wonder," Proceedings of the New Jersey Historical Society 74 (Apr. 1956): 99-106.

10. Paterson Intelligencer, 11 May 1831, 7 July 1831, 14 July 1831; Fidler, Observations, 98.

11. Paterson Intelligencer, 11 May 1831.

12. Ibid., 19 Mar. 1828, 31 Dec. 1828, 11 May 1831. 13. Fidler, Observations, 97 (quote); Paterson Intelligencer, 11 May 1831.

14. Though the contest was fought on many fronts, it is historians of public parks who have

most thoroughly analyzed conflicts between middle-class contemplation and working-class rec- reation. See Roy Rosenzweig, "The Parks and the People: Social History and Urban Parks,"

Journal of Social History 18 (Winter 1984): 289-95; idem., Eight Hours for What We Will:

Workers & Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870-1920 (New York, 1983), 127-52; Bender, Toward an Urban Vision, esp. 161-87; Harris, The Artist in American Society, 146-68; Galen Cranz, The Politics of Park Design: A History of Urban Parks in America (Cambridge, 1982); Daniel

M. Bluestone, "From Promenade to Park: The Gregarious Origins of Brooklyn's Park Move- ment," American Quarterly 39 (Winter 1987): 529-50.

15. On Timothy Crane: Longwell, Historic Totowa Falls, 38; Ellery Bicknell Crane, Genealogy

of the Crane Family. Volume I. Descendants of Henry Crane, of Wethersfield and Guilford, Conn., with Sketch of the Family in England (Worcester, Mass., 1895), 1:102; The Van Houten Manuscripts: A Century of Historical Documents, ed. William Nelson (Paterson, 1894), 69-70; D. Stanton Hammond, comp., "Rev. Samuel Fishers' Census: Paterson, N.J., 1824-1832,"

Bulletin of the Passaic County Historical Society 4 (Aug. 1958): 104; William Nelson and Charles A. Shriner, History of Paterson and its Environs (New York, 1920), 2:406.

16. Albert Winslow Ryerson, The Ryerson Genealogy: Genealogy of the Knickerbocker Fam-

ilies of Ryerson, Ryerse, Ryerss; also Adriance and Martense Families; all Descendants of Martin and Adriaen Reyersz (Reyerzen) of Amsterdam, Holland (Chicago, 1916), 128; Crane, Genealogy of the Crane Family, 1:102.

17. Paterson Intelligencer, 16 June 1830, 18 Nov. 1835, 15 June 1836, 20 July 1836, traces Crane's economic troubles. The north bank remained contested territory for many years. In the 1850s a silk manufacturer bought the grounds and closed them off with the intention of building a house for himself; he reconsidered and turned the property into a privately owned "public" park, with the advertised intention of improving Patersonians. He, too, was harassed and van- dalized off the grounds. See Longwell, Historic Totowa Falls, 40, and Levi R. Trumbull, A History of Industrial Paterson (Paterson, 1882), 332-33.

18. Fidler, Observations, 99-100, tells the jumped-for-love story just after a conversation with Timothy Crane. Patch tells his own story in the Paterson Intelligencer, 15 July 1828 and 2 July 1928.

19. The discussion that follows begins with the analyses of art and related words in Raymond

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448 AMERICAN QUARTERLY

Williams, Culture and Society, 1750-1950 (New York, 1958), and Keywords: A Vocabulary of

Culture and Society (New York, 1976). Williams' principle concern is with the dissociation of

"art" from occupational skills (Sam Patch's definition) and its attachment to anti-occupations

practiced by special people who operate apart from and above the workday world, a redefinition

that was not accomplished until at least the 1850s. A third use of the word (Timothy Crane's

definition) stemmed from the old vocabulary used by Sam Patch, but reshaped "art" in ways

that gave it new entrepreneurial and developmental meanings. Crane's "art" is fully illustrated

in the historical and critical studies cited in notes 1 and 28. Those studies and the works in labor

history cited in note 20 establish the centrality of Patch's and Crane's definitions of art in working-

class and middle-class perceptions of economic development during the crucial second quarter

of the nineteenth century.

20. The vocabulary and ethos to which Patch's "art" was attached had been in existence for

a long time, but had been codified by the experience of the Revolution and the succeeding debate

on economic development. Labor historians have established its importance to working-class thinking and actions throughout the nineteenth century and beyond. That ethos among handworkers

is most thoroughly discussed in Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise

of the American Working Class, 1 780-1850 (New York, 1984). Anthony F. C. Wallace, Rockdale: The Growth of an American Factory Village in the Early Industrial Revolution (New York,

1978), 211-95, discusses a very similar cluster of attitudes. Popular ideas of the value of work

and workers in the shoe and textile towns in which Sam Patch had grown up are discussed in

Paul G. Faler, Mechanics and Manufacturers in the Early Industrial Revolution: Lynn, Mass-

achusetts, 1 780-1860 (Albany, 1981), 28-57; Alan Dawley, Class and Community: The Industrial

Revolution in Lynn (Cambridge, 1976), 42-73; and Gary B. Kulik, "The Beginnings of the

Industrial Revolution: Pawtucket, Rhode Island, 1672-1829," (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 1980). David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor (New York, 1987), places that ethos

at the center of working-class life between the Civil War and World War I. The term "system of rules" is from the definition of art in Noah Webster, An American Dictionary of the English Language (New York, 1828).

21. Johnson, "The Modernization of Mayo Greenleaf Patch."

22. See Isaac Cohen, "Workers' Control in the Cotton Industry: A Comparative Study of British and American Mule Spinning," Labor History 26 (Winter 1985): 53-85; Harold Catling, The Spinning Mule (Newton Abbot, 1970), Cynthia J. Shelton, The Mills of Manayunk: Indus-

trialization and Social Conflict in the Philadelphia Region, 1787-1837 (Baltimore, 1986); David

Montgomery, "Workers' Control of Machine Production in the Nineteenth Century," in Workers' Control in Amedica: Studies in the History of Work, Technology, and Labor Struggles (New York, 1979), esp. 11-15.

23. Pawtucket jumpers: Pawtucket Gazette and Chronicle, 27 May 1853, 26 Dec. 1862, 7 Feb. 1873; Rochester Daily Advertiser, 26 July 1828; Dorson, "Sam Patch." Sheriff McKee: Paterson Daily Press, 20 May 1885.

24. Sam's jumping suit: "Colonel William L. Stone's Visit to Niagara in 1829," Buffalo

Historical Society Publications 14 (1910): 270; and Rochester Daily Advertiser, 7 Nov. 1829.

Spinners' uniform: Paterson Intelligencer, 2 July 1826.

25. Connecticut Courant, 15 July 1828.

26. Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility (New

York, 1983), 25. American uses of this vocabulary are central to Marx, The Machine in the

Garden, and to studies of the culture of developmentalism-including many of the works cited in notes 1 and 28-that extend Marx's seminal discussion.

27. The Life and Writings of DeWitt Clinton, ed. William W. Campbell (New York, 1849), 23.

28. The educated conversation about nature in the second quarter of the nineteenth century

was long and complicated, but it tended strongly to transform pristine nature from an implacable enemy into a divine teacher. Among the most helpful studies of that conversation are Perry Miller, "The Romantic Dilemma in American Nationalism and the Concept of Nature," in

Nature's Nation (Cambridge, 1967), 197-207; Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven, 1967); French, "The Cemetery as Cultural Institution"; Harris, The Artist

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"ART" AND THE LANGUAGE OF PROGRESS 449

in American Society; McKinsey, Niagara Falls; Novak, Nature and Culture; Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York, 1977).

29. The juxtaposition is analyzed beautifully in McKinsey, Niagara Falls, 127-77.

30. New York Post, 24 July 1828.

31. Paterson Intelligencer, 9 July 1828.

32. E. T. Coke, A Subaltern's Furlough: Descriptive of Scenes in Various Parts of the United States, Upper and Lower Canada, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia, During the Summer and Autumn of 1832 (London, 1833), 1:142.

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