Susan Fenimore Cooper, the eldest daughter of American novelist James Fenimore Cooper, was an amateur naturalist and a successful author in her own right. Her nature diary, Rural Hours (1850), covering two years in Cooperstown, New York, was consulted by Henry David Thoreau while he was composing Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854).
In the preface to Rural Hours, Cooper describes her book as "the simple record of those little events which make up the course of the seasons in rural life. . . . In wandering about the fields, during a long, unbroken residence in the country, one naturally gleans many trifling observations on rustic matters."
In recent years, especially since the republication of Rural Hours in an unabridged edition, Cooper has come to be recognized as a significant figure in the tradition of American nature writing. Here she reports on the fields, stumps, flowers, and streams that she observed at the end of a "charming day" in late June.
from Rural Hours
by Susan Fenimore Cooper (1813-1894)
Wednesday, 27th.--Charming day; thermometer 80. Toward sunset strolled in the lane.
The fields which border this quiet bit of road are among the oldest in our neighborhood, belonging to one of the first farms cleared near the village; they are in fine order, and to look at them, one might readily believe these lands had been under cultivation for ages. But such is already very much the character of the whole valley; a stranger moving along the highway looks in vain for any striking signs of a new country; as he passes from farm to farm in unbroken succession, the aspect of the whole region is smiling and fruitful. Probably there is no part of the earth, within the limits of a temperate climate, which has taken the aspect of an old country so soon as our native land; very much is due, in this respect, to the advanced state of civilization in the present age, much to the active, intelligent character of the people, and something, also, to the natural features of the country itself. There are no barren tracts in our midst, no deserts which defy cultivation; even our mountains are easily tilled--arable, many of them, to their very summits--while the most sterile among them are more or less clothed with vegetation in their natural state. Altogether, circumstances have been very much in our favor.
While observing, this afternoon, the smooth fields about us, it was easy, within the few miles of country in sight at the moment, to pick out parcels of land in widely different conditions, and we amused ourselves by following upon the hill-sides the steps of the husbandman, from the first rude clearing, through every successive stage of tillage, all within range of the eye at the same instant. Yonder, for instance, appeared an opening in the forest, marking a new clearing still in the rudest state, black with charred stumps and rubbish; it was only last winter that the timber was felled on that spot, and the soil was first opened to the sunshine, after having been shaded by the old woods for more ages than one can tell. Here, again, on a nearer ridge, lay a spot not only cleared, but fenced, preparatory to being tilled; the decayed trunks and scattered rubbish having been collected in heaps and burnt. Probably that spot will soon be ploughed, but it frequently happens that land is cleared of the wood, and then left in a rude state, as wild pasture-ground; an indifferent sort of husbandry this, in which neither the soil nor the wood receives any attention; but there is more land about us in this condition than one would suppose. The broad hill-side, facing the lane in which we were walking, though cleared perhaps thirty years since, has continued untilled to the present hour. In another direction, again, lies a field of new land, ploughed and seeded for the first time within the last few weeks; the young maize plants, just shooting out their glossy leaves, are the first crop ever raised there, and when harvested, the grain will prove the first fruits the earth has ever yielded to man from that soil, after lying fallow for thousands of seasons. Many other fields in sight have just gone through the usual rotation of crops, showing what the soil can do in various ways; while the farm before us has been under cultivation from the earliest history of the village, yielding every season, for the last half century, its share of grass and grain. To one familiar with the country, there is a certain pleasure in thus beholding tho agricultural history of the neighborhood unfolding before one, following upon the farms in sight these progressive steps in cultivation.
The pine stumps are probably the only mark of a new country which would be observed by a stranger. With us, they take the place of rocks, which are not common; they keep possession of the ground a long while--some of those about us are known to have stood more than sixty years, or from the first settlement of the country, and how much longer they will last, time alone can tell. In the first years of cultivation, they are a very great blemish, but after a while, when most of them have been burnt or uprooted, a gray stump here and there, among the grass of a smooth field, does not look so very much amiss, reminding one, as it does, of the brief history of the country. Possibly there may be something of partiality in this opinion, just as some lovers have been found to admire a freckled face, because the rosy cheek of their sweetheart was mottled with brown freckles; people generally may not take the same view of the matter, they may think that even the single stump had better be uprooted. Several ingenious machines have been invented for getting rid of these enemies, and they have already done good service in the county. Some of them work by levers, others by wheels; they usually require three or four men and a yoke of oxen, or a horse, to work them, and it is really surprising what large stumps are drawn out of the earth by these contrivances, the strongest roots cracking and snapping like threads.
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