Word With a Past: Doing A Land Office Business
In 1785, the newly created United States, burdened by debts incurred in its war for independence, passed a Land Ordinance Act authorizing the Treasury Department to sell land in the public domain as a source of revenue.*
Acting on the principle of "survey before settlement", tracts of land were surveyed into townships and plat parcels, then sold at auction to the highest bidder, or at least the minimum price set by Congress. Eager settlers poured across the Allegheny Mountains into first the Ohio lands and later the Indiana and Illinois territories. The Louisiana Purchase in 1803 brought new opportunities for settlement in the "empty" territory west of the Mississippi.** Between 1800 and 1812, Congress created 19 land districts in the frontier territories and the Treasury Department sold more than 4 million acres of public land. In 1812, Congress created the General Land Office to manage the quickly growing sale of public lands.
Settlers were so eager to file land claims that district land offices were busy places. By 1832, so many claims for land had been filed that there was a backlog of some 10,500 land "patents" waiting for an official signature to make them final.*** "Land-office business" became a metaphor for a brisk business of any kind. It still is--even when the real estate market takes a turn for the worse and a two bedroom coop just won't sell.
*If you've been hanging around History in the Margins for a while, this may sound familiar. America's first interstate, the National Highway, was funded in large part by selling off bits of what became Ohio.
**Which were of course, not actually empty.
***At first all land patents were signed by the president of the United States. On March 2, 1833, Congress passed a law allowing a GLO clerk to sign on the president's behalf.
Seed of the Future:Yosemite and the Evolution of the National Park Idea
Seed of the Future: Yosemite and the Evolution of the National Park Idea is a beautiful book, with gorgeous pictures and heavy paper that made me hesitate to underline and write in the margins.*
It is also an excellent work of history. Written by award-winning filmmaker and writer Dayton Duncan in conjunction with the Yosemite Conservancy, Seed of the Future tells the story of the National Parks System through the lens of the Yosemite Land Grant, which pre-dated the creation of Yellowstone as the first national park by eight years. (Who knew?)
The Yosemite story as Duncan tells it is one of natural marvels, national pride, successful PR, political infighting, attempted land grabs, and determined individuals. Teddy Roosevelt and naturalist John Muir make their expected appearances. Ralph Waldo Emerson and landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted play unexpected roles. (Unexpected to me at any rate.) The park's first guardian, Galen Clark, is heroic in his dedication.
The heart of the story is not the action or the characters--gripping though they are--but the development of a new idea about public space. Today the idea of preserving wild areas for public use is so common that we take it for granted.** When Congress passed the Yosemite Grant Act in 1864, the idea of saving wilderness for public use was unheard of. Distributing public land for private use was more common, at least in the United States. The Homestead Act that allowed the head of a household to claim 160 acres with little more than sweat equity was passed only two years before. The Yosemite Grant Act occurred in a narrow space where ideas about democracy, wilderness, the Sublime, tourism and health came together.
If you're interested in national parks, American history, or how big ideas are created from many small ones, you'll enjoy Seed of the Future. Even if all you do is look at the pictures.
* How do you have a conversation with a book if you don't mark it up? And more important from your perspective, how do I remember what I want to say in a blog post?
**Taking preservation for granted is dangerous. Like many of our liberties, the idea of preservation must itself be protected.
Image courtesy of the Library of Congress
Plane Spotting
Like anyone who has spent time hanging around the British or American homefronts of World War II, I am familiar with the concept of plane spotting.* Plane spotters were trained to look at planes on the horizon and ask "How many?" "Where are they headed?" "Are they ours or the enemy's?" It never dawned on me to ask how they learned to identify planes--or where they reported spotted planes. Which meant I didn't know anything that mattered.
Last weekend My Own True Love and I took a road trip to the Grissom Air Museum,** where I learned enough about plane spotting in the United States to make me want to learn more.
Soon after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the army aided by the American Legion, set up the Army Air Forces Ground Observer Corps (aka GOC): a force of 1,500,000 volunteers who manned observation posts along the coasts. Their purpose was to identify enemy aircraft in time to prevent future attacks.
Observation posts were staffed around the clock. They ranged from specially built structures to a host family's front room. Observers needed a telephone, binoculars, a pad of flash message forms, and an official identification book with photographs and silhouette drawings of warplanes from Allied and Axis air forces. (My guess is they also needed a way to keep themselves awake in the long stretches of no action.) When planes were seen (or heard), the observer recorded as much information as possible and then called it in to an Army Filter Center,*** where sightings were plotted on a large map and checked against other reports and known flights. The system as a whole was known as the Aircraft Warning Service.
Volunteers ranged from Boy Scouts to little old ladies who brought their knitting along, but the corps didn't take just anyone who showed up. Spotters had to pass a training course. One of the training devices--the one that set me off on my plane spotting quest--was model airplanes. Built to 1/72 scale and painted black, the models approximated the appearance of an airplane as seen on the horizon when seen from a distance of thirty feet. Official spotters had to be able to identify each type of plane from the back of their classroom. So many models were needed that the government put out a call for children and hobbyists to build 500,000 models for official use. That's a lot of model airplanes.
Official spotters weren't the only people to check the skies then they heard the sound of a plane. Young boys in particular served as an unofficial GOC auxiliary. Unofficial spotters learned to identify planes with decks of plane spotter cards or the charts that were printed in comic books, newspapers and magazines. Companies produced plane spotter premiums. Coca-Cola offered a popular manual called Know Your Planes for only ten cents. Wonder Bread offered an Aircraft Spotter Dial.
Few enemy planes reached the United States. In October, 1943, the Aircraft Warning Service was put in reserve as advances in radar technology made it obsolete. It was deactivated on the mainland in 1944. Posts remained active in Hawaii through the end of the war--for reasons that I'm sure I don't need to elaborate with the anniversary of Pearl Harbor only a few days away.
* Though now that I think about it, most of what I previously knew came from the 1964 film Father Goose with Cary Grant and Leslie Caron.
**The Grissom Air Museum is not for the general history buff. It is a small museum devoted to military aviation as seen through the filter of Bunker Hill Air Base (later Grissom Air Base). Like many small specialized museums it is chronically underfunded and run by fanatics for fanatics. Inside, the museum is both grimy and grim, but there are jewels of information buried in the exhibits for the patient visitor. Outside, the collection of vintage military airplanes is excellent.
***Often staffed by members of the Women's Army Auxillary Corps (WAAC)--another subject that I keep stumbling across these days.