Out of the Woodwork: U.S. Forests and Black Cultures, 1800–1940

Until the early 1900s, Americans lived in an Age of Wood. Vast forests in the eastern half of the United States and the Pacific Northwest were converted into railroad ties, carts and carriages, houses and buildings, barrels for conveying goods, and charcoal to power emergent industries. Historians have told us a great deal about the Euro-Americans who either took part in this process of deforestation and development or who warned about its recklessness. And Euro-American artists, such as Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Church, made the forests into national symbols, even as they disappeared. Historians have had less to say about African Americans, especially—but not exclusively—in the Southeast, who were integral to the Age of Wood.

In this talk, Susan Scott Parrish will discuss the role Black laborers and artisans played in the transformation of eastern forests into built wooden environments and infrastructural systems. She will also look at the roles that Black artists—painters of woodlands and wood domestic interiors as well as writers of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction—played in representing and interpreting what standing trees and woodwork meant in American life. Parrish will focus in particular on two individuals who lived at the beginning and end of this period: John Hemmings, the enslaved joiner and furniture maker at Monticello whose letters and extant woodwork allow us to imagine what it might have meant to him to materialize the neoclassical designs of Thomas Jefferson; and Horace Pippin, the self-taught modernist artist who inscribed his vision of American history and Black domestic life in wood.

This is the Avery Distinguished Fellow Lecture.