Throw a stone, and it will probably land in a community garden.  It seems like they are sprouting up everywhere – and for good reason.  Communities recognize that gardens are a great way to add a little green space to a neighborhood, supplement residents’ diets with fresh produce, allow neighbors to work side-by-side on meaningful projects, and lessen our dependence on driving to meet our food needs. 

The concept of gardening on public or shared land is not new.  As early as 1649, English peasants, known as Diggers, began gardening on the King’s land, in response to the rapidly increasing price of food. Predictably, the trespassers were forcibly removed and some were lynched.

Fortunately, community gardening had a more peaceful start in the Americas. The garden in the historic Moravian settlement of Bethabara, Winston-Salem, North Carolina dates from 1759 and is generally credited as America’s first, but many of the earliest American settlements contained commonly held property reserved for the cultivation of basic food crops. Although collective efforts at gardening would continue in various forms, the majority of Americans (even those living on farms) tended to purchase a large portion of their food from increasingly distant locations.

Community gardens as we know them really got their start during the Progressive Era, when middle-class reformers sought to introduce nature and healthy diets to impoverished city residents through the cultivation of city lots. For many, small garden plots constituted some of their only experiences with green space. The somewhat heavy-handed moral (and often nativist) rhetoric of the reformers ultimately made these gardens places of social homogenization rather than truly collective enterprises, yet they set a precedent for urban gardening with humanistic goals.

A far more widespread adoption of gardening occurred during the wartime rationing of the first half of the twentieth century. Much of the nation’s food supply was diverted to feeding members of the armed services, so the government encouraged families and communities to maintain “victory gardens” that would supplement reduced diets with “liberty cabbage” and other fresh vegetables. In the last year of the war, Americans planted some 20 million “victory gardens,” which produced upwards of 45% of all fresh produce. Boston’s Fenway Victory Gardens is apparently one of the last remaining active gardens of this type, with 450 plots.

In the 1960s, community gardens took on a different political symbolism, as they were adopted by alternative subcultures that associated gardening with the primitive yet wholesome agricultural work that was fundamental to the back-to-nature ethic. Rather than a means of connecting communities, they symbolized the possibility of isolation from global food markets and their unpalatable capitalistic underpinnings. Still, the grassroots nature of these efforts would characterize most successful gardening initiatives in the future.

As the environmental movement gained momentum and a more diverse constituency, it grew to encompass urban issues as well. This development, along with increasingly sophisticated analyses of the root causes of poverty and inequality, led the federal government and local municipalities to increase funding for gardening initiatives, especially in urban settings. As a result, a number of large cities developed their own initiatives. In Chicago, two planning conferences during the late 1970s led to the founding of the American Community Gardening Association (ACGA), which today is the leading advocacy group for community garden programs nationwide.

With funding and technical assistance available, citizen groups sensed a mandate to create community gardens throughout their neighborhoods. According to ACGA, there are more than 18,000 initiatives across the nation, which is probably a gross underestimate that leaves out the wide variety of less formal gardening projects. Either way, the community gardens phenomenon does not appear to be a flash in the pan. It has been a hundred years in the making and continues to grow in popularity.

Along with New York and California, Pennsylvania is one of the leaders in community gardens. In the Lehigh Valley, their popularity has especially flourished in the last few years. Lehigh and Northampton counties now boast at least 23 gardens, mainly clustered in Allentown, Bethlehem, and Easton. During the last year, the recently-formed Sustainable Urban Neighborhoods of the Lehigh Valley (SUNLV) developed a number of gardens across the valley, and their website provides information on many additional projects. South Side Community Gardens, an organization spearheaded by Lehigh University’s South Side Initiative, has also initiated public discussions regarding a series of new gardens planned for sites along Bethlehem’s greenway. Dr. John Pettegrew, at the head of initiative, has even spoken of these new gardens as a first step towards a regional local farming project.

Without a doubt, community gardens are more popular than ever. Whether or not the rapid proliferation of gardens will withstand the test of time, sporadic funding, and fickle community interest is another question. I hope these gardens prove enduring, but that cannot happen without support. Those able to volunteer are encouraged to participate in any of the worthwhile projects noted above or to consider a garden in your neighborhood. Who couldn’t use some more green space, healthy time outdoors, and yummy locally grown food?

Last Wednesday a group of D&L staff members and local history buffs met with Deidre McCarthy of the National Park Service’s Cultural Resource Geographic Information System facility (CRGIS). As noted in an earlier blog entry, Deidre and her team have spent several months mapping the remains of the Lehigh Canal and adjacent industrial heritage. Between GPS data collection in the field and locations culled from high-resolution aerial photography, they have been able to enter hundreds of sites into a GIS that will allow the D&L and our partners to interpret and manage our historic resources.

Last week we put our heads together to locate and identify a number of sites along the Upper Grand section of the canal, which once stretched from Jim Thorpe to White Haven. A number of previous studies have focused on the lower section of the canal, but the high locks, abandoned towns, pipelines, and railroad infrastructure of the relatively isolated Lehigh Gorge have escaped documentation.

After some brief comments about the importance of this and similar projects, Deidre projected her GIS onto a large white wall to display high-resolution aerial photography of the region. A few highlighted points indicated historic resources that she had already located from other sources, such as the National Register of Historic Places and the State Historic Preservation Office.

Jack Sterling and Tom Ogozolok, two men who have spent decades walking and climbing around the steep gorge and mining documents for local history, began pointing out abutments, retaining walls, and building foundations that did not show up in any of the print sources. David Fry, a ranger at Lehigh Gorge State Park, jumped in with bits of historical data and great photos to back it all up. As people took turns pointing to projected spots on the wall, Deidre zoomed in and marked the locations with a dot, recording information such as resource type, condition, and accuracy of identification in a master attribute table that includes every resource in the database.

We spent almost an hour documenting remains in downtown Jim Thorpe, where the Switchback Gravity Railroad’s coal chutes, the canal and several rail yards and lines once converged. We slowly inched our way out of town and into Lehigh Gorge State Park. The further north we moved, the fewer structures there were to document. However, the stories that Tom, Jack, and Dave told became more and more interesting.

For example, we documented the spot where the nineteenth-century Tidewater oil pipeline crossed the Lehigh River on its way from Titusville, PA to Bayonne, NJ. We scanned the pixels searching for evidence of mysterious structures built into the sides of unnamed hollows. We marked the location where the 1888 Mud Run train disaster killed 64 and wounded over 100. We searched in vain for the site where the railroad once dumped steel trusses from New York City’s 3rd Avenue elevated line into the river, in an attempt to slow raging flood waters.

By the time we neared White Haven, six hours of wrangling over dam and lock locations and the paths of former carriage roads had passed, but the map projected on the wall was filled with dozens of additional dots representing now-documented historical sites. In a few weeks, CRGIS staff will head back into the gorge to physically document a few of the remains we could not make out from the aerials, but we definitely made their job a lot easier and freed them up to work in other parts of the Corridor.

We’ll keep you updated over the next few months as we finish the GIS, receive our hardware, software, and training, and start digging into all of this new data. If you have any questions regarding our efforts, please contact Elissa Thorne at 610-377-4063 or Elissa@DelawareandLehigh.org.