by Ben Swenson; published by Brandylane Publishers, Inc.; audiobook narrated by Brendan Edward Kennedy
You can buy Orphaned Heritage directly from Brandylane Publishers or the paperback copy, e-book or audiobook directly from Amazon or Barnes & Noble.
The spot where the most famous manhunt in United States history came to a bloody end languishes in the litter-strewn median of a four-lane highway. There are no physical traces left of the Garrett farmhouse, where John Wilkes Booth died, and few historic footprints to be found at all in this unlikely place, a common right-of-way. The Garrett place is one of scores of sites on the East Coast that society cast aside, places of historic value left to the natural world as orphans of the American landscape. Orphaned Heritage: The East Coast’s Disappearing History tells the story of the Atlantic seaboard’s historic castaways and explores what we can learn from the ruin.
Excerpt from Chapter 7, “Watts Island: The Wet Fate of a Chesapeake Hermitage”
Charles Hardenberg needed to get away. He had just finished an arduous and heartbreaking obligation: providing end-of-life care for his father. “I had to spend hours and days with him,” he said of the ordeal years later. “I had a lot of time to think. When it was all over, I was tired; tired of everything, of the way we live and of the cities.” It was 1908, and Hardenberg—a thirty-two-year-old Princeton-educated lawyer—took stock of his life. He was overworked and unhappy. Something had to change. A friend bet Hardenberg he couldn’t separate himself from society for a decade. Incredibly, Hardenberg was willing to give it a shot.
Hardenberg soon surrendered civilization for a couple sandy specks of land way out in the Chesapeake Bay. Watts Island, at about three hundred acres, and Little Watts Island, less than three, had a combined population of exactly one. A keeper tended the lighthouse on Little Watts, separated from its uninhabited bigger sibling by several hundred yards of water. An old, abandoned farmhouse stood on Watts, just north of Little Watts, and Hardenberg moved in there. Within a few years, however, even the lighthouse keeper left, and Hardenberg became the only human being for at least five miles in every direction. There he stayed for the better part of three decades—alone, away, content.
Like countless islanders before him, Hardenberg was spellbound by the mystique of living on a remote patch of land. Islands have long been immortalized in legend and literature. There is risk that goes along with living on an isolated speck, but that hasn’t stopped people from trying to tame them, especially in the Chesapeake Bay, the bosom of modern American civilization.
There are hundreds of islands in the bay and its tributaries, and humans have left a footprint on nearly all of them. Some of the traces people left behind are quirky and extraordinary, hatching harebrained schemes to strike it rich, and constructing hermitages where recluses lived out their days free from prying eyes. Most efforts at island life were far more mundane, organic communities that grew from their proximity to the water, small collections of the humble dwellings of farmers and fishermen.
No matter their history or motivations, islanders all had one thing in common: they always kept a wary eye on the sea. They winced when waves carried off a small part of the ground beneath them. Nature has a way of emphasizing that humans’ residences are temporary, that the dry ground they inhabit will one day exist no more. Hardenberg discovered this truth, and it tore at him. He vowed to live on his island kingdom until his last breath, but he watched the waves batter the shoreline, the tides get a little higher each day and he realized the Chesapeake Bay had other plans. This is the story of two tiny islands in the Chesapeake Bay, but in truth, it’s the story of all of them, an endless cycle of birth, death, love, and loss.
Excerpt from Chapter 8, “Anthracite Coal Towns: Communities Consumed by Undying Fire”
Late one Saturday evening in 1915, coal miners underneath the western slope of Wilkes-Barre Mountain in Pennsylvania were ready to call it a day. They looked forward to a Sunday off, an opportunity to recharge their overworked bodies. But their respite wouldn’t arrive without a final hiccup. A mine car had toppled over, a problem they needed to correct before heading out. A crewman hung his carbide lamp from one of the timbers that were framed at regular intervals to keep the roof from collapsing. By the dim glow of golden light, the team righted the unwieldy beast, their week’s labor finally complete. The men left the Red Ash coal mine. The lamp stayed behind. More than a century later, the ground is still on fire.
In what was once Laurel Run, Pennsylvania, scrubby hillsides vent gases made hundreds of feet below the surface. There, deep in the bowels of the Earth, smoldering seams of coal still burn. Through fissures in rocks on the surface, steady cushions of steam roll into open air. Several old vent pipes, like rusting candy canes buried nearly to the crook, pour heat that wrinkles the view behind them.
Those pipes are one of the few manmade signs that people have been here, taken stock of what resides far below, considered their options, and decided to let the inferno burn. They’re also a symbol of man’s feebleness against the forces of nature. The fire below draws humans to scale, paints us as a reckless and impulsive lot. An anomaly along Earth’s long timeline.
Our enduring love affair with coal has had unintended consequences, among them climate change and landscapes permanently altered to mine the rock beneath. Another effect that rarely garners notice beyond coal country are the numerous fires that smolder in the mines we abandoned. They will be burning long after our dependency on coal has come and gone.