Entwined: Botany, Art and the Lost Cat Swamp Habitat

Together for the first time: original paintings of Cat Swamp plants by Edward Peckham from the Rhode Island Historical Society, and corresponding specimens from the Brown University Herbarium, collected by William Bailey and others. The exhibit showcases the rich history of art and science in Providence and we hope it provokes you to consider the consequences of environmental change on local biodiversity.

Throughout the 19th century, the marshy swamps of the East Side of Providence remained a rural hinterland, even as the slopes on either side of downtown Providence were being developed. The wetland area known as Cat Swamp, bounded today by Freeman Parkway, Everett Street, Elmgrove Avenue and Arlington Street, was considered too expensive to develop until 1915 when civil engineer John Freeman filled and began building in this area.

The Brown University Herbarium

The Brown University Herbarium houses approximately 100,000 specimens of plants, fungi, algae, mosses and lichens from North America and beyond. The Herbarium began with specimen donations from Stephen Thayer Olney (local businessman), William Whitman Bailey (first professor of botany at Brown) and James Lawrence Bennett (first herbarium curator at Brown), who gave their collections to the University. From this foundation, a historically important collection has grown.

The Rhode Island Historical Society

The collections of the Rhode Island Historical Society, founded in 1822, include 25,000 museum objects, over 100,000 printed books, 110,000 photographs, 9 million feet of moving picture film, 1,000+ manuscript collections, 3,400 maps, 20,000 prints, 15,000 architectural drawings, and much more. These collections grow every year, due to gifts and purchases.

People

Professor William Whitman Bailey in the late 1800s and early 1900s collected plant specimens in and around Cat Swamp, as did other Brown faculty and students. As a result of their efforts, Brown’s herbarium contains over 500 specimens from Cat Swamp, representing around 280 plant species. Following drainage and development, almost none of these species still grow in the area formerly occupied by Cat Swamp.

Cat Swamp’s proximity to the creative energy of Providence also meant it was a source of artistic inspiration. One representative example is the work of Edward Lewis Peckham, who painted Rhode Island landscapes, Providence streetscapes and studies of New England plants, many from Cat Swamp.

Edward Lewis Peckham (1812–1889)

Edward Peckham was a remarkable artist. His early paintings, dating back to around 1829, are near-photographic depictions of streetscapes and seascapes of Fox Point and upper Narragansett Bay. He painted at least one of them while looking south from the top floor of his family’s house on the corner of Benefit and Arnold streets.

Peckham was also interested in natural history and, with a small group of aspiring botanists, he explored and recorded plants across Rhode Island. “A more varied flora in the same area cannot be found elsewhere in the country,” wrote his nephew, Stephen Farnum Peckham, who went on to say: “His companions all became noted botanists, and gathered large herbaria of dried plants. He, knowing less of botany, painted in watercolors, during a period of forty years, five hundred New England plants.”

William Whitman Bailey

Bailey was originally from New York. He moved to Providence to live with his uncle after his parents and siblings died tragically in a riverboat fire. He attended Brown as an undergraduate but did not finish his degree. Instead, he completed his studies with Asa Gray, Harvard University’s preeminent botanist. Through his connection with Gray, he was appointed botanist for the US Geological Exploration of the 40th parallel in 1867. Sadly for Bailey, he had to leave the expedition because of poor health. This was however a lucky break for Brown University because, in 1877, Bailey returned to campus to develop the herbarium; in 1880 he was named the first professor of botany at Brown. Later, he was named the first Stephen Thayer Olney professor of natural history, an endowed faculty chair funded through a donation from Olney.

This exhibit focuses on Peckham’s botanical watercolors of Cat Swamp plants from the Rhode Island Historical Society archives and associated plant specimens from the Brown University Herbarium. As Peckham’s nephew described,

At the time of the sketches, most of the region east of Thayer Street was embraced by Governor Fenner’s Farm, while the recent construction of the Asylum wall enclosed the buildings and grounds of Dexter Asylum like a fortress. East of the Asylum wall was the farm of Moses Brown, with the woods of Cat Swamp to the north.

With the help of these natural history treasures, we can imagine a lost habitat that was a familiar hunting ground for scientists and artists in the 19th century.

 

Quotes by Stephen Farnum Peckham from The Journal of American History Vol. VI 1912, No. 4, 4th quarter.