386 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1951 



pie, emphasized the opposing dynamics of the North's industrialism. 

 Let the visiting stranger "pass into Virginia," wrote Alexander 

 Mackay in 1847, "and the transition is as great as is the change from 

 the activity of Lancashire, to the languor and inertness of Bavaria" 

 (Mackay, 1849, p. 67). In New England, the Western Railroad, 

 boldly conquering the barrier of the Berkshires, brought modern en- 

 gineering techniques and industrial commerce to the very backyards 

 of rural traditionalism. In Pennsylvania, Mennonite farmers lighted 

 their houses with the medieval-style lamps of their Palatine ancestors, 

 while a few miles away in Philadelphia the latest advances in house- 

 hold illumination were in daily use. At ever}' hand there were evi- 

 dences of two contrasting worlds. 



In artificial lighting, generally, this duality was as apparent as in 

 the larger picture. On the one hand were brilliant concentrations 

 of gas light in theaters and music halls and museums. There were 

 improved fuels and principles of combustion developed by scientific 

 experiment in learned institutions. In urban homes new inventions 

 made the household lamp a vivid contrast to its predecessors. On 

 the other hand were steadfast marks of enduring habit, which only 

 gradually were to yield to change and achievement. These were most 

 evident in those places where isolation, poverty, and ignorance com- 

 bined to exclude even the simplest improvements. On the frontier 

 and in cultural backwaters the means for artificial lighting were little 

 better than what had been available to aboriginal man. In some inr 

 stances, indeed, these primitive circumstances have survived until 

 recent times. There are persons living today who can recall seeing 

 kitchen fat used in a saucer, with a rag for a wick, in backward 

 sections of the country. Vance Randolph, in his study of the Ozarks, 

 stated as late as 1931 (p. 27) : "Not long ago, however, I visited a 

 home in which the only artificial light was a 'slut' — simply a dish full 

 of grease, with a twisted rag stuck in to serve as a wick." During 

 the years we are considering, the Ohio settlers used crude open lamps 

 of iron and pottery, and in parts of Alabama simple iron lamps were 

 in use that reportedly still continue their function today. 



This negative side of the characteristic duality of the period is 

 best illustrated in remote parts of the deep South. In 1853 and 1854 

 Frederick Law Olmsted traveled through that region and recorded 

 his impressions in valuable detail. Not even a "slut" was in evidence 

 in the Tennessee slave cabin that he observed on a comparatively 

 prosperous farm : 



The negro cabins were siuall, dilapidated and dingy, the walls were not chinked, 

 and there were no windows — which, indeed, would have been a superfluous 

 luxury, for there were spaces of several inches between the logs, through which 

 there was unobstructed vision. The furniture in the cabins was of the simplest 

 and rudest imaginable kind, two or three beds with dirty clothing upon them, a 



