Abby Epplett, Historian

Yesterday — Thursday, March 21 at 7:00 p.m. — I watched the third installment of the 2024 season of Parked at Home featuring Amistad National Recreation Area in Texas with park archaeologist Jack Johnson. Park ranger Allison Horrocks of Blackstone River Valley National Historical Park started the webinar by explaining the migration of butterflies between New England and Texas, which takes four generations to complete. She compared this migration to “The Butterfly Effect”, a theory that small events can affect people around the world. In this way, the dam and mill in Pawtucket, RI built in 1793 started social changes and industrialization across the young United States.

On Wednesday, February 15, 2023, Yale Forest Forum (part of the Yale School of the Environment ) and Orion Magazine presented “A Tree’s View of History: A Conversation with Lacy M. Johnson” via Zoom webinar. Johnson is an experienced writer from the greater Houston area. In 2022, she published the book More City than Water: A Houston Flood Atlas with co-editor Cheryl Beckett of the University of Houston through University of Texas Press. More recently, she wrote the essay “The Brutal Legacy of the Longleaf Pine” for Orion , connecting longleaf pine farm to slavery in the United States. The notice of this talk, which I received via email from the Atlantic Black Box project , caught my attention immediately, since I know a lot about longleaf pines my time as a park ranger at Big Thicket National Preserve in Texas , where longleaf pines grow in abundance thanks to conservation efforts . The talk was moderated by Mary Evelyn Tucker , founder of the Yale Forum on Religion ...