48 The Environmental Debate
Document 41: Rebecca Harding Davis on Smoke and Soot in a Mill Town (1861)
This fictional account of life in a mill town is an indictment of air pollution caused by the burning of coal as
well as the general squalor of the lives of poor immigrants.the yellow river,—clinging in a coating of greasy
soot to the house-front, the two faded pop-
lars, the faces of the passers-by. The long train
of mules, dragging masses of pig-iron through
the narrow street, have a foul vapor hanging to
their reeking sides. Here, inside, is a little bro-
ken figure of an angel pointing upward from the
mantel-shelf; but even its wings are covered with
smoke, clotted and black. Smoke everywhere! A
dirty canary chirps desolately in a cage beside
me. Its dream of green fields and sunshine is a
very old dream,—almost worn out, I think.Source: Rebecca Harding Davis, “Life in the Iron-Mills,”
Atlantic Monthly 7 (April 1861): 430.XXXVI. We recommend that measures be
adopted for preventing or mitigating the sani-
tary evils arising from foreign emigration....
XXXIX. We recommend that public bath-
ing-houses and wash-houses be established in all
cities and villages....
XL. We recommend that, whenever practi-
cable, the refuse and sewage of cities and towns
be collected, and applied to the purposes of agri-
culture....
XLI. We recommend that measures be taken
to prevent, as far as practicable, the smoke nui-
sance....
XLII. We recommend that the sanitary
effects of patent medicines and other nostrums,
and secret remedies, be observed; that physicians
in their prescriptions and names of medicines,
and apothecaries in their compounds, use great
caution and care; and that medical compounds
advertised for sale be avoided, unless the mate-
rial of which they are composed be known, or
unless manufactured and sold by a person of
known honesty and integrity....
XLIII. We recommend that local Boards of
Health, and others interested, endeavor to pre-
vent the sale and use of unwholesome, spurious,
and adulterated articles, dangerous to the public
health designed for food, drink, or medicine.Source: Lemuel Shattuck et al., Report of the Sanitary
Commission of Massachusetts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1948; facsimile of Report of a General
Plan for the Promotion of Public and Personal Health
[Boston: Dutton & Wentworth, 1850]), pp. 111, 115, 135,
153, 164, 166, 168, 171, 183, 200, 209, 212, 218, 220.A cloudy day: do you know what that is in a
town of iron-works? The sky sank down before
dawn, muddy, flat, immovable. The air is thick,
clammy with the breath of crowded human
beings. It stifles me. I open the window and, look-
ing out, can scarcely see through the rain the gro-
cer’s shop opposite, where a crowd of drunken
Irishmen are puffing Lynchburg tobacco in their
pipes. I can detect the scent through all the foul
smells ranging loose in the air.
The idiosyncrasy of this town is smoke. It
rolls sullenly in slow folds from the great chim-
neys of the iron-foundries, and settles down in
black, slimy pools on the muddy streets. Smoke
on the wharves, smoke on the dingy boats, on