paper,Farmers’ Register, in , Ruffin eagerly left his rural estate and
moved his large family to nearby Petersburg, Virginia.^15 There he thrived.
Erroneously thought of as cranky and confrontational, especially in his
later years, Edmund Ruffin was actually affectionate with his family and de-
voted to friends, and allowing for the long spells of privacy every reader and
writer requires, he relished company. Petersburg, on the Appomattox River
near its confluence with the James, was also an early rail center, and Ruf-
fin loved travel, too. Richmond was hardly twenty-five miles to the north,
and by way of connections in Portsmouth, by one could easily ride the
‘‘cars’’ (as trains were then called) down into North Carolina, then catch a
decent steamer to Charleston. Ruffin persisted in writing about the coun-
try, but he also long persisted as urban commuter and steadfast city man.
Petersburg had good printers and newspapers, a busy city center, a
waterfront, a rail depot, and much red brick architecture as well as the
usual wood. Notable among the former were magnificent warehouses, most
down near the river; a few survived Yankee mortars and cannon and all the
other ravishes to come. But Petersburg—also Richmond and every other
town and city Ruffin knew—was filthy, foul, unhealthful, and ironically,
he thought, wasteful of a potential resource everyone else called simply
waste. To illustrate: Browsing dogs, cats, and pigs deposited their urine and
fecal matter freely, as did horses and mules. Men relieved themselves in
vacant lots—a scene that offended Ruffin morally as well as civically. (Like
most Americans, perhaps, Ruffin would have been a Victorian without Vic-
toria.) Men and women emerged early each day from their domiciles to
empty chamber pots and buckets wherever they might. Stables accumu-
lated mountains of animal wastes until they were simply shoveled up and
dumped, as likely as not into wetlands and rivers.
Ruffin was astounded by these habits of inefficiency. All such offensive
discharges, secretions, and excretions, even offal and dead animals, should
be rendered neutral to the nose and useful in two ways, to both urban
and rural society. Marl, naturally—Ruffin’s calcareous panacea for worn-
out farmland—was the answer. Sprinkle it regularly in stables and on the
streets. Dig pits and erect privy enclosures on every corner, then have the
police and public health officials enforce strict ordinances against pub-
lic urination, defecation, and pot- and bucket-dumping anywhere but the
public privies. Cities must then regularly clean stables, scrape streets, and
empty privies. Marl would have reduced (if hardly eliminated) odor but
also preserved the value of wastes as fertilizer for the farms of every town’s
hinterland. Some accumulations (as in Petersburg, he suggested) might be