Subsequent generations of descendents transformed the land the Puritans called a “howling wilderness.” By the early 1800s, centuries of European-style agriculture and settlement along the eastern seaboard had created a pastoral landscape. Significantly, people no longer automatically interpreted ‘natural’ landscapes as threatening or savage.

Many New Englanders actively sought out the wilderness. Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne and other, less famous tourists traveled to less-settled regions like the White Mountains, hoping to experience what one tourist called “the wild and wonderful operations of Nature.” In the same period, travelers lauded settled areas for their pastoral beauty and bucolic charm. One writer declared that “all the towns on the Connecticut River…are distinguished for the neatness of their dwellings, the elegance of their churches and meetinghouses, and the beauty of their rich and fertile landscapes.”

The Connecticut River Valley afforded many opportunities to view scenes of ‘natural’ and pastoral beauty. Orra White Hitchcock was a talented artist. She drew many of the more than 1200 illustrations for her husband’s publications in geology and archaeology. A prominent lithography company, Pendleton’s Lithography, printed many of Orra’s drawings, including this one of Mount Sugarloaf in Deerfield, Massachusetts. Her drawing reveals how generations of European settlement and land use had altered the landscape.