The Iron Mine, Port Henry, New York

ELEANOR HARVEY: Around 1862, the landscape painter Homer Dodge Martin created this work of an iron mine near Port Henry, New York on the Hudson River. During the 1850s that ore was used to create the railroad lines now spanning the country, but during the 1860s during the war years the ore was diverted to the West Point foundry also on the Hudson River in order to forge the giant parrott guns which were so effectively used by the Union Army as their heavy artillery against the Confederacy.

What you see here it is an abandoned iron mine. There is no activity along the shore and the adits or the openings to the individual mine shafts now have rusted tailings stretching down to the shore of the river. Those rusted tailings and those added holes begin to take on the metaphorical meaning of bullet holes as though the landscape itself is one of the corpses similar to those seen in the battlefield photographs at Antietam, which Martin would have seen right about the time he painted this picture.

The idea of the landscape itself as the collateral damage of the war took on greater currency, particularly in the south, and particularly toward the end of the war when Sherman and Grant were laying waste to one city after another in their sieges and marches to bring the war to a close. For Martin, the idea that the landscape is a victim of the war along with those who fought on the battlefields was one of the layers of meaning prevalent in landscape painting during this time. The shock of seeing nature stripped raw and needing years for recovery cut to the heart of the ethos of the American landscape as a new Eden and as a symbolic predictor of America’s future. During the war years the landscape becomes one of the victims of the Civil War.