Today, history in a trash bin. The University of
Houston's College of Engineering presents this
series about the machines that make our
civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity
created them.
Since waste removal is a
universal issue in our lives, anthropologists use
it to answer a question any historian inevitably
asks: "What was the texture of life in some other age? How did people spend their days in ancient Rome or in a medieval castle?"
Or, in this case,
"What was it like in antebellum Galveston?"
Inland Texas life was primitive, but Galveston was
a major port -- a window on a larger world,
possessed of some grace and elegance. Yet we gain
one of our best views of Galveston's wealthy from a
most unexpected part of a grand home called
Ashton Villa.
Ashton Villa is one of the few mansions that
survived the terrible 1900 hurricane. It was built
by James Brown, a wealthy businessman and
slaveholder before the Civil War. The home is very
well made, probably because he used the work of
slave craftsmen instead of manufactured
materièl.
Urban archaeologists Texas Anderson and Roger Moore
have extracted its story from an old privy, long
since covered over and forgotten. More than an
outhouse, this was also a general trash dump. This
huge hole in the ground, no longer septic, contains
layers of trash. They reveal the quality of life
from the 1850s all through the Victorian era.
Galveston rode out the Civil War better than most
of the South, and so did Brown. After the war, he
furnished the house with fine European porcelain.
His family ate inch-thick T-bone and porterhouse
steaks; they disdained chicken and pork. They used
elegant wines and cognacs, but not hard liquor. The
ladies imported French perfume and expensive facial
astringents. Brown's business involved selling new
technology to the American West. His mansion
displayed all the latest stuff: the first flush
toilets in Galveston -- the first electric lights.
Sifting through the century-old detritus, we begin
to sense the finery and feel of the place and to
know the actual people. We begin to understand the
combined tyranny and vision that Brown represented.
To say merely that Brown exploited slaves, or that
he brought technology to the West, is like trying
to know baseball only by reading sports-page
statistics.
The intimacy of an accurate look into the drawing
room, or the servants' quarters, is understanding
of a whole different order. And we gain that
understanding when we have the wits to look at it
through a trash heap. History is thus revealed
where history is made. History is found, not in the
drawing room, but in the lowest common denominators
of our existence. George Eliot captured that fact
wonderfully well when she wrote,
If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary
in human life, it would be like hearing the grass
grow or the squirrel's heart beat, and we should
die of that roar which is the other side of
silence.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
