Pre-Colonial Forging, Post-Industrial Foraging: Seeking Stories of Production on the Seekonk
By Ellie Madsen
Illustrations by Eliza Goodwin
I am walking down a set of railroad tracks in the industrial wasteland of East Providence and, in spite of my armor of an umbrella and coat, I am wet. The gloom of the hazy sky pairs perfectly with the barren landscape of browns and grays. Lining the tracks to the left is a chain-link fence, and through that fence, a road of clay. The only thing that signifies it’s a road, really, is the imprint of tire tracks pooling with water. I approach the single human-sized hole in the fence and duck through it, following the muddy path to Phillipsdale Landing. I’m here on a mission, foraging the site for objects to complete an assignment for a Landscape Architecture class.
Occupying twelve acres of land on the east bank of the Seekonk river, Phillipsdale Landing has held a number of names in the past two centuries: Washburn Wire, American Electrical Works, Rhode Island Forging Steel, Ocean State Steel. Since 1883, the land has been passed from settler to settler, corporation to corporation. It housed a paper company, then a wire company, another wire company, then a wire and cable company, and most recently, a steel forgery. None of these remain today. The factories were demolished in 2004 in preparation for the development of a housing complex that never got built.
1959
2014
Today, the terrain of Phillipsdale Landing is best described as a post-capitalist ruin, a post-industrial wasteland. The ground is a patchwork of gravel, dirt, grasses, slag, and asphalt. Orange spray-painted cloth peeks up from layers of the earth, marking the areas where the soil was so contaminated it had to be excavated and capped. Blocks of concrete exhibit red and blue graffiti tags, the only splashes of color among the drear. Rusted pipes jut out from the ground at odd angles.
Scattered over the earth are an assembly of items that can objectively be referred to as junk. As I walk through the site I find myself on a treasure hunt in a maze of litter, searching for enchantment among the constellation of trash. They are the memorabilia left by locals, fast food packaging tossed aside, the mitten that slips through a hole in your jacket. They are:
A pink lighter
A cheetah-print slipper
A blue lighter
A fishing bobber
Miniature shot bottles of liquor
Unidentifiable fragments of rusted steel
A red glove
An empty package of rolling papers, two cigarillos on the front like a pair of smokestacks
A pacifier
Styrofoam chunks
A green circuit board in a plastic casing
More liquor bottles
Some items are testament to the land’s prior function as a forgery: pieces of steel, copper wire, aluminum tags. Others serve as a reminder of human presence on the seemingly-barren property: a red pair of sneakers, plastic jugs, an empty cigarette box. None of the items point to the Wampanoag or Narragansett people’s history here. That’s been long erased.
As I navigate the uneven ground of concrete and slag, I can’t help but think how different this land once looked.
Let’s imagine.
Sweet fern, aster, puffballs, goldenrod, cedar, mullen. Ospreys circled overhead. Quahogs lined the banks. The estuary where the freshwater Blackstone river meets the saltwater Seekonk river was a petri dish for aquatic life: fish, crab, shellfish, and vegetation. Plants thrived in the marshy conditions near the shore, where the tide soaked them in sustenance twice daily. The Narragansett tribe lived near the bay for a reason: the water provided the abundant resources on which they thrived. “Water is life” may be a cliche among modern environmentalists, but to the Narragansett peoples it is a sacred truth. They relied on the water for fishing, shellfishing, hunting, gathering, and growing crops, and used its waterways for travel and trade.
Not unlike the factories and plants located on this land in the twentieth century, the Narragansett molded local resources into the objects that supported their everyday life. Yet in stark contrast to today’s global economy, the Narragansett’s cycles of production were local and self-contained. By working alongside the land instead of manipulating it to work for them, the tribe was able to produce everything they needed to thrive—canoes, crops, weapons, wampum—using regional resources.
Material traces of this history of production and consumption don’t scar the surrounding landscape, but if you look deeper you’ll certainly find them. Less than a mile south of the Phillipsdale Landing site is Walker’s Point, which contains the earliest evidence of human occupation in Rhode Island: a pit and hearth, lithic workshop, quartz biface, and shell midden that dates back from 7,000 to 1,400 years ago. Less than ten miles west of Phillipsdale is the Ochee Spring Quarry, where soapstone bowls and pipes from around 3,000 years ago were found. Other items used for cooking and storing food that were made at this quarry have also been found across New England.
Soapstone Quarry in Johnston, Rhode Island.
Image courtesy of the Rhode Island Historical Preservation and Heritage Commission
Continuing my walk north along the bank of the Seekonk leads me to a long-abandoned barge. Half its sheet metal surface is peeled back, revealing the trusses that support its rusting frame from below. The barge once served as a loading dock for the material inputs and outputs of Washburn Wire, American Electrical Works, and Rhode Island Forging Steel. Markedly distinct from the Narragansett’s local cycle of production, these industrial factories were cogs in a global economy. Their inputs were sourced from oceans away, delivered up the Seekonk by ship and unloaded at the barge. And after being forged and assembled, the products were again shipped off by train along the same railroad tracks I crossed when entering the site.
The modern increase in distance between each stage of an object’s lifecycle, the thousands of miles that separate its production and consumption, is an effect of the increasing fragmentation of supply chains. The drive to increase productivity caused a massive scaling-up of manufacturing processes, and thus the hyper-specialization of both laborers and landscapes. Whereas the land along the Seekonk river was once a biodiverse marsh that hosted the variety of life forms necessary to support a self-sustaining environment, the imperialist push for Western agricultural techniques in the 18th century turned the rich landscape into a homogenous monoculture of grazing land for cattle.
Below is a painting by George W. Whitaker that depicts the marshes of East Providence in 1896, next to a photo I took of the same land in April 2022.
The difference between capitalist and anti-capitalist methods of production is often conceptualized through constructed binaries of traditional/modern, analog/technological, primitive/advanced. But onto what do these opposing paradigms assign value? Another set of dualisms: stewardship/ownership, community/individual, sustenance/growth.
As the Nagaransett peoples stewarded the land, they too altered their landscapes. Yet as Lorén Spears, two-term councilwoman of the Narragansett Tribe, explains, “Changes that were made by the Native Americans were much more in harmony with the environment than those made by the Europeans. Even in the case of our middens (trash piles), the materials there were left behind, but they were materials that would eventually return to the earth. The reason why you can’t find a 3,000-year-old basket from our people is because it was made from the earth, and eventually it returns to the earth.”
The pink lighter I found on Phillipsdale Landing won’t return to the earth. Nor will the blue lighter. Nor the cheetah-print slipper, the heineken can, or the deflated car tire. Certainly not the circuit board.
Foraging the remains of a demolished steel forgery, I can’t help but play with these words in my mind. Forage, forge. Forage. Forge. They appear to be complete opposites, yet in a different light they are exactly the same.
Forge: to make or shape.
Forage: to search, to obtain.
The word connecting them both, I believe, is assemble. To forage is to assemble is to forge, and vice versa.
As industrial modes of production continue to dominate the global economy, our understanding of forging is defined by and limited to strictly capitalist terms: modern, technological, advanced. Yet forging exists far beyond this imperial tunnel vision. In addition to the forging that took place within the 20th-century steel processing factories, Phillipsdale Landing has supplied the resources the Narragansett peoples forged into objects and tools, and harbored the forging of biological processes that build an ecosystem.
On the other hand, the promise of infinite production and growth that capitalism is predicated on leads us to conceptualize foraging through pre-colonial terms: traditional, analog, primitive. Yet Lorén Spears explains that many Narragansett Elders don’t like the term ‘traditional knowledge.’ Their knowledge is not traditional, which implies obsolescence; it is simply knowledge. Among the ruins of unsustainable forging, practicing foraging is not a reenactment of the past, but a way of moving forward. Similarly, the Narragansett are not a people of the past. Despite their absence from the land they stewarded for centuries, a result of forced removal to a reservation 38 miles south of the Seekonk river, they continue to adapt to and shape ever-changing cultures and climates across Rhode Island.
Rain slowly gathers in an upturned solo cup. It’s flirting with me: dying down to a mist until I shut my umbrella, then picking back up to a pour. I walk inland from the river, up a short sandy hill. The sand is an indication of human interference: it marks one of the most toxic places on the site, where the soil was so contaminated that it was removed and replaced with sand. Reaching the top of the hill, I see more rock, more slag, more sand, and among them—miraculously—patches of vibrant green moss and white puffball mushrooms. Some bear the marks of orange spray paint, serving as an analogy for their place among human interference. In the wake of disaster—deforestation, fire, demolition—mosses are typically the first form of vegetation to spring up. They aid the soil’s health and retain water, allowing for other plants to grow and ultimately develop an ecosystem. Mushrooms, too, thrive on disturbance. I pluck one from the ground. When I touch its cap it caves in, releasing a visible puff of yellow spores. Finding delight in this, I repeat it on a handful of neighboring mushrooms before carefully storing them away in my tote bag.
While the damage done to this patch of land is certainly irreversible, I can’t miss the glimpses of renewal. The cycle of the ecosystem perseveres to the beat of the river’s tides gently lapping its shore. Among cancerous fields of invasive species, native plants continue their lineage. Moss grows in the folds of orange fabric ground cover. A fragile stem sprouts from a graffitied block of concrete. Two ospreys circle the patchy collage of asphalt and brush from overhead.
These post-industrial processes of renewal seem to defy entropy. From dirt is born moss; from moss grows plant life; from plants sustain birds. Is this not the process of order establishing itself over chaos? Is this not a net reduction of messiness?
Thousands of years ago, before today’s factories, even before the Narragansett villages, the land was still a hub of production. The lifecycle of an ecosystem necessarily involves bringing objects into existence. Compounds assemble to create organisms anew; life forms amass to form symbioses. The supply chain is to coal as the food chain is to the sun. After all, a tree and a factory are both plants. Yet the agents of nature’s production, in addition to its inputs and outputs, were markedly different from that of industrialism. Forget your 20th century blacksmith: what a craftsperson is a mushroom! Transforming organic matter into usable nutrients is the embodiment of production: a manufacturer’s pipe dream. And to label this decomposition, the end of the food chain. What is it but composition, the beginning?
After arriving back home and peeling off my raincoat, I untangle the mass of objects I’ve foraged from my tote bag and lay them out on my kitchen table. There is a mason jar of clay, three yellow snail shells, a fishing bobber, pieces of moss, a steel washer, a dried pea pod. I find myself arranging the objects, not necessarily in a hierarchy, but certainly in an order. Mushrooms and shells and clay gravitate toward the bottom right corner of the table, opposite from a chipped pink lighter and metallic cigar wrapper.
Further troubling the common placement of foraging within the sphere of ‘traditional’, Māori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith notes the many ways in which collecting—or, more accurately, stealing—objects from indigenous peoples worked to commodify their property as Western knowledge, especially through false narratives of “inevitable historical decay or loss.” Yet, she writes, “colonialism was not just about collection. It was about re-arrangement, re-presentation and re-distribution.”
As usual, I’m left with more questions than answers. As I lay out my collection on my kitchen table, am I arranging the objects, or merely rearranging them? Who do these artifacts belong to? How can we apply situated indigenous knowledge to our current time and place, tangled as it is in colonialism? What does it mean to forage a post-capitalist wasteland? How does one’s experience moving across a landscape differ across climate change, across genocide? How do the objects I forage tell this story?