Fortress Monroe/Physiognomy of the Country
- Physiognomy of the Country.
The face of this county, Elizabeth City by name, is as flat as a Chinaman’s. I can hardly wonder that the people here have retrograded, or rather, not advanced. This dull flat would make anybody dull and flat. I am no longer surprised at John Tyler. He has had a bare blank brick house, entitled sweetly Margarita Cottage, or some such tender epithet, at Hampton, a mile and a half from the fort. A summer in this site would make any man a bore. And as something has done this favor for His Accidency, I am willing to attribute it to the influence of locality.
The country is flat; the soil is fine sifted loam running to dust, as the air of England runs to fog; the woods are dense and beautiful, and full of trees unknown to the parallel of New York; the roads are miserable cart-paths; the cattle are scalawags; so are the horses, not run away; so are the people; black and white, not run away; the crops are tolerable, where the invaders have not trampled them.
Altogether the whole concern strikes me as a failure. Captain John Smith & Co. might as well have stayed at home, if this is the result of the two hundred and thirty years’ occupation. Apparently the colonists picked out a poor spot; and the longer they stayed, the worse fist they made of it. Powhattan, Pocahontas, and the others without pantaloons and petticoats, were really more serviceable colonists.
The farm-houses are mostly miserably mean habitations. I don’t wonder the tenants were glad to make our arrival the excuse for running off. Here are men claiming to have been worth forty thousand dollars, half in biped property, half in all other kinds, and they lived in dens such as a drayman would have disdained and a hod-carrier only accepted on compulsion.