Tuesday, October 22, 2024

Appreciating and Repairing the Stone Horserun at Veblen House


When I tell visitors that the big circle of stones near the Veblen House was a horserun, people frequently say "But it's too small." They just can't imagine a horse running in such a tight circle. Not knowing much about horses, I could only say I'd remembered reading it in an old newspaper article. That article, which I just reread, appeared in the March 17, 1985 Trenton Times. It was a feature on Max Latterman, who by then had served as caretaker of the Veblen House, Cottage and grounds for nearly 60 years. Back in 1927, when the property was probably already owned by Jesse and Mary Whiton-Stuart, Max was told to "build an exercise ring out of rocks for the owners' 22 horses." 

If a news article isn't convincing enough, I can now point to a new source of corroboration. The Cowboy and the Queen is a recently released documentary about a horse trainer in California who developed a non-violent way to train horses. Rejecting the brutal methods traditionally used to break a horse, he studied how mustangs communicate in the wild. The film shows him in a circle much the same size as our horserun, demonstrating how he could saddle an untrained horse in half an hour by using little more than body language. He replaces violence with compassion, trust, and respect. Few adopted his methods until Queen Elizabeth took an interest and transformed his life. My heart was in my throat through the whole film. 

The horses were gone by the time the Veblens bought the house from the Whiton-Stuarts in 1941, but the wall remains. (This photo was likely taken by Veblen in the 1950s.)
Much of the wall is still in good shape -- a testament to Max Latterman's skill and strength.
But a few areas have collapsed, perhaps disturbed in past years as we freed the wall from smothering wisteria vines. Recently, one of the participants in the weekly Gratitude yoga sessions, Artem Grebennik, approached me, offering his services to repair the wall. He had studied with a master wall builder in California, Skip Schuckman.
By the time we gave approval, he was about to return to California, but he came for one day to test the concept that one man could move such heavy stones into position. He explained the logic of the wall, with two rows of big stones running along the top edges,  firmly keeping the stones below in place. The big stones lining the top are in turn held in place by smaller filler stones in the interior of the wall. 

Artem, who goes by the name Tyoma, was surprised at how heavy and dense the stones are, but the result of his day's work was impressive. One more positive step for the Veblen House grounds.

"Super-Stabilization" of Veblen House Complete

Thanks to donations large and small, and a good deal of coordination, the Friends of Herrontown Woods has completed what could be called a "super-stabilization" of Veblen House. I call it super-stabilization because the house has always been a sturdy and stable structure, even back when those wishing to demolish it were alleging otherwise. 

Still, there was some buttressing of the foundation to do, and so our architects drew up detailed plans, and we were fortunate to find a mason and carpenters to do the work.
A desire to hold public events in the house required adding girders in the basement. These, too, were designed by our architects with input from a structural engineer and much internal discussion to get it right. Volunteers have since spread a plastic liner over the crawlspace dirt, to reduce humidity.  
We also moved the basement stairway to better utilize space on the first floor.
Though the basement doesn't flood, even in heavy rains, the hot, humid summer air was still getting in through various openings, causing condensation on the new girders. Fortunately, carpenter Robb Geores has returned to install basement windows. 
With new windows and tightly sealing vents, we now can control when and if outside air enters the basement. 

Thanks to our supporters, mason Jerry Ganz, carpenters Chris Farr and Robb Geores, architects Ahmed Azmy and Sigmund Lerner, and volunteers Scott Sillars and Robert Chong. 

 

Tuesday, October 8, 2024

Who was Richard J. Kramer?

In 1966, two plant ecologists arrived independently in Princeton. One, Henry Horn, joined the faculty at Princeton University and would conduct much of his research at the Institute Woods. The other, Richard J. Kramer, was a Rutgers grad student who wrote his dissertation on Herrontown Woods while serving as the preserve's first naturalist. In this way, the work that Oswald and Elizabeth Veblen did in the 1930s and 40s to preserve land for Herrontown Woods and the Institute for Advanced Study set the stage for the first in-depth studies of local plant ecology in Princeton some 30 years later. 

Kramer's dissertation was later turned into a book published and distributed locally, and it was that book that prompted me to research his life and times.

Below is an account of how, after many false starts, I was finally able to learn of Richard J. Kramer's life, how he played a central role in making Herrontown Woods the go-to place to learn about nature in Mercer County in the 1960s, and later played an important role in organizing the professional side of environmentalism, as a founding member of the National Association of Environmental Professionals. There's even a Dr. Richard J. Kramer, CEP, Memorial Award for Environmental Excellence awarded to "recognize extraordinary achievements of individuals in the environmental profession."

There's been way too much mystery about the man who wrote the 1971 book Herrontown Woods: A Guide to a Natural Preserve. True, the names Richard and Kramer are common, making it harder to google the name, but how many botany PhD's out of Rutgers named Richard J. Kramer could there be? The book itself devotes only one sentence to Dr. Kramer, divulging only that he "served for two summers as Herrontown Woods park naturalist." That would have been in the mid-1960s, when Kramer was doing the field work for his dissertation about Herrontown Woods. Only ten years earlier, in 1957, had the Veblens donated Herrontown Woods as Mercer County's first nature preserve.

Somewhere on the internet back in 2016, I found the following about Kramer, which has proved less than completely accurate:
"A native of Fairmont. Minn., he is a graduate of St. John's University in Maryland, and holds an M.S. in plant ecology from Arizona State University, where he also received a graduate teaching assistantship. Mr. Kramer has worked for the U.S. Forest Service, and spent two years in the Army as a second lieutenant."
Those with a keen eye will note that there is no St. John's University in Maryland, but rather St. John's College,  renowned since the 1930s for its Great Books program in liberal arts. Its Maryland campus is squeezed onto 36 acres in an urban setting.

Undergraduate Training at SJU in Minnnesota

It took our genealogist, Patricia Brady, who teaches at Rutgers. to confirm that a young Richard Kramer spent his college years at St. John's University in Minnesota, known for its expansive, verdant campus--a far more fitting and inspirational setting for a future botanist. The University's website describes a campus essentially surrounded by a nature preserve: 
"set amid 3.300 acres of varied terrain ... remarkable in its natural beauty. It includes wetlands, several lakes, an oak savanna, a restored prairie, and hiking trails that wind through an extensive pine and hardwood forest."
According to our genealogist's research, our future author of Herrontown Woods was born May 27, 1938 in Martin, MN--an unincorporated town in the Chippewa National Forest. Not far away is Lake Itasca, where the Mississippi River is said to begin. He was the son of John Kramer and Genevieve Devine, and had two brothers, Thomas and Edward. Richard appears to have grown accustomed from an early age to being surrounded by greenspace, from childhood through college, then later when he gravitated to Herrontown Woods to do his PhD. 

Our genealogist also made the brilliant suggestion to contact the university for more about his time there. Many thanks to Liz Knuth, Archives Associate at the library for St. John's University in Minnesota, for her generous sharing of the following photos and other gleanings from the University's archives. The registrar and alumni offices also helped out with some info. 

Here's Dick Kramer as a freshman at Minnesota's SJU in 1956. I chose this photo because he looks very much like the young man his wife would later tell me was "really affable, very friendly." Throughout his life, he seems to have been someone equally at ease in the solitude of the woods and in the company of people. Other photos in the university's yearbook, the "Sagatagan," show him standing in coat and tie or uniform with other young men in the Biological Society, the ROTC Distinguished Military Students, the Sanctuary Club, the Social Recreation Club, and sitting with a trombone in the University Band. 

SJU in Minnesota (there's another St. John's University in NY) has a strong Catholic underpinning. Here's Kramer (above in the photo) standing in surplice and cassock in the Sanctuary Club.

The description of the Social Recreation Club's activities conveys something of 1950s America. That's Richard in the upper left of the photo. 

Kramer earned a B.A. in biology from SJU in 1960, the dawn of a momentous decade, with John F. Kennedy running for president, the civil rights movement gaining momentum, and Cold War tensions building. Environmentalism was also on the rise, but the first Earthday was still ten years off.

1960 also happens to be the year Oswald Veblen died. There are a few parallels between Richard Kramer's life and Veblen's. Both came from families with Minnesota roots. In what may seem a surprising aspect for environmentalists, both received military training in midwestern universities and served stints in the military later on. Of Kramer, SJU's Liz Knuth wrote, "Two years of Military Science were obligatory at that time, but not everyone stuck it out all four years." In his military studies, he might have learned of Veblen's leading role in advancing ballistics during the World Wars.
Masters Degree in Arizona

After receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree from verdant St John's U, he headed to the Arizona desert to work on a Masters of Science degree from Arizona State University. Why Arizona? Here, we pick up the story as told by Richard's wife, Patricia Cahill Kramer, who I was able to reach thanks to some sleuthing by Herrontown Woods' mapmaker from Maine, Alison Carver. 

By Patricia Cahill's telling, Richard had been ROTC in college and was given a pass to get a masters degree before he went into the military. He went to Arizona State to follow Dr. Robert Lewis Burgess, who had been a student of John T. Curtis at U. of Wisconsin in Madison. Curtis is particularly known for his lasting contribution to the development of numerical methods in ecology. Kramer would later apply numerical methods to his research at Herrontown Woods. For his masters, Richard did his study on the saguaro cactus.

Military Service and Plant Collecting in Korea

After completing his masters degree, Richard went into the military. Serving in the army in Korea, he was active duty but at that point they were just on the border, and he was the quarter master. A quarter master manages supplies and logistics--everything from food to the movies the troops would get to watch. The job sounded related to the organizing Kramer had done in college as a member of the Social Recreation Club. Military life didn't blunt Richard's interest in plants. He got permission from the National Herbarium in DC to bring plant specimens back. He spent time traveling around Korea, drying plant specimens, and when he came back he gave the plants to the herbarium. 

PhD Work at Rutgers

After two years' service in Korea, he returned to the States and lived in Philadelphia for awhile. He went from active duty into the reserves. Though he would later retire from the military as a Captain, he was still in the reserves when he moved to Rutgers to work on his PhD. 

A clue to how Kramer ended up at Rutgers for his PhD can be found in the Herrontown Woods book's acknowledgements. The book was edited by Professor Murray F. Buell, Department of Botany. Among Buell's many contributions to ecology was his role as director of the William L. Hutcheson Forest. According to a biography on the Ecological Society of America's website, "He devoted great effort in setting aside this forest and in making it into a major ecological study area and one of the best studied woods in North America." Some of Buell's areas of interest seem particularly applicable for Herrontown Woods: the impact of people on park ecosystems, the ecology of power line right of ways, and "tension zones" between vegetation types. As someone who learned of fire ecology in the 1970s, I was also intrigued by Buell's research decades earlier into the effect of fire use on forests and hydrology.

Kramer likely first came under the influence of Buell close to his hometown in Minnesota. According to the Buell biography: 
(Buell's) "life touched many hundreds of North American ecologists through the Rutgers Ecology Seminar that he initiated and sponsored. In the many summers he taught at the University of Minnesota's Lake Itasca Biological Station, he recognized exceptionally promising young students. Often the fortunate person was hired as an assistant, transported across the country in his car, fed chicken dinners and given a thorough introduction to life as a field ecologist."
Meeting His Wife
Rutgers is where Richard met his wife to be, Patricia Cahill. In her own words: 

"While he was working on his PhD, he ran into me. It's a funny story. I was working in my neighbor's restaurant before starting college, to get some money together. So I was waitressing. I wasn't the best waitress in the world, so I had to watch my P's and Q's because the other waitresses were career waitresses. So I was really, "What do you want?", and not taking much notice of or remembering who came in at that point. Richard wrote a note to me one time on the back of a receipt. It wasn't the first time this had happened. So I went to the back and I said you won't believe this, I got another request to make a date or get to know, that sort of thing. George, my neighbor, said "this guy waits for your tables." I said I couldn't believe that, that somebody waits for my tables. And he said, "You really should go out with him. He's really nice. He's in the reserves." The reserve unit was doing their reserve duty right close by and that's why some of them came in at different times to eat at the restaurant. And that's how we met."

Richard's PhD work at Rutgers was in plant ecology, which Patricia described as "the overall relationship of different plants to each other, the ecology of the soil, weather, and land use."

Richard Comes to Princeton to Study Herrontown Woods

On one of their first dates, he took her to Herrontown Woods, to show her what he was working on. She said he would point out jack-in-the-pulpit and things like that. She was a history major, but the second summer, she helped him in the trailer. He dried plants of all the different species. With special ink she wrote the plant names on the folder. Those specimens are preserved at Rutgers' Chrysler Herbarium.

Kramer's time in Princeton coincided with what ecologist Stephen Pacala has called the "heroic age" of ecology at Princeton University. Henry Horn, an ecologist who would share his knowledge with the community during many nature walks over the years, joined the Princeton faculty in 1966 "amid a wave of interest in evolution and ecology in the then-Department of Biology." 

National interest in the environment was on the rise, spurred by images of flagrant industrial pollution. Rachel Carson's book, Silent Spring, was first published in 1962, calling into question the postwar chemical revolution. As a kid in the 1960s, I remember holding Kleenex over my nose as my parents drove from Chicago through Gary, Indiana, where sulphurous clouds of pollution from steel plants would drift across the highway, turning the skies different shades of yellow, orange, and purple in the middle of the day. Another time, as our 707 jet descended into Los Angeles, the smell of L.A.'s notorious smog permeated the cabin. At home in small town Wisconsin, the woods behind our house was periodically sprayed with a fog probably laden with DDT. The Cuyahoga River in Cleveland was so polluted it caught fire in 1969. Unlike our current relentless spewing of invisible, odorless carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the chemical assault on nature back then also registered as a visceral assault on our senses, generating powerful images on the evening news and repugnant odors in daily life that ultimately drove political action. Subsequent regulation spawned a new field of environmental professionals trained to measure pollutants and assess their impact. Though he started out as a plant ecologist, Richard would later have a big impact in developing the environmental profession.

Richard's graduate study of Herrontown Woods was funded in part by a Sarah Barringer Hart Fellowship, awarded in April, 1965, that paid him to be the resident naturalist at Herrontown Woods for a few summers.

Today, this being 2024, Herrontown Woods is 150 acres, plus 80 acres at Autumn Hill Reservation, all owned by Princeton and maintained by the Friends of Herrontown Woods. Back in the mid-60s, it was much smaller but, as the only nature preserve in Mercer County at the time, served as an incubator for environmental education in the county. Taken from Town Topics articles, here's what the scene was like back then, when Elizabeth Veblen was still alive and living next to the preserve in Veblen House, (and women still went by their husbands' first and last names):

Herrontown Woods contains some 80 acres maintained as a natural preserve in the northeast section of Princeton Township, and was given to Mercer County by the late Prof. Oswald Veblen and Mrs. Veblen. It is administered by the Mercer County Park Commission and a citizens development committee, appointed by the commission. Members of the committee are Mrs. Gordon Knox, chairman; Mrs. Alan Carrick, H. Russell Butler Jr.. Carl Breuer, Richard Thorsell and James Sayen. 
By November of 1966, a self-guided tour of Herrontown Woods had been developed.
PARK GUIDE OFFERED
Explorers of the Herrontown Woods Arboretum will be able to observe and interpret natural changes in the woodland with the help of a new guide booklet available without charge at the parking area off Snowden Lane. The explanatory material is keyed to markers along the park's trails. The guide was; sponsored by the Citizens Development Committee and prepared by Richard Kramer of the Rutgers Botany Department. 

A June 22, 1967 Town Topics article underscores how central Herrontown Woods was to environmental education in Mercer County. After a month of hosting school groups from around the county, Richard spent July and August leading nine nature walks per week for the general public.

A WALK IN THE WOODS

Summer Program Offered. Guided walks describing the summer life of a forest will be conducted in HerrontownWoods starting next Tuesday. The walks will be held every day, Tuesday through Friday, at 9 a.m. and 3 p.m., and on alternate Saturdays beginning July 1. Groups of more than 10 must call the Chamber of Commerce office, 921-7676, for reservations. Dr. Richard Kramer of Rutgers, will lead each of the walks. Dr. Kramer is completing his study of Herrontown Woods under Sarah Barringer Hart Fellowship. Subjects covered on the walks are plant and bird identification, predator and prey relationships, soil and water consrervation and stream and woodland ecology. During the past month, guided walks in Herrontown have been the exclusive province of school children in Mercer County. More than 600 children and their teachers visited the woods during this period.

In the mid-1960s, computers were just starting to come into widespread use in research. According to his wife, Richard collaborated back then with a grad student in computer science to collect and analyze data. They divided Herrontown Woods into quadrants and documented what plants grew in which quadrant. That data then had to be transferred to a computer, which back then was a very tedious process. Though some businesses had moved on to magnetic tape, the Rutgers grad students were still using computer cards. The product of his research took the form of a dissertation entitled, The biotic and abiotic influences on, and delimitation of, the plant associations in Herrontown Woods, Mercer County, New Jersey.

An aside: As often happens in my research of Herrontown Woods' history, it has turned out that Richard Kramer's world had many parallels with my own. Like Kramer, I grew up surrounded by natural splendor in the midwest before moving to Princeton. In my 20s, I spent a few months living in a tipi near Black Duck, MN, an hour away from where he grew up. Kramer's botanical mentor, Murray Buell, had a close professional partnership with his wife Helen Foot Buell. Similarly, my botanical mentor at the University of Michigan, Warren (Herb) Wagner, worked closely with his wife, Flora Wagner, whom I remember sitting in the room across the hall from his office, peering into a microscope. Many times I accompanied Wagner on his field trips in search of Botrychium ferns and butterflies. Like Kramer's two year tenure, it was my botanical interest that led me to Herrontown Woods, some 40 years later. I also date back to that early era of computers, having helped my father prepare his astronomical data for analysis in the room-sized computer in the attic at Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin. Each data point had to be typed onto a punch card about the size of an airline boarding pass. The cards were then carefully stacked and fed into the computer. 

1968 was a big year for Richard J. Kramer. He finished his dissertation at Rutgers, married Patricia Ann Cahill of Highland Park, NJ, and moved to Mary Baldwin College in Stanton, Virginia to teach and start a family. 

In a subsequent post, I'll describe what turned into Richard's influential environmental career, during which he wrote many environmental impact statements across the country and co-founded the National Association of Environmental Professionals. 

Not only did Herrontown Woods provide the setting from which Richard J. Kramer's career could grow, but Oswald Veblen's role in early computer development (described here and here) helped make computers available for Kramer to do his research. In this quiet way, Oswald Veblen's influence can be traced far and wide.

In similar fashion to the prestigious Veblen Prize in Geometry that is given out every three years, there is a "Kramer Medal for Environmental Practice Excellence," overseen by the Academy of Board Certified Environmental Professionals (ABCEP). According to the website:
The Dr. Richard J. Kramer, CEP, Memorial Award for Environmental Excellence was established by the ABCEP to recognize extraordinary achievements of individuals in the environmental profession.


Thanks to everyone mentioned above who helped me finally learn about the life of Richard J. Kramer and his profound influence, not only on Princeton in the 1960s but also nationally in his efforts to nurture the environmental profession in the decades that followed. 

The "J", by the way, stands for John. Of the many people who have given their time and talent to studying and rehabilitating the Veblens' legacy of land and buildings, some make such special contributions that they seem like "angels in our midst." For his work at Herrontown Woods and beyond, Richard J. Kramer will always be our St. John.

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