North Carolina Office of Archives and History

Poquosin: A Study of Rural Landscape and Society by Jack Temple KirbyReview by: Lawrence S. EarleyThe North Carolina Historical Review, Vol. 73, No. 1 (JANUARY 1996), p. 96Published by: North Carolina Office of Archives and HistoryStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23522055 .

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96 Book Reviews

Poquosin: A Study of Rural Landscape and Society. By Jack Temple Kirby. (Chapel Hill: University

of North Carolina Press, 1995. Preface, prologue, illustrations, epilogue, notes, index. Pp. xvii, 293.

$17.95, paper; $39.95, cloth.)

Poquosin is a challenging, complex, and uneven history of the region between the James

River in Virginia and North Carolina's Albemarle Sound, from the eighteenth century to

the present. The author, Jack Temple Kirby, divides his focus between the cultures of what

he calls the "hinterlanders," the rural people who forged original ideas about farm and

forest from their exposure to the American landscape, and the "cosmopolitans," the upper

class people of the rivers who tried to remake the region in the image of Europe.

Kirby resorts to diaries, travel accounts, and other primary sources to enable the reader

to "see again, almost as on film, not only personalities but also landscape and culture." Thus

what engages his interest is landscape through the eyes and the actions of the people who

changed it—the swampers, maroons, farmers, soldiers, turpentiners, shingle cutters, loggers,

and timber company executives. His sympathies seem to be with the "intrinsic virtues of

the hinterlanders," the plain folk whose use of shifting agriculture and other adaptations

of Indian folkways was eventually overcome by experts espousing European-style agronomy

and forestry. Kirby's story of the irreconcilable conflict between the old culture of

woodsburners and cattleraisers and the new culture of technical experts and how that

conflict shaped the land is full of nuance and irony.

Ultimately, however, the book fails to be all it could have been. Although natural history

plays a relatively minor role in the book, Kirby shows a shaky grasp of some of the ecosystems

he discusses. His evocation of a pocosin seems academic, lacking the firsthand feel of one

who has actually tried to penetrate its close and alien spaces. And despite his assertions to

the contrary, the cones of longleaf pine do not require fire to release their seeds, although

those of the pond pine, a true pocosin species, do.

The chief fault, at least for this reader, lies in the book's structural defects. The author's

writing is stylish and often witty, but his organization depends more on anecdote and story

than theme. Even this approach might have worked if there had been frequent attempts at

summary and restatement. Chapters begin and end without efforts to tease out the signifi

cance of the bright lives that Kirby traces. A more thematic approach might have brought

into clearer focus more of the meaning within this ambitious yet provocative book.

North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission

Lawrence S. Earley

The Martinsville Seven: Race, Rape, and Capital Punishment. By Eric W. Rise. (Charlottesville:

University Press of Virginia, 1995. Acknowledgments, introduction, notes, bibliography, index.

Pp. x, 216. $27.95.)

In this comprehensive, well-researched study of the Martinsville Seven case, Eric Rise

traces the fate of seven black men convicted of raping a white woman in post-World War II

Virginia. Sentenced to death in six successive trials in which their guilt was not seriously

questioned, the defendants were executed.

Rise masterfully weaves social trends and civil rights strategies into the story of the

Martinsville Seven. Noting the postwar focus of Virginia officials on maintaining social

order through professional police and legal processes, the author convincingly explains the

state's increased use of the legal tools of trials and capital punishment to maintain white

THE NORTH CAROLINA HISTORICAL REVIEW

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