Robertson Feature

[features]

The features section of the CGSG website is designed to stimulate professional and popular interest in recent books and creative works by cultural geographers. Here we highlight the unique qualities of these books and the portraits they provide of people and places around the world. You can follow links to communities, towns, and cities mentioned in the texts, and read about the authors' experiences researching and writing about the locales and landscapes they came to know.

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JULY 2007

Hard As The Rock Itself
by
David Robertson

An intensive & comparative analysis of place identity in American mining towns, Hard As The Rock Itself takes us to meet the people & landscapes in Toluca, Illinois; Cokedale, Colorado; and Picher, Oklahoma.

Links...

Robertson's homepage

University Press of Colorado

The Jumbos in Toluca

Picher Mining District

Photographs of Tar Creek by Vaughn Wascovich

Cokedale, Colorado

Toluca on waymarking.com

Mining elsewhere...

Cornish mining world heritage site

Mining in Bizkaia, Spain

Related...

Montana Magazine

Pacific Northwest Quarterly

"Much of the literature about mining emphasizes its negative aspects such as pollution and landscape degradation. This book, however, is different. . . . one should be impressed by how tenacious the former mining population can be—and how deeply the mining experience can affect attachments to the land, even though outsiders may consider that land ’ruined.’ Written with restraint and remarkable objectivity, Hard as the Rock Itself is highly recommended to anyone interested in mining history, environmental history, or simply how life and landscape are interconnected."

—Richard V. Francaviglia, Montana: The Magazine of Western History, Winter 2006

The town is, if anything, functional--and here in Hard As The Rock Itself we are given a glimpse into urban settlements that do not pretend to hide the evidence of their sheer and brutal mechanicality. Slag piles and derricks lord over torched fields, rows of paint-peeled workers' houses sulk along the unpaved street, the downtown's 'strip' provides only the most basic services and basest of pleasures. But, in these images, the American mining town is fundamentally misunderstood, according to David Robertson (SUNY-Geneseo). Even today, we rely on a pair of mining-town images--the busting boomtown and the delapidated ghost town--to inform our understandings and valuations of these places. Robertson shatters this simple perception with three in-depth portraits of mining communities in the United States.

In each case, though in strikingly different ways, residents have come to identify with a landscape that outsiders typically perceive as depressed and depressing. In Toluca, residents waged a long fight to save the "Jumbos," two mountains of mining debris that stand out against the prairie landscape like beacons signaling the town's unique history and sense of place. In Cokedale, residents worked to preserve a particular image of the town as a utopian mining community, such that now it is difficult to disentangle myth from reality in the landscape. And in Picher--located in the middle of what is now the Tar Creek Superfund Site--the entire community faces buy-out and relocation as the government tries to remediate the effects of decades of lead and zinc mining. Giant piles of mining waste--many over 200 feet tall, they are known locally as "chat piles"--populate the town's landscape. Local people have developed sepcial attachments to these unique features despite the fact that they are the source of widespread lead contamination. The distressing buy-out process is still ongoing today; some residents say they will stay in Picher, regardless of the impact it ultimately has on their health and well-bring.

Robertson's account is richly drawn and written in an accessible and engaging style. It also offers crisp maps and black-and-white images that give readers a glimpse of the unique features, places, and landscapes mentioned in the text. Work on the relationships between place, economy, and identity in mining towns dates as far back as Ben Marsh's work on the anthracite towns of Pennsylvania; Mike Ripmeester's study of mining identity in Rossland, British Columbia; and Stephen Harner's study of company towns in northern Mexico. Robertson's signal contribution to this line of work is the comparative, in-depth analysis he offers. The account is less about the theoretical issues involved in understanding these relationships, and more about the stories and narratives of the people themselves. In this sense, the book is ideal reading for undergraduate courses in cultural, economic, and historical geography. It also would serve well as an example of contemporary sense-of-place work in a graduate setting.

Reviews of Hard As The Rock Itself have appeared in Montana: The Magazine of Western History (Winter 2006), the Pacific Northwest Quarterly (2006), and Historical Geography (forthcoming in 2008).

For more information on the book and how to place an order for a personal copy, please visit the University Press of Colorado site.

David Robertson is a cultural and historical geographer (Ph.D. University of Oklahoma, 2001) whose scholarship deals, most broadly, with human-environment interactions. His theoretical interests center around place and identity. Methodologically he is drawn to qualitative research, particularly historical and ethnographic inquiry. His topical interests focus on industrial landscapes with an emphasis on primary industries, and his regional specialty is Canada. Robertson teaches a broad range of classes at SUNY-Geneseo including courses in Geography, Environmental Studies, and Study Abroad. Born and raised in Calgary, Alberta, he now resides in Geneseo, New York with his wife Dana and children Victoria, Isabella, and Finn.