Book/Printed Material Table rock album, and sketches of the falls [of Niagara] and scenery adjacent

Title

• Table rock album, and sketches of the falls [of Niagara] and scenery adjacent

Summary

• A selection of entries made over the years in public "albums" provided at Table Rock, a now-vanished site that was a favorite vantage-point for tourists viewing Niagara Falls in the mid-nineteenth century, when Niagara itself still epitomized the beauty and grandeur of wild American scenery. The work is therefore a highly unusual reflection of the attitudes of ordinary men and women (chiefly North Americans, though no doubt also including an unknown proportion of foreign tourists) toward nature and natural beauty. The entries--many of which include the authors' names or initials, and some of which are dated, as far back as the 1830s--run the gamut from the solemn to the trivial to the bored to the comic; many are in poetry, and a few are in languages other than English. These are not the pioneering insights of a Thoreau or a Marsh, but the accepted vernacular of acceptable feeling, the ordinary cultural substrate from which the movement to protect and preserve America's scenic wonders first emerged. However clumsily expressed, the two overriding themes found here (other than the would-be witticisms of those who refused to be overawed) are aesthetic transport and religious awe: and these, of course, became two of the guiding themes of the conservation movement itself. The scribblings at Table Rock suggest that in certain vital respects, conservationism developed in continuity with, rather than contradiction of, the older American past. The last part of the book is a discursive description of some of the sights of the Falls, rendered with something of the amiable chatter of a seasoned guide; it suggests what was considered most noteworthy by nineteenth-century tourists. American Memory.

Created / Published

• Buffalo, Press of Jewett, Thomas & co., 1850.

Headings

• -  Niagara Falls (N.Y. and Ont.)

Notes

• -  First published in 1848 with title: Album of the table rock, Niagara falls and sketches of the falls and scenery adjacent.

Medium

• v, [7]-108 p. 19 cm.

Call Number/Physical Location

• F127.N8 A43

Digital Id

• https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.gdc/gdclccn.01014292

Library of Congress Control Number

• 01014292

Online Format

• image

LCCN Permalink

• https://lccn.loc.gov/01014292

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• MARCXML Record
• MODS Record
• Dublin Core Record

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