Connecticut Leader for Environmentalism: Mabel Osgood Wright

Connecticut’s earliest environmentalists were almost all women, and organizing the Connecticut Audubon Society gave them the opportunity to become leaders in the growing movement to preserve nature, Connecticut’s pastoral environment, and — especially — birds. The Nutmeg State has been a home for many species of birds. It is located midway along the east coast flyway, the air route many bird species use to migrate between their northern summer breeding grounds and southern winter habitats. Some bird species summer in Connecticut, others winter here, and still others stop off for rest and food on their way north or south – especially in the food-rich estuarine salt marshes at the mouth of the Connecticut River and along Long Island Sound. And because Connecticut has been a refuge for birds, for more than a century it has also been a home for environmentalists, ornithologists, birders, and bird watchers.

One of the first – and perhaps the most influential – Connecticut environmentalist was Fairfield’s Mabel Osgood Wright, a native New Yorker attracted to Connecticut by its pastoral environment of family farms, traditional villages, open fields, woods, marshes, and abundance of birds – all in welcome contrast to the stark brick-and-concrete artificiality of the sprawling metropolis where she spent her winters. Born in 1859 in New York City, Wright was the youngest daughter of Ellen and Samuel Osgood, typical nineteenth-century upper-class New Yorkers. Samuel was a minister, the pastor of the Church of the Messiah, New York’s oldest Unitarian church. Like many New Yorkers, he was also an immigrant, a transplanted New Englander. He was well educated and worldly, a student and protégée of Henry Ware and William Ellery Channing, and a graduate of Harvard Divinity School. He was a man of letters, the author of six volumes of essays and sermons, a frequent contributor to some of the country’s leading magazines and journals, and friends with William Cullen Bryant, George Bancroft, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and other prominent literati. Like many educated Americans of his day, Samuel was deeply interested in natural history. He would be Mabel’s greatest influence as an ornithologist, writer, intellectual, and naturalist.  

When Mabel was born, her family resided in lower Manhattan, on Eleventh Street, only a short walk from Samuel’s church. Choked by rapid growth and industrialization, by the mid-1800s New York City was already becoming crowded, polluted, noisy, and artificial. Wild plants and animals, woods, marshes, clean water, and even farmland were fast disappearing, replaced by brick buildings, streets, wharfs, and sewers. Not surprisingly, in 1850 Samuel, like many other well-to-do New Yorkers, decided to rent a country retreat, where he could find the kind of pastoral environment that he had known in his youth in New Hampshire, but was now becoming scarce on lower Manhattan. He found it in Fairfield, Connecticut, a quiet, traditional, rural, Yankee-fied community on Long Island Sound, and within easy commuting distance from New York by train. Samuel enjoyed the quiet summers in Fairfield, and seven years later purchased eight acres there and built a house of his own, which he called Mosswood. Mabel grew up shuttling between two ecosystems: pastoral Fairfield and industrial New York. She would be shaped by both.

Mabel shared Samuel’s love of letters, pastoral living, writing, and nature. Yet both her father and her husband (James Osborne Wright, a fellow intellectual and nature lover whom she married in 1884, four years after Samuel’s death) discouraged her from writing, which both men considered outside of women’s proper sphere. It was not until 1890 that Mabel became liberated enough to publish her first nature essays in the New York Times and New York Evening Post – and even then, anonymously and in secret from James. These essays described the pastoral environment of Mosswood, which she and James had inherited from Samuel. For the rest of her life, Mabel continued to commute between New York and Fairfield, as much a part of one ecosystem as the other. In 1894 Mabel collected eleven of her Fairfield essays in a slender volume, The Friendship of Nature: A New England Chronicle of Birds and Flowers. This time, her name appeared on the cover. The book sold well and earned critical praise. James was pleased, and Mabel no longer had to write in secret. The female naturalist had come out of her closet.

The next year, 1895, Mabel published her most important book, Birdcraft, a field guide to birds. As she recalled later, until then “it was well-nigh impossible to obtain any inexpensive handbooks upon birds, flowers, trees, stars, or any other of the objects that set the Nature lover’s mind at work, that were at once accurate and yet written in a style suited to popular consumption.” Birdcraft filled the need. It became the principal field guide to North American birds, and remained so for four decades, until it was finally supplanted by Roger Tory Peterson’s Field Guide to the Birds, the first edition of which appeared in 1934. The sixth and final edition of Birdcraft was published posthumously in 1936. Using natural history techniques, Wright provided a catalog of birds arranged in taxonomic order. She added descriptions of their appearance, songs, and behavior, based on her own personal observations in Fairfield. Although based in part on several years of research at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, it was the combination of careful scholarship and field observations that made Birdcraft so valuable. In 1901 Wright published a similar field guide to plants, Flowers and Ferns and Their Haunts. Both books achieved quick critical and financial success.

At the same time, Wright also began writing nature books for children. In addition, she organized children’s bird classes at her homes in Fairfield and New York, and led field trips to various bird habitats. Her children’s books resembled those of the Scottish-born and Canadian-bred naturalist and artist Ernest Thompson Seton, who had a home in Greenwich, Connecticut, only a few miles from Mosswood. Both writers blended fact and fiction into exciting and sentimental stories that appealed to children. Seton even illustrated one of Wright’s books. Her children’s books drew Wright into an acrimonious “nature faker” debate, begun when President Theodore Roosevelt used his bully pulpit to lambast the popular nature writer William J. Long for publishing fanciful, imagined, and unrealistic animal stories and passing them off as true fact. Because Seton’s animal stories were also sentimental, he had against his will been pulled into the controversy, despite his much greater attention to proper science and observation. To protect herself against similar attacks, Wright became a vocal critic of Long and the “nature fakers,” even as she continued to publish her fictional animal stories for children. She also wrote a series of novels for adults, which were generally panned by critics.

Wright was a skilled photographer as well as a best-selling writer, and she used her photos to illustrate some of her books. She used dry glass plates, first marketed in the 1870s, rather than the simpler, easier-to-use celluloid film introduced by Kodak in the late 1880s. She employed a horse and buggy to lug her large-view camera, glass plates, and heavy tripod around Fairfield. She developed the negatives herself at Mosswood, producing more than 400 images of rural life, nature, and scenic vistas. In the 1920s she began taking “colonial revival” photos in the Wallace Nutting style, using costumed models to reenact tableaux from Fairfield’s colonial history. Like many Progressive-Era East-Coast naturalists, Wright often mixed natural history with dreamy nostalgia for a vanishing pastoral past.

This kind of “pastoral preservation,” although largely absent from the writings and ideas of John Muir, Gifford Pinchot, Theodore Roosevelt, and other early conservationists who remain well known today, was nonetheless commonplace among turn-of-the-century progressives, and was often present in the thinking of John Burroughs, Liberty Hyde Bailey, Wright, and other once-influential thinkers and activists who have since been mostly forgotten. At its core, pastoral preservation identified nature less with wilderness, as Muir did, and more with rural life. In Wright’s mind, the birds she loved could coexist with humans in a traditional countryside of fields, manicured woodlands, and pocket marshes. “Man’s kingdom is a bit of ground and his birthright a resting-place on the earth’s bosom,” she wrote in The Friendship of Nature. “Out of the ground grow the trees that hang their leaves in the wind to shelter him, the flowers that unfold in the sun, the ferns that deepen the silence in the shadowy byways…. Above this bit of ground is a scrap of sky …, and on the ground, in the trees, and in the sky, are the birds….”

It is not surprising, then, that Wright never became identified with wilderness preservation on a grand scale. Instead, she focused her conservation efforts locally, organizing the Connecticut Audubon Society. After a few false starts in the 1880s, the Audubon movement in the United States took off in 1896-98, when bird lovers organized state Audubon societies in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New York, New Hampshire, Illinois, Maine, Wisconsin, New Jersey, Rhode Island, the District of Columbia, and Connecticut. The Connecticut society was formed when Wright and twelve other women met in Fairfield in January, 1898. Wright came up from New York for the meeting. She was elected state president, a position she held for the next 26 years.

The new Audubon Society of Connecticut (now the Connecticut Audubon Society) had several goals: discouraging the use of feathers and dead birds as ornaments, protecting eggs, establishing a bird day in the public schools, and encouraging the study of natural history. It grew rapidly, attracting large numbers of women and school children. Wright not only spearheaded the Connecticut society’s programs, she also became active on the National Association of Audubon Societies (now the National Audubon Society), serving on the Board from 1905 until 1928. One contemporary referred to her as “the most influential woman in the Audubon movement.”

Wright also strove to create a bird sanctuary in Connecticut. Joining with several other Fairfield women, in 1914 she convinced Annie Burr Jennings, a Fairfield resident and heiress to the Standard Oil millions, to finance the purchase of a ten-acre plot in Fairfield directly across the street from Mosswood. The new sanctuary was named Birdcraft, after Wright’s 1895 field guide. Originally a mixture of woodland and pasture, the sanctuary was allowed to revert to forest. Nevertheless, it would be an artificial environment, carefully sculpted to attract birds. It was surrounded by a cat-proof fence, and had stone gateposts, a residence for a caretaker, a museum, trails, an artificial pond, and birdbaths and birdhouses. Songbird species were encouraged. Other birds, dubbed “problem species,” were not. Within a year, Birdcraft Sanctuary and its policy of “birdscaping” had become a model for bird sanctuaries in other states. It is still in existence.

Wright died in 1934. Although mostly forgotten today, she was perhaps Connecticut’s most significant naturalist. The Connecticut Audubon Society and Birdcraft Sanctuary are her most important legacies. Unlike John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt, who are associated more with wilderness preservation, she was a representative of pastoral preservation, the Progressive-Era attempt to save traditional agrarian ecosystems in the belief that they offered spaces where nature and humans could coexist peacefully. It was not a surprising position for someone whose points of reference were New York City and turn-of-the-century Fairfield, for someone who was a product of both metropolitan New York and pastoral Connecticut.