The dominant image of the eastern gray squirrel in early nineteenth-century American culture was as a shy woodland creature that supplied meat for frontiersmen and Indians and game for the recreational hunter but could also become a pest in agricultural areas. Although some other members of the squirrel family, such as the American red squirrel (Tamiasciurus hudsonicus, also known as the pine squirrel), were present in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American cities, and although small numbers of gray squirrels could be found in woodlands on urban fringes, the gray squirrel was effectively absent from densely settled areas. Sometimes called the “migratory” squirrel, the species was known for unpredictable mass movements by the thousands or even millions across the rural landscape. In The Winning of the West Theodore Roosevelt wrote of the eighteenth-century American backwoodsman's fight against “black and gray squirrels [that] swarmed, devastating the cornfields, and at times gathering in immense companies and migrating across mountain and river.” Crop depredation by gray squirrels—Roosevelt's “black squirrels” were merely a color variant of the species—led residents to set bounties and carry out large-scale squirrel hunts well into the nineteenth century.
The only gray squirrels found in urban areas during this period were pets, such as Mungo, memorialized by Benjamin Franklin in a 1772 epitaph, who escaped from captivity and was killed by a dog after surviving a transatlantic journey to England. In most cases such pets had been taken from nests while young, and many were probably abandoned, killed, or had managed to escape after they matured. Nonetheless, they provided opportunities for urban Americans to form opinions about the habits and character of squirrels that complemented and sometimes contradicted those opinions formed in the context of hunting and farming. Pet squirrels, for example, which were widely available from live-animal dealers, were not shy like the wild squirrels in areas where hunting was common, and they often became importunate in their search for food in pockets and pantries. Familiar within the home, these pets appeared exotic and out of place when they escaped into the urban environment. In 1856 the New-York Daily Times reported that the appearance of an “unusual visitor” in a tree in the park near city hall had attracted a crowd of hundreds; until they were scattered by a policeman, the onlookers cheered the efforts to recapture the pet squirrel.
The first introductions of free-living squirrels to urban centers took place in cities along the Eastern Seaboard between the 1840s and the 1860s. Philadelphia seems to have been the pioneering city, with Boston and New Haven, Connecticut, following soon after. In 1847 three squirrels were released in Philadelphia's Franklin Square and were provided with food and boxes for nesting. Additional squirrels were introduced in the following years, and by 1853 gray squirrels were reported to be present in Independence, Walnut Street, and Logan Squares, where the city supplied nest boxes and food, and where visiting children often provided supplementary nuts and cakes. In 1857 a recent visitor to Philadelphia noted that the city's squirrels were “so tame that they will come and take nuts out of one's hand” and added so much to the liveliness of the parks that “it was a wonder that they are not in the public parks of all great cities.” Boston followed Philadelphia's example by introducing a handful of gray squirrels to Boston Common in 1855, and New Haven had a population of squirrels on its town green by the early 1860s.7
The people who introduced squirrels and other animals to public squares and commons in Philadelphia, Boston, and New Haven sought to beautify and enliven the urban landscape at a time when American cities were growing in geographic extent, population density, and cultural diversity. A typical expression of the motivation behind this effort can be found in an 1853 article in the Philadelphia press describing the introduction of squirrels, deer, and peacocks as steps toward making public squares into “truly delightful resorts, affording the means of increasing enjoyment to the increasing multitudes that throng this metropolis.” In Boston the release of squirrels on the Common was the project of Jerome V. C. Smith, a physician, natural historian, member of the short-lived Native American party, and Boston's mayor from 1854 to 1856. Smith's decision to have Vermont squirrels released on Boston Common was interpreted even by his critics as an attempt to “augment the attractions” of an increasingly leisure-oriented public space. For George Perkins Marsh, the author of Man and Nature, the tameness of the squirrels of the Common was a foretaste of the rewards to be expected when man moderated his destructive behavior toward nature. Like the planting of elms and other shade trees in cities and towns across the United States, the conversion of town commons and greens from pastures and spaces of labor into leisure grounds, and the creation of quasi-rural retreats such as Mount Auburn Cemetery (established outside Boston in the 1830s), the fostering of semitame squirrels in urban spaces aimed to create oases of restful nature in the industrializing city.
by Etienne Benson, Journal of American History | Read more:
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