Walking the Berkshires

Conservation by Default

The most ecologically significant land on the Korean Peninsula is not a nature reserve or World Heritage site, but instead a green corridor strewn with land mines.  The heavily militarized DMZ between North and South Korea has been relatively undisturbed by the intensive land use and environmental degradation that has taken place elsewhere in both Koreas since 1953 ,and wildlife and recovering habitats flourish here as nowhere else in the region.  This is a remarkable and unintended consequence of the military standoff that divides the Peninsula.  CNN reports:

"As a result, the ribbon of untouched land along the 38th parallel has now become an important refuge for two of the world's most endangered birds: the white-naped and the red-crowned crane. Other rare species include Asiatic black bears, Chinese gorhals and egrets. According to some accounts there may even be Korean tigers in the DMZ -- a sub-species of the Siberian tiger, one of the rarest tigers on the planet. In total more than 20,000 migratory fowl utilize the border area. They manage to avoid setting off land mines -- although nowadays some may be too old to be active. The 4-kilometer-wide by 250-kilometer long (2.5 miles by 155 miles) DMZ stretches across the entire width of the Korean Peninsula, encompassing a cross section of ecosystems and landscapes."

This is not conservation by design but by default, and it is a tenuous benefit with an uncertain outcome.  The dividends of peace in this region, as welcome and laudable as they would be, will place added pressure on this border corridor as people once again can move freely and as economic activity and demand for land increases.  Without safeguards and the intentional conservation of the extraordinary natural resource that has emerged in the DMZ, it will not endure such pressures.  Yet people do not conserve what they do not value, and often value is determined by what provides tangible benefits to those who live closest to the resource.  Without their support, a narrow strip of green becomes easily fragmented, the will to enforce conservation legislation weakens, and that old dichotomy of choosing between conserving land for wildlife or meeting the needs of people becomes the new default.  As readers of Walking the Berkshires have heard from me before on this subject, when the choice is framed as either human or environmental interests, we do not tend to vote against our own species.

This phenomenon of ecological recovery by default has happened in many other places besides the Korean DMZ.  National Geographic News had a story this month on the extraordinary natural resources and even relatively "pristine" ecosystems that persist today in Cuba.  Regardless of where one stands regarding Castro's regime and the embargo of Cuba, it is nonetheless significant that Cuba's biodiversity remains the richest in the Caribbean.  As for the reasons why, a combination of isolation, totalitarian and autocratic social controls, limited access to markets, and -credit where it is due - progressive environmental policy has eased the pressure on some of Cuba's ecological heritage.  The tragedy is that it is utterly unsustainable.  Again, when Castro's regime falls and reinvestment in Cuba accelerates, those who have lived in tyranny may well value enhancing their living standards over conserving an ecological heritage from which they may feel estranged.   Those who return and those who invest may have different goals and aspirations.  A conservation legacy will endure here only to the degree that Cuba's new leaders have the common experience and shared values of combining poverty alleviation with environmental conservation.

Elsewhere, the abandonment of economically marginal land has lead to a resurgence of wildlife, some reestablishing populations after having been completely extirpated from parts of their historic range.  The woodlands of the Eastern United States, and particularly those on state and federally protected lands, are now maturing forests with robust and growing populations of black bear, bobcat, wild turkey and beaver, many of which only a few generations ago were virtually absence from these lands.  Marginal farmland in economically challenged rural areas was acquired cheaply and in bulk by state agencies during the 20th century and as conservation land and now forms the backbone of extensive park systems with increasing biological diversity.  The once barren Berkshire and Litchfield Hills, stripped for charcoal and grazed by sheep, now have some of the most extensive tracts of relatively intact woodlands in the region.  The management of these lands is far from ideal, and there is a point beyond which they will have diminishing rather than increasing biological diversity, but the land base is there for better management to enhance.

None of these places is a pristine wilderness, and indeed it is not only rural areas that have experienced this phenomenon.  A Yahoo news story yesterday described the return of wolves to abandoned industrial areas in eastern Germany.

"It's a surprising comeback in one of the world's leading industrial nations where 82 million people are squeezed into a country the size of the U.S. state of Montana. The wolves, who arrived from Poland or other neighboring countries, live in a largely vacant area of abandoned strip mines and vacated troop training grounds southeast of Berlin. They serve as a living testament to the profound changes taking place in eastern Germany, once a center of industry and mining, now fallen on hard times.Other species, like the crane and the white-tailed eagle -- have also flourished in the east as the human population decreases - an unintended result of German unification in 1990.

'The wolves were gone for over 100 years and first started coming back a while after the Berlin Wall fell,'said Matthias Freude, head of the Brandenburg state environmental office, who estimates there are now about 20 wolves in two packs in Germany. 'They swam across the Neise river or walked across the ice in winter,' he added. 'There are hardly any people left there now. The wolves' biggest predator is hunters. But it's against the law to hunt them in Germany.'"

As I have recently discussed here, large carnivores returning to areas with competing human interests pose a significant challenge to conservationists and those who live on the land and are directly affected by conservation policy for these species.  The wolf of German folklore, as culturally significant as it may be, is nonetheless not this modern wolf, back from the land of fable and establishing packs southeast of Berlin.  As wolf habitat and ranges increase, so too will the pressures to safeguard the interests of people.  Even a country with green legislation and environmental safeguards will have a difficult time promoting the interests of wolves in suburbanizing areas when the fear of a tragedy or an actual human fatality results from their presence.  There will likely be more available habitat that wolves could use in Germany and elsewhere than there will be tolerance for them occupying it.  That will also be the case in the coming years for black bears in the Berkshires and wolves in Montana.

While it may be attractive to some conservationists to place strong legal safeguards in place for areas or species conserved by default, that strategy alone is unlikely to succeed.  Only the difficult work of reengaging people with these places and species in ways that foster a shared sense of their value, along with tangible benefits for those living closest to and reliant on these resources, is likely to be successful in the long term.

One Of Us Went South: A Confederate Brigadier from New Jersey

This sword recently sold at auction for over $10,000.  The engraving on the blade declares it was presented in 1861 to Maj. Archibald Gracie, 11th Alabama, by Governor Andrew B. Moore.  The lot description from the auction notes that it is "a rather plain U.S. Model 1850 foot officer's sword...and is decorated with etched patriotic designs including 'U.S.' and a spread winged American eagle and shield."  If indeed this was the sword of Archibald Gracie, then it is fitting that this particular confederate officer should have carried a United States sword made over for service in the southern cause, for Archibald Gracie was no Southerner.  He was, in fact, from New Jersey - the confederate in our family attic - and he alone in our northern clan went South during the Civil War.

Archibald Gracie (1832-1864), shown at left in a pre-war photograph, was the third of four generations in the Gracie line to bear that name.  His son Archibald Gracie IV (1857-1912) is famous for having survived the Titanic disaster long enough to testify at the inquiry and write about his experiences before succumbing to the effects of his ordeal several months afterward.  My great-grandfather Archibald Gracie Ogden used to remark that he didn't think much of cousin Archie Gracie but to his credit he did know enough to go down with the ship! 

The first Archibald Gracie came from Dumfries, Scotland and was one of New York's wealthiest merchants until the War of 1812 bankrupted his enterprises and forced the sale of the Gracie Mansion: now the official residence of the Mayors of New York.  The second Archibald Gracie (1795-1865), shown at right, was a prosperous merchant as well who married Elizabeth Bethune of Charleston, SC and resided in Elizabeth, New Jersey. 

Family legend has it that his son and namesake, the subject of this essay, was rather under the thumb of an overbearing father.  The way my grandmother used to tell it, young Archibald Gracie III didn't want to go to West Point but his father secured an appointment for him in the class of 1854 and he dutifully went.  He rather enjoyed military service but after two years on the Northwest frontier his father asked him to go to Mobile to attend to his cotton brokerage interests there, and so he resigned and went.  Along came the war, the legend continues, and he was once again uncertain how to act.  Consequently, he boarded a train for Elizabeth but was met by his brother-in-law, my Gr-great grandfather Dayton Ogden, who said that the citizenry had branded him a rebel and were awaiting him with the proverbial hot pitch and feathers.  "Elizabeth has made up my mind!" quoth Archibald Gracie, and turning his back to the North he commanded an Alabama brigade until his decapitation by a Union shell in the Petersburg trenches late in the war.

One of the joys of being the family archivist is getting to test our oral history against the evidence of the historical record and what is contained in our family papers.  I have been interested in the motivations and career of Archibald Gracie, the Confederate from New Jersey, since I was a boy.  I've read whatever mention of him I could find in the Official Records, and was recently delighted by the publication of Gracie's Pride, a history of the 43rd Alabama, the regiment Gracie raised in the spring of 1862 and commanded first as its colonel and then its brigade commander.  His commandant at West Point was none other than Robert E Lee, and Freeman's biography includes a few nice details about Cadet Gracie for one with an interest in the subject.

There is a solid weight of evidence that, apocryphal family lore to  the contrary, Archibald Gracie was inclined toward the south long before the outbreak of the Civil War.  His West Point Class was decidedly southern, and included six future confederate generals, among them Custis Lee and J.E.B Stuart.  His mother (at right) was a southern aristocrat, and his wife was Josephine Mayo of Virginia from one of the Commonwealth's first families. 

There were ties, then, of class and of kin, and what is more a soldier's bonds as well.  During his stay in Mobile, Gracie was Captain of the Washington Light Infantry Company of that city, and in December, 1860 at the request of the Governor, he lead his men in a bloodless capture of the Federal Arsenal at Mount Vernon, Alabama: days before the state officially seceded!  He hardly needed Elizabeth New Jersey to make up his mind after that!

Gracie's military career saw him serve briefly with the 3rd and 11th Alabama regiments before raising his own command and occupying a relative backwater of the Western Theater around Cumberland Gap.  At the head of an Alabama Brigade at Chickamauga, however, his men formed the final assault on Union General Thomas's position as the rest of the northern army fled the field, and clawed their way within yards of the Union position before falling back with severe casualties.  Detached by Bragg to accompany Longstreet on his return to Virginia through East Tennessee, Gracie's Brigade bore the brunt of a minor battle at Beans Station in which the general was severely wounded in the elbow.  The site of this engagement, sadly, lies beneath the waters of Holston River, drowned by the TVA.

Recovering in Richmond - where in a few months he was well enough to father a child - Gracie returned to his brigade and fought in several battles around Richmond and Petersburg.   By happenstance, Gracie's Brigade occupied the part of the Confederate line that was undermined and exploded during the Battle of The Crater but luckily was moved to an adjacent position beforehand so fought in the counterattack instead of being blown to ribbons at the outset. 

He was slated for division command, but on December 2nd, having just learned of the birth of his daughter, General Gracie was inspecting the Union Lines from his salient in the Petersburg trenches when an exploding shell struck and killed him, a captain, and a third soldier.  The following day in New Jersey, perhaps unaware of her rebel son's fate, his mother died.  Gracie was eulogized by the southern press - some clippings remain in our family papers - and there was even, if you can believe it, an ode written in his honor entitled: Gracie of Alabama! 

Soon after the war, his father arranged for his son's remains to return to his family.  Today Archibald Gracie lies with his ancestors in New York's Woodlawn Cemetery, a small United States flag by his stone.  As with the US sword awarded him by a secessionist Governor, the United States flag by his grave seems fitting decoration for a prodigal's final return to the fold.

Silent Rattle, Empty Den

Something is wrong on the mountain.  There are places in these granite hills where eastern timber rattlesnakes still bask and congregate.  Despite hundreds of years of human fear and ignorance and relentless pressure from illegal poaching, these heavy bodied snakes persist in parts of the Berkshire and Litchfield Hills and in isolated pockets across the northeast Highlands where they are legally protected as state-listed rare species.

But one of the largest dens in our area, a site where it was common only a couple of years ago to find dozens of snakes at a time, is virtually devoid of timber rattlesnakes this year.  State wildlife officials and licensed rattlesnake monitors are alarmed that only a couple of snakes have been seen and, what is more disturbing, there are no gravid females.  At this time of year, there should be many snakes close to their birthing and denning areas, yet at this superb occurrence the woods are empty and the breeding females are gone.

I have posted before on the fragile relationship between these much maligned serpents and the ecology of this region.   Even under the best of circumstances, timber rattlesnakes have poor reproductive success and their populations remain stable.  The loss of a reproducing female has a disproportionately large impact on the entire population. Predation and other natural mortality cannot account for the apparent loss of an entire reproductive class of mature individuals within a single population.  With persistent searches by conservation authorities yielding the same disappointing results, the only logical explanation is that someone, or a group of individuals, is deliberately depleting this site and removing gravid females.

The network of nuisance rattlesnake responders that works with conservation authorities to monitor den sites in this region has been closely monitoring a known individual with close ties to this area and who has stated his intention of reestablishing timber rattlesnake populations in New Hampshire and Maine.  Misguided and illegal tampering with established dens has no basis in conservation science and is without sanction or justification.  This individual is offering rewards for information about existing den sites in northern New England where timber rattlesnakes are thought to be extirpated. 

Anyone who offers cash for the location of timber rattlesnake populations in states where they are protected rare species, and who is not a fully sanctioned representative of the appropriate state agency with authority for the conservation of this species, is not to be trusted.  Anyone who moves a timber rattlesnake without such authority, especially across state lines, is breaking the law.  Anyone with any information about such individuals should contact the appropriate law enforcement and conservation authorities.

In the meantime, there is a hole in the heart of the mountain, an absence that most of us will never recognize but is there nonetheless.  Whether this site becomes yet another empty den, or remains a sanctuary for these rare snakes, depends on our collective ability to curtail illegal harvesting of gravid females. The species cannot afford a second year like this at this site.

Protecting Your Environment...And Retirement

On August 17th, President Bush signed a bill into law that has been enthusiastically received by the land trust community. For 2006 and 2007, the 900-page Pension Protection Act of 2006 expands the charitable tax deduction incentives for landowners who donate conservation easements on their land.  You can see which constituent benefit the administration chose to emphasize in the banner slogan at the signing (left), but it is clearly a huge environmental win as well.  To make matters more interesting for those of us who lean left of center and self identify as conservationists, Republican Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania - often in the public spotlight for his strongly conservative views on social issues - was a key supporter of expanding these conservation tax incentives and his sponsorship was extremely important in passing them into law.

The language of the August 17th Pension Bill raises the federal income tax deduction a landowner can take in any given year for donating a permanent conservation easement from 30% to 50% of their income (100% of their income for qualifying farmers and ranchers who donate agricultural easements), and extends the carry forward period for an easement owner to tax deductions from 5 to 15 years.  This incentive means that there may be better economic outcomes for more willing easement donor s than an outright sale of their land for development.  it also means that land trusts and conservation organizations who cannot compete toe to toe in the open market with real estate developers have something of real, tangible value to offer that developers cannot: the ability to preserve a legacy on land you still own and a better bottom line for the landowner than a full fair market value sale.

Many, many individuals and entities deserve credit for this conservation victory.  In addition to the legislators who passed the bill and the President who signed it into law, the land trust community, spearheaded by the Land Trust Alliance, worked tirelessly to create support for these measures, and to turn around what had been only a couple years previously a Senate Finance Committee inquiry into easements and their potential abuses.  There are some good, sensible requirements for conservation easements within the structure of this bill, and implementing self-defined standards and practices and voluntary accreditation procedures are a central priority for the Land Trust Alliance.

Our land is our future.  It is encouraging to see this positive step forward by our legislators and the Bush administration, who are hearing from their constituents on both sides of the aisle that this issue is of vital importance to their families and communities and these expanded tax incentives are needed.  They sunset after 2007, however, so I will write not only my Congressional delegation from CT but Senator Santorum and President Bush, thanking them for their efforts to enact these measures and encouraging them to ensure that they remain in place when these two years have passed.  You may wish to do the same.

Killer (New South) Whales

Monga Bay notes fascinating new discoveries from ancient Austral Seas that indicate the ancestors of baleen whales were savage, shark killing carnivores a scant 25 million years ago. 

"Erich Fitzgerald, the researcher who studies the Janjucetus huneri fossil, said that the discovery could dramatically change views on the evolution of cetaceans. We have to reassess baleen whales as gentle giants, as passive grazers of krill and plankton,' he said. ' This animal shows that some baleen whales were in fact pretty deadly predators.  It was an animal built for power and crippling attacks on its prey.'"

What is it about recent findings from The Land Down Under and absurdly carnivorous prehistoric beasts?  Only last month I posted here about killer kangaroos and the Demon Ducks of Doom that roamed Pleistocene Australia.

Daybreak Musing

The fog has rolled over the vineyards from the bay, and a night where the temperatures plunged with the vanished sun leaves a chill gray morning for an early riser still contending with jet-lag.  In this, Sonoma is also evoking memories of Namibia, where as with the coast of California a cold upwelling current produces a perpetual fog that advances over the arid inland. 

It is good sleeping weather, and while the day promises to warm up rapidly, at the moment my fingers are cold on the keyboard and would rather wrap around the first cup of morning  brew I hear being prepared in the kitchen.  I am blogging out of doors because the WiFi access here is strong but highly localized and the best connection is poolside, under the spreading oaks and fig trees of this marvelous retreat in the winelands. 

There are geese flying overhead, echos of a migration soon to commence along coastlines east and west.  The sun is lifting above the fog, but where I sit there is not enough moisture in the air for my breath to be visible: another similarity with the cold desert mornings of African memory.

Days of Wine and Roses

Trust California to have the good taste to have an invasive species that is edible.  Wild fennel has escaped from cultivation along roadsides and in sensitive habitats across the Golden State.  We in the Northeast have to make do with knotweed pie: an ersatz and pale substitute for rhubarb when picked young.  I am in Sonoma on a work-related retreat, and in addition to extraordinary wine and nature's bounty in great abundance at the local farmers markets, I can't help looking in California's medicine cabinet and snooping in its drawers to see what's going on ecologically.

The hills around the Westerbeke Ranch where I and my land trust colleagues are gathered are that marvelous dry oak savannah so emblematic of California and so reminiscent for me of the Acacia veld of southern Africa.  If there had been the early evening cooing of cape turtle doves in the eucalyptus grove, and maybe a troop of baboons loping toward the vineyards, the sere grassy hills and clumps of live oaks would have had the feel of Namibia for this old Africa hand.  As it was, I could feel that dry heat with nothing but mare's tails for clouds and the cluster of vine and fig tree felt like the old mission stations where I taught in the early 1990s in Africa.  The Eucalyptus were shedding a soft seed rain on the dry growth beneath, and the shiny leaves of poison oak warned me away from the rank places as their ivy kin would have at home.  I saw a few dead oaks, and wondered whether Sudden Oak Death is making its dire presense known among these pleasant hills.

California is a favored land for gardens, even though it comes at cost of fire, quake and traffic smog. The rosemary bushes grow thick as boxwood and without the terminal pruning of Jack Frost. The plaza in Sonoma this evening was a festival of families, food stalls brimming with the finest fruits of the harvest, old time bluegrass bands and people recreating together.  In our New England village, my wife is fond of saying, the town post office is "a social opportunity with bad parking."  In Sonoma, it is the ample town plaza, with its mission-style architecture and generous shade beneath the oaks and palms.

As I cannot bring wine safely back as checked luggage or legally back as carry on, I am unable to share this bounty with my beloved.  It is no doubt cold comfort to her, at home with our offspring for the rest of the week, to know that I raise exquisite glasses to her good health here with some  frequency.  I'm on with the kids this weekend, my love, and since I have a free round ticket for my pains getting out here, perhaps we can return in the next 12 months and sample some of these pleasures together.

Benedicite! Geoffrey Chaucer Seith Yvel Serpentes go by Planes!

It will come as a great surprise and comfort to medievalists and weary travelers alike that Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog.  Pray do not let the Middle English muddle you, for Chaucer has much good counsel for we moderns about the nefarious ends to which terrorists were willing to go in his day to place "Serpentes on a Shippe!"  He describes one such ancient incident that sounds eerily like the real and imagined threats to air travel we face today, a scheme so nefarious it is worthy of big screen treatment in a Hollywood blockbuster.

"Withinne the hulle of the shipe he had privilye yputte manye a caske fulle of serpentes and wormes and foul addres, and therto he put aboute the boate a philtre ycleped Far-Amoun by the Arabes, the which maketh serpentes to freke the helle oute and starte juste bitinge eny oon thei see. And wyth alchemy he sette the lockes of the caskes for to bursten whan the boate was yn the middel of the see. And yn this wise nat oon of the securitee gardes did knowe of the ambusshe of the serpentes that was to be, even thogh thei did make al the passengers remove her toothpickes and lettre-openeres and especiallye ther jarres of oyntmentz and sportes-drinkes. And thus the vessel departed wyth the serpentes hidden vpon it."

Geoffrey Chaucer has done us a great service in exposing this terrible case of naval insecurity, though I fear once loose in the blogosphere it may inspire modern-day copycat acts of terrorism.  Be sure to read this blog before it is blocked by Homeland Security: it does originate in England, after all.  I can also recommend the blog of his sister-in-law Katherine de Swyneford, who shares many amusing anecdotes of medieval living.

Free Stock Tip: Buy Toothpaste

I left all my bottled water and hair gel at home before heading to the airport, but I didn't think to discard my toothpaste.  An alert airport security screener found my Arm & Hammer Baking Powder Toothpaste tube in my carry-on back and asked if I preferred to go back through securing and check it, or if I wished to discard it.  I avoid having checked baggage or re-entering security at all costs, so it was easy for me to make the choice to walk away from my oral hygiene product in the name of national security.

The new heightened security measures that apply to liquids, gels and creams apply to "other items of similar consistency" and as I have just discovered, that includes toothpaste.  Until air travelers become accustomed to the breadth and scope of carry-on items now under the ban, look for an upswing in toothpaste purchases in this quarter.  In fact, there should be an increase both in the personal and family sized sales of toothpaste, since travelers like me who must replace the tube they had intended to use while traveling probably will need to get another one to replace the contraband tube taken from home and surrendered at security.

Check with the TSA to see what else you should leave at home or stow below

Losing my toothpaste has been the least inconvenience on this trip thus far.  My flight to San Francisco from Albany via Pittsburg and Vegas was scheduled to leave at 6:35 a.m. this morning and has been scrapped because of an equipment malfunction.  The next available flight leaves at 12:40 p.m.  It was a good thing, in hindsight, that I had no checked baggage.  Blogging may be intermittent at best until I return this weekend.  I promise to find a way to brush my teeth in the meanwhile!

A Diamond Courtship: Love and Baseball in the 1890s

She was a schoolgirl at Vail-Deane in Elizabeth, New Jersey.  He was captain of the Elizabeth Athletic Club baseball team.  A high school crush on a red haired second baseman sparked the romance that brought my great grandparents together, and it is fair to say that their many descendants owe a great deal more to what my father calls "that epic poem, told over 162 days."

There were many amateur and semi-pro base ball teams in the late 1880s and early 1890s in New Jersey. These included The "Alerts" and The "Dauntless", the latter of which merged in 1890 with the Elizabeth Athletic Club or E.A.C.  This was a reasonable decision on the part of the dauntless, as 8 of its number also played for the E.A.C.   

Elizabeth base ball fans were extremely partisan, especially  Margaret "Madge" Olmsted and her sister Kate who were staunch supporters of the Dauntless and the E.A.C.  It is no coincidence that the red haired second baseman, Archibald Gracie Ogden, played for both clubs.  The Olmsted girls took great pleasure in extolling the virtues of their diamond heroes in verse, and deriding their adversaries in equally fervent lines.  One of Madge Olmsted's many scrapbooks contains the following item, clipped from the "Town Tattler" section of the local paper:

"The Alerts Base Ball Club requests that those unknown individuals responsible for removing the sign from in front of the Club kindly return and take the nails from which it used to hang as well.  A job worth doing is worth doing well."

No record exists in our family archive of the identity of the culprit or culprits, but both Madge and Kate Olmsted were capable young ladies and their brother Ned was a scamp of the first order.  My money would be on Madge, though.

This photograph of "The Dauntless "was taken on the 4th of July, 1887.  Archie "Mike" Ogden, so called for his red hair although he was not of Irish but of English and Scots descent, is seated 2nd from the right in the second row.  The Dauntless wore light blue uniforms, which coincidently is also the color of a modern-day vintage baseball team from their hometown, The Elizabeth Resolutes, that plays by 1870s rules. 

Here is Archie Ogden once again, this time with the Elizabeth Athletic Club in a photograph probably taken in 1891.  It was cut from a team photo, clearly the only person of interest to my great grandmother Madge Olmsted but as for the rest of the team something of a loss to posterity. He has cultivated the wispiest of mustaches, a facial feature that soon vanished never to grace his lips again.  Could that, too, have been the influence of Miss Olmsted?

Their courtship was long even by the standards of the day.  Briefly interrupted by the Spanish American War, the real reason for the delay in matrimony was that as a cashier at Brown Brothers Bank, Archibald Ogden felt he had not advanced sufficiently enough to provide for his two maiden, elder sisters and a wife and family as well.  This state of affairs stretched into the early 1900s, and yet their interest in each other endured, until quite unexpectedly a wealthy uncle left Archibald Ogden and his sisters a small fortune in his will of $50,000 each, worth over $1,100,000 at the time if one uses a calculation of relative value based on the consumer price index.  With this windfall, he proposed and they were speedily wed in 1904. 

The Depression swept most of these assets away, but the diamond on the grass, and not the green of money, bought and sealed their love, and still for us today, baseball remains a family passion.