Poet and Literary Naturalist

Revised

Great Blue Heron at the wetland at Curtain Pole Road, Chattanooga, Tennessee

I am occasionally asked to give a presentation on Robert Sparks Walker, founder of the Chattanooga Audubon Society. These are my notes for the latest version of the presentation. Quotations from his poetry is sprinkled into the text.

I refer to Robert Sparks Walker as a Poet and Literary Naturalist. His persona is best revealed by two lines from his second book, My Father's Farm (1927):

I am the incarnation here

Of Father’s farm I loved so dear.

Walker was born in 1878, and here are some highlights from his career:

• Editor and Publisher of Southern Fruit Grower Magazine 1900-1920

• 4 Books of poetry

• A Young Adult Novel

• A Young Adult Short Story Collection

• 3 Nonfiction Books

• Numerous booklets, pamphlets, and articles in magazines and newspapers

• Editor of Flower and Feather (1945-1960), published by the Chattanooga Audubon Society. This is sometimes called a newsletter, but it was a 24-page magazine. The board of directors continued publication through 1972.

He died at age 82 from a heart attack suffered in 1960 while leading a nature hike at Audubon Acres.

Ecology

My Father’s Farm is filled with nature stories, and several appear in Anchor Poems. Here is the final stanza of his poem “Subsoil.”

The hard soil stirred, the moisture saved,
When seeds were sowed, large crops were sure,
In spite of droughts, green wheatfields waved;
And when the corn crop did mature,

Prosperity was then secure. My Father's Farm (1927), page 51

Walker’s nonfiction and poetry focus on people's relationships with the land. Trees produce nuts, bark for tanning, and other products. Some poems express the spiritual aspects of that relationship.

In some respects, he prefigures the “deep ecology” movement. In his book As the Indians Left It, Walker recorded stories of the Passenger Pigeon told by members of the Chattanooga Audubon Society old enough to remember them. He included some of these stories in As the Indians Left It, pages 6-7. More stories appear in Flower and Feather magazine, volume 2, issue 1.

He was aware of other writers. In As the Indians Left It, he described the founding meeting of the Chattanooga Audubon Society. He mentioned Spring Notes from Tennessee, Bradford Torrey, 1896 (pg. 122).

“Before the meeting adjourned, the members remembered that almost to the day fifty years previous, Bradford Torrey, editor of the Youth’s Companion, Boston, Massachusetts, was spending the last week of a vacation in these very woods, writing the last chapter of his classic nature book entitled Spring Notes from Tennessee.”

Many nature writers suggest reading existing writings about natural areas one is exploring. These are the four I recommend for the Chattanooga area.

1. Spring Notes from Tennessee by Bradford Torrey

2. Our Southern Birds by Emma Bell Miles

3. Lookout: The Story of a Mountain by Robert Sparks Walker

4. The Living Year by Mary Q. Steele

Each of these authors wrote other books, but I recommend these four above the others. Lookout: The Story of a Mountain is out of print and available at libraries. Copies of it and The Living Year are available from used book dealers. Reprints of Spring Notes from Tennessee and Our Suthern Birds are available online.

Awe

Walker’s poem “The Blizzard’s Masterpiece,” published in Anchor Poems, is the story of a land transformed by nature’s power. He saw beauty at every turn. Here are the concluding stanzas.

This Tyrant of the wintry sky,
An artist in snow-fleece,
From Inspiration of a sigh,
It draws a masterpiece!
Behold what icy snowflakes tell,
Their beauty and their forms;
Now, a blooming flower can excel,
These products of snowstorms.
The voice of God that's at star height,
Rides on the blizzard's wave,
The hand of His works in the night,
His breath lives in the grave. Anchor Poems (1925), pg. 17

Conservation

Walker organized the preservation of Audubon Acres as a sanctuary of the Chattanooga Audubon Society. He later added McClellan Island as a second sanctuary. The acquisition is described in As the Indians Left It, pages 179-184, and Flower and Feather, a nature magazine published by The Chattanooga Audubon Society from 1945 through 1972.

Here are the final two stanzas of “A Green Leaf:”

A miracle it works, for it alone can give
The things that make it possible for me to live
bow to it, the one thing on earth I meet
That takes raw stuff and turns to food that's meant to eat;
And in its busy life it ever stands, I see,
The only thing between me and eternity.
All animal life that lives on land or in sea,
On it depend, wherever they may chance to be:
And when the days grow hot, it cools the atmosphere,
And takes the poisonous gas and leaves a wholesome air;
My food, my home, my clothes, the table where I sit,
And other useful things have all been made by it!

Empire

If one believes that Manifest Destiny is a form of empire building, I would count Walker as a critic of Empires. He criticized the Cherokee Removal and the State of Georgia’s imprisonment of missionaries for giving “aid to the Cherokees.”.

His book Torchlights to the Cherokees is a history of the Brainerd Mission and other missionary work among the Cherokees in the Southeast. The mission took its name from David Brainerd, a missionary to the Lenape tribe, and gave that name to Chattanooga’s Brainerd Road, Brainerd neighborhood, and Missionary Ridge.

Walker began researching the Brainerd Mission in 1920 and eventually spent six weeks at the Andover-Harvard Theological Library in Boston searching the records of the American Board of Missions. Senator Newell Sanders underwrote some of his research.

This resulted in numerous published articles preserved in The Brainerd Mission: A Collection of Magazine and Newspaper Articles, a scrapbook in the custody of the Chattanooga Public Library.

After conducting his research at Andover-Harvard, Walker wrote Torchlights to the Chrokees, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. He included the story of the removal and one missionary who accompanied them as their physician.

Walker also wrote The Chickamauga Dam and Its Environs, a companion book to This is Chattanooga, a city history beginning with Tennessee Statehood, the Hamilton County Charter, and Chattanooga’s founding.

In The Chickamauga Dam and Its Environs, Walker described the loss of the historically significant town of Dallas and Dallas Island, which were inundated by the resulting reservoir. He also wrote about the loss of Mississipian era mounds due to inundation.

Similarly, Tennessee author Marilou Awiatka criticized the Tellico Dam. She considered the Tellico Dam, the taking of land from Cherokee farmers, and the destruction of the historic sites of Tellico and Chota to be a continuation of the Trail of Tears (Selu: Seeking the Corn Mother’s Wisdom, Fulcrum, 1993). See also Stephen Lyn Bales’ story of the Snail Darter in Natural Histories: Stories from the Tennessee Valley (University of Tennessee Press, 2007).

Other works worthy of reading:

Chattanooga’s Robert Sparks Walker: The Unconventional Life of an East Tennessee Naturalist by Walker’s granddaughter, writing as Alexandra Walker Clark (2013)

Robert Sparks Walker: Naturalist and Writer by Mary Bell Fisher (1937) thesis for the master’s program at Peabody College of Vanderbilt University)