Smell Detectives: An Olfactory History of Nineteenth-Century Urban America

6.125 9.25 SPINE: 1.125 FLAPS: 3.
IF YOU SMELL SOMETHING,

Smell Detectives draws insights from the rapidly developing literature in sensory his-
tory and applies them to the nineteenth-century urban environment. The results are
KIECHLE SAY SOMETHING
illuminating and extend the field of environmental history in new and fascinating What did nineteenth-century cities
directions. smell like? An innovative contribution to
MICHAEL RAWSON, author of Eden on the Charles: The Making of Boston sensory history, Smell Detectives follows
the nineteenth-century Americans who
used their noses to make sense of the
Phew! The nineteenth century was smelly! From stockyards to battlefields, Smell
sanitary challenges caused by rapid urban
Detectives shows us why stench mattered. Chemists, reformers, mothers, cartoonists,
AN OLFACTORY HISTORY OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY URBAN AMERICA

and industrial growth. Believing that foul
MEL ANIE A . KIECHLE is assistant professor politicians, physicians, generals, bureaucrats, and industrialists struggled to trace
odors caused illness, medical experts and
of history at Virginia Tech. and abate stink to keep Americans healthy. With grace and verve, Kiechle explains
ordinary people alike equated the new
their reasoning and their legacy.
and stronger stenches of overcrowded
CONEVERY BOLTON VALENCIUS, Boston College cities with disease and danger, and so
they attempted to make cities healthier
The manner in which individuals, governments, by detecting and then mitigating the
scientists, and various groups dealt and react- most menacing odors. But the sources of
ed to smells and fresh air issues provide great offending odors proved difficult to pin-
insight into our culturewhat has value, what point and the search for them sometimes
does not, what makes us sick, what keeps us well. produced even more of a stink.
Smell Detectives is a bottom-up history that is
Drawing on nuisance complaints, medical
necessary to truly grasp the evolution of cities.
writings, domestic advice, and myriad
MARTIN V. MELOSI, author of discussions of what constituted fresh air,
The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure historian Melanie Kiechle looks at the
in America from Colonial Times to the Present relationship between common sense
AN OLFACTORY HISTORY OF the olfactory experiences of common
NINETEENTH-CENTURY URBAN AMERICA peopleon the one hand and the con-
struction of scientific expertise in the
form of city health boards on the other.
The boards introduced new conflicts
University of Washington Press
between complaining citizens and the offi-
Seattle and London
cials in charge of the air, ultimately dele-
www.washington.edu/uwpress
gitimizing those complaints. Although the
rise of germ theory revolutionized medical
knowledge and ultimately undid this
form of sensory knowing, Smell Detectives
recovers how an earlier generation of
city residents used their sense of smell to
Map: Report of the Council of Hygiene and Public Health of the
ISBN 978-0-295-74193-2
90000
MELANIE A. KIECHLE understand, adjust to, and fight against
WEYERHAEUSER ENVIRONMENTAL BOOKS Citizens Association of New York upon the Sanitary Condition of the F O R E W O R D B Y PA U L S. S U T T E R urban environmental changes.
City (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1865). Courtesy American
9 780295 741932
Author photo courtesy of Dennis P. Halpin Antiquarian Society.
keichle_jkt.indd 1 5/17/17 11:16 AM

Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books
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Paul S. Sutter, Editor

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Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books explore human relation-

ships with natural environments in all their variety and complexity.
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They seek to cast new light on the ways that natural systems affect
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human communities, the ways that people affect the environments of

which they are a part, and the ways that different cultural conceptions
of
of nature profoundly shape our sense of the world around us. A com-
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plete list of the books in the series appears at the end of this book.
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F.Kiechle, Smell Detectives.indd 1 5/3/17 10:09 AM

SMELL
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DETECTIVES
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An Olfactory History of
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Nineteenth-Century Urban America

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Melanie A. Kiechle
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Seattle and London

Smell Detectivesis published with the assistance of a grant from the Weyerhaeuser
Environmental Books Endowment, established by the Weyerhaeuser Company
Foundation, members of the Weyerhaeuser family, and Janet and Jack Creighton.
Copyright 2017 by Melanie A. Kiechle

Printed and bound in the United States of America
Design by Thomas Eykemans
Composed in OFL Sorts Mill Goudy, typeface designed by Barry Schwartz
212019181754321
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted

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in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy,

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recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in

writing from the publisher.
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www.washington.edu/uwpress
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

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Names: Kiechle, Melanie A., author.

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Title: Smell detectives : an olfactory history of nineteenth-century urban

America / Melanie A. Kiechle.
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Description: Seattle : University of Washington Press, [2017] | Series:

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Weyerhaeuser environmental books | Includes bibliographical references

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and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016048034 | ISBN 9780295741932 (hardcover : alk. paper)
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Subjects: LCSH: SmellUnited StatesHistory19th century. | Odors

History19th century. | SmellEnvironmental aspectsHistory19th
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century. | Urban health.

Classification: LCC QP458 .K54 2017 | DDC 612.8/6dc23
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LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016048034

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Portions of chapters 1, 2, and 5 were previously published in Melanie Kiechle,

Navigating by Nose: Fresh Air, Stench Nuisance, and the Urban Environment,
18401880,Journal of Urban History42, no. 4 (2016): 75371.
The paper used in this publication is acid-free and meets the minimum
requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences
Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.481984.

In memory of
Carl and Helen, Esther and Stanley,
who connected me to the past
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CONTENTS
Foreword by Paul S. Sutterix

Acknowledgmentsxv
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Introduction: Whats That Smell?3

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one The Smells of Sick Cities21

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two Navigating by Nose: Common Sense and Responses

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to Urban Odors53
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three Smells like Home: Odors in the Domestic Environment78

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four The Stenches of Civil War106

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five Smelling Committees and Authority over City Air138

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six Learning to Smell Again: Managing the Air between

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the Civil War and Germ Theory170

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seven Visualizing Vapors and Seeing Smells198
eight Dirty Cities, Smelly Bodies: City Odors after

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Germ Theory233
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Conclusion: If You Smell Something, Say Something259
Notes267
Selected Bibliography305
Index323

FOREWORD
A Breath of Fresh Air for
Urban Environmental History
Paul S. Sutter
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Growing up on suburban Long Island in the 1970s, I distinctly remem-

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ber a series of television ads that captured my environmental imagina-

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tion. They were for the Fresh Air Fund, which sought (and still seeks) to
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temporarily remove underprivileged children from the inner city during

the summer months and give them a vacation in the exurbs of New York.
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There they attended a summer camp or lived with a host family and
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enjoyed the environmental amenitiesgrassy swards, woods, lakes and

streams, even working farmsthat were absent from the most desperate
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pockets of urban America. The nation experienced an environmental

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awakening during the 1970s, nowhere more so than in its leafy suburbs,
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but it also reeled from an urban crisis that had trapped poor people, and
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particularly people of color, in dirty, dangerous, and declining city

neighborhoods. I did not then understand the deep structural forces that
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had produced such profound inequalities in the nations postwar resi-

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dential geography, but as a child of the dawning environmental era I

sensed that something was profoundly wrong with Americas cities if
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the only source of relief from the summer heat was an illegally uncapped
fire hydrant. The promise of the Fresh Air Fund, to give needy city kids
a chance to get back to nature, thus resonated with my juvenile sense of
environmental justice. But I thought little about why fresh air sat at
the heart of the organizations therapeutic promise, or even what fresh
air was. In my household, fresh air was an unexamined environmental
virtue, something that my parents constantly implored me to get more
ix

of instead of watching television. Fresh air was simply a metonym for
the outdoors, for nature itself.
It turns out that fresh air has a history. The Fresh Air Fund was a
century old by the 1970s, the most important and lasting of a series of so-
called fresh-air charities that thrived in the United States at the dawn
of the Progressive era. Founded in the late 1870s by Willard Parsons, a
minister who had relocated from New York City to rural Pennsylvania,
the Fresh Air Fund came along at a transitional moment in American
thinking about the relationship between air quality and human health.
Parsons had several motivations in starting his charity, but mostly he
was concerned about the well-being of poor and immigrant children
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who lived in New York Citys teeming tenements. Parsons believed, as

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did many of his contemporaries, that cities were unnatural places that
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retarded human development. He worried in particular about tubercu-

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losis and other diseases that seemed to spread easily in cramped indoor
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spaces (Robert Koch was still several years away from discovering the
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tubercle bacillus), and he believed that the supposed freshness and

of
purity of rural air would improve the constitutions of city children,

whose health suffered in sullied city air. In short, Parsons held tenu-
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ously to an older miasmatic notion that ill health was the result of bad
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air, and he fervently believed that the solution was fresh air.
Parsons fresh-air charity came into its own just as the germ theory
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was beginning to transform American medicine in ways that would

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obscure the older miasmatic meaning of the term. Americans came to

understand that it was mostly microbes, unseen but very real disease
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agents, that made people sick. To the extent that bad air was a culprit, it
was because of the microbes it containeddisease agents that bacteri-
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ologists scrambled to find and make visible through advanced technol-

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ogy and techniques. At the same time, the second industrial revolution,
powered by coal, visibly degraded urban air quality and gave us our
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modern sense of air pollution: air filled with particulate matter, pro
duced by combustion, that can be measured in parts per million. Such
air could be a threat to public health, of course, but Americans did not
understand it as causing disease in the older miasmatic sense. As a
result, fresh air took on a vestigial quality in environmental discourse.
It came to serve as a metaphor for the virtues of a new kind of outdoor
recreation, a doctrine that juxtaposed the supposedly enervating,
x|Foreword

feminine, and overcivilized indoors of the modern city with the pur-
portedly invigorating, masculine, and strenuous outdoors of the nations
wild fringes. By the end of the Progressive era and into the interwar
years, even as many urban Americans gasped for breath, fresh air came
to obliquely symbolize the psychological promise of nature as a balm to
soothe personal and societal ills. An older, more literal definition of
fresh airair that was free from the foul odors that caused disease
was lost to us.
Smell Detectives, Melanie Kiechles marvelous olfactory history of
nineteenth-century urban America, restores that world to us in all its
sensory richness. In the early to mid-nineteenth century, as American
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cities grew, they were filled with strong and offensive odors, many of
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them the result of concentrating humans and their economic activities

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within small geographical spaces. Urban Americans not only com-

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plained about these smells but understood them to be unhealthy. This

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can be a difficult concept to wrap ones head around because we are

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so inclined to think of odors as epiphenomenal, as sensations with no

of
substantive causal effect or power. Sure, powerful odors can make us

physically sick to our stomachs, but we do not see them as agents of
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disease. For most of the nineteenth century, however, bad smells were
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not merely clues that air was unhealthy; they were the substance of ill
health itself. Kiechle shows us how ones sense of smell was critical to
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how one made sense of the nineteenth-century city in the most literal
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meaning of that phrase: how one experienced, mapped, navigated, and

reformed urban America. It was in this crucible that fresh air first came
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to be a synonym for healthy air and a vital sanitary need. Indeed, one
of the great achievements of Smell Detectives is to bring the insights of
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the field of sensory history, with its signature call to resist the tyranny
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of the visual and explore other sensory experiences of the past, to bear
on urban environmental and public health questions. To know the
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nature of the city for most of the nineteenth century, and to sense the
ways in which it was becoming an environmentally degraded place, was
to anxiously follow ones nose.
The smell detectives of Kiechles title were urban Americans engaged
in the olfactory forensics necessary to maintain urban public health, and
the eras reliance on the sense of smell to do this work diffused sanitary
authority among the entire populace. There were physicians who tried
Foreword |xi

to claim a special capacity to find and remove offensive odors, but
before the Civil War, what Kiechle brilliantly refers to as common
sensethe ability of ordinary city residents to sense the odor threat
was just as authoritative. Kiechle particularly focuses on how women,
as keepers of urban households, used common sense to practice a
domestic environmental hygiene that kept foul odors at bay, laying
the groundwork for the municipal housekeeping movement of the Pro-
gressive era. Thus, even as doctors and other public health officials
scrambled to bring fresh air into the city, city residents developed their
own strategies, and even their own material cultures, around odor
detection and mitigation.
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The first half of Smell Detectives forces us to rethink some of our most
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common environmental institutions and practices. For instance, while

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we have long conceptualized urban parks as, metaphorically, the lungs

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of American cities, historians have generally treated these parks as

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design interventions meant to insert didactic nature, or, later, spaces

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for active recreation, into the urban fabric. Kiechle shows us that, in
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fact, urban parks also were born as public health solutions designed to
bring more fresh air into cities, to open up spaces that would aid in air
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circulation, and to cleanse the air of disease-causing impurities. For

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figures such as Andrew Jackson Downing, the famed horticulturalist

and landscape designer, urban parks were literally breathing places.
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They functioned not only as olfactory retreats but also as respiratory

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organs designed to fight disease throughout the city. They were places
for the propagation and diffusion of fresh air. Other aspects of urban
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landscaping, from the trees that belatedly came to line city streets to
the planting of sweet-smelling plants as an olfactory buffer around
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urban residences, were also functional responses designed to cleanse

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the air of dangerous odors. Even planted window boxes protected

homes from external odors, as did the vases full of flowers that often
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sat in entryways. Kiechle ingeniously argues that many environmental

ideals and practices that we have come to see as largely aesthetic were
concocted as functional public health responses to the disease-causing
odors of the nineteenth-century city. They were responses not to how
the city looked, but to how it smelled.
The Civil War set in motion a series of changes that would eventu-
ally undermine the antebellum olfactory order. The instant cities of
xii|Foreword

military encampments and prisons, and the reeking aftermath of major
battles, created medical challenges that pushed public health in new
directions, even as Civil War sanitation still leaned heavily on the puri-
fying power of fresh air. The war particularly worked to elevate the
positions of doctors as experts and to suggest a broader government
role in the protection of urban public health. One of the unappreciated
legacies of the Civil War, Kiechle suggests, was its diminishment of
the power of common sense as a form of tacit knowledge about the
urban environment. After the war, according to Kiechle, the olfactory
order shifted in several other critical ways. Even before germ theory
aroseand in Kiechles analysis, germ theory was only one among
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many changes that would slowly undermine this antebellum olfactory

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orderAmericans were beginning to tease apart deodorization and

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disinfection, worried that certain strategies for sweetening the air

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merely masked rather than mitigated olfactory threats to public health.

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The gradual acceptance of germ theory, both medically and culturally,

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would make that separation permanent, slowly removing disease cau-

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sation from the sensory world of ordinary Americans. But germ theory
was not the only force at work, and Kiechle warns us not to put too many
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of our causal eggs in the basket of abstract scientific progress. Increas-

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ingly, scientific experts employed by municipal governments gained

authority as a new generation of smell detectives, even as they contin-
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ued to clash with those who clung to common sense as a way of expe-
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riencing urban public health. Eventually, medical doctors and chemists

claimed authority over urban smells by degrading olfactory detection
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in favor of visual evidence. As Kiechle concludes, Sight, science, and

wealth overcame common knowledge and, many thought, common
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sense about the dangers of bad odors. In the process, municipal pub-
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lic health campaigns to stop making scents stopped making sense.

But that was not the only outcome of these changes. Urban residents
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on the margins increasingly lost the ability to testify about their own
experiences of ill health in the city, even as wealthier city dwellers
turned to both zoning and suburbanization to separate themselves from
urban and industrial odors. Indeed, the better classes reconceptualized
urban odors as a problem not of the general urban environment but as
sensations produced by and consigned to marginal places and peoples.
However wrong the older equation of bad smells and disease was, at least
Foreword |xiii

it had been an empowering and equalizing way of knowing urban nature.
Here Kiechle intimates that a kind of sensory disenfranchisement
occurred in American cities at the end of the nineteenth century that
subtly presaged the postWorld War II urban crisis. Fresh air became
less a tool for reforming an unnatural urban environment and more a
privilege of ones class position and ethnic status. Perhaps not surpris-
ingly, it was in this very context that the Fresh Air Fund came into being
as an organization that embodied a new olfactory order of inequality.
Melanie Kiechle knows it has been all too easy to dismiss wrong-
headed antebellum notions that odors caused illness and thus the
idea that olfactory sensation was critical to protecting urban public
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health. But those ideas, she insists, are worth taking seriously, not only
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because they restore to us a lost world of sensation that was central to

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the nineteenth-century urban experience but also because the loss of

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that world, even if it came partly as a result of scientific and medical

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advancement, had consequences that were not quite so redolent of

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progress. Smell Detectives reminds us of the continuing power of our

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sense of smell, and of the other kinds of tacit knowledge produced by

everyday sensory experience, in rooting out contemporary environ-
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mental threats to public health, threats that experts have often been
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slow to sense. In its recovery of a lost olfactory world, Smell Detectives

helps us to sense our own world anew. It is a compelling model for sub-
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sequent sensory histories of medical and environmental justice.

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xiv|Foreword

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
At the conclusion of writing, it is a delight to thank the many people

who have helped me along the way. Of course, all the oversights, unan-
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swered questions, unexplained smells, and bad puns are my responsi-

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bility. I apologize for the faults, dear reader, and hope you will not find
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them a stench in your nose.

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This project began many years ago, when Ann Fabian indulged a new
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found interest in sensory history and said, Go, write a smell paper.
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Little did I know, though I suspect that Ann did, that this curious
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detour would be so fascinating, inspire so many questions, or bring me

into so many captivating conversations. It is a pleasure, after all this time,
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to thank Ann for her initial prod, her brilliance in thinking broadly,
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and her insistence on specific details. This project would not exist with-
out her, nor would working on it have been half so interesting.
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All my teachers and mentors at Rutgers are wonderful and generous

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scholars who continue to serve as my models for engaged scholars. Ali-

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son Isenberg encouraged me to think carefully and closely about cities,

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shared my fascination with the built environment, and introduced me

to the wonders of panoramic views. Jan Ellen Lewis offered clear advice
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and sharp questions when my writing became muddled, always helping

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me to rethink what I had originally said. Keith Wailoo answered many

questions about medical history but always pushed me well beyond the
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bounds of that field with his thoughts. A chance meeting with James
Delbourgo set me on a new trajectory, when he asked if any of my actors
were chemists. In his seminars on narrative history, James Goodman
changed the writing of this project, and all that will follow, for the bet-
ter. Finally, though Martin Melosi was never in the room at Rutgers, his
thoughts about the urban environment and his feedback on my writing
were instrumental in crafting this book.
xv

One pleasure of studying history at Rutgers is the opportunity to
explore the past, debate your findings, and workshop your ideas with
some of the smartest and most creative thinkers in the field. My initial
writing group with Vanessa Holden, Allison Miller, and Rebecca Tuuri
was an excellent start that I wish could have lasted longer. The further
Ive gotten from the graduate program, the closer Ive become with Kara
Schlichting and Kris Shields, as both have come through with answers
to many strange questions e-mailed out of left field. And for some of my
favorite conversations and lots of camaraderie, I thank Steve Allen, Thea
Brophy, Dina Fainberg, Darcie Fontaine, Leigh-Anne Francis, Bridget
Gurtler, Patricia Hampson, Anita Kurimay, Nick Molnar, Rochisha
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Narayan, Svanur Ptursson, and Tal Zalmanovich. You are the best book
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club in history!
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Launched into the world of thinking with smell by that initial paper,
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Ive had the good fortune and great pleasure to receive support for this
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project from a number of institutions. I am grateful to the American

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Antiquarian Society and National Endowment for the Humanities; to

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the Virginia Tech College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences; to the
American Council of Learned Societies and Andrew W. Mellon Foun-
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dation; to the Chemical Heritage Foundation; to Winterthur Library

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and Museum; and to Rutgers University.

While the coffers of the above institutions provided necessary
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financial support, the conversations that occur within those institu-

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tions are invaluable. Each chance encounter, each stray thought, each
new question, and each fascinating archival find have enriched my
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career in ways that cannot be calculated. During two years at the Chem-
ical Heritage Foundation, early chapters benefited from the close read-
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ing and insights of Carin Berkowitz, Jos Ramn Bertomeu-Snchez,

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Helen Anne Curry, Hilary Domush, Benjamin Gross, Tayra Lanuza-

Navarro, Brendan Matz, Donna A. Messner, Christine Nawa, Evan
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Ragland, Jody Roberts, Bess Williamson, and Nasser Zakariya. At the

American Antiquarian Society, Im glad to have spent time talking
about smells and many far more fascinating things with Richard Bush-
man, Paul Erickson, Cole Jones, Carl Robert Keyes, Heather Kopelson,
Justine Murison, Meredith Neuman, and Will Slaughter. Smart ques-
tions from Claudia Bushman, Betsy Erkkila, and Nan Wolverton helped
me to rethink lilacs and the antebellum home. Special thanks to Ashley
xvi|Acknowledgments

Cataldo, Lauren Hewes, and Kim Pelkey for allowing me to peek into
the stacks, finding materials that I did not know I was looking for, and
helping me track down the evidence for my hunches. Finally, for many
of this books illustrations, I am indebted to the work of Jackie Penny.
My colleagues at Virginia Tech have made this institution a wonder-
ful place to teach, research, and think. Im so glad that Danna Agmon
and I have navigated the start of our careers together, exchanging good
advice and support along the way. For reading portions of the manu-
script and sharpening my thoughts, my thanks go to Mark Barrow,
Angela Elder, Carmen Gitre, Paul Quigley, Brett Shadle, Neil Larry
Shumsky, and LaDale Winling. In addition, Im grateful to David Cline,
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Matt Heaton, Richard Hirsh, Kathleen Jones, Amy Nelson, and Helen
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Schneider for answering countless questions and some excellent hall-

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way banter. Lucas Kelley and Sara Evenson tracked down many use-
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ful tidbits as my research assistants. Outside of Major Williams Hall,

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time spent with Nick Copeland, Zach Dresser, Ann Genova, Ed Gitre,
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Christine Labuski, Sarah Ovink, Ryan Rideau, Petra Rivera-Rideau,

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and Eric Sindelar is always time well spent.

Others have been generous with their time and thoughts because
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they wanted to be. My deepest thanks go to Meghan Crnic, who has read
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every word as my writing buddy and helped to think through all the
hardest questions and trickiest points. Conevery Bolton Valencius has
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become a wonderful mentor and friend, and I hope to pay her many
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favors forward. My thanks as well to Benjamin R. Cohen for reading

scattered pieces and swapping ironies. Paul S. Sutter and the anony-
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mous reviewer for the press engaged the manuscript fully and strength-
ened it considerably through their suggestions.
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Thanks to my family, I grew up with the sights, smells, and sounds

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of dairy farming, laughing about the fresh country air on the days
when my father spread manure. As I uncovered nineteenth-century
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accounts of blood- and manure-spattered slaughterhouses and lurid

descriptions of cattle carcasses decomposing in the yards of fertilizer
manufacturers, I did not know whether to consider myself blessed or
cursed by my familiarity with the smells described, but I have always
felt lucky to share historical revulsion and a good laugh with my family.
My parents, Dawn and Charles Kiechle, have listened patiently to
excited archival finds, answered suddenly pressing questions about the
Acknowledgments |xvii

purpose of whitewashing a barn or sprinkling lime on its concrete floor,
and always supported me in pursuing my passion although it has taken
me far afield. My sister, Jackie Atkins, and her husband, Bryan, have
provided many fun diversions from work, and I look forward to many
more. My aunts, uncles, and cousins have also asked with curiosity about
my work while giving me many other things to ponder and enjoy. For
all of the fun distractions and hectic holidays, Im grateful to Mary Kay
and Robert Molnar, Sarah and Bradley Cates, Georgia and Ray Cates,
John and Mary Kiechle, Jane and Bob Mowatt, Jennifer and Michael
Lindacher, Brian and Veronica Molnar, Jan and Jim Putorti, Jenna
Mowatt and Shaun ONeil, Jared and Shannon Mowatt, and Justin
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Mowatt. After years of being the one with her nose stuck in a book,
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I hope each of you will enjoy sticking your nose in this one.
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Dennis Halpin deserves more thanks than I can give. Since this proj-
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ects inception as a smell paper, he has been a captive audience to many

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a quirky find, nineteenth-century turn of phrase, and the painfully slow

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process of rethinking and rewriting. Through it all, he has remained

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supportive and encouraging, even as he reminded me that evenings and

weekends are for enjoyment rather than work. Thank you, Dennis, for
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making me stop and smell the roses.

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xviii|Acknowledgments

Smell Detectives
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INTRODUCTION
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Whats That Smell?

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In the fall of 2005, New York City smelled like maple syrup,
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and many New Yorkers panicked. The city often stinks, but this pleas-
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ant odor was unusual and people could smell it everywhere. Certain that
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something was wrong, residents called the citys 311 nonemergency hot-
line, spoke with the press, and blogged about their concerns. In a post-
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9/11 world replete with chemical toxins, many suspected bioterrorism

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and feared for their health. Some individuals, unaware that everyone
could smell a strong, sweet fragrance, thought they were having a stroke
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or some sort of brain tumorinduced olfactory hallucination. Others

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joked about the smell, chalking it up to EGGO-terrorism or a Vermont

tourism campaign. Through both fear and humor, New Yorkers tried to
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understand what this odd odor was, where it originated, and how it
affected those living in the city.1
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New Yorkers varying reactions to the maple syrup smell reflect

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twenty-first-century beliefs about the relationship between environ-

ment and health, in which human bodies are registers for environmen-
s
tal toxins that often elude detection by scientific instruments. We live

in an odorous world, but most scents are familiar and go largely unno-
ticed, while unusual odors or strong stenches demand attention.
Whats that smell? can be a casual inquiry about a new perfume or a
fraught question for identifying a potentially noxious odor. For the
New Yorkers alarmed by the maple syrup fragrance, their sense of smell
functioned as a way of knowing and evaluating the environment. You

will learn the source of the maple syrup smell in a few pages, but it
took years for New Yorkers to find its origin. Every time the odor wafted
into Manhattan, New Yorkers smelled the change in the air and won-
dered if it was harming them. Olfaction also performed this function in
nineteenth-century New York, though odors then raised a different set
of health concerns. Whereas modern Americans worry that nefarious
actors will introduce chemical or biological agents into urban environ-
ments to wreak havoc among dense populations, nineteenth-century
Americans feared miasma, literally the bad air that caused illness, when
they detected unusually strong or foul odors. Miasmas were not the
work of foreign enemies, but the creation of local environments, and
U
thus prompted environmental concerns.

ni
In the summer of 1863, thousands of Chicagoans signed a petition

ve
proclaiming that the southwesterly wind filled the atmosphere... with

r
this foul poisonous stench... rendering it quite unsafe, and greatly

si
detrimental to the health to attempt to breath[e] it. Chicagos economy

ty
was booming during the Civil War, but distillers, meatpackers, glue
of
factories, fat renderers, tanners, fertilizer manufacturers, and soap fac-

tories produced foul odors as well as jobs and money. The editors of the
W
Chicago Tribune lambasted the owners of these new businesses as

as
offenders against humanity and manufacturers of disease because

they produced a stench that each day... was greater and more exten-
hi
sive. As one Chicagoan summarized the danger, The oder [sic] is

n gt
enough to create a typhus fever.2

In the certainty of their assertions, nineteenth-century Chicagoans
on
possessed a stronger and more nuanced knowledge of their changing

urban environs than modern New Yorkers and their many questions
Pr
about the unusual smell of maple syrup. In both the nineteenth and
es
twenty-first centuries, odor complaints appeared in the press and citi-

zens appealed to city governments for relief, but Chicagoans never
s
asked what the foul poisonous stench was, where it had originated,
or what effect it would have on their bodies. Instead, Chicagoans con-
fidently declared that the odorous stew came from new and expanded
industries located along the Chicago River and pronounced that inhal-
ing these stenches harmed health and caused disease. No contrarian
voices emerged to mock these health concerns. Rather, Chicagos
4|Introduction

leaders tried to control foul smells while promoting industrial growth
and ultimately resolved the issue through a tremendous feat of environ-
mental engineering: they reversed the course of the Chicago River so
that it flows away from, rather than into, Lake Michigan.
Chicagoans take great pride in their reverse-engineered river, a sym-
bol of nineteenth-century humans conquest over nature, and many
historians have explained how changing nature protected Chicagos
drinking water and public health. By diverting city wastes away from
Lake Michigan, Chicagos water source, the engineers effectively stopped
the spread of cholera and typhus through excrement-contaminated
waters. But when aldermen approved the expensive and ambitious
U
plan of the Board of Public Works, neither they nor the engineers under
ni
stood how polluted water spreads disease. Instead, they thought that
ve
diverting the citys waste-filled river away from downtown would

r
improve the taste of their drinking water and, more importantly, redi-
si
rect that pestilential stench away from the city. In their minds, protect-
ty
ing health meant improving the smell of the city. The lengths that
of
Chicagoans went to raise the question of how encounters with odors

shaped urban development and ideas about American cities.3
W
The idea that a smell could cause illness seems laughable today,
as
because germ theory is so entrenched in contemporary culture. While

unusual smells might signal the presence of something dangerous, the
hi
odors themselves are harmless. But before germ theory explained that
n gt
microscopic germs, microbes, bacteria, and viruses cause illnesses,

miasma theory rationalized ill health ranging from headaches, nausea,
on
diarrhea, and slight fevers to deadly outbreaks of cholera, yellow fever,

and typhus as the result of inhaling bad air. Air, according to Noah
Pr
Websters American Dictionary in 1832, was inodorous, invisible, insipid,

es
colorless, elastic, possessed of gravity, easily moved, rarefied and con-

densed. Because a lack of odor was airs primary quality, smells were a
s
strong indication that this vital gas was compromised. Foul odors por-
tended the presence of miasma, the disease-causing effluvia released by
rotting corpses and swampy environs. The relation between stench,
miasma, and disease was best expressed by the British sanitarian Edwin
Chadwick in 1846 when he said, All smell is disease, a shorthand that
made perfect sense to nineteenth-century Americans.4
Introduction |5

Smell Detectives asks what it was like to live in American cities during
the nineteenth century, when everyone believed that foul odors caused
disease, but urban and industrial growth created new and stronger
stinks. In their attention to social rather than environmental issues,
historians have missed this paradox of urban growth, but nineteenth-
century Americans certainly did not. Those who moved into cities
or experienced rapidly changing environs in the nineteenth century
regularly judged the environment through their noses and found cities
wanting. Yet relatively few abandoned cities. Recognizing the impor-
tance of both healthy economies and a healthy populace, urban residents
from all backgrounds strove to create cities that were simultaneously
U
sweet smelling and industrial.

ni
Americans shared an early and widespread environmental con-

ve
sciousness directed at remaking the city into a healthier landscape. This

r
consciousness was distinctly urban in its embrace of cities and indus-

si
tries. Though they never converged into a reform movement and rarely
ty
recognized their common struggle, health reformers, housekeepers,

of
chemists, businessmen, tenement dwellers, and city aldermen shared

common sense, practices, and goals. The different actions taken by each
W
of these groups and countless individuals created conflicts and changed

as
over time but ultimately shaped cities to conform to their ideals of

healthful environments. The history of smell is critical to understand-
hi
ing this environmental consciousness and recognizing its many tangible

n gt
and lasting effects on cities.

on
Taking Smell Seriously

Pr
In an 1875 article about the daily worsening smells of the city, the New
es
York Times wrote, Here is a nursery of pestilence constructing right

under our eyes and noses, with all the natural incentives to fever.
s
Nineteenth-century Americans wrote about stenches as nauseating,

intolerable, pestilential, noxious, suffocating, disgusting, and deadly.
They petitioned city aldermen and state legislatures for stench abate-
ment and took business owners, those offenders against humanity and
manufacturers of disease, to court over malodorous production. They
wrote poetry about the stinking drains and swamps of death that
poisoned people in their homes. They created boards of health to
6|Introduction

control urban odors, and when the city still smelled, they indicted
health board members for failure to abate a nuisance, a misdemeanor
offense. They quoted Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who had poetically
counted two and seventy stenches, / all well defined, and many stinks!
in Cologne and mused that their city, whether it was New York or Phila-
delphia or Boston or Chicago or New Orleans, smelled worse.5
Nineteenth-century Americans took odors seriously, and that in
turn requires seriousness from us. When miasma theory was common
sense, olfaction was central to the evaluation of air quality. Like the other
senses, olfaction is a product of both the body and the mind. Biologists,
chemists, and psychologists explain that olfaction occurs when odorant
U
molecules bind with olfactory receptors in the nose and send signals to
ni
the brain, where the olfactory bulb interprets and reacts to the odors.
ve
Anthropologists, sociologists, and historians of the senses argue that

r
the senses and their functions are neither innate nor biologically deter-
si
mined but have varied widely over time and space. As a result, the act
ty
of smelling is biological, but the interpretation of and reaction to odors

of
is socially shaped and the product of ones cultural context.6

The questions and methods of sensory history have much to offer
W
environmental historians. Sensory history asks how people have per-

as
ceived their world through their bodies, what role sensory perceptions
play in interacting with the world, and how perceptions have varied
hi
across time and space. Sensory history argues that scholars need to con
n gt
sider all the senses, moving beyond the enduring visual record to think
carefully about how the momentary experiences of hearing, touching,
on
tasting, and smelling also shaped worldviews. This approach assumes

that the senses are not solely biological but have changed over time in
Pr
response to and in concert with societies and, I argue, environments.

es
Sensory history, then, is not a mere catalog of how places looked,

sounded, and smelled at different times but also an investigation into
s
how the people who experienced those times and places understood
the sights, sounds, and smells.7
That said, the history of smell is particularly difficult to research,
not only because odors are ephemeral, but also because smell is the
mute sense, meaning that there are few words to describe odors. I can
conjure the discordant honking and shouting of angry drivers or the
postrain twinkling greenery of my lawn with words: you likely have
Introduction |7

those sounds and sights in your mind right now. Your mental imagery
differs from what I hear and see, of course, but the words have conveyed
a clear sense to you because they are specific: discordant, honk, shout, twin-
kle, and green have meanings on their own. In contrast to the rich vocab-
ulary for sights, sounds, textures, and tastes, our olfactory vocabulary
is truncated, so Iand most others untrained in perfumerycan only
describe an odor by what it smells like: a skunk, a rose, maple syrup.
Those descriptions work if you have smelled skunks, roses, or maple
syrup before; those who have not smelled these have no frame of refer-
ence and only know that I am writing about an odor.8
It is no accident that olfactory words are so few; our vocabulary has
U
resulted from cultural taboos against talking about smells, especially

ni
the nasty ones. Sociologists and anthropologists have argued that

ve
taboos are social creations for creating and policing order and, as such,
r
exert incredible power in society. As Norbert Elias claimed in his 1938

si
The Civilizing Process and subsequent scholars have explored, social

ty
shame and disgust around odors rose with the development of manners
of
and middle-class refinement in European societies. Over time, manners

increasingly prohibited discussing smell in polite conversations. His-
W
torical studies of smell have argued that odors and olfaction played a
as
more important cultural role in Western societies before the Enlighten-

ments emphasis on reason celebrated sight as reliable and denigrated
hi
olfaction as a lower and animalistic sense.9

n gt
As a result of olfactions dual muteness, silenced by a lack of vocabu-

lary and by cultural prohibitions against discussing smells, odors are
on
difficult to find in the written historical record. Smell Detectives begins

with the premise that moments when people felt obligated to translate
Pr
their olfactory experience into words deserve careful attention. More

es
often than not, when people registered a concern about smells, as when
New Yorkers called 311 about the maple syrup or Chicagoans signed the
s
petition about the southwesterly wind, they did so because the odors
were unusual and therefore significant. The few smell incidents that
are notorious in modern historythe Great Stink of London in 1858 and
the Great Stink of Paris in 1880, both events when stenches of excrement
overwhelmed the city, created a health panic, and drove people to flee
became great because the odors themselves and the outrage against
them were anything but ordinary.10
8|Introduction

Environmental historians have not only something to gain by asking
the questions of sensory history but also much to offer. As the study of
perceptions, sensory history often neglects the material conditions
being perceived. Yet miasma theory was not the sole contributor to
nineteenth-century olfaction; flowering plants, decomposing bodies,
fruit stands, rotting garbage, waterways full of offal and sewage, new
chemical industries, and industrialized slaughter produced some of the
odors that urban dwellers inhaled, judged, and reacted against. By con-
sidering environments in all their variety and richness alongside olfac-
tory perceptions, and noting changes in each, historians can better
understand the development of both urban environments and ideas
U
about cities. Creating and living in cities was an iterative process that
ni
incorporated voices and experiences beyond those of traditional author-

ve
ities such as mayors, aldermen, civil engineers, and urban planners.11

r
Furthermore, environmental historians close attention to the par-

si
ticularities of place, geography, ecology, geology, and climate brings

ty
an important corrective to sensory history. These methods of environ-

of
mental history challenge sweeping arguments. Many pioneering works

on the history of smell began from the notion that we live in a deodor-
W
ized world, where both odors and the sense of smell are repressed, and
as
made grand claims about modernity as a forward march of odor removal

and olfactory desensitization. The assumption of a deodorized and
hi
desensitized present led historians to neglect the material effects of sig-

n gt
nificant environmental and social changes in the modern period. The

proliferation of chemical industries, the squalor produced by rapid
on
urbanization, and the rise of gardening and perfumery are modern devel-
opments that produce numerous odors. Attention to the specific fea-
Pr
tures of environsincluding the multiple effects of introducing new

es
people and processes into environments, and the interactions between

the built, natural, political, social, and cultural environmentsyields
s
richer explanations for why certain senses mattered more than others
in particular moments and documents how varied sensory experience
is across space.12
Smell Detectives approaches olfaction as a form of tacit knowledge,
an expertise gained through lived experience rather than formal train-
ing, whereby people know and evaluate their environment but lack the
concepts and vocabulary to articulate how they know what they know.
Introduction |9

When asked to explain how they could distinguish between odors, or
called to testify about the health effects of a stench in the nineteenth
century, individuals referred to their own experience as expertise, as
did the physicians who investigated sanitary conditions and the chem-
ists who analyzed water and air. The equation of olfactory experience
with environmental knowledge did not become problematic until newly
created health officials claimed authority over odors, their sources, and
their control after the Civil War. If historians consider scientists and
men of science in the same way that their contemporaries didas mem-
bers of society rather than authorities over itwe can tell richer stories
about the interactions between lay and scientific knowledge, better
U
understand the imperatives for and difficulties of professionalization,

ni
and recognize why olfactory knowledge was dismissed or downplayed

ve
in specific times and contexts. Stories such as those told here will help
r
historians and society to recognize both the importance of scientific

si
knowledge and the value of other ways of knowing.13

ty
of
Smelling Committees:
W
Science, Authority, Power, and Expertise

as
In response to the many petitions they received about the stench in the
early 1860s, Chicagos aldermen hired chemist Frederick Mahla to con-
hi
duct a scientific chemical analysis of river water in order to determine

n gt
what caused the odors. Week after week, Mahla traveled up and down
the Chicago River with an assortment of vials, jars, and acids, tools that
on
he used to conduct field tests and collect samples for analysis. On his
tenth and final foray in August, Mahla accompanied city aldermen,
Pr
engineers, and newspaper reporters, each of whom carried his own

es
tools for the encounter with stench: bottles of cologne, camphor, chlo-
ride of lime, lemons, cigars, and handkerchiefs. Together, these men
s
and their tools constituted a smelling committee that sought to find

and control the sources of the pestilential stench.14
On this committee, Mahla and his scientific devices were no more
important than the politicians and engineers who carried fragrant instru-
ments. Before they received Mahlas scientific report, city aldermen
passed new ordinances and, following the advice of public works
10|Introduction

engineers, decided that the best way to control odors was the mechani-
cal solution of reverse engineering the Chicago River. The constitution
of the smelling committee around the chemist and ultimate dismissal of
chemical findings illustrate some important realities about nineteenth-
century urban life: science played a significant role in cities and people
often turned to scientists for answers, but science was not automatically
an authority and scientists often lacked power.
Smell Detectives approaches chemists and chemistry, physicians and
medicine through the words of other urban dwellers as well as their own
so that we can see the role that these practitioners and their knowledge
played in society and chart how and why those roles changed over time.
U
Science was vital in nineteenth-century urban life, but it did not trump
ni
other ways of knowing, nor was it solely the possession of trained sci-
ve
entists such as Frederick Mahla. The importance of science within rather

r
than over society is evident in the items the committee members carried.
si
At first blush, it seems obvious that Mahla possessed tools for scientific
ty
inquiry and diagnosis, whereas everyone else employed agents to cope

of
with or find relief from the stench. However, the chloride of lime and
camphor brought by the politicians and reporters would easily have
W
found a place in the chemists arsenal; the use of these chemicals by non
as
chemists indicates that there were many ways in which laypersons inter
acted with, understood, and drew upon chemistry in their daily lives.
hi
This is also a powerful reminder that objects have a purpose. By con-

n gt
sidering material culture as well as the documentary record, histori-

ans can better apprehend how people understood and interacted with
on
their world.
I contend that we need to understand expertise, authority, and
Pr
power as relational. Questions of expertise, authority, and power are

es
vexed, and who is able to claim expertise, establish authority, or wield

power varies greatly depending on context. When Chicagos aldermen
s
hired Mahla as a chemist, they both recognized his expertise and lim-
ited his power. Mahla possessed scientific expertise as a result of his
education and practice. He exercised authority in his laboratory, in his
college classroom, and in the courtroom when called to testify on toxicol-
ogy. However, as an outsider to city government, Mahla lacked political
power over the city and his position of authority was short-lived, ending
Introduction |11

when he submitted his report. Likewise, nineteenth-century culture
recognized women as authorities over domestic space. Women possessed
specialized knowledge or expertise gained through their experiences
and the education they received from their mothers and from domestic
advice. Yet, because nineteenth-century women lacked political power,
female authors such as Catharine E. Beecher and her sister Harriet
Beecher Stowe carefully built upon their cultural authority over the
home to engage in public and political conversations about health.
Despite their different positions in society, chemists and women both
had expertise or specialized knowledge but could only claim authority
and exert power in specific contexts.15
U
In nineteenth-century cities, scientific authority and political

ni
authority were often at odds. This reality frustrated the physicians and
ve
scientists who understood urban environments and industries in dif-

r
ferent terms than the politicians who had the power to decide policies,
si
pass laws, and appoint officials. This frustration was one of many impe-
ty
tuses to campaigns for scientific positions within urban governments,

of
which began before the Civil War, and the postwar organization of pro-
fessional associations. Professionalization, the separation of trained prac-
W
titioners from amateurs, was a concerted effort by scientists to obtain

as
political power that would, in turn, make it difficult for politicians or

citizens to dismiss science as an authority.16
hi
n gt
Smell Detectives
on
On February 5, 2009, three and a half years after New Yorkers first
inhaled the mysterious maple syrup smell, Mayor Michael Bloomberg
Pr
called a last-minute press conference. Reporters assembled to hear

es
Bloomberg celebrate the work of OEM [Office of Emergency Manage-

ment] and DEP [Department of Environmental Protection] smelling
s
sleuths who had tracked the maple syrup smell to its source. The
smelling sleuths had cross-referenced the location of citizens who
complained about the odor with atmospheric conditions of temperature,
humidity, wind trajectory, and velocity. They put all this data on a smell
map that showed how the mysterious maple syrup smell wafted into
New York from Frutarom, a flavor and fragrance factory located in New
Jersey. Smell incidents corresponded with the dates when Frutarom
12|Introduction

had processed fenugreek, an herb common in Asian cooking but better
known to Americans as the flavoring in artificial maple syrup.17
When Bloomberg talked about city employees as smelling sleuths,
he unconsciously echoed Charles Frederick Chandler, the Columbia
University chemist who served as president of New York Citys Board
of Health from 1873 until 1883. Chandler coined the phrase smell detec-
tives in 1878 to describe anyone who followed her nose. Like the twenty-
first-century smelling sleuths, nineteenth-century smell detectives
tried to follow odors to their sources, but the results were mixed; Chan-
dler asserted that citizens are very poor smell detectives, because they
rarely followed smells to distant origins and instead thought that all
U
odors emanated from local sources. Chandler urged the use of properly
ni
trained chemists in place of these poor smell detectives, and he was

ve
ultimately successful in claiming odor identification and evaluation as

r
the exclusive domain of officials.18 When Bloomberg celebrated smell-

si
ing sleuths, he trumpeted only city officials, overlooking the hundreds

ty
of everyday noses that had detected an unusual odor and called 311 to
of
register a concern.
Who could be a smell detective changed over the course of the
W
nineteenth century, as the sciences and medicine professionalized.

as
Education, professional associations, and specialized language distin-

guished trained, expert practitioners from uneducated amateurs or the
hi
lay public. But the sense of smell was universal, which means that any-
n gt
one couldand candetect odors. Early public health reformers used

the universality of smelling to their advantage, arguing that everyone
on
knew cities were unhealthy because everyone smelled the foul air. As
reformers achieved their goals of government positions and power over
Pr
the urban environment, the universality of olfaction changed from an

es
asset to a problem. Citizen smell detectives complained to new health

officials about stenches in their neighborhoods and then complained
s
about the same health officials when those odors did not change. Agi-
tated citizens, fearing ill health from the air they breathed, took men
like Chandler to court, where he invoked scientific authority and politi-
cal power to tell them that they did not know what they smelled. But
Chandler could not stop New Yorkers from smelling and worrying
about the air, any more than todays health officials and environmental
experts can claim exclusive authority over olfaction.
Introduction |13

What Shall We Breathe?
Chicago was not the only American city to grapple with stenches in
the nineteenth century. New Yorks leaders also chartered a smelling
committee to trace odors to their sources. The residents of Charleston,
Boston, and Philadelphia filed petitions seeking relief from stenches.
Physicians in New Orleans, Providence, and Washington, DC, traced
outbreaks of disease to the foul smells that emanated from faulty plumb-
ing, new sewer systems, marshy land disrupted by building projects,
and canals filled with industrial wastes. In 1869, Charles H. Brigham
surveyed the profusion of human-created stinks and summarized the
U
fears of many Americans when he asked, What Shall We Breathe?

ni
Brigham, a founding member of Michigans Board of Health, proph-

ve
esied a dismal yet not so distant future when the airs quality will be
r
destroyed and its benefits lost... by many circumstances and contriv-

si
ances for which men are responsible.19

ty
Brigham was asking if modern, industrial cities could be healthy

of
environments, a question that resonates today when we consider the

fragility of urban life in the face of air pollutants, compromised water
W
supplies, rusting bridges, rising sea levels, earthquakes, hurricanes,

as
and fires. As blockbuster films and the nightly news remind us, cities
are vulnerable environments and urban life is tenuous. But when
hi
Brigham worried about American cities, his sole concern was the loss
n gt
of fresh air to stenches. Brigham was reacting to the rapid urban

growth and industrial development of the nineteenth century, when
on
established American cities swelled and new cities sprang up in the

transAppalachian West. The urban populace ballooned from 322,000
Pr
in 1800, to 1.8 million by 1840, and then to just under 10 million in 1870.
es
By 1900, over 30 million Americans, or 40 percent of the total popula-

tion, called urban areas home. Waves of new residents overwhelmed
s
existing housing stock, transforming homes into overcrowded tene-

ments and cellars into musty apartments. The same industries that
attracted migration with promises of jobs and prosperity spewed
stenches and smoke into the atmosphere. Not sure if fresh air, the
regenerating power of the human machine and its perfect chemical
balance of oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide, could endure these
14|Introduction

onslaughts much longer, Brigham genuinely feared what future genera-
tions would breathe.20
To understand the urgency of Brighams fears, modern readers need
more than the knowledge of rapid urban growth and industrial develop-
ment. We also must suspend our modern knowledge of disease causa-
tion. To look back across a paradigm shift as significant and profound
as germ theory is nearly impossible, because the knowledge that germs,
microbes, bacteria, viruses, and carcinogens cause ill health is common
sense today. But this was not the common sense of nineteenth-century
Americans. In the 1800s, scientists and physicians, politicians and
reformers, housewives and day laborers shared common sense as well
U
as environmental knowledge that foul odors directly harmed health and

ni
caused illness.
ve
The belief in miasma did not make nineteenth-century Americans

r
ignorant or foolish but guided them to do things differently than we

si
might today. When health threats had a material manifestation in

ty
odors, so too did the protections against them. The regular practices of
of
nineteenth-century life, from whitewashing a kitchen to smoking a

cigar to wearing a nosegay, were so routine that we forget they served
W
a purpose. Each of these activities, and many others, occurred for an

as
olfactory reason that corrected local environmental defects and pro-

tected health.
hi
When we recognize that miasma theory was the accepted knowledge

n gt
of what harmed health, we see serious concerns about odors and air
nearly everywhere: not just in overt discussions of health but also in
on
nuisance complaints, domestic advice, scientific research, newspaper

editorials, urban guides, letters, diaries, fiction, and satire. In all these
Pr
venues, comments about fresh air and foul smells were simultaneously
es
discussions of environment, health, material progress, and the perils of

urban life. The environmental consciousness behind these various
s
comments gives coherence to stories too often told independently of

one another, such as public health reform and housekeeping, or life in
Civil War camps and in tenement houses, or the creation of parks and
of environmental regulations. Though these stories have been divided
among historys subfields, they occurred coincidentally and interrelated
with one another. Olfactory history of urban America brings together
Introduction |15

the histories of science and medicine, cultural history, womens history,
and environmental history.
Thinking about air requires considering the insides of homes as well
as a citys streets, waterways, and parks. Too often our histories stop
at the threshold, caught up in the political intrigues of the day and the
conflicts on the streets. Yet, as generations of womens historians have
argued, private homes were not isolated from politics and public life
but were the spaces in which many of the nations biggest problems were
keenly debated and intimately felt. This is especially true when we con-
sider the environment, as the atmosphere and its odors respected no
boundaries. Far from being immune to the environmental and health
U
problems of the city, homes were the places to which the sick returned
ni
and physicians visited, where convalescents lingered, and where most

ve
nineteenth-century Americans drew their last breaths. By considering

r
domestic environments alongside and as part of the wider urban envi-

si
ronment, I contend that womens knowledge and domestic practices

ty
shaped urban life alongside the knowledge and actions of physicians,

of
scientists, politicians, and engineers.

Smell Detectives strives to return odors and conversations about them
W
to their place in nineteenth-century American cities. Smells were not

as
the only thing, and often not the primary thing, that urban residents
thought, talked, and worried about, but they were part of this period in
hi
important ways. The ever-present consciousness of environment and

n gt
health is evident in the constant interactions with and evaluations of

the air, the building of parks as urban lungs, suburbanization in search
on
of fresh air, and the development of scientific expertise, medical author-

ity, and urban governance to control odors. Although odors never
Pr
became a pressing political question in a century marked by abolition,

es
the Civil War, and Reconstruction, they were a continuous concern

that shaped the lives of Americans and the physical, governmental, and
s
social development of American cities.

Furthermore, while modern etiologies teach us that nineteenth-
century Americans were mistaken when they equated foul odors with
ill health, their odor complaints accurately identified environmental
degradation. Many of the places where nineteenth-century Americans
held their noses have become industrial zones, environmental hazards,
and Superfund sites in the twenty-first century. By taking smell
16|Introduction

concerns and olfactory aggravation seriously as expressions of tacit
knowledge, we not only can recover how nineteenth-century Ameri-
cans understood and reacted to ongoing environmental degradation
but also be better attentive to changes in our contemporary world.
While New York Citys maple syrup smell was nonthreatening, the
licorice odor you will read about in this books conclusion led to the
discovery of a chemical spill that streamed into Charleston, West Vir-
ginias water supply and made every home in the state capital hazardous
to health.
Fluctuations in environmental odors provide information about
ongoing ecological damage, but only if individuals and governments
U
respond to olfactory knowledge. This raises the question of why indi-

ni
viduals and governments react in the ways they do. The answer can be
ve
found in the history of nineteenth-century cities, when unusual odors

r
were just as alarming as Rachel Carsons infamous silent spring.

si
ty
Detecting the Smells of Nineteenth-Century Cities

of
There is no one story of city smells in the nineteenth century. Instead,

W
there are many stories that open windows onto what it was like to live
as
in the rapidly changing societies and environs of Americas cities. By

examining actors in cities scattered throughout the United States, Smell
hi
Detectives argues that the myriad ways in which citizens reacted to urban
n gt
smells profoundly and continually reshaped urban lives, landscapes,

and governance throughout the nineteenth century. For every story
on
you will read here, there are many others waiting to be written.
The first three chapters consider three different groups of smell
Pr
detectives in antebellum America, defined by their use of the common

es
sense that foul odors caused disease. The first chapter follows physi-
cians as they encountered their cities, diagnosed health threats in the
s
urban environment, and called upon olfaction as a universal sense to

build a political reform campaign. In chapter 2, we move through the
city alongside the individuals who lived there, sought immediate relief
from the stenches that they thought caused illness, and developed a range
of everyday practices for navigating the city smellscape. Chapter 3
crosses thresholds so we can witness women contending with the foul
odors that entered and concentrated in homes, where these women
Introduction |17

developed and adjusted their domestic regimens to purify and protect
the air their families breathed. Though all three groups thought about
and interacted with the air of antebellum cities, they rarely intersected
with each other and never worked together. Instead, each group worked
independently, evaluating and trying to improve the urban environment
in the best way possible.
It was the Civil War, rather than any of these individual activities
within cities, that changed urban governance and promoted physicians
and scientists to positions of political power. Chapter 4 tours the places
disrupted by the Civil War, where soldiers, physicians, and nurses
inhaled the powerful stenches they associated with cities. Experiences
U
of war-torn environments, and the widespread disease and death that

ni
accompanied them, reinforced the common sense that bad smells were
ve
dangerous and convinced all Americans that governments needed to

r
take active responsibility for environmental conditions. Cities also

si
changed as a result of the war, as its accompanying industrial growth

ty
amplified and intensified urban stenches. In 1866, New York State

of
chartered the Metropolitan Board of Health for New York City, creat-
ing the first standing board staffed by physicians who had the power
W
to create and enforce preventive health measures, and other cities fol-
as
lowed suit. Chapter 5 asks how significantly health boards changed

stenches in cities by comparing the olfactory crisis that sent Frederick
hi
Mahla and the smelling committee up the Chicago River in 1862 to the
n gt
one that put New York Citys Charles Frederick Chandler on the defen-
sive in 1878.
on
Public health bureaucracies could not, or did not, eliminate foul

odors from cities. Residents continued to adapt, both to the physical
Pr
environment and to the changed political landscape. The sixth chapter

es
returns to the home, where women continued their antebellum prac-

tices and implemented new knowledge gained during the Civil War.
s
Domestic advice and practices indicate that both physicians in public

and women in their homes were leaning toward germ theory before
its introduction or widespread acceptance in the 1870s and 1880s.
Charles H. Brigham worried about what Americans would breathe in
1869; four years later, the residents of Cambridge, Massachusetts, awoke
to find their houses blackened by a stench so strong it had become vis-
ible, and they challenged industries before the state Board of Health.
18|Introduction

Chapter 7 enters the new courtrooms created by health boards, where
olfactory experience was losing ground to more readily reproducible
chemical and visual evidence. Through their experience with local and
state health boards, citizens learned to emphasize the visual aspects of
environmental degradation, contributing to the shift from stench to
smoke as the marker of air pollution.
Finally, chapter 8 asks where the social and cultural importance of
stench went after germ theory and finds a range of compelling and con-
tradictory answers. While germ theory changed the reaction to odors,
so people no longer believed they inhaled disease or health with the air
they breathed, it neither rendered the sense of smell obsolete nor elimi-
U
nated odor complaints. Instead, germ theory shattered the coherence

ni
that miasma theory had given to discussions of foul odors, fresh air,
ve
environment, and health, even as the details in many of those concerns

r
remained the same. Some conversations about the air became more
si
technical, as engineers measured smoke in parts per million and air-

ty
conditioning engineers defined fresh air through cubic feet per minute.
of
Other conversations continued as before, with individuals holding

their noses, complaining about smelly areas, and defining fresh air as
W
country air. However, the continuing expansion of American cities,

as
which included both industrial and middle-class residential suburban-

ization, increasingly separated the affluent from industries and laborers,
hi
amplifying the olfactory shock of their encounter. As zoning ordinances

n gt
formalized the spatial and political separation of the classes, the percep-
tion of stenches shifted from a marker of environmental damage to a
on
reflection of class and ethnic prejudice.

The irony of reform and regulation is that as health reformers
Pr
achieved their goal and obtained power in urban governance, they

es
increasingly eliminated the possibility of action against stench pro-

ducers. Sanitarians had used the inaction of city politicians against
s
industries to argue for the creation of health boards made up of physi-

cians and scientists, who would respond to citizen complaints and
eliminate health threats. Early reform efforts incorporated the testi-
mony of aggrieved citizens, but as health officials established themselves
within urban governance, and germ theory disrupted the equation of
ill smells with ill health, health boards became less responsive to citizen
complaints. This occurred not only because health officials definitions
Introduction |19

of offensive odors differed from laymens odor tolerance but also
because health officials created a framework for responding to odor
complaints that required corroborating the stench. Odors were, then
as now, ephemeral and fleeting; they often vanished before an official
could arrive to substantiate the complaint. Thus the regulatory frame-
work of public health was, from its outset, a mismatch for the material
reality of bad smells. Odors came and went more quickly than newly
created health officials.
By seeking immediate relief from foul odors, individuals, health
reformers, and urban governments willfully ignored the complex inter-
actions between industry, population, and environment that produced
U
the smells of their cities and the ill health of their populace. Although
ni
public health reform had its origins in stench concerns and the demand
ve
for fresh air, public health officials ultimately delegitimized the olfac-
r
tory complaints that differentiated fresh air from foul. While many
si
Americans still navigate the world by nose, as well as by sight, by sound,

ty
and by touch, the bureaucratization of public health and the turn from
of
miasma to microbes have all but eliminated discussions of stench from

our political discourse. When it is obvious that Americans still worry
W
about the air they breathe, from the market for air fresheners to the
as
struggles of minority communities against high asthma rates, we have

to ask when and why legal action departed from everyday experience.
hi
The institutionalization of a particular kind of public health in the

n gt
nineteenth century has taught people to ignore or downplay the envi-

ronmental knowledge gleaned through their senses, even when their
on
senses speak loudly.

Pr
es
s
20|Introduction

Smell Detectives: An Olfactory History of Nineteenth-Century Urban America

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6.125 9.25 SPINE: 1.125 FLAPS: 3.

IF YOU SMELL SOMETHING,

AN OLFACTORY HISTORY OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY URBAN AMERICA

keichle_jkt.indd 1 5/17/17 11:16 AM

Paul S. Sutter, Editor

Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books explore human relation-

human communities, the ways that people affect the environments of

F.Kiechle, Smell Detectives.indd 1 5/3/17 10:09 AM

Nineteenth-Century Urban America

University of Washington Press

F.Kiechle, Smell Detectives.indd 3 5/3/17 10:09 AM

Copyright 2017 by Melanie A. Kiechle

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy,

recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in

University of Washington Press

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kiechle, Melanie A., author.

Title: Smell detectives : an olfactory history of nineteenth-century urban

Description: Seattle : University of Washington Press, [2017] | Series:

Weyerhaeuser environmental books | Includes bibliographical references

Subjects: LCSH: SmellUnited StatesHistory19th century. | Odors

century. | Urban health.

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016048034

Portions of chapters 1, 2, and 5 were previously published in Melanie Kiechle,

F.Kiechle, Smell Detectives.indd 4 5/3/17 10:09 AM

F.Kiechle, Smell Detectives.indd 5 5/3/17 10:09 AM

Foreword by Paul S. Sutterix

Introduction: Whats That Smell?3

one The Smells of Sick Cities21

two Navigating by Nose: Common Sense and Responses

three Smells like Home: Odors in the Domestic Environment78

four The Stenches of Civil War106

five Smelling Committees and Authority over City Air138

six Learning to Smell Again: Managing the Air between

the Civil War and Germ Theory170

seven Visualizing Vapors and Seeing Smells198

eight Dirty Cities, Smelly Bodies: City Odors after

Conclusion: If You Smell Something, Say Something259

F.Kiechle, Smell Detectives.indd 7 5/3/17 10:09 AM

Growing up on suburban Long Island in the 1970s, I distinctly remem-

ber a series of television ads that captured my environmental imagina-

temporarily remove underprivileged children from the inner city during

enjoyed the environmental amenitiesgrassy swards, woods, lakes and

pockets of urban America. The nation experienced an environmental

particularly people of color, in dirty, dangerous, and declining city

had produced such profound inequalities in the nations postwar resi-

dential geography, but as a child of the dawning environmental era I

F.Kiechle, Smell Detectives.indd 9 5/3/17 10:09 AM

who lived in New York Citys teeming tenements. Parsons believed, as

retarded human development. He worried in particular about tubercu-

tubercle bacillus), and he believed that the supposed freshness and

purity of rural air would improve the constitutions of city children,

was beginning to transform American medicine in ways that would

obscure the older miasmatic meaning of the term. Americans came to

ologists scrambled to find and make visible through advanced technol-

F.Kiechle, Smell Detectives.indd 10 5/3/17 10:09 AM

them the result of concentrating humans and their economic activities

within small geographical spaces. Urban Americans not only com-

plained about these smells but understood them to be unhealthy. This

can be a difficult concept to wrap ones head around because we are

so inclined to think of odors as epiphenomenal, as sensations with no

substantive causal effect or power. Sure, powerful odors can make us

meaning of that phrase: how one experienced, mapped, navigated, and