As a further illustration of the care which Audubon exercised over the minute details of his great undertaking, we will reproduce the penciled orders on the drawing of the Great White Heron (Plate cclxxxi), which shows an adult male performing the gymnastic feat of seizing a large striped fish, a view of Key West forming the background: "Keep closely to the sky in depth & colouring! have the water a Pea-green tint. Keep the division of the scales on the leg in fact white in your engraving—The colouring over these will subdue them enough! finish the houses better from the original which you have; have the upper back portion very mellowing in the outline." Again, on the drawing of the Great Cinereous Owl (Plate cccli), we read: "Raise the bird about 4 inches on the copper—higher than in the Drawing, and put in a landscape below of Wild Mountains," a direction which in this instance was not followed, for the bird was eventually shown on a branch against the sky.
In many instances towards the end of his work, Audubon furnished Havell with drawings of the birds only, with directions to supply "an old rotten stick" for perch, or to "amend this rascally sky and water"; as we have already seen, he often depended upon him to combine several detached pictures into one plate, but not always with happy results. The following note was written on a drawing of the Carolina Parrot, reproduced in a very striking plate (No. xxvi), in which seven gaudy individuals of this nearly extinct species are represented feeding on a favorite weed, the cockle-bur: "The upper specimen was shot near Bayou Sarah, and appeared as very uncommon having 14 Tail feathers all very distinct—uniformly affixed in 14 distinct receptacles that I drew it more to exhibit one of those astonishing fits of nature than anything else—it was a female.—The Green headed is also a Singular although not so uncommon a variety as the above one. Louisiana—December (1821?) J. J. Audubon." The upper bird, which is here referred to, is noticed in his "Biography" of the species as "a kind of occasional variety."
On the drawing of the Swamp Sparrow (Plate lxiv), which was published in 1829, Audubon wrote, evidently with the wish of having his wife's name appear: "Drawn from Nature by Lucy Audubon, Mr. Havell will please have Lucy Audubon name on this plate instead of mine...!"
Vandalism is always short-sighted, but seldom has its vision been more myopic and sinister than in the case of the copper plates of The Birds of America, most of which were sold for old metal and converted into copper bars. Had they been preserved to this day, their value would have been an hundred-fold greater than that of the few paltry tons of metallic copper which they were supposed to represent. Mr. Ruthven Deane, whose researches in the field of "Auduboniana" have added greatly to this subject, has given a history of these plates,[247] and of the interesting way in which a remnant came to be snatched, as it were, from the very mouth of the furnace, through the persistence and enthusiasm of a lad of fourteen. To follow this writer's account, it seems that shortly after the death of her son John, Mrs. Audubon sold the copper plates to a firm in New York, where they remained until about 1865, stored in the warehouse of Messrs. Phelps, Dodge & Company. Not far from that time the plates were sorted and a few were given away; the large remainder was sent to a brass and copper company, of which William E. Dodge was president, at Ansonia, Connecticut. How some of these were fortunately rescued, in about the year 1873, is told in a letter to Mr. Deane from Mr. Charles A. Cowles, of Ansonia:
At that time I was about fourteen years old. I was beginning the study of taxidermy, and was naturally deeply interested in birds. I happened to be at the refinery watching the process of loading one of the furnaces, and noticed on one of the sheets of copper that a man was throwing into the furnace, what appeared to me to be the picture of a bird's foot. I took the plate from him, cleaned it with acid, and thereupon discovered the engraving, or as I termed it, the picture, of a bird (Plate cvi, Black Vulture), I made an immediate but unsuccessful request to the foreman of the furnace not to melt the plates; and then I appealed to the superintendent, but without avail. I next brought the matter to the general manager of the concern, my father, from whom I received no encouragement. This sort of treatment was evidently what I needed, for I hastened back to the works in a state of mind so determined that I succeeded in having all the plates, that had not been melted, removed to a place of safety. This occurred in the spring of that year; and the plates remained undisturbed until the annual inventory was taken the first of the following year. At that time the disposition of the plates was taken up. I appealed to my mother and interested her to such an extent that she drove to the factory and looked at one of the plates. She of course recognized that they were Audubon plates; and instructions were given by my father to keep them intact. The plates were subsequently submitted to a treatment which removed all oxidation and then taken to the main office of the company, and to the best of my recollection, distributed as follows: Mr. Wm. E. Dodge, president of the company, had a few plates sent to the American Museum of Natural History, New York City, and a few plates to the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C., and I think he retained one or two for himself. The remainder of them, with the exception of two, my father kept; and they have since come into my possession by purchase from the estate. The two plates just excepted were Nos. xxii and lxxxii [Purple Martin and Whippoorwill], and they particularly struck my fancy, so much that when the plates were first discovered I managed to secure them on the quiet, cleaned them myself and hid them; and when the plates were distributed no one knew of the existence of these two and they later became my property.
It was thought possible that some of these plates had been sold in New York City before the bulk of them were condemned as junk and sent to Connecticut, but in 1898 Mr. Deane was able to give the designation and resting place of only thirty-seven;[248] among these, however, were the Wild Turkeys, Canada Goose, Great Northern Diver, Raven, American Robin, and Ruby-throated Hummingbird, all among the finest of the original 435.
Under the guidance of Mr. George Bird Grinnell, on April 6, 1916, I paid a visit to "Audubon Park," now "Minnie's Land" no longer, where country roads have given way to business streets and forests to subways and skyscraper apartment houses. Notwithstanding the momentous changes which the extension of upper New York City has effected both above and below ground during the recent era of rapid transportation, the old Audubon houses still remain, like boulders amid stream, the impact of the city which has flowed around and beyond them being checked for the moment by a rampart of solid masonry, the retaining wall of the far-famed Riverside Drive, which rises above Audubon's old house close to its rear veranda and there makes a wide turn. For Mr. Grinnell this was a return to the scenes of his boyhood; the home of his father, Mr. George Blake Grinnell, stood on the hill just above the Audubon house, not far from the present "Riviera" building at One Hundred and Fifty-Seventh Street; the Grinnell apartment house which towers aloft close at hand stands in their old cow pasture, while their garden site is marked by the present entrance to the subway station on Broadway.
The first part of Audubon's original tract to be sold was the easterly section, extending from what is now the east side of Broadway to the Bloomingdale Road, and between the present One Hundred and Fifty-sixth and One Hundred and Fifty-seventh Streets; on that portion John Woodhouse Audubon built a large frame structure which, for a number of years, served as a boarding house for workmen employed in the sugar refinery of Messrs. Plume & Lamont that stood on the river-bank, at the foot of the present One Hundred and Sixtieth Street. Victor and John W. Audubon also built three houses on the hill, one of which, between One Hundred and Fifty-sixth and One Hundred and Fifty-seventh Streets, was occupied by Mr. Grinnell; another, at one time the dwelling of Henry A. Smythe, a former Collector of the Port of New York, was on land now covered by the Numismatic Building, while a third, which was occupied by Wellington Clapp, was on a part of the Archer M. Huntington estate, south of One Hundred and Fifty-sixth Street, and stood a little easterly of the present Riverside Drive; all of these houses have disappeared. In September, 1842, the Corporation of Trinity Parish acquired from Richard F. Carman, in Carmansville, the tract of land later known as "Trinity Cemetery"; this extended from Bloomingdale Road to the River, and between the present One Hundred and Fifty-third and One Hundred and Fifty-fifth Streets.[249]
The original Audubon house, standing in the angle nearly opposite One Hundred and Fifty-fifth Street, is all but concealed, except from the river side, but may be approached by a lane which leads off from One Hundred and Fifty-eighth Street. In 1913, when this old landmark was in imminent danger of demolition, the Commissioner of Public Parks made an eloquent plea for its preservation to the Audubon Societies and to lovers of birds and nature everywhere. It was then suggested that instead of permitting the historic structure to be destroyed, the city should acquire it, float it up the Hudson River to Fort Washington Park, and re-establish it there as a permanent memorial to the naturalist; it was also noticed that the public interest was enhanced by the fact that the father of telegraphy, Samuel F. B. Morse, had worked upon his invention while Audubon's guest, and that the first message to be received from Philadelphia came over a wire which entered his room at the northwest corner of the building.
An early engraving[250] represents the naturalist's house essentially as it appeared during his lifetime, surrounded by goodly forest trees of oak and chestnut, but these, when standing at all, are now reduced to gaunt and scarred remnants. A later print[251] shows the three Audubon houses, the river, and between it and the lawn "that eye-sore of a railroad,"[252] which was built not long after Audubon settled upon his estate. The original house was sold before 1862,[253] and about eight years later its new owner occupied it, after having given it a mansard roof and made numerous changes which were sanctioned by an era of bad taste. The naturalist's house overlooked the river and commanded a grand view from its high veranda on the front, while Victor's, which later adjoined it to the north, owing probably to the encroachments of the railroad, was built to face the hill-slope opposite; a top studio, at a corner of its roof, is an addition of a later purchaser.[254]