Entwined: Botany, Art and the Lost Cat Swamp Habitat in Providence. A major joint project of the Brown University Herbarium and the Rhode Island Historical Society. There’s the new online website for it, and there was a just-gone exhibition.

Here’s H.P. Lovecraft…

My home was not far from what was then the edge of the settled residence district, so that I was just as used to the rolling fields, stone walls, giant elms, squat farmhouses, and deep woods of rural New England as to the ancient urban scene. This brooding, primitive landscape seemed to me to hold some vast but unknown significance, and certain dark wooded hollows near the Seekonk River took on an aura of strangeness not unmixed with vague horror. They figured in my dreams — especially those nightmares containing the black, winged rubbery entities which I called “night-gaunts” — from “Some Notes on a Nonentity”.

Where were Lovecraft’s childhood “hollows”? I wrote a detailed extended essay which delved into the likely sites. It can be found in my book Lovecraft in Historical Context: fourth collection as “In the hollows of memory: H.P. Lovecraft’s Seekonk and Cat Swamp” (in Historical Context #4). Cat Swamp was one of the sites I investigated and considered.

It was one of the oldest named places in the area, named as such in a document of 1667. It would be delightful to imagine it being named because it was a haunt of escaped cats brought by the settlers, and thus to imagine the possibility that the boy Lovecraft was once followed homeward at sunset by an Ulthar-like army of kitties. But that vision of Cat Swamp must be left to the fancy of a future graphic-novelist, as it seems equally likely that the swamp was named for the supply of useful ‘cat-tail’ rushes that grew there.

Before extensive drainage Cat Swamp started about a third of a mile north of Angell Street, and ended about a mile north of Angell Street where it formed the ‘Great Swamp’. This whole area (if unbuilt on) appears to have been open to children in Lovecraft’s childhood, as was the way in the era of free-range childhoods. The undergraduates from Brown would also go there to skate on the ice during freezing weather. Much of it appears to have been drained between about 1903 and 1907, i.e. after Lovecraft reached age 12-13, part of it going under housing and part to Brown University for sports use such as playing fields and a new gym. Given the close proximity to his home, the swamp may well have featured in Lovecraft’s younger exploratory boyhood, but he and his fellows seem to have gravitated to the riverside and by the time of his maturing middle childhood his “hollows” seem more likely to have been around York Pond by the Seekonk river. Possibly on a northern flank later taken for sand and gravel. That he often returned to the surviving southern wooded rise above York Pond in later life, to write letters in the open air, seems confirmatory evidence of his attachment to the place.