Woods Hole Historical Museum Weekly Dispatch

Rachel Carson: Some Highlights of Her Time in Woods Hole

Statue of Rachel Carson in Woods Hole’s Waterfront Park

“I had my first prolonged contact with the sea at Woods Hole. I never tired of watching the tidal currents pouring through the Hole – that wonderful place of whirlpools and eddies and swiftly racing water.”

This week, as we celebrate the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, we honor Rachel Carson, whose book,  Silent Spring , is considered by many to be the impetus for the environmental movement.

Courtesy Marine Biological Laboratory

Rachel Carson first visited Woods Hole in summer 1929 as a beginning investigator in zoology at the Marine Biological Laboratory. She applied for the position on the recommendation of her biology professor at Pennsylvania College for Women, from which she had just graduated. She would return to MBL the summer after she finished her master’s degree at Johns Hopkins University. She later worked at the Bureau of Fisheries in Washington, DC, as a biologist, then as a writer and editor, returning sometimes to the Woods Hole lab during the summer. She enjoyed and appreciated the village, from talking to fishermen on the docks about their catch to her interactions with the science community. "Woods Hole is a wonderful place to come for research," she told the Falmouth Enterprise in 1951. “There are biologists here from all over the country. If you want to talk to them you just come here in summer instead of traveling all around the country to find them in winter."

In her book  Under the Sea-Wind , published in 1941, she wrote to the Enterprise that “In writing this chapter I actually had a slightly modified version of the harbor at Woods Hole. In fact, I wrote the chapter there, and used to stand on the Fisheries dock and watch the schools of mackerel moving up and down along the stone breakwater, with squids and other predators often darting among them.”

‌ Courtesy Fish and Wildlife Service

In 1949, Rachel Carson (on left in photo) and her literary agent Marie Rodell were the first women ever to go on the RV Albatross III, based at the Woods Hole Fisheries lab.   Roland Wigley was a college student in 1949 and he served as a biological aide on the Albatross III when Rachel Carson and Marie Rodell went on Research Cruise 26 to assess species composition and geographic distribution of ground fish using trawl samples. Mr. Wigley recalled in a story in Spritsail that “it took substantial courage for them to sail aboard the ship. It was considered ‘off limits’ for females to ship out on fishing boats or research vessels.”

Rachel wrote  The Sea Around Us  in 1951.   John Valois was in his first year at the MBL Supply Department in August 1952 when he was asked to take “an important writer of books” - Rachel Carson - to Lake Tashmoo for tidal flat observations. In a museum conversation, he recalled “we went on the old Tern, which was a miserable boat for throwing spray into the cockpit. We anchored on the inside at Katherine Cornell’s house in the deepwater channel and then waded to the sand flats. She was full of questions as to what lives in that hole or what is that tape worm called. And had endless curiosity about the dynamics of a salt pond and its geological features.”   For more information on Rachel Carson’s time in Woods Hole, see our Spritsail vol. 27, number 2 ; and when possible, stop by the museum for our booklet on “Rachel Carson in Woods Hole,” published in 2013, and visit our archives that include a transcription of the conversation with John Valois on the collecting trip to Lake Tashmoo.

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Woods Hole Historical Museum 579 Woods Hole Road (P.O. Box 185) Woods Hole, MA 02543 Phone: 508-548-7270 Email: [email protected]