Fertilizer Nation: Plaster, Land, and the Art of Colonial Memorialization

“...there is also on the Missouri, a Gypsum, which appears to me to be equal to the Plaster of Montmartre, with which I have compared it...all of these things will add to the great national Store of unexplored riches for ages to come.”

William Herries to Thomas Jefferson, 3 November 1804

By the time Jefferson received the letter excerpted above, gypsum—a common mineral comprised of calcium sulfate dihydrate—had already captured his attention as a promising fertilizer for increasing crop yields. In the form of “land plaster,” gypsum was an essential ingredient for the emerging nation’s pursuit of agricultural success, and its discovery within the newly acquired territories of the Louisiana Purchase reinforced the ideological and economic justifications for westward expansion. Nine decades later, a different kind of gypsum-based plaster—Plaster of Paris—served as the primary building material for erecting the infrastructure of the 1893 World’s Colombian Exhibition, whose utopian “White City” became a symbol for a racially-exclusive American exceptionalism. Reading gypsum across a century of U.S. nation-building, this paper considers the material entanglements between agricultural development and the art of colonial memorialization—from the White City to its plaster cast public sculptures. How, it asks, did this mined material serve to reproduce, or fertilize, both the physical and commemorative landscapes of settler colonial occupation?