“Yesterday in Old Fall River Mr. Andrew Borden died,”. So starts the song, “Fall River Hoedown”, and in this line rest the three questions that will be explored. What is “Old Fall River” is the first question? Fall River in the 21st century is not the Fall River of 1892. To understand events that take place in 1892 we first have to know what the community was like in 1892.
Who is Mr. Andrew Borden is the second question. Looking at maps of the Fall River region at various times during the 19th century the name Borden is prominent. Even the 2003 map of Fall River list a Borden Street and Borden School. The headline proclaims him venerable and while this may simply an acknowledgement of his age it could also mean Mr. Andrew Borden himself was either a prominent citizen of the town is or a member of one of its prominent families.
Why Mr. Borden died is the third question. The well established facts are that he and his wife were murdered in their home on the morning of August 4, 1892. Their daughter Lizzie, and not some drunken farm hand, was charged with the crimes, stood trial, and was acquitted. Since she never admitted to the deeds, and no one else has admitted to committing them either, her motive, if she did kill her parents, has always been a subject of debate.
The spacial relationships involved, the geography, will help answer these questions. It won’t provide all the answers or complete answers but it will help to clarify the past and put it in context.
Setting the Scene
Fall River, Massachusetts is located right on the border with Rhode Island about half way up Narraganset Bay. It had an ideal location of industry in the early 19th century having a nearly 100 foot drop in elevation between Watuppa Pond, the lake located east of the city, and Mount Hope Bay over the distance of about a mile. Mount Hope Bay is a deep water port with easy access to the ocean. The first mill at Fall River was opened in 1812.
By 1892 the town had grown to become one of principal manufacturing centers in Massachusetts. Nearly 50 mills were located along the Quequechan River and the adjacent Mount Hope Bay shore line. The residential areas spread out north and south of the mill district. Here is how the city looked on the 1893 U.S. Geological Survey quadrent map of the area.
A better view can be had from this three dimentional map. Here the view is of the city from the northwest. The low valley of the river can be seen cutting the town in half. The mills, government, and other business was concentrated here. The poorer sections of town, including company housing projects, were to the south. The upper class areas were to the north.
How’d He Do That
I'm working in BRYCE and one of the first things you learn about importing objects into BRYCE is that the wireframe and the texture must be registered to each other before importing or you'll never get them to match. With terrain maps this means that the DEM and map really need to come from the same source. Since I’m using an 1893 map the likelyhood of a downloadable DEM of the same map existing is very small. This means I have to make my own substitute for a DEM. I can do this by tracing the contour lines on the 1893 map in Illustrator using a grayscale fill going from black as the lowest to white as the highest. This is what I got.
Another BRYCE tip is to use a square background. BRYCE puts everything that is imported into the terrain editor into a square whether it came that way or not. If not the image gets distorted. I used the same black square with the map cutout fitted exactly over the contour line image to make sure my texture was registered to the wireframe. When you put everything into the terrain editor you get this.
The first thing I do is clip the image to take out the black background. If left in there would be a big flat square area at the base of the wireframe.
After a quick render here is what you get. Notice the vertical exageration. Since this isn’t Rocky Mountains it will have to be flattened out. How much is the question.
To determine the “Y” value in BU I start with the following assumptions:
- Mapped area is about 4 nautical miles north to south
- The “X” and “Z” values in Bryce Units are 82bu each
- 1nm = 2,000yds = 6,000ft
- Thus 4nm = 24,000ft
- If 82bu = 24,000ft then 1bu = 292.863ft on this wireframe
- With the highest elevation on this map greater than 280ft but less than 300ft 1bu seem the right “Y” value
- Since Rumsey recommends exagerating the vertical I’ll use 1.5bu for my “Y” value
The rendered image following this modification appears below. To simplify the image I created separate polygons to fit into the Mount Hope Bay and Watuppa Pond areas. Note that while the elevations are still somewhat stair stepped the effect is not that pronounced. For this reason no further modification will be made to the wireframe.
The final step is to drape the map texture over the wireframe. This was done in Photoshop using the 0 elevation outline from the traced topo map and the Quickmask tool to make a cutout from the USGS map. The cutout was aligned with the contour outlines and placed on top of the black square background. This image was then processed through BRYCE as a photo texture.
