Towns & Bridges

OU species monitoring 5.5.25- BIG log

Below is a passage from the town records of Edenton, North Carolina that describes its founding in 1740 by articulating its boundaries, and one of the markers of its boundaries is a beaver dam. Excerpted from an “Act for Confirming Titles to the Town Lands of Edenton,” this passage is a record of a purchase of 420 acres by the “public,” and the casual mention of the beaver dam as a boundary in a list of other boundaries formed by privatization gives us a glimpse into the common presence of beavers on the landscape before their near extinction in the 19^th century:

Whereas, pursuant to the several Acts of Assembly of this Province heretofore passed and Ratified, Four Hundred and Twenty Acres of Land, lying in the Fork of Queen Ann’s Creek, in Chowan County, in the Province aforesaid, bounded Eastward, by the Lands of Miles Gale, Northward, by the Lands of William Badham, deceased, and George Lisle, on the Westward, by the Beaver-Dam, and Creek, and on the Southward, by the Sound, was purchased by the Public, and hath been laid out for a Town, called Edenton, and Part thereof divided into Lots of half Acres, as will more fully appear by the Plan thereof, already laid out, with convenient Streets, Passages, Place for a Church, Governour’s House, Court-house, Burying-place, Market-place, and a Council Room, and other Purposes, and by the said Acts, were vested, in Fee, in Commissioners or Trustees, to dispose thereof according to the Directions of the said several Acts; many of which Commissioners or Trustees have conveyed Lots of Half Acres to several Persons, who built thereon, and have made a considerable Improvement; and the Residue of the said Four Hundred and Twenty Acres was reserved for a Town Common” (103; italics added)[i]

At the heart of Edenton is the “Town Common,” signifying a unified “public” sphere predicated on a shared political, cultural, and institutional voice and perspective. The beaver dam sits in the middle of this paragraph but stands out in uncanny ways that include the dam among other acts of enclosure and privatization in the midst of what Elizabeth Maddock Dillon has called "commoning."

In our trail cam footage from April 25, 2025, one of our campus beavers is maintaining their dam, which was built under a footbridge that leads hikers into a bio-preserve. Taken together, the passage on Edenton’s founding in 1740 and the footage of dam maintenance on our campus in 2025 generate some interesting questions about coexistence that are rooted in an archives of allotment, privatization, and enclosure. Of course, what beavers do from an ecological standpoint is enclose. They build leaky dams to hold water back, and that enclosure creates habitats where multispecies interdependency can thrive. If you ask visitors to the campus wetland, they will say it is Edenic.

However, it’s an Eden whose existence is made perpetually fragile and tentative in a state that put beaver on their “nuisance” animal list in 2023. This listing allows private landowners to kill beavers without a permit if they are “doing damage or physically present where [they] could immanently cause damage to an individual’s property” (3). The irony of this statement has centuries of privatization behind it. Histories of allotment and enclosure that have perpetuated legacies of privatization and the many forms of extraction ideology that follow them are enshrined once again in Michigan’s Department of Natural Resources mission. Natural resource extraction, whether it’s mountaintop removal, open pit mining, clear-cutting, fossil fuel economies, crops sprayed with pesticides, or lawns sprayed with herbicides, is reflected in every corner of our lives. The DNR’s listing reflects and perpetuates these histories of planet damage in a way that is deeply troubling.

If we are a culture that celebrates bio-diversity and ecological restoration we can only celebrate it in limited terms, determined by the scope of our own backyards. We sing the praises of pollinator gardens and all the ways we try to save the monarch butterfly (I have two rain gardens myself). But when a beaver shows up in our backyard, a species that can literally bring back whole ecosystems and repair the damage we’ve done, we need only panic and kill them without regulation or repercussion. Beaver hats may not be in style anymore, but extraction lives on.

What I like about the way that our campus beaver pauses after moving a log into place is that they look up and toward the camera. They’re obviously pausing to listen, but their gaze, nearly directly at the trail camera, is haunting. Beavers carry memories of landscapes and ecosystems in their DNA that we’ve forgotten. And when they build their dams and rewater the land, they remind us of our true inheritance: that a “commons” must be built around a multispecies interdependence that our legacies of privatization cannot accommodate and our institutions continue to erase. We continue to extract; beavers keep trying to restore. The DNR’s nuisance listing is a tragic re-inscription of values that endanger our multispecies futures.

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[i] An Act, for the Confirming Titles to the Town Lands of Edenton, for Securing the Privileges heretofore granted to the Said Town, and for further Encouragement and better Regulation thereof, 1751. Colonial laws of North Carolina. A Collection of all the public acts of Assembly, of the Province of North Carolina: now in force and use. Newbern: James Davis, 1751. Early American Imprints, Series 1, no 6742 (AAS Supplement).