The Weird History of Basement Turtles
By: Kate Aaron
Tags: America, History, St Louis, Americana, American History

The Weird History of Basement Turtles

A common box turtle. Photo by Lloyd Blunk on Unsplash

There are many things that have baffled and amused me since moving to America. The endless election cycles, free refills that arrive after I’ve barely taken a sip of my original drink, and flags, flags everywhere. Keeping basement turtles, however, is one of those quirky activities that are so weird, so out of the left-field, and so utterly American — it’s delightful.

So the story goes, old houses with dirt basements and subfloors would suffer from encroaching pests. Box turtles (chiefly Terrapene carolina) were an ideal natural solution. They’re common around the fields and rivers of Missouri, are land-based, and eat insects. A bowl of water and a handful of greens are the only other things they need. In the winter, when bug populations dwindle, the turtles hibernate, waking again to resume their work in the spring.

Anecdotal evidence¹ shows basement turtles were common across the St. Louis area from at least the 1930s through the ’80s. Some might even exist to this day. Usually, the turtles were wild-caught. Others came from carnivals or were found injured in the road. Some simply got in and claimed the basements as their own.

Why St. Louis?

The St. Louis arch. Photo by Joshua Ness on Unsplash

The wisdom of keeping any animal in a dark basement for its whole life aside, pest-control turtles make a lot of sense. Victorian houses in England often kept hedgehogs² in the kitchen for the same purpose. Transplanting that relationship across the pond to the local fauna seems obvious. (You may be surprised to learn there are no native hedgehogs in the Americas.)

However, that doesn’t explain what makes St. Louis special. After all, box turtles live in every state east of the Rockies. What aren’t so ubiquitous are basements.

In fact, the West North Central region — Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North and South Dakota —is the basement capital of the U.S., thanks to an ideal combination of soil quality and climate. The water table is low enough to make basements possible, while harsh winters make deep foundations necessary to get below the frost line. If you’re digging down eight feet anyway, you might as well use that space. Then there are the tornadoes. “Tornado alley” overlaps a large part of West North Central, and it’s really reassuring to know you can get underground if an EF5 appears on the horizon.

The final factor in making St. Louis the home of the basement turtle is people. The city just happened to be the largest metropolis in the West North Central for the majority of American history.

For the first three censuses of the nineteenth century, St. Louis was the only regional city on the map. It remained the dominant city until the 1880s, when its population was overtaken by the Twin Cities metropolitan area—but not the individual cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. No other regional city outpaced the Lou until 1990, long after its heyday in the 1950s. By 2010, St. Louis had fallen to the fifth-largest city in the region.

Census population counts for major WNC cities and metropolitan areas 1810–2010. Compiled by the author.

Simply put, basement turtles are a result of ecology and geography, and St. Louis has the happy accident of being the oldest and largest city in the region where the conditions for both basements and turtles overlap.

Anyway, back to the turtles

An ornate box turtle. Photo by Aman Mahapatra on Unsplash

It isn’t surprising that turtles became the American pest-catcher of choice. Like European hedgehogs, box turtles are slow-moving, don’t climb, and usually stay within a very small roaming area. They also have a similar palate. The economic advantages of keeping a turtle or two around were often noted by American herpetologists:

“The insect-eating proclivities of this species make it a highly desirable turtle to have around, for the diet includes many species of noxious insects — such as cutworms, grasshoppers, caterpillars of various species, ants, flies and their larvae, and several species of injurious beetles.³”

The only real danger to box turtles came from cantaloupe farmers. It turns out turtles can’t resist a bite of their crops. But in general, box turtles were considered useful and valuable animals.

Knowing that St. Louis united the trifactor of bugs, basements, and box turtles solves the why of basement turtles, but not the when. That remains a mystery. The earliest reference I could find to basement turtles dates from 1828, but suggests they were already well established by then.

“[The box turtle’s] food consists of fruit, insects, and the edible fungi, particularly the different species of clavaria. Many persons are in the habit of keeping them in their cellars, where they destroy snails, crickets, and other noxious insects; it may however be questioned whether they ever attempt, as has been said, to devour rats and mice ; they are not well formed for the pursuit of such active animals, who have too much sense to suffer themselves to be caught by so sluggish a hunter. The same may be said of the ridiculous stories of their catching and destroying snakes.” ⁴

According to LeConte, it was a common misconception that turtles fended off rats and snakes — a claim he was quick to dismiss. Many similar books from the period repeated a story of a box turtle using its hinged shell to kill snakes. The authors were divided on whether the story was fact or fiction.

A decade or so after LeConte tried to debunk the idea that box turtles made good rat catchers, another herpetologist, James Ellsworth DeKay, tested the theory for himself — to the misfortune of his turtle. Unsurprisingly, a hibernating animal has no defense against predators, and the turtle “was found in the spring, eaten up by the rats.”⁵

Another common anecdote explains why box turtles were considered bad eating. So the story goes, during the 1902 coal miners’ strike, a group of miners ate some turtles and were violently sick. People speculated the box turtles had eaten poisonous mushrooms. The toxins then get into their flesh and poison people. While unproven, the theory was enough to take that species off the menu.

The case for turtle welfare

This leads us to a final interesting footnote in the story of American turtles. Turtle soup was all the rage from the days of the first colonizers to Campbell’s canned versions in the 1920s. However times and tastes changed, and by the Swinging ’60s, it had all but vanished from the national plate.

While box turtles weren’t a common ingredient, the fate of the turtles that were consumed became the focus of a pivotal court case in 1867.

In 1866, Henry Bergh founded the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, in New York. It was the first and oldest animal welfare organization in the States. In the early days of the ASPCA Bergh needed publicity to get the society off the ground, and he found it with “the turtle case.”

“But the general public was still apathetic and Mr. Bergh longed for some case that would turn the spotlight on the society and give it space on the front page of the newspapers. The discovery of a boatload of live turtles that had been shipped from Florida on their backs, with their flippers pierced and tied together with strings, offered this opportunity. When the captain of the vessel refused to turn the turtles over, Mr. Bergh caused his arrest, together with the members of his crew. They were taken to the Tombs, but were later acquitted of cruelty by the court. . . . The judge, before whom the case was tried, told Bergh to go home and mind his own business. Some of the newspapers charged him with being overzealous and many abused him roundly. A lengthy satire in the New York Herald , a few days later, set all New York talking. For a time James Gordon Bennett continued to systematically ridicule Bergh and his society, but later the two men became personal friends and the Herald one of the staunchest supporters of the movement. The final outcome of the turtle case was to greatly increase the number of supporters and friends of the new society.” ⁶

Turtles were evolving in the American national consciousness. From a useful source of food and pest control, they became an animal to celebrate and even love. The Century of Progress World’s Fair of 1933–34, held in Chicago, started a craze for pet turtles (specifically, red-eared terrapins). In 1961, the Louisiana Conservationist⁷ drew a straight line from the Chicago World’s Fair to modern turtle-keeping.

That doesn’t mean we should revive the practice of keeping a turtle in the basement. Box turtles are long-lived, reaching an average age of 40–50 years. Anecdotally, evidence suggests some individuals live to 120 or even older. However, in captivity, that life expectancy plummets to around 20 years, even when kept in good conditions. And a basement is not a good home for an animal that needs to feel the sun on its shell.