The jumps in agricultural and all other forms of productivity were enormous, but they still required large amounts of human and animal labor. Farming at the end of her lifetime, though substantially different from what she would recall as a child, would still be recognizable. Skills learned as a youth would still apply. Many of the changes could be experienced as changes in quantity, more than quality. The could be experienced as a recreation of a settled, civilized life out of the "howling wilderness" or a realization of a European peasant’s dream of yeoman farming.
Let’s imagine a great grandson was born in 1890, as she died. Within his lifetime farming would be utterly transformed. He would grow up and begin farming during the Golden Age of agriculture; in his imagination, that world of prosperous farms peopled with laborers’ cabins, of bustling market towns every 5 to 7 miles along the railroad tracks, was normal. The agricultural depression that faced him after World War I, as he turned 30, seemed a passing spell of bad luck. When it stretched into the next decade and enveloped the rest of the country, he may well have been among those farmers who welcomed the New Deal programs that would forever change the shape of rural America and of farming. The war over, in his early 50s, he would perhaps have been a leader in his community, imagining that they could now recreate that remembered world of his youth.
His sons would fight in World War II; some of his children would leave for urban jobs; one or two would aggressively modernize the family farm. The market roads were paved, electricity reached every household. His grandchildren went to the consolidated school in town; most went on to college. Chemistry and technology replaced (or displaced) the laborers whose old houses were bulldozed down.
If he retired in 1955, with Social Security he could afford to maintain his own household either on the farm or in town; his farming children in modern homes nearby. But now the neighbors were disappearing: his sons bought their land, or rented from widows. Empty farmsteads began to dot the landscape. Only one grandson stayed on the farm, keeping the tradition going.
continued
Let’s imagine a great grandson was born in 1890, as she died. Within his lifetime farming would be utterly transformed. He would grow up and begin farming during the Golden Age of agriculture; in his imagination, that world of prosperous farms peopled with laborers’ cabins, of bustling market towns every 5 to 7 miles along the railroad tracks, was normal. The agricultural depression that faced him after World War I, as he turned 30, seemed a passing spell of bad luck. When it stretched into the next decade and enveloped the rest of the country, he may well have been among those farmers who welcomed the New Deal programs that would forever change the shape of rural America and of farming. The war over, in his early 50s, he would perhaps have been a leader in his community, imagining that they could now recreate that remembered world of his youth.
His sons would fight in World War II; some of his children would leave for urban jobs; one or two would aggressively modernize the family farm. The market roads were paved, electricity reached every household. His grandchildren went to the consolidated school in town; most went on to college. Chemistry and technology replaced (or displaced) the laborers whose old houses were bulldozed down.
If he retired in 1955, with Social Security he could afford to maintain his own household either on the farm or in town; his farming children in modern homes nearby. But now the neighbors were disappearing: his sons bought their land, or rented from widows. Empty farmsteads began to dot the landscape. Only one grandson stayed on the farm, keeping the tradition going.
continued
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