Jane Adams Lecture page 14

Imagine that the first settler’s great grandson died in 1960, 142 years after her birth. Imagine his great granddaughter was born in 1960, at the end of the baby boom. Her childhood was marked by turbulence. She went to school in town, watched television, expected she would go to college. But high school sex changed that. She bore her child alone, although her distressed parents sheltered her, glad her grandparents had not lived to see their shame. In 1979 she married a man whose parents had given up farming. Glad to have someone to keep the farm in the family, despite spiraling land and credit prices, her parents leveraged their farm to help them buy land. The farm crisis of the 1980s hit them hard. When they had to declare bankruptcy, neighbors crossed the street or busied themselves in the far aisle of the grocery store. They eventually worked their way out of bankruptcy, managed to keep the farm. In 2001, the old folks are still farming alongside their son-in-law and grandchildren. Their daughter got a college degree and teaches in the district grade school, some 20 miles distant, their son-in-law works as a mechanic on the side.

The nearby market town where they once traded has shrunk to a "convenience store," a post office, a struggling restaurant, and a few antique and junk shops, and an aging population. The oldest grandchild works in the prison–a good job, as jobs go. The other grandchildren plan to leave.

Within three lifetimes, the land has been populated and depopulated, the towns built and decayed. Rural America entered the twentieth century optimistic, energetic, dynamic; it ended the century dispirited, grim, barely surviving.

continued.