‘Grain Forward’ with Palouse Heritage Grains & The History of Grain Exploration

Palouse Heritage was recently featured on the increasingly popular Foraging and Farming blog. Foraging and Farming author, Robin Bacon, shares stories about agriculturists and producers doing extraordinary things for our food system. We are honored and proud to have Robin write about us in order to spread awareness of the goodness of heritage grains.

Robin’s blog post explains how Palouse Heritage has revived the legacy of grain farming that originally came to the Pacific Northwest from the old world via the Hudson’s Bay Company. She also explains how we have partnered with other members of our local and regional food system to build a resilient model the delivers amazing flavors while prioritizing environmental and human health. Please take a moment to read Robin’s blog post about Palouse Heritage here.

Pendleton’s Umatilla County Museum and the Runquist Brothers

“Save the best for last,” the saying goes, and what a pleasant surprise to find on the last day of our cross-country expedition one of the finest agricultural exhibits we had seen anywhere in the country. Pendleton, Oregon, is best known for the annual “Stampede” rodeo held there for over a century. But grain has been grown in the area far longer—reaching back to nineteenth century Hudson Bay Company trader days. The remarkable story of the region’s agricultural heritage is the subject an impressive new exhibit at the city’s Umatialla County Historical Society’s Heritage Station Museum where we were hosted by tour coordinator Shannon Gruenhagen.

The museum’s substantial “Umatilla Gold” exhibit showcases numerous aspects of grain production with special emphasis on agricultural innovations. But among the featured treasures is the remarkable art of Portland artist brothers Arthur (1891-1971) and Albert (1894-1971) Runquist. They both attended the Art Students League in New York in the early Thirties and returned to the Northwest where they shared a studio and painted scenes laden with social commentary on the experiences of minorities and laborers. Arthur, who began working for the Federal Arts Program in 1935, was once severely beaten for his socialist leanings. He painted numerous landscapes including the richly colored Early Oregon (1941) mural as a state Federal Arts Program commission for Pendleton High School on which he was assisted by the brothers’ “self-described sister” and fellow activist Martina Gangle (1906-1994). The immense painting includes a substantial harvest scene that shows unsmiling field hands resting amidst the stubble in the foreground of a passing threshing machine while other workers stack grain sacks on a truck. A red elevator rises in the distance against a range of barren hills and the pensive pose of the central figure casts a mood of resilience amidst despair upon the idyllic landscape. The harvest scene, now framed in three panels with other sections of the mural, were salvaged during renovation at the school for exhibition at the Pendleton museum.

Although still in the throes of the Great Depression, most Northwest farmers had long since made the transition to mechanized farming. Only one large farm along the lower Columbia River route as late as the 1940s still used animal power to pull the combine behemoths. George Wagenblast of Dufur, Oregon, harvested rugged slopes near the mouth of the Deschutes and could not bear to part with his beloved team of twenty-seven mules. But times were changing and in 1941 they would make their last appearance before being sold for wartime service by the U. S. Army for about $45 a head. (He had paid $175 apiece in 1929). Comparing New Deal era and twenty-first-century themes in public art and critical discourse indicates a modern trend away from intellectual consideration of the land and its toiling masses who feed the world. Of over 45,000 entries in the most recent edition of the authoritative thirty-four-volume Grove Encyclopedia of Art (2011), for example, no subject headings are included for agrarian, agriculture, rural, or rustic.

Arthur Runquist, Early Oregon Harvest Panels (1941)

New Deal Art Project Mural, Pendleton, Oregon, High School

Relocated to the Umatilla County Historical Society Museum, Pendleton

“Umatilla Gold” Exhibit Panel

To be sure, countless numbers of regional artists and authors continue to create important interpretive works. Their enduring appeal is evident in the listings of agency websites like Saatchi Art and Mutual Art that feature hundreds of contemporary harvest-themed works and in exhibits like we found in Pendleton. Israeli historian Yuval Harari, author of Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2015), suggests that the pace of technological innovation is increasingly associated with the volume of personalized digital postings that threaten shared values that have long knit cultural identities and connected peoples to landscapes. Such preoccupation, Harari asserts, not only increasingly distances people from employable skills, but risks humanity’s wellbeing by neglecting regard for land care and sustaining social values. Hats off to the dedicated folks who affirm timeless agrarian values in places we visited this summer like Mt. Vernon and Steele’s Tavern, Virginia; the Spanish colonial missions from Texas to Arizona, Springville, Utah; Aberdeen, Idaho; and Pendleton, Oregon. Washington (D. C.) to Washington …nice to be back home!

Founding Farmer Art and Architecture

George Washington understood the primacy of land stewardship for bountiful harvests and expressed concern about settlers’ “ruinous” tendency to exhaust frontier soils only to continue farther westward and inflict similar damage. He advocated use of “scientific farming” to renew soils and transition away from Southern tobacco and New England maize to grains, legumes, and grasses through a complex system of crop rotation and use of soil amendments. Washington’s progressive ideas were strongly influenced by foreign correspondence and reading of books by Great Britain’s most respected agricultural writers—Arthur Young’s first four volumes of Annals of Agriculture (1785) and Henry Home, Lord Kames’ The Gentleman Farmer (1776).

George Washington Presidential Library Reading Room, Mt. Vernon

Fred Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington

Washington made dozens of pages of notes from these and similar works and twice recorded Kames’ observation that, “No branch of husbandry requires more skill and sagacity that a proper rotation of crops,” which in England had come to involve cycles as long as seven years. Washington wrote to Alexander Hamilton in the 1790s of the public need to promote a “natural fertility” (his own italicized expression), and that if “…taught how to improve the old, instead of going in pursuit of new and productive soils, they would make these acres which now scarcely yield them anything, turn out beneficial….” (The opening essay of the Annals series which Young personally sent to Washington carried a broadside against Britain’s wasteful wartime spending.)

Harvesting wheat, oats, and rye remained labor intensive and undertaken by Washington’s enslaved workers. But he sought to make the process more efficient by careful field observation and in 1786 recommended that every pair of adult cradle scythers be followed by four reapers and one binder followed by younger carriers of bundles. Harvest at Mt. Vernon and Washington’s other farms generally took place in July and August followed by the seeding of fall grains. Threshing was conducted in winter or even in spring. Washington also advocated improved agricultural mechanization and in 1792 constructed an innovative sixteen-sided, two-story threshing barn at Mt. Vernon’s Dogue Farm so horses could more efficiently tread out grain stalks on a slatted floor so the kernels could rain down and be gathered below. Prior to the advent of mechanized threshing, four pairs of horses trotting in a circle some sixty to one hundred feet in diameter could tread out some 300 bushels of wheat per day. Similar results with flailing might take five threshers working exhaustively for ten days. After a tour of Washington’s estates in 1788 guided by Washington himself, French minister to the United States Comte de Mousteir termed the newly elected president’s treading barn “a true monument to Patriotism.”

Mt. Vernon Threshing Barn

Mt. Vernon “New Room” Plaster Ceiling and Doorway Frieze Harvest Motifs

Mt. Vernon National Historic Landmark; Mt. Vernon, Virginia

Columbia Heritage Collection Photographs

Washington’s meticulous records of purchases at Mt. Vernon indicate his aesthetic as well as commercial interests. He was a serious collector of art prints and purchased no fewer than one hundred during his time in Philadelphia and at Mt. Vernon. Washington also bought six landscape paintings from English immigrant artists William Winstanley and George Beck that depicted the Potomac and Hudson River Valleys. These first hung in the original presidential residence in Philadelphia, but upon completion of his second term in 1797, Washington bought the entire group along with prints and furniture for his Mt. Vernon home’s grand two-story “New Room.” Designed in the style of an English manor house salon, the large room with airy Palladian windows was crowned with Richard Tharpe’s intricate plaster ceiling bas reliefs depicting harvest sheaves, scythes, rakes, and other farm tools. Art appreciation through collecting and display was understood to foster the moral virtue of both owner and viewers, and ornamental details honored sources of wealth and aspirations.

Washington also acquired exquisite copper mezzotints by London master printer John Boydell (1719-1804) and others showing scenes from biblical history and Greek mythology as well as Dutch pastoral landscapes (e. g., Adam Pynacker’s Morning and Evening). Boydell learned the complexities of printmaking and became one of the era’s most influential publishers who procured the services of such leading British artists as Benjamin West (1738-1920) and Richard Westall (1765-1836). Boydell engraver Francesco Bartolozzi (1727-1815) perfected colored stippling techniques that drew widespread acclaim from European and American patrons who had only known reproductions in black and white or brown tones. Washington’s Boydell prints were from the London publisher’s magisterial edition of Liber Veritatis (1774-1777), a precursor to the modern coffee table book, which contained two hundred drawings of works by influential French landscapist Claude Lorrain that came to be owned by William Cavendish, Duke of Devonshire. The scenes were reproduced by engraver Richard Earlom (1743-1822) as distinctive mixed-method colored mezzotint for washes and etching for pen lines, and the series soon became a standard for aspiring artists to study.

U.S. Department of Agriculture Inner Court

Artists and authors contributed to an iconography of Washington as a modern Cincinnatus and agrarian statesman that was well established within several decades. His uncommon leadership and benevolence stand in contrast to the presence of amiable slaves who appear in several early nineteenth-century Mt. Vernon scenes. But Washington himself underwent a paramount life transition as young patrician who inherited vast estates with slaves when only eleven to Father of the Nation who freed them upon his death.

Of Grains and Domes: Jefferson and U. S. Capitol Building Design (Part 2)

After Thomas Jefferson returned to the United States in 1789, he began the extensive rebuilding of Monticello. He added the distinctive second-story octagonal dome that included design elements of the Halles aux Blés to become the first feature of its kind for an American residence. As president in 1805, Jefferson directed British-American architect Benjamin Latrobe (1764-1820) to construct the ceiling for the new Capitol Building’s House of Representatives chamber based on the Paris grain market design. Despite Latrobe’s concerns about leakage, Jefferson’s intentions to build “the handsomest room on the world” prevailed although it was destroyed when the British burned the Capitol in 1814. Latrobe applied similar principles in the design of the first cathedral in America, Baltimore’s Basilica of the Assumption (1806-1821) to form the skylit lumiere mysterieuse (mysterious light) that to this day still hovers above the altar.

Visiting Jefferson’s Monticello with family

The Founders’ grand visions for New World prosperity was translated into Charles Bulfinch’s neoclassical Federal Style design and decoration of the United States Capitol Building that featured numerous agrarian associations. The massive inner and outer domes crowning the original central 1800 structure were completed in the 1860s with an inner oculus that reveals an enormous fresco covering approximately 5,000 square feet, The Apotheosis of Washington (1865) by Italian-American artist Constantino Brumidi (1805-1880). The painting depicts George Washington enthroned amidst the heavenlies above six allegorical perimeter scenes. Brumidi’s Agriculture shows Ceres with a wreath of wheat and cornucopia perched atop a mechanical reaper assisted by a capped Young America who holds the reins of the horses. Flora gathers flowers nearby.

Constantine Brumidi, The Apotheosis of Washington—Agriculture (1865)

United States Capitol Building Rotunda Dome, Washington, D. C.

Architect of the Capitol Collection

Brumidi had trained at Rome’s Academy of St. Luke where he mastered trompe l’oeil (“fools the eye”) depiction of human forms on flat surfaces in three dimensions, and restored frescoes at the Vatican. His Summer in the House Appropriation Room’s four-panel Season’s series (1856) shows Ceres attended by cherubs who tend to an enormous grain sheaf and cornucopia. Bulfinch’s work influenced versatile Salem architect-woodcarver Samuel McIntire (1757-1811) whose designs of New England homes frequently featured sheaves of wheat and garlands for wall frieze and mantel ornamentation as well as for furniture.

Monticello Farming Exhibit

Of Grains and Domes: Thomas Jefferson and U. S. Capitol Building Design (Part 1)

“And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.”  These lines from T. S. Eliot’s poem “Little Gidding,” first published in 1943, crossed my mind while driving cross-country this summer helping to move our son and family back to the Northwest from their year in Washington, D.C. My wife and I enjoy visiting the U.S. Capitol and surrounding city given the variety of sights and special events to take in. This trip was especially memorable as we visited National Defense University to witness son Karl’s graduation at Ft. McNair and learned more about his studies that focused on global food insecurity in the wake of the war between Russia and Ukraine. (His research paper, “Weaponizing Wheat: How Strategic Competition with Russia Threatens the U. S. Wheat Industry,” will be published this fall in National Defense University’s journal, Joint Force Quarterly.)

Following our time in D.C., we commenced the long journey home but traveled south from Virginia to Alabama and then west via Texas to Arizona and north to Washington to see relatives and friends. All along the way we visited sites related to various agrarian (and grandchildren) interests which provided discoveries shared in the following dozen posts. One memorable scene was our first view of the Grand Canyon’s southeast rim at day’s end. While not agricultural, I’ll offer it here in the spirit of Eliot’s “exploring.” In spite of the heat and gas prices we had a grand time with old and new friends that reaffirmed the many reasons America is such a special place. May we ever safeguard its democratic institutions and the magnificent lands that provision our country and much of the world.

                  Yours for spacious skies and amber waves, -Richard.

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Some historians consider Thomas Jefferson’s application of restrained Enlightenment reason to culture and cultivation especially relevant to the “pursuit of happiness” he penned in the Declaration of Independence. Old World European conditions that had made gleaning a necessity for impoverished Europeans would not be the case for Americans. Pursuing happiness in the New World would bring new techniques to improve crops and livestock as well as construction of new roads, canals, and markets. As American minister to the Court of Versailles in the 1780s following Benjamin Franklin’s tenure in that crucial role, Jefferson traveled extensively throughout France with more on his mind than diplomacy.

Above: Halle aux Blés, Paris (Hall of Grain, 1808); aquatint on paper, 5 ¾ x 8 ¾ inches

Columbia Heritage Collection

In a letter to Lafayette from Nice, Jefferson wrote, “I am never satisfied with rambling through the fields and farms, examining the culture and cultivators, with a degree of curiosity which makes some mistake me to be a fool, and others to be much wiser than I am.” Heir to Newtonian science, Jefferson was ever fascinated by the prospect of a rational cosmos and the complexities of new mechanisms, yet grew anxious over the prospect of a machine age in America that might disturb the fragile equilibrium between Nature’s bucolic ideal and emerging notions of technological progress. These ambiguities represent an unresolved ambivalence in Jefferson’s thinking about nature and progress.

Benjamin Latrobe, “Sketch of the South Wing of the Capitol” (c. 1810)

Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

In Paris Jefferson viewed Old Master works and paintings by Royal Academy artists at museums and salons as well as Roman antiquities at the Maison Carrée. Mindful of his new nation’s public spaces, Jefferson had special interest in Neoclassical architecture and carefully studied the design of numerous churches, palaces, and bridges. In August 1785, he accompanied Maria Cosway, wife of English artist Richard Cosway, on a tour of the Halles aux Blés, the city’s principal grain market. Jefferson was awestruck by the immense skylit dome covering the round structure’s bustling 130-foot diameter central court where buyers gathered throughout the year to bid on piles of grain and flour sacks. Famous domes of substantial size at Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia, the Roman Pantheon, and elsewhere were made of stone and brick, which would significantly complicate construction contemplated by Jefferson. The grain market’s dome, designed by Jacques Molinos and Jacques-Guillaume Legrand and completed in 1783, featured an innovative skeleton of laminated wood adapted from rural carpentry methods to frame enormous vertical windows of arched glass. The restored structure today is the Pinault Art Museum.

Harvests Then and Now

Stories and paintings that relate a range of interpretations regarding contemporary and future existence add voice and visibility to diverse perspectives on land use. Consolidation of family farms in recent decades into larger corporate enterprises and the commodification of grain—William Cronon’s “transmutation of one of humanity’s oldest foods,” warrant high regard for stewardship of the land. Reinvigoration of Americans’ deep-seeded social memory and cultural capacity can guide landowners and public officials who contend with environmental challenges and finite production acreage. When Conrad Blumenschein told me in the 1970s about leaving Russia for America just before the outbreak of World War I, ten families lived on a dozen farms of about 320 acres each scattered along the road between my hometown of Endicott and the Palouse River some seven miles to the north. (The other two landowners lived in town.) Numbering some fifty people, most attended one of two Lutheran churches in the area—the Missouri Synod in the country, and the Ohio in town, and two country schools enrolled the area’s children through the eighth grade. Many of these families were related to each other, and regularly gathered for summer harvest labors, fall butchering bees, and various ceremonies and celebrations.

A half-century later when I began interviewing first generation immigrant elders like Conrad Blumenschein and Mary Morasch, the number of farms had fallen to nine with some consolidation of property holdings among the seven families of thirty-two individuals who remained. The size of area farms had increased to an average of 550 acres, and both country schools had consolidated with the larger town district that offered instruction through grade twelve. My father was able to complete our month-long harvest on about that much acreage by keeping in good repair the old tractor and pull-combine that had teamed up for at least a quarter-century to make the annual run. Based on a photograph from the time, family member Rob Smith captured the scene in the watercolor A 3L-160 Harvest, c. 1970 (2012, named for the equipment model numbers). The price of a bushel of wheat rarely rose to $2 from 1960 to 1973, when a controversial U. S. trade deal to supply the Soviet Union with grain boosted prices to as much as $6.25. The long-sought optimism felt by growers ushered in a year of equipment upgrades and land purchases encouraged by Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz’s 1973 “get big or get out” slogan. Favorable Russian harvests the following year coupled with reduced federal subsidies contributed to America’s 1970s “farm crisis” followed by years of rural economic stagnation.

The year of Butz’s remarks was coincident with publication of British-German environmental economist E. F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as If People Mattered (1973). The contrast in perspectives regarding the wellbeing of farmers could not have been starker. Schumacher (1911-1977) considered federal promotion of larger production acreages and related needs for more expensive equipment to be a reckless hubris of domination. Inspired by thinkers like Tolstoy and Gandhi, Schumacher understood the forces of modernity to be complex but fueled by a blinkered preoccupation with short-term solutions that ignore ancient ways of sustainable living. He invoked a sovereignty of reason to advocate for enterprising farmers who valued the longstanding natural and social commons that provided economic benefits well worth protecting. Without such public policies vast numbers of younger farmer families would be driven from the countryside. And so they have been. (Ohio farmer-essayist Gene Logsdon, author of The Mother of All Arts: Agrarianism and the Creative Impulse [2007], responded to Butz’s admonition with advice on how to, “Get small and stay in.”)

Palouse Harvesttime Smoky Sunset and Pine City Grain Elevator Firestorm Aftermath (2020)

Columbia Heritage Photographs

In the fifty years that has now passed since my 1960s high school FFA speech on world hunger, global population has increased by four billion and the world has consumed some 1.3 trillion barrels of oil. (Approximately one and a half trillion metric tons of carbon dioxide have been released into the atmosphere since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.) The result has been a warming of the earth’s surface by 0.6 degrees C. and the disappearance of a million square miles of spring snowpack in the northern hemisphere. The pace of change has led to devastating impacts on biodiversity and prospect of neo-Malthusian food security crises. Regional trends can only be discerned over time but already some disturbing patterns are evident. Since 2020 annual precipitation has declined across the Columbia Plateau and in the summer of that year the only firestorm in living memory made national headlines when it devastated the Palouse hamlets of Malden of Pine City and destroyed vast areas of standing grain. Notable modern writers like James Rebanks, author of Pastoral Song: A Writer’s Journey (2021), reflect upon the impact of climate change upon agriculture and natural systems in passionate and informed prose as compelling as Rachel Carson. The urgent planetary imperative is to live within the biosphere’s means through new economies and methods of sustainable production. 

My boyhood rural neighborhood of several thousand acres that had been home to about fifty souls in 1900 is comprised today of just eight farms. All but one are parts of larger family-owned operations whose members also own or lease other cropland in the area. (The average Palouse Country farm size in 2020 was approximately 1200 acres.) Only four households are located on the same seven-mile stretch that supported those ten families a century ago, and today are populated by just five adults whose grown children live elsewhere. In between these habitations one can now see lonely clusters of dying locust trees, broken fences, and the rusted equipment of abandoned farmsteads. The trend has brought debilitating effects on rural communities that contend with closures of local stores, banks, and public service by reaffirming pioneer values of hard work, integrity, and teamwork.

The broader demographic impacts on rural life and labor are consistent with trends over the past two centuries that have changed the nature and necessity of worker communities. In 1840s pre-industrial America, for example, a farmer could produce an acre of hand-broadcasted wheat yielding about twenty bushels from approximately fifty hours of annual work using simple implements like a single-shear plow and scythe. (Soil exhaustion and other factors in early nineteenth-century France and Germany contributed to average yields of less than half that amount, or about ten bushels per acre; yields on unmanured fields in England were in the range of fifteen. Continental Europeans commonly faced substantial crop failure and famine at least once every ten years.) A single day’s harvest by an able-bodied reaper could cover up to one acre. By 1900 an American farmer equipped with horse-pulled gang plow, harrow, and mechanical drill still produced about twenty bushels from an acre but in some ten hours. An experienced crew operating a reaper-binder and steam-powered thresher at that time could cut about forty-five acres a day for some 1,200 bushels (31 tons) of grain. A farmer in 1940 using a gas-powered tractor, three-bottom plow, and combine with 12-foot header further reduced annual per acre labor to 3.5 hours.

Harvests Yesterday and Today—Different Times, Identical Location

Lautenschlager & Poffenroth (1911) and Klaveano Brothers Threshing Outfits (2019)

Four miles north of Endicott, Washington

 Dryland grain yields increased three-fold nationally during the twentieth century and Palouse Country yields of eighty bushels per acre are common today along with diesel-powered, satellite-guided equipment that make crop rows of linear perfection. High-capacity combines now cost as much as a million dollars and feature sidehill leveling, cruise control, and electronic monitoring of threshing functions that automatically adjust to crop load. Modern farmers invest scarcely fifty minutes in total annual per-acre labor, and can harvest three hundred acres in a ten-hour day with a combine header forty feet wide to yield some 30,000 bushels (900 tons) of wheat, or 72,000 bushels of corn. Sickles endure. Modern versions feature four-inch-wide chromed, serrated triangular sections arranged toothlike in a row that runs the length of the header and moves back and forth at lightning speed. Such mechanical marvels represent the output of a thousand reapers and twice as many binders laboring in harvest fields before the Industrial Revolution. (Substantial numbers of others were tasked with carting unthreshed stalks to barns, flailing grain, tending livestock, and other related tasks.) A phalanx of these modern behemoths cruising through a field of golden grain evokes appreciation for techno-mechanical ingenuity, and still stirs ancient feelings of gratitude for agrarian bounty. Dayton watercolorist Paul Strohbehn’s dramatic Sorghum Hollow Gold (2018) shows three immense John Deere Titan combines rising from a Palouse hillside chaff cloud.

Among the most recent developments in farm mechanization is the application of autonomous driving capabilities to tractors and combines. Technology has also transformed bulk grain handling facilities at strategically located places like Endicott and other locations along railroads and river ports. Endicott was platted in 1882 by the Oregon Improvement Company, a subsidiary of the Northern Pacific Railroad, on its Columbia & Palouse branch line. This route tapped the fertile grain district along a route from the main NPRR transcontinental line at Palouse Junction (present Connell, Washington) eastward to Endicott, Colfax, and eventually Pullman and Moscow. An extensive network of feeder lines later fanned across the northern and southern Palouse to other farming communities.

Columbia & Palouse Railroad Grain Storage Flathouses, Endicott, Washington (c. 1910)

Northwest Grain Growers High-Capacity Unit Train Loading Facility, Endicott (2022)

With the recent merger of the local Endicott-St. John grain storage cooperative with Walla Walla and other groups to form Northwest Grain Growers, the new entity constructed a storage and 110-car unit train loading facility in Endicott since the line there had been constructed with heavier rail weight capacity. The project called for construction of seven immense steel silos located to bring total capacity there to approximately 3,100,000 bushels. The new facility, which became operational in 2020, is designed for rapid one-day loading of the trains which are capable of holding 100 tons of grain per car for a total capacity of 420,000 bushels. Grain is trucked from farms and other elevators for rail shipment and barging along the lower Columbia River to Portland and Kalama for distribution worldwide.

The Holy Days of Harvest

Centuries of agrarian experience by European peasants and yeoman farmers led to adroit adaptations to the typically harsh conditions of life on the land. They learned to survive during the long continental winters through hard work and carefully arranged field operations suited to local conditions. Changes in the winds, soil textures and available moisture, and myriad other aspects of nature informed their management decisions throughout the year. The earth’s fertility meant life, perpetuation of family, and community wellbeing. The center of existence came to be the village church where people gathered weekly in the presence of an altar representing the axis mundi of heaven, earth, and the underworld. Here priests and pastors mediated a secure grace-filled dimension from past to future with hallowed reference to good soil and sowers, gleaners and reapers, and “fields white for harvest.”

Archibald Hartruck, A Harvest Festival in the Cotswolds
Boxwell Church on a manor formerly owned by Sir Walter Raleigh
The Sphere (London, September 21, 1901)

Medieval literature is rich with subjects of agricultural association derived from biblical texts, early church documentary accounts, and regional folklore. St. John the Baptist has been venerated at various times of the year as Herald of the Harvest, and since the Middle Ages on Midsummer Day—June 24, in part because of the metaphorical significance of his prophetic call for repentance before the baptism of Jesus: “His winnowing fork is in His hand, and He will thoroughly clear His threshing floor; and He will gather His wheat into the barn, but He will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire” (Matthew 3:12). The holy days of the medieval harvest season reaffirmed the cycle of the Jewish agrarian calendar although these commemorations typically took place three to four months later with the cooler climates and later harvests of northern Europe.

The patron saint of harvesters and peasants, St. Isidore the Farmer (c. 1070-1130), was curiously honored less because of his agricultural diligence than his attention to prayer and worship even when interrupting field operations on his master’s estate in Spain. But St. Isidore, who is often portrayed in paintings and sculpture with a sickle fastened beneath his belt, remained steadfast in religious observations and his crops flourished. His wife, St. Maria Torriba (d. 1175), was also canonized for the miraculous provision of grain after she shared their few precious seeds with the needy and foraging birds.

Medieval European Harvest Holy Days and Festivals

June 24: St. John the Baptist’s Day—Feast of St. John, Herald of the Harvest (Midsummer Day)

August 1: Lammas Day (Loaf Mass)—Feast of First Fruits and Blessing of the Fields, ceremonial beginning of harvest

September 24: St. Rusticus Day—Feast of the Ingathering, traditional “Harvest-Home” celebrations (Autumnal Equinox)

September 29: Michaelmas—Feast of St. Michael and All Angels, ceremonial end of harvest and the farm year

November 11: Martinmas—Feast of St. Martin, general thanksgiving, end of fall wheat seeding, beginning of winter