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 Hackles and Scutching— Old World Flax for New World Linen

My granddaughters explaining flax and linen production to George Washington
Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia

Last week our three granddaughters and their parents had the exciting opportunity to visit Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia. The experience gave them an chance to dine at restaurants that serve from menus that would have been familiar to 18th century America visitors to the colony’s capital and immerse themselves in the sights and sounds of this special place. Several years ago our Palouse Colony Farm supplied Williamsburg’s Great Hope Plantation with the seed of grains like Red May and Virginia White that are known to have been grown in that region during the colonial period, and farmer Ed Schultz kindly hosted our family members for their recent visit. The farm was in the midst of flax harvest so visitors could participate in the kind of “living history” for which Williamsburg is famous, and their time included a memorable conversation with George Washington who surprised them with his extensive knowledge of his extensive Mt. Vernon farming operation.   

The girls had great fun splitting the fibrous plants in the first stage of turning flax into linen, and they learned some new vocabulary about the process. Their stories reminded me of interviews I had done years ago with community elders who had grown up on the Volga and knew this very work first-hand. Diminutive, cheery Mary Morasch and Mollie Bafus told of Old Country flax and hemp harvests and the laborious process of transforming the dried stalks into beautiful silvery-brown thread, yarn, and fabric.

These spring-sown crops were pulled out by the roots, tied into small bundles, and first broken down by either dew or soak retting. After drying workers then used a wooden “breaker” to crush the outer, brittle layer for separation with knives from the strands of soft inner bast that extend into the roots. After this peeling process (scutching) the threads were pulled through combs of thin, sharp prongs (hackling) to clean, split, and straighten the fibers. The long, hair-like threads were then spun and woven into three grades of fabric that was patiently boiled and sun-bleached to made into linen tablecloths and bedspreads, heavier work clothes, and coarse material for tents and sacks.

Puget Sound Flax Harvest (c. 1900)
Columbia Heritage Collection

In the 1890s Northwest farmers began experimenting with flax cultivation using plants and techniques introduced from Russia, Belgium, and Holland. Russian Riga and White Blossom Dutch were the most widely cultivated American varieties with vast acreages raised along Puget Sound and in the Willamette Valley. Substantial quantities were exported to Ireland and Scotland. While wistful at memories of life in the Old Country, our immigrant elders we knew did not paint a pastoral idyll. They had willingly left and were grateful to have come to America and Canada.

Volga German speech was heavily seasoned with Russian loanwords, especially in areas like our ancestral village that were located on the periphery of the colonial enclave and closer to ethnic Slavic settlements. Our immigrant elders’ word for granary, ambar, was from a Russian peasant term for barn, ambary, that is probably Persian and came to southern Russia through the region’s Tatar tribes. Like inhabitants of many rural communities, the Volga Germans were very clannish and residents of our people’s village divided it into the Galmucka and Totten sections. These names were derived from the native Buddhist Kalmyk and Muslim Tatar tribes.

Mary Morasch identified two plants used for processing into fabric—Höneft and Fabel, possibly localized Volga German terms for hemp and flax. Dominant Russian flax varieties of the era were Slanets (dew-retted) and Motchenets (water-retted). Lower Volga River production of colorful Sarpinka gingham from cotton was a thriving business originally established in the late 1700s by colonists from Sarepta near the Sarpa River. On Northwest American flax production origins, see A. W. Thornton, European System of Flax Culture Americanized and Adapted to Local Conditions of U. S. A., c. 1917.

Goodness, Grain, and Humankind— Thoughts Concerning Ukraine and Our Nation’s Founders

Cabrini Brothers Plaster Bas-Relief (c. 1910)
After Emmanuel Leutze, Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851)
Endicott-St. John Middle School; Endicott, Washington

How happy to think to our self when conscious of our deeds, that we started from a principle of rectitude, from conviction of the goodness of the thing [freedom] itself, from motive of the good that will come to humankind.
—Thaddeus Kosciuszko to General O. H. Williams; February 11, 1783

Day after day throughout all twelve years in the stately three-story brick school in rural hometown Endicott, notable figures from America’s past stared down at us from each classroom in the form of substantial bas-relief sculptures. Bearing the incised manufacturer name “Caproni Brothers” of Boston, these substantial plaster works resembled carved marble and spoke to the value placed on public education and art by members of our farming community who built the school in 1911. The three largest Caproni masterpieces hung against a wall of the third floor auditorium and included the famous scene Washington Crossing the Delaware which was painted some seventy years after the event by German-American artist Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze (1816-1868). The painter had returned for a time to his homeland and sought to support the wave of democratic revolts against European monarchies in the late 1840s. Leutze painted several other American Revolutionary War views including Mrs. Schuyler Burning Her Wheat Fields (1852) which is now held by the Los Angeles County Art Museum.

Notable battles that changed the course of world history were famously fought on fields of grain including Caesar’s defeat of Pompei in 48 BC on Greece’s Thessalian Plain at Pharsalos (Farsala—birthplace of Achilles), and English King Henry’s victory over the French at the Battle of Agincourt (1415) during the Hundred Years’ War. That large military engagements took place across vast rural areas is unsurprising and came to be associated with heroic sacrifice and symbolic harvests of souls. The Schuyler Wheatfield scene is especially notable for depicting an incident associated with the 1777 Battle of Saratoga that is considered the turning point of the Revolutionary War.

We learn in school about the nation’s Founders—men and women like Washington and Jefferson, John and Abigail Adams, James and Dolly Madison, Benjamin Franklin, and others who pledged their “sacred fortunes” to procure a free if imperfect nation based on democratic values. As part of this effort begun nearly 250 years ago other influential names are also familiar—army heroes Marquis de Lafayette of France, and stern Baron von Steuben of Prussia who became General Washington’s Chief of Staff and helped bolster patriot forces amidst the baleful conditions of Valley Forge. Another formidable if lesser-known foreign officer in freedom’s cause was cavalry general Thaddeus Kosciuszko (ko-choose-ko) who played a leading role in the Continental victory at Saratoga.

Emmanuel Leutz, Mrs. Schuyler Burning Her Wheat Fields (1852)
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Painting at the distance of many decades, Leutze took liberties for his masterpieces of patriotic romanticism and the dramatic view of harried Catherine Schuyler, wife of Continental General Philip Schuyler and in-laws of Alexander Hamilton, combines elements of fact and legend. She is shown clad in red, white, and blue setting fire to a field of wheat on the family’s Hudson River estate presumably in September of 1777 to prevent its harvest by British troops approaching in the distance. The subsequent defeat of British General Burgoyne at the nearby Barber Wheatfield during the Battle of Saratoga in early October is considered the turning point of the American cause. The painting is remarkable not only for its depiction of a female figure in heroic wartime action, but she is shown being assisted by an African-American boy who carries a metal lamp.

Kosciuszko was a Polish nobleman and idealist, whose own privileged position in life contrasted with the democratic values he came to champion in peacetime and war. Commissioned a brigadier general by the Continental Congress and later made a member of the American Philosophical Society through Benjamin Franklin’s support, Kosciuszko nevertheless returned to Europe and helped lead the fight against autocracy in Poland as well as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in the 1790s. Russia with far superior forces under Catherine the Great eventually prevailed against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Ottoman Turks in order to gain strategic access to the warm water Black Sea ports. Russia emerged victorious in 1792, and two years later Empress Catherine herself initiated the founding of Odessa which soon became Russia’s third largest city. Russia’s roots in Ukraine stretch back much further as Kyiv is considered Russia’s founding capital and flourished in a cultural Golden Age from the 10th to 12th centuries until its devastation in 1240 by the invading Mongols.

To secure her vast newly acquired southlands from such foreign threats, Catherine instituted one of the largest and most diverse settlement campaigns in European history. Substantial numbers of Armenians, Greeks, Italians, and other ethnic groups were directed to Ukraine to live among native Crimean Tatars and Turkic peoples. Beginning in the 1760s Catherine arranged for the relocation of 27,000 peasants from her native Germany to the lower Volga region, and some 50,000 followed until the 1830s to establish Black Sea colonies throughout Ukraine. Many came in the aftermath of Napoleon’s ill-fated invasion of Russia in 1812 that inspired Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace. A century later the prolific Black Sea German colonists needed more land to farm and faced increasing cultural threats from ascendent Slavic influences. Some chose to relocate as their ancestors had done, and many found new homes in America’s fertile farming districts—the Chesapeake Peninsula’s red loam country of Maryland and Delaware, southeastern New York’s “black dirt” area, the vast Midwest’s Great Plains, Pacific Northwest’s Columbia Plateau, and Canada’s prairie provinces. Black Sea German Mennonites brought Crimean “Turkey” Red wheat seed to Kansas in the 1870s which revolutionized American grain production and breadmaking.

Massey-Siemens Family Black Sea German Samovar
(c. 1890)
Palouse Heritage Collection

Those who appreciate this heritage have important reasons to be grateful their ancestors emigrated. European borders closed in 1914 with the outbreak of World War I, the Communist Revolution and three-year Russian Civil War followed until 1921, and Stalin’s brutal war on religion and campaign of collectivization led to Ukraine’s catastrophic Holodomor that claimed some eight million lives in the 1920’s and 30’s. Hitler’s invasion of the USSR caused the death of 27 million people during World War II. (American World War II casualties were about one million.) No wonder Timothy Snyder’s excellent 2010 chronicle of this era and place carries the disturbing title Bloodlands.

 Eastern European immigrants and survivors came, and substantially remained, because Americans both new and old found fidelity in the ideas expressed in Kosciuszko’s 1783 letter about “deeds,” “principle,” “conviction,” and “goodness.” These terms may be variously debated today, but they did not have vague meanings to those who wrote or heard them. And while they have been lived out in ways that excluded many since the nation’s founding, they have provided a framework for freedom, security, and economic prosperity unknown on a national scale in previous history. Such core ideas are threatened today because of extremism on both sides of a political continuum that values personal benefit and perceived “rightness” above the common good—an inversion of American First Principles.

To be sure, Jefferson’s expression “pursuit of happiness” is eighteenth-century code talk for private enterprise which forms the basis of modern economic development. But in the same breath he writes of “promoting the general welfare” since he, Kosciuszko, and the Founders understood liberty to be the use of freedom to promote national wellbeing, versus licentiousness as use of freedom for selfish power and gain. The peoples of Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus faced a momentous decision in 1991 when in the wake of the USSR’s collapse they voted to declare independence. Much has been written about the litany of events and political vacillations that have ensued since then. May the cause of Kosciuszko yet prevail on both sides of the Atlantic, and peace and prosperity return to the people of Ukraine’s fertile Black Earth grainlands.

Farmhouse, Statehouse, White House — Agrarian Motifs and American Politics

Most everywhere in small town America local folks can provide names of favorite sons and daughters who left town to make a positive impact on the wider world. Many would like to think that youthful experiences born of rural community experience instill values of cooperation, hard work, and service to others that are evident in the lives of those who remain and others who head off to make lives elsewhere. Those of us raised in places like Endicott and St. John, Washington, heard many times about the exploits of locals raised on area farms who went off to distinguish themselves far beyond the rolling hills of the Palouse Country. I remember taking my E-SJ Middle School students in the 1990s to interview Carl Litzenberger, whose grandfather, Henry, was among the founders of our Palouse Colony Farm in the 1880s. Carl and his brothers were quite the adventuresome spirits and he told us about seeing a biplane fly over the Union Flat wheat field where he was working one day and deciding right then and there that we would do that someday. And so he did—studied blueprints, ordered parts, and built the thing with his brothers in their barn back about 1918 to become a true barnstormer. Carl became acquainted with Emelia Earhart, Pancho Barnes, and host of other Roaring Twenties celebrities before another career of training World War II Army Air Corps pilots. He eventually served as a private pilot for political leaders back East before returning to the Northwest.

Endicott Union Elevator Company and Flathouse Railroad Grain Sack Storage (c. 1920); R. R. Hutchison Photograph Collection, WSU Terrell/Allen Library, Pullman

There are many tales like this to share, but one of the most notable individuals to hail from our home was Washington Mike Lowry—born in St. John and a graduate of Endicott, who served in Congress in the 1980s and as Washington’s governor in the 1990s. Mike’s parents were vital members of the community as Bob managed the local grain growers cooperative in the 1950s while Helen taught school in nearby LaCrosse. I remember well when Mike returned to Endicott in 1992 for a downtown rally at which he announced his candidacy from the back of a wheat truck. Not long afterward in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse, Mike helped in significant ways to facilitate the Operation KareLift project that provided Northwest food and medicine to children’s hospitals and orphanages throughout the Russian Far East. We were saddened to learn of Mike’s passing this past spring and joined in a celebration of his life at St. Matthew’s Lutheran Church in Renton near Seattle last May. Washington’s former governors were attendance along with other leaders who offered eloquent remarks on Mike’s longstanding commitment to the less fortunate. For me the most memorable reminiscence came from Pastor Kacey Hahn who recalled how last fall she asked for volunteers from the congregation to help with arrangements for a month-long tent city on church property for area homeless. She remembered that Mike had been among those who raised his hand but thought little more about it until coming to work early one weekend and hearing loud whistling from the downstairs laundry room. She investigated and found Mike making music while folding a mountain of clothes from the newcomers. At the memorial service Pastor Hahn asked how many retired politicians, or those from other walks of life, would spend time in such anonymous service, or as volunteer advocates for migrant farmer housing and the host of other humanitarian causes Mike so fervently pursued.  

As I continue to compose my treatise on harvest motifs in agrarian art and literature, my thoughts have turned to their use as political campaign slogans and images. The transformation of America from the land of self-sufficient yeomen to commercial farmers using labor-saving equipment took place throughout the nineteenth century when the rural populace still worked hard and sought land ownership, but depended increasingly on cash crops transported by newly constructed railroads to Eastern and foreign markets. The concurrent advent of improved agricultural mechanization fostered larger farm acreages and greater need for communities with bankers, merchants, grain brokers, equipment dealers, blacksmiths, and workers in other businesses and trades. The time increasingly witnessed a shift in rurality from small-scale farming as an end itself to consolidated land holdings that supported an array of local businesses, and held land value in similar regard to the old attachment to the land itself. Yet the agrarian myth of diligence, honesty, and independence had enduring appeal and remained a powerful symbol of the nation.

John McNevin, engraved by John Rogers, Washington at Mt. Vernon (1859); Steel engraving on paper, 7 x 10 ⅛ inches; New York Public Library

Vermont genre artist Junius Brutus Stearns (1810-1885), famed for his series on the American Founders, depicts a harvest scene in George Washington—Farmer (1850) in which the president, a reincarnation of the Roman general Cincinnatus, is clad in formal wear while conversing with his overseer as grain is cut by Mt. Vernon’s slaves. The symbolic scene is inspired by ancient writers like Hesiod, Virgil, and Horace whose writings in praise of husbandry formed the basis of a classical education for American upper classes, but overlooks the brutal realities known to toiling workers deprived of opportunity to own land. Cereal grains were raised in the South to a much lesser extent than cotton and tobacco, but agricultural mechanization came more slowly. The iconography of the benevolent harvester president as national patriarch and gentleman farmer was well established by the early nineteenth century. Popular prints followed Stearns’s painting including the fanciful harvest scenes of Washington at Mt. Vernon by Nathaniel Currier (1852) and by John Rogers (1859). The stereotype of hardworking, noble scythe-wielding agrarian remained a powerful image for nineteenth century politicians who sought to capitalize on public regard for rural rectitude and the patriotic farmer-leader. For this purpose various party organizers designed broadsides with agrarian imagery to promote candidates with campaign prints like William Henry Harrison, the Farmer of North Bend (1840), and Farmer Garfield Cutting a Swath to the White House (1880). The approach apparently reaped the expected benefits as both candidates, and many other seeking other offices, were elected.        

Currier & Ives, Farmer Garfield Cutting a Swath to the White House (1880); Lithograph, 13 x 10 ⅝ inches; Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

Whites of Their Eyes, and White Lammas Wheat — The 2017 Northwest Colonial Festival and Early American Heritage Grains

With a state named for the first president, counties that honor Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin, and towns like Mt. Vernon, perhaps it was only time before the Northwest should host a full-blown Northwest Colonial Festival complete with Concord Bridge battle reenactments and Early American grain demonstration plots courtesy of WSU/Mt. Vernon and Palouse Colony Farm. You may recall from blogs posted earlier this year that in partnership with Glenn Roberts of Anson Mills, founder of Anson Mills in Columbia, South Carolina, and Stephen Jones and Steve Lyon at WSU/MV, we embarked on a marvelous adventure to (1) document specific grain varieties raised by George and Martha Washington, John and Abigail Adams, and other “Founding Farmers,” (2) find any samples that had been kept vital in US and world germplasm collections, (3) begin propigating them, and (4) share samples with the dedicated heritage-minded folks at Colonial Williamsburg, Mt. Vernon’s Living History Farm, and the National Arboretum in Washington, D. C.

Colonist Encampment, 2017 Northwest Colonial Festival; George Washington Inn, Port Angeles, Washington

Among our most recent partners in this special endeavor has been Dan and Janet Abbott, proprietors of the George Washington Inn, a five-star B&B situated on fifteen acres overlooking the Strait of Juan de Fuca between Washington State’s coastal communities of Sequim and Port Angeles. The inn is an incredible full scale replica of President Washington’s Virginia estate mansion with exquisite period interiors, only with updated conveniences! Lois and I were guests of the Abbotts this past winter and marveled at the meticulous care taken to develop the building and grounds as a tribute to the democratic ideals and legendary hospitality of the Washingtons and other Founders. We were even joined for a breakfast by General (Vern Frykholm) Washington himself in full uniform and in keeping with the occasion we supplied the Colonial White Lammas wheat flour for the pancakes. The Father of our Nation said he hadn’t tasted anything so delicious in over 200 years.

Dan and Janet spearheaded the first Northwest Colonial Festival in August, 2016, and with such an overwhelming public response made plans far in advance of this month’s August 10-11 event that attracted reenactors throughout the country including regiments of British regulars and American colonist soldiers. Dan and friends had built a model of the famous Concord Bridge just east of the inn and I’m happy to report that once again the patriots managed to drive the Redcoats back and claim victory. A vast encampment is set up along the long driveway from the Finn Road entrance and organizers and participants go out of their way to make for a family-friendly experience where kids can experience how colonial families lived, worked, played, and ate. There are games, music, marching soldiers, demonstrations on Early American printing, spinning and weaving, cooking, and a host of other crafts so you might want to mark calendars for August, 2018, in case you missed it this time around.

Early American Heritage Grain Plots; George Washington Inn, Port Angeles

My special interest was in the grains of Early America and Dan invited Steve Lyon from WSU/Mt. Vernon and me to present on this topic at one of the afternoon sessions. We met folks who had come from as far away as Arizona and I especially enjoyed getting to know Dr. and Mrs. Benjamin (Mr. and Mrs. Gregg Hardy) Franklin from Utah who go to great length to fully dress and act the part. Dr. Franklin reminded me that his brother was a prominent New England farmer and that he had great interest in “agricultural improvement” by introducing new techniques to improve soil fertility and bringing new grain varieties to the colonies from Europe. I was heartened to hear that others who took part in the festival had heard of the work we had done this past year through Palouse Heritage to reintroduce Virginia White May wheat and Scots Bere barley to the National Arboretum and Colonial Williamsburg.  George Washington and Benjamin Franklin lauded the fertility of American soils in their correspondence, as did Thomas Jefferson when writing of the Piedmont region in his Notes on Virginia (1785). He also also famously proclaimed, “Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God,” and the haven of “substantial and genuine virtue.” Jefferson envisioned a vast network of yeoman farmers who would be rendered self-reliant and virtuous through possession of private property. Widespread appreciation for both commerce and cultural heritage grounded in religious values is evident in Early America’s many weekly and monthly newspapers and other popular publications.

Festival Celebrity Visitor Benjamin Franklin of Philadelphia, AKA Gregg Hardy of the Colonial Heritage Foundation

Although a confirmed Philadelphia city-dweller, Franklin visited farms throughout the area and turned his scientific mind to experiments with grains and grasses and crop rotations. He famously proclaimed, “The great Business of the Continent is Agriculture,” carried on extensive correspondence with Scottish agricultural improver Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696-1782) and through interest and influence circulated ideas as well as seeds to promote more productive farming. Franklin was also the prime mover in establishing The Library Company of Philadelphia in 1731, predecessor of American public libraries, to promote members’ literary and political knowledge. Franklin served for a time as the organization’s librarian and gathered numerous agricultural titles that were widely circulated.

Agrarian allusions were common in the expressions of Franklin’s Poor Richard who observed that the divine call to “Places of Dignity and Honour” went forth to those who cared for land and livestock: “David keeping his Father’s Sheep,” “Shepherds feeding their Flocks,” and “Gideon from the Threshing Floor.” The same 1756 edition of the Almanack and Ephemeris offered verse that resonated with the prevailing Protestant work ethic of Franklin and his readers:

Learn of the Bees, see to their Toils they run

In clust’ring Swarms, and labour in the Sun:

…Unless you often plow the fruitful field,

No grain, but mix’d with Thistles it will yield.

…Plough deep, while Sluggards sleep;

And you shall have Corn, to sell and to keep.

The pithy sayings and light-hearted verse that made the Almanack a best-seller in colonial America reflect Franklin’s creed regarding liberty of persons as a “key freedom” so Americans could own property and enjoy the fruits of their labor in the philosophic tradition of John Locke and John Milton. But in Franklin’s view, such freedom should have reasonable limits since unrestrained personal liberty could transform into exploitation that threatened the public good through radically unequal distribution of wealth. While touring Scotland and Ireland in 1771, diplomat Franklin had seen firsthand the widespread abject poverty of the countryside which he attributed to absentee landlords and exploitive farming practices. He proposed an amendment to the Pennsylvania constitution of 1776 to limit the large concentrations of farmland and other property which he believed would be “destructive to the Common Happiness of Mankind.”

Franklin’s designs for paper currency in 1775 as an expression of growing spirit of American independence also incorporated familiar agrarian imagery. TRIBULATIO DITAT (Threshing Improves It) proclaimed the banner of a circular shield in the center his two-dollar bill that featured a flail above a sheaf of grain. Invoking the colorfully stirring rhetoric characteristic of Franklin, he described the image as symbolic of “enriching virtues” in an anonymous submission to the Pennsylvania Gazette: “…[T]ho at present we are under the flail, it blows, how hard soever, will be rather advantageous than hurtful to us: for they will bring forth every grain of genius in arts, manufactures, war and council, that are now concealed in the husk…. And threshing, in one of its senses, that of beating, often improves those that are threshed.”

Franklin United Colonies Flail and Sheaf Two-Dollar Bill (1775); Private Collection

From Colonial America To El Camino Real — The Great American Heritage Grains Adventure, April 2017 (Part 1)

This blog is the beginning of a series on my (Richard's) trip across the country visiting important sites related to heritage and landrace grain studies. View the other posts in the series here.

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Adolph Weinman, Cereals (1908), Vermont Marble; North Pediment, U. S. Department of Agriculture Whitten Building

Last spring I was checking the calendar for dates of what our family calls “coming attractions”—the periodic gathering of the clan at Camp Casey on Whidbey Island in Puget Sound, family birthdays, an annual Cascades high country hike, and the like. In doing so I noticed that I had long since qualified as a member of the faculty at Seattle Pacific University for a sabbatical, and had probably missed the application deadline for this year, which turned out to be the case. Since I had done a fair amount of research and writing on environmental sustainability education which dovetailed nicely with my interests in Palouse Heritage regenerative agriculture and heirloom crops, I pled mercy from Dean Eigenbrood’s department court since the trail for further study led beyond Seattle. Many sources of information I sought were not available online but would greatly benefit from visits to the Library of Congress, Rockefeller Library at Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia, the University of California-Riverside, and other locations. With strong enrollments in our SPU teacher education and my pledge to supply the dean with bread and ale from the King’s Arms Tavern in Williamsburg, my request was thankfully granted for this current spring quarter.

Pancake Time with Amy, Andrew Ross, and Glenn; Oregon State University Barley Day, Corvallis (2016)

Valued travel support for these endeavors has also come from the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation, founded by Glenn Roberts of Anson Mills, Columbia, South Carolina. Glenn is one of the founders of the country’s “back to land and table” heritage grains and culinary arts movement, a fellow incredibly generous with his time and wisdom, and known to fly cross-country for breakfast made by our mutual friend and “Pancake Queen of America” author Amy Halloran of New York. (As I recall he also took part in Oregon State University’s Barley Conference that day last year, but mostly came for the pancakes.) I am very grateful to the SPU administration, Glenn, Amy, my wife, Lois and family, and a host of others for encouragement and arrangements and invite you to let me be your guide on this fun cross-country adventure. I’ll be posting updates here to our Palouse Heritage blog in the event you’d also like to experience new insights related to heritage, sustainability, and health. Onward!   --Richard

WASHINGTON, D. C.

Capitol Mall Classical Agrarian Sculpture

For the past couple years I’ve been composing a sequel to Harvest Heritage: Agricultural Origins and Heirloom Crops of the Pacific Northwest (WSU Press, 2013), and for various reasons found the muse leading me to a work tentatively titled “Hallowed Harvests: Gleaners, Reapers, and Threshers in Western Art and Literature.” Although I barely picked up an undergrad literature minor long ago, and my formal art training chiefly consists of having watched legendary educator Arden Johnson in action at Endicott-St. John Middle School when I served as principal there in the 1990s, the prospect of completing a proper study has been somewhat daunting. But I take heart in knowing that many of authors and artists featured in the burgeoning HH manuscript had little formal training though I have tried to make up for that by reading far more library and abebooks.com volumes than I ever anticipated, and thought someone who grew up with good Palouse Country dirt on his shoes might be able to offer at least a dusting of some fresh insight on van Gogh’s Wheatfield series, Monet’s Grainstacks, Thomas Hart Benton’sharvest fields, and the sculpted Art Deco treasures at the Chicago Board of Trade Building. This trip is greatly furthering this hope by enabling me to view such works in person and meet their thoroughly informed guardians.    

James E. Fraser and Edward H. Ratti, Heritage (1935); National Archives South Entrance, Washington, D. C.

My intention has been to fly from Washington State to Washington, D. C. in order to begin this peculiar expedition by viewing examples of notable monumental agrarian art on the Capitol Mall, and then discussing heritage grain restoration with staff at the National Arboretum, Mt. Vernon Living History Farm, and Colonial Williamsburg’s Great Hopes Plantation. This begins with a confession that both back in the day as a chaperone with student groups and on personal trips to Washington, D. C., I have passed most of these monuments without ever noting their presence let alone significance. And since they grace the entrances to some of the nation’s most prominent places—the National Archives and Arlington Bridge, for example, it isn’t as if they’ve been inconspicuous. But having a dozen or so kids in your charge in the big city does have its diversions. 

In 1923 the U. S. Commission of Fine Arts, an independent federal agency charged with reviewing design of all construction in Washington, D. C., began consideration of plans authorized by Congress to build Arlington Memorial Bridge as part of a major route connecting Arlington National Cemetery with the Lincoln Memorial and Capitol district. Sculptors James Earle Fraser (1876-1953) and Leo Friedlander (1888-1966) were later commissioned to present designs for four heroic equestrian monuments at the bridge’s eastern plaza entrances—The Arts of Peace and The Arts of War. Minnesota-born Fraser had attended the Art Institute of Chicago and later studied under Augustus Saint-Gaudens at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris. He conceived of Music and Harvest and Aspiration and Literature in Neoclassical style to symbolize the aesthetics of peace, while Friedlander’s martial designs were titled Valor and Sacrifice. Earlier notable works by Fraser included the Indian Head (Buffalo) Nickel and End of the Trail, the iconic melancholy image of a mounted Sioux Indian he had created when just fifteen years old for the 1893 World Columbian Exposition. 

James E. Fraser, The Arts of Peace—Harvest (1950); Lincoln Memorial Circle Fire-gilded Bronze Statue; Washington, D. C.

Music and Harvest featured a male figure grasping a sickle and carrying sheaf of grain while striding alongside Pegasus. After fashioning a series of smaller working models, the final works were cast in Italy using the lost-wax process and fire gilding to form a 400-ton monument on a granite pedestal measuring nineteen feet high and sixteen feet long—the largest equestrian statue in the America. Budgetary constraints, World War II, and technical problems in casting works of such proportions delayed their installation until 1950.

Fraser was also commissioned to create other iconic structures in Washington, D. C., including the nine-foot tall Heritage and Guardianship monuments (1935) that flank the National Archives South Entrance. Designed by Fraser and carved from Indiana limestone by New York sculptor Edward H. Ratti (1904-1969), Heritage (see frontispiece) features a seated allegorical matriarch holding a child and sheaf of grain. The statue’s massive granite base is surrounded by images in relief of farm tools and livestock and the inscription, “The heritage of the past is the seed that brings forth the harvest of the future.”

National Arboretum

Jeff Reinhart, Grass Coordinator; Jason Wight, Field Trials Coordinator, University of Maryland College of Agriculture and Natural Resources

With Jason and “Waves of Grain” Heritage Wheat Plantings

The National Arboretum covers 440 acres and Jeff works tirelessly to promote best practices and varieties for DC area managed landscapes, while Jason works directly with farmers all across Maryland. Since our son, Karl, completed his master’s degree in public policy from the University of Maryland and I hadn’t visited the school since then, I was pleased to see some familiar sights around Terp-dom. Jeff and Jason have both helped organize the popular “Waves of Grain” exhibit of demonstration plots established in 2014 for visitors who might be unfamiliar with production of wheat, barley, rye, and other crops. Jeff also manages the Arboretum’s 1 1/3 acres of various grasses, and both report strong interest in heritage grain varieties by area microbreweries because of their unique and rich flavor profiles.

Original Capitol Corinthian Columns (1826), National Arboretum

The twenty-two sandstone Corinthian columns that appear starkly in the center of the National Arboretum were part of the original United States Capitol Building and installed in 1826. They appear in numerous pictures of presidential inaugurations from the time of Andrew Jackson to Dwight Eisenhower when they were dismantled and replaced in 1958. Jeff said they rested in obscurity along a grassy embankment until someone suggested they would make an impressive assembly at the Arboretum and in 1990 they were erected at their present location.

Constantine Brumidi, The Apotheosis of Washington—Agriculture (1865); United States Capitol Building RotundaDome, Washington, D.C.

Our American Founders’ grand vision for New World prosperity was beautifully translated into the design and decoration of the original Capitol Building. The massive inner and outer domes crowning the 1800 structure were completed in the 1860s with an inner oculus that reveals an enormous fresco coveringapproximately 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. 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. Next time you’re inside the Capitol Rotunda, be sure to look up!

Library of Congress, Farm Security Administration Collection Harvest Series

National Archives, Agricultural Extension Service Photograph Collection

The Farm Security Administration (FSA) originated in 1935 as an independent government agency first known as the Resettlement Administration (RA) and one of President Franklin Roosevelt’s signature New Deal programs to promote rural recovery in the wake of the Great Depression. The RA oversaw a number of farm relief efforts including government loans to enable sharecroppers and tenant farmers to purchase their own acreage on favorable credit terms and small farm owners to underwrite equipment and operational costs. In a day when many Americans still lived in rural areas, RA field representatives established offices throughout the country to screen candidates and assist in applications, facilitate extension education, and monitor progress. 

John Collier, Wheat Shocks in Pennsylvania (1939)

In 1937 the RA was transferred to the Department of Agriculture and renamed the Farm Security Administration, and publicity efforts were launched to promote the agency’s work and acquaint government officials with the plight of the rural poor. Prior to this period the most extensive photographic documentation of American agriculture had been undertaken by George W. Ackerman and E. C. Hunter of the USDA Agricultural Extension Service in the 1920s, but their work had primarily focused on American progress in agricultural mechanization. The 1930s FSA Historical Section Photo Unit was organized by director Roy Stryker both to document the agency’s fieldwork and to foster continued support from Congress and local governments. The unit’s work under Stryker would come to significantly shape the emerging genre of American documentary photography.

Although some experimentation was done with color film as early as 1939, the vast majority of FSA photographers black-and-white. The stark and stunning visual record amassed by the unit from 1938 to 1942 yielded a prodigious collection of some quarter-million negatives ranging in size from 35 mm to 8 x 10 inches. Approximately 170,000 FSA images, digitized in the 1990s, survive as a national treasure and are now housed under controlled conditions at the Library of Congress’s Packard Campus Audio-Visual Center.

George W. Ackerman, Unloading Wheat (1925) and Harvesting Wheat in Kansas (c. 1925); Agricultural Extension Service Photograph Collection, National Archives and Records Center

Most of the photographers recruited by Stryker for the FSA devoted considerable attention to farm life, and those who especially did so included, in order of being hired, Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Marion Post Wolcott, Jack Delano, Jack Vachon, and Marjory Collins. The group brought aesthetic perspectives to their far flung endeavors throughout the nation and formulated a remarkable vernacular realism of images and articles that honored the traditions of common folks while recording the lives of farm families. Complicating their plight were social adjustments in the wake of an unprecedented era of agricultural mechanization.               

FSA photographers deployed across the country during the period that witnessed the waning years of cradle scythe reaping in isolated valleys of the South and Midwest horse-drawn reapers and steam threshers to the massive horse-drawn combines of the Pacific Northwest, and the advent of combustion engine-powered harvesting equipment in all these places. Since most of his photographers were from East Coast cities or Europe, Stryker provided copies of Columbia University geographer J. Russell Smith’s authoritative North America: Its People and Resources (1925) that featured detailed descriptions and maps of the country’s geophysical regions with summaries of their distinctive rural demographics and agricultural profiles. Members of the team also periodically met to discuss methodologies and subject matter for upcoming assignments.

In the mid-1930s, Lithuanian-born Ben Shahn (1898-1969) shared a Manhattan studio with Walker Evans, who collaborated with James Agee on the classic book about three impoverished Southern tenant families, Now Let Us Praise Famous Men (1941). Shahn was well acquainted with dire poverty from his youth, and his sympathy for the down and out would be evident in a lifetime of artwork and political activism. The intellectual range Shahn applied to his work is reflected in his exhortation to students at Harvard where he delivered the 1956-’57 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures: “[B]efore you do attend a university work at something for a while. …If you do work in a field do not fail to observe the look and the feel of earth and of all things that you handle…. Read the Bible; read Hume; read Pogo. Read all kinds of poetry and know many poets and many great artists.” Pre-Raphaelites, Hudson River artists, and German Genre painters were all notable for study, as were classical and popular music, big city preachers, and small town New England politicians.

Arthur Rothstein, Combines of More Prosperous Days, Central Oregon (1936)

Dorothea Lange, Wheat Shock, Sperryville, Virginia (1936) and Lee Russell, Oats, Park County, Montana (1942)

Shahn used his photographs not only to advance the agency’s moral mission of informing the wider population in order to support rural economic and social reform, but also as models for various forms of agrarian art. He photographed many harvest scenes, and later created such paintings and lithographs as Bountiful Harvest (1944), Beatitudes (1952), and Wheat Field—Ecclesiastes (1967). Shahn’s remarkable series of Ohio grain harvest photographs taken in August, 1938, consisted of over 200 images with many that feature women preparing and serving meals to famished field workers.

Among the best known Depression-era photojournalists was Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) whose iconic 1936 image Migrant Mother, for which she received a Guggenheim Prize, forever associated her work with the plight of the dispossessed described in John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel, The Grapes of Wrath. Raised under difficult circumstances herself in New Jersey, Lange studied photography at Columbia University and spent most of her adult life in California. She began working for the RA/FSA in 1935 and sought to bring public attention to the conditions of the rural poor by documenting the lives of sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and migrant workers and distributing her pictures to newspapers throughout the country.

Dorothea Lange, Cradling Wheat near Christianburg, Virginia (1936)

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Stay tuned for the next installment of this blog series on Richard's "Great American Heritage Grains Adventure."

Richard's trip has been made possible by generous support from The Carolina Gold Foundation, Anson Mills and Glenn Roberts, Seattle Pacific University, the University of California-Riverside Department of History, and Palouse Heritage.

A Weekend Trip to the George Washington Inn and other Pacific Northwest Agricultural Heritage Sites

President Washington entertaining his guests. Wife Lois is on the left.

My wife and I recently returned from a remarkably enjoyable weekend trip visiting some amazing sites related to agricultural heritage right here in the Pacific Northwest. We began at the George Washington Inn, Dan and Janet Abbott's five-star B & B located on the ocean between Sequim and Port Angeles. The Inn is a full scale replica of Washington's Mt. Vernon and Dan is passionate about America's colonial heritage in every way, including farming techniques for the living history farm he is developing. The last week of July the Pacific Northwest Colonial Festival will be held on the scenic grounds of the George Washington Inn. We had the special privilege of meeting President Washington himself (acclaimed reenactor Vern Frykholm) at breakfast and served him some Palouse Heritage Colonial pancakes made with our own landrace grain flour, which he pronounced as, "Just like Martha makes!" 

The George Washington Inn, located between Port Angeles and Sequim

Richardsons' Oat Pancakes

Fry's Bakery

Following a delightful time with Dan and President Washington, we continued on across the water via the Blackball Ferry to Victoria, British Columbia, where we were treated to a wonderful tour of the vicinity's agricultural heritage by Foster and Natasha Richardson who farm near Mill Creek, British Columbia. We dined on the most scrumptious oak pancakes--more like a cake actually, at Victoria's Nourish Kitchen & Cafe, and also toured Fry's Bakery, operated by friends of the Richardsons. Our principal destination was Hatley Park Castle, located about ten miles west of Victoria, which is the home of BC's Royal Roads University and three-time host of Queen Elizabeth on her trips to British Columbia. Royal Roads occupies the former grounds of the Hudson's Bay Company's Colwood Farm. Some of the province's earliest grain was raised at Colwood and adjacent Craigflower Farm, and evidence of these places' agrarian heritage can still be seen in Craigflower's manor house and the Colwood Farm stone dairy building. 

Our trip was another reminder of the rich agricultural heritage we have here in the northwest, and further inspires us to continue restoring those healthy and earth-friendly landrace grains from our past. People like George Washington and fur trade farmers thrived on them, and so should we!

Hatley Park Castle