Friends of the Land and Sustainable Agriculture (Part 1)

Ohio farmer and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Bromfield deeply loved farming as cooperative art in the classical sense of working in partnership with nature. He combined experience from a rural upbringing with agricultural studies at Cornell and in journalism at Columbia to author nineteen novels and eight books of non-fiction. Bromfield established Malabar Farm in 1939 on a thousand acres near his native Lucas, Ohio, to promote soil conservation, animal husbandry, and sustainable “permanent” farming. Bromfield explained his agricultural principles in a book named for the farm which had become an enormously popular tourist attraction and is now a state park and living history farm. Malabar Farm (1948), illustrated with woodcuts including scenes of wheat, oat, and corn harvest by Kate Lord, is based on Bromfield’s 1944 journal “written when the weather was bad and the work was light.” The book relates dinner table conversation and musings on a range of wartime economic issues, talk about Gertrude Stein and Edith Wharton, “farmer religion,” and political constraint on human tendencies to exploit and do harm.

In 1940 writer-conservationist Russell Lord (1895-1964) and Bromfield founded the Society for the Friends of the Land, a non-profit advocacy organization to publish the quarterly journal The Land (1940-1954) and promote sustainable agriculture. Honorary members included venerable environmentalist prophet Liberty Hyde Bailey, Soil Conservation Service founding director Hugh Bennett, Aldo Leopold, and other leading figures. The group envisioned an interdisciplinary forum as relevant to agrarian affairs as Atlantic Monthly was to urban interests by offering an enriching humus of pragmatic and cultural perspectives. Edited and illustrated by the Lords from their farm near Bel Air, Maryland, The Land was published in Columbus, Ohio, for fifty-two issues under Bromfield’s oversight and featured short stories, articles on farming, science, politics, religion, and poetry. It became an influential voice for a permaculture based on “interdependent” biodiversity and multinational cooperation. The approach contrasted with developments in a world of nationalist rhetoric growing out of rising East-West tensions and the advent of controversial new technologies. Bromfield expressed the group’s hopes for the movement with allusion to emerging issues of the time in a membership appeal:

 Friends of the Land attempts to create an awareness in the minds of all our citizens of the importance to them of the wise use of our soil and water, and to provide a forum for all points and shades of opinion on conservation, to the end that the people themselves shall form their own opinions and take proper action. …There is a great revolution going on in American agriculture. This is being brought about by economic and population pressures, including increasingly high taxes, mounting labor costs and mechanization. These pressures make it imperative that the farmer who is to survive must adopt new and more efficient methods for the production of food, feed and fiber. …Friends of the Land would have our people see that forests, cover crops, grassland farming, inter-row cropping, stream flow, water power, transportation, commerce, and flood prevention are all tied together to promote our prosperity and to determine our standards of living and therefore our health and happiness.

Bromfield’s words underscore the holistic nature of the founding Friends perspectives against the backdrop of events that profoundly affected American farming. They reveal the emerging fault lines between a new order of global cooperation and sustainability envisioned under Franklin Roosevelt, Henry Wallace, and Gifford Pinchot in contrast to unilateral approaches pursued under the Truman administration to increase production at home and unilaterally advance American foreign policy objectives. Despite misgivings over Wallace’s progressive advocacy, his concern over the militarization of science, and conciliatory attitude toward the Soviets, Truman retained him as a cabinet member for six months until Wallace delivered a speech in September 1945 advocating conciliation with the USSR. The new president had given Stalin the benefit of the doubt but Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe and the specter of totalitarianism led to a fundamental shift in his thinking by 1947 and the beginning of the Cold War.

Truman’s pick for Secretary of Agriculture, Clinton Anderson (1895-1975), reorganized America’s post-World War II agricultural economy to increase domestic food production, alleviate global post-war shortages, and enter the foreign policy realm to counter communist tendencies in developing nations. New Deal initiatives in soil conservation, rural electrification, and other realms celebrated by WPA artists and authors gave way to government contracts with industry scientists, university researchers, and corporate laboratories. Discussion of the contest over the future wellbeing of the planet played out on the pages of The Land throughout the 1940s and early ‘50s. Bromfield and Lord contributed numerous articles as did other notable figures in conservation including Wallace Stegner, Paul Sears, and William Vogt. A collection of popular selections illustrated with Kate Lord’s woodcuts appeared in 1950 as Forever the Land: A Country Chronicle and Anthology.

While soliciting a range of viewpoints on domestic and world affairs, plant genetics, global population growth, and other topics of agrarian relevance, Lord and Bromfield expressed concerns over “quick buck” policies they feared would transform fields into factories and enlist technologies that risked unintended environmental consequences. During the war years, the USDA had suspended publication of the annual Yearbooks but released a 900-page compendium titled Science in Farming—The Yearbook of Agriculture, 1943-1947. In the new volume’s introduction, Secretary Anderson dismissed fears about DDT, genetic testing, and “[concern] that life be too abundant.” A generally favorable review of the book by The Land’s assistant editor James R. Simmons included some skepticism: “I decline to eat the bread that is no longer bread but a puffed-up something that has about as much flavor as ground peanut shells…. I can’t understand why it is necessary to grind the nourishment out of our grain and ship something that must be ‘enriched’ with chemicals before it is fit to nourish the human body.” Simmons also touched on recent national changes that were detrimental to rural vitality—interstate highways that bypassed smaller communities, centralized processing and marketing facilities, and a growing societal affluence that prized consumerism above conservation. The Land’s summer 1953 issue featured “The World Gets Warmer” by meteorologist Harry Wexler, one of the first widely published articles on the likelihood of climate change due to burning of fossil fuels. Bromfield wrote passionately about the dangers of militarism and the nuclear arms race other Land contributors warned of potential dangers from atmospheric testing of atomic bombs.

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.

Living History “Open-Air Museum” Farms and Self-Discovery: The European Background

Making Lefse the Old-Fashioned Way
Norsk Folkemuseum, Oslo

Inspired by the architectural restoration at Bygdøy and Kristiana art scene, Swedish folklorist and museum administer Artur Hazelius (1833-1901), a native of Dalecarlia in the west-central Swedish heartland, established Skansen, the first country’s outdoor museum in Stockholm in 1891. Hazelius further envisioned centers of cultural vibrancy where artisans and workers in period costume would inhabit the historic structures and demonstrate traditional skills. He had received acclaim throughout Europe for his dioramas on Scandinavian folk art and vernacular life at the Paris Universal Exposition in 1878. The popularity of these approaches at Skansen and places that followed in Denmark, France, and across the continent reflects the widespread concern regarding threats to agrarian culture and its association with a new national consciousness. After Scottish ethnographer Isabel Grant (1887-1983) toured historical parks in Sweden and Norway in the 1920s, she established the first open-air museum in Great Britain—Scotland’s Highland Folk Museum in 1935 on the Isle of Iona, which was relocated four years later to Laggan, Badenoch in the central Highlands.

Brinton wrote enthusiastically about the remarkable ethnographic contributions of Hazelius and others who had founded Skansen and Bygdøy, and told American audiences how the Europeans had “transported bodily” medieval structures from remote countryside locations to similar public settings. “Rooms were re-erected and furnished precisely as they were in bygone days,” he marveled, “and the incidental decorative and domestic arts, such as wood-carving, iron work, pottery, and weaving, found place in the broad scheme. The color notes of which were contributed by the bright red, clear green, dauntless yellow, or discreet white and black of native dress.” Brinton noted the cultural value in handicrafts and rural custom and judged open air museums to be a “great movement toward self-discovery” that involved fine art. The efforts of Brinton and others on both sides of the Atlantic also revived traditional festivals and folk music and led to the organization of cultural-historical societies and professional study.

Hallingdal “Harvest House” Threshing Barn (c. 1800)
Norsk Folkemuseum, Oslo

In the spirit of this unusually creative epoch, rural landscapist and architect Gustaf Ankarcrona (1869-1933) established a home and ensemble of restored farm buildings between 1980 and 1911 in Tällberg, a lakeside farming village in Dalecarlia. The area became a vibrant summer enclave for prominent Swedish artists, writers, and musicians. Anders Zorn undertook a similar project from 1914 until his death in 1920 by moving forty historic structures to his hometown of Mora north of Stockholm. The complex later formed the nucleus of the community’s Gammelgarden (“Old Farm”) Heritage Museum. Its fourteenth-century threshing barn is the oldest structure of its kind in the country and one of Europe’s oldest wooden buildings.

A dozen miles southwest of Kristiana in the rural community of Bærum, artist Erik Werenskiold (1855-1938) established the Fleskum Farm art colony after he and his wife, Maggie, acquired the property in 1885. Although only active in the late 1880s, Fleskum became an influential center for artists like Werenskiold, Harriet Backer (1845-1932), and Frits Thaulow (1847-1906) who had all studied in Germany and in France. Exposure to German Realism and the Barbizon experience influenced their return home to paint en plein air Scandinavian landscapes and scenes of peasant life. They introduced Norwegian art to a fresh naturalism and atmospheric “mood painting” that ventured beyond objective reality by imparting artists’ personal feelings. Notable Fleskum works include Backer’s Farm Interior, Skotta in Bærum (1887) and Thaulow’s harvest scene, The Field at Froen (c. 1889).

Swedish Symbolist poet Erik Axel Karlfeldt (1864-1931), raised on a small Dalecarlian farm near the village of Karlbo (origin of his self-designated surname), served as librarian at the Academy of Agriculture from 1903-1912 and published six volumes of poetry between 1895 and 1927. His lyrical verse relates the ancient harmony of peasant life with the earth and rhythm of the seasons. Often speaking through his country gentleman alter-ego Fridolin, Karlfelt’s poems range from exhilarating to somber and flavored with numerous idiomatic allusions that challenge translation about harvest, planting, and other field labors.

…Fridolin dances free, — / Your son, and a brave lad he;
He can talk in the peasant style with a churl, / And in Latin to men of degree.
His scythe goes sharp through the harvest’s gold, / He is proud of the store that his granaries hold,
Toward the moon’s red saucepan he tosses his girl / Like a man of your stalwart mould.

As intermediary between Karlfeldt’s formal “Latin” schooling and threatened “peasant style” talk, Fridolin combines botanical science and religious stories with farmstead lore and echoes from Scandinavia’s pagan past. Karlfeldt’s Fridolin’s visor (Fridolin’s Songs, 1898) expresses hope for cultural understandings informed by the rich legacy of rural wisdom in the wake of unprecedented modernization and depopulation of the countryside. In the collection’s “Song After Harvest,” Fridolin’s “murmuring” is “filled with memory. “Song of Parting” invokes the image of a grain sieve to symbolize the prospect of an approaching storm’s separation of family from surroundings as if the approaching new century threatened a cherished old order.

Karlfeldt continued these musings in Fridolins lustgård (Fridolin’s Garden, 1901) with lines that soar with hope and sometimes fall to despair in the same poem. Finally, “In Fridolin’s Footsteps,” a selection from Flora och Bellona (1918), Karlfeldt laments his longtime imaginary companion’s “ravaged garden” and “forgotten song.” Fridolin speaks no more. The “mourning music” and “ghost of joy” presage Karlfeldt’s personal struggles over family relationships and war on the continent. For his remarkable corpus of poetry and prose, Karlfeldt was posthumously awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1935.

Swallowtail Butterfly on Thistle
National Colonial Farm; Accokeek, Maryland

Living History “Open-Air Museum” Farms, Self-Discovery Accokeek, and Beyond

National Colonial Farm Entry at Piscataway Park
Accokeek, Maryland

One of our stops on last month’s cross-country tour was the 200-acre National Colonial Farm on the Maryland peninsula about ten miles southeast of Washington, D. C. where we were welcomed by a host of colorful swallowtail butterflies, friendly squirrels, and flock of heritage breed Hog Island sheep. The farm has operated since 1957 as a partnership between the National Park Service and non-profit Accokeek Foundation. It is one of the nation’s first land trusts and includes the farm and large vegetable garden, heritage sheep, swine, and cattle breeding program, and maintains a visitor and education center. Farm buildings include colonial era Laurel Branch Farmhouse (c. 1770) and “Bachelor’s Choice” estate Tobacco Barn (c. 1780).

Regenerative agriculture coordinator K. C. Carr had recently harvested the farm’s small stand of Red May wheat using sturdy aluminum scythes with long steel blades. Using the ancient method, they then thrashed the cuttings with wooden flails and cleaned the grain with screen sieve. The yield was still rather limited so all the seed was saved for planting season but K. C. hopes there will be enough next year for servings of Accokeek bread and biscuits. Red May is a flavorful soft red winter wheat but the region’s 18th century production was devastated in the 1770s when Hessian troops brought over from Germany to fight against the Americans in the Revolutionary War also brought the Hessian fly. The farm’s seed stock was generously provided by our friend Ed Schultz from Colonial Williamsburg’s Great Hope Plantation.

The first large scale American open-air museum and living history farm was Henry Ford’s Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan which opened in 1929. Influenced by similar places in Sweden, antiquarian George Francis Dow (1868-1936) restored buildings on the grounds of the Salem, Massachusetts Essex Institute between 1898 and 1910. Virginia’s Colonial Williamsburg opened in 1934 with major support from John D. and Abby Rockefeller, Jr. The living history movement’s fascinating story in the United States is profiled in Jay Anderson, Time Machines: The World of Living History (1984). One of the movement’s most influential advocates was Ellis Burcaw, longtime professor of history and museum studies at the University of Idaho in Moscow. 

With son Karl and Accokeek Regenerative Agriculture Coordinator K. C. Carr

Laurel Branch Farmhouse (c. 1770), National Colonial Farm

Prominent American art collector and critic Christian Brinton (1870-1942) also championed the approach throughout the inter-war years in a storied career that resulted in over 200 published articles and dozens of curated art shows. Brinton moved easily among artists, intellectuals, and government cultural administrators to foster appreciation for art and history by arranging for exhibitions in leading galleries of prominent painters and sculptors, as well as lesser known artists who he believed merited wider attention. Although basing his far-flung endeavors in Philadelphia, Brinton traveled zealously throughout Europe from 1912 to the Thirties to collect and study exemplary works of Nordic, Slavic, and German art. He sought to uplift distinct national trends in modernism and use gallery exhibitions and publications to improve cultural relations.

For these purposes Brinton organized the European-American Art Committee which included representatives from the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Pennsylvania Museum of Art, leading European art museums, and members of the diplomatic corps. Through these ambitious efforts and other associations arranged by Brinton, highly visible exhibitions held in various American cities included Contemporary Scandinavian Art (1913), Russian Painting and Sculpture (1923), and Contemporary Belgian Painting, Graphic Arts, and Sculpture (1929). In the introduction to the Scandinavian exhibit catalogue, Brinton made his case for enriching national aesthetics of “soil and tradition” to uplift spirits instead of perpetuating the “souless convention” of nineteenth-century classical styles or pursuing abstract universals.

Notwithstanding the Romantic tendencies of Swedish artists like Gunnar Hallström (1875-1943), Brinton found in his paintings and others by Anders Zorn (1860-1920), renown for his landscapes for portraits, and Denmark’s Karl Shou (1870-1938) a refreshing naturalism of coloristic beauty. Scenes of everyday country life including Shou’s The Farm and On the Border of the Field and works by Hallström were included in the popular 1913 exhibition. Zorn’s pensive watercolor Our Daily Bread (1886) depicts his aged mother tending a mealtime campfire to feed workers who harvest grain nearby.

Anders Zorn, Our Daily Bread (1886)
The International Studio XLIV:173 (July 1911)

In the summer of 1912, Brinton visited Norway, Sweden, and Denmark in preparation for the exhibition under the auspices of the American-Scandinavian Society. In additional to arranging loans of notable art works, the trip introduced him to living history “open-air” museums that showcased what he termed “the humble, anonymous treasure troves of peasant industry” seen in indigenous decorative art, rural architecture, and farm tools. The world’s first open-air museum had been established at the Bygdøy Royal Farm near Oslo (Kristiania) in 1881-1882 when King Oscar II of Norway and Sweden arranged for the relocation of four farm buildings and a medieval stave church from Gol in the Hallingdal Valley to his summer country residence. Gol was my maternal great-grandmother Sunwold’s ancestral village. Restoration and management of other historic structures that followed from the area were transferred in 1907 to the Norsk Folkmuseum which had been established in 1894 by historian Hans Aall (1869-1946).