A Heritage Grains Adventure Through Europe, Part 2

Part 1 of this blog post is available here.

Nordic Pancakes and Landscapes

Our Baltic adventure continued with visits to the capitals of Finland, Sweden, and Norway so at every stop we took advantage of tour options to area farms and locations related to rural life and agrarian arts. One gets thoroughly spoiled on cruise ships with food so nicely prepared and abundant along with all manner of entertainment. Our Regal Princess did not disappoint with wondrously rich and crusty European breads and flavorful entrees including buttermilk pancakes and sweet and savory crepes. I’ve come to have special interest in crepes since our Palouse Heritage team has been on the hunt for some time to determine the grain varieties traditionally grown for crepe flour. I’m happy to report that we finally have done so and that next season we will be harvesting our first (though small) crop of Yellow Breton wheat. We learned that buckwheat was customarily used for savory crepes.

Regal Princess Buttermilk Pancakes topped with Strawberries

A special highlight among the Scandinavian stops was a visit to Oslo’s Norwegian Folk Museum, which is a living history park similar to Germany’s Hessenpark near Frankfurt with some 160 historic structures divided among nine areas representing the country’s principal cultural regions. Since Mom’s Sunwold/Anderson ancestors hailed from the scenic Hallingdal Valley northwest of Oslo, Lois and I headed to the park’s restored Hallingdal Village and found not only several 18th century log homes with grassed roofs, there was also a substantial threshing barn and granary. I marvel at the all the effort that must have gone in to deconstructing these and the park’s other many old buildings and then transporting them and reconstructing them here. Walking into the old barn impressed on me the original meaning of the term “threshold” since the entry way had the well-worn raised board that ensured the precious grain flailed (threshed) inside remained inside the building and was not lost outside. Inside the barn were old photographs from Hallingdal showing families at work in fields from long ago fashioning and drying grain sheaves, and flailing and winnowing (cleaning) grain inside the barn. It crossed my mind that those pictured might well have been some distant kin.

Norsk Folkemuseum Hallingdal Village Threshing Barn and Granary and Winnowing

A few minutes’ walk found us entering the park’s restored village of Trøndelag where Lois and I encountered a crowd of enthusiastic children with their parents waiting to enter a long kitchen where a pair of the park’s many workers playing the part of an village inhabitant labored over a hot fire to prepare delicious whole wheat lefse “pancake-bread.” These two ladies spoke perfect English and offered substantial samples slathered in butter and honey which may have accounted for the long line and delighted kids. I knew of lefse because of regular family visits in my youth to our beloved Norwegian-born Aunt Mary Sunwold in Spokane, a native of Hallingdal who had immigrated to America as child and after some years in the North Dakota and Minnesota had relocated with her family to Spokane, Washington.

But Aunt Mary’s lefse was always made of flour mixed with mashed potatoes so had a very peculiar yet pleasant flavor. When we saw the informative Folkemuseum ladies working away on the next batch without any potatoes in sight I asked about their recipe. They laughed and told us that potatoes were commonly used for “poor man’s lefse,” and that most folks preferred it made from wheat flour. Since our clan certainly came from peasant stock, I can understand Aunt Mary’s preference for potato lefse but certainly found this “new old” recipe to be delicious, and nicely sweetened with honey and butter.

Richard the Trøndelag Rye Field Scarecrow and Baking Lefse, Norsk Folkemuseum

Our culinary historian hosts kindly shared their traditional wheat flour lefse recipe with us which I present here as given to us so will take some conversion from metric to English measure:

INGREDIENTS: 1 kilo wheat flour, 2 eggs, 250 grams sugar, 125 melted butter, ½ liter buttermilk, 1 teaspoon baking powder. DIRECTIONS: Mix eggs with sugar and butter, and stir into the milk. Mix the baking powder with some flour into the blend. Mix with enough flour so the dough is easy to roll flat. (May use barley flour for easier rolling.) Bake on griddle or in a dry frying pan. May be stored in the freezer. Serve with butter, sugar, and cinnamon on top.

The early nineteenth century’s foremost Scandinavian landscape artist was Norwegian Johan Christian Dahl (1788-1857), a native of Bergen raised in poverty who studied in Sweden and Denmark, traveled widely in Switzerland and Italy, and created most of his art in Germany. Dahl’s mature oeuvre represented a synthesis of academy training in Copenhagen in the emotional power of the great Dutch Master grand landscapes with the Naturalism for which Dresden had become famous by the 1820s and where Dahl lived continuously from 1818. Throughout his experiences across the continent, however, Dahl returned recurrently in his art to interpretation of the northern landscapes of his native land with dazzling oils and attention to detail as seen in such canvases as The Fortun Valley (1842) and Hjelle in Valdres (1851). Nestled at the head of narrow Lake Oppstynsvatnet one hundred miles northeast of Bergen, scenic Hjelle in late summer offered an ideal setting for the artist to express the beauty of the countryside and moral virtue of rural folk in a time of rising Norwegian nationalism. The spectacular Hjelle view rendered in Dahl’s meticulous tiny strokes depicts a golden brown field of upright sheaves that seems to glow between a row of village structures to the right with deep blue lake and emerald-clad mountain slopes in the background.

L A. Ring, The Harvester (1884), Oil on canvas, 74 ¾ x 60 ⅗ inches, National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen

Dahl’s most ardent disciple, Thomas Fearnley (1802-1842), met his mentor in 1826 during one of Dahl’s trips to his homeland, and studied with him in Dresden from 1829 to 1830. Unlike Dahl, Fearnley returned to Norway following his studies in Germany to reside there permanently from 1838. Among his many naturalistic rural scenes are Haystacks, Rydal, Cumbria (1838) and View from Romsdalen (1838) that show harvesters strolling throughrolling fields of ripened grain in the fabled coastal valley northwest of Hjelle. The views express Rousseau’s Enlightenment concept of the intrinsic nobility of country people who live apart from the decadent influences of urban life. The paintings of Norwegian Romanticist Hans Dahl (1849-1937) evoke similar sentiment and reflect the influence of his warm palette landscape and portrait studies at the Düsseldorf School in the 1870s and ‘80s. Many of his detailed yet fanciful paintings rendered in fine brushstrokes like Norwegian Girl depict farm maidens returning from the fields in colorful national dress.    

Nineteenth century Danish landscape art introduced a synthesis of traditional almue folk art motifs with a softly colored naturalism and rural social consciousness for a new Symbolic Realism evident in the evocative paintings of L. A. Ring (1854-1933), Harald Slott-Møller (1864-1930), and Peter Hansen (1868-1928). Ring was among Europe’s foremost landscape artists and in solidarity with rural identity replaced his surname of Anderson with the name of his native village in southern Zealand. Deeply influenced by Millet and Gauguin, Ring’s paintings depict life’s natural cycle in such masterful compositions as The Harvester (1884), for which his brother served as the model, and The Gleaners (1887). Peter Hansen was an influential member of Funen Painters group who withdrew from Academy traditions and gathered on the Danish island of Funen in a new spirit of Realism. Country scenes there and from his travels in Italy inspired his many genre paintings rendered in soft tones of yellow, brown, and blue that included Threshing with Oxen (1904), Harvest (1910), and Winnowing Wheat (1914).

Vasa Family Grain Sheaf Coat of Arms, Contemporary wood sculpture from a 15th century warship, The Vasa Museum, Stockholm

The image of a grain sheaf had long been used throughout northern Europe as a symbol of prosperity and peace as prominently featured in Allegory on Peace Being Crowned by Minerva (1643) by Danish painter Willem de Poorter (1608-c. 1650). Other notable examples include Tsar Peter the Great’s Grand Sheaf Fountain (c. 1720) in the Monplasir Gardens of his grand Peterhof Palace estate overlooking the Baltic Sea near St. Petersburg. Peter designed the fountain base to resemble the wide rounded base of a sheaf with water casting forth from two tiers of jets as if arched stalks of grain. The medieval crest of Sweden’s Vasa dynasty, which derives its name from a term for sheaf, features of a central golden sheaf and crown flanked by two cherubs. The jeweled Royal Order of Vasa which also incorporates the sheaf design was created in 1772 by King Gustav II to recognize outstanding achievement in agriculture and the arts.

A Heritage Grains Adventure Through Europe, Part 1

German Grain Fields and Academy Artists

 After completing my recent trek along California’s El Camino Real and previous Mid-Atlantic exploration of Colonial heritage grains and agrarian art (see blog series here), I turned my attention to Europe as opportunity had arisen through Journey Tours of Wenatchee, Washington, to lead a group on a ten-day Baltic cruise preceded by several days in Germany. A special benefit was that my wife, Lois, was able to join me and also enjoy the fellowship of several longtime friends who accompanied us on the tour that commenced in Frankfurt, a. M. where our group convened for a remarkable summertime adventure. One of our first destinations was the Hessenpark Open Air Museum north of the Frankfurt about twenty-five miles and where over 100 historic buildings, many of them timber-frame structures dating from the 1700s, had been relocated and restored since 1974 in a substantial park covering 160 acres.  Hessenpark is divided into several village sections representing the surrounding state’s several regions, and contains several small farmsteads where heritage grains and fruits are raised. We found Kaiser Wilhelm and King of Pippin apples but I was most interested in the park’s maturing stands of ancient emmer, einkorn, and spelt, grains that are the prehistoric precursors of all heritage grains.

Hessenpark Heritage Grain Plots (left to right): Einkorn, Spelt, Emmer

The entrance to Hessenpark features a substantial art gallery that showcases paintings, etchings, and other works that depict agrarian experience in central Germany. We learned that Berlin, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Munich, and other major German cities hosted art academies that became widely known for interpretations of nature and rural life through new approaches to subject, color, and composition. Peter von Cornelius (1784-1867) and Wilhelm von Schadow (1789-1862) served successively as influential directors of the Düsseldorf Academy spanning the decades from 1819 to 1859 when Kunstakademie artists painted finely detailed and often fanciful, allegorical landscapes that significantly influenced many prominent American Hudson River painters including George Caleb Bingham and William Morris Hunt.  Cornelius and van Schadow were among the earliest members of Lukasbund (Brothers of Luke), derisively called The Nazarenes for their close-cropped hair and pious lifestyle, who had banded together in Rome as young men in order to grow spiritually and rediscover the nearly lost techniques used by Renaissance Italian masters for monumental fresco painting.  The Nazarenes chose to paint Old and New Testament religious scenes with timeless messages and selected the story of Joseph from the Book of Genesis for their first major commission which was installed as five sections in 1817 for the banqueting hall of Rome’s Palazzo Zuccari (present Bibliotheca Hertziana), residence of the Prussian Consul-General Jacob Bartholdy. Cornelius’s Joseph Interprets Pharaoh’s Dream features a shield of grain stalks to represent the young prophet’s explanation of the coming seasons of abundant harvests following by the lean years, and The Seven Years of Plenty by Philipp Veit (1793-1877) shows a seated maiden and children surrounded by fruit and golden sheaves of grain. Known later as the Casa Bartholdy Frescoes, the paintings and their creators became famous and in the 1880s were transferred to Berlin’s National Gallery. 

Casa Bartholdy Frescoes, Philipp Veit, The Seven Years of Plenty (1817), Peter von Cornelius, Joseph Interprets Pharoah’s Dream (1817), Old National Gallery, Berlin

One of Germany’s most prolific painters of harvest and other agrarian scenes, Hugo Mühlig (1854-1929), was born in Dresden to a family of prominent landscapists. He became a seasonal participant in the country’s oldest art colony, the Willingshäusen Malerkolonie, which had been established in the picturesque Hessian village north of Frankfurt, a. M. surrounded by rolling hills and valleys bathed in a liquid light that had long attracted artists to the area. Colony founder and Baltic German Gerhardt Wilhelm von Reutern (1794-1865) had come to Willingshäusen to recover from serious injuries suffered when a commander in the Russian army at the 1814 Battle of Leipzig. The Romanov family provided von Reutern a stipend and with encouragement from Goethe and Emil Lugwig Grimm, the third of the brothers Grimm, he decided to convalesce in the area and paint local inhabitants and scenery.

Landscape painter and book illustrator Hans Richard von Volkmann, a native of Halle who trained at the Düsseldorf Academy, also frequented Willingshausen. Some of von Volkman’s work anticipates Art Nouveau, and he rendered many harvest scenes in masterful sepia etchings including Field Road (1907), Harvest Time, Willingshausen (1909), and Cloudy Day (1910). Düsseldorf native Leopold Graf von Kalckreuth (1855-1928) became an influential professor of portraiture and landscape art at Weimar and Stuttgart where he painted many peasant farming scenes including The Gleaners (1888), Reapers in Bergsulza (1888), and Harvest Time (1900). Von Kalckreuth’s views are notable for the melancholy depiction of female field laborers who seem to shoulder their burdens with stoic indifference. Summer captures an expectant mother clad in blue with a white headscarf striding forth deep in thought alongside a patch of ripened grain.

Leopold Graf von Kalckreuth, Summer (1890), Oil on canvas, 140 ⅙ x 115 ¾ inches, Royal Danish Museum, Copenhagen

The Tsar’s Village and Imperial Farm at St. Petersburg

 The next destination on this summertime Baltic cruise was St. Petersburg, Tsar Peter the Great’s spectacular “Window on the West” to which he moved the imperial capital in the early 1700s and which remained the seat of the Russian government until the early 20th century. After the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution its name was changed to Leningrad and distant Moscow became Russia’s capital again. Since the 1990s St. Petersburg’s original name has been restored and considerable development has returned much of the city to its original splendor after considerable damage during the Second World War and economic stagnation under Communist rule. Mr. Putin is not nearly as interested in the ways of the West as was Peter the Great, but we were treated warmly by our Russia hosts and treated to unforgettable tours of Peterhof Palace west of the city, and to Catherine the Great’s legendary Winter Palace and Hermitage.

Peterhof Palace near St. Petersburg, Russia

 Catherine was a contemporary of George Washington, and has gone down in history as sympathetic to the American cause for not supporting British King George’s request to send troops to help defeat the Colonists. And while Peter the Great was greatly interested in modernizing the military and building new cities, Catherine had special interest in improving Russian agriculture. In the 1760s she issued a special manifesto inviting foreigners to settle on the vast steppes of southern Russia and supply the country and continent with grain. In this way my ancestors immigrated to Russia in the 1760s and settled in the Volga River region near Saratov where they introduced productive grains like Saxonka soft red wheat. A century afterward, in the 1870s, some of their descendants began relocating to the United States to become farmers in the Mid-Atlantic states, Midwest, and beyond. By 1920, over 100,000 of these “German-Russians” were living in the Pacific Northwest. In the process, hard red bread wheats native to south Russia and Ukraine like Red Fife and Turkey Red made their way to North America in the 1800s and became the first true bread wheats ever raised in the United States and Canada.

Palouse Heritage Turkey Red Wheat

Palouse Heritage Red Fife Wheat

Among many other accomplishments during her long reign, the Empress Catherine the Great composed children’s stories like Tsarevitch Chlor, a morality tale set in the Russian countryside where the young man must find the right path for his own wellbeing and that of others through pursuit of virtue and application of reason. “…[T]hey saw a peasant’s hut and some acres of very fertile land in which there was every cereal: rye, oats, barley, buckwheat and others. Further, they saw pastures on which sheep, cows, and horses were grazing.” Catherine further commissioned a breathtaking project to transform a vast area near the summer palace at Tsarskoe Selo, the “Tsar’s Village” west of St. Petersburg, into an allegorical landscape shaped by her conception of this Russian ideal. Catherine found in Orthodox priest and agronomist Andrei Samborsky (1732-1815) a teacher with the proper background to tutor her grandsons and a small circle of privileged classmates like Prince Alexander Golitsyn. After graduating from the Kiev Academy in 1765, Samborsky had studied agriculture in England and served as chaplain at the Russian Embassy in London, married an Englishwoman, and returned to Russia to begin tutoring the Russian dukes in religion and natural science in 1782.

 K. K. Schultz, Imperial Farm Cottage, c. 1835 (Tsarskoe Selo west of St. Petersburg), Views of St. Petersburg and Moscow (1847)

With the Empress’s support, Samborsky formulated plans for an Imperial Farm and School of Practical Agriculture on a thousand acres adjacent to Tsarskoe Selo (Tsar’s Village) which became an important state institution devoted to the improvement of crop and livestock production and farm management. An engraving from the time shows Samborsky plowing with an improved English implement as his distinguished Order of St. Vladimir medal hangs from a nearby tree. Open land in the vicinity was sown to wheat, rye, pasture grass, and other crops while workers labored nearby in the 1780s atPavlovsk, the splendid summer palace of Catherine’s son, Paul I, and from 1792 to 1796 on his son’s Neoclassical residence, the Alexander Palace. The first structure built at Pavlovsk was the open air Temple to Ceres (later Catherine’s Concert Hall, 1780) by the empress’s favored architect Charles Cameron (1745-1812), a colonnaded Doric rotunda that originally contained a statue of Catherine as Ceres and the painted panel An Offering to Ceres. Images of Ceres and a variety of grain and other botanical designs also adorn the magnificent Raphael Loggias commissioned in the 1780s by Catherine for the walls of a new wing the Hermitage. Austrian artist Christoph Unterberger (1732-1798) led the ambitious project of replicating Raphael’s sixteenth century originals for the Vatican Palace, where they have since been lost. Unterberger and his team worked from 1783 to 1792 to complete the meticulous and vivid designs for Catherine’s great hall using egg tempura on canvas.

Christoph Unterberger, Raphael Loggias and Grain Motif Panels (c. 1783), Winter Palace and Hermitage, St. Petersburg

The Imperial Farm as originally constructed from 1828 to 1830 under Tsar Nicholas I (1796-1855) featured buildings of Tudor Gothic country style designed by Scottish architect Adam Menelaws (c. 1750-1831) with a Farm Cottage built nearby as an izba containing rooms for visiting members of the imperial family. Outbuildings included a stone barn, stables, granary, and dairy, and a kitchen redesigned in 1841 to serve as a Grand Ducal School. The Cottage was expanded to three floors in the late 1850s with the addition of bedrooms, and dining and drawing rooms. An imposing two-story ocher-colored Farm Palace and surrounding gardens were then built nearby in English country style which Alexander II used as his favored summer residence for the rest his life. When time permitted, Alexander especially enjoyed his Blue Study which displayed favored paintings and fine bindings. Produce from the farm was used to provision residents and workers at Tsarskoe Selo estates.

With support from his influential minister and spiritual advisor Alexander Golitsyn (1773-1844), Alexander I approved creation in 1819 of the Moscow Agricultural Society which began operation three years later. The important precedent for such a voluntary association with agricultural interests had been the Free Economic Society established by Catherine in 1765, though the Moscow association was solely devoted to promotion of progress in the empire’s farming sector by influential landowners and scientists through “a harmonious fusion of west European improvements and native traditions. Through study and dissemination of rational techniques to improve production, prevent regional crop failures, and advance agricultural education, the society represented an important step in translating Enlightenment thought into practical action. Alexander II held numerous meetings at the Farm Palace on land reform and appropriately composed the Emancipation Edict of 1861 abolishing serfdom in the while residing there.

This blog post is continued in Part 2, available here.

Travels Through European Agrarian Art History

This week my wife, Lois, and I are off to lead a two-week European tour with visits to Germany, St. Petersburg, Russia, and the Scandinavian capitals. Taking such a trip in 2017 has special significance since it marks the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, and the 25th anniversary of our ancestors’ migration from Germany to Russia in the 1760s when the colonized areas of the lower Volga River region. Martin Luther (1483-1546) had often mentioned that he was “a farmer’s son” in his sermons as an Augustinian preaching friar and later as theological champion of the Protestant Reformation, and his extensive Bible commentaries contain much agrarian imagery. The complete Lutherbibel was first published in Wittenberg in 1534 and because of the newly invented printed press copies were widely disseminated and delivered Reformation thought in the vernacular of the laity. Indeed, fully a third of all books printed in German during the first half of the sixteenth century were works by the reformer. Luther had high interest in using artful illumination to facilitate understanding of biblical texts, and had known the Elector of Saxony’s court painter and engraver, Lucas Cranach the Elder (c. 1472-1553), since 1504 as both men had been in Duke Frederick III’s circle of patronage.

Hans Holbein, Ruth and Boaz; Biblia Sacra iuxta Vulgatam (Paris, 1552); Adolf Bartels, Der Bauer in der deutschen Vergangenheit (Leipzig: Eugen Diederichs, 1900)

Luther and others from his circle of translator-colleagues like Wittenberg Greek professor Phillip Melanchthon (1497-1560) are known to have participated in the arrangement of text and Cranach’s vividly colored woodcuts of lively depictions for the first complete 1534 version. Habsburg Emperor Maximilian I commissioned Cranach and renowned German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) to illustrate in pen the margins of a parchment Order of St. George Prayer-Book (c. 1515) that included Dürer’s drawing of the Virgin Mary with ears of wheat. Images of Maria im Ährenklied (Mary in [Grain] Ear Dress) date to the late fourteenth century in Milan and cathedral paintings of the graceful Madonna with long blonde hair and clad in dark blue dresses adorned with golden heads of grain were popular until the Reformation. The origins of these depictions have been attributed to early church lore about the Virgin’s girlhood when she was said to have prayed for the Bread of Heaven while she embroidered clothes. In the medieval church tradition, blue represents heavenly grace and ears of grain have symbolized the spiritual nourishment and fertility of the church. 

Albrecht Dürer, “Mary in [Grain] Ear Dress” (c. 1515)  
Randzeichnungen zum Gebetbuche des Kaisers Maximilian I (Munich, 1907)

Maria in Ährenkleid (c. 1490), Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, Salzburg

German artist and printmaker Hans Holbein (c. 1497-1543) also provided woodcut illustrations for early editions of the Lutherbibel as well as commissioned works for Sir Thomas Moore in England and European papal princes. While his ambiguous religious convictions changed over time, Holbein is generally associated with the reformist movement and his art is considered among the supreme examples from the German reformation. As seen in his rendering of Ruth and Boaz for a Vulgate edition of the Bible (c. 1525), Holbein’s art represents a unique aesthetic in the transition from Gothic formalism to the refreshing realism in illustrations and portraiture. German printmaking is also notable for the popular “perspective” (vue d’optique) panoramas by Georg Balthasar Probst (1732-1801) and others artists affiliated in the eighteenth century with Augsburg printers that simulated three-dimensional views of Bible and historical and city scenes.

Among the most important contributors to Hausväterliteratur were the Lutheran pastors Johann Coler (1570-1639) and Franz Phillip Florinus (1649-1699). German writers like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) were also known to moralize on agrarian themes in poems like “As a Man Soweth”:

We must not gather hope to be mowers,
And to gather the ripe old ears,
Unless we have first been sowers
And watered the furrows with tears.”

“It is not just as we take it,
This mystical world of ours,
Life’s field will yield as we make it
A harvest of thorns or of flowers.

Works like the Florinus’s widely read Oeconomus Prudens (1702) were beautifully illustrated with technical drawings and engravings of threshing scenes and other field labors. One of Germany’s most acclaimed engravers and lithographers of country scenes was Johann M. Mettenleiter (1765-1853), a native of Baden-Württemberg whose early work included illustrations for Franz Marius Babo’s Paintings from the Life of the People (1784) and Lorenz von Westenrieder’s History of Bavaria (1786).  Mettenleiter became a founding member of the Munich Kunstverein where he improved lithographic processes of the time which led the wider distribution of his workmanship and noble patronage. In 1790 Elector Karl Theodor of Bavaria appointed Mettenleiter as his court engraver, and Russian Tsar Alexander I subsequently commissioned him to complete a series of engravings of his country estates in St. Petersburg and awarded him the Imperial Order of St. Stanislas. Mettenleiter’s distinctive compositions that depict both country labor and aristocratic life are evident in his 1788 woodcut, Lords and Reapers Celebrate Harvest.

Agrarian associations with German Enlightenment thought is also evident in the writings of Augsburg’s Gottlieb Tobias Wilhelm (1758-1811) and poet and pedagogue Christian Felix Weisse (1726-1804) of Leipzig. Wilhelm was a Protestant pastor and natural philosopher who contributed nineteen of twenty-five volumes in the magisterial Discourses in Natural History published from the 1790s to 1810 by his father, Christian Art Wilhelm, with hundreds of hand-colored copperplate engravings by Jacob Xaver Schmutzer (1713-1775) and Balthasar Friedrich Leizelt (1855-1812). Wesse tutored children of the nobility and edited the influential journal Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften und der freyen Künste (Library of the Beautiful Sciences and Liberal Arts) for three decades beginning in 1759. Weisse criticized extravagance in literature and became a popular children’s author of stories that blended religious piety with regional folklore, and published a pedagogical weekly, Der Kinderfruend (The Children’s Friend), the first periodical for children in German. As in his poem “After the Harvest” (“Nach der Ernte”), many of Weisse’s stories and poems served to impart young and old alike with appreciation for country life throughout Saxony.

The fields around all empty lie,
Our barns are stored with grain,
And joyfully we homeward hie,
And bring our labor’s gain.
Lovely field, when Spring around
Has flung her verdue bright,
When May spreads flowers on the ground,
And trees are blooming white.
But lovelier far the golden wheat
That springeth from the soil,
That bows the head as though to greet
With thankfulness our toil.
On wagons, ‘neath their golden weight
That groan, our maidens ride,
The while, with honest joy elate,
Our reapers march beside.
      

Attributed to Jacob Xaver Schmutzer, “Methods of Threshing and Flailing Grain”
Hand-colored engravings, 3 ¾ x 6 ½ inches
Gottlieb Tobias Wilhelm, Unterhaltungen aus der Naturgeschichte (Augsburg, 1810)

Rural themes in Continental literature further developed into the nineteenth century Volksliteratur (folk literature) and Dorfgeschichte (village tales) of Swiss writer Jeremias Gotthelf (1797-1854), Germans Fritz Reuter (1810-1874) and Berthold Auerbach (1812-1882), and Austrian novelist and poet, Peter Rosegger (1843-1918). Writing in the Low German dialects of country people, these popular writers composed colloquial verse, humorous short stories, and adventuresome Bauernroman novels of local flavor that idealized some aspects of peasant life while presenting frank depictions of the rural poor. Julian Schmidt, a literary critic of the time, observed that these writers keenly conveyed their characters’ personal enjoyments alongside internal dissensions common to village life through the hearty openness of peasant conversation. 

Gotthelf’s Uli der Knecht (Ulrich the Farm Servant, 1841), translated into English by John Ruskin, is the story of a poor farmer who struggles to learn newer methods of cultivation to transform his meagre holdings into a thriving enterprise. He seasonally hires out to more prosperous Bernese neighbors to sharpen scythes and tend livestock. He partakes of harvest feasting where, “Even the most callous [landowners] feel some sentiment of thankfulness towards God, and understand that they owe Him some offering as an expression of their gratitude. …Should not habitual thanksgiving be the result of so much bounty?” Reuter, who was jailed as a young man for political activism, wrote the three-volume novel Ut mine Stromid (1862-1864), published in English as Seedtime and Harvest (1872) and From My Farming Days (1878), which describes with hints of Dickens-like caricature the peasant farmers and villagers of his native Mecklenburg.

One of the most influential Dorfgeschichte writers was the German-Jewish poet and Swabian novelist Berthold Auerbach, author of the immensely popular Schwartzwälder Dorfgeschichten (Black Forest Village Tales, 1843), published in English in 1869 as Black Forest Village Stories. In the eponymous tale “Lauterbach,” Auerbach tells of the young country schoolmaster who finds work patiently tending the youth of Nordstettin. As a result of Lauterbach’s after-school countryside ramblings, readers are shown his “Wisdom of the Fields” notebook that records personal reflections and relates coarse-grained peasant harvest lore and provincial expressions to lessons for life:

     —In cutting grain, the reaper must lay the swath behind him, so as to have nothing before him but the blades still standing. So with the deeds that we have done. They must be out of sight, so that all our attention may be turned to what yet remains to do.
     —When in the distance I see mowers bowing and rising so regularly, it seems as if they were going through some ceremonious ritual of prayer.
     —The weeds in the grain-fields are no man’s property until the poor take them away and convert them into nutritious food. Do you ask, of what use are weeds? Perhaps many other things should be judged by the same rule.
     —Every patch of ground has its history. Could anyone unravel the mutations which transferred it from hand to hand, and the fortunes and sentiments of those who tilled it, he would understand the history of the human race….

    One of the Austria’s most beloved authors, Heimatdichter (homeland poet) Peter Rosegger fashioned lively novels, short stories, and poetry deeply influenced by his experiences as a farm youth and devout country schoolteacher in the rural southeastern Tyrolian highlands. Critics praised such works as Volklieben in Steiermark (Folklife in Styria, 1871), his semi-autobiographical Waldheimat (The Forest Farm, 1877), and epistolary novel Erdsegen (Earth’s Blessing, 1900) for their lyrical yet unsentimental representations of land-folk that combined humor and ill-fortune. Rosegger’s country characters live between worlds ancient and modern and confront challenges of the day in stories rich with rural proverbs, folksongs, traditional remedies, and culinary lore. Europeans who perceived growing urban pretentiousness found in Rosegger’s works meaningful expression of Die Gute Gesellschaft (The Good Society) where dignity and respect for others and nature were informed by tradition and religious belief. Personal autonomy celebrated by avant popular culture offered a choice of risk divorced from the stabilizing, meaningful Volksgeist humus of locale, community, and obligation. By 1905 Rosegger’s books had been translated into twenty-two languages; in 1913 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature and became the most widely read German author of his day. Details of agronomy and nature woven into Rosegger’s prose reflect intimate knowledge of farm life, as evident in the observations of Waldheimat farmer “Jakob der Letzte:”

    Before him the brown fields stretch away, the larks blow their trumpets, and in tender, reddish blades the dead arise and look up to heaven. Then gradually everything begins to grown green, the tiny leaves curl and bend earthwards again as if they are listening for any counsels about life that the Mother may give to them. Then they aspire upwards, rolling themselves into sheaths, out of which, little by little, emerges the stalk and the inmost being of the grain. …And the single blade is now in its full glory. The four-sided ear, in which the still tender grains lie scale-like over each other, hangs its blossom out like tiny flags wherever a grainlet lies in its cradle, which flutter and tremble without ceasing, while the high stalk rocks thoughtfully to and fro.
    …Strong and slender the stalks grow up from joint to joint. The lance-shaped, dark green leaves that lorded it at first, have nearly vanished, the stalks droop their heavy heads, which give back the sown grain thirty or forty-fold, one stalk laying its golden head on the shoulder of another. In the sun’s heat by day, at night in the light of the moon and the stars and the glimmer of glow-worms, they are ripening towards harvest. …When Jacob, always first and last in the heat and burden of the day, rests in late evening beneath a grain-stook in the harvest field, his dreaming begins again. The breath of grass and flowers makes him drowsy: he watches the antics of a jolly grasshopper, hears the chirp of a cricket—then it all fades away. He is looking out over a country where there is no blue forest, no green meadows, no mountain crags, and no clear streams. So far as ever the eye can reach is one great golden sea, an immeasurable field of grain.

    Anthologies of nineteenth century German poetry included works by such authors as Wilhelm von Merckel (1803-1861) and Martin Greif (1839-1911) whose verse attests to their intimacy with rural life. While von Merckel pursued a career in law in Berlin and Greif chiefly resided in Munich, these cities were surrounded by productive farmlands where city dwellers often visited friends and relatives on holiday. Von Merckel’s long poem Ruhe (Rest, 1855) expresses affection for country life and is filled with sensory descriptions of experience well-known to field workers such as the sight of quail weaving down rows of grain, and elders forecasting the weather and estimating crop yields. Grief’s short Hochsommernacht (High Summer Night), featured in Hausbuch Deutscher Lyric (1906) with a woodcut by Munich artist Fritz Schmidt (1876-1935), expresses the fragile serenity of a field of grain under the harvest moon:

The vast world silently rests,
Slumber falls on the moon’s horn,
All is held in the Lord’s safe hands.
Mountain furies seem to beckon—
But those sent to the harvest field
Are angels waving through the grain.

    
The early nineteenth century’s foremost Scandinavian landscape artist was Norwegian Johan Christian Dahl (1788-1857), a native of Bergen who studied in Sweden and Denmark, traveled widely in Switzerland and Italy, and created most of his art in Germany. Dahl’s mature oeuvre represented a synthesis of academy training in Copenhagen in the emotional power of the great Dutch Master grand landscapes with the Naturalism for which Dresden had become famous by the 1820s and where Dahl lived continuously from 1818. Throughout his experiences across the continent, however, Dahl returned recurrently in his art to interpretation of the northern landscapes of his native land with dazzling oils and attention to detail as seen in such canvases as The Fortun Valley (1842) and Hjelle in Valdres (1851). Nestled at the head of narrow Lake Oppstynsvatnet one hundred miles northeast of Bergen, scenic Hjelle in late summer offered an ideal setting for the artist to express the beauty and moral virtue of the country in a time of rising Norwegian nationalism. The spectacular Hjelle view rendered in Dahl’s meticulous tiny strokes depicts a golden brown field of upright sheaves that seems to glow between a row of village structures to the right with deep blue lake and emerald-clad mountain slopes in the background. 

Dahl’s most ardent disciple, Thomas Fearnley (1802-1842), met his mentor in 1826 during one of Dahl’s trips to his homeland, and studied with him in Dresden from 1829 to 1830. Unlike Dahl, Fearnley returned to Norway following his studies in Germany to reside there permanently from 1838. Among his many naturalistic rural scenes are Haystacks, Rydal, Cumbria (1838, PLATE 25) and View from Romsdalen (1838) that show harvesters strolling through  rolling fields of ripened grain in the fabled coastal valley northwest of Hjelle. The views express Rousseau’s Enlightenment concept of the intrinsic nobility of country people who live apart from the decadent influences of urban life. The paintings of Norwegian Romanticist Hans Dahl (1849-1937) evoke similar sentiment and reflect the influence of his landscape and portrait studies at the Düsseldorf School in the 1870s and ‘80s. Many of his detailed yet fanciful paintings like Norwegian Girl depict farm maidens returning from the fields in colorful national dress.

After Ferdinand Waldemüller, The Harvest (1847); Lithograph on paper, 7 ½ x 9 inches (1887); Palouse Regional Studies Collection

From Colonial America To El Camino Real — The Great American Heritage Grains Adventure (Part 4)

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

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Cabizon Cultural Museum, Indio, California

Judy Stapp, Director

The Garden Oasis Of Mara, Joshua National Monument, Twenty-Nine Palms

John Legniole, Keeper

Oasis of Mara Scythe

My incredibly gracious hosts and longtime friends, Cliffand Lee Ann Trafzer of Yucaipa, California, generously provided lodging for me during my week in the Los Angeles area so I could further my research on landrace grain varieties of the American West. Cliff and Lee Ann are both noted professors of history, and our friendship goes back to the 1970s when Cliff taught at Washington State University where we began a close friendship that has long endured and led to collaborations on many publishing projects. Lee Ann is an author in her own right, and by some coincidence we learned when she was also studying at WSU back in the day that has many mutual friends and relatives from Brewster, Washington, where she had lived for many years.

Cliff serves a Rupert Costo Endowed Chair of History at UC-Riverside and arranged for me to lecture there on environmental sustainability. Cliff is a prolific writer with the heart of a humanitarian, and he introduced me to an impressive group of graduate students who included Cahuilla tribal elder Sean Milanovich. What Cliff and Sean proceeded to share with me about early Southwestern agriculture was fascinating. I learned that early grain culture spread from 17th century Mexico to the native peoples of the Southwest where some like Cahuilla of present south central California had long gathered grain-like seeds of indigenous plants. Cahuilla elder Francisco Patencio (1857-1947) explained the appearance of the first wheat through the ancient tribal story in which benevolent Cahuilla Creator Múkat fell victim to a conspiracy of the people and animals he had fashioned. The people mourned his loss, and in the place where Múkat died and was cremated in Painted Canyon near Palm Springs, they noticed a variety of nutritious plants emerge from the ashes of his heart, teeth, hair, and other remains. “The first name that they had was the beans, which were the fingers of Múkat,” Patencio related. “These were named Ta va my lum. The corn was named Pa ha vosh lum and the wheat was named Pach che sal and the pumpkins were neh wit em, ….” Soon afterward Múkat returned to earth as a spirit. The following day Cliff took me on an extensive tour east of Riverside to tour the Cahuilla’s legendary Garden of Mara, a place know widely from the tragic story of Willie Boy, Joshua Tree National Monument, and the Painted Rocks area associated with the Múkat story.

Garden of Mara Keeper John (left) and Author-Scholar-Friend Cliff Trafzer

Cliff is of Wyandot Indian heritage and was raised in the Yuma area so also had much to share with me about the early grain culture of the Pima and Papago peoples of the Gila River basin. By the mid-1800s Pima growers substantially supplied wheat to private teamsters for trade along the Overland Mail Route. These grains contributed to nutritious piñole and other staple soup mixtures of grain, corn, and beans. Some of the earliest California missions developed substantial grain farming and milling operations including places I had been like San Carlos Borroméo de Carmel (1770) and San Antonio du Padua (1771), founded on the fertile lowlands to the south near present Jolon, and San Gabriel Arcángel near present Los Angeles. By the early 1800s San Gabriel, Santa Inéz, and La Purísima led the California missions in production of wheat and barley and helped provision other missions along the El Camino Real. The 1806 stone foundations of San Antonio du Padua’s reconstructed grain mill remain intact, and a stone circular stone-lined threshing floor remains remarkably preserved and is likely the oldest known feature of its kind in North America. German-born artist Edward Visher (1809-1870) included these missions in his collection of twenty-six drawings and pen washes, The Missions of Upper California (1872).

Colored lithograph after Edward Vischer, “Mission San Antonio du Padua”; The Missions of Upper California (1872)

Mission Mortars and Pestles

The Alta California missions produced substantial amounts of grain and vegetables and raised considerable livestock. An 1850 sketch by frontier artist William H. Dougal (1822-1895) of the San Mateo Rancho granary near the San Juan Bautista Mission shows one side of the wide two-story structure with six doorways and five high windows near the eaves. The oldest extant one in North America is believed to be the Mission San Jose Granary (c. 1726) near San Antonio, Texas, which is a massive barrel-vaulted stone structure with flying buttress supports. Wheat production was especially notable at San Gabriel, Santa Inéz, La Purísima, and San Luis Obispo where at least 150,000 bushels raised at each location from the 1780s until secularization in the 1830s. Mission granary foundations have been located at Mission San Antonio de Padua, La Purísima, and Nuestra Señora de al Soledad. I had read somewhere that the latter, located a few miles west of Highway 101 near Soledad, was among the least restored of the El Camino missions so had not intended to stop there until I found out later its namesake was Mary’s sorrow between the time of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection. Since I was traveling by on that Saturday I made a pilgrimage to that quiet place which gave some consolation since I had never spent an Easter apart from the family. 

The Huntington Library and Gallery, San Marino, California

Rivera Library, University of California, Riverside

Huntington Library Interior

Lois and I had visited the Huntington Library and Gallery in 1974 when we lived in Monterey, but in those days I was more interested in Western history than European art. So I spent most of the time back then reading through old records of Northwest military posts without much luck without finding much that was useful while Lois had more sense and strolled through the galleries and beautiful grounds. We had no idea that California’s oldest grist mill—El Molino Viejo (c. 1816), was located just a short walk from the library. It has been nicely restored so my recent journey included a visit there to learn more about the story of early Southwest grains and milling. El Molino is officially closed on Mondays—the day I went, but I pled my case of having come so far to a kindly grounds-worker who let me take a look inside. Back at the Huntington I visited the gallery building that was constructed as a grand villa of 55,000 square feet for the family of railroad magnate Henry Huntington and was completed in 1911. A year after his death in 1927, the house was opened to the public for tours of the magnificent rooms, library, and art gallery with such treasures as Gainsborough’s Blue Boy and Thomas Lawrence’s Pinkie. What I didn’t expect to find was a masterpiece by French artist Jules Breton, The Last Gleanings (1895), the subject of recent writing I had been doing for a manuscript tentatively titled “Hallowed Harvests” about agrarian themes in art and literature.

El Molino Viejo Entry

Nineteenth century France presented the growing contrast between landlord plenty and tenant suffering as the enclosure movement displaced the landless. The trend restricted access to fields and forests traditionally held in common to provide grain for bread, barley and beans for soupe, berries, chestnuts, and other traditional peasant staples. To be sure, the demise of the open-field (“champion”) system occurred to varying degrees throughout Europe due to geographic diversity and social-political circumstances, but brought similar social pressures with changes to land tenure. Across the richer soils of France’s northern plains, for example, open-field access known artists and authors of the time endured well into the nineteenth century as the old village communes could maintain economic viability on smaller plots of fertile allotted lands. The lighter soils of the south required substantially larger acreages which led to consolidation of holdings by fewer residents and erosion of agrarian collectives. More steeply rolling districts in the west like Brittany, Maine, and Vendée facilitated enclosure as farmers demarcated their fields with rows of the native hedge, shrubs, and trees.

Standing next to Breton’s The Last Gleanings (1895); Huntington Gallery, San Marino, California

The art of French artist Jules Breton (1827-1906), who I discussed in an early blog in this series, spurred emergence of a new European Realism. He and others elevated the virtues of country life in new ways through more refined interpretations of agrarian workers and thriving community. Principal themes included rural festivals and depictions of the noble, longsuffering strength of peasants—often women and children clad in ragged clothes tending to field labors, and visually document the laborers’ dress, tools, and toil. But the artists’ rustic colors, backgrounds, and resilient expressions of their characters honor creation’s bounty above arduous service. They struggled to interpret the continent’s shifting values in the face of industrial displacement of common folks whose humility, hard work, and happiness had long impressed them.

Breton was raised in rural Artois village of Courrières and his The Life of an Artist: Autobiography (1890) contains numerous descriptions of places and agrarian experiences that influenced his art including lines about inspiration for his first rendering of The Gleaners in 1854: 

The bending wheat sprinkled me with dew as I walked along the narrow foot-path. Among the mists the willows dropped their tears, while their gray tops caught the light overhead. Then I re-entered the village, now all bright and awake, where rose, at times, with the blue wreaths of smoke from the chimneys, the sweet, monotonous songs of the young embroiderers.

I returned to the fields to look at the gleaners. There yonder, defined against the sky, was the busy flock, overtopped by the guard. I watched them as they worked, now running in joyous bands carrying sheaves of golden grain; now bending over the stubble, closely crowded together. When I went among them they stopped their work to look at me, smiling and confused, in the graceful freedom of their scanty and ill-assorted garments.

…I loved the simple beauty of my native place, that offered itself to me, as Ruth offered herself to Boaz.

Breton’s paintings also exhibit remarkable depth of field and suffused light of dawn and dusk—his “magic hours” of luminous high summer beauty, that engender intimacy with his rural subjects. Other works depict peasant life throughout the year, but among the most notable are others showing summer labors—Return of the Reapers (1854), The Harvesters (1867), and luminous The Last Gleanings (1895). The latter shows three sheaf-bearing peasants—young, middle-aged, and elderly, returning together from the field at day’s end as if a metaphor for the passage of time and life’s simple blessings. 

Ceres with Grain Cluster Diadem, Huntington Library

From Colonial America To El Camino Real — The Great American Heritage Grains Adventure (Part 3)

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

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The Presido Of Monterey, California

Missions San Antonio Du Padua (Jolon) and San Carlos Borremeo (Carmel)

Mission San Juan Carmel Sanctuary (founded 1770); Good Friday, 2017

From 1973 to 1974 my wife, Lois, left the rolling hills of our native Palouse Country to begin married life in Monterey, California, where I attended the Defense Language Institute to study Russian at the oceanside city’s historic Presidio. While stationed there we explored many of the region’s Spanish missions that had greatly benefited from New Deal era restoration and other preservation work undertaken since the 1930s. One memorable visit to nearby historic Carmel Mission, founded in 1770, was a thoroughly multicultural experience—singing Russian folksongs with our Presidio choir in a Spanish church with commentary by our American conductor in English!

Cousin Patty Poffenroth Bell tending our German “Suesspleena” pancakes

(Monterey Bay beyond the windows!)

Monterey Bay’s breathtaking beauty is legendary, and we are blessed to have gracious relatives who have lived there for many years—John and Patty (Poffenroth) Bell. Patty’s grandmother and my grandfather were sister and brother, and our family has special memories of their annual summer treks north to tiny Endicott to visit us country cousins. Patty’s Grandma Mae Poffenroth Geier was a young girl when she arrived in 1891 with her Russian-born parents in the Palouse, and shared stories with me about her life at the Palouse Colony where they lived before located nearby on a farm where I was raised between Endicott and St. John.

Back in California, due to concern long before about colonial ambitions by Russia and Great Britain, King Carlos III of Spain authorized an expedition from San Diego led by Gaspar de Portolá and Franciscan friar Junípero Serra to travel overland to Monterey to claim the region “for God and the king of Spain.” They reached this scenic area in 1769 and six years afterward Monterey became the capital of Alta California. Father Serra established the Royal Presidio Chapel in 1770 and in the following year founded Mission San Carlos Borromeo as his headquarters in nearby Carmel Valley. Two hundred years later we attended a friend’s wedding here! San Carlos and San Diego were the first in a chain of twenty missions constructed along the 600-mile El Camino Real from San Diego to present Sonoma (San Francisco Solano) over the next fifty years.

Above: Mission San Antonio Threshing Floor and Grist Mill, near Jolon, California

Left: Father Serra Statue and Mission San Antonio du Padua Façade

Exhibits at the Presidio of Monterey Museum and Carmel’s San Carlos Borromeo showcase many treasured art objects associated with the missions’ spiritual and agrarian heritage including crosses meticulously decorated with lustrous grain straw appliqué, tapestries with colorful rural scenes, and deftly hand-wrought metal work in the forms of wheat stalks and grape clusters.

Our Mother of Perpetual Help Icon with Grain Stalk and Grape Cluster Candelabras (c. 1850); Mission San Carlos Borromeo near Carmel, California

Wooden Cross with Grain Straw Appliqué (c. 1860); Mission San Carlos Borromeo near Carmel, California

Until the United States seized control of California during the Mexican-American War in 1846 and later secularized the missions, these centers of regional development utilized Indian workers to raise vast livestock herds and substantial amounts of wheat, barley, corn, beans, and other crops. Areas of highest crop production, with a total of approximately twenty thousand tons of wheat produced from 1782 to 1832, centered around the missions San Gabriel Arcángel west of present Los Angeles, and at Santa Inéz and La Purísima Concepción to the northwest. San Antonio du Padua, founded by Father Serra in 1771 near present Jolon in central California, is today the most fully restored of the El Camino missions and features the original stone threshing floor—among the last extant in North America, adobe granary, and water-powered grist mill.

Mission San Gabriel Arcangel, San Gabriel, California

Mission San Gabriel Sanctuary

In recent years scientists in the fascinating field of archeobotany have turned their attention to old adobe bricks from the El Camino Missions in order to determine the varieties of wheat, barley, and oats raised in the region from the 1770s. Since the bricks were made using grain straw and can be dated using church records with some precision, this research has been of great interest to many and has relevance to our work reviving landrace varieties at Palouse Colony Farm.

Cereal grains arrived in the New World in the late 15th century when Columbus brought Mediterranean wheats and barleys to Isabella, Puerto Rico, in order to sustain the men and livestock of his later voyages and subsequent arrivals. The grains of the early Spanish explorers did not mature well in the humid Caribbean, but eventually spread across fertile Mesoamerica following Hernán Cortés’ discovery of three wheat kernels in a sack of rice soon after the conquest of Mexico City in 1521. The conquistador directed his Black secretary-aide, Juan Garrido, to plant the grains in a newly established chapel garden plot (huerta). Andrés de Tapia’s sixteenth century Relaciòn Geográfia records that “little by little there was boundless wheat,” and by 1535 wheat was being exported from Mexico City to the Antilles. By the end of the century this grain was adapting to the fertile plains in Spanish-dominated areas to Oaxaca and beyond as the foreigners preferred wheat flour to the flatbreads and tortillas made from cassava, maize, and other indigenous crops.

Original El Camino Real Route, near San Juan Batista Mission, San Juan Bautista, California

“Chronicler of the Indies” Pedro de Cieza de León (c. 1520-1554) traveled widely throughout the Inca empire in the 1540s and records fields of wheat and barley “thick with stalks” in valleys of Ecuador. The Flemish Franciscan Jodôco Ricke had planted South America’s first wheat at Quito about 1538. Since the eleventh century, the Catholic Church only allowed wheat flour for altar breads so the far-flung missions of New Spain encouraged local cultivation given the irregular schedules of colonial pack trains. Cereals also represented means of acculturation and nutrition. “Eat that which the Castilian people eat,” preached Friar Bernardo de Sahagún to the native peoples of Mexico, so they could also become “strong and pure and wise.”

Mission San Gabriel Harvesters (c. 1895)

Frontier trade in grain northward advanced before Spanish settlement and evidence indicates that wheat reached the Pima Indians of the Gila Basin in present southern Arizona in the late seventeenth century. Father Eusebio Kino distributed wheat seed among the area’s native peoples upon his visit to Pimería Alta in 1687. Wheat sown in December during the appearance of Wēq—Sculpin (The Pleaides) ripened in the time of Na’sigînax-qua—Three Men in a Line (Orion’s Belt) after harvest of traditional crops like maize and pumpkins. In this way cultivation of Pima Club and other winter grains fit well into the agricultural calendar of the Pima and Papago peoples and were soft enough to grind with stone metatas. When explorer Juan Bautista de Anza visited the Pima in 1774, he wrote that “…standing in the middle [of their wheat fields], one cannot see the ends, because they are so long. Their width is also great, embracing the whole width of the valley on either side.”

Southern California Indian Basket Grain Design

Pima and Papago women crafted exquisite watertight fine- and coarse-woven baskets and platters for winnowing and storing grains using wheat straw bundle foundations. With Pima vessels these were typically wrapped and decorated in geometric patterns with willow and mesquite bark while Papago bundles, sometimes also fashioned from beargrass and ocotillo, were bound with split yucca leaves and mesquite bark. Large barrel-shaped globular household granary baskets up to six feet high and wide were also made of coarsely woven wheat straw to hold grain, corn, and other seeds.

Mission San Juan Bautista Cradle Scythes, Plows, and Other Farm Tools

From Colonial America To El Camino Real — The Great American Heritage Grains Adventure, April 2017 (Part 2)

This blog is a continuation 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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Hillwood Estate Museum, Ann McClellan, Interpreter

We’re big breakfast cereal lovers at the Scheuerman household! I still enjoy a good bowl of Post Grape Nuts or Toasties Corn Flakes, though I wish they would cut down on the sugar. I had some vague memory of the Post family’s association with Post cereals. C. W. Post was a man of humble origins and a passion for healthy living who built the Postum Cereal Company into a substantial empire. After he passed away in 1914, his only child and heir, Marjorie Meriwether Post, took over the family enterprise and transformed it into the General Foods Corporation and a host of other related concerns. In the 1930s Marjorie lived in Moscow as the wife of the U. S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union, Joseph Davies. She became fascinated by Slavic culture and began collecting treasures from Russia’s Imperial Age as many tsarist objects and works of art were sold at auction by the Soviet government in order to obtain hard currency. Ms. Post had special interest in Catherine the Great and was among the few who could afford the finest pieces which began the vast collection at her Hillwood estate west of Washington, D. C. She arranged to have the mansion and its treasures donated to the nation upon her death in the 1970s.

Russian Empress Catherine the Great (1729-1796) commissioned a breathtaking project to transform a vast area near the summer palace at Tsarskoe Selo (Pavlovsk), the “Tsar’s Village” west of St. Petersburg, into an allegorical landscape shaped by her conception of this Russian rural idyll. She found in Orthodox priest and agronomist Andrei Samborsky (1732-1815) a teacher with the proper background to tutor her grandsons and a small circle of privileged classmates like Prince Alexander Golitsyn. After graduating from the Kiev Academy in 1765, Samborsky had studied agriculture in England and served as chaplain at the Russian Embassy in London, married an Englishwoman, and returned to Russia to begin tutoring the Russian dukes in religion and natural science in 1782.

Buch Chalice with Gold Wheat Stem; presented by Catherine the Great to Nevsky Cathedral, 1791

Hillwood’s Imperial Palace Service and Furnishings from Pushkin, Russia

With the Empress’s support, Samborsky formulated plans for an Imperial Farm and School of Practical Agriculture on a thousand acres adjacent to Tsarskoe Selo which became an important state institution devoted to the improvement of crop and livestock production and farm management. An engraving from the time shows Samborsky plowing with an improved English implement as his distinguished Order of St. Vladimir medal hangs from a nearby tree. Open land in the vicinity was sown to wheat, rye, pasture grass, and other crops while workers labored nearby in the 1780s on Pavlovsk, the splendid summer palace of Catherine’s son, Paul I, and from 1792 to 1796 on his son’s Neoclassical residence, the Alexander Palace. The first structure built at Pavlovsk was the open air Temple to Ceres (later Catherine’s Concert Hall, 1780) by the empress’s favored architect Charles Cameron (1745-1812), a colonnaded Doric rotunda that originally contained a statue of Catherine as Ceres and painted panel An Offering to Ceres.

The Imperial Farm originally constructed from 1828 to 1830 featured buildings of Tudor Gothic country style designed by Scottish architect Adam Menelaws (c. 1750-1831) with a single story Cottage Palace built nearby as an izba containing rooms for visiting members of the imperial family. Outbuildings included a stone barn, stables, granary, and dairy, and a kitchen redesigned in 1841 to serve as a Grand Ducal School. The cottage was expanded to three floors in 1859 with the addition of bedrooms, and dining and drawing rooms to become the ocher-colored Farm Palace which Alexander II (1818-1881) used as the family’s preferred summer residence for the rest his life. When time permitted, Alexander especially enjoyed his Blue Study which displayed favored paintings of rural scenes and fine bindings, and where he signed the Emancipation of the Serfs decree in 1861.

Mt. Vernon National Historic Site

“I hope, some day or another, we shall become a storehouse and granary for the world.”  --George Washington, letter to Marquis de Lafayette, June 19, 1788

“The great Business of the Continent is Agriculture.” --Benjamin Franklin, “The Internal State of America,” c. 1790

“I am never satiated with rambling through the fields and farms, examining culture and cultivators, with a degree of curiosity which makes some take me to be a fool, and others to be much wiser than I am.” --Thomas Jefferson to Marquis de Lafayette, April 11, 1787

I had day of splendid Virginia sunshine for the short drive from Washington, D. C., down to Washington’s Mt. Vernon estate overlooking the Potomac River where I made arrangements to visit the park’s living history farm and the nation’s most recently presidential library—the spectacular Smith Library for the Study of George Washington. Prior to leading freedom’s cause in the Revolutionary War, Washington first leased Mt. Vernon after the death of his half-brother, Lawrence, in 1754, and obtained full title in 1761 upon his sister-in-law’s death. Washington significantly expanded his holdings to 8,000 acres through acquisitions of Mansion Farm, Ferry Farm, Dogue Run Farm, Muddy Hole Farm, and River Farm. He began experimenting with various kinds of crop varieties in the late 1780s in order to move from tobacco to grain production in order to eliminate reliance on slave labor and in to improve the land’s fertility. My very helpful host was Lisa Pregent, who manages Mt. Vernon’s Living History Farm, where our Palouse Heritage Scots Bere barley will once again be growing after an absence of over two hundred years!

Mt. Vernon National Historic Site and Living History Farm, Lisa Pregent, Farm Manager, holding Palouse Heritage Scots Bere Barley Seed

; and George Washington’s Restored Octagonal Threshing Barn

I continued down the winding road about five miles through the sparsely populated countryside to the recently rebuilt George Washington Gristmill and Distillery. (Someday soon they’d also like to reconstruct his farmhouse.) I arrived right at 5 PM closing time and the place was about empty, so thought my chances of any kind of guided tour were slim. But I was pleased when Head Miller Cory Welshans emerged along the lane leading to the mill with an inviting smile that seemed to say, “I’ll spare time for anybody with information about George Washington’s original grain culture.” And indeed he did show me around the grounds and invited me to return on my trip back from Williamsburg to meet Historic Trades Manager Sam Murphy.

Cory Welshans, Head Miller

Sam Murphy, Historic Trades Manager

In no tribute to my time management skills, I did return but this time a few minutes after closing hours though Sam and the milling team could not have been more accommodating to my interests. I got a grand tour of all three stories of the operating mill and found Sam, like Cory, to be a storehouse of knowledge and very interested the old White Virginia May wheat for milling and Scots Bere barley for both milling and brewing.

Mt. Vernon National Historic Site Gristmill and Distillery

Sam provided some valued insights into Washington’s agricultural know-how and business savvy:

"President Washington did many things as a political and military leader, but here we really emphasize George Washington the agricultural entrepreneur. He led the transition from tobacco to grain culture in this region and built the two-story octagonal threshing barn based on a European design that reduced his loss to soil and sky by traditional methods from 20% to less than 10%. He also experimented with new grains from Europe and Asia, and installed the first Oliver Evans stone milling and silk-sifting equipment in the country. The reconstruction here is the only one of its kind presently operating.

"Washington developed a very lucrative milling business by vertically integrating his operations. He raised high quality milling grains for that time and installed sophisticated silk-sieve sifting equipment to separate the flour into three products—superfine white flour for the best bread and pastry flour, middlings with the bran and endosperm, and “ship stuff” for making hardtack or sea biscuit. He traded considerable grain to Caribbean markets for rum which he sold here in the Colonies, and also used those profits to import goods from China. So he was into global trade and vertical business integration long before those terms became fashionable."

Thanks again, Lisa, Corey, and Sam, and I can’t wait to see these Early American grains once again flourishing where they did in the time of our Founding Farmers!

Williamsburg, Virginia

I continued to the southeast on my rental car expedition for some 170 miles via Richmond to Colonial Williamsburg, America’s famed and meticulously restored 18th century community with generous support from the John D. Rockefeller, Jr. family. I was invited to meet with Ed Schultz and Wayne Randolf who have managed Great Hopes Plantation there and who have been wanting to restore the period’s authentic grain culture to the farm. I found them to be very gracious hosts and incredibly knowledgeable regarding Early American agricultural history. Various Williamsburg museums and libraries also contained works relevant to my “Hallowed Harvests” study.

Great Hopes Plantation Rye Field, Ed Schultz, Journeyman Farmer

William Prentis Store Field

What’s more, I hadn’t dined at the King’s Arms Tavern since first visiting Williamsburg with my wife, Lois, our parents, and my sister Debbie in the 1970s. I was pleased to find the same colonial era wines, savory pot pies, and desserts on the menu that we found back then. Today, however, some craft ales said to be based on old recipes had been added to the mix.

King’s Arms Tavern Marquis, Colonial Williamsburg

But I really knew I was where I was supposed to be after checking in late at night to the Quarterpath Inn and finding a framed print of this work by the French artist Jean Millet that I had been writing about in “Hallowed Harvests” hanging above my bed. Below it are some lines I composed about its significance.

Jean Millet, Harvesters Resting (1854)

Millet sought to paint “pictures that mattered” and the work he considered his masterpiece, Harvesters Resting—Ruth and Boaz (1857), earned the artist his first medal and is among very few paintings he explicitly based on a biblical theme. The canvas bathes Millet’s aesthetic mission in a spiritually charged golden pink light that merges appreciation of nature with faith, while the complex composition reflects associations with precedents like Breughel’s The Harvesters. In this monumental idyll, Millet reinterprets biblical Ruth and Boaz with contemporary relevance in clothing and setting to illustrate the mutual respect born of her courage and his benevolence. A jarring disparity is expressed between rustic peasant piety and privation.

Painting from a carefully moderated palette of soft tones, Millet clothes Ruth in blue, the symbolic color of purity typically seen in Renaissance portrayals of Mary, the mother of Jesus. The artist almost certainly intended this in accordance with Boaz’s proclamation that Ruth be known as a woman of excellence. Boaz presents her to his laborers, most of whom recline and eat their fill from a communal dish while Ruth clings to her grain as if she were protecting a child. She is vulnerable, excluded, and poor—like those who exist on the margins of society in any age. Yet a man of means shows uncommon compassion and chooses her to be a member of his household and offers promise of a new life.

The pithy sayings and light-hearted verse that made Benjamin Franklin’s Almanack a best-seller in Colonial and Early America reflects his 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 views, such freedom should have reasonable limits since unrestrained personal liberty could transform into licentiousness 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. Franklin 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.”

Keep Within the Compass Print (Carrington & Bowles, 1784)

Agrarian toil was likewise associated with moral wellbeing in Early America. The popular Keep the Compass allegorical broadsides, printed in England with separate versions for young men and women, depicted the benefits of proper behavior and hard work. Colorful scenes around a draftsman’s compass show the perils of vice beyond the instrument, while a harvest scene and church steeple inside represent keys to success symbolized by a sack of treasure. “KEEP WITHIN COMPASS AND YOU SHALL BE SURE,” the poster admonishes, “TO AVOID MANY TROUBLES OTHERS ENDURE.“

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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.

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.