Pendleton’s Umatilla County Museum and the Runquist Brothers

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

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

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

Arthur Runquist, Early Oregon Harvest Panels (1941)

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

Relocated to the Umatilla County Historical Society Museum, Pendleton

“Umatilla Gold” Exhibit Panel

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

Amazing Aberdeen (Idaho) and the National Cereal Grains Collection

Nearing the end of our cross-country road trip from the east coast to home in the Inland Northwest (see blog posts immediately prior to this one), we drove through Aberdeen, ID. Since 1988 the small southeastern Idaho community of Aberdeen has been home to the USDA’s National Small Grain Collection that contains one of the world’s largest seed banks for wheat, barley, oat, rice, rye, and other small grain germplasm as well their various wild relatives. The location was chosen because of the University of Idaho’s long history of agricultural extension research nearby, the region’s favorable growing conditions, and proximity to irrigation. Special thanks to Chad Jackson, director of UI’s Research and Extension Center in Aberdeen for providing information on the facilities.

The advent of widespread use of grains as a food staple can only be estimated, but archaeological evidence indicates humans in eastern Africa mixed crushed primitive wheats and barleys with water to form a nutritious gruel several hundred thousand years ago. The 23,000-year-old Ohalo II site on Israel’s Sea of Galilee’s southwest shore has yielded flint and bone sickles and primitive grinding tools with remnants of wild emmer wheat, barley, and oats that supplemented the omnivorous diets of area Paleolithic hunter-gatherer bands. Wild cereals reluctantly surrendered their dense nutrition through millennia of human ingenuity requiring the sophisticated mastery of elemental forces—stone for cutting and grinding, water for mixing and kneading, and fire for cooking. Use of heated stones, with embers, and in other ways enabled the roasting of grains to enhance flavors and led to primitive breadmaking. But the revolutionary advent of fire-resistant earthenware pots in the Middle East by the eighth millennium BC fostered a significant advancement in food supply, culture, and population growth. Grains boiled in water made possible a savory array of pottages, soups, and stews, with the softened food especially benefiting the very young and elderly. No culinary advance since the invention of earthenware has had such salutary effects on cooking methods.

Cultivation of cereal grains has been integral to humanity’s advance since time immemorial and was undertaken independently at several times and places throughout the prehistoric Eastern and Western Hemispheres. Development of agriculture may be said to be humanity’s relentless quest to recreate environmental conditions that gave rise to our species. Cereals, named for the Roman goddess of fertility, Ceres, are not only nutritious but also adaptable to a wide range of climates and soil conditions. The ancestral range of cereals stretched along the Fertile Crescent from the Upper Mesopotamian-Anatolian slopes of southeastern Turkey, eastward across Transcaucasia to Kashmir and south to Egypt and Ethiopia. This vast region is notable for long, hot summers and mild, moist winters which were ideal for the emergence of large-seeded wheat, rye, and other grains along the alluvial shores of lakes, streams, and springs. These became the principal foods that fueled human settlement and expansion throughout the world.

Wild Einkorn and Wild Barley growing on the Karaca Dağ Plain

USDA National Small Grains Germplasm Research Center Photographs

“Amber Eden” Heritage Hard White Wheat

Palouse Colony Farm near Endicott, Washington (July and August 2023)

Grain cultivation and replenishment of soils by annual flooding coincided with animal husbandry as villagers sought to prevent creatures of horn and hoof from damaging grain fields by domesticating them for food and labor. Dispersion of cereals by wind, animals, and other natural processes in prehistoric times was inexorable if slow—perhaps a thousand yards per year on average. Successive plant selections by early agro-pastoralists and discovery of tending operations (seeding, watering, manuring) led to earlier and more uniform maturing stands of protein-rich grains with characteristics unique to each region. These developments began the Neolithic “Revolution” along the Mesopotamian wetlands approximately 11,000 BC that developed over three millennia. Crop production and processing represented key cultural breakthroughs that led to settlements with fields, gardens, and livestock. This led over time to food surpluses and transition from unowned open commons to fixed residence sedentary “homelands,” cities, territorial states—and “civilization.”

Cyrus McCormick and the Reaper Revolution

Visiting the McCormick Blacksmith Shop and Forge near Steele’s Tavern, Virginia

The earliest practical reaping machines were introduced in the 1830s by father-son Robert and Cyrus McCormick of Steele’s Tavern, Virginia, Obed Hussey of Cincinnati, and Montgomery County, New York farmer Enoch Ambler. We had the chance to visit the original farm on our summer road trip across the country. The McCormicks fashioned their landmark model with the help of the family’s Black slave, Jo Anderson, in their Walnut Grove Farm’s blacksmith shop and successfully demonstrated in stands of wheat and oats in July 1831. Ambler and the McCormicks secured patents for their models in 1834. These horse-pulled machines featured a reciprocating bar of small sickle sections with separating fingers and reel that could cut up to fourteen to fifteen acres a day and increased output more than tenfold over the cradle scythe method. In the late 1850s brothers William and Charles Marsh, natives of Ontario who had relocated to Illinois, introduced the revolutionary “Marsh Reaper-Binder” than could both cut grain and tie sheaves into bundles. Rights to the Marsh machine were acquired by entrepreneurs William Deering and Elijah Gammon in the early 1870s and established their base of operations in North Chicago.

Informed by a generation of farmer-innovators, men like Hussey and Case, and the McCormicks and Marshes would revolutionize world agriculture. “This magical machinery of the wheatfield solves the mystery of prosperity,” lauded McCormick biographer Herbert Casson in The Romance of the Reaper (1908), and “explains the New Farmer and the miracles of scientific agriculture.” Casson observed with capitalized emphasis, “…[I]t is true that until recently the main object of all nations was to get bread. Life was a Search for Food—a desperate postponement of famine. …Then came King Reaper.”

McCormick, a devout Presbyterian, was also imbued with a keen business sense that would transform his humble Blue Ridge Mountain enterprise into the world’s leading manufacturer of farm equipment based in Chicago from 1847. His improved “Virginia Reaper” model made its European debut at the 1851 Great Exhibition in London which was the first large-scale industrial fair to include foreign exhibitors. A skeptical reporter for the Times jokingly dubbed McCormick’s reaper a “cross between an Astley chariot, a wheel-barrow, and a flying machine.” But in trials conducted that summer on farming estates at Tiptree Heath in Essex and Pusey, Berkshire, an enthused jury recognized that the new inventions would render the scythe as obsolete as the mechanical thresher would the flail. Although Prince Albert would later order two Hussey machines for royal farms, the judges awarded McCormick’s eagle-emblazoned machine its Grand Council gold medal and declared the device “worth the whole cost of the Exhibition.” By 1851 McCormick’s Chicago factory was turning out a thousand reapers a year and by 1859 approximately 50,000 were in use throughout the country. 

Cyrus McCormick 1834 Reaper Model

Cyrus McCormick’s passion for promotion matched his mechanical inventiveness and within a year colorful company advertisements cast his reaper in a scene as if a Roman conqueror appearing before an adoring crowd and bearing the prestigious award above a banner proclaiming it “Best in the World.” The 1853-1856 Crimean War between Great Britain and Russia interrupted export of grain from Ukraine to Europe which boosted commodity prices worldwide. American farmers responded with greater production and the favorable market brought a flood of new orders for improved equipment. McCormick deployed agents across the Midwest and eventually established a vast global network of outlets from London and Odessa to Melbourne and Wellington to sell in the grain districts of Europe and the British and Russian empires.

McCormick continued with Grand Gold Medal recognition at the glittering 1855 Paris Exposition Universelle where Emperor Louis Napoleon expressed special interest in the American’s invention. At the city’s next world’s fair eleven years later, McCormick was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor by imperial decree and other Grand Golds came from world fairs in Hamburg and Vienna. Grandiose promotional iconography with these international recognitions would be colorfully featured in company advertising that merged prosperity with ingenuity and gave rise to one of the era’s earliest and most successful transnational corporations.

Agricultural Equipment Display, London Crystal Palace Exhibition (1851)

Dickinson’s Comprehensive Pictures (1853)

McCormick and Hussey reapers, Pitts and Case threshers, Marsh binders, and other mechanical harvesting equipment came into widespread use in the United States in the 1850s, and in the following decade steam-powered threshing machines were commonplace. Small farmers still flailed crops in many areas, however, due to the early threshers’ expense and tendency to clog in heavy grain and crack kernels with the metal cylinders. By the 1870s reaper-binders appeared that could drop a half-dozen grain bundles at a time on the ground tied with wire and later with twine. The sheaves were then arranged into larger shocks to further ripen or be hauled directly on open wagons to stationary threshing machines. Cyrus Hall McCormick, Jr. took over leadership of the family enterprise after the death of his father in 1884, and the sprawling Chicago-based McCormick and William Deering companies merged with the Plano Harvester Company to form International Harvester Company (IHC) in 1902. By that time the three firms had acquired or consolidated with several competitors, employed some 30,000 workers, and were producing over a thousand reapers per week in “harvester war” competition worldwide.

Founding Farmer Art and Architecture

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

George Washington Presidential Library Reading Room, Mt. Vernon

Fred Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington

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

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

Mt. Vernon Threshing Barn

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

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

Columbia Heritage Collection Photographs

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

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

U.S. Department of Agriculture Inner Court

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

Determining and Affirming Values of Care

Cultural tensions rise with proliferating perils of climate change, global food security needs, and concern about impacts on soil biomes and wildlife. Establishing balance involves mediation of the ancient urges for veneration and exploitation, and consideration of technocratic limits and trade-offs in agricultural improvement. Soil scientists estimate that no-till chemical intensive farming has reduced erosion on American farms by 40% while also creating conditions for the emergence of herbicide-resistant weeds. Yet less tillage in such systems reduces American diesel consumption by two-thirds for some 280 million gallons of annual savings. For Promethian bioentrepreneurs CRISPR gene modification and related technologies offer prospect of crop improvement although prominent biologists acknowledge that cellular arrangements can be altered in ways that are poorly understood. Reengineering life forms raises uneasy questions about the complicated relationships between the natural and unnatural, and theological distinctions between obeying God and playing God, or between earthly tenancy and proprietorship. Theoretical physicist Richard Feynman likened the complexities of modern science to a cosmic chess game at which we are only observers with limited capacity to predict outcomes regardless of worthy intentions.

Wendell Berry explores these tensions and offers a fertile field of practical recommendations for how anyone can apply the useful habits of memory, attention, and reverence. He recognizes the primacy of earth care to support all other human endeavors, and likens this to holy service: “The most exemplary nature is that of the topsoil. It is very Christ-like in its passivity and beneficence, and in the penetrating energy that issues out of its peaceableness. It increases by experience, by the passage of seasons over it, growth rising out of it and returning to it…. It keeps the past, not as history or memory, but as richness, new possibility.” In this sense the urgent partisanship in political and economic affairs becomes secondary to stewardship of land and life, and the function of healthy community for enduring fulfillment.

Whether on a Midwest farm or in a Chicago high-rise, one may live with fidelity to place by learning and practicing domestic arts and community building. Family care and homemaking need not require moving “back to the land,” though new paradigms for remote working are faciliating rural residency. In any setting folks can summon moral courage to eat together, shop locally to support practicioners of local crafts, connect young people to worthwhile endeavors, and affirm the values of environmental care. Policies and practice of self-reliance and promotion of the common good that characterized republicanism in the ancient world are relevant more than ever in an era of threatened landscapes, endangered species, and marginalized labor. Ethicist Julie Crouse characterizes Berry’s ongoing literary conversation about these matters as a “sacred harvest” for renewing the common good by promotion of connections among people, landscapes, and spirituality. In the context of farm work for participation in the market economy, or mental work for healthy imagination and discernment, Berry calls the external standard of such endeavors the “Great Economy,” or the “Kingdom of God.” The goal is to promote abiding, abundant harvests and the longterm wellbeing of individuals in community. In spite of dreams of space colonization, exploration of extraterrestial neighbors near and far has shown that, in the words of science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson, “There is no Planet B.”

Berry has explored ideas of earth care most fully in his novels and short stories about the Coulter, Catlett, Branch, and other families. They dwell together in imaginary Port William, for which the author’s native Port Royal, Kentucky, serves as a touchstone. The place is not a utopian metaphor as its residents navigate with failure and success through cross-currents of old ways and modernity’s encroachments and benefits. In “That Distant Land” (1965), a rural neighborhood crew gathers for tobacco harvest in the sweltering August heat, and Berry casts a scene that resembles field laborers of ancient times: “They dove into the work, maintaining the same pressing rhythm from one end of the row to the other, and yet they worked well, as smoothly and precisely as dancers. To see them moving side by side against the standing crop, leaving it fallen, the field changed, behind them, was maybe like watching Homeric soldiers going into battle. It was momentous and beautiful and touchingly mortal.” The classical allusion is not incidental. In “The Agrarian Standard” (2002), Berry invokes lines from Virgil’s Fourth Georgic about “an old Cilician” who cares for a small plot of land that produces abundantly because of an ethic “rooted in mystery and sanctity” that values giving back to the health of the soil—an affectionate agarian stewardship for the sake of present and unborn generations.

Meaning-making in classical thought came through an honorable paideia of civic engagement and reflection. Intellect detached from action risks loss, and empathy apart from action is purposeless. Apparent in literature and art from Virgil and Horace to British Georgics, French Rustics, and Russian Itinerants, a holistic life of labor—such as Port Royal harvesting, craft,  and community, promotes personal as well as cooperative wellbeing. A related education grounded in distinctly local connectedness through stories and art, mealtime fellowship and field study offers prospect of cultural renewal.

“Ancient Prayers” — Discing, Planting, Cutting

Contemporary agrarian art and literature offer insightful if variable perspectives on the transformation of rural landscapes and ways of country life. Stories and paintings can be elegiac and abstract as well as hopeful, with expressions of agrarian renewal evident in newfound appreciation for regional heritage and stewardship of the land. These considerations juxtapose values related to the natural world with those of private development and global capitalism. There is little to regret about archaic rural prejudices, grinding aspects of exhaustive dawn to dusk farm labor, and highly erosive tillage practices that once characterized areas like the Palouse. Small town redevelopment efforts are examining in new ways how local stories, specialty crops, and other resources might be shared to better contend with shifting labor patterns and demographic change. Harvest bees and church benefits still aid neighbors in times of special need. At the same time the annual harvest experience requires seasonal urgency, and the instinct for necessary provision unites humanity worldwide through rituals of planting and harvesting and thanksgiving.

Reflecting on contemporary agrarian experience, my longtime friend and novelist Bruce Holbert observes that in places like the Palouse, “God is in the details—turning a wrench, discing the summer fallow, spraying and rod-weeding, planting and cutting.” He considers these to be prayers “of the ancient sort, the ones you offer not for an answer as much as to be heard. Their reward is the opportunity to perform similar acts tomorrow and the next day. Their faith is not invested in an end; it is the opposite, a prayer to continue and in it is a kind of patience with the fates that few outside this place share.” The inhabitants of Holbert’s stories are not portrayed to explore the classic American theme of personal freedom amidst the conformist mainstream. Instead, they seem to take for granted a life of mystery and misery amidst economic hardship and the vagaries of nature, and speak perceptively from deep within as they move about in clouds of uncertainty. Holbert explores the abiding toil and periodic terrors of country life in Hour of Lead (2014), winner of the Washington State Book Award for Fiction, and in other novels and writings. His short story “Ordinary Days,” in which the Mason Hills are cast for the Palouse, features an exploration of rural change and meaning-making.

Nostalgia for some halcyon past contributes to the popularity of rural art but tempered with consideration of what has been lost and what has been gained. These contrasting themes are considerably explored in contemporary photographic art and are the special interest of Pacific Northwesterner John Clement and Don Kirby of Santa Fe. Ambivalent considerations about such trends are expressed in “Palouse” by Lewiston, Idaho, poet William Johnson:

There is always an empty house

by the road at the edge of town,

its windows whiskered with lilac

and letting in rain. Nearby,

a barn drags itself home,

and in May, daffodils trim the yard

against an ocean of wheat

that rolls in on a slow inexorable tide.

The stark, mysterious black-and-white photography of Kirby’s Wheatcountry (2001) shows unpeopled agrarian vistas from Texas to Washington. Essayist Richard Manning writes of the contrast between the imaginative West of the national consciousness—reshaped since settlement and largely uninhabited, and landscapes tended by farmers who contend with the vagaries of weather and maneuver through an array of government programs to provision the masses. Kirby’s monochromatic views bear the titles of nearby locations scarcely known or seen by outsiders, but that conjure memory and meaning to locals. His Palouse series includes Diamond and Lancaster (places where farmers came from miles around to procure seed wheat), Harrington and Pomeroy (home to area flour mills), and the Snake River port of Central Ferry, which remains one of the Northwest’s largest grain exporting terminals.

Having grown up in the vicinity, I immediately recognized Kirby’s “Wheatfield III, Repp Road, Endicott, Washington,” which shows a prodigious stand of ripening wheat cloaking an enormous swirl of sloping summer-fallow beneath a stack of cumulus clouds. The Repp family had the only pool for miles around before the town built one in the 1960s, so kindly taught a generation of us how to swim. The matriarch of the clan is still active at age 104 and her nephew Mike Lowry—our state’s twentieth governor who contributed to normalized US-Russia relations in the 1990s, surely helped harvest that very hill. Trends in the depopulation of the countryside are found throughout the nation, even as affordability of houses in small towns has helped keep some populated with newcomers to sustain local schools, churches, and clubs. Shrinking numbers of farmers remain as vital carriers of intimate knowledge about the land and growing conditions, and of practical skills that keep bringing forth the crops.

Themes of change upon the landscape mixed with agrarian wonder characterized many poems by Pulitzer Prize winning author Howard Nemerov (1920-1991). Although the New York native spent much of his life in academia, he traveled widely through the New England countryside and with publication of his 1955 collection The Salt Garden, Nemerov’s refined, contemplative verse took on more practical tones in defense of the land. Poems like “Midsummer’s Day” and “The Winter Lightning” reflect upon the timelessness of the seasons and consider a consilience with humanity’s ephemeral presence. In “A Harvest Home” an abandoned vehicle stands in a recently harvested field (“So hot and mute the human will / As though the angry wheel stood still / That hub and spoke and iron rim”), while marvelous creatures of the wing appear throughout the day—jays “proclaim” dawn, afternoon crows “arise and shake their heavy wings,” and an owl “complains in darkness.”

Harvests Then and Now

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

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

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

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

Columbia Heritage Photographs

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

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

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

Harvests Yesterday and Today—Different Times, Identical Location

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

Four miles north of Endicott, Washington

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

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

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

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

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