Mark V. Wetherington - American Agriculture: From Farm Families to Agribusiness

I USED TO WALK AROUND the small hometown where I grew up mostly unaware of farmers. Strange, for without the countrysides farmers the town would have been empty of the grocers, feed and seed, mule and tractor dealers, and bankers and doctors whose jobs depended on providing goods and services to farm families. Today, almost all those buildings are either empty or gone. So are most of the farmers. A buzzword in high government places calls for a plan for the economic redevelopment of rural America and small towns. I think they are two or three generations too late, but I wish them the best of luck.

This book is dedicated to Glenna Pfeiffer. It was with her encouragement and support that I took on the project and I would not have completed it without her. She has been beside me all the way raising questions, pointing out sources, and keeping the faith.

One of our first research stops was the Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens in Jacksonville, Florida, to look at images of plants and American Indian agriculture. There we found the papers of Ninah Holden Cummer, an avid gardener and the museums benefactor. Her husbands family, Michigan lumber manufacturers, moved south for the final assault on northern Floridas longleaf pine forest. At one time the Cummer Lumber Company was Floridas largest landowner. Unlike so many of their fellow timbermen who followed the cut out and get out philosophy, the Cummers stayed in Florida and left a legacy to the citythe Cummer Art Museum and Gardens.

In Ninah Cummers papers are words to the effect that trees are plants too. As I researched and thought about this book that sentiment came back to me more than once. In addition to the wild grasses, flowers, and plants she loved, ironically longleaf pines, the source of Cummers wealth, were rarely, if ever, mentioned in her papers. But trees are the first casualties of agriculture, and after trees the natural grasses beneath them.

A project like this depends on many peoplefriends, archivists, librariansand I thank them all: John David Smith, University of North Carolina, Charlotte, and Series Editor, for contacting me about this project; Lynn Norris and Holly Keris, Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens; Patrick Haughey, Savannah College of Art and Design; the Georgia Archives and the National Archives at Atlanta; Martha Lundgren, Bellarmine University W. L. Lyons Brown Library; Jacksonville Historical Society; Coastal Georgia Historical Society; Epworth by the Sea Arthur Moore Methodist Museums library staff; Brunswick-Glynn County Library, Brunswick, Georgia; Johna Ebling, independent museum and archives consultant; Jon Sisk and the Rowman & Littlefield editorial department. I also thank James J. Holmberg, curator of collections, Filson Historical Society, for his friendship and support, and to the historical societys staff, especially Jennifer Cole and Heather Potter. Last but certainly not least, I thank my teachers.

Paul K. Conkin, A Revolution Down on the Farm: The Transformation of American Agriculture Since 1929 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2009); Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); Wendell Berry, Life and Work (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2007); Joel Salatin, Folks, This Aint Normal: A Farmers Advice for Happier Hens, Healthier People, and a Better World (New York: Center Street, 2011); David Pitt, Of Growing Concern, Dallas Morning News, July 26, 2018.

T. Douglas Price and Ofer Bar-Yosef, The Origins of Agriculture: New Data, New Ideas, Current Anthropology, Vol. 52, No. S4 (October 2011); Lyman Carrier , The Beginnings of Agriculture in America (New York: Johnson Reprint, 1968); James A. Vlasich, Pueblo Indian Agriculture (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006); Bradley J. Vierra, The Late Archaic Across the Borderlands: From Foraging to Farming (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005); Bruce D. Smith, The Emergence of Agriculture (New York: Scientific American Library, 1995); Cynthia Stokes Brown, Big History: From the Big Bang to the Big Present (New York: New Press, 2008); Noel Kingsbury, Hybrid: The History and Science of Plant Breeding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), especially helpful for domestication of plants; James C. McCann, Maize and Grace: Africas Encounter with a New World Crop, 15002000 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). Among the more helpful early recorded observations of Indian agriculture in the Southeast is Samuel Cole Williams, ed., Adairs History of the American Indians (Johnson City, TN: Wautauga Press, 1930). John Adair was a trader among the Cherokee and other tribes; Mark Van Doren, ed., Travels of William Bartram (New York: Dover Publications, 1955); Lyman Carrier , The Beginnings of Agriculture in America (New York: Johnson Reprint, 1968); Lawrence Clayton, Edward Moore, and Vernon James Knight Jr., De Soto Chronicles: The Expedition of Hernando De Soto to North America in 15391543 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993); Claire Hope Cummins, Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds (Boston: Beacon Press, 2008); Ralph H. Brown, Historical Geography of the United States (New York: Harcourt, 1948) notes Indians clearing land and meadows for cattle in New England; William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003); Charles Hudson, The Southeastern Indians (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992); John E. Worth, The Struggle for the Georgia Coast (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007); Charles Hudson, Marvin T. Smith, Chester B. DePratter, and Emilia Kelley, The Tristn De Luna Expedition, 15591561, Southeastern Archaeology, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Summer 1989); Benjamin Madley, An American Genocide: the United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 18461873 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016); Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975); Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975); Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 16241713 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973); Carla Gardina Pestana, The English Conquest of Jamaica: Oliver Cromwells Bid for Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017); David Hackett Fischer, Albions Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Carl Bridenbaugh, Myths and Realities: Societies of the Colonial South (New York: Atheneum, 1963); David L. Carlton and Peter Coclanis, eds., The South, the Nation, and the World: Perspectives on Southern Economic Development (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003); Gavin Wright, Slavery and American Economic Development (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006); Jackson Turner Main, The Social Structure of Revolutionary America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965); Charles Joyner, Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984); Numan V. Bartley, The Creation of Modern Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990); Lawrence S. Easley, Looking for Longleaf: The Fall and Rise of an American Forest (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Phillip Greven, Four Generations: Population, Land, and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1970); Sumner Chilton Powell,