A Forgotten World

Farmers who had prospered in earlier years were wiped out in the 1930s. Farm auction sales were a weekly event and farmers sold every item on the farm or in the house to get a few dollars, sometimes pennies, to exist for a while and move on. Summers were difficult but winters were equally tough. One family told me they had so much snow they shoveled tunnels under the snow to reach the barn, the well or other buildings. Nature was cruel in summer and winter. There was no let up: blazing heat in the summer, mind-numbing cold in the winter.

Farmers forced off their farms frequently just left without a trace and title to the land eventually reverted to the local bank. These banks were land rich but profit poor because they could not find anyone to work the land under any arrangements, on shares, cash rent or other terms. Why work someone else’s land (the bank’s) when your crop was wiped out each year? Half of nothing was still nothing!

I’ve talked to friends who went through the Great Depression on those farms and they will never, ever forget those years. Discuss with them today’s farming methods where a farmer climbs into an air-conditioned tractor or threshing machine cab, checks his computer for fertilizing or seeding percentages and turns on his stereo to hear soft music – or maybe heavy metal – and they can’t come to grips with what you’re outlining to them. They remember farming as an isolated, dismal, backbreaking life of hard labor and no amount of twenty-first century technology will ever alter that viewpoint. Rational? Maybe not. But that’s their memory of those years and nothing will change that as long as they live. 

That life is epitomized for me by a life-size statue that stands today outside a local company in the neighborhood where I live. The statue, about six feet tall, is a farmer in old-fashioned bib overalls, work shirt rolled up to the elbows, broad-brimmed hat (obviously before baseball caps), and heavy booted shoes. He is bent slightly at the waist, tying the top of a large gunnysack, probably with some type of grain in it. Each time I look at this statue I see more meaning in it.

My first look was several years ago and all I saw was a farmer busy at work. As I observed it on subsequent occasions I began to see hard labor on his part, then old-fashioned value in his plain dress, then honesty and simplicity in the work he is doing which is needed to feed people and, finally, admiration for the bygone values of unpretentious work done conscientiously.