Chapter 4: Fertile Ground for Agricultural Change, Part 2
Chapter 4: Fertile Ground for Agricultural Change, Part 2
One participant in the Illinois tour of Crossroads: Change in Rural America compellingly demonstrated how changes in the lives and livelihoods of local farming families have exemplified and perhaps contributed to regional, statewide, and national trends in agriculture and rural life.
Like the DeKalb County History Center, Marshall Public Library in east-central Illinois, which hosted Crossroads: Change in Rural America from late March through early May 2019, prominently featured centennial farms in its programming, as well as its companion exhibition. One of the two main sections of the library’s locally focused exhibition examined the histories of two long-established farms—those belonging to the Guinnip family and the Miller family—as microcosms of the evolution of agriculture in Clark County.
Marshall Public Library and Illinois Humanities co-hosted a workshop about documentation of rural mid-American culture in May 2018, almost a year before Crossroads visited Marshall. During that workshop, library staff and volunteers interviewed local farmers Bob Miller and Don Guinnip. Their interviews provided much of the content of the library’s companion exhibition and were added to its extensive collection of local oral histories. Audio recordings and written transcripts are available on a page devoted to Crossroads-related content on the library’s website. The exhibition also featured contextual commentaries by agricultural geographer Christopher Laingen of Eastern Illinois University that situated the histories of the Miller and Guinnip family farms in relation to broader regional and national trends.
Guinnip, age 65 at the time,[1] and Miller, then 64,[2] described the dramatic changes that have occurred on their farms from their early childhood years to the present, which are indicative of developments in agriculture that have occurred in recent decades in many parts of the lower Midwest.
“Both of the oral histories addressed how it used to be that every person they knew grew up on a farm. Every person they knew had some sort of farm animal, had a larger family,” noted Alyson Thompson, director of the library. “But as they got older, and as technology advanced and urban America grew, they began seeing these shifts from small farms that were operated by the entire family to larger farms operated by less people in the family, and that’s credited to technology, mostly, which also pushed some of those family members into urban America.”[3]
Bob Miller, whose German American ancestors arrived in Clark County by way of southwestern Indiana in the late nineteenth century, observed, “As I grew up, we always had the garden and the milk cow and the chickens and things like that, but as our farm changed with labor and began to change with technology and the new way of doing things came along, a lot of those aspects were gone.”[4]
“One of the big changes is that agriculture went to a business mindset, r