Farm Crisis and Rural Revitalization in South-Central New York during the Early Twentieth Century

Abstract

In contrast to both the critique of rural backwardness made by the Country Life Movement and the lament about rural declension expressed by proponents of agrarianism, the history of the Nanticoke Valley of south-central New York State demonstrates the possibilities for rural revitalization that lay in connections between the countryside and the city. In the early twentieth century, as long-settled families departed for urban employment, European immigrant families escaping the mines and mills bought abandoned farms. Motorized transport enabled farming families to send household members to the city each day and furnished them with a local market for their produce. This flexible combination of subsistence production, wage labor, and petty commodity production revitalized the rural economy and sustained the community in spite of the consolidation of the dairy industry. This essay explores the social changes that accompanied this profound reorientation of local life.