Our common country: family farming, culture, and community in the nineteenth-century Midwest

Abstract

Our Common Country: Family Farming, Culture, and Community in the Nineteenth-Century Midwest By Susan Sessions Rugh. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. Pp. xxi, 285. Illustrations, maps, appendices. $45.00.) Susan Sessions Rugh has written a book that stands at the intersection of several historiographical trends. David B. Danbom and R. Douglas Hurt (Born in the Country: A History of Rural America [1995] and The Rural West since World War II [1998], respectively) have brought renewed attention to rural culture. Andrew R. L. Cayton and others have written pioneering works on the Midwest as a region (The Midwest and the Nation: Rethinking the History of an American Region [1990] with Peter S. Onuf and The American Midwest: Essays on Regional History [2001] with Susan E. Gray). Among the new regional history, there is increased attention to the sectional origins of Midwestern settlers in Susan E. Gray's The Yankee West: Community Life on the Michigan Frontier (1996) and my own book, The Emerging Midwest: Upland Southerners and the Political Culture of the Old Northwest, 1787-1861 (1996). Much of this new literature is situated in Illinois, beginning with John Mack Faragher's classic Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie (1986) and including works by Kay J. Carr (Belleville, Ottawa, and Galesburg: Community and Democracy on the Illinois Frontier [1996]), and Jane Adams (The Transformation of Rural Life: Southern Illinois, 1890-1990 [1994]). To all these trends, Rugh has responded. Her elegantly written and thoroughly researched book thus speaks to a number of different fields: rural history, midwestern history, and the history of Illinois. Rugh's examination of Fountain Green township in Hancock County, Illinois, is a case study with broad applications to the formation of what Rugh calls the agrarian myth (xv). Rugh traces the settlement of Fountain Green, the family farm culture established there by the first settlers, and the demise of that culture. Eroded by the market revolution in agriculture, the nationalism of the Civil War, and the triumph of middle-class urban values over those of the country, family farm culture was in retreat by the time Fountain Green's first settlers began dying in the late 1800s. The early chapters examine the varied migration streams-from New England, the South, the Mid-Atlantic states, and, eventually, Europe-that helped form the population of Hancock County. Despite their disparate origins, settlers shared a commitment to independent family farming (4). Regionalism manifested itself in settlers' preference for crops, spouses, and churches. By mid-century, residents of the township were choosing between self-sufficiency and increased reliance on the profitable, but risky, market economy. The choice involved changes in crops, the ability to pass on a viable farm to sons, and increased reliance on credit. Regional identities began to be subsumed by class and political ones as residents divided on whether to accommodate to the new market order by, for example, improving roads and schools. …