This Place, These People: Life and Shadow on the Great Plains by Nancy Warner and David Stark

Abstract

Reviewed by: This Place, These People: Life and Shadow on the Great Plains by Nancy Warner and David Stark Molly P. Rozum Nancy Warner and David Stark, This Place, These People: Life and Shadow on the Great Plains. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. 118 pp. $39.95. This photograph collection is another grim, if infused with a spare beauty, interpretation of abandoned Great Plains “places.” Warner’s selenium and sepia photographs tell a regional story that encompasses Cuming County, Nebraska, largely through the historic built environment of the Stark family. Warner and Stark are cousins whose parents grew up on their great-grandfather’s 1865 homestead. Stark’s essay contextualizes the images accompanied by poetically transcribed “voices” linked to the contemporary county. Groves mark “places” within a general residential pattern that originally spaced four farmsteads to a section of land. From the mid-twentieth century on, however, those who once inhabited the farmsteads abandoned them to the Plains elements even as farmers placed more land into production. These people left these places not because of 1920s agricultural depressions or 1930s droughts, Stark argues, but mostly because of ramifications from technology (machinery and biochemistry), especially after World War II. Most of the photographs depict homes, barns, and outbuildings, but selected details make up the bulk: windows, doorways, stairs, walls, rooms, and objects that convey old “love” even in the “ravishing damage of that abandonment” (101– 2). Poignant shots include “Wedding dress,” “Weeping curtain,” “Tricycle in shed,” and “Upstairs” (a close up of stylish shoes from another age left as if kicked off for the evening). The photographs show the deterioration one would expect (that constrict the throat and knot the midriff): half-fallen down buildings and crazed paint chipped away by wind, sun, rain, hail, and snow, but truly fascinating and characteristic of Plains abandonment is a decaying from within: peeling wallpaper, water-stained fabrics, rusted kitchen cabinets, broken glass, tree limbs inside, and curtains bug-gnawed or whipped by wind around any protuberance. Photographs of a local store and from Cass County, Iowa, however, float awkwardly unexplained. The desire to tell family history with regional resonance mostly works, but makes for some awkward features. A few pieces suggest the larger Great Plains regional landscape (“Spring planting”), but there is little discussion of regional patterns of abandonment. To conclude “Life was difficult for these homesteaders” and to mention “the physical rigors and economic hardships” (93) does not go far [End Page 168] enough to allow the assemblage to speak to region. A shot looking out from a corncrib, however, allows one to imagine the region from the perspective of a farm “place.” Another reveals wispy clouds of a grasslands sky captured in a window’s reflection. Stark awkwardly distinguishes between the northern and southern Plains in a way that seems to exclude Oklahoma from the Plains. Yet there is insight for the Plains in his observation that small communities exude “a strong sense of accomplishment in being small and doing something world class” (99). The suggestion of an ongoing farming “way of life,” despite the changes that make twenty-first-century agriculture almost wholly unlike that which established “these places” conveys the central rural theme of the collection and will make it particularly useful to those interested Middle West agriculture. Concerned less with distinguishing regional culture, Warner and Stark instead most successfully place Great Plains farming within a larger rural American culture and its historic shifts. Molly P. Rozum University of South Dakota Vermillion, South Dakota Copyright © 2019 Paul M. Renfro