John Sanderson's Farm
There are two very influential articles in the Environmental History canon, separated by forty years, written about “The View from John Sanderson’s Farm.” The first was written in 1966 by Hugh M. Raup, the director of the Harvard Forest in Petersham Massachusetts (located on the site of Sanderson’s farm). Raup described the growth and decline of New England agriculture and its impact on the forest, attributing change to economic forces outside the area and beyond its residents’ knowledge or control. Although this wasn’t the main point of his essay (his main point was that conservation planning doesn’t work), Raup painted a picture of the declension of New England farming, with the farmers as first the beneficiaries and then the victims of market forces they could neither anticipate nor influence.
An important element of Raup’s essay is the fact that it was originally a public lecture that Raup frequently gave to diverse audiences. The story he presented has over the years become the dominant history of eastern agriculture. Raup’s story of farming popularized the accounts of Harvard and Yale professors Percy Wells Bidwell, Harold Fisher Wilson, and John Donald Black, whose books are still required reading for Ag. Historians despite the fact that many of their conclusions have been contested. And it popularized their ideas very successfully: in addition to the many lectures where Raup presented his case, the essay has become possibly the most widely read and cited article in the history of the Journal of Forest History (now Environmental History).
According to the story, early New England communities were based on subsistence farming, because the roads were poor. Farm products could not be easily brought to seaport markets, so rural life reflected the “simplicity and self-contained quality of the farm economy.” (Raup 3) Between 1791 and 1830, better roads and the growth of local industrial centers caused a farm boom and the cleared area of land increased to 60 percent. (4) But although New Englanders like Sanderson planned for the future and invested in their farms, “a different kind of people,” investors, built the Erie Canal which spurred “expansion of agriculture in the Middle West.” New Englanders were caught by surprise, because “the conceptual frame they had for their lives didn’t allow for such unknowns.” Their farm “economy collapsed…rather suddenly and on a large scale,” and the abandoned farms of the region were overgrown with second growth forests. (6)
I have several issues with this story. First, neither Raup nor his sources actually demonstrated the supposed cultural simplicity of rural people. The claim, like the supposed condition, was economically determined. The story of the building of the Erie Canal put the cart before the horse: transportation did not produce products, a growing volume of expensive overland freight justified the canal project. This is shown by the extensive use of portions of the Canal, as they were opened prior to the entire line (Raup not only failed to mention this, he got the Canal’s opening wrong by five years). But perhaps the biggest flaw with this story was Raup’s continuing use of the idea of “another kind of people.” (8) “The people who visualized and built the canal,” he said, were only interested in the flow of products, and “where they came from or went, at either end, was of secondary importance as long as the flow continued.” (10) This is not only extremely presentist, it’s inaccurate. The promoters of the Erie Canal were mainly western New Yorkers like William H. Seward or agriculturalists like Elkanah Watson (who incidentally was born in Plymouth Massachusetts and lived in Pittsfield, which by Raup’s logic should have made him either ignorant of the project or opposed to it). And perhaps most anachronistic and damaging was Raup’s assumption that capital is always external (and, so obviously that he doesn’t need to say it, urban). Economic development projects were investments that “had to be made attractive to investors so that capital would flow into them.” (8) Raup’s assumption of rural people’s passivity and ignorance as capitalists is especially difficult to swallow, because a few paragraphs earlier he noted that the Sanderson heirs liquidated their father’s farm at a profit, “took their capital and started a bank.” (8)
One final note, based on my own primary research: Raup seemed to conclude that although Sanderson’s “heirs did well by themselves when they sold their property while land prices were still high,” their profit was basically accidental. (10) The story he told hinged on “comfortable old New England farmers…actors in each segment [who were] essentially uninformed about what those in other segments had in mind.” (10) I don’t think this was the case. Most New England farmers (possibly the Sandersons themselves) by the 1830s and 1840s had relatives in the newer western farming regions. My research suggests that these family connections were extremely active in passing information, money and people along the new east-west land, water, and rail connections. I suspect that the farmers of New England towns like Petersham were not only aware of the changes going on around them, but that many of them welcomed or participated in these changes.
In “Another Look from Sanderson’s Farm,” environmental historian Brian Donahue took issue with Raup on several of the points I’ve mentioned. The thrust of Donahue’s article (published in Environmental History, January 2007) was that the American economic growth that Raup believed would always provide better solutions than planning actually depends on unsustainable and environmentally destructive practices that generally happen far away, where we don’t see them. Donahue concluded that conservation provides a “moral brake on economic drives [that] is necessary to ensure greater ecological and social well-being,” but that “conservation cannot succeed if it is subjected to short-term economic tests.” (Donahue, 31) Along the way, he challenged many of Raup’s facts and interpretations.
In Donahue’s story of the New England farm economy, Petersham grew naturally (and forests were cleared steadily) as the population grew and sons became farmers. Returning agency to people like the Sandersons, Donahue said population and farm growth would have happened, “increased outside stimulation or not.” (18) And, looking closer at the structure of these farms than Raup had, Donahue pointed out that “the idea that Midwestern grain could have caused the collapse of New England farming is an odd one, considering how little of New England farmland was committed to tillage to begin with.” (20) Contrary to Raup’s story, Donahue said “the number of acres in tillage scarcely grew at all and never rose above 4 percent of all the land in town.” (18) Pastureland was added, partly for wool but mostly for dairy production. Western grain actually replaced marginal pastures, which were allowed to grow up to pines. As a result, “Between 1880 and 1910, the acreage in agricultural production in Massachusetts fell in half…[while] During the same thirty years, the value of agricultural production doubled.” (20) Massachusetts agriculture actually peaked not “around the time of the Civil War, as standard accounts like Raup’s would have it, but about 1910,” 85 years after the opening of the Erie Canal and 41 years after the completion of the transcontinental railroad.
But the farm economy of New England did ultimately decline. “Population in hill towns like Petersham fell in half between 1860 and 1910,” Donahue said. (20) But then he turned aside from the agricultural story, to return to his main theme about conservation. I’d like to stay with the farmers a little longer, and find out what happened to them.
Population decline could have been the result of people moving away, people dying, or simply of no one moving into a town like Petersham for a couple of generations. Who dies, who moves away, and who decides not to come seem to be the crucial questions at this point in the story. If most Petersham families had sent sons and daughters into the west, then the deaths of the old folk back home or their retirement to the homes of children in New York or Michigan takes on a much different emotional tone than the standard tale of a region crushed and impoverished by the wheels of progress. But we won’t know, until someone looks for the actual people, examines their records, and tells their story. This is the next step in the growth of rural history as a discipline. Someone needs to take another look from Sanderson’s farm, and this time follow the people rather than the trees.