it's so i what i want to do tonight is to play a series of excerpts from recordings with older farmers that i made in the eighty's and early ninety's to evoke the world the pre war farming world that they were talking to me about but i want to first get some ideas out there to as a context for these recordings and i grew up in northeastern indiana in that a place that my family came from vermont interesting lee enough  hundred in the nineteenth century and the nearest trading village to my family's farm was called vermontville and just west of vermont fell were middlebury goshen and bristol indiana and just east of vermontville were montpelier burlington and swanton ohio was a swath of the upper midwest which extended into michigan and on out into southern wisconsin that was settled by people from here when there was the new frontier here which in the case of the county where i grew up was eight hundred thirty four that was when the county was open for settlement and when my mother's family arrived and so one of these ideas that i want to sort of bring forward  is something that was very real to me as a child growing up my family sold this farm that they had been where they lived since eight hundred thirty four in  nine which was the year before i was born all of my cousins and aunts and uncles continued to be dairy farmers but we lived in the village but the world of that farm was vividly real to me through the stories that my mother and her mother my grandmother who lived with us and my father who had come to that farmer's a sort of hired boy and the woman who came to help my mother clean the house who for a while had been with her husband tenant farmers on that farm when my grandparents had gone off to the city in search of another livelihood all of these people had made this and the idea of the concept of a palin sest is that a message is inscribed on the surface and then erased and a new message written and he raced and so on so forth but each message leaves a trace and those traces are recoverable and can be understood sequentially so that you can have access to what those things that proceeded in sequence what whatever is inscribed in the surface now and when i was a graduate student i got really interested in in english economist his name was william george hoskins wrote a book called the making of the english landscape an odd sort of thing for an economist to have written but he was very compelled by the way in which the veriest past lives past uses past communities of the area of britain where he lived were still excessive well in the present through those fragmentary sometimes fragmentary sometimes more substantial remains on the landscape he wrote him hoskins wrote a book called field work in local history and the cover has an aerial photograph of some some village and in england it's probably a square mile and then the these little balloons with arrows that go down to a prehistoric track a roman road a norman fortification a medieval church and so on and so forth and in a one room school actually it was two rooms because i was in the basement but you know my you know i've my my point with the this group of kids was like we don't have to go to a museum to experience history because history is everywhere all around us we just need to educate our eyes to be able to see what there is here that we can access to understand the story of how people have lived here across time so that history in the context of this third fourth and fifth grade group of kids that i was working with i framed as a kind  detective were which when you think about of the above ground archaeology is it's essentially what it is you know in informed detective work so this notion of power incest of past experience were maining active visible sometimes you know well it's actually a talk that i gave i gave not in this library but  further up this road probably twenty years ago it was a talk about seeing history in the in the world around you and i had a series of photographs that i had taken in randolph village and  one was of a grain elevator another was of this amazing coal storage structure right on the railroad there were a whole series of things that were big and really incredibly visible the coal storage thing was across from the post office yet when i showed those slides in in randolph some people were like well where's that you know it's like you know you get accustomed to the way that things look and or i do and i don't necessarily sort them out but the opportunity to sort things out and to understand what we can learn is there ok so this notion of palimpsest that's one thing the second thing that i want to kind of underline is the idea of sense of place now when i was a kid growing up in the one nine hundred fifty s i don't remember anybody ever saying anything about sense of place was not a term that people tossed around and now i hear about it a lot but it my sense is that people have attribute different meanings to it some people think a sense of place as the feelings that a particular landscape whether known or unknown evokes when you see it you know b roll kind of scenes that one encounters here so often but my use of the term sense of place is about the web of connection the to the places that we know through our own experience and through the reported experience of others either family members or just you know other people that live in the same place we do and  with whom we have occasion to hear stories about what happened here this was very vivid for me as a kid growing up because  you know i had an older brother but he was a lot older and so in a sense i was sort of like an only child and my parents and i would for recreation on sundays after church and  dinner would often go for a drive sunday afternoon drives we always drove around the county you know we never went anywhere else and i never ever see east to be you know really excited about that you know it's fun and wherever we went in ever to bully we would pass a location that would evoke some kind of story you know not necessarily of you know like you know a big long developing with a plot but more like this is where laura klink was killed on that big hill you know after that party when when her husband who was the funeral director had too much to drink you know but many stories related to again my family's experience my mother who's still living now in rutland and will be ninety nine next month was born on a farm this farm in indiana and place you know without electricity or running water and at this point her father and mother were living with his mother who is a widowed woman and was running the farm on her own and as i say they went off to to toledo seeking fortune in toledo and my mother stayed with her grandmother on the farm and the stories i always heard about her grandmother were about this woman being resourceful in pendant clear thinking you know and some of them were you know just direct things of appreciation but others were about something that happened and now when i look back on them i can see you know why that was an important story to my mother to tell because people don't tell stories of ram but just east of angola headed out toward montpelier ohio was a crossroads that in my childhood was simply a crossroads had a sign said alice nothing there alice but in my mother's childhood there'd been a general store been a cluster of it was a trade xander and my her grandmother's deceased husband's brother operated the general store there so in the teens after my mother's birth her grandmother decided it was time for her to have a car and  the hired man on the neighboring farm delivered this car to her showed her how to operate it and her i don't know if it's her first use but in my memory this is become her first use was to charge out across the county was quite a distance not good use of a horse to see her brother in law who she made her way from the farm to alice and by my mother's telling when she arrived at  she realized she had no idea how to stop the car so she drove it into the wall of the of the grocery and it stalled ok so is this kind of thing you know i have i have once my parents when my father was ninety two we drove to indiana spent the day and then drove back and it was long enough for me to say you know why don't you move where i am you know for two reasons my father was cooking cleaning you know he was good to go every now and then i'd say let's go for a ride in the car you know and he was he was a fine driver and i was like you know you're in great shape let's spend let's spend this time together for christ sake and then when something goes wrong i will be a thousand miles away drove back the phone rang picked up as my mother she said your father wants to talk to you and when i when i picked up the phone with him he said ok he said i thought the events that you had to look forward to was death but instead will have an adventure oh so this this i no longer go to indiana but i still feel deeply and emotionally connected to that place through this web of stories that is i feel sort of part of my patrimony and it's part of all of our path of matrimony patrimony whatever it's part of our collective inheritance in the places where we live and it's something we can seek out you know from other people saying hey you know i think i would i used to hitchhike for recreation when i was like nineteen or twenty and i'd end up in some place i'd never been some cross roads and wander in to get something to drink and say tell me about you know what's this place about you know anyway so then the last thing here i'm i'm sort of meandering a little bit too much has to do with oral history  is the opportunity that it offers for a researcher to really come to know the sort of intimate details of daily life which otherwise it's the things that are the most sort of ordinary that are the most susceptible to loss the things that are most common most broadly distributed best known to the generation whose lives they're a part of  the least known to us you know in terms of architecture fancy houses the blonder rich people get saved but what about some of the you know their tom visser who teaches in the historic preservation at you v m one time i went off with him somewhere and he was so excited because there was the potential at least i think i'm remembering this right to see a sheep far from the air and the eight hundred forty s when sheep were king here you know sheep barn ordinary working structure on a farm when no longer needed you don't save a sheep barn it becomes something else pretty quickly so this isn't this idea of oral history as a route into the heart of every day life i really embrace and celebrate and just one more little anecdote  my spouse is a grandfather great grandfather was a diary keeper and we live in well it wasn't his house but it was his daughter and her husband's place and so when he died some of his stuff migrated into into this building which was when i bought it abandoned and really big around then and stuff and find you know thirty diaries little tiny ones kept by a man which means that he noted the weather you know didn't and he also noted what work he did how many cords of wood he split or whatever else but each entry each vermont interviewed everyone in the early one nine hundred eighty s who is shipping milk in the towns of randolph braintree and brookfield also volunteered as a hired man for a year on three different farms and i interviewed and rode around with with you know artificial insemination veterinarians equipment dealers mill callers you name it and even when i came to work at the folklife center then in the later nine hundred eighty s i expanded that research to statewide and in the end i probably did six or seven hundred interviews with people that were focused on farming  the majority with people who were i mean was the time of the whole herd by others all kinds of stuff going on continuing farm consolidation klein and farm numbers but one of the  groups of people that i and of spending a lot of time with were older people either who had grown up farming and retired from farming or backed off a little bit at least when one of their children kind of took the lead in the operation or somebody who is sold out sold the farm to a neighbor and brought the operations together but i wasn't there to find out about food for example i was i was there to see what this person wanted to talk about and inevitably things that had to do with the fabric of everyday life figured pretty prominently in these conversations and now i'm coming back to them and there's all this interest in local food and you know the generation who can talk about local food in the period before the second world war in detail is as thin considerably yet these recordings are quite vivid in their description of things like salt pork and milk gravy for example but so it's from this body of in interview material that i'm going to be now stepping back and i'm not going to talk i'm going to play excerpts the first here is an excerpt from a recording with catherine do close this is the longest and the least it has the least entertainment value of the pieces that i'm going to play but it's about making butter the home production of butter catherine lived in braintree the town where i used to live and she taught in the show in my class what became my classroom or up stairs for thirty seven years i was hired when she retired and you better believe she was down that it check out what i was up to and we became good friends but here's catherine talking about making butter i don't know whether you'd be interested in the way we made but you know the dad of course  catherine was born in one nine hundred seven so we're talking early twenties with this recording she lived to be one hundred three lived in a mobile home and braintree and heated with wood and her birthday was in december and on new year's day she announced that she had lived long enough and died the next i want to go to horses you know just really connected to their horses and here's here's john massey are talking about the team of horses about just talking about the tom but  the piece that didn't make it into that excerpt was john john's account of his father's reaction when the fellow who's buying the farm from said and the old tom if you want to work you're going to have to get him to bac of course he did and then let's see i think i'd like to just drop in to food a little bit and this is  edgar dodge he grew up in tonbridge he used to be the president of the co op fire insurance in the middle burry and he's talking about a farm drink that his family used to make and which the folklife center now  about hard cider because of the prominent role that hard cider played in daily life in the pre war era i was over nice try get one time i played both of those excerpts and afterward an older woman came up to me and said i don't like what you're doing i was like what do you mean she said you're making the our ancestors out to been a bunch of drunks anyway so now in central vermont if there's running water it's usually a brook whereas you go down in south the southwestern corner the bat and kill and  had to areas of like western pennsylvania i don't actually know exactly but run barren run is where my father's family is all buried barren run and so you can map culture you can start with words you can start with food traditions you can start with building styles you can start with tools from the arrow when tools were handmade and homemade according to ideas that people had in their heads as opposed to magazines or something and and identify and describe culture regions so the culture region that this part of the world represents extended out into that swath of northern indiana it wasn't just the towns the you know were named for places back home but southern indiana was settled by people from the upland south so it wasn't uncommon for people to eat biscuits and gravy but biscuits and gravy from my point of view up there in that northern corner of indiana was something as far as i was concerned that you know it had to do with grits you know and sweet tea i mean it was like well what foreign food so but one thing that that was true of the area where i was growing up that was also true here at least on the basis of interviews that i've done were neighborhood work exchanges was a system that has been well documented actually and much described called changing works and the you know it's it was true in the midwest it was true here  but it had to do with a group of neighbors who had band together and at key points in the agricultural year would support one another in getting work done in a timely manner and often that had to do with threshing because at the scale at which people were farming in the teens in the twenty's it was a little bit too big  scale to hand flail odes for feeding animals so you needed to use a tool a threshing machine but as many older farmers told me when i was doing these interviews the two things that bring out my mind are that they lived less on income than lack of expense and they got their living from the farm and people the two main expenses were fire insurance and taxes and people often had a crop that they raised potatoes for example they peddle to pay property taxes so threshing machine was beyond the it was had to larger capital expenses expenditure for most people who were engaged in relatively small scale agriculture and therefore there were entrepreneurs who bought these things invested in them and then brought them around farm to farm and they operated kind of like a lawyer the thing arrives and being the clock starts running until it goes on to the next place and the the the piece that governs the length the stay was how fast you got the boats out of the field and fed through this machine so that you needed a more and the limiting factor then was was man power and to a certain extent you know horses and wagons so rural sociology was a prominent field in the around the time of the first world war two big centers of rural sociology were cornell and the university of wisconsin at madison and a lot was written in that era about farm community where researchers would go out to a farming area walk up to somebody banging on the door and say you know we're doing this study do you live in a neighborhood the meats and bounce the neighborhood usually around eight households because that was a number where the work could be done in a timely fashion going farm to farm and it was essential something was illustrated to me most strongly again by my childhood experience where there was one farm in that eight farm neighborhood that my grandfather's family was part of one farm that was a tenant farm and i remember hearing about a fellow who moved in there who was a drinker and who abused his wife and children and when time came for the thresh machine to arrive at his place no one can so he had to he had to move away that was it he was he was gone from that neighborhood but again and in these recordings that i've done many many stories about  going farm to farm and big feed when just the man who can was a women big meals and so on so forth and the flipside of that although no one drew this connection directly for me this is more like a leap of imagination on my part was the way in which the neighborhood functioned also within the context of non work relations money one thing that i found interesting was that as i traveled around the state you know getting together with people to talk about their remembered experience in some parts of the state kitchen junkets were you know it's like sure yeah that that happened a lot but and different people have different theories for why it died out you know move people start being barn dances people got the point where they were drinking things like that but in other parts of the state they were like whoa yeah i heard my grandparents talk that so it seems as though their currency varied location to location around vermont but in central vermont in tunbridge chelsea that area  he spoke to the neighbors who were attending these dances and said you know let's let's keep doing this and from that came the ad lark and dancers and  you ever ever go to the tunbridge fair the ed larkin dancers dance there every year and they danced at the new york world's fair and thirty six or thirty nine and won a prize and but you know a conscious effort on the part of ed larkin and his collaborators to to continue participating in a cultural form that that they he they believed in  this year her loose chuck loose lived in chelsea a fiddler who had played with ed larkin at these dances the last of the old time fiddlers i mean certainly they'll never be a last of the old time fiddlers because th will time fillers taught other fiddlers you know but the last of the folks who is connected to the kitchen dances at least that i know of died this year so  what i want to move onto here now are the the sense that people had when i was doing this research of change and of loss this is this time i'm not playing rock piece of field tape but a section from i produced a radio series in a long time ago twelve part or fourteen part radio series about farming called never done and this is a segment from the the egg episode about neighboring he was right up with his horses and his help and they don't git it you didn't ask them they just came right out because they knew you had a doubt and if the other way you did it the other way so people were work together then when it came night they had their own or cows some of them don't know the difference even and they work somewhere in town and their main object in life is to have a road that will get them to town to work on time and we didn't use common culture that in the era when people were you know you left the village you were in a farm neighborhood and the again this this was a world that i had grown up with that i hadn't reflected on then why dissertation project was extended period of like engaging with this world and then thinking about you know what is what are  the how i would you describe this you know and one of the things that struck me immediately was a different sense of time because i don't know how many times i've heard someone say well it's you know twenty four hours a day seven days a week three hundred sixty five days a year and it is and that stands in sharp contrast to paid industrial work which has beginning and an and and one hopes vacation time so there's a you know on a farm there's a different sense of time in in the case the places where i was where place i was working in was in south randolph and i remember whatever we were doing we paused for a minute the fellow russ reynolds said you go ask anybody and in the village meaning randolph village who what kind of kid they they hire they knew they had a job they need to do what kind of kid are they going to hire they'll tell you kid from a farm yeah because farm kids know how to work you know and that may seem self evident it is as are all deeply embedded cultural practices but the family as the unit of production and children carrying real responsibility shoulder to shoulder with their parents from a very early age that's a characteristic of farm culture and so when we talk about you know the changing face of vermont and the loss of farm numbers often this is framed only in terms of its impact on the landscape but it is also had a big ramifications culturally in terms of  that experience the experience of a farm being now a minority experience as opposed to an experience that is broadly shared and has a shaping influence on the larger community so i want to wind down here with just reading a little excerpt from the introduction to a book called the transformation of rural life southern illinois eight hundred ninety the one nine again seems kind of far afield for me to be reading this but it's a woman who grew up in a county in southern illinois again on a dairy farm or what was in her childhood a dairy farm who returned to the county for over a century as a researcher to look at change to try to understand how the world that her grandparents remembered had become the world that her children would know and reflect on you know what's the lesson here so here she goes i seek not to she's talking about a book i seek not to tell the stories of people who have lived here i think not only to tell the stories of people who have lived here but also to comprehend how we came to be the way we are i understand our past as a constant process of taking certain paths which invariably shut off other alternatives sometimes those paths were clearly chosen but lead to unexpected destinations other times alternatives were simply blocked by actors more powerful than we as individuals as citizens of a relatively poor marginal region or as members of a relatively powerless group sometimes we seemed to be travelling at such breakneck speed that alternative routes into the future were bypassed unseen part of my project in writing this book is to try to reimagine the past taken by a specific rural area by specific farm families and to try to imagine alternative routes into the future perhaps we could have invented a course that would have allowed us our material prosperity without simultaneously impoverishing our social life this was one of her big findings that as people reported on life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century the two big characteristics were about lack of material goods wealth that kind of stuff and the richness of social connections community that that that dimension of experience and then in talking to people about the circumstances of farming in the ninety's it was the absolute opposite people had much greater material prosperity but their social lives had diminished at least the kind of social life was centered around community and and family on the farm perhaps we could have made different decisions that would have allowed more young people to stay in the area and they would have allowed farming in these hills to remain viable perhaps that's what our new stalled is all about the sense that had we known better we would not have lost so much even as we gained so much so you know my i think john was asking me what's this talk about and saying that it's you know i'm trying that to go back to these notions sense of place palimpsest you know evoke the world on which our world rests the world that informs still the present even as it is passed and you know for somebody like i was having a short visit and you know when you know i can't think of cannon bill with cannon bill earlier just before we got going here this is no news to you yeah yeah yeah so this is the reality of this experience is still here you know and when people talk about vermont a special place or vermont exceptionalism you know the things that vermont public radio celebrates for example as are bunch of things that seem to me very deeply rooted in the historic experience of people here and my so my point is  as we look into the future it isn't as though the future we have no control it isn't as though we are going to inevitably and ahead of a future that we may not like you know we we have agency and we can make decisions we can shape the course of how things go to make sure that the things that matter most to us continue to be real an important and viable in the places where we live so it's sort of like my my thing is like an expert patient and i you know let's go but what i want to do i want to play one more recording and then  i would like to take a little time here to visit if anyone has something they want to say this is my last little piece here is from a guy who i don't know yeah it seems to me like the digital world for me at least it's new enough that i don't really know what it means even as i'm very deeply involved yes yes yes yes i'm not yeah i am we have actually a fellowship from the library of congress to put a series of interviews to document quote unquote the new face of agriculture so we've been kind of hunkering down with people to get a sense of when we present this to you i mean from chuck ross to you know the director of the acorn group which is the local foods networking madison county saying who would you recommend that we talk to because the young there's so much background was eastern colorado on a farm yeah and you talked about somebody doing custom threshing yeah well my grandfather was a customs writer and he would go from farm to farm you talked about and we had a cream separator that we cranked by hand and we'd go when you got the critics step or go fast enough the bell would quit ringing that was in the in the handle and you could light up and different kind of country and not vermont yeah but there's a lot of similarity from the barn dances that my parents used to go to to  how the neighbors work together during certain time of the year i can identify with a lot of what you share how about from bill and ken yes you're dealing with th before is saying used to be you know about entertaining oneself and now people don't feel like they're having a good time till they go somewhere and they pay someone to entertain them but we used to make our own fun now in a way that sounds like sort of commonplace i mean you know sort of like oh well that's what some old person would say you know but when you think if you call ahead and make a time out you know show you anything you want to see i mean we've got six thousand recordings and that would keep you busy but those that are were done on we've been recording digitally since two thousand so about two thirds of the collection was originally analog tape we've moved more than half of that now into a digital format which from a preservation point of view is a good thing and also from an access point of view and people often say to me well can i get at that on line but the difficulty that i'm struggling with is access versus privacy because all of these folks i made these recordings they give me blanket release yeah yeah yeah we trust you to do whatever you want to with the middle be good but there was no world wide web and to make these internet personal documents available online to anyone anywhere for any purpose doesn't seem to me to really honor the trust that we have been given you know so we have to figure out how we can make these more accessible remotely without really compromising that trust and we haven't figured that out yet but in the meantime this is a great of all research collection and exhibits and school our reach programs and there's all kinds of stuff coming  going on and i'd love to to show you around and do a little show sort of media show things that students have made cool stuff you know so yes yeah yeah yeah yeah so i'm going to end with a katherine do close the woman at the beginning and talked about the butter making she said no no i'm going to change my  braintree and he was one of those people who loved horses and didn't he was the last person in braintree to have a tractor and he kept horses to sugar of course but he also used them to rake if he had time and any develop he was great showman he was a big talker and he would take people on sleigh rides he said to me one time gregg when i die i want to be buried with a horse and of course what c