Prairie patrimony: family, farming, and community in the Midwest

Abstract

SALAMON, Sonya, PRAIRIE PATRIMONY: Family, Farming and Community in the Midwest, Chapel Hill, N.C.: The University of North Carolina Press, 1992, 297 pp., $62.95 hardcover.Prairie Patrimony is much more than a study of family, farming and community in the Midwest, and deserves a far wider audience than might be attracted by the tide alone. In Prairie Patrimony Sonya Salamon demonstrates how culture and ethnicity continue to shape gender, family life, farming practices, and land tenure in rural America. Although the subject material of the study is sharply defined, the scope is never narrow, so that scholars with diverse interests in gender, family ethnicity and culture will find much of interest in this book.Salamon argues that the two groups who settled the region had distinctively different beliefs, values and attitudes toward land. For the Yankees, whose remote ancestors were the landless waged laborers of post-enclosures Britain, and whose more direct forebears were New Englanders, land is simply a possession, to be bought, exploited and sold in the pursuit of profit. Thus the Yankees became entrepreneur-farmers, with their eyes always firmly fixed on. the bottom line. For the Germans, whose ancestors immigrated from the villages of Alsace and Saxony, land is a means to ensure family continuity, to be held in trust and husbanded by one generation for the next. Thus the Germans became yeomen-farmers, with their eyes always firmly fixed on the succession.According to Salamon the distinct cultural meanings of land have repercussions for every aspect of life. Because of their duty to preserve the farm intact, yeoman-farmers are financially conservative, tend to work smaller farms, and may own equipment in common with other yeomen. In contrast, the profit motive leads Yankees to work larger firms, take more risks, and diversify into other activities such as trucking and livestock production. In turn these differences generate a myriad of other differences. Yankee omen often work off the farm and never work in the fields; German women may work in the fields and rarely work off the farm. Yankee couples own land jointly; German wives retain inherited property in their own name. Yankee wives are involved in business decision making; German women only get involved in business when as elderly widows they control land. Yankee sons who wish to farm must earn the right, by serving a long apprenticeship and raising the money to buy out siblings, thereby proving their entrepreneurial acumen; German heirs are chosen to farm, they do not choose, and may receive preferential treatment leading to sibling conflicts. …