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S ometimes research data confirm a story that many people know well. The GIS maps in figures 2 and 3 look like just such a case. The maps themselves come out of a quantitative study of the Kickapoo Valley’s history, which my colleagues and I carried out in the late 1990s. Based on data for six dates at intervals of roughly ten to fifteen years, they show land ownership trends and landscape change in the township of Liberty since 1930. Figure 2 shows that local residents owned almost all of Liberty’s land up to 1955. The few exceptions involved out-of-town heirs (usually children of deceased landowners) or banks holding property on which they had foreclosed. This is not to say that land ownership was static in Liberty or in the Kickapoo Valley. Land turnover was a fact of rural life before and after 1955. A majority of the land in Liberty went to new owners at least once every ten to fifteen years. But the picture in Liberty changed during the 1960s, almost imperceptibly at first. Someone from outside the Valley bought 249 acres from two local families. Then a second couple, not from the area, consolidated five parcels totaling 950 acres in the northeastern part of the township. This same couple, along with five more local landowners , later sold a combined 1,800 acres to an Illinois buyer. By 1965, absentee owners had made inroads in Liberty; by 1978, they had bought nearly half the land there; and by 1995, they controlled the majority of the township. These are data that rural areas around the country might take to be their own. They know firsthand the trend from local to absentee land ownership. Figure 3 represents Liberty’s landscape from 1939 to 1995—its dynamic pattern of agricultural fields, pasture, and forest. The eye will naturally 21 1 Intended Consequences Soil Conservation Figure 2. Trends in absentee land ownership in the township of Liberty, 1930–95. Figure 3. Township of Liberty land cover, 1939–95. Note the decline of cropland (the “agriculture” category), while forest cover expands. In the early 1950s, cultivated land was at its peak in the township, but by 1995 it had declined by nearly 60 percent. pick out changes in the figure from one date to another, with forests increasing in some parts of the township, pasture expanding or contracting in others. Putting actual numbers on the changes complicates the picture considerably. For instance, from 1954 to 1967 cropland decreased by 425 acres. Some of this land went into pasture, while an additional 375 acres of pasture regenerated to forests. Like land ownership, farm systems in the Valley were never static. So a shift in cropland, pasture, and forest between any two dates could have been a typical fluctuation. But the virtue of looking at a place over several dates is that you can distinguish normal fluxes within a landscape from long-term changes across the landscape . In the Liberty of 1967, agriculture was clearly on the wane. A drop of 425 acres by 1967 became a drop of nearly 1,875 acres by 1995. From a high in 1954, cultivated land in Liberty fell almost 60 percent. In many rural places, changes in land ownership are bound up with what has become their overriding story, the decline of farm communities. In its most generic form, the story explains the relationship between the two sets of maps as follows: During the twentieth century, national and global market forces clasped an ever-tighter grip on rural America. Farmers had to meet international market demands or get out of agriculture. By the 1960s, local real estate markets were also changing. Farmland went cheap in many places—an attraction to investors and speculators—while recreational land (rising in popularity) went more expensively. Increasingly those who could or would pay fair market value were neither local nor farmers. An “invisible hand” was at work in which thousands of independent real estate buyers and sellers inexorably reshaped rural America. This is the big story, the narrative with which these first three chapters are concerned. There is an interesting puzzle in the data, however. Land turnover in Liberty actually decreased from 1955 to 1965, the very period in which agriculture began its decline. Only 44 percent of Liberty’s land changed hands during that period, by comparison with a turnover of 52 percent from 1930 to 1940 and 68 percent from 1940 to 1955. Afterward, from...

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