The Midwest Farmers Daughter: In Search of an American Icon

Preface: Pioneering Women

ix The Story of a Pioneer Cedar County Farm” headlines the account of my ancestor Levi Pickert’s settling of our midwestern family farm. “The next year, 1855, he again came out to Iowa,” the recounting goes, “bringing not only his wife and son, but his father and mother also.” So begins the history of my people, and the plot advanced as they planted seeds real and metaphorical in the good midwestern dirt. Yet while the presumed protagonist of the pioneering drama, Levi, earns multiple mentions, his helpmate in life remains nameless but for the unremarkable moniker “wife.” As the pioneering history unfolds with its breathless stories of the “coldest winter in Iowa’s history” when, “for forty consecutive days it did not thaw,” climaxing in tales of hangings and horses thieves on a frontier where “trees in the vicinity [had] been decorated with the bodies of desperadoes,” the very name of Levi’s life partner is lost to the wind, a sound and fury, signifying nothing. PREFACE PIONEERING WOMEN “ PREFACE x By my late twenties I could recite the names of my male farming forebears on the Pickert side as far back as the early 1800s. But had I been asked to name a wife or daughter predating my great-grandmother, I would surely have come up empty, not because I was a poor student of genealogy, but because the names were seldom found in print. It wasn’t until my thirties, in fact, that a bundle of letters I’d chanced upon revealed to me the hearts of the family’s farm daughters, making them, quite literally, something to have and to hold. In one letter datelined 1867, Syracuse, New York, Eliza Smith writes her long-lost sister, my great-great-great-grandmother Sally Pickert, wife of Levi, to observe, “This world is full of sorrow and disappointment. We was very glad to hear from you once more and know that you are alive, but I think you will not live long if you keep on working so hard as you do. What profit will it be to you to have it said that you were rich after you are dead? I have seen the folly of working so hard for greater riches and see them take wings and fly away. Sally, you do not know how much I want to see you and talk with you. I have so much to say that I can’t write . . .” The earliest missive Sally saved, dated 1855, would have arrived while she, Levi, and her in-laws shared a one-room schoolhouse with four other families, according to a 1962 article in the Cedar Rapids Gazette entitled “Three Generations of Pickerts Have Lived in Mechanicsville House.” The Pickerts arrived in Davenport, Iowa, in 1854 by train from Waterton, New York, the Gazette’s Amber Jackson reported, and began walking west until they came upon the 200 acres of black earth that would become our Iowa Heritage Farm, purchasing the ground from David Platner for the bargain price of $10 an acre. Jackson’s recounting makes no mention of the female partners in the enterprise beyond the wife-obscuring umbrella “The Levi Pickerts,” nor does it mention the baby Sally lost in that first unforgiving year in the Heartland. “Your Uncle Ben told me he would give $100 if you would come back,” another New York relative named William Wallis conveyed in his own note to his far-flung Iowa relatives. But there would be no such turning back for pioneering families, not for love or money, no diminution of the arcadian dream of mother and father, daughter and son, cultivating the countryside for generations. To the yeoman the dream seemed unerring, the yield xi PIONEERING WOMEN perennial. The farmer’s son may have made the harvest possible, but the daughter made it worthwhile. And still today the same reverie comes each spring, the scenes are the same. Everything, in fact, save for the little girl,” my great-grandfather Walter Thomas Jack wrote of his own farmer’s daughter, Helen, in his book The Furrow and Us. “She has grown up now and has gone, but imagination keeps her on the set, and her role will always be that of the leading lady.” Still, even as Grandpa Walt penned homage to his own long-gone girl of 1943, powerful cultural and economic changes had already swept many a farm...