Littletowners

This book is part of the distinguished Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Modern History series edited by Robert Fogel and Stephan Thernstrom. Author Dean May furthers a series tradition of deeply researched and challenging discussions of transitions and change in the American countryside. ¹ In Three Frontiers, May takes the series west. He has painstakingly reconstructed the lives of the people who settled three tiny, far-flung communities in the American West—Sublimity (Oregon), Alpine (Utah), and Middleton (Idaho)—during the second half of the nineteenth century. Three Frontiers is superbly researched, and May renders his findings with empathy and care. The farming families come to life in these pages.

In the book’s introduction, May makes reference to the difficulties of doing research on small American farming towns of a hundred or more years ago. Sources are few and, like the towns under study here, widely scattered. The research process is, as May’s colleague Paul Johnson reminded him, virtually archeological. The historian pours and sifts tiny bits of data in the hope that some semblance of reconstruction might yield insight and sustain analysis. It is an appropriate image, for May has certainly culled data from every imaginable source. Diaries, journals, and family letters have been meticulously sorted and studied, as have ledger after ledger of tax, probate, and land sale compilations.

An even more fitting archeological metaphor would be to think of historian May using one of those impossibly tiny archeological brushes, carefully dusting away speck after speck of intervening residue from the rural past. He then uses that same brush to paint the stories in this book in great detail. That attentive care portrays America’s farming past as a lost world, one palpably, if not incalculably, different than ours of today.

May not only visits each of his three towns but sticks around awhile. He gets to know the people; there’s Worthy, Ephraim, and Bountiful, Jeptha and Enoch, Melancthon and Temperance, even Cinderella. Photographs reveal these sturdy rural folk and their pride in homes and farms. The little brush works detail into the narrative. Farm accidents rob children of fathers, disease carries away helpless infants, a wife dies, a man remarries. Stumps get yanked out of the ground, a farmer works alongside a hired man and a horse or ox. Grain goes from farmland to market and comes back in the form of cash or perhaps a maple sideboard or cherished oil painting hung in a sitting room. Throughout, farmers make certain to keep track of land and water (how much, how good, how expensive), knowing that bad weather or bad luck can so easily and so quickly spell ruin. May’s careful work in narrative sources is complemented by his equally careful renderings of quantitative research findings.

May suggests that his book began as a project by which he would illustrate “the world we have lost.” There is no doubt that he has done this. But there’s more to the story than rural reconstruction, and May clearly expects us to see the differences between his three chosen communities even more than the similarities. This aspect of the project requires a heavier stroke to bring life in Sublimity, Alpine, and Middleton into relief and have it stand out from the general backdrop of hardscrabble nineteenth-century American farm life.

Sublimity, in Oregon’s Willamette Valley (close to Salem) was settled in the 1840s by people in search of more room and better land to do what they had always done: farm. In the 1850s, Mormon converts out of England’s industrial heartland began settling in and around Alpine, Utah (south of Salt Lake City). Many of the settlers in Middleton, Idaho (just west of Boise), atop rich farmland and near important mineral deposits, were simply escaping the divisive horrors of the Civil War in the 1860s and 1870s.

May posits and develops three different cultural ideals critical to each town’s founding and, essentially, each town...