Renewing the Countryside: Wisconsin

New York’s junior senator Hillary Clinton, around this time last decade, gave a speech entitled “It Takes a Village to Raise a Child, ” which became a book, It Takes a Village and Other Lessons Children Teach Us (1994). As I read Renewing the Countryside Wisconsin—both the profiles of the local, regional, and community businesses and organizations and the afterword explaining how Wisconsin’s contribution to the Renewing series came to fruition —Senator Clinton’s mantra came to mind. This interesting snapshot of how rural marketplaces have succeeded through linking to suburban and urban centers could not have been created without the work of myriad people throughout the state.

This book’s editors brought together stories of thirty-nine businesses and organizations, cleaved into seven subsections —Arts and Culture, Innovative Farming, Building Community, Towards a Healthy Planet, Travel and Recreation, Good Enough to Eat, and Learning and Action. Most of these groups are ensconced in rural Wisconsin. These entities, from chairmakers to cheesemakers and community radio creators to county farmer’s market creators, used twenty-first century tools to attempt to earn a living and boost the state’s rural economy.

The editors enlisted the help of writers and photographers from around the state to describe each group’s work and vision both verbally and photographically. The writers interviewed the men and women who own the business or lead the organization, as well as interested community members, to let each individual’s words help create the text. The first-hand accounts enrich the document, particularly the sections on Native American rural initiatives that not only use these current interviews but also discuss how oral tradition helps vivify their community’s economy.

As mentioned earlier, Renewing the Countryside: Wisconsin has become a part of a series. This idea was spawned in The Netherlands, as an attempt to boost that country’s rural denizens through showcasing new approaches to noncity prosperity. It gained a foothold in the U.S. and has inspired both the series of books (Wisconsin appears to be the fifth state after Minnesota, Iowa, North Dakota, and Washington) and a nonprofit group. (One can go to www.renewingthecountryside.org for more information, including their store to purchase books and other material.)

As always when someone has published this type of book, the question about choice will arise. Even with thirty-nine essays, the editors note that they are only showcasing “a fraction” (161) of the possible examples. If there were so many other candidates, perhaps they could have been displayed with a paragraph each and added to the wonderful map (or created an additional map), depicting where these case studies live.

In this type of book, which the reviewer has heard described as vanity histories, the focus does shine on those that have succeeded or persevered. These editors probably found examples of rural initiatives that have floundered or failed. While that type of story would belie the Renewing title, their examples could serve as cautionary tales to those who would read this book and say, “Let’s try something like that! ” without perhaps doing the necessary research. It should be noted, however, that on several occasions in this piece, the men and women do describe the depth and breadth of research they do to keep their business or organization afloat and furnish examples of how living rural has its share of fiscal and emotional bumps and bruises.

Is this work imbued with oral history? It is not in the definitional sense. I would guess that most interviews were not recorded and did not end up in a repository. But Renewing the Countryside: Wisconsin does offer readers a view of men and women trying to create a landscape —both with new and old ideas —in a global economy, an idea that historians (oral or otherwise) should be keen to gather and preserve. Or, perhaps it will spur other “villages” in other states to document this movement, too. And from my perspective, the book has given the oral history community in Wisconsin dozens and dozens of future narrators for possible rural renewal oral history projects.