Pennsylvania Farming: A History in Landscapes by Sally McMurry (review)

Sally McMurry, a seasoned fieldworker and researcher, has crafted a book that treats the cultural and architectural legacy of agriculture in a single state, but which represents a scholarly work of national significance for its insights into the interplay between agricultural method, architectural landscape, and broader societal currents. Pennsylvania is not just any state when it comes to farm history. Early on, the “best poor man’s country” was America’s most voluminous producer of foodstuffs, exporting great quantities of wheat flour to feed the populations of the British Isles, the Iberian peninsula, the sea-board towns of New England, and the islands of the Caribbean. Colonial-era Pennsylvania farmers of German-speaking and British Isles heritage developed an American cultural pattern of farmstead arrangement and agricultural methods, emphasizing diversified production of farm commodities, that was carried west to Ohio, southwest to the Valley region of Virginia, and beyond, and ultimately informed agriculture in a vast portion of the nation. What better agricultural building type to personify the impact of this migration on the nation’s architectural landscape than the Pennsylvania barn (as identified and defined by Robert Ensminger) or forebay barn as McMurry terms it.¹

Examining the landscape of the entire state, McMurry marshals data and stories on a multiplicity of settings, groups of people, and aspects of farming method and life. She treats these phenomena over time, developing an interwoven narrative of the social and cultural development of the nation that formed the context in which Pennsylvania agriculturists thrived and struggled, of economic rises and declines, and of the transformations in agricultural and architectural technology. McMurry writes with a varied touch, often bringing humor and a conversational informality that most readers would not expect when they initially heft this tome. Throughout the book she uses firsthand sources, especially diaries from individual farm families, to convey a more immediate sense of the life experience of the historical actors.

McMurry opens the work by identifying three major themes pervading the overall work. One is the character of farm work and organization of farm labor. McMurry attends closely to gender roles, as well as to strategies of farm tenancy, which varied over time and between regions. The second of the book’s major themes is the role of diversification in farming as regards crops and other farm commodities produced. McMurry’s third major theme is the impact of modernization as manifested in farming technology and in the impact of evolving aspects of the larger society such as transportation systems, modes of marketing foodstuffs, and the ever-increasing degree of urbanization and suburbanization.

Sally McMurry is no stranger to agricultural history, having earlier produced two national-level monographs, Families and Farmhouses in Nineteenth-Century America (1988), and Transforming Rural Life: Dairying Families and Agricultural Change, 1820–1885 (1995), as well as From Sugar Camps to Star Barns (2001), a study of agriculture and rural life in Somerset County, Pennsylvania. But the present volume’s scope in terms of chronology, topics and themes, and geographical coverage are of an entirely different order. This book is an outgrowth of the Pennsylvania Agricultural History Project, a “gray literature” contextual project undertaken to facilitate the evaluation of historic agricultural resources, that McMurry led over the decade 2005–2015. Presenting an accessible summation of the study’s wealth of knowledge, McMurry has drawn on the research of many collaborators. Her personal achievement is no less, however, as the book represents an analytical accomplishment in synthesizing a complex body of data and thematic strands to make an encompassing interpretation informed by a unitary vision. In addition, the work is pervaded by the strength of insight McMurry gained from driving the backroads in every region of the state.

This is just the second full-length book ever to treat the history of agriculture in Pennsylvania on a statewide basis. The predecessor was a two-volume study published in the...