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  • They Have All Gone AwayFarms, Families, and Change
  • Paula Nelson
Curtis Harnack, We Have All Gone Away. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011 (reprint of 1973 edition). 188 pp. $19.95 (paper).
Sara DeLuca, Dancing the Cows Home: A Wisconsin Girlhood. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1996. 232 pp. $15.95 (paper).
Sara DeLuca, The Crops Look Good: News from a Midwestern Family Farm. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2015. 254 pp. $17.95 (paper).

Farming was once central to American life. In 1790, ninety-six percent of the population lived in rural areas, most on farms; in 1860, eighty percent of Americans still lived on farms or in small towns. Farming was the route to independence, self-sufficiency, security, and prosperity. The work was hard, but it brought reassuring seasonal routines: the births and deaths of livestock; planting, growing, and harvesting crops; family births, maturity, aging, deaths. Farms provided an organic unity that conveyed lessons about nature and the human condition that were sometimes hard to learn. For some families, the farm became a sacred entity, standing apart from and above the family. Even in today's modern, super-mechanized agriculture, there remains great pride in having had multiple generations farm the same ground. There is regret, even grief, when the farm is sold and bulldozers erase decades of family history.

Post-Civil War urbanization and industrialization, however, created new technologies, new opportunities, and new values that undermined agriculture's cultural primacy. Working set hours for pay appealed to farm children, as did chances for entertainment and the possibility of socializing [End Page 213] with people beyond family and the farm neighborhood. By the 1920s, slightly more Americans lived in cities than in rural areas. Farm mechanization and consolidation accelerated the trend: farmers made up forty-one percent of the workforce in 1900; 21.5 percent in 1930; four percent in 1970; and only 1.9 percent in 2000–2002.1 Although all farm families struggled with the vagaries of nature, low crop prices, and an over-abundance of work, they were not all the same, as the books reviewed here illustrate. Both authors describe farm families' lives and labors from the late nineteenth through late twentieth centuries, but some reveal significant dissent from the belief that farming offered the best life. By the end of each memoir, no one from these families farmed.

The poignant title of Curtis Harnack's classic memoir about his extended family in Plymouth County, Iowa, We Have All Gone Away, sums up the history of midwestern agriculture. The careful planning and hard work of his grandfather John Harnack, who acquired 240 acres of northwest Iowa land in the 1880s, led to prosperity and more comforts than most farm families enjoyed. A skilled carpenter, he raised a landmark barn and other outbuildings, planted fruit trees and berry bushes, built a large house to replace the first home, a 6x10 cabin, and created a successful farm. By 1900 the family had running water and a complete bathroom in the house. They were prosperous, even during the Great Depression. Curtis Harnack grew up in an atypical family arrangement. His mother, Carrie Meyer, earned a college degree and taught school for ten years before marrying Henry Harnack in 1920. They shared the substantial farm home with Henry's brother, Jack, and his wife, Lizzie Meyer, Carrie's youngest sister. Curtis, born in 1927, was the youngest of four. When Henry Harnack died of pneumonia six months after Curtis's birth, Carrie decided to stay on the farm with Jack, Lizzie, and their three children so that her children would have a father figure in Uncle Jack. Nonetheless, she made sure that her children knew that they would leave the farm for brighter futures elsewhere. Uncle Jack had never wanted to farm, but fell into it when his father retired. Lizzie, much to her disappointment, had to leave school after eighth grade to care for her ailing stepmother and do the household work. Unhappy with their lot, Jack and Lizzie also expected their children to move up and out.

Despite the wariness of the second generation of Harnacks toward farm life, Harnack's memoir...

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