I’m the last person to be writing about a family farm. Born in Chicago, raised in the suburbs, I lived on a pig farm for only fifteen years, and I really don’t have the perspective of a third generation farmer. Yet farms have played an integral part in my family’s story.
During the second half of the nineteenth century in Sweden two driving factors for emigration were the compulsory membership in the state church and the potato famine. All Swedes were required to register with the state church—the Swedish Lutheran Church. The church collected taxes. If you moved, you had to tell the church where you lived and then register with the church in the new location.
The potato famine hit Sweden about the same time as it hit Ireland, causing poverty and starvation, so there was hope in emigration by looking to the U.S. One of my ancestors was an eighteen-year old woman with a one-year-old child. They had been living on one bowl of potato soup a day.
My mother’s grandfather (Axel Victor Gabrielsson) was unable to hold a job because of alcohol use, so he left Sweden illegally (did not tell the church) and came to the U.S. His son (Johann Albert Edward Axelsson) followed in 1874. I have little information on where they lived until Axel shows up in Varna, Illinois (in north central Illinois). I looked Varna up and decided to take a trip. What I found was shocking. The town of 3,000 people had decent homes, but the downtown area was run down with empty stores scattered among the ones still open. On the main street, a set of huge grain bins overwhelmed the little ones next to them. Instead of seeing miles of family farms, there were miles of huge farms, obviously owned by corporations. How had this happened over our lifetimes?
When my great-grandparents and grandparents came to the United States, they found their way from New York City to rural Illinois and Iowa. The railroad offered steady work, and farms needed hired hands. Western Iowa was the frontier, and those who stayed on the land for five years could acquire it for free. A man in Sweden bought land in southwest Iowa and put ads in Swedish papers for God-fearing men to settle it. I like to joke that he got my great-grandparents instead.
My mother’s parents met in northwest Iowa, where her father was a circuit preacher and her mother was an organist in two churches. They traveled to Boston, New York City, and Chicago, where he ministered to large Swedish churches. When the Depression hit he retired to a farm in Red Oak, Iowa. The remaining family consisted of him, a son, daughter-in-law, three children and my mom. They lived off the food they could grow, since ministers weren’t paid salaries then. The idea that a small farm could sustain a family seems ludicrous now.
My father’s parents lived in Stanton, Iowa, a very Swedish town, where his grandparents owned the local hardware store. It failed in the Great Depression. My parents knew each other in high school, but became interested in each other on a train trip home for the holidays one year. Dad rode the rails with cattle for the stockyards in Chicago, then worked in the steel mills in Gary, Indiana. Mom had gone to Swedish Covenant Hospital for nurses training. My parents left the small towns for the suburbs and never missed it.
The government began legislating to help farmers. The years of 1940-1950 brought technology making it easier to plant, fertilize and harvest. Farmers began to sell excess crops to other countries. The Food Stamp Act of 1964 had as its goal “to achieve a more effective use of agricultural overproduction, improve levels of nutrition among individuals with low-incomes and strengthen the agricultural economy. “ (1) Schools found their free lunches were often heavy on surplus dairy and corn products.
Fast forward to the 1960s. Young people were not happy with the culture and created a counterculture. Going “back to the land” was a trend, although most hippy-like famers were not successful in living off the land. Nevertheless, it was an ideal. The environmental movement was in its infancy. Heavily influenced by this, my brother left his well-paying computer job to live in a Colorado commune. I was offered a job in western Illinois in January and chose it over one on the west side of Chicago. I fell in love with the land and the people and stayed, met my children’s father. Small family farms were still available at that time, although it helped if your parents and grandparents had land to leave you.
The farm debt crisis in 1980s was a result of higher interest rates and lower land and crop prices. I remember news of a farmer that went to a savings and loan company and shot a person. I also remember wondering what we would live on for two weeks, when our money ran out one month.
To be continued…
(1) The History of SNAP, https://www.snaptohealth.org/snap/the-history-of-snap/. Accessed 5/7/22.
