Farming the Cutover: A Social History of Northern Wisconsin, 1900-1940

by Robert Gough

Overview

After northern Wisconsin was cleared by commercial loggers early in the twentieth century, enthusiastic promoters and optimistic settlers envisioned transforming this "cutover" into a land of yeoman farmers. Here thousands of families—mostly immigrants or second-generation Americans—sought to recreate old worlds and build new farms on land that would come to be considered agriculturally worthless. In the end, they succumbed not to drought or soil depletion but to social and political pressures from those who looked askance at their way of life.

Farming the Cutover describes the visions and accomplishments of these settlers from their own perspective. People of the cutover managed to forge lives relatively independent of market pressures; and for this they were characterized as backward by outsiders and their part of the state was seen as a hideout for organized crime figures. State and federal planners, county agents, and agriculture professors eventually determined that the cutover could be engineered and the lives of its inhabitants improved. By 1940, they had begun to implement public policies that discouraged farming and they eventually decided that the region should be depopulated and the forests replanted.

By exploring the history of an eighteen-county region, Robert Gough illustrates the travails of farming in "marginal" areas. He juxtaposes the social history of the farmers with the opinions and programs of the experts who sought to improve the region, and shows how what occurred in the Wisconsin cutover anticipated the sweeping changes that would transform American agriculture after World War II. Farming the Cutover is a readable story of the hopes and failures of people who struggled to build new lives in an inhospitable environment. It makes an important counterpoint to Turnerian myths and the more commonly-told success stories of farming history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780700608508
Publisher:	University Press of Kansas
Publication date:	10/29/1997
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. The Cutover in 1900

2. Building a New Life in the Cutover, 1900-1920

3. The Shaping of the Cutover by Agricultural Experts, 1895-1925

4. Struggles with Adversity, 1920-1940

5. A New View of the Cutover, 1925-1940

6. The Cutover in the Late 1930s: Last Efforts at Yeoman Farming

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliographic Essay

Index

Editorial Reviews

"Farming the Cutover revisits a sad chapter in American agricultural history, and this time puts a human face on on it. The strength is in the narrative which weaves together the lives of many people who struggled against the environment—physical, financial, social, and political—to start new lives in the cutover."—H-Net Reviews

"This book is valuable for readers interested in the sustainable agricultural movement, as the values of that movement are similar to the values of the cutover farmers."—Journal of American History

"A detailed, informative, and enjoyable account of the agricultural settlements and farms that sprouted in the desolate ‘cutover’ region of northern Wisconsin."—Choice

"A major contribution to the agricultural history of Wisconsin and American agriculture in general."—Wisconsin Magazine of History

"An important study for understanding the human experience in the denuded forest lands of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota."—Michigan Historical Review

"Gough tells a fascinating story of the people who inhabited the farms of the cutover and the social and economic world they built."—Annals of Iowa

"A tender elegy to yeoman farming and to the American dream that it represented for centuries. Gough sets forth a tenacious indictment of those who fancied themselves the best and the brightest, who wrought the destruction of that dream. His achingly sad account teems with tantalizing implications for our understanding of our history as a rural society and of our fragile future as a capitalist nation."—Michael Zuckerman, author of Almost Chosen People: Oblique Biographies in the American Grain

"Gough has an ear for the telling anecdote. He really knows the cutover and demonstrates an admirable affection for it."—David Danbom, author of A History of Rural America

"A meticulously researched analysis of one of the sadder episodes in the rural history of the United States that is informed by both the new rural history and an understanding of environmental and policy issues."—Hal S. Barron, author of Those Who Stayed Behind: Rural Society in Nineteenth-Century New England

"An engaging history."—John Gjerde, author of The Minds of the West

From the Publisher

Chronicling the recycling of land use in Northern Wisconsin from logging to marginal farming on cutover lands back to (replanted) forests, Gough (history, U. of Wisconsin, Eau Claire) narrates an accessible case study of trends that shattered the myth of successful yeomen farmers and transformed American agriculture after World War II. For forging independent lives on marginal lands, these settlers were stigmatized as backward organized crime harborers. Public planners would do well to review the sometimes unexpected results of the Progressive social model applied to this part of the country. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

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