“Ancient Prayers” — Discing, Planting, Cutting

Contemporary agrarian art and literature offer insightful if variable perspectives on the transformation of rural landscapes and ways of country life. Stories and paintings can be elegiac and abstract as well as hopeful, with expressions of agrarian renewal evident in newfound appreciation for regional heritage and stewardship of the land. These considerations juxtapose values related to the natural world with those of private development and global capitalism. There is little to regret about archaic rural prejudices, grinding aspects of exhaustive dawn to dusk farm labor, and highly erosive tillage practices that once characterized areas like the Palouse. Small town redevelopment efforts are examining in new ways how local stories, specialty crops, and other resources might be shared to better contend with shifting labor patterns and demographic change. Harvest bees and church benefits still aid neighbors in times of special need. At the same time the annual harvest experience requires seasonal urgency, and the instinct for necessary provision unites humanity worldwide through rituals of planting and harvesting and thanksgiving.

Reflecting on contemporary agrarian experience, my longtime friend and novelist Bruce Holbert observes that in places like the Palouse, “God is in the details—turning a wrench, discing the summer fallow, spraying and rod-weeding, planting and cutting.” He considers these to be prayers “of the ancient sort, the ones you offer not for an answer as much as to be heard. Their reward is the opportunity to perform similar acts tomorrow and the next day. Their faith is not invested in an end; it is the opposite, a prayer to continue and in it is a kind of patience with the fates that few outside this place share.” The inhabitants of Holbert’s stories are not portrayed to explore the classic American theme of personal freedom amidst the conformist mainstream. Instead, they seem to take for granted a life of mystery and misery amidst economic hardship and the vagaries of nature, and speak perceptively from deep within as they move about in clouds of uncertainty. Holbert explores the abiding toil and periodic terrors of country life in Hour of Lead (2014), winner of the Washington State Book Award for Fiction, and in other novels and writings. His short story “Ordinary Days,” in which the Mason Hills are cast for the Palouse, features an exploration of rural change and meaning-making.

Nostalgia for some halcyon past contributes to the popularity of rural art but tempered with consideration of what has been lost and what has been gained. These contrasting themes are considerably explored in contemporary photographic art and are the special interest of Pacific Northwesterner John Clement and Don Kirby of Santa Fe. Ambivalent considerations about such trends are expressed in “Palouse” by Lewiston, Idaho, poet William Johnson:

There is always an empty house

by the road at the edge of town,

its windows whiskered with lilac

and letting in rain. Nearby,

a barn drags itself home,

and in May, daffodils trim the yard

against an ocean of wheat

that rolls in on a slow inexorable tide.

The stark, mysterious black-and-white photography of Kirby’s Wheatcountry (2001) shows unpeopled agrarian vistas from Texas to Washington. Essayist Richard Manning writes of the contrast between the imaginative West of the national consciousness—reshaped since settlement and largely uninhabited, and landscapes tended by farmers who contend with the vagaries of weather and maneuver through an array of government programs to provision the masses. Kirby’s monochromatic views bear the titles of nearby locations scarcely known or seen by outsiders, but that conjure memory and meaning to locals. His Palouse series includes Diamond and Lancaster (places where farmers came from miles around to procure seed wheat), Harrington and Pomeroy (home to area flour mills), and the Snake River port of Central Ferry, which remains one of the Northwest’s largest grain exporting terminals.

Having grown up in the vicinity, I immediately recognized Kirby’s “Wheatfield III, Repp Road, Endicott, Washington,” which shows a prodigious stand of ripening wheat cloaking an enormous swirl of sloping summer-fallow beneath a stack of cumulus clouds. The Repp family had the only pool for miles around before the town built one in the 1960s, so kindly taught a generation of us how to swim. The matriarch of the clan is still active at age 104 and her nephew Mike Lowry—our state’s twentieth governor who contributed to normalized US-Russia relations in the 1990s, surely helped harvest that very hill. Trends in the depopulation of the countryside are found throughout the nation, even as affordability of houses in small towns has helped keep some populated with newcomers to sustain local schools, churches, and clubs. Shrinking numbers of farmers remain as vital carriers of intimate knowledge about the land and growing conditions, and of practical skills that keep bringing forth the crops.

Themes of change upon the landscape mixed with agrarian wonder characterized many poems by Pulitzer Prize winning author Howard Nemerov (1920-1991). Although the New York native spent much of his life in academia, he traveled widely through the New England countryside and with publication of his 1955 collection The Salt Garden, Nemerov’s refined, contemplative verse took on more practical tones in defense of the land. Poems like “Midsummer’s Day” and “The Winter Lightning” reflect upon the timelessness of the seasons and consider a consilience with humanity’s ephemeral presence. In “A Harvest Home” an abandoned vehicle stands in a recently harvested field (“So hot and mute the human will / As though the angry wheel stood still / That hub and spoke and iron rim”), while marvelous creatures of the wing appear throughout the day—jays “proclaim” dawn, afternoon crows “arise and shake their heavy wings,” and an owl “complains in darkness.”

Questioning Popular Assumptions

Jacqueline Daisley, Palouse Hills—End of Harvest (2018), Oil on canvas, 42 ½ x 32 inches, Columbia Heritage Collection

Recent Palouse Country fine art exhibitions that have explored themes of food security and agrarian landscapes have been sponsored by the Pullman Arts Council, Moscow Arts Commission, and Colfax Arts Council. They have featured works by George Bedirian, Vicki Broeckel, Anna Blomfield, and by Jacqueline Daisley, who lives on a farm near Pullman where the surrounding countryside inspired her curvaceous masterpiece, Palouse Hills—End of Harvest. Anna Blomfield embarked on an artistic farrago in the fall of 2006 to explore and depict Palouse grain production throughout the seasons. The British newcomer had studied painting and printmaking at St. Martin’s School of Art in London and in Liverpool before moving to California in 1987 to work as an animator and muralist. Her popular online “frogblog cartoondiary” commenced on November 7, 2006 when she observed, “If I wanted to buy a combine harvester there are 3 dealers in town to choose from.” Blomfield, whose family had operated a farm implement business, first applied her special interest in the venerable forms of manual labor to paintings of foundry and tannery workers.

Relocation to the Northwest brought unexpected agrarian vistas and serendipitous friendships with area farmers, combine dealers, shop mechanics, and others engaged in agricultural pursuits. “I was entranced with the landscape, the people, and the various crops” she remembered; “each one had a story to tell and show.” Over the course of her five-year residence in the region, these encounters yielded dozens of such colorfully illustrated posts as “Out Amongst the Wheatfields (8.28.07),” “Threshing Bee (9.3.08),” and “A Combine Chorus Line (4.25.2010)” with commentary provided by the artist’s alter ego Froggie who traveled year-round in Studio Subaru. Characterizing her captivating genre as “visual storytelling,” Blomfield combined illustration and information to transport and amuse readers through expeditions to harvest fields, grain elevators, inspection stations, rural railroad sidings. Public “gallery” showings of her popular work were appropriately held in repurposed silos, barns, and the farm equipment dealerships she had first noted in her earliest online posts.

Henry Stinson, Untitled Wall Mural (2019), Fonk’s Store Mural; Colfax, Washington

Columbia Heritage Photograph

Pullman, Washington, artist Henry Stinson has painted beautiful representational canvases of harvesting combines and other modern farm equipment in action, but is especially known for whimsical views that reflect his lifelong fascination with gadgets and electricity that attest to modern American society’s ubiquitous connections to technology. An enormous untitled Stinson 2019 exterior wall mural looks as if American Gothic appeared in an 1960s episode of Lost in Space. The painting reflects the artist’s interest in a world where people and livestock increasingly share rural landscapes with with drones and satellite-controlled, computer-monitored  field equipment. The work may also suggest dehumanization of the countryside as well as frayed intimacy and responsibility to landscapes.

Disturbing provocations have long been essential work for artists and authors who question popular assumptions about the benefits of innovation and globalization while trying to preserve what should not change. Shapes and names of the surreal artwork of contemporary Canadian painter Jo-Anne Elniski reflect rural environmental concerns. The Last Harvest depicts a fulminating sky in vivid swirls of yellow, purple, and white that rain down upon rows of grain that wave in the same garish colors. Other works by Elniski like Field of Gold and Prairie Harvest appear as flaming fields of abundance that rise to confront brightly lit horizons of pink, orange, and yellow. The depictions are awesome if unsettling. Yet concerns expressed through art and literature also present opportunities for reconsideration of assumptions, intervention, and progressive change. Such reconsideration is a principal theme of Indian author-anthropologist Amitav Ghosh’s 2016 book The Great Derangment. Ghosh’s ecumenical survey of world literature from the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Odyssey explores storytelling as commentary on natural resource extraction and climate change. He holds authors and artists of the modern era as culpable as politicians and economists for a collective failure of imagination to express an unfolding “derangement” of natural systems, social stability, and food production.

A disturbing scenario of consequences resulting from such dislocation is the subject of Uncertain Harvest (2021) by Vermont sociologist Charles Simpson (1941-2021). The novel relates American journalist Ed Dekker’s hazardous global quest after uncovering evidence at a European biotech conference of minacious environmental and food security risks wrought by transnational agribusinesses. Dekker finds that the company “Naturetek” and others exert unprecedented control of the university and government research sectors and develop genetically engineered terminator seeds that produce sterile offspring and compel grower reliance on their patented germplasm. The engaging story draws on Simpson’s own experiences working with farmers and indigenous peoples in Mexico and Guatemala and investigation of U. S. government subsidies, lax regulation, and global trade policies that are inimical to small-scale sustainable farming and regional rural development.

I first learned about the scope of GMO commercialization in 2012 while traveling from Seattle to a global orphan care conference in Indonesia. I noticed the logos of prominent U. S. seed suppliers on the shirts and backpacks of other passengers on the Tokyo to Bali connection. I spoke with several while waiting for our bags at the airport and learned that the Asia & Pacific Seed Association Conference was also taking place that same week at the city’s posh Legian Seminyak Resort. During a break in the meetings I was attending in more humble surroundings, I ventured across town to the seed conference and met security befitting the visit of a head of state. After considerable effort and the intervention of delegates I had met on the plane, I was finally admitted. A combination trade show with large group presentations, the forum provided an opportunity for transnational agribusinesses like Sygenta, Bayer, and Monsanto to showcase proprietary seeds and technologies that I was told could “transform” Asian agriculture.

Small Farmer’s Journal 45:2 (November 2021)

Cover Photo: Measuring a Case thresher operating speed

One of the influential contemporary voices on small-scale sustainable farming and rural culture is painter-farmer-author Lynn R. Miller of Sisters, Oregon, who has written over twenty books of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. In publication since 1976, Miller’s quarterly Small Farmer’s Journal reaches 20,000 readers and features articles on a wide range of topics for farmers and ranchers devoted to the “craft” of farming and husbandry and for those interested in the life and literature of the countryside. He decries industrial agriculture as well as trivialized boutique “fad” farming. The Journal has featured numerous harvest-related articles including Esther M. Jensen’s c. 1940 Willamette Valley memoir, “The Day the Threshers Came,” equipment reprints like H. R. Trolley’s “The Efficient Operation of Thrashing Machines” from a 1918 USDA Farmer’s Bulletin, and detailed accounts by twenty-first century operators of horse-drawn reaper-binders and stationary threshers like Khoke and Ida Livingston of Davis City, Iowa (“The Harvest of Grain”).  Miller’s photo essay “Anatomy of a Threshing” (2021) is a prelude to forthcoming books, “Threshing Machines” and “Grain Binders and Reapers,” which will be the culmination of his years-long mission to glean practical information from out-of-print books, manuals, parts lists, and catalogs.

 Miller describes the Journal as more of a “community odyssey” than periodical. In a recent editorial titled “Seedbeds & The Rooted Mend,” he recalls visiting a local high school where he was asked to speak about farming. “I told them, no I tried to show them, that the small s big F—small Farming—the one where the farmer is the measure—contains every single element of life, most every attainable pedestal of adventure, and the best chance at everlasting health.” Perhaps spurred by the immediacy youthful hearers, Miller then mused about the significance of their high desert homeland: “To take root here is to find and see the elements, wind, sun, trees, wildlife and our own meddlesome footprints as belonging. You do that in part by keeping sight of what is near at hand, by being ‘short-sighted.’ If you are looking off to imagined holiday vacations, to deep seedy city environs, to video fantasies, to cosmetics in pursuit, to worrisome accounting, you will NOT see yourself rooted, you will NOT see the other elements near you as rooted.” In closing Miller expressed hope that his enduring effort at “community journalism” had provided “a soft drumming of information, shared adventure, and kinship” to support, celebrate, and gather the vital assembly of “human-scale,” small farmers.

Scythes, Sickles, and Mr. Tusser

A vivid memory from my Palouse Country boyhood is watching Dad cut tall grasses and weeds around our farmyard with an exceedingly old scythe. He was fond of saying, “There’s a right way and a wrong way” (to just about everything), and I remember him showing my brother and I how to properly hold the handles (“nibs”) and set a rhythm to the cutting. Early cradle scythes appeared in the thirteenth century and are depicted in paintings by Pieter Brueghel the Elder (c. 1525-1569). These featured a small half-circle loop attached to the base of the handle that caught the entire mowed gavel that was dropped at the end of each stroke for gathering into piles. Some ten swaths by an experienced fieldworker typically provided enough stalks to fashion a sheaf about one foot in diameter, and a long day’s labor with a scythe kept keen could cover from one to two acres depending on field conditions. A customary fieldworker echelon of four reapers followed by a binder could then harvest about five to six acres per day. The improved cradle scythe featuring a long scythe blade connected to four to six long wooden ribs that could hold several swaths eventually appeared in nineteenth century America. Its more substantial cuttings were then dropped in the stubble to be bundled and placed into rows of shocks. Using the more modern method, a single cradler-bundler pair could cover about the same area as the medieval five-member team.

Cradle Scythe (c. 1890), Columbia Heritage Collection

In medieval times, a landowner typically appointed a bailiff to preside over the day-to-day operations of the manor’s agricultural enterprises. Reporting to the bailiff were the reeve (Old English gerefa), the workers’ representative in civil affairs, a hayward (heggeward) responsible for safeguarding fields of hay and grain from theft and roaming livestock, and harvest overseer (“lord”) who urged timely completion in Thomas Tusser’s sixteenth century poem, “The End of Harvest.”

COME home, lord, singing,

Come home, corn bringing.

'Tis merry in hall,

Where beards wag all.

Once had thy desire,

Pay workman his hire:

Let none be beguil'd,

Man, woman, nor child.

Thank God ye shall,

And adieu for all.

 Tusser’s classic was among the most popular printed works in Elizabethean England and reflects his own experience as a small farmer. Some proverbs on thrift and country life that appear in his verse may not have been original with him, but appear for the first time in such writings from the period and also testify to harvest labor and equipment from the time (“Threshe sede and go fanne”). Tusser also offers qualified support to the era’s controversial enclosure of open fields which was widely opposed by rural commoners who had long benefited from access to the commons (“champion farming”). But Tusser saw economic benefits for all from individualized stewardship of natural resources that would improve efficiency and diversify crop production (“More profit is quieter found / Where pastures in severall be; / Of one seely acre of ground / Than champion maketh of three”).

Thresholds and Theology

Lewiston, Idaho artist W. Craig Whitcomb has painted rural scenes for a half-century in watercolor and acrylic with subject matter ranging from isolated Northwest grain elevators to English thatched cottages and Japanese landscapes. His Amber Waves (2008), finalist for the first annual “H’Art of the Palouse” Banner Competition, shows an immense abandoned grain elevator in vivid rusty reds and blues rising from a field of ripe grain. Vibrant watercolors of grain and legume fields scenes by Palouse Country artists Jacqueline Daisley, who lives on a farm near Pullman, Washington, and Andy Sewell of Viola, Idaho, have appeared on the posters of the Pullman-based National Lentil Festival.

Andy Sewell, National Lentil Festival Poster (2008), Columbia Heritage Collection

Works by Seattle’s Roger Feldman, winner of the 2005 Prescott Award in Sculpture, reflects his study of theology and art education. Raised in the Palouse Hills, Feldman has created large site-specific sculptures in the United States, Canada, and Europe. He meticulously plans each installation by visiting the location to “dream about the possibilities” before rendering a small 3-D scale maquette from mat board before fashioning a larger, more refined model from wood. For Threshold (2013) at Laity Lodge, an ecumenical retreat along the Frio River in Texas’s Hill Country, Feldman conceived of three interconnected chiseled limestone monoliths including a 15-foot tall tower to represent the three-in-one concept of the Trinity. The work’s title is derived from Hebrew words used in the Old Testament (saph, miptān), a raised beam at the edge of a threshing floor, to signify the boundary between the outside world and sacred space for contemplation and worship.

Roger Feldman, Threshold (Laity Lodge near Leakey, Texas, 2013), Courtesy of the Artist

Tradition and innovation have presented cultural tensions since the dawn of civilization, and responsible appropriation of lifeways from each contributes to humanity’s wellbeing. Like Van Gogh paintings of gleaners and reapers with factory smokestacks on the horizon, great agrarian art and literature contribute to better understandings of tensions that involve emotion and reason, and local and universal values. Among other recent developments in grain production, the advent of minimal tillage operations using specialized power equipment has greatly reduced soil erosion on American farms while increasing yields.

The emerging New Agrarianism of the twenty-first century moves beyond nostalgic romanticism to moderate use of industrial energy within the context of natural systems for soil fertility. Wise approaches to innovation respect stewardship of land and the long term wellbeing of others. Duke Divinity School environmental theologian Norman Wirzba writes of a New Agrarian ethic that honors modern science as well as ancient religious appreciation for the transformative mystery of soil, water, and grain for human sustenance. Implicit acknowledgement is also made of fair compensation for farmers and other workers. “How we make bread, how we share and distribute it, are of profound moral and spiritual significance,” he writes in Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating. “[E]very loaf presupposes decisions that have been made about how to configure the social and ecological relationships that make bread possible.”

Tim Dearborn of Fuller Theological Seminary and author of Taste & See: Awakening our Spiritual Senses (1996) tells of Jesus’ reference to bread in the context of material well-being and spiritual strength. During his temptation in the Wilderness (Luke 4:4), Jesus quotes the familiar Old Testament passage, “[M]an does not live by bread alone” (Deuteronomy 8:3), which recognizes legitimate needs for “daily bread” physical sustenance (Matthew 6:11) provided through divine provision and sacrifice. Sharing food and faith goes hand in hand with prayer (“grace”) and communion with family and friends for the vital, sinuous experience of daily feasting. In this way, meals can transform mundane consumption into enriching spiritual experience that honors grains, greens, and other foods, but recognizes their material essence, cultivation, harvest, and preparation as rooted in meaningful service. The tragedy of religious piety is not materialism Dearborn writes, “but that in a particular way we are not materialistic enough.” By dividing aspects of human existence into sacred and secular realms, one can also render possessions, physical needs, and the land into domains separate from their divine source and protection.

Frustrations with farm equipment repair and long hours of solitary fieldwork may appear scarcely related to religious faith. But farmers and other members of St. Macrina’s Episcopal Church near San Francisco regularly meet to share the challenges of twenty-first century farming with area millers, bakers, brewers, and consumers. All contribute perspectives on grain as a “community crop” and how each group can participate in consequential efforts to strengthen cultural ties and serve as stewards of the land. In 2015, St. Macrina co-founder and Agricultural Chaplain Elizabeth DeRuff established The Bishop’s Ranch Field on Russian River Valley church property near Healdsburg, California. Young and old gather there throughout the year to plant, till, and harvest heritage grain that is milled for communion bread and distributed throughout the diocese. “We want to see local farmers succeed and be part of local communities,” explains Rev. DeRuff, “and to learn with them about ‘belonging’ as well as ‘having.’”

Although based in Baltimore, landscape artist Katherine Nelson has regularly traveled cross-country since 2001 to the Palouse’s undulating grainlands. Her fluid charcoals and dye sublimates capture the summertime chiaroscuro of swirling slopes, saddles, and swales laden with wheat, barley, and legumes. Nelson has also contributed to Oregon State University’s Art About Agriculture program and to Glen Echo, Maryland’s Yellow Barn Gallery exhibitions. She traces threads of her fascination with the region to her diplomat father’s interest in Turkish rugs: “I remember their luxuriant textures and shapes which influenced my affection for rolling landscapes. The Palouse is a tapestry of woven connections among seasons, fields, and people. The effect is thoroughly spiritual and provides a place of reflection, solace, and beauty that overcomes the noise of the outside world.” To emphasize the rhythmic effects of light for line and shadow, Nelson works entirely in black-and-white which evokes heightened awareness of layering, texture, and movement. “My ‘Portraits of the Palouse,’” she explains, “are metaphors for the human prospect. ‘Harvests’ to me are exhibitions that depict the land as hallowed space through views of heritage farm architecture and landscape vistas. Implicit rural values relate to the natural environment, hard work, and community, and are relevant anywhere.”

Katherine Nelson, Ideas About Infinity (detail, Grainfields from Steptoe Butte, 2018), Charcoal and dye sublimate on opaque and sheer fabric, 3 x 9 feet, Collection of the Artist

The McCormick Reaper

I couldn’t help but smile at the special childhood memory brought to mind recently when local historian Manton Bailie, lifelong resident and farmer in rural community of Mesa, Washington, showed me some old farm equipment in rusty retirement at this place. When Manton told me about playing on the old horse-powered mechanical reaper it instantly brought back memories of my own Palouse Country boyhood. Although the old McCormick reapers on the hillside above our house had largely been invaded by the branches of cherry tree, a skinny youth could still wiggle down between wooden draper roll and outside iron wheel and dream of driving a tank.

Edwin Fulwider, Manton Poe (Manton Bailie’s grandfather of Mesa, Washington), The Ford Times (September, 1953)

The effectiveness of mechanical reapers like Manton’s and my grandfather’s equipment led to their widespread use throughout the country and subsequent improvements further reduced the need for rural laborers and rendered traditional field gleaning virtually impossible. While some loss of kernels took place as grain heads could shatter from the reaper’s wooden reel paddles, the stalks were effectively captured to be bound, carted, and threshed. But the ancient grain varieties native to Europe for thousands of years and introduced to the New World as early as the 1500s remained essentially unchanged until twentieth century plant genetics spawned hybridized cultivars resistant to shattering and lodging. The inexorable shift to technological modernity eclipsed eons of social and economic relationships that had guided human endeavor since the beginning of recorded history.

Reaping in the Olden Time; Above: Reaping in Our Time (1857)

“Reaping at Syracuse,” Harper’s Weekly (August 1, 1857)

The momentous tilt that brought greater productivity can be dated with some specificity through art and literature from the period. Explicit depiction of the new horse-power order was shown graphically in an August, 1857, issue of Harper’s Weekly. The unattributed author and artist depicted a gathering during the previous week of the influential U. S. Agricultural Society near Syracuse, New York. Crowds had surrounded a grain field there to witness a competition among ninety-five different mechanical reapers. A grand parade of contestants preceding the event led through an impressive castle façade adorned with colorful flags and banners casting mythic significance on the mechanical marvels, jousting drivers, and patron inventors.

“…[T]he days of the sickle are over,” proclaimed the reporter, who advised readers, “Lay it up—the old tool—in a museum, on a fair cushion; label it, number it, …for the time is coming when the sickle will be as rare as the headsman’s axe or the Spanish blunderbuss. We must have a machine like a steam-engine, with two horses to draw it, which shall tear devastatingly through a field of oats or wheat, cut ten feet wide of grain at a stroke, and lay it all ready for sheaving.” The advent of this “startling mechanical enterprise” would lead to the manufacture of an estimated 200,000 machines the following year, with one of the biggest beneficiaries of such land office business being the manufacturer of the Syracuse contest’s gold medal winner—the McCormick’s Reaper.

Palouse Harvests and “Painterly Skies” — the Agrarian Art of Katherine Nelson and Hal Sutherland

Katherine Nelson’s reputation as artist, thinker, and friend of rural ways long preceded my meeting her several years ago. She had lived in the Spokane area in the 1990s and fallen in love with the rolling grainlands of the Palouse Hills. Although now living in Washington, D.C., Katherine has regularly traveled across the continent since the early 2000s to capture the Palouse’s summertime chiaroscuro of swirling slopes, saddles, and swales. She happened upon our cousin Tom Schierman’s “oasis” in the hills near the hamlet of Lancaster several miles north of our Palouse Colony Farm, and through Tom we came to be acquainted. Katherine traces threads of her fascination with the region to her diplomat father’s interest in Turkish rugs: “I remember their textures and shapes which influenced my affection for rolling landscapes. The Palouse is a tapestry of woven connections among seasons, fields, and people. The effect is thoroughly spiritual and provides a place of reflection, solace, and beauty that overcomes the noise of the outside world.”

To emphasize the effects of light for line and shadow, Katherine works entirely in black-and-white which evokes heightened awareness of layering, texture, and movement. “My ‘Portraits of the Palouse,’” she explains, “are metaphors for the human prospect. ‘Harvests’ to me are exhibitions that depict the land as hallowed space through views of heritage farm architecture and landscape vistas. Implicit rural values relate to the natural environment, hard work, and community, and are relevant anywhere.” This coming July 14, Katherine’s work will be featured at Art Spirit Gallery in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, and I’ll be on hand to give a talk about her remarkable art at 10 a.m. that morning.

Katherine Nelson, Palouse Harvest Oasis (2015), Charcoal on paper, 22 x 30 inches, Collection of the Artist

Another artist whose agrarian paintings recently caught my eye is Hal Sutherland (1929-2014). He became enamored with rural themes late in the 1980s after a distinguished career as a Hollywood animator and television producer. Born in Massachusetts amidst the onset of the Great Depression, Sutherland moved to the West Coast in the early 1940s and after military service studied at the Art Center School of Design in Los Angeles. His skills and study led to work at Disney and he eventually acquired his own production studio. Sutherland overcame any limitations from color blindness by developing a color-coded palette and experimented with unusual color combinations. In 1974 he relocated to a small farm near Bothell, Washington, devoted the rest of his life to painting and became president of the American Artists of the Rockies Association.

Hal Sutherford's Wheat Harvest (c. 1985)

Although long interested with Western Indian and history themes, Sutherland turned his attention to landscapes late in his career and began touring the American countryside in the 1980s. “…[T]here’s a tremendous void regarding American farmers and the unbelievable hardships they endured,” he stated in a 1989 Art of the West interview. “It’s my hope to capture as much as I can so their stories can be remembered It’s hard to imagine the severity of the struggle confronted daily by those folks. …[Humor] helped carry them along in their various dreams of a new start in life, as they carved out the heartland of this country for generations to come.” In this spirit Sutherland painted with detailed realism such farm scenes as Wheat Harvest (c. 1985) with a team of sickle-wielding men and women binders, and a returning farmer and work horse in Day’s End. Regarding the latter, he commented, “Rewards are often meager for hard labor such as farming. But, after a long day struggling in the fields, it had to bring tremendous satisfaction to have accomplished the task and to be rewarded with one of God’s painterly skies as you headed homeward.”

Farmhouse, Statehouse, White House — Agrarian Motifs and American Politics

Most everywhere in small town America local folks can provide names of favorite sons and daughters who left town to make a positive impact on the wider world. Many would like to think that youthful experiences born of rural community experience instill values of cooperation, hard work, and service to others that are evident in the lives of those who remain and others who head off to make lives elsewhere. Those of us raised in places like Endicott and St. John, Washington, heard many times about the exploits of locals raised on area farms who went off to distinguish themselves far beyond the rolling hills of the Palouse Country. I remember taking my E-SJ Middle School students in the 1990s to interview Carl Litzenberger, whose grandfather, Henry, was among the founders of our Palouse Colony Farm in the 1880s. Carl and his brothers were quite the adventuresome spirits and he told us about seeing a biplane fly over the Union Flat wheat field where he was working one day and deciding right then and there that we would do that someday. And so he did—studied blueprints, ordered parts, and built the thing with his brothers in their barn back about 1918 to become a true barnstormer. Carl became acquainted with Emelia Earhart, Pancho Barnes, and host of other Roaring Twenties celebrities before another career of training World War II Army Air Corps pilots. He eventually served as a private pilot for political leaders back East before returning to the Northwest.

Endicott Union Elevator Company and Flathouse Railroad Grain Sack Storage (c. 1920); R. R. Hutchison Photograph Collection, WSU Terrell/Allen Library, Pullman

There are many tales like this to share, but one of the most notable individuals to hail from our home was Washington Mike Lowry—born in St. John and a graduate of Endicott, who served in Congress in the 1980s and as Washington’s governor in the 1990s. Mike’s parents were vital members of the community as Bob managed the local grain growers cooperative in the 1950s while Helen taught school in nearby LaCrosse. I remember well when Mike returned to Endicott in 1992 for a downtown rally at which he announced his candidacy from the back of a wheat truck. Not long afterward in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse, Mike helped in significant ways to facilitate the Operation KareLift project that provided Northwest food and medicine to children’s hospitals and orphanages throughout the Russian Far East. We were saddened to learn of Mike’s passing this past spring and joined in a celebration of his life at St. Matthew’s Lutheran Church in Renton near Seattle last May. Washington’s former governors were attendance along with other leaders who offered eloquent remarks on Mike’s longstanding commitment to the less fortunate. For me the most memorable reminiscence came from Pastor Kacey Hahn who recalled how last fall she asked for volunteers from the congregation to help with arrangements for a month-long tent city on church property for area homeless. She remembered that Mike had been among those who raised his hand but thought little more about it until coming to work early one weekend and hearing loud whistling from the downstairs laundry room. She investigated and found Mike making music while folding a mountain of clothes from the newcomers. At the memorial service Pastor Hahn asked how many retired politicians, or those from other walks of life, would spend time in such anonymous service, or as volunteer advocates for migrant farmer housing and the host of other humanitarian causes Mike so fervently pursued.  

As I continue to compose my treatise on harvest motifs in agrarian art and literature, my thoughts have turned to their use as political campaign slogans and images. The transformation of America from the land of self-sufficient yeomen to commercial farmers using labor-saving equipment took place throughout the nineteenth century when the rural populace still worked hard and sought land ownership, but depended increasingly on cash crops transported by newly constructed railroads to Eastern and foreign markets. The concurrent advent of improved agricultural mechanization fostered larger farm acreages and greater need for communities with bankers, merchants, grain brokers, equipment dealers, blacksmiths, and workers in other businesses and trades. The time increasingly witnessed a shift in rurality from small-scale farming as an end itself to consolidated land holdings that supported an array of local businesses, and held land value in similar regard to the old attachment to the land itself. Yet the agrarian myth of diligence, honesty, and independence had enduring appeal and remained a powerful symbol of the nation.

John McNevin, engraved by John Rogers, Washington at Mt. Vernon (1859); Steel engraving on paper, 7 x 10 ⅛ inches; New York Public Library

Vermont genre artist Junius Brutus Stearns (1810-1885), famed for his series on the American Founders, depicts a harvest scene in George Washington—Farmer (1850) in which the president, a reincarnation of the Roman general Cincinnatus, is clad in formal wear while conversing with his overseer as grain is cut by Mt. Vernon’s slaves. The symbolic scene is inspired by ancient writers like Hesiod, Virgil, and Horace whose writings in praise of husbandry formed the basis of a classical education for American upper classes, but overlooks the brutal realities known to toiling workers deprived of opportunity to own land. Cereal grains were raised in the South to a much lesser extent than cotton and tobacco, but agricultural mechanization came more slowly. The iconography of the benevolent harvester president as national patriarch and gentleman farmer was well established by the early nineteenth century. Popular prints followed Stearns’s painting including the fanciful harvest scenes of Washington at Mt. Vernon by Nathaniel Currier (1852) and by John Rogers (1859). The stereotype of hardworking, noble scythe-wielding agrarian remained a powerful image for nineteenth century politicians who sought to capitalize on public regard for rural rectitude and the patriotic farmer-leader. For this purpose various party organizers designed broadsides with agrarian imagery to promote candidates with campaign prints like William Henry Harrison, the Farmer of North Bend (1840), and Farmer Garfield Cutting a Swath to the White House (1880). The approach apparently reaped the expected benefits as both candidates, and many other seeking other offices, were elected.        

Currier & Ives, Farmer Garfield Cutting a Swath to the White House (1880); Lithograph, 13 x 10 ⅝ inches; Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress