Amazing Aberdeen (Idaho) and the National Cereal Grains Collection

Nearing the end of our cross-country road trip from the east coast to home in the Inland Northwest (see blog posts immediately prior to this one), we drove through Aberdeen, ID. Since 1988 the small southeastern Idaho community of Aberdeen has been home to the USDA’s National Small Grain Collection that contains one of the world’s largest seed banks for wheat, barley, oat, rice, rye, and other small grain germplasm as well their various wild relatives. The location was chosen because of the University of Idaho’s long history of agricultural extension research nearby, the region’s favorable growing conditions, and proximity to irrigation. Special thanks to Chad Jackson, director of UI’s Research and Extension Center in Aberdeen for providing information on the facilities.

The advent of widespread use of grains as a food staple can only be estimated, but archaeological evidence indicates humans in eastern Africa mixed crushed primitive wheats and barleys with water to form a nutritious gruel several hundred thousand years ago. The 23,000-year-old Ohalo II site on Israel’s Sea of Galilee’s southwest shore has yielded flint and bone sickles and primitive grinding tools with remnants of wild emmer wheat, barley, and oats that supplemented the omnivorous diets of area Paleolithic hunter-gatherer bands. Wild cereals reluctantly surrendered their dense nutrition through millennia of human ingenuity requiring the sophisticated mastery of elemental forces—stone for cutting and grinding, water for mixing and kneading, and fire for cooking. Use of heated stones, with embers, and in other ways enabled the roasting of grains to enhance flavors and led to primitive breadmaking. But the revolutionary advent of fire-resistant earthenware pots in the Middle East by the eighth millennium BC fostered a significant advancement in food supply, culture, and population growth. Grains boiled in water made possible a savory array of pottages, soups, and stews, with the softened food especially benefiting the very young and elderly. No culinary advance since the invention of earthenware has had such salutary effects on cooking methods.

Cultivation of cereal grains has been integral to humanity’s advance since time immemorial and was undertaken independently at several times and places throughout the prehistoric Eastern and Western Hemispheres. Development of agriculture may be said to be humanity’s relentless quest to recreate environmental conditions that gave rise to our species. Cereals, named for the Roman goddess of fertility, Ceres, are not only nutritious but also adaptable to a wide range of climates and soil conditions. The ancestral range of cereals stretched along the Fertile Crescent from the Upper Mesopotamian-Anatolian slopes of southeastern Turkey, eastward across Transcaucasia to Kashmir and south to Egypt and Ethiopia. This vast region is notable for long, hot summers and mild, moist winters which were ideal for the emergence of large-seeded wheat, rye, and other grains along the alluvial shores of lakes, streams, and springs. These became the principal foods that fueled human settlement and expansion throughout the world.

Wild Einkorn and Wild Barley growing on the Karaca Dağ Plain

USDA National Small Grains Germplasm Research Center Photographs

“Amber Eden” Heritage Hard White Wheat

Palouse Colony Farm near Endicott, Washington (July and August 2023)

Grain cultivation and replenishment of soils by annual flooding coincided with animal husbandry as villagers sought to prevent creatures of horn and hoof from damaging grain fields by domesticating them for food and labor. Dispersion of cereals by wind, animals, and other natural processes in prehistoric times was inexorable if slow—perhaps a thousand yards per year on average. Successive plant selections by early agro-pastoralists and discovery of tending operations (seeding, watering, manuring) led to earlier and more uniform maturing stands of protein-rich grains with characteristics unique to each region. These developments began the Neolithic “Revolution” along the Mesopotamian wetlands approximately 11,000 BC that developed over three millennia. Crop production and processing represented key cultural breakthroughs that led to settlements with fields, gardens, and livestock. This led over time to food surpluses and transition from unowned open commons to fixed residence sedentary “homelands,” cities, territorial states—and “civilization.”

Incredible Springville and Its Art

Next stop of agricultural interest on our summer road trip was Springville, Utah. Founded in 1937, Springville’s acclaimed Museum of Art Soviet and Russian Collection holdings are among the nation’s most extensive for rural subjects that include numerous harvest scenes painted in the 1890s by members of the Church of Latter-day Saints Paris Art Mission. I thank docent Judy Mansfield for helpful information on the remarkable story of the museum’s vast holdings. Springville’s Soviet and Russian Collection began unexpectedly in 1989 when museum director Vern G. Swanson first embarked on a series of trips to the USSR on behalf of the Grand Central Art Gallery Education Association. Swanson met Russian artist Vladimir I. Nekrasov (1924-1998) of Moscow’s Surikov Art Institute who introduced him to important works of Russian Expressionism and Social Realism that led to a major exhibition at Springville in October 1990 and eventual artwork purchases for the museum.

Springville Art Museum; Springville, Utah

Mahlon Young, The Farm Worker (1938)

Successive assaults upon the Soviet Union’s rural populace in the 1920s and ‘30s involved Stalin’s brutal campaigns to collectivize agricultural lands and against religion that led to widespread violence and famine. Millions of peasants perished or were displaced from their native villages through the imposition of these policies to abolish private property and modernize the economy. Russia remained a major producer of grain until this period which witnessed the expropriation of commodities from landed peasants (kulaks) who had withheld harvests in order to boost prices. Stalin’s push to industrialize the country at all costs required the provisioning Soviet cities, agricultural mechanization, the mass murder and exile of kulaks, and the exodus of vast numbers of younger rural residents to urban areas. The impact of these forces was devastating to traditional Russian village life and crop production. The nation was plunged further into cataclysm after war with Germany commenced in 1941.

As people and landscapes suffered, authors and artists sought memory for solace as well as lament. The glorification of communist principles through state-sanctioned Socialist Realism governed official Soviet art and literature from the 1930s to 1980s. Muscular representations of urban and rural life that lauded labor and socialist ideals generally characterized the approach, but later strains featured honest views of everyday life reminiscent of the French Impressionists and Taos Expressionists. Marx had viewed artists and writers as valued members of an intellectual vanguard promoting revolutionary change. Leon Trotsky later wrote in Literature and Revolution (1924) that their insights revealed the nature of society and if freely expressed would help guide the revolutionary struggle. Stalin, however, had no tolerance of art for art’s sake. His authoritarian policies sought conformity and denigrated individuality—the basis of creativity.

Konstantin Topuridze, People’s Friendship “Golden Sheaf” Fountain (1954)

Exhibition of Economic Achievements, Moscow; Wikimedia Commons

Unless about earlier periods or other places, Soviet depictions of internal discontent and tragedy were forbidden in favor of sentimentalized worker characterizations of the proletarian dream. The character of Soviet monumental art was famously exemplified in Vera Mukhina’s 80-foot steel sculpture Industrial Worker and Collective Farmer (1936) that was built to crown the Soviet pavilion at the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris. Plated in radiant chrome-nickel, the massive female figure designed by Mukhina (1889-1953) grasps a sickle alongside her hammer-wielding companion in striding poses that symbolized the nation’s aspirations. After the Paris fair, the sculpture was relocated to the entrance of Moscow’s sprawling All-Union Agricultural Exposition on the city’s north side where substantial halls showcased numerous aspects of crop, livestock, and food production. Architect Konstantin Topuridze (1905-1977) designed the enormous Golden Sheaf (People’s Friendship) Fountain (1954) as one of the park’s centerpieces that features a towering grain sheaf encircled by three colored glass cornucopias and sixteen bronze statues of young women who symbolized the Soviet republics. (In 1959 the complex’s name was changed to the Exhibition of Economic Achievements and has come to include a grandiose amusement park, year-round trade shows, concert hall, and pavilions featuring space exploration and technological advancements.)

Idealized paintings of country life like Arkady Plastov’s Harvest Festival (1937) and Field after Harvest—Sheaves (1954) by Yuri Kugach show bountiful fields and smiling brigades of kolkhoz (collective farm) laborers clad in red neckerchiefs and head scarves enthusiastically driving farm equipment or tending threshing operations. Plastov, born to a family of icon painters near Simbirsk on the middle Volga, also painted works like Harvest (1945) and Spring (1954) that risked official condemnation given his Impressionistic renderings of commonplace scenes devoid of political sentiment. Harvest is a discomforting view of an aged reaper sharing a meal in the field with three children scarcely old enough to shoulder such responsibilities. Completed in the last year of a war that had inflicted enormous suffering throughout Europe, the scene also inspires appreciation for the home front brigades of women, children, and the elderly who labored for years to sustain soldiers and civilians. Plastov’s dynamic, colorful Haymaking (1945) shows a shirtless teen flanked by two elderly men and a woman who cut grass near a copse of birch trees.

Kugach, who settled in the Tver countryside after the war, went on to establish the Moscow River School in 1974 to revive the dramatic style of Repin, Levitan, and other Russian Realists. Ambidextrous painter Nikita Fedosov (1939-1992), Yuri Kugach’s nephew, became a prominent member of the group and painted numerous country scenes including Last Rays and Overcast Field (1966). Muscovite Victor Ivanov studied with Kugach at Moscow’s Surikov Institute of Art in the late 1940s and in the 1960s became a leading member of the Avant Garde Severe Style that depicted the grim austerity of post-war Soviet life in opposition the naïve depictions of Socialist Realism. Artists like Ivanov risked establishment censure but painted throughout the Khrushchev reform era in ways that recalled the 1910s Futurism of Kazmir Malevich and Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin. Ivanov painted numerous harvest scenes like Harvesting near Ryazan, Men Resting at Harvest, and Women Harvesting (1965). These spare, balanced compositions in irregular blocks of olive, mustard yellow, and chestnut contrast rural toil with the rustic beauty of the Russian countryside.

Dmitry I. Slobodin, Untitled Donbas Harvest Scene (1982)

Gouache on paper, 17 ¼ x 22 inches

Columbia Heritage Collection

A native of the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine, Dmitry I. Slobodin (1929-2005) graduated from the Art College of Lugansk and became a master of Impressionistic palette-knife paintings in tempura and oil earth tones that depict the quiet beauty of his native land while resisting the artificiality of the regime’s officially sanctioned Socialist Realism. Slobodin’s untitled Donbass Harvest (1982) shows mottled field rows of tawny cream with shadowed forest greens beneath a gleaming orange ribbon of setting sun. At left far in the distance beyond a darkened tree-lined swale one can almost hear the hum of a late model Rostelmash self-propelled combine throwing a roiling cloud of yellow-white chaff. The red machine appears to be opening up a field of ripened grain at day’s end near at base of a broad gentle slope in a scene of bounty and peace.

Colonial Spain and American Grain Culture

Tucson, AZ and Mission Tumacácori was the next stop on our cross country road trip. In 1540 Spanish explorer Hernando de Alarcón sailed with three vessels from Acapulco to the northern shores of the Gulf of California to await the arrival of Francisco Coronado’s land expedition in quest of the Seven Cities of Cibola. He carried supplies including wheat seed for trade with indigenous peoples and in late September became the first European to ascend the Colorado River. Alcarón humanely treated the native Quechan (Yuman) and Cocomaricopan peoples of the lower Colorado-Gila region in present southwestern Arizona and was likely the first to share grain for cultivation in several locations. Alcarón’s account, published by Richard Hakluyt in 1600, includes reference to his historic encounter with the Cocopah who presented him with gourds of corn. The Spaniard responded in kind: “I showed them wheat and beans, and other seeds; …but they showed me they had no knowledge of them and wondered at all of them.” Alcarón continued upstream for at least 150 miles before turning east in a vain overland search for Coronado.

Mission Tumacácori near Tucson

Considerably farther to the east conquistador Juan de Oñate crossed the Rio Grande River from Mexico in 1598 at present El Paso and continued north with a substantial caravan of soldiers, Indians, and Franciscan missionaries along with several thousand horses, sheep and goats, and sacks of wheat. Oñate claimed the region as New Spain’s province of Santa Fe de Nuevo México and initially established his capital at Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo. In 1607 the provincial capital was relocated nearby to present-day Santa Fe where Mission San Miguel was established shortly afterward and is considered today the oldest church in the United States. Oñate dispatched expedition missionaries to pueblo communities throughout the region and within three decades twenty-five missions had been established that featured substantial churches, conventos, granaries (alhóndiga), and surrounding farms. These locations ranged from magnificent stone structures at places like Gíusewa (Mission San José de los Jémez) and Salinas (Gran Quivari) to impressive adobe edifices at Acoma (San Estévan del Ray), Isleta (San Agustín) near Albuquerque, and Taos (San Francisco de Asís) near the fertile bottomlands of the Rio Pueblo de Taos. Many of these places suffered extensive damage from the Pueblo Revolt of 1680.

Mission Tumacácori Adobe Granary Restoration

Frontier trade in grain advanced before extensive Spanish settlement and wheat likely reached the Zuni Pueblo (Mission Nuestro Señora de Guadalupe) and Pima Indians of southern Arizona’s Gila Basin in the late seventeenth century. (Trade in grain from Alcarón’s plantings a century earlier among the Cocomaricopa to the west apparently had not reached the area.) The Italian-born Austrian Jesuit missionary Eusebio Kino (1645-1711), who had tended crops and cattle as a youth, distributed soft white wheat to the area’s native peoples upon his visit to Pimería Alta in 1687. Four years later the intrepid blackrobe visited the Pima to establish Mission San José de Tumacácori and eventually over twenty other missions in the region. Pueblo dwellers along the region’s rivers had long practiced flood irrigation for maize, beans, and squash, and soon added wheat as well as barley in many places. Mission San José was relocated in the 1750s to its present site south of Tucson, Arizona where remnants of a substantial two-story adobe granary and storeroom can still be seen. Father Kino also introduced Iberian cattle, sheep, and goats to mission stations and Indian rancherias that were later tended by Franciscans following the withdrawal of Jesuits from New Spain in 1767.

Wheat sown in the Southwest during December’s appearance of the constellation Wēq—Sculpin (The Pleaides) would ripen in the time of Na’sigînax-qua—Three Men in a Line (Orion’s Belt) after harvest of traditional crops. In this way cultivation of Pima Club and other grains fit well into the agricultural calendar of the Akimel O’odham (Pima) and Tohono O’odham (Papago) peoples and were soft enough for stone grinding. When explorer Juan Bautista de Anza visited the Pima in 1774, he wrote that “…standing in the middle [of their wheat fields], one cannot see the ends, because they are so long. Their width is also great, embracing the whole width of the [Gila] valley on either side.” Continuing west on his historic overland trek to Alta California, Anza also noted prodigious stands of wheat among the Quechan.

Edward Curtis, Pima Baskets (c. 1905)

Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

By the mid-1800s Pima growers supplied vast quantities of wheat to teamsters and settlers traveling along the Gila Trail and Overland Mail Route. Grain also contributed to nutritious piñole and other staple soup mixtures of grain, corn, and beans. Pima and Papago women crafted exquisite watertight fine- and coarse-woven baskets and platters for winnowing and storing grains using wheat straw bundle foundations. These were typically wrapped and beautifully decorated in geometric patterns with willow and mesquite bark while Papago bundles, sometimes fashioned from beargrass and ocotillo, were bound with split yucca leaves and mesquite bark.

Large barrel-shaped globular household granary baskets up to six feet high with a capacity of several hundred bushels were also made of coarsely woven wheat straw to hold grain, corn, beans, and other seeds. Old West painter-illustrator Frederic Remington (1861-1909) visited the Papago community at San Xavier’s Mission in Baja Arizona in 1886 while on assignment for Harper’s Weekly and noted the area’s distinct deep blue horizons and burnt sienna landscapes with warm purple shadows. He contributed a series of sketches of Papago life including “Threshing Wheat” and “Grinding” arranged as a bulletin board illustration that the magazine published in 1887.

Frederick Remington Papago Threshing Harper’s Weekly Illustration (April 2, 1887)

Remember the Alamo! (and Mission Granaries)

Later in our cross-country road trip this summer, we found ourselves in San Antonio, TX. Beginning in 1718, Franciscan missionaries from New Spain established a cluster of five mission communities among the indigenous Coahuiltecan peoples who lived along the headwaters of the San Antonio River in present Texas. Their efforts were encouraged by colonial Spanish authorities who sought to secure the northern frontier from the influence of French Louisiana. The area’s first of five missions, San Antonio de Valero (more popularly known later as The Alamo), was built at its present location from 1724 to 1727 and consisted of a walled enclosure with church, residences, and granary surrounded by ranches and cropland watered by a carefully constructed acequia (irrigation canal).

Mission San Jose; San Antonio, Texas

Mission San Jose Granary and Original Granary Doors

Mission San Antonio’s granary was one of several substantial rooms located in the northern portion of the spacious convento (later known as the Long Barracks after Mexican forces occupied the location in the 1820s) and is the state’s oldest extant structure. The Franciscans also established Mission San José y San Miguel de Aquayo several miles downstream from Mission San Antonio and built an enormous granary (c. 1747-1752) with vaulted ceiling and flying buttresses to support the thick stone walls that safeguard the annual harvests of wheat, corn, and vegetables. The mission’s nearby acequia-powered grist mill (molino) with horizontal wheel, constructed c. 1794 (rebuilt in 1930) was the region’s first mill. Covering the largest area of the San Antonio River missions, San José became known as “Queen of the Missions” for the church’s resplendent Spanish Baroque architecture and substantial plaza.

Missions San Juan Capistrano and San Francisco de la Espada were founded in 1731 on opposite sides of the river several miles south of Mission San José. Mission San Juan’s granary was completed by 1756 and rebuilt in 1824 on its original foundation as the mission church which functions to the present day. The imposing structure was painted by German-American landscapist Hermann Lungwitz (1813-1891) who studied at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts before immigrating to the United States in 1850. Lungwitz became known for his many detailed, luminous renderings of Texas Hill Country farms and ranches. Mission Espada’s c. 1762 stone granary was also used as a church in the 1770s and a new storehouse erected on the southwest side of the compound in 1773 to secure the harvests of grain, vegetables, and fruit. The Espada Acequia still carries water to area farmlands and is the oldest feature of its kind in the country.

Cyrus McCormick and the Reaper Revolution

Visiting the McCormick Blacksmith Shop and Forge near Steele’s Tavern, Virginia

The earliest practical reaping machines were introduced in the 1830s by father-son Robert and Cyrus McCormick of Steele’s Tavern, Virginia, Obed Hussey of Cincinnati, and Montgomery County, New York farmer Enoch Ambler. We had the chance to visit the original farm on our summer road trip across the country. The McCormicks fashioned their landmark model with the help of the family’s Black slave, Jo Anderson, in their Walnut Grove Farm’s blacksmith shop and successfully demonstrated in stands of wheat and oats in July 1831. Ambler and the McCormicks secured patents for their models in 1834. These horse-pulled machines featured a reciprocating bar of small sickle sections with separating fingers and reel that could cut up to fourteen to fifteen acres a day and increased output more than tenfold over the cradle scythe method. In the late 1850s brothers William and Charles Marsh, natives of Ontario who had relocated to Illinois, introduced the revolutionary “Marsh Reaper-Binder” than could both cut grain and tie sheaves into bundles. Rights to the Marsh machine were acquired by entrepreneurs William Deering and Elijah Gammon in the early 1870s and established their base of operations in North Chicago.

Informed by a generation of farmer-innovators, men like Hussey and Case, and the McCormicks and Marshes would revolutionize world agriculture. “This magical machinery of the wheatfield solves the mystery of prosperity,” lauded McCormick biographer Herbert Casson in The Romance of the Reaper (1908), and “explains the New Farmer and the miracles of scientific agriculture.” Casson observed with capitalized emphasis, “…[I]t is true that until recently the main object of all nations was to get bread. Life was a Search for Food—a desperate postponement of famine. …Then came King Reaper.”

McCormick, a devout Presbyterian, was also imbued with a keen business sense that would transform his humble Blue Ridge Mountain enterprise into the world’s leading manufacturer of farm equipment based in Chicago from 1847. His improved “Virginia Reaper” model made its European debut at the 1851 Great Exhibition in London which was the first large-scale industrial fair to include foreign exhibitors. A skeptical reporter for the Times jokingly dubbed McCormick’s reaper a “cross between an Astley chariot, a wheel-barrow, and a flying machine.” But in trials conducted that summer on farming estates at Tiptree Heath in Essex and Pusey, Berkshire, an enthused jury recognized that the new inventions would render the scythe as obsolete as the mechanical thresher would the flail. Although Prince Albert would later order two Hussey machines for royal farms, the judges awarded McCormick’s eagle-emblazoned machine its Grand Council gold medal and declared the device “worth the whole cost of the Exhibition.” By 1851 McCormick’s Chicago factory was turning out a thousand reapers a year and by 1859 approximately 50,000 were in use throughout the country. 

Cyrus McCormick 1834 Reaper Model

Cyrus McCormick’s passion for promotion matched his mechanical inventiveness and within a year colorful company advertisements cast his reaper in a scene as if a Roman conqueror appearing before an adoring crowd and bearing the prestigious award above a banner proclaiming it “Best in the World.” The 1853-1856 Crimean War between Great Britain and Russia interrupted export of grain from Ukraine to Europe which boosted commodity prices worldwide. American farmers responded with greater production and the favorable market brought a flood of new orders for improved equipment. McCormick deployed agents across the Midwest and eventually established a vast global network of outlets from London and Odessa to Melbourne and Wellington to sell in the grain districts of Europe and the British and Russian empires.

McCormick continued with Grand Gold Medal recognition at the glittering 1855 Paris Exposition Universelle where Emperor Louis Napoleon expressed special interest in the American’s invention. At the city’s next world’s fair eleven years later, McCormick was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor by imperial decree and other Grand Golds came from world fairs in Hamburg and Vienna. Grandiose promotional iconography with these international recognitions would be colorfully featured in company advertising that merged prosperity with ingenuity and gave rise to one of the era’s earliest and most successful transnational corporations.

Agricultural Equipment Display, London Crystal Palace Exhibition (1851)

Dickinson’s Comprehensive Pictures (1853)

McCormick and Hussey reapers, Pitts and Case threshers, Marsh binders, and other mechanical harvesting equipment came into widespread use in the United States in the 1850s, and in the following decade steam-powered threshing machines were commonplace. Small farmers still flailed crops in many areas, however, due to the early threshers’ expense and tendency to clog in heavy grain and crack kernels with the metal cylinders. By the 1870s reaper-binders appeared that could drop a half-dozen grain bundles at a time on the ground tied with wire and later with twine. The sheaves were then arranged into larger shocks to further ripen or be hauled directly on open wagons to stationary threshing machines. Cyrus Hall McCormick, Jr. took over leadership of the family enterprise after the death of his father in 1884, and the sprawling Chicago-based McCormick and William Deering companies merged with the Plano Harvester Company to form International Harvester Company (IHC) in 1902. By that time the three firms had acquired or consolidated with several competitors, employed some 30,000 workers, and were producing over a thousand reapers per week in “harvester war” competition worldwide.

Founding Farmer Art and Architecture

George Washington understood the primacy of land stewardship for bountiful harvests and expressed concern about settlers’ “ruinous” tendency to exhaust frontier soils only to continue farther westward and inflict similar damage. He advocated use of “scientific farming” to renew soils and transition away from Southern tobacco and New England maize to grains, legumes, and grasses through a complex system of crop rotation and use of soil amendments. Washington’s progressive ideas were strongly influenced by foreign correspondence and reading of books by Great Britain’s most respected agricultural writers—Arthur Young’s first four volumes of Annals of Agriculture (1785) and Henry Home, Lord Kames’ The Gentleman Farmer (1776).

George Washington Presidential Library Reading Room, Mt. Vernon

Fred Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington

Washington made dozens of pages of notes from these and similar works and twice recorded Kames’ observation that, “No branch of husbandry requires more skill and sagacity that a proper rotation of crops,” which in England had come to involve cycles as long as seven years. Washington wrote to Alexander Hamilton in the 1790s of the public need to promote a “natural fertility” (his own italicized expression), and that if “…taught how to improve the old, instead of going in pursuit of new and productive soils, they would make these acres which now scarcely yield them anything, turn out beneficial….” (The opening essay of the Annals series which Young personally sent to Washington carried a broadside against Britain’s wasteful wartime spending.)

Harvesting wheat, oats, and rye remained labor intensive and undertaken by Washington’s enslaved workers. But he sought to make the process more efficient by careful field observation and in 1786 recommended that every pair of adult cradle scythers be followed by four reapers and one binder followed by younger carriers of bundles. Harvest at Mt. Vernon and Washington’s other farms generally took place in July and August followed by the seeding of fall grains. Threshing was conducted in winter or even in spring. Washington also advocated improved agricultural mechanization and in 1792 constructed an innovative sixteen-sided, two-story threshing barn at Mt. Vernon’s Dogue Farm so horses could more efficiently tread out grain stalks on a slatted floor so the kernels could rain down and be gathered below. Prior to the advent of mechanized threshing, four pairs of horses trotting in a circle some sixty to one hundred feet in diameter could tread out some 300 bushels of wheat per day. Similar results with flailing might take five threshers working exhaustively for ten days. After a tour of Washington’s estates in 1788 guided by Washington himself, French minister to the United States Comte de Mousteir termed the newly elected president’s treading barn “a true monument to Patriotism.”

Mt. Vernon Threshing Barn

Mt. Vernon “New Room” Plaster Ceiling and Doorway Frieze Harvest Motifs

Mt. Vernon National Historic Landmark; Mt. Vernon, Virginia

Columbia Heritage Collection Photographs

Washington’s meticulous records of purchases at Mt. Vernon indicate his aesthetic as well as commercial interests. He was a serious collector of art prints and purchased no fewer than one hundred during his time in Philadelphia and at Mt. Vernon. Washington also bought six landscape paintings from English immigrant artists William Winstanley and George Beck that depicted the Potomac and Hudson River Valleys. These first hung in the original presidential residence in Philadelphia, but upon completion of his second term in 1797, Washington bought the entire group along with prints and furniture for his Mt. Vernon home’s grand two-story “New Room.” Designed in the style of an English manor house salon, the large room with airy Palladian windows was crowned with Richard Tharpe’s intricate plaster ceiling bas reliefs depicting harvest sheaves, scythes, rakes, and other farm tools. Art appreciation through collecting and display was understood to foster the moral virtue of both owner and viewers, and ornamental details honored sources of wealth and aspirations.

Washington also acquired exquisite copper mezzotints by London master printer John Boydell (1719-1804) and others showing scenes from biblical history and Greek mythology as well as Dutch pastoral landscapes (e. g., Adam Pynacker’s Morning and Evening). Boydell learned the complexities of printmaking and became one of the era’s most influential publishers who procured the services of such leading British artists as Benjamin West (1738-1920) and Richard Westall (1765-1836). Boydell engraver Francesco Bartolozzi (1727-1815) perfected colored stippling techniques that drew widespread acclaim from European and American patrons who had only known reproductions in black and white or brown tones. Washington’s Boydell prints were from the London publisher’s magisterial edition of Liber Veritatis (1774-1777), a precursor to the modern coffee table book, which contained two hundred drawings of works by influential French landscapist Claude Lorrain that came to be owned by William Cavendish, Duke of Devonshire. The scenes were reproduced by engraver Richard Earlom (1743-1822) as distinctive mixed-method colored mezzotint for washes and etching for pen lines, and the series soon became a standard for aspiring artists to study.

U.S. Department of Agriculture Inner Court

Artists and authors contributed to an iconography of Washington as a modern Cincinnatus and agrarian statesman that was well established within several decades. His uncommon leadership and benevolence stand in contrast to the presence of amiable slaves who appear in several early nineteenth-century Mt. Vernon scenes. But Washington himself underwent a paramount life transition as young patrician who inherited vast estates with slaves when only eleven to Father of the Nation who freed them upon his death.

Protecting the Common Good

Mentalities of limits and moderation foster individual identity as well as social cohesion to sustain both culture and soil. French sociologist Émile Durkheim criticized modern society’s “malady of infinite aspiration” that trades cultural renewal for a fixation on replacement and perpetual commercial agitation to acquire things. In his foreword to Of the Land and the Spirit (2008), an anthology of Walter, Lord Northbourne’s writings on ecology and religion, Berry (like Lord Northbourne) points to perennialist matters of ultimate purpose as expressed by Jesus to, “[S]eek first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness...,” in order to be provided food, drink, and clothing. Berry suggests that mastery of agriculture, husbandry, weaving, and other skills are assumed in this context, and that Jesus demonstrated faith by prayerful service to others in feeding and healing them. In these ways, literary, artistic, social, and vocational endeavors in any age represent harvests in which anyone can participate. A wide range of sustainable farming initiatives have been advocated and implemented in recent decades with varying success. Those with prospect for enduring progressive change incorporate core elements of crop rotations for soil health; improved conservation through reduced tillage and terracing of slopes; and policies that reward farmers for these practices.

Amidst the mistral winds of June 1888, Vincent van Gogh painted his Harvest (Wheat Fields) series of ten paintings which provided him opportunity to experiment with color and technique. He worked quickly, “just like the harvester, …intent only on the reaping,” and blended striking hues of gold, copper, and bronze with yellow, red, and brown. The lush expressionistic masterpiece Wheat Field with a Reaper he painted in July 1889, gleams with a swirling sea of grain in impastoed layers of yellow-orange with white highlights seen in many of his Saint-Rémy paintings. A benevolent sun stands against a sky of aquamarine and seems to shine from the canvas uninterrupted by shadow or shade. The view is from the upper story of the building where van Gogh had sought recovery and shows the field’s gray-white boundary wall without any sense of confinement. Van Gogh wrote of its “vague figure toiling away… in broad daylight with a sun flooding everything with a light of pure gold,” as a modernist expression of “sacred realism” with calm, religious hope in the face of death and his own demise.

Association of grain with life suggested humanity’s vulnerability and resiliency in passionate reds and golds composed in balanced synthesis with the greenery and browns of verdant earth. These colors he complemented by mysterious orange and blue tones of the cosmos—a palette strikingly similar to his The Resurrection of Lazarus (1890). In spite of grain’s susceptibility to ruin from fire and wind, or harvest with scythe and sickle, the fields serenely endured as tangible evidence of incomparable beauty, fecundity, and energy of the divine order. The death reaper fulfilled the sower’s purpose in the grand mysterious cycle of life.

Johann Raphael Wehle, And They Followed Him (1900), Lithograph on cardboard, 4 x 6 inches, Columbia Heritage Collection

 Tolstoy’s exposition on aesthetics in What is Art? (1897) embraces a wide range of creative expression from painting and sculpture to literature, folklore, and liturgy. He characterizes their highest forms as conveyance of the makers’ regard for human dignity and the natural world in ways that astonish, mystify, and benefit the common good. That Tolstoy points to Millet, Lhermitte, Gogol, and Pushkin as aesthetic exemplars is significant for their use of agrarian themes to present such universal values. Great painting and writing express struggle and beauty through memorable associations with ideas, people, and places. Such understanding is at risk in contemporary society at once smart and ignorant. Information technologies can be exploited to distraction for endless browsing and displace contemplation of relationships to the earth and to others. Unprecedented threats to wellbeing loom if humanity’s commons of seed for harvest becomes unalterably modified and proprietary. Enduring individual and societal flourishing in any age, as Ruskin observed when considering a sheaf of grain, requires the discpline of work and rectitude. The beneficial middle way tempers entreprenership and technology through hard decisions protecting the common good. 

The characters who inhabit Tolstoy’s stories have heroic capacity, even when cast as loners and losers. They walk familiar paths to work together in the fields and better understand the people and world around them. Among the most stirring moments in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is when landlord Konstantin Levin, who sought the full life of mind, love, and labor, joins a scythe-wielding brigade in an afternoon of great satisfaction: “He… wished for nothing, but not to be left behind the peasants, and to do his work as well as possible.” In a day of tension over progressive approaches to a more sustainable future, ancestral regard and considerations of Ruth and Boaz, muzhik harvesters, and Port William farmers offer restorative interpretations of land use and the human prospect.

     Praise God for the harvest of farm and field,

     Praise God for the people who gather their yield,

     The long hours of labor, the skills of the team,

     The patience of science, the power of machine.

     Praise God for the harvest of conflict and love,

     For leaders and people to struggle to serve,

     To conquer oppression, earth’s plenty increase,

     And gather God’s harvest of justice and peace.

     —Brian Wren, “Praise God for the Harvest” (1968)