The Crops Look Good: News from a Midwestern Family Farm
✍ Scribed by DeLuca, Sara
- Book ID
- 110481950
- Publisher
- Minnesota Historical Society Press
- Year
- 2014
- Tongue
- en-US
- Weight
- 3 MB
- Category
- Fiction
- ISBN-13
- 9780873519755
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
When Margaret Williamson left her family's rural Wisconsin farm to work in Minneapolis in 1923, her mother, Olava, wrote regularly with updates about daily activities: laundry, bread baking, plowing, planting, and harvesting the crops. Sometimes she enclosed a note from seven- year- old Helen, who reported on school and shenanigans and how she longed to see Margaret again.
So begins decades of stories about a family at once singular-- with personal joys and challenges-- and broadly representative of the countless small farms that dotted the midwestern landscape in the early twentieth century. As Margaret's niece Sara DeLuca weaves together family tales gleaned from letters and conversations, we learn of births and deaths, of innovations like the automobile, radio, and telephone that drew rural communities together, and of national and international events that brought home stone- hard truths. Depression- era farmers struggled to keep their land and feed their...