PEA RIDGE — It is probably hard for most of us today to imagine life before the Industrial Revolution and before the rise of mechanized agriculture. What strikes me about that is that those huge changes took place not very long ago, at least if you are willing to allow that 130 years ago or 150 years ago is not really very long ago.
If you are 10 or 12 years old, I suppose that 150 years ago probably seems like a long time ago, but when you are 65 to 75 years old, you may realize that you have been alive for fully half of the time since mechanized agriculture arrived, or since steam power revolutionized the ways goods are produced and how they are transported all over the country and world.
Today it is commonplace when we buy things at the store to see that so many of our goods are imported.
The Made in China label has become as familiar to us as the Made in the USA label, possibly even more so. Many of us well remember when imported goods were an exotic, almost unheard-of idea. The Made in Japan label in earlier days usually involved low-quality imported trinkets. Now, almost strangely, car names like Honda, Toyota, Suzuki, Isuzu and Mitsubishi have become as familiar as Ford, Chevrolet, Dodge, Buick, Mercury and Chrysler; and whatever happened our great old names like Pontiac and Oldsmobile and Plymouth?
I got turned into thinking about the Industrial Revolution and the farm revolution by a simple little transaction. Nancy and I like to take in the farmers market in Pea Ridge on Thursdays. The tomatoes are so much better than those grown in hot houses or hydroponic tanks or shipped in from distant states, and you can find a pretty good variety of locally-grown fresh-from-the-garden vegetables and fruit. To me the farmers markets are like having a time machine to turn back the clock to 1940, or to 1910, or even to the 1880s. These home-grown vegetables, cantalopes, peaches and apples are a strong reminder of our ties to the soil, a dependence that is often forgotten or obscured in today’s world of mass-produced goods and processed foods.
When I was growing up on the farm in the 1940s and early 1950s, most ofthe people living around us were making their living from their farm and garden. It was rather unusual for our neighbors to “have a job” in town or somewhere. We were farm families. We worked for ourselves. It was common back then to hear farmers talking among themselves about how much better it is to work for yourself rather than having to answer to a boss on a job somewhere. The independence and self-reliance involved in farming were much-prized values.
One of the problems in today’s recession is that people are hugely more dependent now on finding a job somewhere away from home. In the Great Depression of the 1930s, unemployment in the cities was a great problem, but if a farm family was fortunate enough to be able to hang onto their land, then theyhad a job at home, a way to make a living, whether or not they made much money.
Today we don’t make much difference between making a living and making money. Today it is as though the two things are the same. But it didn’t used to be that way.
In earlier days, if you had land for farming and gardening, that took you a long way along the road toward making a living for yourself and your family.
Your soil and your crops and your livestock were your job, and in a real way they were your wealth. On the farm in the 1940s, one could be money poor, but otherwise not poor at all.
By today’s standards my family back then would have been considered poor. But we didn’t think of ourselves as poor. We didn’t know that we werepoor. Actually we often supposed that we were doing very well. We didn’t go hungry. We ate pretty well, bacon and sausage with biscuits and gravy for breakfast, and fried chicken for Sunday dinner.
That seemed pretty good.
We had a house that kept out the wind and snow, a good well for drawing water, wood for the fire and oil for the lamps.
How much luxury do you have to have before you begin thinking of yourself as blessed and fortunate?
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Editor’s note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is an award-winning columnist, a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history. He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.
Community, Pages 5 on 08/29/2012