Hill Farms: Surviving Modern Times in Early Twentieth-Century Vermont by Brown, Dona

Hill Farms: Surviving Modern Times in Early Twentieth-Century Vermont (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781625348722)

Vendor: Dona Brown
Product type: Books
Format: Paperback
$34.95
$34.95
$34.95
Subtotal: $34.95
Hill Farms: Surviving Modern Times in Early Twentieth-Century Vermont by Brown, Dona

Hill Farms: Surviving Modern Times in Early Twentieth-Century Vermont

$34.95
Hill Farms: Surviving Modern Times in Early Twentieth-Century Vermont by Brown, Dona

Hill Farms: Surviving Modern Times in Early Twentieth-Century Vermont

$34.95
Format: Paperback
Description
Description
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There is a stubborn myth that has persisted for almost two centuries: the narrative of the abandoned farm in the rural American northeast. In Hill Farms, historian Dona Brown confronts this myth of rural decline with a focus on Jamaica, Vermont, a small town in the hills west of Brattleboro. Through this town's history, she reveals a more complex economic and environmental narrative, a story of the continued use of traditional farm methods despite the growing power of modernization and demands for increased efficiencies.

Brown examines the records of a 1930 study by the University of Vermont's now infamous Eugenics Survey, part of a flood of problematic investigations of Vermont rural life at the time, wherein eugenicists interviewed residents in every Jamaica household about crops, incomes, and housing conditions. These researchers from various disciplines saw in Jamaica and towns like it poverty and ignorance rather than a commitment to farming as a modest but sustainable way of life. Extensive handwritten notes from the Eugenics Survey provide a remarkable glimpse into the daily lives and practices of these upland farmers, revealing the value in maintaining older, less intensive farming practices and shedding new light on the social and environmental history of the time. As debates around farming and rural life intensified during the Great Depression, advocates beyond Vermont rose to the defense of traditional farms. Though industrialized agriculture ultimately prevailed, the old farming strategies cultivated by these upcountry residents continue to attract adherents in the face of new challenges to traditional farming in our own times.

Author: Dona Brown
ISBN-10: 162534872X
ISBN-13: 9781625348722
Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
Language: English
Published: 07/03/2025
Pages: 252
Format: Paperback
Weight: 1.00lbs
By Dona Brown
By Dona Brown
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DONA BROWN is professor emerita of history at the University of Vermont. She is the author of Back to the Land: The Enduring Dream of Self-Sufficiency in Modern America and Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century, and editor of A Tourist's New England: Travel Fiction, 1820-1920. She has contributed essays to The Routledge History of Rural America, New England: A Landscape History, The Encyclopedia of New England Culture, and Picturing Old New England: Image and Memory. She has consulted on numerous museum exhibits, and has held a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, at the Winterthur Museum, and the Frances Hiatt Fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society.

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