Jefferson's Dream and the Search for a Sustainable Future

By John S. Ferrell

In the 1930s, a former science fiction writer named Peter van Dresser presented an elaborate vision of a decentralized "garden civilization," complete with biodynamic agriculture, renewable energy, biobased plastics, and homes that were functioning organisms "rooted in a particular portion of the earth."

 

Although his civilization had striking similarities to present-day visions of a sustainable future, Van Dresser was describing a place he considered suitable for "modern Jeffersonians." It was a term that reflected a feeling that something important had been lost that needed to be restored.

 

What had been lost? Thomas Jefferson's dream of self-reliant farm families, rooted in rural communities, serving as good stewards of their land, and remaining a major force in the life of the nation.

 

The dream faded as America grew more urbanized and industrialized. But during the first 80 years of the 20th century, Peter van Dresser and fellow "Pioneers of Permanence" pushed back with ideas and projects that placed agrarian ideals in a more ecologically sound, technologically advanced context. As Jefferson's Dream makes clear, their work made them fascinating forerunners of today's sustainability advocates.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John S. Ferrell
• Release date: May 30, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224824021

Book preview

Jefferson's Dream

and the Search for a Sustainable Future

John S. Ferrell

Copyright © 2024 by John S. Ferrell

All rights reserved.

No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.

Published February 2024. Latest minor revisions: April 2024.

To my sister Ruth

Contents

Preface

Introduction

Prologue: What Happened to the Dream?

Part One: Seeking Permanence (1901-1920)

1.A Permanent Rural Civilization

2.Conservation and Country Life

3.The Plant Doctor

Part Two: Creating a Garden Civilization (1921-1940)

4.Too Many Farmers?

5.Fleeing the City

6.Homesteads in Hard Times

7.Dust and Destiny

8.An Elusive Jeffersonian Alliance

9.Homestead Humus

10.The Technics of Tomorrow

Part Three: Wartime Dreams/Postwar Realities (1941-1960)

11.The Sinatra of the Soil

12.Organic Audacity

13.Betting on Disaster

14.Paradise Lost?

15.Pushed to the Fringe

16.Beyond Wind and Sun

17.Crusade for Purity

18.The Pesticide Resistance

19.Memorial at Malabar

Part Four: Sun, Soil, and Self-Reliance (1961-1980)

20.An Organic America

21.To Change the World Completely

22.Arks and Alchemy

23.Doing What's Appropriate

24.Self-Reliance in the City

Epilogue: Sowing Seeds for the Next Century

Sources

About the Author

Preface

In 1937, members of my family became back-to-the-landers. Actually, just one member, a former Nebraska farm girl, was literally moving back. But everyone else thrived in their new world of farm animals, county fairs, and 4-H projects. I came along too late to participate, but I heard so much about it, it felt almost as if I was there.

I eventually learned that during the 1930s, seeking a self-reliant life in the country was far from unusual. With a Depression underway, many city people sought, or at least craved, rural security. But there were larger forces at work—forces that my relatives likely knew little or nothing about. When their rural adventure began, a temperamental would-be reformer in rural New York state was running a school that emphasized how human-scale technologies could help people lead drudgery-free lives on small homesteads. That would-be reformer was also one of the editors of a magazine that ran articles from a young writer who described a future civilization where people used natural methods to grow their food, made plastics from farm crops, and drew energy from sun wind, and water.

In the early 1980s, I was surrounded by people with similar ideas. We called ourselves appropriate technologists, and our concerns derived in part from a perception that the fossil fuel era was drawing to a close, and in part from the environmental awakening that had occurred since publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. But I gradually came to realize that we were also connected to those people in the 1930s, and to other doers and thinkers who preceded and followed them.

What had motivated those doers and thinkers? Why had their efforts been sidelined? And what relevance did their efforts have to current hopes for a sustainable future? With no conception of how many journeys through obscure books, magazines, and manuscript collections lay ahead, I finally decided to find out.

In the course of finding out, I received invaluable help from the staffs of the various archives and manuscript libraries that I visited or corresponded with. All deserve thanks, but I am particularly grateful to Dale Patterson of the United Methodist Church Archives and Dena Hunt of the State Archives of New Mexico.

I am also grateful to the following: The late Dr. Gordon B. Dodds for inspiring my interest in history; Dr. Linda Lear for sharing her knowledge about Rachel Carson; Dr. Mark D. Hersey for sharing his knowledge about George Washington Carver; Jenny Holmes, my amazing wife, for sharing her expertise on food-security issues and all things environmental; my wonderful sister, Ruth Perry, for her careful reading and helpful suggestions; my other wonderful sister, the late Mildred Rasmussen, for her supportive interest in the project; Earle Barnhart for information about the early years of the New Alchemy Institute; Steve Solomon for his invaluable online Soil & Health Library; Tanya Kucak, Patty MacNamee, and Debbie Freeman for their research assistance; and Steve van Dresser, Valerie Knouse Kooyker, and Tom Sharpe for information on Peter van Dresser.

And of course I must add that none of these fine people bears responsibility for any errors on my part.

Introduction

There are factories in the Republic of Jeffersonia, but many of them are small and local. There are also cities and towns, but families living on small farms and homesteads are honored as special trustees of the nation’s social, economic, and ecological permanence. By emphasizing perennial polycultures that mimic the way wild plants thrive in a particular region, these rural families reduce both their own labor and their impact on the soil. They focus first on meeting their own food needs, then on producing crops for sale. But sales are modest since food production is a principal preoccupation for Jeffersonians, regardless of where they live. People in the cities raise fish in basement tanks and vegetables in rooftop solar greenhouses. Compost bins—a common sight behind urban homes, apartments, restaurants, and stores—convert what was once called food waste into rich soil amendments. And any compost not used in the cities is transported to nearby farms.

Wherever they choose to live, Jeffersonians have dwellings that are made of indigenous materials and are designed to take maximum advantage of sunlight and natural airflow. Many homes have solar collectors to heat water and wind generators to power the small devices that Jeffersonians use to save time and labor in their kitchens, workshops, barns, gardens, and farm fields.

Learning is a life-long process in Jeffersonia, and much of it centers on nature appreciation and self-reliance skills. Children become intimately familiar with the flora and fauna in their own regions through participation in a comprehensive nature-study program. And many adults spend spare hours in schools that offer courses in gardening, weaving, furniture making, and home carpentry. Because of their previous exposure to nature study, these adult students are well aware of the need to responsibly manage the local natural resources that serve as raw materials for their endeavors.

History is also an important part of education in Jeffersonia, and particular attention is paid to the nation’s founding fathers and mothers. These founders are called Pioneers of Permanence because they recognized the importance of people being rooted in a place that they nurtured generation after generation, protecting not only its soil and water, but its social and economic well-being.

Where is Jeffersonia? Although it resembles 21st century visions of a sustainable future, its features were imagined—and in some cases modeled—in the first eight decades of the 20th century by people we’ll meet in the pages to follow.

And why is it called Jeffersonia? In his classic book The Unsettling of America (1977), farmer-author Wendell Berry described an exploitative tendency that had been dominant in what is now the United States ever since European explorers arrived in search of riches. But he also pointed to a subordinate tendency of settlement, of domestic permanence that was the ambition of thousands of immigrants; … the dream of the freed slaves; [and] … written into law in the Homestead Act of 1862. That tendency, said Berry, had also been formulated eloquently in some of the letters of Thomas Jefferson.

Of course Jefferson was also an exploiter. After famously declaring that all men are created equal, he remained a slaveholder for the rest of his life. Nevertheless, his contribution to the subordinate tendency that Berry identified was so pronounced that it long inspired visions of permanence—of families rooted in a place that they nurture and sustain across generations.

How did Jefferson inspire those visions? Looking at the new republic he had helped to create, he called farmers its most valuable citizens. Why? Because they were the people with the most vigor, virtue, and independence—the ones who were tied to their country and wedded to its liberty and interests by the most lasting bands.

Like many other Americans at the time, Jefferson associated independence with land ownership. A land-owning farm family could not only produce the food and fiber needed for its basic sustenance, but at least in theory, have the independence needed to thoughtfully consider the common good. Part of that common good—as well as a step toward further family independence—was healthy, productive acres, and Jefferson envisioned agricultural societies disseminating knowledge about improved farming methods—including methods to protect and improve the farmers’ soil.

But with a vast number of fertile acres tempting farmers westward, many chose land exploitation over settled permanence. And while that exploitation was underway, the young republic was becoming an industrial power. Much of its manufacturing took place in growing cities whose inhabitants were far removed from the daily rhythms of nature and dependent on food grown and processed many miles away. Families that remained on the land grew less self-reliant as they devoted more attention to growing crops for urban consumption. And that consumption produced wastes that could be cycled back to the land, but often were not.

By the early 1900s, Jefferson’s dream lay in tatters, but for people identified in these pages as Pioneers of Permanence, it still had power. Some even argued that despite growing urban dominance, it was still possible to turn much of the country into a permanent rural civilization where children would learn to appreciate their natural surroundings, where farmers would replenish their soil, and where neighbors would join in building vibrant communities.

What came instead was more impermanence. Agriculture grew more industrialized, farmers were pushed off the land, and rural communities declined. But as that unsettling occurred, Pioneers of Permanence fought back with ideas and projects that echoed Jefferson’s dream. Although there were elements of nostalgia in their quest, they were not trying to recreate the past. They were instead seeking to adapt values associated with his dream to new social, economic, and environmental realities. For example, they promoted alternatives to chemically dependent industrial agriculture, they helped Depression victims move to rural homestead communities, and they described—or in some cases, demonstrated—how self-reliance could be enhanced by modern small-scale devices, including those that harnessed renewable sources of energy. For many years, a stubborn urbanophobia weakened their appeal. But when some of them finally set out to explore how cities could be made green and self-reliant, the results were striking.

The pioneers’ projects tended to be small and their influence was limited. In some cases, their ideas were too far ahead of their time for most of their contemporaries to understand. In other cases, they had a perspective that drew moderate interest during times of economic stress, but fell into obscurity when conditions improved. Despite those barriers, one generation of pioneers influenced the next, and by the 1980s what had begun as an American search for permanence was one of the streams flowing into a global quest for sustainability.

Today that quest can be found in fields as diverse as forestry and fisheries, energy and urban planning, agriculture and architecture. But for many Americans, sustainability remains something esoteric and distant. The word may conjure little more than images of wind generators, green buildings, and conferences in far-off places. The concept behind the word is also obscure—in part because so many definitions have been offered. The one most commonly quoted was originally applied to international development. Such development was sustainable, it said, if it met the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

Since a goal of meeting long-term needs has economic and social, as well as environmental, dimensions, sustainability is often described in terms of three interrelated E’s—environment, economy, and equity. That echoes a recognition by Pioneers of Permanence that the changes they sought had multiple dimensions. In 1940, for example, some of them bluntly warned that so long as we keep on scrubbing off, blowing off, killing off our topsoil, business and social conditions in this country will remain fundamentally unsound.

Another echo is the emphasis that today’s sustainability advocates place on farmers’ markets and other means to relocalize food systems. In 1902, one of the earliest Pioneers of Permanence commented on how absurd it was that despite living in a state with ample potential to meet his food needs, one of his recent breakfasts had included items from five other states and two foreign countries. Another pioneer, writing in 1938, pointed to the fossil fuel wasted in transporting potatoes hundreds of miles when they could have been grown locally.

It should also be noted that like today’s quest for sustainability. the pioneers’ search for permanence had international dimensions. When they adapted elements of Jefferson’s dream to 20th century realities, they found inspiration as far afield as Ireland, France, Switzerland, India, and Burma. Jefferson himself, when he portrayed agriculture as a special calling, was tapping into a stream of thought that was widespread in Europe and had roots in ancient Greece and Rome.

Aside from filling gaps in the historical record, how is the pioneers’ story relevant to the present and the future? Quoting from scripture, one of them warned that where there is no vision the people perish. Building a sustainable future may require not one vision, but many, so that people around the world can imagine how that future would look in their own homes and communities. Moreover, each local vision would gain power by tying it to relevant stories from the past. In America, for example, the vision might well incorporate the story of a founding father’s dream, his nation’s departure from that dream, and efforts by dedicated, creative people to recover and build on what was best in it.

Prologue: What Happened to the Dream?

When Thomas Jefferson became president in 1801, he said the youthful American republic had room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation. Even allowing for hyperbole, what could account for such optimism? The American population was still tiny—5.3 million. And as historian Henry Adams would later note, more than two thirds of the people clung to the seaboard within fifty miles of tide-water.

But the nation already stretched to the Mississippi River, and soon—thanks to the purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France—it nearly doubled in size. Still more expansion came through conquest and diplomacy, and a series of land acts made much of the added territory either free or affordable for people willing to carve out new lives in the West. Many of those people were farmers, and an expanding array of transport options—roads, canals, steamboats, and railroads—helped them not only move to new land, but move crops to market. And over the course of the century, farmers also benefited from advances in agricultural technology that allowed them to produce larger harvests with less labor.

Jefferson wanted his favored yeomen to be—like him—willing to try new farming methods. In 1811 he provided a scheme for establishing a cooperating network of county agricultural societies, and among the topics he thought such societies should consider were crop rotations and means of ameliorating the soil. During the 1800s, there was indeed a proliferation of agricultural societies. Farm journals and rural fairs also disseminated information useful to people on the land. And beginning in 1836, the US Patent Office became an unlikely national center for farm-related information and services. That office’s role ended in 1862 when President Lincoln signed an act creating the US Department of Agriculture (USDA).

Between 1862 and 1890, three additional acts did much to create an infrastructure for agricultural research and education. The first was the Morrill Land-Grant College Act, which granted states either public land or scrip to purchase it. Funds from sale of the land would be used for the endowment, support, and maintenance of colleges that emphasized agriculture and the mechanic arts. Next came the Hatch Act, which provided for creation of agricultural experiment stations at the land-grant colleges. And finally there was a second Morrill Act that made additional funding available to the land-grant schools but stipulated that none shall be paid out under this act to any State or Territory for the support and maintenance of a college where a distinction of race and color is made in the admission of students. Despite that provision, the act bowed to prejudice by directing federal funds to states where white and black students were trained separately as long as the funds were divided equitably. Of course they were not, but some money did flow to black colleges.

Education moved outward as land-grant college teachers shared their knowledge at local farmers’ institutes and as experiment station personnel corresponded with farmers and spoke at farmer gatherings. Experiment stations also produced bulletins on topics as diverse as spaying of cattle, winter protection of fruit trees, and pea-canning in Delaware.

Available land, better transportation, labor-saving farm machinery, advances in agricultural science, and expanding educational options for farmers. All would have pleased Jefferson. But a century after the Louisiana Purchase, his agrarian dream had faded to the point that some prominent Americans feared the nation would lose what was left of its soil and its soul.

Factories Replace Household Production

Massive industrialization did much to erode the dream. But for some time after the American Revolution, it was by no means clear that the industrialization would be massive. Jefferson and other leaders sought to create a republic whose virtues would stand in sharp contrast to the perceived corruptions of the defeated mother country. And the mother country’s ragged embrace of the industrial revolution provided a cautionary tale.

In 1805 Yale College professor Benjamin Silliman visited some cotton manufactories in Manchester, one of England’s principal industrial centers. Although he was impressed by what was being accomplished with intricate machinery and curious processes, he described the workers he saw as generally pale, thin, and deficient in muscular vigour. He thought the high temperature necessary in most of their processes, together with constant confinement in hot rooms, and, more than all, the debauched lives which too many of them lead, make them, at best, but an imbecile people. Savannah merchant Joshua E. White, who visited England five years later, made similar observations, and—ironically for a resident of the slaveholding South—he was especially touched by the children who toiled long hours in factories, deprived of schooling and youthful amusements. White said he would rather see my countrymen cultivators of the soil and enterprising mariners, than occupied in manufactures which are less favourable to the increase of intellect, to the promotion of morality, to the security of health, and the production of a hardy people.

In 1814, Daniel Webster, then a young congressman, voiced his own misgivings about an American industrial future. He did not want to hasten the day when young men would be obliged to shut their ears to the bleatings of their own flocks, upon their own hills, and to the voice of the lark that cheers them at the plough, that they may open them in dust, and smoke, and steam, to the perpetual whirl of spools and spindles, and the grating of rasps and saws.

Since expressing similar concerns a generation earlier, Thomas Jefferson had come to recognize how vulnerable his country could be when other nations’ wars and trade policies affected its commerce. In April 1809, a month after he left the presidency, he told a correspondent that he now favored an equilibrium of agriculture, manufactures and commerce. The disruption of American commerce during the War of 1812 further convinced him that we must now place the manufacturer by the side of the agriculturist. But since most Americans lived on farms, and farm homes were centers of domestic industry, those shifts did not constitute a radical departure from his earlier agrarian emphasis. In fact Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin had stated in 1810 that by far the greater part of the goods made of … cotton, flax, and wool … are manufactured in private families, mostly for their own use, and partly for sale. According to Gallatin, family manufacture also accounted for a great portion of the soap and candles used in the United States.

In June 1812, the same month the United States declared war on Britain, Jefferson enthusiastically declared that we have reduced the large and expensive machinery for most things to the compass of a private family: and every family of any size is now getting machines on a small scale for their household purposes. The disruptions of war gave additional impetus to household manufacture, and in 1815, months after the United States signed a peace treaty with Britain, Jefferson asserted that carding machines in every neighborhood, spinning machines in large families, and wheels in the small are too radically established ever to be relinquished. His attraction to small-scale technology was again evident that year when a miller in Louisa County, Virginia, sent him an idea for a new kind of steam engine. Jefferson thought the proposed engine had the valuable properties of simplicity, cheapness, and accommodation to the small and more numerous calls of life. As we will see, those properties would also be sought by some of the 20th century’s leading Pioneers of Permanence.

In 1815, some American industries were already serving distant markets. Among them were rum distilleries in New England, sugar mills in Louisiana, and salt works in Virginia and New York. But it was still a time when most Americans either lived on farms or in small communities largely devoted to supplying goods and services to farmers. For people who resided in well-settled rural areas, it would have been easy to assume that much of the nation’s industrial future would resemble what they saw in the present: household manufacturing supplemented by the services of specialists—e.g., tailors, cobblers, and blacksmiths—and by the output of small-scale industries—e.g., sawmills, gristmills, iron works, brickyards, and tanneries. To an impressive degree, it was a matter of local economies relying on local skills and local resources to meet local needs.

General stores were a partial exception to the local emphasis. There, shoppers might find goods from far away sharing shelves with items produced by their own neighbors. Showman P. T. Barnum, who worked in his father’s small-town store during the 1820s, recalled waiting upon customers, whether in weighing tenpenny nails, starch, indigo, or saleratus, or drawing New-England rum or West India molasses. And he admitted to driving many a sharp trade with old women who paid for their purchases in butter, eggs, beeswax, feathers, and rags, and with men who exchanged for our commodities, hats, axe-helves, oats, corn, buckwheat, hickory-nuts, and other commodities.

But while Barnum was haggling over hickory nuts, a very different kind of business culture was emerging in Lowell, Massachusetts—one that drew national and international attention. What was so noteworthy about operations in Lowell? Certainly their scale. In 1833, a decade after the first water-powered wheel turned in the first Lowell mill, operatives in 19 multi-story mills turned out 27 million yards of cotton cloth. And they did so in accordance with a unified plan that proved to be a major step in the evolution of the American textile industry. As succinctly described by a former operative, the plan was to have the raw cotton taken in from the picker on the lower floor of the mill, ascend in regular order through the processes of carding, spinning, and dressing, and come out of the weaving-room in the upper story, finished cloth.

What drew even more comment was Lowell’s workforce. Of the 5,000 operatives in 1833, 3,800 were girls and women. Like the unified production system, the hiring policy had originated at a mill in Waltham, Massachusetts, that sent its first cloth to market in 1815. Many years later, Nathan Appleton, one of the Boston merchants who had helped finance initial operations in Waltham and Lowell, explained the policy. In New England, he wrote, the daughters of respectable farmers were a potential source of labor that was both well educated and virtuous. Because the owners established boardinghouses under the charge of respectable women, and made every provision for religious worship, these ideal recruits were readily induced to come into these mills for a temporary period. These arrangements, as well as the expectation that operatives would return to their own communities in a few years, fit with the founders’ determination not to foster the kind of degraded permanent workforce that Benjamin Silliman and Joshua E. White had witnessed in English factories.

The female operatives were not all farmers’ daughters. Lucy Larcom, who worked in Lowell from the mid-1830s to the mid-’40s, said that some of her companions were children of clergymen or physicians, or of men of business, left orphans, or deprived in various ways of pecuniary support. Some other operatives were daughters of the kind of skilled workers (e.g., blacksmiths and wheelwrights) who supplemented the farming population in rural districts. Larcom’s own father had been a small-town shopkeeper. But town life was not far removed from country life, and Larcom recalled the path bordered with cornfields and orchards that led to her father’s own orchard and vegetable garden.

Author Charles Dickens, who visited Lowell in 1842, said the girls he saw there were healthy in appearance, many of them remarkably so, and had the manners and deportment of young women: not of degraded brutes of burden. He was impressed by how many of them subscribed to circulating libraries, and he noted that some of their boarding houses even had pianos. Certainly life in Lowell offered cultural opportunities not available at home. The operatives could attend lectures by such prominent visitors as John Quincy Adams and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and some had their poems and essays published in their own journal, the Lowell Offering. Dickens was impressed by its quality and said that a strong feeling for the beauties of nature, as displayed in the solitudes the writers have left at home, breathes through its pages like wholesome village air.

But the operatives’ lives were hardly idyllic. For those who were farmers’ daughters, hard work was nothing new, but farm life had not exposed them to loud machinery, nor had it forced them to inhale cotton particles or smoke from the oil lamps that were used to extend factory workdays. And long workdays left limited time for cultural pursuits. Moreover, mill owners wanted their female workers to be docile, and boardinghouse supervision was one means to that end. So was the blacklist policy by which owners sought to assure that operatives fired for such alleged offenses as insubordination or profanity were unable to find jobs in another mill.

In the early years of Lowell, the women seemed to take such policies in stride. But beginning in the 1830s, factory owners instituted a series of changes that provoked unrest. First they cut wages and raised boardinghouse rates, then they not only made operatives responsible for tending a larger number of machines, they sped up the machines. Aligning themselves with America’s revolutionary heritage, some operatives pushed back. They were, after all, the daughters of freemen. Many of the operatives did have one important kind of freedom: they could reject the new policies and return to their parents’ farms. But those who tried to effect change in Lowell were part of an old order arguing with a new. Far more freedom resided with the owners, who hired more and more immigrants to work in the mills. The Lowell model fell away, and as America continued to industrialize, many factory workers experienced conditions disturbingly reminiscent of those that Silliman and White wrote about after visiting England. And as industry became increasingly urban, job miseries were joined by squalid living conditions.

The Farmer and the City

In 1853 a writer for Scientific American observed that steam power, for manufacturing purposes, is fast supplanting that of water in many places. Twenty-three years later, writer Walt Whitman and other visitors to the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia stared in wonder at a 39-foot-high steam engine that powered all of the exhibits in the exposition’s Machinery Hall.

For manufacturers, one advantage of steam over water power was the freedom to set up their operations in major population centers, and some cities actively sought their presence. More urban factories meant more temptation for rural residents to seek work in the cities, and more people in the cities meant that people who chose to stay in the country had more markets for cash crops.

Looking at the American cities of his day, it would have been hard for Thomas Jefferson to imagine how large those markets would eventually be. When he became the first US secretary of state in 1790, Washington, D.C., did not yet exist. In March of that year, he arrived in New York City, which was then serving as a temporary capital, and by November he was in Philadelphia, the new temporary capital. This varied urban exposure happened during the same year the first national census was conducted. It ranked New York as the nation’s most populous city and Philadelphia as second. The combined population of these two urban giants was less than 62,000!

Even in 1820, the last year a census was conducted during Jefferson’s lifetime, only one city, New York, had more than 100,000 residents. But 80 years later, there were 38 such cities, and six of them were metropolises with populations ranging from 508,957 to 3,437,202.

As they grew more cash crops for urban residents and for export markets, farm families used some of what they earned to buy things formerly made at home. The expanded transportation network that helped those families move their crops to market also brought competition to rural merchants. Some of that competition came from Aaron Montgomery Ward, who both reflected and effected major shifts in the life of the nation. As a boy, he moved with his family from New Jersey to Michigan, traveling part of the way on the Erie Canal. As a young man he worked in a country store, then as a salesman who visited many country stores. In 1872 he sent out a one-page product list for the recently founded Montgomery Ward & Co., a mail-order business that proved popular with rural customers. As the century drew to a close, thick Ward’s catalogs—as well as catalogs from the rival Sears, Roebuck & Co.—tempted farm families with every product they could ever need or want.

Some of those products also conjured images of a presumably brighter, more satisfying urban life. Such images were nothing new. Commentators during the century had appealed to pastoral sentiment or portrayed great cities as places cursed with immense accumulations of ignorance and error, vice and crime and misery, but no amount of agrarian rhetoric could keep long, hot days behind a plow from sparking dreams of a new and possibly better way of life.

For people who did move from country to city, the contrast between dreams and reality could be stark. American cities grew pell-mell, and living conditions were often appalling. Some urban dwellers did plant gardens, raise pigs, or keep chickens. And some patronized farmers who sold their goods at public markets. But to a large extent, people in the city were dependent on food whose purity they could not trust, supplied by people they did not know. Urban milk, for example, often came from cows whose principal—or only—food was swill, the waste product of local distilleries. In 1879, St. Louis physician P. V. Schenck claimed that the swill-milk and in-town dairy question is one of those recurrent subjects that are brought before all local Boards of Health, and will keep up an agitation until a city becomes so large and the nuisance so stupendous that it must be finally disposed of. Schenck was exaggerating, but at various times during the century, swill milk production did draw negative attention in some cities, including Schenck’s own. Among the others were New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Cincinnati, and San Francisco.

Turning the waste from one production process into