Hamlin Garland's IowaThe Power of Place: A Photographic Essay
of Hamlin Garland’s Mitchell County, Iowa
by Kurtis Meyer
Photographs by Jon Morris
IntroductionRobert Frost reminds us, “The land was ours before we were the land’s.”1 This dynamic interaction between people and their surroundings is at the heart of the American experience: people setting out to change the landscape and finding themselves transformed in the process. The interplay between humans and their physical environment is personified by Hamlin Garland and is at the heart of his best, most enduring writing.
Garland as a child in Iowa
American literature has always had a regional flavor and authors who capture and convey the distinctiveness of a particular way of life: the South of William Faulkner; the New England of Robert Frost; the West of Stegner and Steinbeck; the Midwest of Cather, Fitzgerald and, yes, of Hamlin Garland. Wallace Stegner described these as placed writers: “lovers of known earth, known weathers, and known neighbors both human and non-human”2 and having “knowledge of place that comes from working in it in all weathers, making a living from it, suffering from its catastrophes, . . . valuing it for the profound investment of labor and feeling that you, your parents and grandparents . . . have put in it.”3 By Stegner’s standards, Hamlin Garland is a placed writer. And Iowa -- specifically Mitchell County, Burr Oak Township, and a locale named Dry Run -- is his place.
In this photographic essay, you will travel to a place -- Northern Iowa -- and to a time -- the 1870s. First, our geographical coordinates. The layout of Iowa is, in essence, the United States in miniature . . . bordered on the east by the Mississippi and the west by the Missouri, mimicking oceans. If Iowa, then, is the U.S., Mitchell County is comparable to Ohio, in the northern tier of counties (or states), slightly east of center. The Garland family’s move from Winneshiek County, Iowa, two counties west of Mitchell County, in 1870 is analogous to a move from say Buffalo, New York, to Cleveland, Ohio.
Garland contemporary Edward Eggleston observed that “. . . every work of art is an autobiography in that it is the result of the experience and observation of the writer.”4 This was especially true for Garland. Even his fiction draws heavily on Iowa people and places, scenes and sites, which, in Garland’s words, were “burned deep into our memories.”5 Tapping into these writings means Garland himself guides us through his boyhood haunts; his words and descriptions provide the best captions for these photographs, which, with one exception, were taken in Mitchell County, Iowa.
Garland in 1881
As Garland noted in “Crumbling Idols” early in his career, a sense of place was central to his literary philosophy: “We are forming a literature from direct contact with life”6; “The surest way to write for other lands is to be true to our own land and true to the scenes and people we love.”7 As important, Garland’s sense of place was essential to his literary success. As Keith Newlin and Joseph McCullough observe, “His early experiences influenced his later and best fiction, for they provided him with an intimate knowledge of the details of farm life.”8
Sense of place is more than mere geography. Generally, it’s an emotional blend of associations: landscape and manscape, families and neighbors, customs and values, flora and fauna, history and contemporary observations. All these Garland absorbed during his decade-plus in Iowa, meaning that to know and understand Garland requires knowing and understanding this setting. Fortunately, some elements of Garland’s Mitchell County environs remain relatively unchanged today, more than 120 years after the Garland family’s departure.
Summing up Garland’s career, Joseph McCullough noted that Garland is admired today “for the vivid impressions he created” and for “his ability to create pictures and scenes in memorable ways.”9 My intent is that these photographs, taken by my colleague Jon Morris, create the same vivid and memorable pictures and scenes through film that Hamlin Garland created through words.
The Power of Place: Garland's Iowaby Kurtis Meyer
Photographs by Jon Morris
Page | Intro | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5
#1 Gate with weeds
“Idols crumble and fall, but the skies lift their unmoved arch of blue, and the earth sends forth its rhythmic pulse of green, and in the blood of youth there comes the fever of rebellious art.” [Crumbling Idols, 1894]
The Garland family lived in five places in Iowa -- two in Winneshiek County, approximately 60 miles east of where this photo was taken -- and three in Mitchell County. This was the site of their first home in Burr Oak Township, Mitchell County, Iowa, where they moved in August 1870, and it is less than two miles from what became their primary Iowa homestead. Garland recalls the scene, although no physical remnants exist today: “I can see every acre of that rented farm. I can tell you exactly how the house looked. It was an unpainted square cottage and stood bare on the sod at the edge of Dry Run ravine. . . . [W]e cooked, ate and lived in the square room which occupied the entire front of the two story upright, and which was, I suppose, sixteen feet square.”10
This setting lodged deep in Garland’s mind only to re-surface later in his fiction. From Jason Edwards in 1892: “So this is the reality of the dream! This is the ‘homestead in the Golden West, embowered in trees, beside the purling brook!’ A shanty on a barren plain, hot and lone as a desert. My God!”11 From Money Magic in 1907: “The ranch house stood at the foot of the mesa near a creek. . . . It was a little house -- a shack merely, surrounded by a few out-buildings, all looking as temporary as an Indian encampment.”12
#2 Garland homestead
“[A]n infinite drama has been going on in those wide spaces of the West, a drama that is as thrilling, as full of heart and hope and battle, as any that ever surrounded any man.” [Crumbling Idols, 1894]
The homestead site is unusually level, which was a change for the Garland family. The coulee region of Hamlin’s birth and, to a lesser extent, the topography of Winneshiek County, Iowa was much more uneven, its slopes and ridges carved by the Mississippi River. This flat setting also found its way into Garland fiction -- for example, in “A Preacher’s Love Story” (1897): “All about him the prairie extended, marked with farmhouses and lined with leafless hedges. Artificial groves surrounded each homestead, relieving the desolateness of the fields.”13
Note the remoteness of the setting and the paucity of neighbors. The population of Burr Oak Township was approximately 600 people in 188514 (four years after the Garlands left). According to the 2000 Census, there are now 260 residents in the township,15 or 8.2 people per square mile, slightly more than the six people or less per square mile that defines a frontier, which means the Garland site today is much closer to being frontier than it was when the Garlands lived here.
In September, 1872, the month of Hamlin’s 12th birthday, the Garlands moved to their newly constructed farmhouse, which became their most permanent Iowa home.16 This is the foundation of that house, a photograph taken from within the cellar.#3 Stonework in foundation
“On a little rise of ground near the road, [they] were building our next home. It did not in the least resemble the foundation of an everlasting family seat, but it deeply excited us all. . . . [A]s it stood on a plain, bare to the winds, my father took the precaution of lining it with brick to hold it down.” [A Son of the Middle Border, 1917]
#4 Garland house
“There, on a low mound in the midst of the prairie, in the shadow of the house we had built, beneath the slender trees we had planted, we were bidding farewell to one cycle of emigration and entering upon another.” [A Son of the Middle Border, 1917]
This is the Garland home, in the classic “L” shape of a typical farmhouse, that today, from this angle, looks remarkably like it did 120 years ago. Hamlin remembered it well, if not fondly. “That bleak little house is clearly defined in my mind at this moment; . . . It was not a hovel, it was a pioneer cabin persisting into a settled community.”17
This house was built by and for the Garlands and improved by them prior to leaving, as Garland explains in Boy Life on the Prairie: “As the years passed, the homes of the prairie changed for the better. . . . Mr. Stewart put up a new kitchen with a half-story chamber above, which relieved the pressure a little. The garret . . . was lathed and plastered also, and the rooms below were papered. These improvements made vivid impression on Lincoln’s mind. There was still no touch of grace, no gleam of beauty, about the house. . . . Nature was grand and splendid -- the works of man were pitiful.”18
This house is re-created in Garland’s fiction, as in this excerpt from Money Magic (1907): “The poverty of this . . . working-man’s home was plain to see. . . . It was not a dirty home, but it was cluttered and hap-hazard. . . . There were three rooms on the ground-floor and one of these was living-room and dining-room, the other the kitchen, and a small bedroom showed through an open door. For all its disorder it gave out a familiar odor of homeliness. . . .”19
Photographs by Jon Morris
Page | Intro | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5
#1 Gate with weeds
“Idols crumble and fall, but the skies lift their unmoved arch of blue, and the earth sends forth its rhythmic pulse of green, and in the blood of youth there comes the fever of rebellious art.” [Crumbling Idols, 1894]
The Garland family lived in five places in Iowa -- two in Winneshiek County, approximately 60 miles east of where this photo was taken -- and three in Mitchell County. This was the site of their first home in Burr Oak Township, Mitchell County, Iowa, where they moved in August 1870, and it is less than two miles from what became their primary Iowa homestead. Garland recalls the scene, although no physical remnants exist today: “I can see every acre of that rented farm. I can tell you exactly how the house looked. It was an unpainted square cottage and stood bare on the sod at the edge of Dry Run ravine. . . . [W]e cooked, ate and lived in the square room which occupied the entire front of the two story upright, and which was, I suppose, sixteen feet square.”10
This setting lodged deep in Garland’s mind only to re-surface later in his fiction. From Jason Edwards in 1892: “So this is the reality of the dream! This is the ‘homestead in the Golden West, embowered in trees, beside the purling brook!’ A shanty on a barren plain, hot and lone as a desert. My God!”11 From Money Magic in 1907: “The ranch house stood at the foot of the mesa near a creek. . . . It was a little house -- a shack merely, surrounded by a few out-buildings, all looking as temporary as an Indian encampment.”12
#2 Garland homestead
“[A]n infinite drama has been going on in those wide spaces of the West, a drama that is as thrilling, as full of heart and hope and battle, as any that ever surrounded any man.” [Crumbling Idols, 1894]
The homestead site is unusually level, which was a change for the Garland family. The coulee region of Hamlin’s birth and, to a lesser extent, the topography of Winneshiek County, Iowa was much more uneven, its slopes and ridges carved by the Mississippi River. This flat setting also found its way into Garland fiction -- for example, in “A Preacher’s Love Story” (1897): “All about him the prairie extended, marked with farmhouses and lined with leafless hedges. Artificial groves surrounded each homestead, relieving the desolateness of the fields.”13
Note the remoteness of the setting and the paucity of neighbors. The population of Burr Oak Township was approximately 600 people in 188514 (four years after the Garlands left). According to the 2000 Census, there are now 260 residents in the township,15 or 8.2 people per square mile, slightly more than the six people or less per square mile that defines a frontier, which means the Garland site today is much closer to being frontier than it was when the Garlands lived here.
In September, 1872, the month of Hamlin’s 12th birthday, the Garlands moved to their newly constructed farmhouse, which became their most permanent Iowa home.16 This is the foundation of that house, a photograph taken from within the cellar.#3 Stonework in foundation
“On a little rise of ground near the road, [they] were building our next home. It did not in the least resemble the foundation of an everlasting family seat, but it deeply excited us all. . . . [A]s it stood on a plain, bare to the winds, my father took the precaution of lining it with brick to hold it down.” [A Son of the Middle Border, 1917]
#4 Garland house
“There, on a low mound in the midst of the prairie, in the shadow of the house we had built, beneath the slender trees we had planted, we were bidding farewell to one cycle of emigration and entering upon another.” [A Son of the Middle Border, 1917]
This is the Garland home, in the classic “L” shape of a typical farmhouse, that today, from this angle, looks remarkably like it did 120 years ago. Hamlin remembered it well, if not fondly. “That bleak little house is clearly defined in my mind at this moment; . . . It was not a hovel, it was a pioneer cabin persisting into a settled community.”17
This house was built by and for the Garlands and improved by them prior to leaving, as Garland explains in Boy Life on the Prairie: “As the years passed, the homes of the prairie changed for the better. . . . Mr. Stewart put up a new kitchen with a half-story chamber above, which relieved the pressure a little. The garret . . . was lathed and plastered also, and the rooms below were papered. These improvements made vivid impression on Lincoln’s mind. There was still no touch of grace, no gleam of beauty, about the house. . . . Nature was grand and splendid -- the works of man were pitiful.”18
This house is re-created in Garland’s fiction, as in this excerpt from Money Magic (1907): “The poverty of this . . . working-man’s home was plain to see. . . . It was not a dirty home, but it was cluttered and hap-hazard. . . . There were three rooms on the ground-floor and one of these was living-room and dining-room, the other the kitchen, and a small bedroom showed through an open door. For all its disorder it gave out a familiar odor of homeliness. . . .”19
The Power of Place: Garland's Iowaby Kurtis Meyer
Photographs by Jon Morris
Page | Intro | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5
This photograph is from inside the barn on the Garland homestead. (Note the wooden pegs.) According to the current owner,20 the barn was built by the Garland family, although Garland makes no references to barn building in his autobiographical books.#5 Inside the barn"Farm life in the West is still a stern round of drudgery. My pages present it -- not as the summer boarder or the young lady novelist sees it -- but as the working farmer endures it." [Preface to Other Main-Travelled Roads, 1910]
#6 Maple trees
“Next day I rode forth among the farms of Dry Run, retracing familiar lanes, standing under the spreading branches of the maple trees I had planted fifteen years before.” [A Son of the Middle Border, 1917]
These majestic, 60-year-old,21 silver maples stand guard over the Garland house today, replacing similar maples planted by the Garlands in the 1870s. As Garland explained in Boy Life: “Nearly every farm-house sorely needed protection from the winter winds, and the thriftiest of the farmers set about planting trees at once. . . . [T]o bring any kind of tree into being seemed noble and fine. . . . They shot up like corn . . . and yet, fast as they grew, they were too slow for the settler. It seemed as though they would never grow tall enough to shade him. (They stand there now with bodies big as his own -- reaching out their arms like yawning young giants.)”22
#7 Cornfield
“No writer, so far as I knew, had ever put the farm life of the West into literature. . . . With a resolution to maintain the proper balance of rain and sun, dust and mud, toil and play, I began an article descriptive of an Iowa corn husking, faintly hoping it might please some editor.” [Introduction toBoy Life on the Prairie, 1926]
The cornfield is a key port of entry into Garland’s literary career, to the point that he entitled an early short story “Among the Corn Rows.” He describes his motivation for writing in an introduction to a school edition of Boy Life on the Prairie: “I began an article descriptive of an Iowa corn husking. . . . I had the advantage of having spent many days in corn husking. . . . As I went on with my composition, my design broadened. From a resolution to write of my personal boy-life experiences, I began to dream of depicting the habits and customs of my elders. I became a short-story writer and later a novelist and chronicler of the region I like to call the Middle Border.”23 Garland's local color approach, which he called "veritism," was anticipated by Thoreau's memorable phrase, "words transplanted to the page with earth adhering to their roots." According to Garland, "Genuine American literature . . . must come from the soil and the open air, and be likewise freed from tradition."24
Photographs by Jon Morris
Page | Intro | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5
This photograph is from inside the barn on the Garland homestead. (Note the wooden pegs.) According to the current owner,20 the barn was built by the Garland family, although Garland makes no references to barn building in his autobiographical books.#5 Inside the barn"Farm life in the West is still a stern round of drudgery. My pages present it -- not as the summer boarder or the young lady novelist sees it -- but as the working farmer endures it." [Preface to Other Main-Travelled Roads, 1910]
#6 Maple trees
“Next day I rode forth among the farms of Dry Run, retracing familiar lanes, standing under the spreading branches of the maple trees I had planted fifteen years before.” [A Son of the Middle Border, 1917]
These majestic, 60-year-old,21 silver maples stand guard over the Garland house today, replacing similar maples planted by the Garlands in the 1870s. As Garland explained in Boy Life: “Nearly every farm-house sorely needed protection from the winter winds, and the thriftiest of the farmers set about planting trees at once. . . . [T]o bring any kind of tree into being seemed noble and fine. . . . They shot up like corn . . . and yet, fast as they grew, they were too slow for the settler. It seemed as though they would never grow tall enough to shade him. (They stand there now with bodies big as his own -- reaching out their arms like yawning young giants.)”22
#7 Cornfield
“No writer, so far as I knew, had ever put the farm life of the West into literature. . . . With a resolution to maintain the proper balance of rain and sun, dust and mud, toil and play, I began an article descriptive of an Iowa corn husking, faintly hoping it might please some editor.” [Introduction toBoy Life on the Prairie, 1926]
The cornfield is a key port of entry into Garland’s literary career, to the point that he entitled an early short story “Among the Corn Rows.” He describes his motivation for writing in an introduction to a school edition of Boy Life on the Prairie: “I began an article descriptive of an Iowa corn husking. . . . I had the advantage of having spent many days in corn husking. . . . As I went on with my composition, my design broadened. From a resolution to write of my personal boy-life experiences, I began to dream of depicting the habits and customs of my elders. I became a short-story writer and later a novelist and chronicler of the region I like to call the Middle Border.”23 Garland's local color approach, which he called "veritism," was anticipated by Thoreau's memorable phrase, "words transplanted to the page with earth adhering to their roots." According to Garland, "Genuine American literature . . . must come from the soil and the open air, and be likewise freed from tradition."24
The Power of Place: Garland's Iowaby Kurtis Meyer
Photographs by Jon Morris Page | Intro | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 Garland’s best work came from “the working side of the fence,” including stories like “Up the Coulé,” which accentuated the differences between two brothers who stood on opposite sides of a metaphoric fence. As many have noted, when Garland stayed on the working side, dealing with agrarian material he knew first-hand, he was at his strongest; when he moved to the other side of the fence, for example, to the city, he became more superficial.#9 Barbed wire“I see life from the working side of the fence, and not from the buggy of the visiting city novelist. . . . The beauty of the scene is there truly enough, but beneath it all are pain and squalor. I aim to put all there is in the scene, on the surface and beneath, into my pictures.” [Garland interview, 1894] #10 Wet grasses "The grass in rustling ripple, cleaves to left and right in emerald flow" ["Prairie Memories," Prairie Songs, 1893] Garland authored many poems featuring native grasses, including one entitled "A Tribute of Grasses," dedicated to Walt Whitman: "I bring a handful of grass to thee -- The prairie grasses I know the best; Type of the wealth and width of the plan, Strong of the strength of the wind and sleet, Fragrant with sunlight and cool with rain, I bring it and lay it low at thy feet, Here by the eastern sea.25 In 1870, when the Garland family moved to Mitchell County, north Iowa was part of a vast tallgrass prairie that spread across the region. Garland makes frequent references to the verdant grasses that tempted him to halt his field work and idle away a few hours.#11 Timothy at the field's edge"The temptation to sit on the corner of the harrow and dream the moments away was very great, and sometimes as I laid my tired body down on the tawny, sunlit grass at the edge of the field, and gazed up at the beautiful clouds sailing by, I wished for leisure to explore purple valleys." [A Son of the Middle Border, 1917] Although similar, this is not the Garland windmill, which is a bit more dilapidated than this one in a southern Minnesota field (once a farmstead), 15 miles northwest of the Garland site. Along with barbed wire, windmills were the kind of technological advancement that marked Garland’s Iowa years. Remember, in the 1870s, there was no gas or electricity here, no power other than wind and water, horse and human muscle. The Power of Place: Garland's Iowaby Kurtis Meyer
Photographs by Jon Morris Page | Intro | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 Let these rather modest snowdrifts underscore a key transformational difference between Garland’s time and ours. In Garland’s years, man defended himself against nature, including blizzards that howled across the prairie, figuratively and literally, bringing life to a standstill. At some point since Garland’s Iowa years, these roles reversed; the greater concern today is man threatening nature.#13 Tree with snow drifts “Along the iridescent billows of the snow The sun-god shot his golden beams, Like flaming arrows from the bow. He broke on every crest, and gleams Of radiant fire Alit on every spire…” [“Lost in the Norther,” 1887] #14 Road to Cedar River “The main-travelled road in the West (as everywhere) is hot and dusty in summer, and desolate and drear with mud in fall and spring, and in winter the winds sweep the snow across it. . . . Follow it far enough, it may lead past a bend in the river where the water laughs eternally over its shallows.” [Main-Travelled Roads, 1891] This Mitchell County road leading down to the Cedar River looks here much like it would have in Garland’s day. It left an indelible impression, for as Robert Gish observed, “The stock metaphor of life's ‘journey’ sees extra duty in Garland's writing.”26 Garland’s titles frequently employ words like roads and roadside, trail and trailers. All of which is to say that if this presentation required a poster -- if Garland’s life required a poster -- this is it, a choice made indirectly by the author himself during more than 50 years of writing.#15 Cedar River waterfall "These prairies were intersected by beautiful streams, belted in splendid groves of oaks and maples and basswood trees. The prairies were generally level, with long swells like a quiet sea, but in the neighborhood of streams they grew more varied and wooded." (Foreword, Prairie Songs, 1893) To Garland, the Cedar River, three miles west of the family homestead, meant a cool respite from sweaty toil. As he recalled in Boy Life on the Prairie, "To go from the dusty field of the prairie farm to the wood shadows and to the cool murmuring of water, to strip stark to the caressing winds, and to plunge in the deeps of the dappled pools, was like being born again."27#16 Cedar Valley Seminary “The school was in truth a very primitive institution, hardly more than a high school, but it served its purpose. . . . [E]very day was to me like turning a fresh and delightful page in a story book.” [A Son of the Middle Border, 1917] This was once the primary building of Cedar Valley Seminary, in Osage, county seat of Mitchell County, approximately four miles away from the Garland homestead. Hamlin graduated from this institution in 1881. Doors open today to visitors of the Mitchell County Historical Society, which displays its collection to the public during the summer months. A fictional description of this building and its setting is in Garland’s short story “Upon Impulse,” published in 1897: “The seminary buildings stood not far from the low, lodgelike railway station, and a path led through a gap in the fence across the meadow. People were soberly converging toward its central building, as if proceeding to church. . . . A broad path led up to the central building, whose double doors were swung wide with most hospitable intent.”28 In 1888, an anxious young author named Garland, then living in Ordway, Dakota Territory, sent a poem about his horse to a friend named James Whitcomb Riley, noting that “the enclosed poem . . . has value because of its pictures rather than the story.”29 Our purpose in this photo-essay is similar -- that you might find value in pictures rather than in story. But then, as we examine these photographs more closely, slowly our perspective starts to shift and eventually a simple story does emerge. It’s the story of a boy who came of age in rural Iowa and the setting that was imprinted deeply on his psyche and on his soul -- a setting that stayed with Hamlin Garland for the rest of his productive life. We see a small part of the world much as Garland saw it, and as he himself wanted, “from the working side of the fence.” The value of this perspective lies in the fact that almost a century and a quarter after Hamlin Garland left Dry Run prairie, Burr Oak Township, Mitchell County, Iowa, readers throughout the world visit these same sites in the pages of Garland books . . . to better understand rural life in the 19th century, to better understand America. |
Contact information:Kurtis Meyer
[email protected]
Jon Morris
[email protected]
612.414.4645
http://jonmorrisphoto.com
Press:
[email protected]
Jon Morris
[email protected]
612.414.4645
http://jonmorrisphoto.com
Press:
- Exhibit at Luther College, Decorah, Iowa, 10/28/04 - 1/16/05
- In Search of Early Mitchell County, 5/19/04, Mitchell County Press-News
- Interest reviving in renown Mitchell County author, Waterloo/Cedar Falls, IA, Courier, 5/16/2004
- UNCW Randall Library Hosts Photographic Essay and Book Exhibition, "The Power of Place: Hamlin Garland's Iowa,"University of North Carolina at Wilmington, 10/28/2003
Contact: [email protected]