The only landscape that approximates this vision is the one created by the Amish–a people who deliberately and steadfastly turn their backs on the modern world, and whose lives few of us would truly wish to replicate. They seem, to my sensibility, both admirable in their plain living, and insular and narrow.
The rural landscape around Arthur is striking in its difference from the rest of central and southern Illinois:
First, there are no wires. Amish do not use electricity nor telephones.
Second, large, multigeneration homesteads like this one appear at close intervals, maybe separated by a quarter mile–not unlike the road on which I grew up, where a child could walk barefoot to one’s neighbor and to school, and stay in hailing distance of home.
Third, people visit one another in buggies. On a Sunday, you will see family groups crowded into their buggies travelling from house to house; weekdays the roads are not so busy, but you can see buggies turn into houses and then leave, visiting on business or otherwise. Everyone has horses. This is not the rural landscape created even by their Anabaptist brethren, the Mennonites, who live on the fringes of the Amish heartland.
But outside of these strongly covenanted communities, the pressures to increase scale, to depopulation, are enormous: Sonya Salamon, in her deep study of central Illinois farming communities, has clearly demonstrated the ethnic diversity of Illinois’ farmlands. Upland Southerners, German Lutherans, Catholics, and Apostolic Christians, Mennonites, and generalized old stock Yankee Americans and Irish, although different in some particulars, all have grown large, devoured their neighbor’s land as owner or renter, cleared virtually all traces of human habitation from their fields.
continued
The rural landscape around Arthur is striking in its difference from the rest of central and southern Illinois:
First, there are no wires. Amish do not use electricity nor telephones.
Second, large, multigeneration homesteads like this one appear at close intervals, maybe separated by a quarter mile–not unlike the road on which I grew up, where a child could walk barefoot to one’s neighbor and to school, and stay in hailing distance of home.
Third, people visit one another in buggies. On a Sunday, you will see family groups crowded into their buggies travelling from house to house; weekdays the roads are not so busy, but you can see buggies turn into houses and then leave, visiting on business or otherwise. Everyone has horses. This is not the rural landscape created even by their Anabaptist brethren, the Mennonites, who live on the fringes of the Amish heartland.
But outside of these strongly covenanted communities, the pressures to increase scale, to depopulation, are enormous: Sonya Salamon, in her deep study of central Illinois farming communities, has clearly demonstrated the ethnic diversity of Illinois’ farmlands. Upland Southerners, German Lutherans, Catholics, and Apostolic Christians, Mennonites, and generalized old stock Yankee Americans and Irish, although different in some particulars, all have grown large, devoured their neighbor’s land as owner or renter, cleared virtually all traces of human habitation from their fields.
continued
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