BRATTLEBORO — What can we learn today from Vermont's rural past?
“Each generation arrives on the landscape surrounded by the world as it is,” said Gregory Sharrow of the Vermont Folklife Center. “It's hard to imagine things ever having been any different. But what came before now, and how did we got from there to here?”
This is a question of some importance in a culture that is focusing on the concept of sustainability.
Sharrow gave a talk on “A Sense of Place: Vermont's Farm Legacy” at the Vermont Center for Photography on June 11. His talk was held in conjunction with the exhibit of Stan Sherer's photographs of daily farm life called “Vermont Farmsteads.”
“You arrive here and see what you see and know what you know,” Sharrow said in a interview earlier this month. “But older people who were born here know the trajectory of change. Was the path that we took inevitable, or could we have made different decisions? At which junctures did we take paths that ultimately may not have delivered to us what we wanted? And how can we be more thoughtful in ensuring the future we create for ourselves and our inheritors is the future that we want? I'm trying to sketch a little bit of what was here before and offer it a kind of challenge to the present.”
For example, back when Vermont was an agricultural state, if a rainstorm washed out a culvert, a farmer threw some tools in the back of his truck, drove out and fixed it. Today, we call the town highway garage.
“When I was beginning my field work, focusing on farm life and rural culture in Vermont, in my interviews I asked older farmers what they did with trash,” Sharrow said. “The response was, 'What trash?' There were a few things that ended up on a farm dump, but things were reused and recycled. This whole culture of consumption and waste supported by fossil fuels is a creature of relatively recent construction.”
Each farm was a sustainable unit. But at certain times of the year, especially during the threshing season, farmers had to join together.
“In this vanished world, people were linked together because they needed each other,” Sharrow said. “So to the extent that we are obligated to work together, that has become a major building block of community.”
Some may call all this nostalgia, but from the past we learn things that are valuable and relevant today, Sharrow said.
“Even now, an agricultural ideal is that a farmer will, at the end of his or her tenure, leave the land they've been working even more productive than when they arrived,” Sharrow said.
“So I'm trying to sketch what rural culture looked like in the 1930s and 1940s. What was the agricultural world of Vermont in that era? What changes have we experienced? What have we gained and what have we lost? And, more particularly, how did the people frame this change?”