The Middle Border’s Middle Borders: Trees and the Making of the Corn Belt

• In Event: Interrogating Naturalization and Romanticization in Rural Extractive Environments: The American Midwest and Scotland

Abstract

Regionalist literature, art, and, recently, historiographic revival of the US Midwest “heart-land” in the Prairie Peninsula-turned Corn Belt of Illinois and Iowa work hard to naturalize, even romanticize, the abstract and material lines drawn since the 1780s by surveyors and traced by farmers’ roads, fences, and hedges. By the end of the nineteenth century the construction of such structures, and the corn-focused economy they contained, marked their establishment not only of a colonial environment but an extractive, industrial one.

Fields forty acres or larger have been normal for many decades, but this paper analyzes the smaller subdivisions that farmers made to account for the limitations on arable field size imposed by animal, as opposed to fossil fuel, energy and smaller implements. More importantly, farmers and agricultural “improvers” of Civil War-era Illinois and Iowa were greatly concerned with planting trees around farmhouses to separate productive space from domestic space; raise a secondary crop of fruit; and provide windbreaks, shade, beautification, refinement, and a source of the one natural resource the Midwest seemed to lack: timber. Twentieth-century regionalist landscape painters, working after agricultural industrialization began, ratified improvers’ emphasis of trees in place-making by situating many of their romantic farmsteads not amidst fields of grain but amidst the shelter of trees.

Improvers’ discourses on the cultivation of a type of plant for which the Midwest is not well known – trees – softened, romanticized, and made this ecological and social violence seem natural. Making a sylvan environment the center of agricultural production – creating more “middle borders” for the region later called the “middle border” – conveyed an important sense of cultural and racial superiority as it assured – and continues to assure – the agents of colonial-ism that agriculture was an “art of peace” even as it worked profound rural ecological, economic, and technological changes.

Author

• Michael Belding, Iowa State University