A01=Dona Brown
agrarian community defense
agrarian cultural landscapes
agricultural heritage
agricultural modernization critiques
agriculture
American agrarian traditions
Author_Dona Brown
Brattleboro region history
Category=JBCC4
Category=NHK
Category=WQH
census records
Commission on Country Life
community resilience narratives
contested histories of agriculture
cultural history of Vermont
daily life
Depression-era farm debates
documenting agricultural lifeways
early 20th century farming
ecological farming narratives
economic survival strategies
environmental history
environmental justice in history
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Eugenics Survey
family farm continuity
farm life ethnography
farming
farming economy in crisis
farming families of New England
forgotten farm histories
Great Depression
hand-written survey records
historical farming methods
history of small farms
housing
income
industrialization
interdisciplinary rural studies
Jamaica
Jamaica Vermont studies
lessons from traditional farming
localized food systems history
New England heritage preservation
New England rural communities
newspapers
persistence of rural traditions
pre-industrial agricultural methods
railroads
regional identity in farming
resistance to industrial agriculture
rural life
rural mythologies challenged
rural sociology research
slow farming antecedents
small town resilience
subsistence farming heritage
sustainable agriculture precursors
sustainable land use
traditional farm practices
twentieth-century rural change
University of Vermont history
upland farmer perspectives
upland farming heritage
Vermont agricultural history
Vermont environmental past
Vermont Eugenics Survey context
Vermont in the Great Depression
Vermont social history
Product details
- ISBN 9781625348722
- Weight: 454g
- Publication Date: 03 Jul 2025
- Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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There is a stubborn myth that has persisted for almost two centuries: the narrative of the abandoned farm in the rural American northeast. In Hill Farms, historian Dona Brown confronts this myth of rural decline with a focus on Jamaica, Vermont, a small town in the hills west of Brattleboro. Through this town’s history, she reveals a more complex economic and environmental narrative, a story of the continued use of traditional farm methods despite the growing power of modernization and demands for increased efficiencies.
Brown examines the records of a 1930 study by the University of Vermont’s now infamous Eugenics Survey, part of a flood of problematic investigations of Vermont rural life at the time, wherein eugenicists interviewed residents in every Jamaica household about crops, incomes, and housing conditions. These researchers from various disciplines saw in Jamaica and towns like it poverty and ignorance rather than a commitment to farming as a modest but sustainable way of life. Extensive handwritten notes from the Eugenics Survey provide a remarkable glimpse into the daily lives and practices of these upland farmers, revealing the value in maintaining older, less intensive farming practices and shedding new light on the social and environmental history of the time. As debates around farming and rural life intensified during the Great Depression, advocates beyond Vermont rose to the defense of traditional farms. Though industrialized agriculture ultimately prevailed, the old farming strategies cultivated by these upcountry residents continue to attract adherents in the face of new challenges to traditional farming in our own times.
Brown examines the records of a 1930 study by the University of Vermont’s now infamous Eugenics Survey, part of a flood of problematic investigations of Vermont rural life at the time, wherein eugenicists interviewed residents in every Jamaica household about crops, incomes, and housing conditions. These researchers from various disciplines saw in Jamaica and towns like it poverty and ignorance rather than a commitment to farming as a modest but sustainable way of life. Extensive handwritten notes from the Eugenics Survey provide a remarkable glimpse into the daily lives and practices of these upland farmers, revealing the value in maintaining older, less intensive farming practices and shedding new light on the social and environmental history of the time. As debates around farming and rural life intensified during the Great Depression, advocates beyond Vermont rose to the defense of traditional farms. Though industrialized agriculture ultimately prevailed, the old farming strategies cultivated by these upcountry residents continue to attract adherents in the face of new challenges to traditional farming in our own times.
Dona Brown is professor emerita of history at the University of Vermont. She is the author of Back to the Land: The Enduring Dream of Self-Sufficiency in Modern America and Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century, and editor of A Tourist’s New England: Travel Fiction, 1820–1920. She has contributed essays to The Routledge History of Rural America, New England: A Landscape History, The Encyclopedia of New England Culture, and Picturing Old New England: Image and Memory. She has consulted on numerous museum exhibits, and has held a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, at the Winterthur Museum, and the Frances Hiatt Fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society.
