40°01'57.1"N 87°57'06.8"W, County Road 1080 N.
Consolidated Grain & Barge Co.
Homer, Illinois
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Old Big-10 Conference
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WHERE IS THE MIDWEST?
The Old Northwest Territory
Atlas from 1886
U.S. Census
Cornbelt
Garmin Database
Teradata
The sum is a heatmap that delineates a sequence of happenings. And represents a common place of understanding and frameworks of identity – not that this is necessarily a good thing.
Much like the capacity of human nature, this map signifies nature + culture, both common virtue and common iniquity.
40°01'32.6"N 88°03'25.0"W, County Road 1000 N.
Sidney Township, Illinois
It is instructive to use an agricultural framework to understand how thinking about the Midwest would evolve.
Until 1880, the farm population was nearly 50% of the total population of the country, and the farm population and the number of farms continued to grow until the early decades of the twentieth century.
These overlays offer more interpretation in terms of how the Midwest is characterized.
Mechanization and the advancement in agricultural technology play a huge part in how these numbers change, but the first breaks in the trends coincide with the onset of the great depression.
From top to bottom the sequence is this:
a.The Midwest grows, as farming becomes key to the economy
b.New wealth and a farm-focused population, develop political power
c.Politicians, Intellectuals, and popular media begin framing the region more specifically
d.The federal agencies support advances in Agriculture
e.The most serious negative impacts – like world wars and financial panics
f.Then, nostalgia for the simple life of the family farm
g.Lastly, the federal government re-inforces those threads using means like The New Deal Resettlement Administration, The Farm Security Administration, and ultimately the Office of War Information.
This is when Midwestern mythology reaches its crescendo.
TIMELINE OF FIELD CORN ADVANCEMENTS
This diagram shows the advancements of hybrid corn from 1850 to 2010. It is meant to be read from the middle outwards. The dots along each axis show the frequency of the advances.
It suggests that early innovation was mechanical (the blue), but then policy (in yellow) and chemical (in orange) are the factors that continued the progress. Surprisingly, genetic advances (in green) are less frequent but are consistent over time.
These advances meant that despite an increasingly smaller population of farmers, production continued to increase, and with the adoption of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, production has managed to keep pace with the needs of the general population.
40°12'26.3"N 88°24'01.4"W. Lake of the Woods Forest Preserve, Buffalo Trace Prairie Loop
Mahomet, Illinois
Illinois farmland covers 27 million acres of the state, which is about 75% of the total land. There are about 72,200 farms, averaging 358 acres each. 90% of the field crops are corn, soybeans, and wheat –three virtually static monocultures that supplanted the diverse ecologies which had existed in a state of dynamic equilibrium.
This diagram gives a sense of what that means: On the left is a list of all plant associations in Illinois. On the right, the Blacksoil Prairie Association’s 720 unique plant species.
In a 1921 interview, Willa Cather (living in New York) said, “I decided not to ‘write’ at all – simply to give myself up to the pleasure of recapturing in memory people and places I’d forgotten.”
The Regionalists, a trio of mid-century painters, who were born in rural places, but worked in cities, grew prominent through their images celebrating small-town, rural life
Pare Lorentz directed a pair of very high-profile films chronicling the prowess of U.S. agriculture, natural resources, and infrastructure. These were labeled “documentaries”, but somehow one of them won a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
A timeline of the lives of authors and artists who made creative work about the midwest and rural life, or the conflicts between rural and urban, PLOTTING the dates of their most “important” works suggests that even though they were publishing in the mid-20th Century, they were recalling a more arcadian past.
39°58'53.5"N 88°11'56.2"W, County Road 700 N. and 1400 E.
Philo Township, Illinois