Getting ready to "food-map" Wendell

This blog isn't going to turn into one of those this-is-what-I-planted-today-and-this-is-how-it-made-me-feel things.  Promise.  Its purpose is to help me think about the intersection of critical historical study and the local food movement, and I'm going to stick to that.  But since I'm trying to be more local in where and how I use my critical/historical skills, as well as where and how I get my food, my own place comes into the picture to some extent as well.

That place is in Wendell, Mass. (pop. 850), in a new house that we moved into just over a year ago.  We're newcomers in town, although we've lived in the area for 25 years.  Now that we've gotten through the house-building process, I'm now obsessing about building a garden--literally building it, because the soil in our part of Wendell is inhospitable at best.  I've been learning from experienced growers around here who have created thriving small farms and large gardens on equally inhospitable land--people like Sharon Gensler in Wendell, Ricky Baruc and Deb Habib of Seeds of Solidarity in Orange, and Dan Botkin of Laughing Dog Farm in Gill, among many others--and have been working on no-till "lasagne" beds and season-extending techniques (currently just a small cold frame, but I'm also trying to make a moveable hoop-house system).  We recently finished setting the last of the black locust fenceposts--"Nature's pressure-treated," according to the website of the forester we got them from. After years of container-gardening, it's a huge treat to have a big sunny space where I can really grow food.

Wendell in 1871

It's also a treat to be here because there are so many smart people in the area who are engaged in re-thinking and reinventing our food systems.  Wendell's well-deserved reputation as a hub for "alternative" ways of living is one of the things that made me decide to use this as a base for developing a "historical food-mapping" project, which I'll be launching later this spring. My plan is to start with a series of large town maps from different time periods and to invite people in town to add about what they and others have grown on particular pieces of land over time, with the goal of building up a more detailed picture of the networks of food production and exchange that Wendell has historically been part of.  The town cultural council has given me a small grant for supplies, and I'm hoping to gather enough data this spring and summer to give a sense of what kinds of additional research might help to fill in some of the blanks in the picture.

I was originally envisioning this as having a purely local focus, in keeping with the widespread notion in "transition" and "relocalization" circles that places need to become more food-self-sufficient as a strategy for resilience in an era of peak oil and climate change.  My ideas are already morphing on this, though, in large part through listening to historians and food activists like Brian Donahue who are arguing that regional self-sufficiency is actually a smarter strategy to aim for, as well as more closely reflecting historical patterns of the pre- and early-industrial eras.  And that makes me think that these food-maps should keep an eye open to larger scales, probably by asking not only what people have grown here in various time periods but also what food they've bought and from where. 

One crucial piece of history for this project is the story of why places like Wendell stopped being mainly agricultural over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries.  I can see this history just by looking out the window:  as with many places around New England, Wendell's woods are criss-crossed with old stone walls that speak of farms past and abandoned.  The rocky soil is a big part of this story;  my no-till raised beds are a solution on a fairly small scale, but once agriculture became more commercialized in the early 19th century, those people who were still trying to make a living farming began to struggle with the very real limitations of this landscape.  You can actually produce food in an intensive way here, but it's labor-intensive to do it, and it doesn't work on a large commercial scale.  And of course that connects to a whole raft of issues relating to how we work and travel and eat--our whole modern, consumption-driven, energy-intensive way of living.

So as I start to develop this local food-mapping project, I'm thinking that it's going to be as much about scale as about localness per se.  What evidence is likely to be out there for Wendell's involvement in regional-scale agriculture in the 18th and 19th centuries?  And what can be discovered locally about the pivotal moments (like the official designation of some environments as agriculturally "submarginal" in the 1920s and 30s, leading to reforestation and the creation of places like Wendell State Forest) when the scales changed radically?  Stay tuned--I hope to be able to report on some of this over the summer!

For an article on how the "submarginal lands" designation played out in neighboring Vermont, and how some farmers resisted it, see Sara M. Gregg, “Can We ‘Trust Uncle Sam’? Vermont and the Submarginal Lands Project, 1934-1936,” Vermont History 69 (Winter/Spring 2001):201-221, available as a PDF here.