I walked over to the Marblehead Arts Festival the other day, and as I strolled among the art and artisanal exhibits, took in a couple movements of chamber music in Abbot Hall, and watched the children goggling at the Horribles Parade, I got to thinking about the history of farming out West.
Let me explain. I grew up on a quarter-section farm on the Nebraska-Wyoming border. When that farm was homesteaded in the late 19th century, it supported one family at subsistence level. By the early 20th century, it took eight men and a full-time cook to run the place. Rising commodity prices and technological advances made farming profitable. However, by midcentury, rising standards of living meant the farmer had to seek additional income off the farm, and relied on sons and daughters for free labor to fill in the gaps. By the farm crisis of the 80s, further advances in technology meant one person could run the farm part-time, before and after a day job in town, so long as the sons and daughters still provided free labor. That was me. I was the labor. By this time, our quarter-section farm did not “support” a family at all; the family supported the farm.
Nowadays, field machinery run on by smartphone and GPS has grown so massive and requires so much capital to maintain that a mere quarter-section farm cannot support it. Thus, our quarter-section farm, still in the family, is a cog in the machine of a much larger operation, rented out to an operator who runs enough acres on enough farms to keep a fleet of machinery profitable. Soaring land values and commodity prices keep the farm alive as part of a complex portfolio of Investments. Every time I am back west I go out to the farm. I now see the fields where I toiled as a kid through the lens of a spreadsheet like the movie “The Matrix”; and in that falling alphabet I sometimes see the ghost of that original homesteader with his mule, breaking virgin sod under the hot sun with a one-share plow.
Marblehead was already 250 years old by that homesteader’s time; and has itself gone from a rocky outpost of hard-drinking and recalcitrant fishermen and their long-suffering wives to a peninsula so prosperous it can afford to regulate window panes on houses in the Historic District. If you squint hard enough, you can see a fisherman untangling his nets by his dory on the rocks beneath present-day Crocker Park, even as you are taking in a virtuoso performance given by a teenager with a ukulele. I mean it – the kid’s name is August Belf and he rocked.
I even got to participate a bit in this year’s festivities. I’m still an active member of the Cranks, that group that keeps the bell up in Abbot Hall bonging every hour on the hour. On the Fourth of July, we help the public ring the bell. During my shift, I helped show both a group from Australia and a born and bred ‘Header how.
Duties finished, I wandered back to the main level of Abbot Hall. Among all the artwork, I particularly enjoyed a quilt depicting the characters from “Alice in Wonderland,” sewn Nintendo video game-style. The piece exuded the nostalgia of my generation for those old games in comforting blanket form.
Down the street, the Cape Ann Vernal Pond Team exhibit was doing a brisk business with snakes kids could touch and hold. The streets were packed and the line for a lobster roll at St. Michael’s and the Muffin Shop were out the door. There was a carnival feel to the muggy air. It’s a wonder how the Festival manages to feature so much while still maintaining a cozy, county-fair feel. I can only imagine the thousands of volunteer hours that go into producing this week-long affair. My hat is off to you all.
Sometimes I think about that long-ago homesteader farmer, how astonished he would be at the progress made on that quarter-section farm, and how pleased. The whole idea of going out to the high plains was to prosper. Likewise, I think that 17th-century fisherman, come out to Marblehead to throw off the yoke of the Puritans back in Salem and whose descendants would do so much to overthrow colonial oppression in the century to come, would look out on the Arts Festival and smile, too. The whole idea, after all, is to prosper.
As always, if you’ve got an idea upon which I can embark for a Marblehead First Time, drop me a line at court.merrigan@gmail.com.
Court Merrigan
Wyoming transplant Court Merrigan is a new Marblehead resident. His column “My Marblehead First Time” appears regularly in the Current.
