The church of the land-farmer is the typical Protestant church of the United States. So influential has the farmer been in national life that organized religion has idealized his type of church. It has been transported to villages and towns. It has become the type of church most frequent in the cities.
Nearly all the Protestant churches in New York City are land-farmer churches; "and that," says a noted city pastor, "is what ails them."[6] This church centers its activities in preaching, rents or assigns its pews to families, and organizes societies for the various factors of the family group. It has Sunday schools, women's, men's and young people's societies, with only one minister to supervise them all.
The transformation of this type of church, so deeply rooted in the idealism of the whole people, into a church better suited to city, factory, town and mining settlement, has been the problem for Protestant bodies to solve in the past twenty years. The beginning of this transformation, it is striking to observe, came at the end of the land-farmer period, about 1890.
The land-farmer, then, whose period according to Prof. Ross, [extended] from 1835 to 1890 in the Middle West, is the best known agricultural type. He is the typical countryman as the countryman is imagined in the cities and recorded in [our] literature. It has been the American hope that he should be the land-owner of the days to come. In East Tennessee the farmer is still the type of landowner in country communities. In some portions of Michigan and Minnesota the farmer type gives character to the whole population, but generally throughout the country the processes described by Prof. Ross have undermined the integrity of the farmer type and broken his hold upon leadership of the country population. Within the last two decades, since 1890, the farmer has been gradually discouraged and has realized that his economy is not suited to survive. The most representative farming communities today are those of Scotch or Scotch-Irish people, whose instinctive tenacity, their "clannishness," has perpetuated longer than in other instances the rural economy and the country community.
In using the term land-farmer I am aware of its close resemblance to the term exploiter. The word itself points to exploitation of land. The land farmer has used the raw materials of the country. He has tilled the soil until its fertility was exhausted and then moved on to the newer regions of the West, again to farm and to exploit the virgin riches of a plenteous land. The planter in the South, possessing frequently more than a thousand acres, was accustomed to till a portion of one hundred, two hundred or four hundred acres, until its fertility had been exhausted. Then he moved his slaves to another section, cleared the land and cultivated it until its power to produce had also been exhausted. The difference between land-farming and exploitation is the absence of speculation in land in the former period.
FOOTNOTES:
[6] Rev. Charles Stelzle.