The Evolution of the Country Community / A Study in Religious Sociology

by Warren H. Wilson

The dates of this exploitation of land are, generally, from 1890 onward. Reference is made elsewhere to the description of this process in the Middle West.[31]

Independent of these causes the same process has appeared in the South, in Georgia, Mississippi and in West Tennessee, as well as other states. In sections in which the values of land have not been doubled, as in Illinois and in Indiana they have, the same exodus from the farm and invasion of the country community by new people has taken place.

One cause of this exploitation of land is the shrinkage in size of the older families. Everywhere the exploitation of land is the greatest where the soil is the richest and the farmers the most prosperous. Even in the exceptional populations such as the Scotch Presbyterians and Pennsylvania Germans, this effect of agricultural prosperity is slowly at work.

In Chester County, Pennsylvania, and in Washington County, where the most substantial farmers in the country are found, the families in the present generation are small. Many of the older stock have no children. Families which have retained the title of their land for eight generations are losing their hold upon the soil, by the fact that they have none to inherit after them.

Another cause of this exploitation of land is the increasing number of small farms in certain regions. This means that in certain sections the farming population has a new element, for the holders of these small farms are many of them new to the community.

The process, which is made clear by the census of 1910, is this. The earlier retirement from the farms was by sale, the farmer taking money instead of land. The second stage of retirement from the farm was through absentee landlordism and the placing of tenants on the farm. This process has come to an end in many sections of the Middle West, with the return of the sons of the landlord to the family acres in the country, so that there is a sort of rhythm in the flow of population from the country into the town and backward to the land. In this process there is no invasion by new people, except the temporary residence of the tenant farmer in the country, and some of these have in the process gained a footing by ownership of land. But this ebb and flow of population out of the country community and back again has weakened and strained the country church and school and has not yet begun to strengthen them. There is every evidence that with a pleasant and agreeable country life the country community can retain the best elements of this population, which comes and goes. The country church and school ought to take measures to retain the best of the country population through these changes.

Through all these causes the presence of a large proportion of aliens in the community who are American born, but locally unattached by birth or ownership, has effected great changes in the country church, and other community institutions. The State of Illinois, which has a tenant farmer population of more than 50 per cent in its richest sections, has suffered severely through the loss of many country churches. There is no precise measure of this loss, but a sociological survey recently made in Illinois indicates that in the past twenty years more than fifteen hundred country churches have been abandoned in the State. This statement must be accepted as approximate, but the number is likely to be greater rather than less. This abandonment of country churches has come in the same period in which the proportion of tenant farmers has greatly increased. Reference is made elsewhere to a similar condition in the State of Delaware, in which the churches of the old land-owners have been abandoned and replaced at heavy expense with poorer churches built by the incoming tenant farmers.

Everywhere in the United States this process has in some measure affected the country. It does not much matter whether the proportion of tenants is increasing or decreasing, the present effect is one of instability. In New England where in the past ten years tenantry has been diminished ten per cent, the country churches are weakened as elsewhere. The churches have not yet had time to recover while the population is in a state of change.

The old order in the country is crumbling. The church is an expression of stability. The people on whom the church always depends for its audiences, its enthusiasm and its largest accessions, are marginal people, working men, adolescent youths and those who are coming to a position in the community. The exodus of these from the country community, or the incoming of persons in these classes into the country community, has been unfavorable to the country church at the present time.

It may be said at this point that a state of transition is for the time being unfavorable to ethical and moral growth. Moral conditions are sustained by custom, and where customs are in change, moral standards must themselves be in transition. The country community is moral so far as adhering to the standards of the past is concerned. But the population themselves who have to do with the country are undergoing extraordinary moral change, with incidental loss, and many of the problems of the United States as a whole are made more acute by the waste of the country community. Among these should be cited the amusement question in the small town, the decadence of the theatre in the cheaper vaudeville, the white slave traffic and the social disorders peculiar to unskilled laborers, many of whom come from country communities of the United States and Europe.