Hill Farms : Surviving Modern Times in Early Twentieth-Century Vermont

There is a stubborn myth that has persisted for almost two centuries: the narrative of the abandoned farm in the rural American northeast.In Hill Farms, historian Dona Brown confronts this myth of rural decline with a focus on Jamaica, Vermont, a small town in the hills west of Brattleboro.Through this town’s history, she reveals a more complex economic and environmental narrative, a story of the continued use of traditional farm methods despite the growing power of modernization and demands for increased efficiencies. Brown examines the records of a 1930 study by the University of Vermont’s now infamous Eugenics Survey, part of a flood of problematic investigations of Vermont rural life at the time, wherein eugenicists interviewed residents in every Jamaica household about crops, incomes, and housing conditions.These researchers from various disciplines saw in Jamaica and towns like it poverty and ignorance rather than a commitment to farming as a modest but sustainable way of life.Ex