I doubt that today's Homestead movement (assuming there is something you can truly describe as a movement) shares many roots with the American original, when chunks of the Great Plains and the West were opened up to settlement by anyone who could stake a claim and "improve" it, which itself stems from the many earlier waves of homesteading beginning with Plymouth and Jamestown. These waves were by necessity self-sufficient: if your rye and wheat failed, if the foxes ate your chickens and the bears your hogs, you and your family would starve. You couldn't run down to Safeway for a dozen eggs, or get a day-job substitute teaching or asking tourists if they'd like fries with their hamburger.
The modern "movement's" origins seem more related to more recent cycles of interest--in the 1930s, with the Depression and first-generation-urban Americans who remembered the farm they grew up on, and heard from their relatives in the country (like my grandparents) who said Depression? What Depression? Nother piece of fried chicken? They planted gardens in their urban and suburban backyards, kept a few chickens, and eked out an existence. Some left the cities altogether, either to return to the farm or to attempt farming themselves. And I'll place quotes around "farming," because typically the large diversified for-profit farm wasn't the model so much as a small supplemental "truck" farm, a more intensive generation of income from a smaller piece of land selling higher-profit products (chicken, for those whose memories don't extend back into the 1950s, used to be a luxury meal unless you raised them yourself).
Track the books published on the subject, and you'll see spikes in the 1930s (Five Acres and Independence, the escape-from-New York writings of E. B. White), and again in the 1940s (Louis Bromfield, The Robinson Family's famous "Have-More Plan," the novel The Egg and I), and again in the early 1970s (The Whole Earth Catalog, Alicia Bay Laurel's Living on the Earth, Canned Heat singing "Going up the Country," The Mother Earth News). There was another wave in the 1980s, and the current one seems based in that: a search for (for want of a better word) "authenticity," in life in general and in food in particular. The Slow-Food movement; restaurants based on a carefully shepherded and locally sourced array of high-quality, simply prepared ingredients. See Eliot Coleman: The New Organic Grower, Four-Season Harvest. In the UK, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and his River Cottage media empire (homesteading books, cookbooks, TV show on Channel 4, unaffordable land in Dorset because Londoners all want to plant some swedes and raise some chickens and walk around in Wellies and Barbour jackets on weekends).
Of the "homesteaders" who came to my part of Maine in the early 1970s, half now have no dirt at all under their fingernails: moved away, got real jobs, lost interest in the constant labor of homesteading added on to the constant labor of real jobs. A quarter have real jobs and still raise a big garden, keep a few chickens, maybe sheep, maybe ducks, and buy as much as possible of the remainder from the remaining quarter: small market gardeners who kept at it, and make a fair-to-middlin' living selling to restaurants (or in the case of the Chase family of Belfast, starting a farm-to-Garden restaurant that was recently up for a James Beard Award), and at the various farmer's markets, and through CFAs.
The most recent wave mostly follow this path--they tend to be young (well, I think of them as young), often college-educated (most of us 70s arrivals were literal and figurative dropouts), and often with actual business plans in mind. They grow high-end organic vegetables and high-quality poultry simply because you can't make a living selling cheap food unless you're willing to grow countless acres of cheap food, on the corporate model. Five acres of arugula and cardoons and free-range poultry and organic eggs will support a small family wearing Icelandic sweaters and home-knit Goat-Ropers and driving a 10-year-old Volvo wagon with rusty quarter-panels and a Free Tibet bumper sticker.
To me, these last two groups seem to define modern "homesteaders." Totally self-sufficient folks, growing everything and spinning their own flax? We see one or two from time to time, just as we did in the 1970s, but they never last long. They're ideologically driven, for the most part. And ideology doesn't put much food on the table.
The modern "movement's" origins seem more related to more recent cycles of interest--in the 1930s, with the Depression and first-generation-urban Americans who remembered the farm they grew up on, and heard from their relatives in the country (like my grandparents) who said Depression? What Depression? Nother piece of fried chicken? They planted gardens in their urban and suburban backyards, kept a few chickens, and eked out an existence. Some left the cities altogether, either to return to the farm or to attempt farming themselves. And I'll place quotes around "farming," because typically the large diversified for-profit farm wasn't the model so much as a small supplemental "truck" farm, a more intensive generation of income from a smaller piece of land selling higher-profit products (chicken, for those whose memories don't extend back into the 1950s, used to be a luxury meal unless you raised them yourself).
Track the books published on the subject, and you'll see spikes in the 1930s (Five Acres and Independence, the escape-from-New York writings of E. B. White), and again in the 1940s (Louis Bromfield, The Robinson Family's famous "Have-More Plan," the novel The Egg and I), and again in the early 1970s (The Whole Earth Catalog, Alicia Bay Laurel's Living on the Earth, Canned Heat singing "Going up the Country," The Mother Earth News). There was another wave in the 1980s, and the current one seems based in that: a search for (for want of a better word) "authenticity," in life in general and in food in particular. The Slow-Food movement; restaurants based on a carefully shepherded and locally sourced array of high-quality, simply prepared ingredients. See Eliot Coleman: The New Organic Grower, Four-Season Harvest. In the UK, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and his River Cottage media empire (homesteading books, cookbooks, TV show on Channel 4, unaffordable land in Dorset because Londoners all want to plant some swedes and raise some chickens and walk around in Wellies and Barbour jackets on weekends).
Of the "homesteaders" who came to my part of Maine in the early 1970s, half now have no dirt at all under their fingernails: moved away, got real jobs, lost interest in the constant labor of homesteading added on to the constant labor of real jobs. A quarter have real jobs and still raise a big garden, keep a few chickens, maybe sheep, maybe ducks, and buy as much as possible of the remainder from the remaining quarter: small market gardeners who kept at it, and make a fair-to-middlin' living selling to restaurants (or in the case of the Chase family of Belfast, starting a farm-to-Garden restaurant that was recently up for a James Beard Award), and at the various farmer's markets, and through CFAs.
The most recent wave mostly follow this path--they tend to be young (well, I think of them as young), often college-educated (most of us 70s arrivals were literal and figurative dropouts), and often with actual business plans in mind. They grow high-end organic vegetables and high-quality poultry simply because you can't make a living selling cheap food unless you're willing to grow countless acres of cheap food, on the corporate model. Five acres of arugula and cardoons and free-range poultry and organic eggs will support a small family wearing Icelandic sweaters and home-knit Goat-Ropers and driving a 10-year-old Volvo wagon with rusty quarter-panels and a Free Tibet bumper sticker.
To me, these last two groups seem to define modern "homesteaders." Totally self-sufficient folks, growing everything and spinning their own flax? We see one or two from time to time, just as we did in the 1970s, but they never last long. They're ideologically driven, for the most part. And ideology doesn't put much food on the table.
