Historic Contexts Study and Phase II Inventory (Downtown Elk River) 2022

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Exhibit Station: 14 Topic: Agricultural Failure: Poor Land and the Agricultural Depression Story: If you combine generally infertile, drought -prone sandy soil, with low prices, and bad luck, farm failure is the likely result. Listen, and you can almost hear the land weep for the farmers who have tried and failed to wrest a living from its porous soils. Jacob Clitty and his wife purchased a 160-acre tract including the lake now known as Clitty Lake in 1883. The Clitty family probably built the farmstead, whose ruins we can see today, and apparently farmed the land successfully for twenty years. The land was sold to an Iowa couple named Frank and Mary James, who lived here for about ten years. The James family may have lost the farm on mortgage foreclosure, because Charles and Anna Wendt purchased 220 acres that included this farmstead from an investment company in 1913. When Charles and Anna moved here from Iowa, they had two daughters: Anna, 7, and Ruth 6. A son, Howard, was born a year after they arrived. We can only imagine their struggle to make a living on the sandy farm, but good agricultural prices during World War I may have sustained them until tragedy struck in January 1920 when their youngest daughter was killed in an accident. We learn that a little girl named Ruth Wendt of Becker, aged about 12 years, was almost instantly killed while sliding down hill near that village last Friday evening. The sled she was riding upon collided with another sled just ahead, the end of the runner penetrated her neck, severing an artery and causing her death in a few moments —The family came from Iowa recently and the body was taken there for burial. (Clear Lake Times January 8, 1920) Perhaps moved to despair by the accident, they quickly sold their land to Louis and Louisa Stuve of Hubbard County and moved away. (Kurt Kragness, "Uncovering the Past," Historically Speaking, SCHS, 6) The 1920s were a bad time to buy a farm. The World War I years had been a golden age of American agriculture, so good that the price of farm products in comparison to the price of manufactured goods in 1914 was used as the government standard for fair farm prices. This became known as "parity" price. Agricultural products declined from 99 percent of parity in 1920 to 83 in 1930, a drop of 26%. Corn prices, for instance, fell from $1.50 a bushel in 1919 to $.52 a bushel in 1921. (Robert Gough, Farming the Cutover: A Social History of Northern Wisconsin, 1910-1940 (Lawrence: University of Kansas, 1997) 116-117) After the flush years of World War I, rural America entered a long-term devastating agricultural depression. Farmers had become accustomed to producing at maximum capacity for wartime consumption, but after the war, demand dropped dramatically. Poor crop rotation, little fertilization, and few attempts to prevent soil erosion were typical approaches to farming throughout most of America in the 1920s. When the rest of the American Sherburne County Historical Society Heritage Center Interpretive Plan, April 21, 2005, page 94