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Ray Ackerman, who farmed in Tazewell County as a young man, talks on
video about his early farming days: “No one wants to go back to the
hard work they did in the past.” Ackerman talks about having to haul
and spread manure on his fields but notes that now farmers use artificial
fertilizers that leave dangerous residues. “We are going a step
backwards,” he says. “We gained on one side, lost on
another.”
The interview with Ackerman is one of just 50 that
Robert Warren, curator of anthropology at the Illinois State Museum, and
Mark DePue, director of the Oral History Project at the Abraham Lincoln
Presidential Library, hope to complete in the Oral History of Illinois
Agriculture project. Warren is the principal investigator, DePue the
co-principal investigator. The agriculture project is one of six in the
larger one that DePue directs, called Capturing the Voice of Illinois. Before DePue started as director, on Sept. 1, 2006,
the library’s Audio-Visual Department was collecting histories on
cassette tapes donated by institutions and individuals from around the
state. Most of those histories, however, did not come with transcripts, and
cassettes have a shelf life. When DePue inaugurated the library’s
oral-history program, he says, “I was brand-new in oral
history.” He is, in essence, self-taught, having recently published Patrolling Baghdad, a book
based on 80 interviews he conducted with the members of the 233rd Military
Police Company, an Illinois National Guard unit based in Springfield that
was the first MP unit to patrol Baghdad in 2003.
DePue’s program primarily uses digital audio
recordings, but for the agriculture project, conducted in conjunction with
Warren and the Illinois State Museum, interns and volunteers are
interviewing on digital video and transcribing and editing the interviews
with the help of an outside firm. “It’s a pretty ambitious goal,”
DePue says. “Once you get into it, it becomes more complex.
It’s a great project to work on.” Transcription and editing are
painstaking and take much more time than the actual interviews. Every hour
spent on an interview requires about 40 hours of preparation,
transcription, and editing. For example, DePue recently had to study the
operations of the Board of Trade to prepare for an interview with a grain
farmer. “There is nothing more exciting than a good interview,”
he says. What oral historians want are people’s firsthand
experiences. “Our volunteers must be passionate about the
topic,” he says. “It’s something they fuss
about.”
Warren received a $564,651 grant from the Institute
of Museum and Library Services for the project. Once the two had the grant
money, they asked Charlyn Fargo, formerly with the State Journal-Register and now
with the Illinois Department of Agriculture, and Steve Simms of the
Illinois Farm Bureau for the names of possible interviewees. Between them
they submitted 160, from which the researchers picked the 50 on the basis
of geographical spread and diversity. Warren hired Mike Maniscalco to help
with interviews. DePue has also turned to Cullom Davis, professor
emeritus at the University of Illinois at Springfield, for advice. He
describes Davis as “one of the pioneers in oral history.”
Warren says he likes to do a sit-down interview
first, then a walk-and-talk during which the interviewee demonstrates what
he or she does. Oba and Lorene Herschberger are among the people he’s
interviewed. Oba is a retired Amish dairy farmer in Moultrie County who
breeds Belgian draft horses. Others include Lloyd Johnson, a gospel singer
who has retired after a career spent on the farm his family founded in
1850, and Geneva Sweet, who has kept many of her late father-in-law’s
pictures of the family farm, stretching back to the 1890s. Most interviews run an hour or two, but one with
Jacqueline Jackson of Springfield — professor emerita of English at
UIS and a regular contributor to Illinois Times — took eight hours over two days.
“She’s a fountain of interesting stories and information going
back to the early 1900s, when her grandfather established a farm in
Wisconsin,” Warren says. Jackson recounted how her grandfather made
his first milk delivery (six quarts) on May 1, 1907, and in 1911 built a
round barn, about which she has written two books, with a third on the way.
He later built a concrete silo with the aims for the farm printed on it,
the last being, “Life as well as a Living” — her
family’s philosophy. Ackerman describes his farm’s beef, dairy, and
grain operations during the Great Depression. “I know we can’t
go back to the 160-acre farm,” he says, “but if I had a choice
that’s the way I’d want it.” His nephew John Ackerman and
John’s wife, Yvette, found a way to stay on a small farm, discovering
that people wanted to buy their ornamental pumpkins and gourds. Then they
converted an old farrowing barn into a shop where Yvette sells gifts, home
décor, and her handpicked food products. “I have quite a following,” Yvette says.
“It’s growing into a sustainable
business,” John adds. Although agriculture is at the top of the
oral-history efforts, other programs are continuing.
For example, one effort involves interviews with
historians who have written about Lincoln or Illinois. Allen Guelzo, a
noted Lincoln scholar, was the subject of a recent interview for the
Historians Speak program.
For the presidential library’s Statecraft Project, former Gov. Dan
Walker and several key aides from his administration were interviewed.
Veterans Remember is focused on Illinoisans who fought in World War II and the
Korean War. “They all have great stories to tell,” DePue says. By the end of 2008, the library hopes to begin
posting the interviews online.
Linda Hughes of Springfield is a regular contributor.
This article appears in Jun 12-18, 2008.
