This Blessed Earth

by Ted Genoways

  So Lincoln’s team came up with a simple plan: give away the unsettled territories 160 acres at a time. The size of the allotment may have seemed arbitrary even at that moment, but it was actually the direct legacy of the Public Land Survey System. Under this plan, the western regions ceded to the new republic by King George at the end of the American Revolution and later the open prairieland of the Louisiana Territory acquired from Napoleon had been mapped out according to a rigid grid and tamed into townships, each six miles square, each township further subdivided into one-mile sections, and each section divided again into 160-acre quarters. Railroads stops were extended to each township, dirt wagon paths were built along the section lines, and farms were allocated one to a quarter.

  With the passage of the Homestead Act, the grid was extended onto the flat expanse of central Nebraska, dividing the land evenly, eschewing the realities of terrain in favor of the harsh simplicity of geometry. In those days, there was no one to lend a name to the country lanes. And to this day, the east-west gravel tracks have only numbers; the north-south roads are lettered. The intersections are still coldly determined—precisely a mile apart, unchanged from the nineteenth century. The only deviations on the unbroken straightaways come in occasional hard jogs inserted by surveyors to correct for the curvature of the Earth. Otherwise the grid is only interrupted in the precious few places where it is slashed by the braided diagonal of the Platte River.

  Despite this strict adherence to the vagaries of the plat maps, Lincoln was a pragmatist when it came to meeting the challenges of farming on the windswept prairie. Having spent years as a young lawyer and congressman on the frontier of Illinois, he knew life for homesteaders would not be easy; he understood what it would take to lure them and also what they would require to survive. So along with passage of the Homestead Act, Lincoln created the U.S. Department of Agriculture and also signed the Pacific Railway Act and the Morrill Act, named for Representative Justin Smith Morrill, who introduced the legislation. The Pacific Railway Act authorized large land grants to the Union Pacific Railroad and Central Pacific Railroad to encourage their growth westward. The Morrill Act provided each state with still more land grants of 30,000 acres per congressional seat. Funds from the sale of the land were to be used to establish schools of agriculture and mechanical arts, dubbed A&Ms. And the newly designated Department of Agriculture announced that it would conduct research on best farming practice and dispense information through the A&Ms to aid the growth of agriculture in the West through hard science.

  The creation of the USDA was especially significant, because it heralded a new era of government intervention into agriculture—not merely providing incentives for spreading farming into the West but actively providing support. To head the new department, Lincoln selected a man with the unlikely name of Isaac Newton, a Pennsylvania farmer and entrepreneur who had risen to become superintendent of the Agricultural Division of the U.S. Patent Office. Newton declared that the USDA would focus on several key areas, including scientific analysis of farm data, collecting and analyzing soil, supporting the creation of hybrids and regionally specific crops, and testing and promoting new equipment. He set up an experimental farm on the National Mall to keep his initiatives constantly in view of Congress; he lobbied for funding to establish professorships of botany and entomology at the A&Ms; and he advocated for implementing British meteorologist Robert FitzRoy’s use of the telegraph to gather daily weather observations, what he called “forecasts,” that could be shared with farmers by way of their local newspapers.

  By the time Thomas Barber arrived in Nebraska in 1866, the country was entering a renaissance of modern farming. But before he could take advantage of the nearly free land and agricultural know-how on offer from the government, he first had to figure out how he would meet the conditions of the grant. If he was going to occupy the land and also improve it with a home and a successful crop, he first was going to need some money. So in June 1866, he took a job on a farm in Sarpy County on the bustling edge of Omaha. He worked there for four years, seeing Nebraska become the first state admitted to the newly preserved Union and slowly putting away $190. He used those savings to rent a farm and built his nest egg for another two years. Somewhere along the way, Jenni wasn’t sure just when, Thomas married Mary Mitchell and had a daughter. With a family now, and enough saved to make a go of things, he set out looking for land in the counties west of Omaha, particularly York and Hamilton counties, where the richest soil was reputed to be. But by now it was 1874, and he found that whole area had been homesteaded and much of the desirable farm ground there, which had been available for just $18 per quarter section barely a decade ago, was now selling for a steep $20 per acre.

  That summer, Thomas caught what would prove to be an unlikely break. After nearly two months of drought in May and June, a disaster of apocalyptic proportions befell eastern Nebraska—and most of the American West. “In a clear, hot July day,” one eyewitness in Seward County remembered, “a haze came over the sun. The haze deepened into a gray cloud. Suddenly the cloud resolved itself into billions of gray grasshoppers sweeping down upon the earth. The vibration of their wings filled the ear with a roaring sound like a rushing storm.” For ten days straight, innumerable grasshoppers swept across the middle of the country from Texas to the Dakota Territory, devouring everything in their wake. Newspapers reported that the locusts chewed through fields of corn so fast that it sounded like a crackling fire, and the clouds soon grew so thick that they stalled a Union Pacific engine at Stevenson station, near Kearney, Nebraska. By August, there was nothing left, and thousands of farmers, who had been counting on their harvest to keep them afloat, were panicked.

  One of those early settlers, Reverend C. S. Harrison, had come to York County in 1871, in search of unsaved souls on the godforsaken plains. He had purchased a piece of ground and laid out a hatchwork of homesites. The railroad was rumored to be on its way, and Harrison planned to sell homes to the lineworkers, feed-mill employees, and shopkeepers who would follow. In order to receive an additional quarter section awarded by Nebraska under the Timber Culture Act of 1873, Harrison had planted trees along either side of the lanes—Cottonwood Street, Box Elder Street—hoping they would one day spread and arbor the yards. He predicted that the Great American Desert would soon be forested to the base of the Rocky Mountains and, to show his confidence, named his tiny tree-lined town Arborville. But that savage summer, the grasshoppers ate the paint off his church, the handles from plows, and crops out of the fields. They chewed the leaves, the limbs, of Arborville’s trees down to the trunks.

  Nearly three-quarters of the American agricultural crop of 1874 was lost. One Nebraska newspaper mused: “We have heard some sighing, ‘Oh, for a Moses to lead us out of this land of grasshoppers.’ We fear the next cry will be, Oh, for a Joseph to sell us corn.” And, indeed, farmers soon had no feed for their cattle or hogs, and the bodies of dead grasshoppers choked and putrefied their ponds and open wells, leaving them without water. By October, with winter approaching, desperation had begun to set in. The Omaha Daily Republican estimated that more than 10,000 people (in a state of fewer than 200,000) were in need of help “to keep them from actual starvation, until next harvest.” Those who feared they couldn’t make it that long flowed back east, selling land for pennies on the dollar or abandoning it altogether. Hamilton County, hoping to stem the hemorrhaging, offered low-interest loans of up to $200 for anyone willing to stay, but still, families loaded their wagons and left.

  Farmers will tell you that rural communities unite at moments like this, rallying together to survive. It’s not really true. In times of crisis, the pragmatic and the prudent pack up and go. Only the most stubborn remain, over the years and decades giving rise to loose, often unincorporated and thus ungoverned communities of hardheaded hermits, prideful in having outlasted their neighbors. And they are experts in finding opportunity in others’ misfortunes. Thomas Barber, with almost as much saved cash as any man in Nebraska cou
ld get on loan, arrived in York County and selected 120 acres of prime land, two miles east of Arborville—what he later named the Centennial Hill Farm. The hill is really something less than a rise, just enough to give the land a southward slope. So the property is sufficiently level to hold a steady rain, but not so pancake flat that the rows puddle in a downpour. Instead, runoff pools into a natural catchment along the edge of the acreage, bounded by the roadbed. It’s a perfect spot for farming—easily planted and with a ready source of water.

  Jenni handed me the family scrapbook, open to a clipping from some long-forgotten Nebraska newspaper. The editors had asked Thomas late in his life to recall his arrival in York County. “On the 13th day of November, 1874, I moved on to the land,” he wrote. He had an 80-acre homestead and 40 acres picked up for cheap. He brought with him, in addition to Mary and their infant daughter, two cows and twelve hogs, along with the most modern farming equipment of the day: a combined reaper and mower, a threshing machine, two wagons, and six horses to supply the power. He built a sod house from the prairie soil, and almost exactly one year later, Lela, his second child and the first born on family land, was delivered there.

  Over the next few years and successive summers of locusts, farmers continued loading up and fleeing Nebraska. As they did, Thomas registered neighboring fields as abandoned and bought them, and he filed a timber claim that allotted him more land in return for planting trees. His family’s first farmhouse, the replacement for the original soddy, was erected in what would become a windbreak created by that line of even-spaced saplings, and its frame and shingles, its clapboard siding and floors, were built from the milled planks and beams of Arborville’s denuded trees.

  For the next six years, Thomas raised wheat and barley, hauling it some thirty miles to market in York, and he picked up extra money by threshing wheat for his neighbors as well. “Just as fast as I could get any money ahead I put it into land until I secured 320 acres,” he remembered. When the town of Bradshaw was platted along the Burlington & Missouri River Railroad in 1879, Thomas had a ready way to get his livestock to Omaha, Kansas City, and even Chicago. He expanded his herds of cattle and hogs and began growing more and more corn to feed them. Eventually, he was raising as much as two grain carloads per year, enough to start a small cattle-feeding operation. At the same time, he bought up surrounding plots of land, paying $20 to $28 per acre, until he had 520 acres of contiguous land.

  When the Kansas City & Omaha Railroad arrived in 1886, the town of Benedict was platted exactly five miles east of Thomas’s land. In no time, the depot was a hive of activity with supplies for Sparling’s General Store arriving daily and grain and livestock being loaded to be sold in Lincoln and Omaha. A schoolhouse was built, where Thomas sent his children during the week. And on weekends, the opera house hosted phonograph concerts, dances, and plays. Perhaps it was there that Thomas’s daughter Lela met Henry Moore Harrington, known affectionately as Harry, whose uncle had put up the land for the town and still owned the farm directly across the tracks. It almost certainly was there that Lela and Harry’s relationship, little by little, grew into a courtship. On New Year’s Eve 1894, they were married, and Thomas Barber, after twenty years on Centennial Hill Farm, turned the operation over to Harry and moved into York to retire.

  MEGHAN WAS never as caught up in the tradition of Centennial Hill Farm as her mother and aunts. Yes, she grew up there, within feet of where Thomas Barber’s original farmhouse was built, but as high school graduation approached, she couldn’t wait to get away. She had a storybook senior year at High Plains Community High, the consolidated school drawing kids from farms for miles around. Even in a tiny class, where everyone does everything, Meghan stood out. She was the homecoming queen, senior class president, junior marshal, band majorette. She played on the volleyball and basketball teams. But she had grown up skiing in Colorado, taking vacations to visit family in New York. For her, brighter things beckoned. When she went away to Metropolitan Community College in Omaha, she told me, she wasn’t looking back. “I was sure that I was never coming back to this place,” she said, “never going to scoop any more poop in the barn, never going to sort cows again in my life. I was done.”

  Her high school sweetheart, Brent Zoucha, had graduated a year ahead of her. From the small town of Clarks, just across the Platte River from the house Rick built when Meghan was in high school, Brent was the all-American kid. He worked at Pollard Oil in Clarks, changing oil and fixing cars, and he was a star of the basketball and track teams, placing in the top three in the high jump at the state track meet in both his junior and senior year. But Brent was also shy and a little goofy. Initially unable to work up the courage to ask Meghan out, he had stopped her by her locker to see if he could borrow her calculator. It was enough to get them talking, and eventually they were inseparable.

  When Brent graduated in May 2005, he enlisted in the Marines, following in his older brother Dyrek’s footsteps. Brent went through basic training at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms, California. Meghan had wanted to attend his graduation that January, but her parents insisted that she stay in Nebraska and focus on finishing her own school year. She was there in Omaha when Brent arrived back home after boot camp, and she was there again seeing him off from the airport when he was deployed to the Anbar Province of Iraq as part of the Marine Expeditionary Forces. They kissed and said their goodbyes. Being apart from Brent for nine months was more than she could imagine.

  With Brent now gone, Meghan made plans for a late-summer trip to Ireland before classes started in the fall, and she spent the rest of the summer hanging out with friends in Omaha and Lincoln. On an early morning in June 2006, Meghan was sleeping at a friend’s apartment across the street from Southeast Community College in Lincoln. “We’d been out partying the night before,” she told me. The landlord called first thing in the morning, rattling their hung-over nerves, to say that there were going to be repairmen coming by later in the day. They had just gotten back to sleep when the phone rang again. They groaned loudly as Meghan’s friend answered the phone impatiently. “It was my mom,” Meghan said. “She just said that there was an accident, and I needed to come home.”

  We were in the living room of Meghan’s home just up the road from her parents’ house, a light-filled afternoon in the quiet weeks after harvest, as the year runs toward winter. She paused a moment, fighting back tears. She said she yelled at her mother, demanding to know what was going on, but there were no details. All anyone knew was that Dyrek had called Brent’s mother Rita and told her that Brent was hurt. In shock, Meghan’s friends helped her gather her things and then drove her back home, all the way from Lincoln. As they drove, Meghan kept hoping for the best—that this was a mistake or that Brent was hurt but not badly. “Usually, it’s a casualty assistance crew that comes out and tells you, if it’s really bad,” she said, and no one had contacted Rita yet.

  Once Meghan was home, her parents drove her to Clarks to wait with Rita for further news. Hours passed. As evening came on, two men in uniform pulled into Rita’s driveway. “I guess that’s when you know it’s real,” Meghan said. She wiped her eyes. “Normally, I’m not sad. Normally, I can talk about it.” They soon learned that Brent’s Humvee had been hit by a roadside bomb in Al-Qa’im, where the Sunni insurgency was now spiraling out of control. The improvised explosive device had killed Lance Corporal Zoucha and two other Marines.

  Meghan said she would never forget the flood of emotion as the two casualty notification officers delivered the official news. “But the hardest day is the day the body comes home. You go to the airport and you expect them to walk off the plane, as good as the day they got home from boot camp. But they don’t. It’s nighttime and you go down to the tarmac and you receive the body.” Dyrek was not hurt in the explosion, but he was detailed to return to Nebraska with his brother’s remains. He was supposed to arrive on the same flight as Brent’s coffin, but one of Dyrek’s connecting flights was delaye
d. So Meghan met the funeral services crew and waited with Rita and Brent’s family with the hearse. They loaded the casket and started the two-hour drive.

  When they finally neared the funeral home in Central City, it was the middle of the night, but people lined either side of the highway. Those in cars and trucks fell into a convoy trailing the hearse. In the days after, Rita appointed Dave Beck, a family friend, to deal with the press. He told the local newspaper that Meghan was having a rough time accepting Brent’s death. “They were the picture-perfect couple,” he said, “the homecoming queen and the Marine. She was waiting for him to get home.”

  As the Zoucha family made arrangements, they soon learned that members of the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas, were threatening to show up at the funeral to stage a protest. A hate-filled family cult, all related to founder Fred Phelps, they believe that all tragedies are divine retribution for modern society’s acceptance of Jews, Muslims, and gays. Since the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq had begun, they had been arriving uninvited at military funerals, chanting during eulogies and carrying signs that read “God Hates Fags” and “Thank You for Dead Soldiers.” Zoucha family friend Carol Hanson was determined not to let the Phelps family disrupt Brent’s funeral.

  With Rita’s permission, Carol began working with local law enforcement, the Department of Defense, and St. Peter’s Catholic Church in Clarks to map out the funeral procession route. They figured out where protesters might set up and devised a plan for how best to shield family and friends. She called in the Patriot Guard Riders, a national organization of motorcycle enthusiasts created specifically to oppose Westboro Baptist, to form a line of flags to block the view of protesters. If their chanting got too loud, the guard was instructed not to engage them, not even to make eye contact, just to kick-start their motorcycles and idle the engines to mask the sound. In the end, the protesters never showed. Members of the cult were at funeral services in Beatrice, Nebraska, for Army Private First Class Ben Slaven of Plymouth, but a new state law had barred protesters from standing closer than 100 yards from a funeral parade route—and it appeared that the Westboro Baptist protesters were put off by their inability to disrupt services.