{"id":8316,"date":"2025-09-01T08:22:24","date_gmt":"2025-09-01T13:22:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordpress.library.illinois.edu\/hpnl\/?p=8316"},"modified":"2025-10-08T08:39:19","modified_gmt":"2025-10-08T13:39:19","slug":"farmers-wife-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.library.illinois.edu\/hpnl\/blog\/farmers-wife-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"The Story of the “Farmer’s Wife” (Part 1)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Beclouded Beginnings and Suspicious Name Games<\/h2>\n

Little is known about the origins of the Farmer\u2019s Wife<\/em>. It might have begun publication in 1897, but more likely 1900, in Winona, Minnesota. Its first publisher was John Halvor Johnson, who went by \u201cJ.H.\u201d just about everywhere except his gravestone. The son of Norwegian immigrants, Johnson was a traveling salesman turned investor: he began with buying-and-selling newspapers and ended with real estate. His first big investment was the Winona Daily Herald<\/em>, which he purchased in 1890 and sold ten years later.1<\/sup><\/strong> He then began launching new publications under the names of recently-abandoned titles. For example, in 1892 Farm, Field and Stockman<\/em> changed its name to Farm, Field and Fireside<\/em>, and that same year Johnson began publishing a monthly under the title Farm, Field and Stockman<\/em>, which he later sold to the Model Farmer Publishing Company of Chicago. Similarly, in 1900 the weekly American Stock Farm<\/em> changed its name, shortly after which Johnson began a monthly using that title as well.2<\/sup><\/strong><\/p>\n

Because his pattern was eventually to sell his publications, it\u2019s quite likely that he chose discontinued periodical titles in order to exploit each title\u2019s brand equity. Understanding his business model is important because historians have long denied any connection between the Farmer\u2019s Wife<\/em> that he published, and the populist journal of the same name, begun about ten years earlier by Emma Pack in Topeka, Kansas.3<\/sup><\/strong> Pack unofficially discontinued her Farmer\u2019s Wife<\/em> in 1894, but she permitted it to remain in the trade directories until 1897, leaving open the possibility that she intended to revive the magazine at some point. There\u2019s certainly nothing in the final issue (October 1894) to suggest that she expected it to be the last. A careful study of the numbering and dating Johnson gave to his iteration of the magazine does leave open the possibility that he was trying to pass off his version of the Farmer\u2019s Wife<\/em> as a continuation of Pack\u2019s.4<\/sup><\/strong><\/p>\n

As he had done with his other publications, Johnson sold the Farmer\u2019s Wife<\/em> shortly after launching it. In 1904, he brought John Hunt Curryer on board as a partner, forming the Johnson-Curryer corporation. Curryer relocated the entire operation to St. Paul, while Johnson remained in Winona to conduct his other businesses. Within a year, Johnson and Curryer had sold the Farmer\u2019s Wife<\/em> to Edward Allyn Webb, owner of the Webb Publishing Company in St. Paul. This sale proved to be the turning point in the magazine\u2019s history: Johnson was more salvage agent than serious publisher, and his magazine struggled to maintain a modest circulation of even 40,000 subscribers. Webb, on the other hand, aggressively promoted the magazine, doubling Johnson\u2019s circulation within three years and pushing it above two million by 1940.5<\/sup><\/strong><\/p>\n

A Path to Success<\/h2>\n

\"MastheadThe magazine\u2019s beclouded beginnings are part of what makes it significant: plucked from obscurity, the Farmer\u2019s Wife<\/em> became the most successful publication of its kind, and in many ways its history paralleled, even enacted, the history of capitalism\u2019s penetration of the rural Midwest. To whatever extent \u201cJeffersonian Democracy\u201d ever existed anywhere, one can witness its disappearance\u2014as a reality or an agrarian ideal\u2014in the pages of the Farmer\u2019s Wife<\/em>. This history of capitalist opportunism fittingly began with Johnson\u2019s appropriation of a brand name created by Emma Pack, a populist and suffragist who, especially in her association with the Grange, advocated farmers\u2019 cooperatives and some degree of collectivism. Webb took the magazine even further from its Grange roots. Whereas Pack believed that farmers could best succeed through cooperation, Webb had a more top-down philosophy that emphasized the primary importance of information disseminated from metropolitan centers outward into the rural peripheries where it could be used by individuals: what the farmers needed was not more cooperation, but better education and newer technology, an attitude consistent with Webb’s own background as the child of Protestant missionaries in India. Upon returning to the United States, the Webbs first settled in Pennsylvania, the father taking a job at Lincoln University.6<\/sup><\/strong> Whereas Pack and her husband were both the children of laborers, Webb\u2019s parents were educated, middle-class, missionaries: the direction Webb chose for his newly acquired farm paper represented a rupture with its putative past.<\/p>\n

In other respects, however, the new Farmer\u2019s Wife<\/em> was characterized more by continuity than rupture. It was not even the first farm paper for women,7<\/sup><\/strong> and women were already regular readers of farm newspapers: the very title Farmer\u2019s Wife<\/em> was almost certainly a nod to the pseudonym many women used in letters intended for publication in the farm press. Furthermore, almost every farm paper included sections for women. In Wallace\u2019s Farmer<\/em>, the section was called \u201cHearts and Homes.\u201d The Prairie Farmer<\/em> had departments like \u201cHouse Decorations,\u201d \u201cMother\u2019s Department,\u201d \u201cGirl\u2019s Corner,\u201d and \u201cGarden.\u201d Women-oriented content was typographically marked with fretwork ruling. These women\u2019s sections featured articles on the domestic aspects of farm life, such as cookery, child rearing, house cleaning, medical remedies, needlework, gardening, and, for the rare \u201cfireside\u201d moments of farm life, poetry, fiction, and music. In short, these sections covered everything from a farm woman\u2019s practical responsibilities to the perhaps more aspirational aspects of gracious living. The Farmer\u2019s Wife<\/em> took what was common to almost every farm weekly and bundled it into a single monthly magazine.<\/p>\n

To Be Continued…<\/h2>\n

Part 2 will examine the connections between the Farmer’s Wife<\/em> and the Country Life Movement.<\/p>\n

Notes<\/h2>\n

1.<\/strong> R. L. Polk & Co, \u201cJohnson, J.H.,\u201d in Little Sketches of Big Folks, Minnesota 1907: An Alphabetical List of Representative Men of Minnesota, with Biographical Sketches.<\/em> (R.L. Polk, 1907), 208; Warren Upham, \u201cJohnson, J.H.,\u201d in Minnesota Biographies, 1655-1912<\/em>, with Rose Barteau Dunlap (Minnesota Historical Society, 1912), 377; \u201cJ.H. Johnson, Former Herald Owner, Dies,\u201d Winona Republican-Herald<\/em> (Winona, Minn.), February 9, 1953, 3.<\/p>\n

2.<\/strong> \u201cCity in Brief,\u201d Winona Republican and Herald<\/em> (Winona, Minn.), May 24, 1901, 5 Johnson sold Farm, Field and Stockman in 1901; \u201cPublished in St. Paul: Winona Publication Now Issued at That Place,\u201d Winona Republican and Herald<\/em> (Winona, Minn.), February 13, 1904, 8.<\/p>\n

3.<\/strong> For more on Emma Pack and her Farmer\u2019s Wife, see: Brenda Jackson-Abernathy, \u201cThe Farmer\u2019s Wife,\u201d in Encyclopedia of Populism in America: A Historical Encyclopedia<\/em>, ed. Alexandra Kindell and Elizabeth S. Demers (ABC-CLIO, 2014), 233\u201334; Thomas R. Burkholder, \u201cThe Farmer\u2019s Wife, 1891-1894: Raising a Prairie Consciousness,\u201d in A Voice of Their Own: The Woman Suffrage Press, 1840-1910<\/em>, ed. Martha M. Solomon, Studies in Rhetoric and Communication (University of Alabama Press, 1991), 153\u201364.<\/p>\n

4.<\/strong> Pack\u2019s Farmer\u2019s Wife <\/em>ceased at the beginning of its fourth year. See: Burkholder, \u201cThe Farmer\u2019s Wife<\/em>, 1891-1894: Raising a Prairie Consciousness\u201d If Johnson was truthful when giving 1900 as the establishment of his version, then the earliest extant issue (January 1906) should be its fifth or sixth year, and yet the publisher called it volume ten. In other words, its numbering creates the illusion that it continues the numbering of Pack\u2019s Farmer\u2019s Wife<\/em>. That is, for anyone who had not actually seen the original Farmer\u2019s Wife<\/em>. While Pack did give the first year of her magazine a volume one designation, she changed its numbering in the second year to continue the numbering of the City and Farm Record, which had been her husband\u2019s less successful paper.<\/p>\n

5.<\/strong> The main reason Webb purchased the magazine was that he had greatly expanded his company’s printing facilities (for its marquee publication, the Farmer<\/em>), resulting in unused printing capacity (which, to a businessperson, means unrealized revenue). Circulation figures come from the annual Ayer Directory of Publications. See: Robert Orr Baker, The Webb Company: The First Hundred Years<\/em> (St. Paul, Min.: Webb Company, 1982), 13; For more on ownership history, see: \u201cPublished in St. Paul: Winona Publication Now Issued at That Place,\u201d 8.<\/p>\n

6.<\/strong> For biographical information on Webb, see Baker, The Webb Company<\/em>, 3\u20135 Lincoln University is considered the nation\u2019s first HBCU.<\/p>\n

7.<\/strong> Aside from Emma Pack\u2019s Farmer\u2019s Wife<\/em>, a periodical called Woman\u2019s Farm Journal<\/em> began publication in St. Louis almost a decade earlier.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Beclouded Beginnings and Suspicious Name Games Little is known about the origins of the Farmer\u2019s Wife. It might have begun publication in 1897, but more likely 1900, in Winona, Minnesota. Its first publisher was John Halvor Johnson, who went by \u201cJ.H.\u201d just about everywhere except his gravestone. The son of Norwegian immigrants, Johnson was a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":40,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[46,96],"tags":[91,103],"class_list":["post-8316","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hpnl","category-idnc","tag-farm-newspapers","tag-farmers-wife"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.library.illinois.edu\/hpnl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8316","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.library.illinois.edu\/hpnl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.library.illinois.edu\/hpnl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.library.illinois.edu\/hpnl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/40"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.library.illinois.edu\/hpnl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8316"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.library.illinois.edu\/hpnl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8316\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8344,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.library.illinois.edu\/hpnl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8316\/revisions\/8344"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.library.illinois.edu\/hpnl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.library.illinois.edu\/hpnl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.library.illinois.edu\/hpnl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}