The social, spiritual, and political benefits of combating isolation was well understood in the 19th century.

One of my favorite scenes in The Searchers involves a moment that seems almost unimaginable today.

The arrival of Texas Ranger Charlie McCorry at the Jorgensen homestead in west Texas is treated in the classic 1956 John Ford film as a great occasion – because he brought a letter.

Lars Jorgensen hovers over his daughter as she reads. He plucks the missive from the fire after she angrily wads it up and hurls it into the flames. A letter – the second of the year, Jorgensen marvels – was too precious to simply discard.

Part of Ford’s genius was his gift for illuminating aspects of daily life in the 19th-century American West. Perhaps no feature of existence from that century is harder to imagine in our digitized world than the extreme loneliness endured by families eking out a new existence on farms and ranches throughout the country.

_{Grange recruiting poster. Library of Congress.}

When the family of James B. Weaver left its homestead in southern Iowa in the 1840s and settled in what would become the county seat town of Bloomfield, the gregarious Iowan rejoiced. It was a “priceless boon” to have the chance to visit neighbors and talk to them, Weaver recalled. “Our home life was more varied as we met our neighbors with greater frequency.”¹

Isolation was psychologically devastating. Defeating it would yield significant rewards.

Among the first to understand this were Methodist preachers who convened summer camp meeting at which families would stay for days to worship, sing and celebrate with their neighbors. The first camp meeting was probably held in Logan County, Ky., in 1800, according to a blog post for the United Methodist Church by Joe Iovino. In the decades that followed, camp meetings were held across the Old Northwest and in the territories – such as Iowa – across the Mississippi.²

“In them,” according to an entry in the Encyclopedia of World Methodism, “multitudes were converted.”³

In Davis County, Iowa, Cumberland Presbyterians (the denomination that would claim William Jennings Bryan as one of its own) held camp meetings, but the Methodists pioneered the event, according to Henry C. Ethell’s history of the county’s early days. “Cloth tents or board houses were ranged round a large square, seated with slabs or thick planks. Families living several miles away came and lived in these tents throughout the meeting. A Sunday congregation would often number three of four thousand,” Ethell wrote.⁴

The grandson of an Iowa Methodist, the Rev. Francis Carey, offered an account of how camp meetings worked in the Pioneer History of Davis County. The meeting included the famous Iowa Methodist pastor Henry Clay Dean, who preached two sermons – the first failing to move his listeners. But the second did not disappoint. “The people were completely overcome,” Carey’s grandson wrote, “and many in the multitude, weeping and sobbing, embraced the church that evening.”⁵

Weaver fondly remembered the visits of circuit-riding Methodist pastors who stopped at isolated farms to minister to families who could not attend church.⁶

Through these forms of evangelism, the Methodists gained a foothold on the frontier that would help make the denomination one of the most influential in the United States in the 19th century.

In the years after the Civil War, a secular group formed to overcome the isolation of the farmstead rose to power and prominence. The Patrons of Husbandry, widely known as the Grange, spread like wildfire across the Old Northwest and the Upper South.

Its purpose was, in theory, apolitical. The founders of the Grange envisioned a secret society much like the Masons in which elaborate ritual played a central role. “Although the original idea of the founders appears to have been that the benefits of the order to its members would be primarily social and intellectual, it very soon became apparent that the desire for financial advantages would prove a far greater incentive for the farmers to join,” Solon Justus Buck wrote in his history of the Grange.⁷

Buck writes that Granger efforts were initially directed at cooperative schemes aimed at lowering production costs for members – buying supplies and insurance – and maximizing profits on commodity sales. Another concern soon converted the Grange from an apolitical society for farmers into a potent force in American politics.⁸

Growing discontent with railroad business practices and political clout alarmed farmers who saw the promises of access to distant markets for their products evaporate due to high – and often seemingly arbitrary – freight rates. Attempts in state legislatures to address this issue by regulating rates began as early as the late 1850s but went nowhere. The Grange offered a means for farmers to organize themselves politically to press their case for railroad regulation.

Washington took notice as Grange lodges proliferated across the Old Northwest. “The movement of the western people against the great railroad monopolies begins to assume definite shape,” the Washington Evening Star noted in its editorial column on Feb. 20, 1873. The newspaper predicted that “it is pretty certain that the control of railroad fares and freight will be the issue on which the next legislatures of several of the western states will be chosen.”⁹

Anti-railroad sentiment did indeed emerge as a prominent issue in the off-year elections of 1873. State Republican platforms throughout the Old Northwest called for “cheap transportation” and denounced railroad business practices. Anti-Monopoly candidates swept to victory in Iowa and elsewhere. Granger William R. Taylor defeated Republican Gov. C.C. Washburn in his bid for re-election despite Washburn’s record as a critic of railroad business practices.¹⁰

In the late 1880s, another farmer’s movement followed the trail blazed by the Grangers. The National Farmers Alliance & Industrial Union advocated an explicitly political program that called for, among other things, government control of the railroads, Robert C. McMath Jr. writes in his history of populism. Like the Grangers, the Alliance featured its own passwords and rituals, McMath notes – including burial services.¹¹

The movement spread across the Plains and the South with rallies that McMath likened to camp meetings. In 1892, it morphed into a political party – the People’s Party, commonly referred to today as the Populists – with Weaver at its head. Weaver carried four states in that year, running against Grover Cleveland and President Benjamin Harrison.

The conversion from social organization to political party, however, did not end well. In 1896, Populists put Democratic presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan at the top of their ticket – a move backed by pragmatists like Weaver but which spelled the end of the party as an effective third force in American politics. Weaver, who had broken with the Republicans in 1877 and spent the next two decades in the ranks of the Greenback-Labor and Populist parties – eventually joined the Democrats.

Nevertheless, the populist movement enjoyed its moment in the sun in large part because it brought farmers together to work for a common goal. It merged politics and social engagement and tapped into what historian Joseph F. Wall identified as the farmer’s delight in meeting with others. “He is an individualist who enjoys working in the fields alone, but he also craves company,” Wall wrote of the prototypical farmer in his bicentennial history of Iowa. “Most farm organizations from the National Grange to the Farm Bureau were initially inspired by the farmer’s desire for some kind of social communication and an opportunity for an interchange of new ideas.”¹²

Lars Jorgensen would have appreciated that.

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Books by Robert B. Mitchell are available at amazon.com

1. Robert B. Mitchell, Skirmisher: The Life, Times, and Political Career of James B. Weaver (Roseville, Minn., Edinborough Press, 2008), p. 18; hereafter referred to as Skirmisher. ↩︎
2. Joe Iovino, “”Fishing with a large net”: UM camp meetings,” https://www.umc.org/en/content/fishing-with-a-large-net-united-methodist-camp-meetings. ↩︎
3. Nolan B. Harmon, ed., Encyclopedia of World Methodism, Vol. 1 (Nashville, United Methodist Publishing House, 1974), p. 383. ↩︎
4. Henry C. Ethell, The Rise and Progress of Civilization in the Hairy Nation (Bloomfield, Iowa: Republican Steam Print, 1883, pp. 80-81.
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5. Skirmisher, p. 11. ↩︎
6. Carey quoted in Skirmisher, p. 10. ↩︎
7. Solon Justus Buck, The Granger Movement: A Study of Agricultural Organization and Its Political, Economic, and Social Manifestations (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), p. 52. ↩︎
8. Ibid. ↩︎
9. Washington Evening Star, Feb. 20, 1873, p. 2. ↩︎
10. Robert B. Mitchell, Congress and the King of Frauds: Corruption and the Credit Mobilier Scandal at the Dawn of the Gilded Age (Roseville, Minn.: Edinborough Press, 2018), pp. 165-166. ↩︎
11. Robert C. McMath Jr., American Populism: A Social History 1877-1898 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1993), pp. 109, 70, 125. ↩︎
12. Joseph Frazier Wall, Iowa: A History (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1978), p. 128. ↩︎