Farmers Mutual Insurance Association

A page from William Close’s pamphlet promoting settlement in northwest Iowa. Note there were only 39 states in the U.S. at that time.

up on a farm near Remsen and graduated from Le Mars High School. Even though he lived in New York City, he retained ownership of a portion of the original family farm until his final years. Over the course of his life, he was an English professor at Grinnell College, the University of Iowa and Sarah Lawrence College in New York. He also was executive director of the Yaddo artists’ colony in upstate New York and was president of the School of American Ballet.

Insights on the colony experiment were captured in the positive book reviews. One said “Harnack captures … compellingly a story too good to be true, except that it is – a band of 19th-century English gentlemen, led by a visionary, naïve, courageous, foolish, and all-too-human young man, who come to virgin-prairie Iowa to make their fortune and transplant their aristocracy. Soon they encounter all the inhospitable and irreconcilable elements of wildly dissimilar cultures – the impoverished immigrant striving to make a life versus those born to privilege seeking to continue one. What ensues is a deeply moving, dramatic, and highly comic narrative, a case study, finally, of immigration and assimilation …”

Another reviewer wrote: “The confluence of upper-class Victorians with northwest Iowa makes for a social comedy as well as giving us an unexpected glance into the abiding strength of the Middle West.” The New York Times said: “Through the experience of these picturesque emigrants [Harnack] allows us to see afresh the

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