USING METADATA TO UNCOVER COOPERATORS IN NEW DEAL CONSERVATIVE INITIATIVE

By Sarah Cope and Nikita Mansinghani

Sarah Karle, UNL College of Architecture

Laura Weakly, The Center for Digital Research in the Humanities

Introduction

The Prairie States Forestry Project Digital Archive is a comprehensive record of archival maps, planting documents, and a photography collection that documents the tree plantings completed through the Prairie States Forestry Project, a New Deal program that took place between 1935 and 1942. The landowners of farms that participated in the program are a key part of the program due to their collaboration with the federal government. This research focuses on describing a methodology for analyzing the number of female “cooperators’’ who participated in this New Deal conservation program. By having a better understanding of female landowners in Nebraska during the New Deal, avenues for interpreting the contributions women made to agricultural history and conservation heritage are expanded.

Project History

The Prairie States Forestry Project, which operated from 1935 to 1942, is a part of America’s agricultural history. The 1930s Dust Bowl period resulted in a need for soil conservation. The Prairie States Forestry Project was a federally funded New Deal project that addressed soil conservation through the planting of trees in cooperation with landowners and the U.S. Forest Service. Through this program, nearly 220 million seedlings were planted from the Texas Panhandle to the Canadian border, creating 18,600 miles of shelterbelts on 30,000 farms. Unlike other New Deal programs, the Prairie States Forestry Project gave federal funding to private land, with the project headquarters being located in Lincoln, Nebraska. This collaborative project led to the largest afforestation projects in United States History.

Study Area

Our study area by looking at previous research done in Nebraska through the Homesteading the Plains project done by Richard Edwards, Jacob K. Friefeld, and Rebecca S. Wingo. This project looked at 10 total townships in Custer and Dawes counties because the majority of land in the township had been transferred from the public domain via the Homestead Act. Settles began arriving in the Custer County townships in 1978, ranging from 25 to 83 years of age, and of the 324 successful homestead claims, 32 women had filed them (Edwards et. al, 2017). This makes the area highly useful due to its known amount of female homesteaders found in the Homesteading the Plains research. We then selected the township T17N, R24W from the five different townships the researchers used because of its higher number of female homestead claims.

Metadata Analysis

We then went through the Prairie States Forestry Project Digital Archive (a spreadsheet generated from metadata entry on primary source archival documents which reference cooperators) to assess the number of landowners by gender.. In the case where the gender of a landowner was unclear (for example, no prefixes were listed, or only initials were given) we checked the cooperators’ names with the United States Census. Upon verifying the genders of the landowners, the data was then collected and compared using a mixed-method approach.

Results

DISCUSSION & CONCLUSION

Analysis

These charts indicate the shift in landowning possibilities for women in the 1930s and 40s in Custer County.

A better understanding of the number of female landowners in Nebraska at the time of the Prairie States Forestry Project provides opportunities for a wide range of research to branch from the information. Women in agriculture is much less discussed in history. The next research steps could include researching the history of these women landowners and how they came to be. Additionally, many of the women that owned land rented it out to tenants to cultivate it (oftentimes men). By separating those women that rented their land from those that managed their land, an expanded narrative can be told. This would allow researchers to further understand these women’s lives and the history of female landowners in Nebraska.

Personal Artwork

Works from 2017 to 2023 | Self

Art and Architecture inspire me as art not only helps us look at dynamic conditions created by space, volume, perspectives and proportions. The graphic indicates various media from charcoal to ink and paint. There are many inspirational figures such as Jackie Chan and Mother Theresa two very different inviduals from different time periods but when put next two each other the power the imagery holds is artistic. My interests include a wide range of types of artforms to learn a new way of looking and changing perception.