Community Building among Farmers in Providence, Utah, 1940–1960
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Cooperation and Competition
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Ten minutes south of Logan, Utah, in the Cache Valley, lies the town of Providence—a model of modern suburbia, with new homes set on quarter-acre lots and the promise of more construction to come. The downtown heart of Providence, in contrast, is characterized by historic homes and large plots, reminders of the town’s past as a place settled by Mormon pioneers in the 1880s. Part of that past was a thriving fruit-growing area along the town’s eastern bench. The Providence bench, now filled with winding suburban neighborhoods, once produced fruit bountifully, helped along by canals and winds from the canyons. As with other regions of Utah, the fortunes of agriculture in the Cache Valley fluctuated throughout the twentieth century, with an orchard boom in the early years, depression in the 1920s and 1930s, recovery and growth during World War II and the postwar era, and, finally, mechanization and consolidation as the century wore on.1 This article focuses on the patterns of working and socializing established by the farmers on the Providence bench and the successes they accomplished through community ties and folk practices in the decades following the Great Depression. It is based on interviews I conducted with the children of the fruit farmers, their parents having passed on, and the people who in their youth picked fruit on the farms. Their recollections tell a story of family, community, nostalgia, and struggle. Even with the inaccuracies of memory and the filter of individual perspective, it is clear that many of the farmers on the bench tended toward collaboration in the face of hardship. Their interactions were defined by a balance between cooperation and competition, fueled by the cultural norms and values of their small neighborhood. A sense of interdependency made it possible for
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