A Witness Tree on the Land, Part One

Presenting: A Witness Tree on the Land  

Content: forced removal, colonialism, 

• Main Voice(s): Emerson Cram 
• Special Guests: 
  • Geoff Mouming 
  • Chant Eicke 

Highlights
This chapter tells the story of the Historic Poor Farm’s land from the point of view of a 250 year old Bur Oak on the southern edges of the property. Geoff and Emerson walk through the restored natural areas for Emerson’s first close-up of “Oakland,” a regenerating savanna of oak trees. The legacy tree that initiated the trek might tell stories about its connection to disability community and lineage; time travel through and with glacial kinship, the Oneota, the Blackhawk War, and Meskwaki journeys with new people and relations. The radical imposition of a new biological regime. A central question: how should we use public land?

Conclusion
How do the ways we talk about public land reveal how we imagine our relationships to our planetary home? In a landscape shaped by radical transformation and change, how should we imagine “natural” as something to grasp or measure? Can “natural” even be a bench mark? What then, does it mean to practice restoration ecology in a context not of our making? 

Transcript
For a full transcript of this episode, visit: disabilityecologiespodcast.buzzsprout.com

Credits
Episode written and narrated by Emerson Cram, University of Iowa. Recorded with Riverside FM. Production and Sound Editing by Maura De Cicco. 

All media clips are used for educational purposes only. Sound effects licensed through Pixabay.

Jonathan Buffalo speaking to the Rotary Club of Ames, “Meskwaki Nation, a History,” YouTube, March 20, 2021.   

Funding
Research, writing, and production have benefitted from generous support from multiple sources, including: the National Communication Association’s Karl R. Wallace Memorial Award; UI OVPR Arts and Humanities Initiative Standard Grant; UI Provost Investment in Strategic Priorities;  UI College of Liberal Arts DSHB Humanities Scholar; CLAS Summer Humanities Award.

Special Thanks
With thanks to Maura De Cicco; University of Iowa Departments of Communication Studies, Gender, Women’s & Sexuality Studies, and American Studies (Especially Angie Looney, Kembrew McLeod, Eric Vázquez, Naomi Greyser, and Hallie Abelman); State Historical Society of Iowa (especially Hang Nguyen, Allison Johnson, and Anu Tiwari); V Fixmer-Oraiz, Johnson County Board of Supervisors; GROW Johnson County (especially Jason Grimm, Emmaly Renshaw and Malik Salsberry); the 2024 Colby Summer Institute in Environmental Humanities Seminar Participants; Claire Fox; Teresa Mangum; Jennifer New; Phaedra C. Pezzullo; Constance Gordan; and Jesse Waggoner. 

Audience Participation

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Transcript

Transcript for Disability Ecologies Podcast Chapter Four, Part One: A Witness Tree on the Land   

Emerson, 00:00:
Chapter Four. A Witness Tree on the Land, Part One.

[background noise of two people talking, buzzing cicadas, and feet walking on grass sounds, these underlay under Emerson’s narrative]

Emerson Narrates, 00:09: 
It’s a Monday afternoon in late September, and also happens to be the Fall Equinox. On average in southeastern Iowa, we’ve witnessed a warmer and drier fall. We are well past mid-summer’s immense heat and blanketing humidity, but some afternoons, the sun’s warmth will still catch you off guard with parched lips and sweaty brows. I’m walking with Geoff Mouming, a Project Manager with Eocene Environmental Group. Today, we are seeking out a very specific Bur Oak, hidden within the woodland on the historic poor farm’s southern boundary. We walk past Grow Johnson County’s “beetle bank” tucked away in a thick row of sorghum and sunflowers, and Geoff, who is a Certified Arborist through the International Society of Arboriculture, highlights for me some of the unique characteristics of the land.

Geoff Mouming, 1:08:
So we are walking back toward the historic cemetery. This is also the headwaters of Willow Creek. So little Willow Creek that goes through the west side of Iowa City, spills into the Iowa River over kind of in the direction McCollister Boulevard over by the airport. But this is where it starts out here. And we’ll see shortly, we’re going to come upon it, what we would call a pond or a storm water best management practice that limits the amount of water in a heavy rainfall event, from all kinds of rushing into there and eroding the stream banks. This controls it and then drops the level more slowly, so that it can keep stream bank integrity.

Emerson Narrates, 1:51:
Ever since our first meeting, when Geoff mentioned a still living 250-year-old tree, I was spellbound. The hope of encountering an organic remnant soothed some of the yearning I had long felt towards the records otherwise lost to time. For me, that absence generated a desire to establish connections and to search libraries or archives far and wide. But, as I would learn from Geoff’s marking of this Bur Oak, there was also more to the story. The fact this tree survived for an estimated 250 years, through prairie fires, potential land sales or private development was itself evocative. From the decades of my life living amidst non-metropolitan and rural communities within and beyond the Midwest, I’ve learned it’s unbearably common for these kinds of landscapes to be repurposed for different economic ends. The fact of this tree’s survival, I would learn, was peculiar given well-known stories of deforestation for land cultivation in Iowa’s mid 19th century settlement era. 

Land use is rarely if ever a neutral or inconsequential practice. By “land use,” I mean how boundary areas are marked for specific social or economic functions. We might, for example, assign land for housing, or agriculture, and draw stark boundaries around those uses through ordinances and zoning laws. These functions partly explains why so many planning debates about so-called “empty” or “unused” lands and their repurposing bring residents out to town halls. At this site, for instance, it's meaningful that each time a land auction or sale proposal came to the county supervisors—most notably in the 1970s and the early 2000s—community members assembled to advocate for the land’s value based on its potential benefit to community beyond private development. These forums resisted attempts to sell the land to develop golf courses or even at one point, a new jail. 

When we listen to those debates and the undercurrents of public concerns, what we might hear are disagreements about what community needs should be prioritized, aligned, or what even constitutes “need” in the first place. What this means is that land use can tell us a great deal about what we value. In this case, I want to explore how we imagine land aligns with how we organize institutions and relationships that often anchor care responsibilities towards each other. What does that mean for the people who are cast as “dependent” in a negative way? What does decision making look like when values operate in conflict? We might even go further to say that planning for land use comprises the keys to a much more radical conversation: how do we want to design the world in which we want to live? That Bur Oak stood through the test of supervisors time and again, as they asked the question: “how should public land be used?”

Back with Geoff on a day like today, we walk past the growing oak savanna adjacent to the newly establishing prairie. We pass a dilapidated white box homing a collective of what some of us at the farm have lovingly called “feral bees.” On this trimmed path out to find the Bur Oak, I can’t help but think how a single decision could have rendered this all impossible. Well, perhaps impossible isn’t the word, but unthinkable? 

This Bur Oak is a reminder of the generational impact of our decisions; to remember a phrase from Supervisor Fixmer-Oraiz at the end of the previous chapter. To me, there was real value in knowing how so many people’s time and energy enabled this tree’s survival. Maybe not in the terms of how that tree could be calculated and measured for lumber or cabinets—but because to me, it was evidence of interdependency. This tree was alive: it wasn’t torn down for more grazing space or turned into raw resources to meet someone’s desire for economic potential. That remnant touched my affinity for trees and the stories they might tell.  

[sounds of strumming on guitar strings]

Emerson Narrates, 7:38:
That affinity is grounded in curiosity and the kind of speculation that tarries between pasts and futures. I imagined this bur oak as a witness to a place moving through time, and the deeper struggles over land carefully documented by both Indigenous and Settler oral histories and documents. Witness is a peculiar word for a tree, I know. We tend to find “witness” as a legal reference, or even circumstances invoking the divine. Witnesses trade testimony in genres of truth seeking, and so their stories test our collective capacity to remember, and record based on what we believe is collectively significant. And, that testimony calls on listeners, so it also tests our commitment to who we might witness in turn, as an act of acknowledgement of one’s dignity. 

As it turns out, the recognition of trees as witness to historic time is not new. In the making of the United States, land surveyors would mark witness trees as boundary objects as they established property lines. In 2006, the National Park System created a “witness protection” program for trees designated as nationally significant within the National Capital Region. Artists and writers within and beyond the United States have taken the moniker further to adopt trees that mark landscapes they want to rise to the same level of significance, like Hiroshima’s anti-nuclear movement’s ongoing efforts to seed new generations of “hibaku-jumoku,” the Japanese word meaning “atomic bombed trees.”[1] Trees are also common references in the artworks on display in Iowa City by Artists at Systems Unlimited, or in the art created by past patients that I found included in Independence State Hospital’s museum. Trees are active witnesses to our lives, in both the mundane and the spectacular, and in the context of disability communities, they are part of our lineage. 

[Sound picks up again of Geoff and Emerson walking…underlay under the narrative] 

Geoff Mouming, 10:20:
Oh, it’s just beautiful. And just imagine what kind of life this has brought back to this plot of ground….

Emerson Narrates, 10:29:
We pass over the trunk of a large fallen tree and wade into a thick underbrush of diverse plant communities, poison ivy, and active clusters of bees humming around early fall flowers. 

Geoff Mouming, 10:44:
Okay…are you okay navigating through here...So, the massive old Bur Oak is this one right down…. 

Emerson, 10:54:
Oh wow…

Geoff Mouming, 11:01:
Isn’t it beautiful? We know there are progeny from that tree, little ones coming up around, there’s one right there; and our approach to taking care of this tree, because over the last 30 to 35 years or so, this what we call early successional woodland has grown up around it. But we still don’t want that area where tons of people are going to be walking around the root system and stuff like that. And I think it’s most dramatic from a distance too, it’s got a really nice shape to it. We’re guessing 200+ years old. It pre-dates the settlement of Iowa City, and like so many old trees, we always think it would be great if it could talk…

Emerson Narrates, 11:50: 
Geoff’s knowledge and enthusiasm were infectious, and as he talked about the significance of Bur Oak as a species, I hung onto every word…

Geoff Mouming, 12:04:
Where they’re established, so we think the Bur Oak savannas that are remaining…Bur Oaks are kind of unique in that they didn’t really grow in woodland settings, so that sprawling shape that we’re used to, uh, was a result of their ability to grow out in the open, and that thick corky bark meant that they could survive the fire that would sweep across the tallgrass prairie….They survived because they could withstand fire…They’re pretty adaptable, too. Bur Oaks will grow in a variety of soil conditions and moisture conditions, too.

Emerson Narrates, 12:37:
As he spoke, I couldn’t help but hear deeper terrains of meaning. That was one where the Bur Oak was rooted to disability lineage for its adaptability and resilience against fires. In Chapter 3, you learned about Patty Berne, one of the co-founders of Sins Invalid, who taught new generations of the love, compassion, and possibility in building new worlds committed to disability justice. In an interview, Berne describes how trees embody the love ethic of disability justice…Patty said: “trees live in community. They are connected through their root systems and through scent, they can look out for each other. Shouldn’t we all do that?” This is what disability justice means by interdependence. Trees, through Patty, teach us to hold each other through the fires that come, time and time again, to recognize patterns of similarity and difference, despite the fires that remain. They also teach us to imagine the world on a different timeline, which, like tree rings, place people’s relationship with place in circles instead of linear paths. 

In this chapter, I draw on the witness tree to bring you closer to the land, the soil, and surrounding plant species that once supported human and more than human communities, and which now support local foods infrastructure. Over its life thus far, that Bur Oak witnessed extraordinary change. Settlement and later revolutions in machines, the speed of production and the intensity of global connections made even settlers themselves keenly aware of the consequences of transformations in the land. As Wisconsin’s lauded environmental historian William Cronon argued in his pathbreaking work, social transformations—like military conflicts that brought settlers west, or agricultural revolutions that change the technologies humans use to cultivate—well, social transformations are simultaneously ecological.[2] And the stories that we tell about those transformations—through myths or data or diaries—impact how we understand ourselves in relation to non-humans, land, waterways, and this whole project we call humanity. As we think about the broader importance of the poor farm period, and what its memory teaches us today, we can pause and ask questions about how land undergirds everything; and how reckoning with the relationships that inform debates over land, might guide us to engage with our contemporary crises in a different way.

Within our stories about land, specifically those that surround the location of poor farms—we hear glimpses of their use for settlement, agricultural innovation, property, and labor. But we also hear stories about possibilities for connection, repair, restoration, and abundance. These are different relationships, different modes of organizing our lives. And I feel earnest saying they give me great hope—anchors of meaning making to steward our collective imaginations of the future. In Cronon’s words, land is anything but a “rehearsal” space of human action. Instead, actions of the past are entangled within the living conditions of our contemporary lives. The ways we talk about land reveal a great deal about how we imagine our relationship to our planetary home, to ourselves, and to, well, each other.     

But collectives certainly disagree about how to answer that question, “how should we use public land?” You’ll hear those disagreements centered here, but not with the goal of simply dramatizing our collective discontent. Instead, by outlining the frictions that live in the layers of sedimentation created by cultural, geological, biological, and chemical processes—my hope is that we can cultivate the benefit of a reflexive perspective. While that term friction in the last chapter centers barriers to access, friction also has another set of meanings: it can be generative, a rubbing force of creativity. That might be a similar friction invoked when Berne emphasizes the radical creativity of disabled bodyminds in the world. 

So, what I have learned talking to restoration ecologists, farmers and cultivators, archeologists, land historians, and engineers, is that we are in our own ways guided by the desire to care for the land. In turn, our guide is a feeling of obligation to the people who lived, labored, and for some, who were buried here. And we also are guided by a commitment to developing the means to meet community needs in the present day. At times these commitments might find themselves in conflict, itself a growth edge, and a way into honest questions and possibly challenging conversations. Other times, there are days where the break between past and present blurs, a porous boundary that breaks you—out of time and space with a jolt.  

[transition into running Introduction, with guitar strumming and soft ooo vocals underneath Emerson’s spoken narrative]: 

Emerson Narrates Running Introduction, 19:25:
Disability Ecologies is a podcast series dedicated to telling the story of the Johnson County Iowa Historic Poor Farm throughout its lifespan: from its origins to attempts at preservation to the still unfolding dynamics on site today. My name is Emerson Cram, I’m a place-based researcher and storyteller based in a small college town in the midwestern region of the United States. Since 2019, I’ve worked alongside community members and county administrators to tell the story of the historic poor farm’s history, its planned transition into a national historic site, and a vibrant place for building connections to land and people through local foods. As a note on content, throughout each chapter, you will encounter historical language that describes disabled and “mad” people (or those who might otherwise be called mentally ill). This language is outdated and pejorative by modern standards. These terms and the content overall may feel triggering to some listeners. I’ve chosen to include terms within the historical record of social services, psychiatry, and social sciences because they are windows of meaning into the period, and it’s also important I be honest about what the historical record shows us about our past. [End running introduction].

Emerson Narrates, 20:55:
Patty’s invocation of tree root systems makes me wonder about some pretty fundamental questions…what do roots need? How did the roots of this particular Bur Oak flourish for so long? How I answer that question depends on who I ask, but a common refrain is that the conditions of early Iowa—its black humus packed with rich minerals—provided conditions for life to thrive. And, as I would find in the written accounts of settlers in the poor farm era that you will hear later in this chapter, it’s that same soil that was exhausted by a demand for it to produce and produce and produce beyond its capacity. Soil, and land, and people, all overworked. But from our vantage point, I have a hard time visualizing or even conceptualizing that scale of change and transformation. But I don’t think I’m the only one who feels this way. 

Chant Eicke is a restoration ecologist, one of many of the scientists I’ve met along the way. He helped me take stock of just how radical our current landscape is by comparison of a deeper relationship with time. 

Chant Eicke, 22:24:
Mother Nature needs a little support in the near term to maintain diversity to maintain health in a rapidly changing environment. Rapidly changing because of the climate, but also rapidly changing because we have introduced so much fundamental change to our environment. And here in Iowa, it’s a perfect example. It is, we’ve got more, I remember reading the statistic years and years ago. We have more roads per square mile than any other place on earth. If you take the whole state, sure there are cities where it’s more dense, but the whole state, we have more roads, you know, and it’s things like that, you know, allow you to put into context how altered our state is. 

Emerson Narrates, 23:17:
In that conversation, Chant, Geoff, and I all reflected how we have very little memory of how to visualize this change. And so, at this risk of sounding like a tour guide, let’s go to the library, rev up the microfiche reader, and web together the constellation of how Iowa’s soils preserve the remaining traces of their glacial kinship, the human, plant, and animal communities that soil supported, and how the initial glacial pace of transformation was undone, and supercharged through the new mechanistic paradigm of industrialization. Here….we….go:
 
 [audio of upbeat string music with bells that shift into the sound of a microfiche reader spool spinning]

Emerson Narrates, 24:32:
Billions of years before the bur oak’s fibrous root system anchored it in place, glacial drifts from the north would generate the mineral and microbial magic that we call “soil.” Those ice sheets bestowed a precious gift of minerals, water, and other matter that on a timescale not sensible to any human experience, linked life to deep webs of interconnectivity underground. When I read of these ancient glaciers that flattened the horizon of the upper Midwest, and whose geological force repositioned the ancient location of the Mississippi River, I am again awe-struck. Their sheer power is humbling, and yet I am also struck by the reality that these days we hear story after story about soil erosion, or nutrient and mineral depletion. 

Glacial drift was not merely a geological event—it initiated a what should have been a lasting gift for humanity’s long-term survival. The Glaciers that created this place lived in memory deposits—be it boulders or oral traditions. As Patty Krawec recounts, for the Anishinaabe of the Great Lakes, the “word for north holds our history: giiwedin, the north, contains the idea of going home.”[3] The ice sheets traveled south, then retreated home, to the north, leaving the landscape transformed for time immemorial. Glacial drift generated those conditions on a timescale we will never be able to replicate. So, what now, on this human timescale?  

Some communities practiced reciprocity with the soil and prairies for thousands of years, flourishing within the Upper Mississippi’s rivers and extensive woodlands, as far east as the outskirts of Chicago. If the estimated age of that bur oak is accurate, its germination might have witnessed the migrations of Indigenous communities collectively known as the Oneota migrating toward trade routes on creeks and rivers across the tall grass prairie. Long before settlers arrived, the Oneota were first to farm these lands, growing corn, beans, and squash. The prairie thrived in what Cornelia Mutel describes as relations of codependence: roaming buffalo and prairie fires were regenerative disturbances, meaning their impact offered steady pressure from above and ignition sparks to resupply nitrogen and other critical minerals into underlying soil.[4] Before a steady stream of Euromerican settlers made their way to what is now known as Iowa, French and British traders and explorers sought wealth in the form of animal pelts, mines filled with iron ore, among other riches from land and surrounding water ways. These endeavors largely fueled export economies to Europe and greatly impacted the ecological diversity these explorers encountered. 

The French and their allies within the region of Iowa and Wisconsin went to war, in devastating conflicts known as the Fox Wars, which was also a battle for the Fox River, a critical channel for the fur trade. As a consequence of these battles, the “People of the Red Earth,” also known as the Meskwaki and their allies, the Sauk, were pushed out of Wisconsin and forced to the south, into Iowa, Illinois, and Missouri.[5] Meskwaki historian Jonathan Buffalo shares how the Meskwaki made their long journeys into what became known as Iowa, and the different people they encountered, some who became friends, and others who did not bring good relations.    

Jonathan Buffalo, 29:21:
So, the British are here and we kind of recover from the wars. We, our population grows a little bit, and we take up half of Missouri, up to the Missouri River. And then we cross over into Illinois and take their land up to the Illinois River. So that was all of Iowa, half of Missouri, half of Illinois was our lands. But then, the Revolutionary war is fought. And a new people are born, called Americans. And Americans…our Indian word for Americans is […], which means long knife. So, when we say […], we’re not saying white people, you know. We’re saying Americans. Long Knife. The Long knives. So, they start coming into the area and we start making treaties with them. And eventually, central Iowa is the last lands that we cede in 1842. And in the treaty, we’re supposed to remove in 1845. 

[in the background, soft, a steam powered train]

Emerson Narrates, 31:11:
As Cornelia Mutel shares in her history of nature in Iowa, The Emerald Horizon, the pace of transformation in the 19th century moved at an unprecedented pace, a speed that matched the glaciers only by way of force.[6] This time period was rife with deeply consequential military conflicts, the drawing of land boundaries and patents delivered by land surveys, and the steady movement of Euromerican settlers across the western boundary of the Mississippi River. 

In his autobiography, Blackhawk, a leader within a section of the Sauk, recounts the events leading up to what became known as the Blackhawk War of 1832. For Blackhawk, the war ignited because of the signing of an 1804 Treaty between the United States and very few Sauk and Fox leaders. The treaty ceded lands East of the Mississippi to the United States, and in exchange, they were told they would receive an annual payment. That treaty was rife for dispute for many reasons: from the terms of compensation, to the conditions of signing, to the interpretation of how long the Sauk and Fox could remain on their lands. In his autobiography, Blackhawk recounts: “I find, by that treaty, all our country, east of the Mississippi, and south of the Jefferson, was ceded to the United States for one thousand dollars a year! I will leave it to the United States to say, whether our nation was properly represented in this treaty? Or whether we received a fair compensation for the extent of country ceded by those four individuals? I could say much about this treaty, but I will not, at this time. It has been the origin of all of our difficulties.”[7] Despite the Sauk’s persistence—for their land as a base of their subsistence, and for their people, Blackhawk would surrender and become a prisoner of war. According to Meskwaki historians, after the war, the United States recognized the Meskwaki and Sauk as a single group and forced their movement to a reservation in eastern Kansas. Here again, is Meskwaki historian, Jonathan Buffalo: 

Jonathan Buffalo, 33:51:
And in October of 45, we start our journey to Kansas, to the Kansas reservation. But some tribes doubled backed and went into hiding, and some people made it to Kansas. And the following year, the State of Iowa is born. It’s made into the territory is made into a state in ’46. And new people come in, and we meet new people. Because before, we knew the French, and we called the French, […] wooden canoe people, the English, the Spanish, and Americans. And then we meet new people. Like Norwegians, Swedes, Danes, and English, as Iowa is settled by these groups. And we meet Germans. At the first, from 46 to 52 the army, the US army would come into Iowa and gather all the Meskwaki bands they could find and send them back to Kansas. By 1852, Iowa citizens start having petitions to have us remain in Iowa, like Marion. Towns like that. Because we knew these people. When these people came, they didn’t know how to survive Iowa winters. But we did, and they learned a lot from us.[8]

Emerson Narrates, 35:55:
The Meskwaki’s desire for the woodlands would lead to the 1857 purchase of what would become known as the Meskwaki Settlement in Tama County. One note needs emphasis here: these events are foundational to the creation of Iowa statehood. These details are indispensable, not superfluous to the land’s history. The land and the Bur Oak teach us to find the sedimented layers of transformations over time. These all make the conditions of possibility for poor laws, and Iowa Codes explicating the treatment of the so-called “insane.” Slightly before and even during the Blackhawk war, land surveyors were already at work drawing boundary lines with survey chains, which was one of the first techniques of transforming large swaths of land into commodities for an emerging land tenure system. 

[sounds of strumming on guitar strings]

[audio of microfiche reader spool moving, with background sounds of people talking]

The broader picture of Iowa’s settlement deserves a depth of nuance that could fill an entire chapter of this podcast. In short, despite the power and prevalence of the agrarian myth, the economic history of this land deserves a deeper inquiry. Myths are powerful cultural narratives that shape a collective identity, and it’s always important to pay attention to the moments where myths surface and recirculate. The story that individual settlers came to Iowa to transform it into workable agricultural land is certainly based in historic evidence, of course. But, in reality, the historic record shows how farmers confronted high land prices driven up by speculators and federal land policies. For instance, in reading Benjamin Horace Hibbard’s 1939 book, A History of Public Land Policies, I encountered this Dubuque newspaper excerpt, describing the conditions of Iowa in 1836:
 
[hushed typewriter sounds, that carry on under the narrator]

Dubuque News Narrator, 38:31:
The rage for speculation in wild lands, though natural enough in the present state of things, and indeed, unavoidable to some extent, is, notwithstanding, a great impediment to the pursuit of agriculture. Men come to this county to make money by speculating, not by steadily pursuing a course of tilling the fertile soil, of which they become the temporary proprietors, and which soon passes into the hands of others. Who are equally disposed to sell out at an advance. Hence the low state of the agricultural art everywhere is to be seen in this state; and until all the public land is sold, we despair of seeing even a beginning to a regular system of cultivation. There is another view to be taken of this subject. The present mode of speculation is a species of gambling, leading men to rely upon uncertain events for the completion of their grasping and eager wishes for wealth. It puts a stop to the pursuit of every object worth the attainment of good and virtuous citizens. It operates as an essential check to efforts to drive at moral and intellectual excellence. It impedes the progress of science and literature, and of every species of moral culture. It leaves the mind a barren waste, unprepared for the reception either of moral or religious impressions. It is the moral upas which taints, with the poison of its influence, every aspiration of the mind after purity of thought and integrity of conduct. Happy is the man who escapes unscathed the enticing vortex.”[9] 

Emerson Narrates, 40:30:
Another newspaper, this time from Charles City, narrated the scene this way, as prospective farmers themselves were pulled into a game of speculative risk:

[hushed sounds of crackling fire underlie the next narrative]

Charles City Narrator, 40:44:
The professional speculators who produce more poverty than potatoes and consume more midnight oil in playing poker than of God’s sunshine in the game of raising wheat and corn did their share of buying and holding for a higher price. At the same time the farmer himself became a speculator to the extent of his means.[10] 

Emerson Narrates, 41:14:
Although the agrarian myth sustains any number of conversations about national identity, the reality of land records begs of us additional questions. These take us to the cycle of speculation and poverty that shaped early Iowa, of the long exhaustion of soil, of the psychic and physical impacts of debt, and economic uncertainty. What I hear in some of these voices is a story about a wild atmosphere of speculation and inflated land prices, where farmers make hard choices to risk everything for the chance of land to cultivate their futures. What this means is that the stressors of the system so well known today have historical roots that deserve de-sedimenting. Here is a land tenure system that divided cultivators along the lines of landowners, tenant farmers, and farm laborers, which would certainly contribute to conditions in which agricultural workers were incredibly vulnerable to financial risk and poverty. 

What if we ask the question: as a society, how are the ways we imagine our relation to each other fundamentally rooted in some of these original hierarchies of land? Or, even the notion that land is a resource to be accumulated and traded? I’ve noted in earlier chapters, laws enumerating care of the poor and insane were first and foremost rooted in residence, then property, and then familial systems of support. And yet, we haven’t yet asked what impacts these systems had on people’s wellbeing and access to the support they needed to survive. 

You also heard some of the perspectives of Meskwaki settlement, wherein part of their story as people of the Mississippi River includes the purchasing of acreage that over time led to a settlement, where today, the land and elders are resourcing practices of food sovereignty. During the same period of land settlement, Iowa passed in 1838 what were known as “Black Codes.” At the time, Iowa was a “free” state with soldiers who fought for the Union against the Confederacy. But these laws essentially segregated Iowa along the color line, prohibiting Black folks migrating from the south or the Northeast from voting, participating in civic life, or attending public schools. Of course, despite claims to the contrary, Black people have lived in Iowa since at least 1838, and historians are seeking out these stories from all corners of the state. In some places, such as the rail company owned town of Buxton, Black families thrived. These stories teach us how much we don’t know about Iowa’s past, as much as they also show significant patterns over time of the exclusions built into the land tenure system, exclusions that still impact all of us today. 
 
[layer in hushed combine sounds under the next paragraph]  

We do know that agriculture in these early days was painful and backbreaking work. So much so that new technologies—like John Deere’s steel plow and the McCormick reaper—created machines with the purpose of easing the physical toll of work. The former replaced cast iron with steel to cut through the dense, heavy prairie soil; whereas the latter combined horsepower with turning wheels and blades to increase yields of wheat with decreased amounts of time.[11] Technologies like these operate like energy extenders. They mechanize part of the energy required to do hard work, in turn making more work possible. With new technologies comes bigger scale. These technologies, combined with the cost of land, opened new doors for the industrialization of agriculture, introducing new speed, optimization, and deep risks. These certainly took their toll as much as they might have also made that work less laborious on the human body. 

[audio transition with steps walking on the ground, bird song]

As you learned in the first chapter, Johnson County purchased the land in 1855 after putting the issue to a vote. I don’t yet have the chain of deed transfers or know the circumstances by which the Board of Supervisors accessed this particular land. What I do know is that the surrounding plats were originally deeded to those with military scrip. These were otherwise known as “Bounty-Land Warrants” for military service, covering national wars since 1775, including through the removal of Indigenous peoples from their homelands—approximately the same year as that Bur Oak witness tree seeded. Earlier surveyors described the land in their field notes: 

East random between sections 26 and 35 

1.50  Enter Field N. and S. 

17.50 Leave same 

51.00 Branch 30 links S. sluggish and miry 

78.50 Wagon Road S.E. & N.W. 

Intersected North and S. line 

30 links North of post 

Land first rate, level bottom rather wet.

Made mound of Earth and Sod. 

Elm, white oak, black oak, hickory—hazel, prickly Ash.[12]

In its time, the land supported the subsistence of residents, as much as it also at times generated a profit. For instance, in 1863, the steward reported $500 in profit. The latter—an excess of the input costs of maintenance and supplies, was an impact of resident’s labor. You’ll remember from earlier episodes, residents collected eggs from chickens, milked cows, or otherwise were required to complete farm chores. In 1862, they reported the following crops: wheat 773 bushels, corn 1400 bushels, potatoes 30 bushels (which was noted as a failure), sorghum 175 gallons, and tobacco 30 pounds. According to a local historian, they also had “five horses, 22 head of cattle, and 12 hogs. As the years progressed, the steward would add to those numbers, as well as oxen, cabbage, oats, and more. In early 1874, the Board voted to authorize the building of a new building with adequate quarters for the insane of the county who were “not admissible to the insane hospital of the state,” and that those plans be completed as soon as possible.[13] And also in those early years, part of the land was sequestered for use as a cemetery. To this day, an unknown number of people are buried in unmarked graves, hundreds of feet away from the Bur Oak witness. Knowledge of that cemetery, as I would come to find, is likely one of the primary reasons why the land would remain for as long as it has. 

Geoff Mouming, 50:14:
But this is, and I should have mentioned this as we were walking toward it, not really an old woodland. If you look at the overhead photos as early as 2000, and definitely 1990, this doesn’t have much of a woodland character at all. There are maybe little clumps of trees or specimen trees like the Bur Oak that we’re going to see soon, that had clearly been here for a long time, and for whatever reason—be it the topography or generation after generation just loved that particular tree…I like to think that was the case, that those trees got worked around…uhm I assumed it’s because grazing stopped out here, because there was no longer dairy production, that this area just kind of grew in, because it goes along the creek. This is the hilliest part of the farm so there’s some ravines in there. But as we began the project, we started to see little pockets of “hope.” Some oak regeneration and from the oaks that were existing out here. We also think that based on some of the tree species that are out here—they’re native and desirable for sure—we see pockets of Pin Oak in here. But didn’t really see real old Pin Oaks. We think they were contributed by some industrious squirrels from the Chatham Oaks location, they were hiding them over here…or blue birds or whatever. 

Emerson Narrates, 51:41:
From the first chapter, you’ll remember that Supervisor Bob Burns worked with others during the 1970s to preserve the historic asylum building. I did not realize until searching through mounds of newspapers that also in the 1970s, the county first proposed auctioning farming equipment and some of the County Care Facility’s land. On February 22, 1979, a headline in the Iowa City Press-Citizen reads, “County getting out of farming business.” On the precipice of the 1980s farm crisis, the County Home’s Care Review Committee—something of an oversight board comprised of individuals from the community—recommended that the supervisors auction the farmland for rent, in addition to two tractors, wagons, hoes, and other equipment. From the perspective of the Richard Kelley, who is named as the County Home co-director at the time, the poor farm model that necessitated this land was no longer viable. Kelley lamented that an earlier model could generate revenue based on unremunerated resident labor, but the new world of federal regulations for compensation made that untenable. Kelley also blamed the fewer number of individuals with farm experience, noting that most individuals served by the county home were individuals with physical or intellectual disabilities. 

Reading these words now, I can’t help but wonder how to be curious about transformations in mental health care systems that might account for how different economic models were imagined as more or less tenable. In other words, it feels like the values remain the same—inputs, outputs, costs, and efficiencies. But to whose benefit? Despite efforts from members of the Johnson County Democratic Central Committee to halt the sale, as of March of that year, the plans continued. By November, an ad in the Iowa City Press-Citizen announced, “NOTICE OF AVAILABILITY OF REAL ESTATE FOR FARM LEASE.” It read: “Notice is hereby given that Johnson County, Iowa, proposes to lease 106.81 acres of real estate located at the Johnson County Care Facility. Terms of said lease are to be a 50% crop share basis with the county to pay one-half of the cost of seed, fertilizer, lime and chemicals. The tenant will be expected to farm said acreage in a manner consistent with proper husbandry and to execute a written lease within ten days after delivery thereof.”[14] Then, approximately 20 years later, in the early 2000s, the county would once again take up questions of how to use this land….

[transition into guitar strumming and soft ooo vocals underneath Emerson’s spoken narrative]: 

…You can continue listening to this story, with Chapter 4, part 2, Next, on Disability Ecologies. 

[1] Donican Lam, “Silent Witnesses: A-Bomb Trees Carrying On Aging Survivors’ Legacy,” Kyodo News No date, https://immersive.kyodonews.net/silent-witnesses-a-bomb-trees-carrying-on-aging-survivors-legacy/index.html; Accessed 2 November 2025.
[2] William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonist, and the Ecology of New England (Hill and Wang), 2003.
[3] Patty Krawec, Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future (Broadleaf Books, 2022), 29.
[4] Cornelia Mutel, The Emerald Horizon: The History of Nature in Iowa (University of Iowa Press, 2008), 6.
[5] “The Meskwaki Nation’s History,” https://www.meskwaki.org/history/; No date; accessed November 1, 2025.
[6] Mutel, 77.
[7] Blackhawk, Autobiography of Ma-ka-tai0me-she-kia-kiak, or Blackhawk (St. Louis: Press of Continental Printing Co., 1882), 40.
[8] Jonathan Buffalo, speaking to the Rotary Club of Ames, “Meskwaki Nation, a History,” YouTube, Uploaded March 22, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vx76YKfFfnY.
[9] Benjamin Horace Hibbard, A History of the Public Land Policies (New York: P. Smith, 1939), 216.
[10] Hibbard, 222-223.
[11] Mutel, 24.
[12] Field notes of the survey of townships and township boundaries in Iowa, Microform. General Land Office. Records stored at Iowa City Historical Library.
[13] Anonymous, History of Johnson County, Iowa, Containing a History of the County, and its townships, cities and villages from 1836 to 1882 (Iowa City, Iowa), 1883.
[14] Mary Donovan, “Notice,” Iowa City Press Citizen 5 November 1979, 8B.