dragonlady7

farm is on an old van rensselaer tenant farm

via https://ift.tt/33SKFrS

Tenant Farming (But Make It Fashion) https://www.wonkette.com/tenant-farming-but-make-it-fashion:

probablyasocialecologist https://probablyasocialecologist.tumblr.com/post/629972122619510784/tenant-farming-but-make-it-fashion :

As a Southern crop scientist, when I see a farm with a big house and a little house I think “Ah! That’s some classic Jim Crow bullshit!” But the sturdy folk of upstate New York seem to have no such qualms. They really should. Did you know that in the Hudson Valley, feudalism was legal until 1845? Farm tenants in the Hudson Valley didn’t just have to pay rent to stay on the lord’s land. They had to pay to leave. Good times, right? It finally ended because there was an actual, honest-to-God peasant uprising. It’s called the Anti-Rent War! You should check it out sometime! It could add some useful historical perspective to reporting on adorable little cottage farms! In fact, tenant farming and sharecropping were a coast-to-coast American institution until well after the second World War. In 1920, nearly half the “family farmers” in Iowa, Illinois, Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma were actually sharecroppers and tenant farmers.

This is an article by Sarah Taber that I saw first as a Tumblr thread, but it’s fantastic to read it all in one place. It’s a direct response to a NYT article where they had… their arts & leisure person write an article about a farm. Yes they did.

Also, to read more about the end of sharecropping/tenant farming/ serfdom in NYS, here’s the Wikipedia article about the Anti-Rent Wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Rent_War, in which I had ancestors who killed a cop, so.

Idyllic cottagecore history my ass.