The South Grows Green & Edmondson Farm
My grandfather, George Mountain Edmondson Jr., invited a film crew from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to his farm in Culpeper, VA in 1947. Images of my grandfather and father made it past the final cut. My uncle John remembered the film to me earlier this year, so I tracked it down at the National Archives and had a copy made. I found a big-budget production with two clips that everyone agrees on, and two more clips that might or might not show Edmondsons. I have put them all here so you can make up your own minds and discuss this among yourselves.
Although Grandpa ran a small farm in northern Virginia, his father was a prominent photographer in Cleveland. The photographer sent Junior to Cornell University in 1921, but he didn’t stay. When the Depression hit, grandpa and grandma had three boys and two girls to feed. Jobs were hard to find, so he bought the farm to ensure a safe place to raise his family. But Grandpa was a scholar, too. He studied agricultural techniques. He was devoted to improving land, and he was active in the local Republican Party. These two things might explain his involvement in the Culpeper Soil Conservation District.
Traditional agricultural methods had been hard on Southern soil. Putting in a tobacco or cotton crop several years in a row depletes soil nutrients, and the longer you keep doing it, the worse the soil gets. Plowing and planting a hillside causes severe soil erosion if you don’t do it right, and many farmers messed this up, too. Thousands of southern farmers were failing because their land had been played out. Their children were moving away because there were no jobs, and there were no jobs because no one had told the farmers a few simple techniques that could preserve and enhance the value of their land. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Soil Conservation Service was a New Deal program that sent agents to teach farmers these tricks. Soil Conservation Districts were the local coordinating boards for the USDA. My grandfather was active on his local board, and this is how the USDA learned that his farm used contour plowing and other techniques they wanted to talk about in their educational film.
“The South Grows Green” was released in 1948. It is charming, corny, and hopelessly dated. Its message could easily be covered in a short pamphlet: cover crops, contour plowing, crop rotation, and diversification can boost a small farm’s productivity. But a lot of southern farmers back then didn’t read pamphlets. The film was an organizing tool. It was made for small groups to see in rural meeting halls, so it also had to be a show.
The film is about 45 minutes long, in two reels. It opens with an expensive dolly shot, and the first several minutes are devoted to a goofy travelogue celebrating the south. There are scenes of the shopping districts of downtown Dallas and Knoxville, which must have been thrilling to a farm wife who didn’t often get further than the general store. There are several shots of attractive young women, some of them wearing bathing suits, which have nothing to do with soil conservation but were almost certainly thrilling to the farmers. And there is a cringe-worthy scene of a black “mammy” serving fried chicken and cornbread to a scrubbed-up white family in the dining room of an old plantation house. Sixty years ago, nobody gave that one a second thought.
About nine minutes into the movie, the booming “Voice of God” narrator starts talking about Soil Conservation Districts, and my grandfather makes his first appearance. The men of the Culpeper District are shown at the edge of a field, discussing and evaluating. My grandfather, the guy with wire-rimmed glasses and brown hair, is shown briefly, squatting, talking, and pointing. He’s taking charge, as usual.
A few minutes later, the narrator is talking about how smart it is to plant lespedesia, a form of clover, in fields that aren’t being used for crops. This is where my father, Tom Edmondson, makes his first appearance. He is 18 years old, and he is helping a conveyor belt deliver bales of clover hay into the loft of the Edmondson barn.
Edmondson Farm was considered an example back then because the Federal government was encouraging farmers to grow lots of different things and reduce their impact on the land. Today things couldn’t be more different: the USDA has spent decades promoting monoculture, fertilizer, pesticides, and federal subsidies. Meanwhile, local markets in many places have returned to the 1940s by rewarding small, diversified, low-impact operations that sell direct to consumers. Today it’s called “sustainability.”
When I saw this movie, I saw two more clips that I thought showed Culpeper and the Edmondsons. One of them happens during a segment on managing woodlots. It seemed to me that the broad-bottomed man walking into the woodlot was my grandfather, and the guy watching a core sample being removed from a tree is my father. When I showed this to my dad and Uncle John, however, they said this could not be because they did not have a woodlot. My dad also said that the young man in the woodlot is not the same young man who’s loading hay. He does not remember anything about the filming, however. So what do you think? Is this another shot of the 18-year-old Tom Edmondson, and do you remember Grandpa’s rambling gait the same way I do?
Unfortunately, my uncles (Bill and John), aunts (Liz and Alice), and grandmother (Mary Elizabeth) are not in the film. But I think there is one more shot of my grandfather. My father and uncle say that the dairy farm shown in the following clip is not theirs, and that the man hanging up a pail of milk is not their father. I think it’s the same guy who was squatting in the field and walking into the woodlot. What do you think?
For me, the most poignant moment in “The South Grows Green” comes at the end. The announcer says, “When Northern farms are still covered with snow, livestock are filling out on Southern pastures.” My grandfather paid attention. By the time this film was released, the Edmondsons had left Culpeper and moved to another farm in Nokomis, a rural outpost in the southern part of Sarasota County, Florida. My grandfather’s Florida pastures had been cleared just 25 years before he arrived. He moved the family into a small house that was covered with tarpaper. The first thing he did was dig a drainage ditch to control flooding, and his children remember being frightened by things howling in the marsh on pitch-dark nights. Edmondson Farm in Nokomis was a lot closer to the raw frontier than it was to the mansions of Cleveland. But Grandpa proved his homestead, and he also moved back into his old role as a community leader as Sarasota County’s postwar boom began. He even served a term in the Florida State Legislature.
My grandfather is 44 years old in these images. He was 56 when I was born in 1959. When he died in 1973, he was 69 and I had just turned 13. In my first-hand memories, grandpa is a jolly old man who has a bad hip and back pain. He smokes Pall Mall cigarettes and has heart disease, but he hides this from the grandkids. His health is fading as my childhood memories become clearer. “The South Grows Green” is a wonderful gift because it shows me Grandpa in his prime, working with his neighbors to make a better world. Thanks to Uncle John for remembering the film crew and setting me off to find the footage, and Merry Christmas to all the Edmondsons.
Contact: brade@lightlink.com