Where Are the Fellows Who Cut the Hay?: How Traditions from the Past Can Shape Our Future

By Robert Ashton. Unbound, 2024. 256 pages. $22.95/hardcover; $11.99/eBook.

On a First-day morning in 2016, Robert Ashton sat in the silence of Leiston Meeting in southeastern England and contemplated the fact that Florence Evans also would have worshiped in that still room. She had been his school headmistress in the 1960s, and he had always been grateful for the influence of Quakerism on her gentle ways as an educator. But on this particular day, he was meditating on the work of her husband, George Ewart Evans, who had published in 1956 Ask the Fellows Who Cut the Hay, a collection of stories from England’s rural past that shed light on the disappearing skills and traditions that were practiced before the introduction of twentieth-century mechanization. These thoughts planted in Ashton the seeds of his own book.

As the title of Where Are the Fellows Who Cut the Hay? implies, traditional farming practices have continued to disappear. In four sections, Ashton examines the impact of continued modernization on Life, Work, Power, and Community. Technical improvements, he argues, have taken us further from the land and the seasons, and we have lost our connection with the material world around us. While we are materially far better off than our forebears, are we as happy? Can we turn the clock back to rediscover the best parts of that lost world?

Ashton’s descriptions of that vanishing world evoke the writing of Wendell Berry and his attention to the culture and economy of the rural United States, albeit with a vocabulary of English terms that might helpfully have included a dictionary! He is no Luddite, nor is he overly nostalgic for a “golden past.” He acknowledges the benefits of modernization for health, leisure, and mobility but is equally attentive to the cost in the loss of certain skills, traditions, and community bonds.

Having grown up on an Indiana dairy farm in the 1950s and ’60s, I was especially drawn to Ashton’s chapter on milk. His examination of the traditional ways of a dairy economy, ways that have largely been replaced, mirrored my experience. Our small farm with its small herd of cows required all hands on deck every day of the year. And by “all hands,” I mean more than just our immediate family. Six generations of our family had lived in close proximity since settling in north central Indiana in the mid-1800s, and like other farming families, we helped each other with “work circles.” Especially at harvest time, we shared equipment and brought in each other’s corn, wheat, hay, and silage. Uncles, aunts, and cousins formed a tight-knit community through this shared labor.

And our local Quaker meeting benefited from the traditions. Large farm families provided a funnel into membership; milking twice daily meant we didn’t get far from home, assuring attendance at Friends’ activities. When that farming economy changed dramatically and rapidly in the 1960s and ’70s, it had a devastating impact on the life of many rural Quaker meetings. Small farms gave way to huge agribusinesses; traditional “general farms” gave way to monoculture; practices that included tasks small children could easily pitch in and help the adults with gave way to huge equipment and specialization. It all led to a decline in the vitality of small towns, rural meetings, and the practices that bound communities together.

Though grounded in modern English history, Ashton’s book offers insights into some of the sociological and economic roots of the decline in Quaker membership in North America. It also provides insight into the vibrant community of Friends in the past that assured success in so many aspects of life as Quaker farmers, businesspeople, bankers, accountants, greengrocers, and industrialists formed a “work circle” that made it practically impossible to fail. It raises the question of what might be possible if Friends recaptured that kind of community with our present educational, institutional, and service organizations.

Where Are the Fellows Who Cut the Hay? not only asks a question about disappearing farming practices but also offers a response to the question of “Where are the people who once sat in worship in our Friends meetinghouses?”

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Max L. Carter is the retired director of Friends Center at Guilford College. He is a member of New Garden Meeting in Greensboro, N.C. His latest book is Annice Carter’s Life of Quaker Service (Friends United Press), written with two cousins, Sarabeth Marcinko and Betsy Alexander, about their great-aunt Annice.