Editor’s note: Mark Bushnell is a Vermont journalist and historian. He is the author of “Hidden History of Vermont” and “It Happened in Vermont.”
It was a strange, new world, a rural world they had only seen in books and magazines.
“I hadn’t been any closer to a horse than I’d been to an elephant,” recalled Margot Mathewson in a 2006 interview. Mathewson was one of hundreds of urban teenagers who spent their summers in Vermont during the 1940s.
They were here on a mission. The country needed their muscles and their energy. There was a war on and Vermont farmers were being asked to do the impossible, or at least the improbable. They were expected to produce more food with less help.
Ever since the United States’ entry into World War II in December 1941, indeed even in the years leading up to it, Vermont farmers had been short of hired hands. During the depths of the Great Depression, many men would have been thrilled with the offer of a farm job. But now they were joining the military, or taking higher-paid factory work in war-related industries. The machine tool factories in Springfield and Windsor operated 24 hours a day, six days a week. Employees, working 12-hour shifts, were turning out so many vital pieces of equipment for the war effort that the area was considered a prime target for enemy bombing. Competition from booming war-related industries meant that, by one estimate, two out of every three Vermont farm laborers had left the field.
Dorothy Thompson, an internationally renowned journalist, organized the initial response to the problem. Thompson had tried to alert the world to the dangers of Nazi Germany, and had been expelled by the regime for her reporting. Now, with war having broken out, she wanted to help on the home front. Thompson’s idea was to recruit an army of farm volunteers.
Modeling her program on the Civilian Conservation Corps, she started her Volunteer Land Corps in 1941, hoping it would become a national program. When she launched it in 1942, she did so only in Vermont, which would serve as a pilot program.
Thompson chose the state because of her connection to the state. She owned a summer home in Vermont, a 300-acre farm in the town of Barnard, with her husband, the novelist Sinclair Lewis. When the couple divorced in 1942, Thompson kept the farm.
Drawing teenagers from East Coast cities, the Volunteer Land Corps placed 626 workers on Vermont farms that first summer. Thompson reported that the program had more volunteers than positions to fill. She deserved much of the credit for the successful recruitment drive. her work included writing the script for a promotional film about the program, “Farm Work is War Work.” (You can view it here)
Thompson wanted to serve not just her country but also the small farm towns that were its backbone. She worried that the loss of workers would cripple smaller farms, driving many out of business. Their loss would be devastating to agricultural communities, she feared.
The threat was quite real.
“I believe the government is much more willing to talk about their farm labor shortage, than to take the necessary steps to correct it,” wrote Enosburg farmer Charles Nichols in a January 1943 letter to a state agriculture official. “Most of the time this winter I have been entirely alone to care for 50 head of livestock and my farm work has reached a critical stage.”
Nichols had only been able to find three “floaters” to work on his farm. “Two of them were here less than a week, left without warning and drank up their earnings,” he wrote.
The plight of farmers like Charles Nichols drew the attention of the U.S. Agriculture Department, which decided in February 1943 to launch its own labor program. The department announced plans to recruit between 500,000 and 650,000 Victory Farm Volunteers and a separate Women’s Land Army, both of which would be part of the 3.5 million workers in the new U.S. Crop Corps.
The Victory Farm Volunteers program, which was to be administered in Vermont by the Agricultural Extension Service, mimicked Thompson’s Land Corps in many ways. Volunteers of high school age would be paid a small stipend to work on farms in need. The Land Corps, which had been privately run, would limit its activities to helping interview recruits.
As with the Land Corps, Victory Farm Volunteers were drawn from East Coast cities. Margot Mathewson (then Margot Carlson) came from the Bronx. Though there was a farm across the street from her childhood home (“It was not the Bronx of today,” she said), she knew little about farming.
Mathewson volunteered to work on the Whitehill farm in Passumpsic. She knew about the place from a girl in her New York City neighborhood, who had worked for Austin and Dot Whitehill the summer before.
Mathewson took a train from New York to White River Junction and then a bus to St. Johnsbury. When Austin Whitehill met her there, he was dressed in overalls, his shoes caked with mud and his face speckled with hay dust. “I was wondering what I was going to say to this man. I didn’t have to worry. He just talked and talked and talked.”
From the minute she arrived at the farm, “I was just one of them,” said Mathewson, who moved to Vermont in the 1970s with her husband and sons, and lived here the rest of her life.
The farm day started at 5 a.m. and the workload was heavy. Though Mathewson was one of the few girls in the program, she spent her days doing farm chores. (The U.S. Agriculture Department had delayed authorizing the Women’s Land Army for fear women weren’t up to farm work.) She milked cows, hayed, cleaned the chicken coop. Only when Dot and her girls went on a trip for a couple of weeks, did she serve as the household cook.
The work was constantly changing. “Nothing went on so long that you got bored with it,” she said.
Mathewson worked two summers on the farm, which was unusual. Many farmers complained that their volunteers couldn’t do the work of regular farm hands. Only about 20% of Victory Farm Volunteers returned for a second summer. Many didn’t even make it through a single summer. Roughly 20% went home early, because they couldn’t handle the work or they didn’t get along with their host family.
Mathewson admitted to helping one volunteer decide to depart early. During her second summer, Mathewson was joined at the Whitehill farm by a boy from Boston, who was something of a malcontent who wouldn’t do his share of the work. One day, Mathewson found a dead snake in the field and put it under the boy’s pillow. He was soon on his way home.
Mathewson didn’t feel trapped on the farm. Austin would take her everywhere in his pickup. They would visit lumber camps and poor backwoods farms, where Mathewson saw shoeless children dressed in tattered clothing. “I had never seen such poverty,” she said. “It broke my heart.”
Every Saturday afternoon brought relief from the work. Mathewson was allowed her one bath of the week – she swam regularly between baths – then she and the whole family would go to St. Johnsbury. There she could spend some of the $7 she earned each week. (Her pay rose to $10 a week during her second summer.) Some Saturdays the family would return to Passumpsic for the local square dance. Picnics were regular occasions on Sundays.
Once she arrived on the farm, Mathewson never saw any of the other city volunteers. She also didn’t see her family. After her two summers in Vermont, it was her brother’s turn to help the Whitehills. Mathewson visited him that summer with her parents, to show them where she had lived.
During that visit, as the midday dinnertime approached, Austin kept saying, “I’ve got to go out and kill that chicken.” It was 11 in the morning and the bird was still running around in the yard. Each person got just one plate for the meal, Mathewson remembered. In country fashion, once the chicken and gravy were gone, dessert, a slice of blueberry pie, was plunked down in their place. Mathewson’s parents were used to the more genteel trappings of New York, where food came from the store. “It was too much for them,” Mathewson said.
Victory Farm Volunteers kept coming to Vermont for a couple years after the war to replace men who hadn’t yet returned to their old farm jobs. The program had helped Vermont farmers perform a minor miracle. Shorthanded and working with novice laborers, the state’s farmers managed to increase milk production by 4%, chicken production by 16%, turkey by 19%, egg by 40% and maple product by 16%. Gov. William Wills proudly announced in 1945 that in response to the war, Vermont had generated “the greatest production in her history.”
