September 18, 2003

Plains Folk: Metcalfe Farm

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

This is a fine mess we’ve gotten into, I thought more than once. Three days tramping sandy ground and picking out sandburs in 105 degree temperatures, all for wages working out to about $5 an hour. I could have stayed on the farm and baled hay. On the other hand, a treasure hunt has to entail some hardship; else the treasure is not prized. What we sought and found in this venture was a way of life on the Great Plains, the story, in material evidence, of one family finding its own way through ingenuity and perseverance.

I’m talking about the family of Augusta Corson Metcalfe, the sagebrush artist, the prairie painter, the Grandma Moses of Oklahoma. We were tramping around her farmstead smack in the middle of the Black Kettle National Grassland in Roger Mills County, Okla. My companion was charged with nominating the home place to the National Register of Historic Places. I was along to take photos and do the heavy lifting.

I study those sandy photographs and marvel at the material evidence. Augusta Corson was the daughter of homesteaders. She grew up with the country, married unfortunately, and calling herself a widow after that, supported herself, helped eventually by her son Howard.

They were talented people. Augusta tried early in life to make it as a western artist and illustrator and just couldn’t break into paying markets. Subsequently she settled into subsistence agriculture, milking cows, raising poultry, raising modest field crops and a great big garden. As Howard grew to manhood he proved wonderfully handy, if somewhat eccentric--competent at the forge, able to build just about anything from scavenged materials. He made the house they lived in of concrete blocks he formed himself. In the east end he set a remarkably beautiful chimney of sandstone quarried on the place; set into the sandstone is a relief of a horse in white stone, Augusta’s work no doubt, as she loved horses.

Late in life unexpected fame came to Augusta as a memory artist, that is, an artist who paints scenes from her youth, often in a style of naïve realism. She got written up in Life and sold some paintings out of eastern galleries, but mostly she painted for people who shared her personal history on the southern plains frontier. She and her clients constituted a memory community, her paintings speaking for their shared experience.

This was in the 1950s, when other farm folk faced the choice, as was often said, of getting big or getting out. Augusta and Howard were examples of another alternative, which was to stay small in farming but find supplemental income. They got some gas leases, but the main source of supplemental income was sales of Augusta’s paintings. Howard, meanwhile, continued piecing together a modest, productive, ingenious farmstead.

We spent hours admiring his stuccoed tile chicken house, his outbuildings, and most of all, his water handling system. The windmill sat atop a homemade tower fashioned of iron casing and a sucker-rod ladder. It pumped into a little reservoir, which in turn fed through the wall of the milkhouse into a cooling tank. (The milkhouse, too, is a neat piece of work, made up of drainage tile and cement.) Overflow from the cooling tank ran into a stock tank made of sandstone and concrete. Augusta has her fame; I think because of the way we have documented these ingenious farm buildings, Howard will have his, too.

All this stuff is preserved, and the art of Augusta Corson Metcalfe is exhibited, by the Break’O’Day Farm and Metcalfe Museum, Durham, Okla. This is a growing, worthwhile institution set into a lovely prairie landscape--worth a visit, if you’re interested in real things.

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Source: Tom Isern, (701) 799-2941, isern@plainsfolk.com
Editor: Rich Mattern, (701) 231-6136, richard.mattern@ndsu.nodak.edu 

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