The Power of Place: A Photographic Essay 
of Hamlin Garland’s Mitchell County, Iowa  

by Kurtis Meyer
Photographs by Jon Morris

Introduction

Robert Frost reminds us, “The land was ours before we were the land’s.”¹  This dynamic interaction between people and their surroundings is at the heart of the American experience:  people setting out to change the landscape and finding themselves transformed in the process.  The interplay between humans and their physical environment is personified by Hamlin Garland and is at the heart of his best, most enduring writing.

Garland as a child in Iowa

American literature has always had a regional flavor and authors who capture and convey the distinctiveness of a particular way of life:  the South of William Faulkner; the New England of Robert Frost; the West of Stegner and Steinbeck; the Midwest of Cather, Fitzgerald and, yes, of Hamlin Garland.  Wallace Stegner described these as placed writers: “lovers of known earth, known weathers, and known neighbors both human and non-human”² and having “knowledge of place that comes from working in it in all weathers, making a living from it, suffering from its catastrophes, . . . valuing it for the profound investment of labor and feeling that you, your parents and grandparents . . .  have put in it.”³  By Stegner’s standards, Hamlin Garland is a placed writer.  And Iowa -- specifically Mitchell County, Burr Oak Township, and a locale named Dry Run -- is his place.

In this photographic essay, you will travel to a place -- Northern Iowa -- and to a time -- the 1870s.  First, our geographical coordinates.  The layout of Iowa is, in essence, the United States in miniature . . . bordered on the east by the Mississippi and the west by the Missouri, mimicking oceans.  If Iowa, then, is the U.S., Mitchell County is comparable to Ohio, in the northern tier of counties (or states), slightly east of center.  The Garland family’s move from Winneshiek County, Iowa, two counties west of Mitchell County, in 1870 is analogous to a move from say Buffalo, New York, to Cleveland, Ohio. 

Garland contemporary Edward Eggleston observed that “. . . every work of art is an autobiography in that it is the result of the experience and observation of the writer.”⁴  This was especially true for Garland.  Even his fiction draws heavily on Iowa people and places, scenes and sites, which, in Garland’s words, were “burned deep into our memories.”⁵ Tapping into these writings means Garland himself guides us through his boyhood haunts;  his words and descriptions provide the best captions for these photographs, which, with one exception, were taken in Mitchell County, Iowa.

Garland in 1881

As Garland noted in “Crumbling Idols” early in his career, a sense of place was central to his literary philosophy:  “We are forming a literature from direct contact with life”⁶; “The surest way to write for other lands is to be true to our own land and true to the scenes and people we love.”⁷  As important, Garland’s sense of place was essential to his literary success.  As Keith Newlin and Joseph McCullough observe,  “His early experiences influenced his later and best fiction, for they provided him with an intimate knowledge of the details of farm life.”⁸ 

Sense of place is more than mere geography.  Generally, it’s an emotional blend of associations:  landscape and manscape, families and neighbors, customs and values, flora and fauna, history and contemporary observations.  All these Garland absorbed during his decade-plus in Iowa, meaning that to know and understand Garland requires knowing and understanding this setting.  Fortunately, some elements of Garland’s Mitchell County environs remain relatively unchanged today, more than 120 years after the Garland family’s departure.

Summing up Garland’s career, Joseph McCullough noted that Garland is admired today “for the vivid impressions he created” and for “his ability to create pictures and scenes in memorable ways.”⁹  My intent is that these photographs, taken by my colleague Jon Morris, create the same vivid and memorable pictures and scenes through film that Hamlin Garland created through words.

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