Like the Great War and the Civil War, World War II was again a boom period for agriculture, as America and Canada fed their European allies in addition to themselves. If you were farming, you could ALSO get a draft deferment! And, of course, there were always black market opportunities.
*Both World Wars revived a product whose use had been fading… maple sugar products. (Cane sugar was rationed, but maple wasn’t.) Maple had traditionally provided a cash crop in a slack season, when the cows stopped giving and the hands stood idle. But it was murderous work, and folks considered it fuddy-duddy peasant food when compared with cane sugar – the reason that the highest grades are the versions that are the LEAST mapley. Now UNrationed maple sugar supplemented rationed cane.
*World War II was also the last gasp of the horse, as tires and gasoline were rationed off the road. The war ended in ’45 and by ’50 we were embarked on major social change. Rural Electrification was soon completed. The one-room schools were closed, even as Corning Community College opened. TV came in. Factories boomed (Corning, Mercury, the Rand). TB and polio began to disappear. By 1950 more women were working than had been the case during the war. By 1960, they had the birth control pill. The New Deal, the Fair Deal, and the G.I. Bill were gigantic social engineering programs, and they guaranteed that the postwar recession was short and shallow, and our economy boomed.
*In 1919, as World War I was ending and Prohibition beginning, Walter Taylor had bought the Columbia Winery. Since so much of his business was in grape juice and sacramental wines, he was somewhat insulated from Prohibition. In 1936 (after Repeal) they began the manufacture of champagne, and in 1940 dropped non-alcoholic products. A stock offering in 1961 raised capital to buy the Pleasant Valley Wine Company, and Taylor became the second-largest employer in Steuben County, until closing out in the early ‘nineties.
*Joe Paddock told me that when he began his veterinary practice in the mid ‘fifties, there were 300 dairies in the Town of Bath… half a dozen of those within the Village limits. If you had one cow and sold the milk, that constituted a dairy, and I’m sure that many of these were small family operations supplementing a small general farm, or a small specialty farm, OR a factory job.
*For about 30 years after the war, an annual influx of migrant workers was a prominent feature of Steuben life and farming. Still, the family farms in general were going out. Many of the farms and ranches out west in the 1800s were large-scale corporate operations. Their success ruined the farmers of eastern Europe, who then immigrated over here in huge numbers. Now that was catching up with farmers here in the northeast, along with the reality that the children now had other options. If they stayed farming it’s because they wanted to, not because they were stuck with it. But even if they wanted to, cruel economic realities often forced them out.
*The farms went back to scrub and forest, and the deer came back as the trees grew up. Pheasant population dwindled but the deer came back, and then the turkeys, then the beaver and then the bear, and now the bobcat. Hunting became big business for Steuben. The hunter and the hiker often came upon old foundations, long-neglected stands of apple trees, and long-since forgotten graves.