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But it wasn't just their spending habits and land use that changed with the advent of what Donahue calls "agricultural capitalism"—their language did, too. "The Great Meadow," with its 400 acres of rich land along the Concord River, had been at the center of their system of mixed husbandry due to its provision of hay for their livestock and, consequently, manure for their fields, thus maintaining decades on end the fertility of the land. Crucially, the Great Meadow was a commons: owned by the town, maintained by the town, used by the town. But by Thoreau's day, Donahue notes in a powerful closing section, the Great Meadow had become known as the Great Meadows: "Instead of a common entity of which each owned a part, the Great Meadows were thought of as a collection of individual pieces." "The singular," he writes in lament, "had become plural."

Donahue's turn to language at the book's end is a brief but telling analytic shift, underscoring what sort of work needs to be done to advance beyond the point at which he leaves us. His argument, persuasive as it is, leads naturally to questions about who these people were, and what it was that drove them, against increasing odds, to maintain their way of life as long as they did. At several points he gestures toward the culture interwoven into their agriculture; noting "the larger communitarian and spiritual goals upon which their towns rested," he occasionally quotes from a will or deed to give some hint of the nature of their relations one with another. When in 1690 the aged settler William Hartwell passed along his earthly goods, for instance, his parting words reflected a culture weighted with a thick admixture of kinship, obligation, and continuity: "I warmly desire my said two sons John and Samuel & as their father charge them to maintain brotherly love and unity between themselves, living as becometh brethren in mutual helpfulness each to other."

By Thoreau's day, some 150 years later, Hartwell's world was being radically altered by those Donahue dubs "the improving men of quiet desperation." If we, their children, are to forsake, in Donahue's words, "the shortsighted environmental blunders" of the world they helped to create, a probing of the relations this earlier people guarded between ecological practice, politics, and faith will provide necessary illumination. What kind of soul does husbandry take? What kind of soul does husbandry make?

Eric Miller is professor of history and humanities at Geneva College.

Copyright © 2004 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

The Great Meadow is available from Amazon.com and other book retailers.

Yale University Press has more information about Donahue and his book.

Earlier Eric Miller reviews for Christianity Today have included TV's The West Wing and American Dreams, and the Mark Heard biography Hammers and Nails. He also wrote an article on American "roots" music. His first article for the magazine was "Keeping Up with the Amish: We evangelicals have made a too-easy peace with the inroads of consumer culture."

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August (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48