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Lloyd and Boyd
(E)MOTIVE POWER
boustrophedon /ˌbuːstrəˈfiːdən/: a style of writing in which alternate lines of text are reversed, with letters also written in reverse, mirror-style.
A handful of orthographies can do this quite handily. Chinese or Japanese, for example, can be written top-to-bottom or left-to-right and possibly even right-to-left. The ancient Greeks, however, are the folks who gave this system its name: its meaning is “as the ox ploughs”. Which came to mind when I saw this photograph to two yoked oxen doing what oxen do: beasts of burden. I’ve named them Lloyd and Boyd and we’ll fit them into the story somewhere and make certain that their golden years were filled with leasurely grazing in fields of tender grass.
[#1586]
Music
“Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent”. ―
Of our five senses, smell is said to be the most acute, the most reliable. I once challenged students involved with Agincourt to map the landscape of their youth, not by sight, the physical landmarks that define our personal world, but by the sense of smell. And it works in the conjunction of space-time: There is a commercial bakery on my route from campus to home and I think that smell of freshly baking bread is linked automatically with the turn signal and my usual left turn onto Fourth avenue; it tells me where I am and what to do.
Smell can also transcend time. The smell of egg salad transports me instantly to my grandmother’s kitchen where I’m standing before the open refrigerator and being lectured to know what I want before opening it. Likewise, the changing styles of music and my shifting taste could be a chronology of my life. Given a bit of time, we could write the history of Agincourt in its music. Indeed, it already has been through scattered musical references: Gerry Leiden rehearsing the “Lessons & Carols” at St Joe’s church on election eve 2015 and the premier of his oratorio “Shanawdithit” soon after; a punk band playing at the Yellow Brick Roadhouse; the 1895-1895 opening season at The Auditorium. Each of these could be someone’s reference point in space-time.
“Music is a total constant. That’s why we have such a strong visceral connection to it, you know? Because a song can take you back instantly to a moment, or a place, or even a person. No matter what else has changed in you or the world, that one song stays the same, just like that moment.”
― Just Listen
In 1963 our Senior Class met to consider a memorial gift to the school. I can’t recall what it was; maybe something like a score board for the swimming pool, though that sounds way beyond our means. But at some point during the meeting, I offered a suggestion: Why not (I suggested naively) commission a living American composer — names like Vincent Persichetti or William Schuman came to mind — to write a graduation march, something to bear our school’s name into the future and, perhaps, beyond the confines of District #217.
“But ‘Pomp & Circumstance’ is traditional,” they protested. Reminding them that “Pomp & Circumstance” — actually the first of a group of five marches written by Sir Edward Elgar in 1904; I looked it up — had itself been an innovation got me nowhere. My eccentricities had already put me at the fringe of teenage culture and this just confirmed their suspicions. But that idea, to commission a musical composition lodged in my psyche and wouldn’t go away. So as we prepared for the first of what would be three Agincourt exhibits, the exhibit celebrating the 150th anniversary of the city’s incorporation in 1857 — its “sesquicentennial”; I love saying that word — it was clear the time had come: we would commission a Sesquicentennial Fanfare for brass as part of the opening ceremonies.
Who to approach with the commission? Several composers came to mind but the list quickly focused on Daron Hagen, familiar because he had written an opera based on the early life of American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Hagen was also a Midwesterner, born in Milwaukee and rooted in the same soil as Wright and Sullivan. And, so, I crafted an email message, explained that I represented “the Sesquicentennial Committee of Agincourt, Iowa, a town of 27,500 people” and we wished to commission a fanfare to inaugurate the city’s 150th birthday celebrations. And, oh, by the way, Agincourt is a work of fiction, an academic exercise in the relationship between design and narrative, place-making and story-telling, to which I expected one of three reactions: 1) the delete button; 2) a recommendation to seek serious therapy — I was already getting that and Agincourt had become a large part of it — or, 3) a qualified “yes”. His actual reply was more than we could hope for: “I’m there,” he wrote. It’s reassuring when an idea resonates with others.
Maestro Hagen asked what we had in mind and I suggested “Musik for His Majesty’s Sackbuts and Krumhorns”, though William Byrd was several generations too late for the actual Battle of Agincourt. But it set a tone and allowed Hagen to revisit a 1989 composition unknown to me, “Sennets, Cortege & Tuckets”. Two months later came the PDF of “Agincourt Fanfare,” scored for four trumpets, four french horns, three trombones, baritone and tympani. The brass section of our local symphony did justice to a complex work and those in attendance that Thursday evening had just witnessed a world premier. That itch had finally been scratched.
“We Few”
Eight years and several semesters later, there was enough new material to suggest a second exhibit to our friend and museum director James O’Rourke. The six hundredth anniversary of the actual Battle of Agincourt would pass largely unnoticed here in the United States on October 25th, 2015, which was hard to ignore — everywherre except a small town in Iowa. Once again there was an opportunity for music to reinforce the exhibit. We approached Daron Hagen a second time — he had already been recognized as Agincourt, Iowa’s official “Composer-not-in-Residence” — with the suggestion to set a Shakespeare text for baritone voice and piano; I had in mind Henry’s speech to his troops on the eve of battle, fifty powerful lines that have been delivered by the likes of Lawrence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh and during innumerable speech tournaments and theater auditions. So this time, the exhibit closed on October 25th, the 600th anniversary to the day (allowing for calendar shifts from O.S. to N.S.) of the battle, the definitive battle, of the Hundred Years’ War, off-stage centerpiece of Shakespeare’s Henry V, with “We Few”, another surprise world premier.
“Dear Ronald, I wanted to let you know that I finished a second set of revisions to the Henry scene written in memory of your father. TWELVE years after first finishing the piece! But I have learned a lot since then and the piece is now very much the “big moment” in the Henry opera that I shall never have written, and well worth having stewed over for so long. I am grateful for the commission long ago, and for the chance to have a go at that text. Importantly, what motivated me to go back in is that I signed my catalogue over to Peermusic Classical, which is a highly honorable global independent that will keep the music in print for a couple of generations, at least. Relieved.” — Daron Hagen
Anson Tennant
CHAP ##: DESIGNING DESIGN: A CONVERSATION WITH MYSELF
No work of architecture stands alone. It comes from a designer’s cumulative experience — historian J. Ritchie Garrison calls it “memory in motion” — and takes form through collaboration with clients and builders (and, dare I say it? bankers, and code enforcement officials). When asked about his best design, Frank Lloyd Wright replied, in that spirit, “The next one, of course”, a design that will, in turn, influence the one following and the next. It also has potential to affect the work of others in both positive and negative ways. Very likely, both. At the same time. The consequence itself becomes consequential.
Those complex relationships exist on a broad spectrum of awareness, a large measure of it subliminal; the result of what designers call intuition. But “the happy accident” is neither accidental nor incidental. And, so, I have to fit young Anson Tennant’s design of Agincourt’s new public library somewhere into this highly organic process.
Carnegie libraries constitute a major event in American cultural history: During the “wholesale” period of his giving, the Pittsburgh industrialist underwrote more than 1,800 public and academic libraries and effectively created an icon. One hundred and eight were built in Iowa alone. And their stimulus encouraged other communities to follow suit through local benefaction or outright public support. But whatever the source, Carnegie’s efforts had established a virtual template for small public library design. Indeed, popular opinion holds that Carnegie provided the plans themselves and that “all Carnegie libraries look alike”. Well, yes, there was bound to be a family resemblance. But there was considerable variation on the basic theme and a measure of downright innovation. Sites and local taste varied, as did the abilities of local architectural talent. And such a prominent public “statement” could only enhance a young architect’s career.
Strict chronology doesn’t quite apply here. I’m not Anson Tennant (no matter how much I might enjoy inhabiting his world for a little while), so the backstory is really mine. And my experience as an historian of architecture predisposes me to certain defaults — Louis Sullivan, for instance, the founder of this feast. Young Tennant would have been a Sullivan enthusiast at age twenty-five but so was I, a Chicago native exposed to Louie’s work for a dozen years by that time in my life. A project like this depends on either 1) this kind of familiarity before the fact, or 2) a necessarily intense exploration to compensate for ignorance. So, the evolving APL design has been interrupted now and then with a need to tell Anson’s backstory, not mine, and allow it to shape the narrative.
Young Tennant’s exposure to Sullivan could have come through professional periodicals. But many Iowa communities looked toward Chicago generally as a cultural mecca. Sullivan’s five Iowa commissions — three banks, a church, and small department store — were a tempting but unlikely factor. Sullivan himself, as I’ve noted more than once, designed no public library facility during the Carnegie Era. But he did produce designs for buildings of similar scale and complexity: small-banks, substantial single-family homes, the aforementioned church in Cedar Rapids. Those were helpful for shaping the library’s space and its sequencing, what Beaux Arts architects like Sullivan would have called enfilade.
One of the most useful tools during the project has been another cultural phenomenon at the turn of the century but one likely to fall below our radar: the common penny postcard, popular during the years 1880-1920. They could be bought for a penny and mailed for the same. The U.S. Postal Service delivered twice daily and also on Sundays — who says we’re not a secular state? — and folks used “postals” as a common means of communication even within small towns, until the telephone was more widespread. And also because the postcard coincided with the Carnegie era, those new symbols of civic pride were featured in rotating racks at the drug store cashier. I began this project just about the time the on-line auction site that dare not speak its name entered the picture. And as its search engine has become more sophisticated, the number of postcards has compounded geometrically. At the time of writing, nearly six million are offered for bids and a respectable number of them will be library buildings of the 1890-1920 era. One of those cards played a major role in shaping the APL.
Conventional wisdom (which is neither) tells us those Carnegie libraries were built from stock plans provided by Carnegie himself. Not so. Indeed, he commissioned a survey in 1909 to assess how wisely his benefaction was being invested and was shocked to find many communities had wrongly assumed his intent was immortality! Pompous porticoes sporting Carnegie’s name in an august two-foot Roman font. So the thrifty Scot produced a tri-fold pamphlet titled “Hints on Library Bilding”. And, no, that’s not a misprint; Andrew was also a proponent of simplified phonetic spelling which he calculated would save millions of trees and tank cars of ink. So Anson’s initial notion for his design, one which would separate him from his fellow competitors, was a hybrid scheme incorporating both civic and commercial space: why shouldn’t the building generate income to supplement the library’s operating budget?
One day my casual search of postcards at auction produced something I had never seen: a late 19th century public library occupying all of its site — something Carnegie libraries rarely did — with two twenty-five-foot commercial storefronts on the major street frontage and the library entrance halfway down the length of the building, a lobby providing access to the second floor library itself [the first floor for Europeans], pre-Carnegie pragmatism. Anson’s building had already taken this form on faith, so I was temporarily vindicated.
An inquiry to the Keokuk Public Library (an Iowa town on the Mississippi River) confirmed this building had served the community’s needs from 1883 into the 1960s. And an interesting footnote: the reference librarian said her mother would not allow the child to go unattended, because the ground-floor space at the rear of the building had at one time housed prostitutes — another American notion of taxing sin to underwrite virtue.
Sullivan’s late house for Henry Babson was an obvious point of departure for Anson Tennant. It was published in the Architectural Record magazine for October 1911, about the time the APL competition would have been in discussion. And the scale of the Babson house was ideal. Unlike Frank Lloyd Wright’s houses of the time — the so-called Prairie School period of flowing space and blurred lines between inside and out — Sullivan’s spaces were discrete, cellular, and formally sequential. Sullivan thought in terms of rooms and buildings as collections of them, axially organized like an ancient Roman bath: frigidarium — tepidarium — calidarium. Tennant adapted Sullivan’s pulsing enfilade (spatial progression) to the needs of the small American public library.
No work of architecture stands alone. It results from a designer’s cumulative experience — what historian J. Ritchie Garrison calls “memory in motion” — and takes form through collaboration with client, builders, and (dare I say it?) bankers, and code enforcement officials. When asked about his best design, Frank Lloyd Wright replied, in that spirit, “The next one, of course.” A design that will, in turn, influence the next and the next. It also has potential to affect the work of others in both positive and negative ways. Very likely, both. Simultaneously. The consequence becomes consequential.
Those complex relationships exist on a broad spectrum of awareness, a large measure of it subliminal; the result of what designers call intuition. But “the happy accident” is neither accident nor incidental. And, so, I have to accept young Anson Tennant’s design of Agincourt’s new public library developing somewhere in this highly organic process.
Strict chronology doesn’t quite apply in this case. I’m not Anson Tennant (no matter how much I might enjoy that for a little while), so the backstory here is mine. And my experience as an historian of architecture predisposes me to certain defaults — Louis Sullivan, for instance, the founder of this feast. Young Tennant would have been a Sullivan enthusiast at age twenty-five but so was I, a Chicago native exposed to Louis’s work for a dozen years. A project like this depends either 1) on this kind of familiarity before the fact, or 2) a necessary intense exploration to compensate for my ignorance. So, the evolving APL design has been interrupted now and then with a need for Anson’s backstory, not mine.
Carnegie libraries constitute a major event in American cultural history: During the “wholesale” period of his giving, the Pittsburgh industrialist underwrote construction of more than 1,800 public and academic libraries. One hundred and eight were built in Iowa alone. And their stimulus encouraged other communities to follow suit through local benefaction or outright public support. But whatever the source, Carnegie’s efforts had created a virtual template for small public library design. Indeed, popular opinion holds that Carnegie provided the plans themselves and that “all Carnegie libraries look alike”. Well, yes, there was bound to be a family resemblance. But there was considerable variation on the basic theme and a measure of downright innovation. Sites and local taste varied, as did the capabilities of local architectural talent. And such a prominent public “statement” could enhance any career.
Young Tennant’s exposure to Sullivan could have come through professional periodicals. But many Iowa communities also looked toward Chicago generally as a cultural mecca. Sullivan’s five Iowa commissions — three banks, a church, and small department store — were a tempting but unlikely factor. Sullivan himself, as I’ve noted more than once, designed no public library facility during the Carnegie Era. But he did produce designs for buildings of similar scale: small-banks, substantial single-family homes, the aforementioned church in Cedar Rapids. Those were helpful for shaping space and its sequencing, what Beaux Arts architects like Sullivan would have called enfilade.
INTRODUCTION (update draught)
Introduction (an updated draught)
We learned a lot about ourselves during the Great Depression. And a large part of it came from the Federal Writers Project, which was established in 1935
Agincourt is a town located in northwestern Iowa, America’s heartland, and typical of many middling communities in the Midwest. Founded on the banks of the Muskrat river in 1853 by settlers from Pennsylvania and western New York State, it soon became the seat of Fennimore county. And long before the arrival of the railroad, it had also become a center for large scale agriculture. Agincourt’s establishment, growth and development during the next one hundred and sixty-plus years have been subject to the same conditions experienced elsewhere, especially in the Midwest and on the Great Plains. And like other communities of its time and place, those large-scale phenomena continue to adjust for local conditions, the influence of special interest groups, and even specific families and individuals. All of these and more have played their part in shaping today’s Agincourt.
Oh, yes, there is one more thing you should know: Agincourt doesn’t exist. But the tale of its evolution and of the characters integral with that organic process present an opportunity to explore the relationship between story-telling and place-making, the intimacy of a narrative and its natural setting.
Situated twelve hundred twenty-eight feet above sea level, its population of 17,693 according to the last census is holding steady. The elderly from smaller rural communities in the hinterlands come to socialize and shop, have access to health care, and attend funerals of friends and family until they themselves ultimately become one. Meanwhile, young adults bolt for economic opportunity elsewhere. Anywhere! Lately, though, that displacement has slowed. Building a diversified economic base through enlightened self-interest and the internet has made the future less cloudy, if not actually bright for small towns like Agincourt.
Culturally, the community is Protestant and 91.38% White — with marginal representation of African, Asian, Hispanic, and Native Americans. Conservative, with a lingering whiff of Progressivism, yet the likes of Teddy Roosevelt could not field a candidacy in today’s political color spectrum: Agincourt is purple tending toward red, in the otherwise bright crimson of the 7th Congressional District. Its current representative might have done a cameo in “Pleasantville” and remained uncomfortable with the film’s shift from black and white to technicolor. He and another prominent political figure hold that White Nationalists are “fine people.”
The city was founded in 1853, when the former reserve of the Sac and Fox Nation opened to White settlement, and incorporated four years later. The only plausible reason for its name — the definitive battle in the Hundred Years War between the French and English — is the Classics background of the town site’s promoters Virgil, Pliny, and Horace Tennant, East Coast investors who intuited Horace Greeley’s admonition that the country’s surplus population “Go West” years before he actually said it. With financial backing from their brother-in-law and a Philadelphia banker, the Tennants acquired a mile-square section of The Louisiana Purchas — the physical building block of Manifest Destiny — and then conceived a rational plan for growth based on Enlightenment Philadelphia, let it waft onto the unplowed tall-grass prairie, and stood back to watch.
The consequences weren’t unexpected considering their plan had provided for all the civic virtues: education and culture, government, enterprise, and spiritual nurture, in no particular order. Long before arrival of the railroad, the mighty Muskrat River offered rudimentary water power for the milling of grain and wood, as well as fish and fowl to supplement the frontier diet. And when the seat of government at Muskrat City proved flood-prone and untenable, the block already designated for a courthouse was another stroke of foresight. The frenzy of railroad speculation twenty years later effectively sealed the city’s good prospects.
Forces, Factor, Faces
A middling Midwestern town, Agincourt’s establishment, growth and development for one hundred and sixty-seven years have been subject to the same factors and forces experienced elsewhere, especially in the Midwest and Great Plains; and like other communities, those large-scale phenomena continue to be modified by local conditions, by special interest groups and even by specific families and individuals. The Civil War and the westward march of Manifest Destiny mentioned earlier; the arrival of the railroad and impact of the automobile; large scale agriculture, all but industrialized even in the 19th century; government initiatives (or their absence), war, pestilence and other natural disasters; shifting population and economic uncertainty: these have all played their part in shaping today’s Agincourt. For purposes of telling this story, let’s call them Forces, Factors, and Faces.
FORCES are the raw natural conditions into which we are born: geology and plate tectonics, climate, the force of gravity, disease. It would be comforting to think we have some effect over them — planetary warming suggests we do, in spite of our better intentions — but rivers jump their course and cyclones rage in season. The influenza pandemic of 1918 is just one case in point where an event with worldwide implication had very local consequence.
FACTORS, on the other hand, are generated by us and our intent as a society; they are driven by purpose: culture and all its sundry institutions, such as commerce, education, religion, government and all that flows from them. How might Agincourt have reflected phenomena like these:
- The Second Great Awakening washed over us, as it did Western New York State, bringing salvation to the banks of Crispin Creek.
- Agincourt was a station on the Underground Railroad as former slaves fled north to the Union states and Canada.
- President Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive Order #9066 incarcerated everyone of Japanese ancestry, regardless of citizenship, while leaving German lives unaffected.
- The Hill-Burton Act of the 79th Congress underwrote a spate of hospital and rural clinic construction. Other acts at different times have funded law enforcement facilities and historic preservation.
FACES, finally, are individuals. Their reach may be long, like Pope John XXIII, JFK, or Dr Jonas Salk, or more localized and immediate, like the founding Tennant family and other community leaders past and present. Without two of these faces, Andrew Carnegie, for example, who funded 2,500 public and academic libraries between 1883 and 1929 and Chicago architect Louis Sullivan, whose small-town banks brought Progressive design to Main Street, this project would’t exist.
And so, as radio announcer Fred Foy opened each weekly episode of “The Lone Ranger”, “Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear!” We invite you to explore the community of Agincourt, Iowa, the town that time forgot and geography misplaced.
SPOKESPERSON
Maybe it’s time you met Howard Tabor, writer for The Daily Plantagenet and principal voice for Agincourt’s past. I can’t honestly tell you what motivates Howard to tackle the topics he has since 2006, the year his sesqui-centennial series began on the back page of the Saturday paper. But I can tell you that his style is anything but journalistic and wouldn’t survive a week of scrutiny at a “real” newspaper — of which fewer and fewer exist each year. Howard should be proud of that. Since he’s such a self-effacing guy, I wrote a short biographical sketch last Sunday on the drive back from Minneapolis. A lot of rumination occurs during those 240 miles:
Howard Tabor, purported author of “A few figs from thistles…,” lives a quiet unassuming life in the modest Iowa town where he was born seventy-four years ago.
As a high school graduate in the early 1960s, a career in journalism for Tabor was farfetched, not to say unthinkable. He aspired to be an architect, like his great-uncle Anson Tennant, designer of the old Agincourt Public Library in 1914-1915. But one semester at the State University in Ames convinced Tabor that the profession might tolerate him at best; it would certainly never welcome him into its ranks or files. Architecture, he knew, was both art and science; the art he could learn, the mathematics he would endure, but it was the unforeseen business of architecture that dissuaded him from making any further commitment to its five-year course of study. He was, it turned out, a devotee of words; words carefully chosen but not always deployed with diplomacy or tact. A quick lateral move to the English department afforded Tabor a comforting anonymity and time to marinate in language. Seven semesters later, he graduated into a world where uncertainty was sure, and his job prospects obtuse at best. It was 1968 and all that that entailed. It was the year that changed us all: Anson Tennant died during the winter; Howard Tabor graduated in the spring; and American political life ruptured during the summer of our discontent at the Democratic National Convention. Tumultuous times leave their mark.
Chicago called to him—perhaps with the same voice that had beckoned great-uncle Anson — to engage there with the architecture of words. So in the fall, Howard found an apartment on Chicago’s north side and a job on its south, as part-time staff for Draugas, a Lithuanian Catholic newspaper — an odd choice, since Tabor was neither, and journalism hadn’t even been his major. Additional income came from work at a used and rare book dealer on North Dearborn Street near his apartment; incidentally, it was at this now forgotten book store that I met him. Coincidentally, he also lived only seven blocks from the Chicago Historical Society headquarters in Lincoln park. This triangle defined life for the next three years, until an opening at the Plantagenet brought him home.
If you hadn’t already guessed, Tabor is part of the extended Tennant family, a double-edged sword in his part of Iowa. The Tennants were interested (i.e., had their fingers) in everything — media, manufacturing, culture and heritage — so it’s hard to say if those connections played a role in landing the job at the newspaper. From July 1971, Howard has honed his craft, writing everything from ads to obits; selling ad space and subscriptions; working hard to keep the paper afloat into the digital age; and now and then working with bucket and mop. The up-side of this extended family has been easy access to information, the sort that rarely qualifies as “public record.” His columns are redolent with those intimate personal insights; history as oral tradition enabled by a family of chroniclers. While we’re at it, you may as well have a Tennant family tree:
More personally, Tabor lives with his partner Rowan Oakes, history teacher at Fennimore County High. The two of them recently undertook a daunting project: restoration of the Wassermann Block, home of The Periodic Table, Agincourt’s newest restaurant, and also a bed-and-breakfast on the second floor. Other “bucket list” projects include writing a family history (for private circulation), a more public anthology of his “Few figs…” columns, and yet another exhibition in October 2015 which celebrated the actual Battle of Agincourt.
Howard Tabor and I will form a tag team, passing the narrative back and forth, alternately telling the story as well as telling the story of telling the story.
“I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge. That myth is more potent than history. That dreams are more powerful than facts. That hope always triumphs over experience. That laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe that love is stronger than death.”
― Robert Fulghum, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten
INTRODUCTION (a first draught)
Introduction
Agincourt is a town in northwestern Iowa—America’s heartland—and the seat of Fennimore County government. Twelve hundred twenty-eight feet above sea level, its population of 17,693 according to the last census is holding its own. The elderly from smaller rural communities come to enjoy shopping convenience and access to health care, to attend funerals of friends and family until they themselves ultimately become one; meanwhile, young adults bolt for economic opportunity elsewhere. Anywhere! Lately, though, that displacement has slowed. Building a diversified economic base through enlightened self-interest and the internet has made the future less cloudy, if not actually bright for small towns like Agincourt.
Culturally, the community is Protestant and 91.38% White—with marginal representation of African, Asian, and Native Americans. Conservative, with a lingering whiff of Progressivism, yet the likes of Teddy Roosevelt could not field a candidacy in today’s political color spectrum: Agincourt is purple tending toward red, in the otherwise bright crimson of the state’s 7th Congressional District. Its current representative might have done a cameo in “Pleasantville” and remained uncomfortable with the film’s shift from black and white to technicolor. He and another prominent political figure hold that White Nationallists are “fine people.”
The city was founded in 1853, when the former reserve of the Sac and Fox Nation opened to White settlement, and incorporated four years later. The only plausible reason for its name—the definitive battle in the Hundred Years War between the French and English—is the Classics background of the townsite’s promoters Virgil, Pliny, and Horace Tennant, East Coast investors who intuited Horace Greeley’s admonition that the country’s surplus population “Go West” years before he actually said it. With financial backing from their brother-in-law and a Philadelphia banker, the Tennants acquired a mile-square section of The Louisiana Purchase—the physical building block of Manifest Destiny—and then conceived a rational plan for growth based on Enlightenment Philadelphia, let it waft onto the unplowed tall-grass prairie, and stood back to watch.
The consequences weren’t unexpected considering their plan had provided for all the civic virtues—education and culture, government, enterprise, and spiritual nurture, in no particular order. Long before arrival of the railroad, the mighty Muskrat River offered rudimentary water power for the milling of grain and wood, as well as fish and fowl to supplement the frontier diet. And when the seat of government at Muskrat City proved flood-prone and untenable, the block already designated for a courthouse was another stroke of foresight. The frenzy of railroad speculation twenty years later effectively sealed the city’s good prospects.
Forces, Factor, Faces
A middling Midwestern town, Agincourt’s establishment, growth and development for one hundred and sixty-seven years have been subject to the same factors and forces experienced elsewhere, especially in the Midwest and Great Plains; and like other communities, those large-scale phenomena continue to be modified by local conditions, by special interest groups and even by specific families and individuals. The Civil War and the westward march of Manifest Destiny mentioned earlier; the arrival of the railroad and impact of the automobile; large scale agriculture, all but industrialized even in the 19th century; government initiatives (or their absence), war, pestilence and other natural disasters; shifting population and economic uncertainty: these have all played their part in shaping today’s Agincourt. For purposes of telling this story, let’s call them Forces, Factors, and Faces.
FORCES are the raw natural conditions into which we are born: geology and plate tectonics, climate, the force of gravity, disease. It would be comforting to think we have some effect over them—planetary warming suggests we do, in spite of our better intentions—but rivers jump their course and cyclones rage in their season. The influenza pandemic of 1918 is just one case in point where an event of worldwide implication had very local consequence.
FACTORS, on the other hand, are generated by us and our intent as a society: culture and all its sundry institutions, such as commerce, education, religion, government and all that flows from them. How might Agincourt have reflected these phenomena:
- The Second Great Awakening washed over us, as it did Western New York State, bringing salvation to the banks of Crispin Creek.
- Agincourt was a station on the Underground Railroad as former slaves fled north.
- President Roosevelt’s Executive Order #9066 incarcerated everyone of Japanese ancestry, regardless of citizenship, while leaving German lives unaffected.
- The Hill-Burton Act of the 79th Congress underwrote a spate of hospital and rural clinic construction.
FACES, finally, are individuals—whose reach may be long, like Pope John XXIII, JFK, or Dr Jonas Salk, or more localized and immediate, like the founding Tennant family and other community leaders past and present. Without Andrew Carnegie, who funded 2,500 public libraries between 1883 and 1929, and Chicago architect Louis Sullivan, whose small-town banks brought Progressive design to Main Street, this project would not exist. And so, as radio announcer Fred Foy opened each weekly episode of “The Lone Ranger”, “Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear!” We invite you to explore the community of Agincourt, Iowa, the town that time forgot and geography misplaced.