Necessary Closets
Migrant labor camps generally look something like this photograph, taken during the 1970s, of the Marquart Farm in Gainsville, Wyoming County. In keeping with informal practices of the time it was called Hunter Camp because its crew leader was Elijah Hunter, who had recruited workers—likely from Florida—and bused them to a series of harvests in the North. Elmira Star-Gazette reporter Peg Gallagher wrote how “Most of the camps are isolated, back in the hills away from any communities. Most have a basic cinderblock or even fiberboard construction. There are rows of tiny cell-like rooms, often dirty and with no heat” (4B). By this low standard the Hunter Camp looks a little better than most, but in a way the photo’s defining feature is the dirt road and yard separating it as a world apart from everyone else.
As of 2018 Marquart Farms had successfully managed the challenges of family farms by growing in size and creating value-added products for its crops. Instead of selling its potatoes on the commodity markets, the family created a successful line of “New York Chips” and diversified their business. They employed 170 workers during harvest season on some 10,000 acres of farmland (Taddeo). Within this economic and agricultural paradigm, it seems there is little choice but to continue with the practice of large, minimalist housing for hired workers. But during the 1800s there were other possibilities for the places they would sleep at night, eat and recover after a day’s work. Let's look at a couple of examples.
The first was designed by George E. Harney as a Farm-House in the Rural Gothic Style. This style of architecture, sometimes called “carpenter’s gothic,” was just coming into fashion and borrowed elements of European gothic using American materials (like its plentiful wood) along with on-site improvisation as to the details. Its ground plan is quite opulent, and a mention of construction “in the neighborhood of Boston” suggests it wasn’t used on many working farms. It’s of interest, though, because it brought to America the European paradigm of hired labor living in close proximity to landowners: “The second story contains seven good-sized bed-rooms, with their necessary closets. Those in the L being entirely distinct from the main body, and reached by a different flight of stairs, may be used for servants and hired men” (“Farm-House” 149). The second set of drawings show the Design for a Small Cottage whose features included a living room, pantry, three bedrooms, and a cellar. Its purpose was to relieve the burden of farmers’ wives responsible for "boarding and lodging large numbers of hired men”; instead, a farmer could “employ married men and have them board themselves”--or more accurately their wives would do this work instead of the farmer’s wife (Hill).
These and other evolutionary pathways saw limited success, although rarely to the benefit of hired farmworkers. A poorly constructed “small cottage” is simply a shack, and much of the impetus seemed to be “emancipation of farmers' wives from the slavery of 'keeping Irish,' or Dutch, or even Yankee 'boarding houses'" (Hill). Yet even partial glimpses of private space--the necessary closets an individual farmworker is due--suggest that contemporary migrant labor camps are even bleaker and more isolating than during the 19th century.
Works Consulted
-- “Farm-House in the Rural Gothic Style.” The Genesee Farmer 20.5 (May 1859): 149-150. Courtesy of Internet Archive.
-- Gallagher, Peg. “Migrant Workers.” Elmira Star-Gazette 25 Oct. 1981: 4B-5B
-- Hill, M. “Laborer’s Cottages—Farmer’s Wives.” The Genesee Farmer 19.1 (Jan. 1858): 16. Courtesy of Internet Archive.
-- Taddeo, Sarah. “Local Stores Gobble Up New York Chips.” Rochester Democrat & Chronicle 8 July 2018: E1+.