Book Review

Canada and the United States

No region of the United States can compete with Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, in its ability to fuel the rural imagination. While the presence of a large Old Order Amish settlement surely contributes to that, the renown of Lancaster County as the "Garden Spot of America" long antedates the celebrity of the Amish. David Walbert utilizes this much-acclaimed region, its inhabitants, and the discussions they have spawned to explore longstanding questions about the nature of rurality and, more specifically, questions about "saving" America's rural life in the face of urban-oriented progress.

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The book focuses on the twentieth century: that is, on the years when Lancaster County's residents were not only cognizant of their rurality but saw it as a unique and treasured aspect of their identity. This proud identity, however, was constantly accompanied by another cultural inheritance, one that deemed Lancaster County to be a bastion of economic and cultural progress. While the coexistence of rurality and progress was not always problematic in Lancaster County, their easy relationship grew increasingly conflicted as the twentieth century ran its course. Debates over public schooling (particularly one-room education), Amish-themed tourism, suburban development, and farmland preservation revealed deep fissures in how locals conceived of their county's past, present, and future. But while preservationists and progressives often found themselves at loggerheads over specific issues, their arguments, according to Walbert, manifested an ironic similarity: both parties tended to assume that rurality was something "of the past" (p. 10). In making that assumption, they not only justified "the consumption of the country ... by the city" (p. 10), but they confirmed the suspicions of many Americans, including many historians, that the twin ideals of rurality and progress were hopelessly contradictory.

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