Culture of a Contemporary Rural Community: Irwin, Iowa

Excerpts from the report Foreword: This is a report on one of six communities which were studied contemporaneously by six different participant observers or field workers during 1940. Each study was sufficiently independent of the other five to make separate treatment and publication desirable, but the reader will gain full understanding of the findings only when he has read the reports of the six studies as a group. The analysis of Irwin community, in Shelby County, Iowa, justifies the placing of a Corn Belt community midway between the extremes of stability and instability. The membership and social life of the community have experienced change from earliest settlement and are still in the process of change but the type of farming stabilized itself so early in settlement and has remained so constant that there is a high degree of stability in the enterprise of agriculture. Farming and thinking about farming so dominate all members of the community both farm and nonfarm, that there is a high degree of stability in the midst of constant change