K The Ken Bradbury Foundation

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Pike County Farm Theater Project

2018

In celebration of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Pike County Farm Bureau, Ken Bradbury built this piece the way he built so many of his community shows: by listening. He and a team of interviewers fanned out across Pike County and gathered "a hundred or so hours of interviews with those who knew Pike best, its farmers." Out of that mountain of recorded memory he wove a readers-theater script, performed by readers seated on stools with fiddle music drifting underneath, that lets the county tell its own story in its own voices.

The script opens with a wink of history, a line from an 1822 gazetteer noting that "Chicago is a village of Pike County," back when the county stretched from Indiana to Wisconsin. From there it reaches back ten thousand years to the retreating glacier that carved the Mississippi and Illinois rivers and left Pike County high and dry between them, then rolls a roll-call of the place names that map the county's soul: Nebo and Fishhook, Atlas and Hull, Grubb Hollow, Rattlesnake Ridge, McKee Creek, Pig Pen Lane, and Gasville. But the heart of the evening is the land and the people who farmed it. The stories are funny, tender, and unsparing: a great-grandfather who walked four years out of Germany and never saw his family of fourteen again; a man who "raised enough hogs to build this house, 1900 square feet"; a child running home from school each night to flip the switch and see whether the electricity had finally been turned on; a wife walking the levee to her Chambersburg schoolhouse with a gun for snakes when the river got out.

This was an oral-history project as much as a performance. Bradbury's own interviewer instructions survive among the papers, urging gatherers to "create a comfortable atmosphere," to put the recorder somewhere inconspicuous, and above all to listen: "If they casually mention the fact that their grandfather had only one arm due to that incident with the horse, then dig deeper and get the details." The result is a living narrative of threshing crews and party-line telephones, steamboats hauling hogs to the St. Louis stockyards, square dances held in rooms made by knocking out a wall, and the slow arrival of electricity, running water, and the first cranky corn pickers, the kind of thing, as the project put it, "that will be lost unless we find and record them."

Cast

The readers who gave voice to Pike County's farmers:

Production Notes

The show was created for the 100th anniversary of the Pike County (Illinois) Farm Bureau. Source material came from roughly a hundred hours of interviews conducted across the county in 2018, with many of the recordings made by interviewer "LC" in the subjects' own homes. Among the dozens of farm families and Farm Bureau figures whose memories shaped the script were Cleve and Susanne Curry, Jim and Donna Koeller, Jim and Julie Dehart, Larry and Tammy Fischer, Ann Ward, Leon Kenady, Philip and Linda Bradshaw, Richard and Gladys Ann Myers, Roger and Vivian Smith, Harry Wright, and Ken's own father, Elmer Bradbury, "the jokester in the group." Blake Roderick, the Pike-Scott County Farm Bureau executive director, both contributed and read in the production. The piece also drew on the recollections of charter member C. Russell Smith, who at 95 had "lived the history of the 20th century, the farming and the Farm Bureau all at once," and on the roundtable memories of the Bureau's past presidents.