,408 swine,
171,526 chickens and 178 mules. One-tenth of the farms enjoyed the use
of a tractor and 25% had a radio. The average capital holding on land
and buildings was $8,229, and the Fairfax County farmer netted something
less than $1,000 income annually.[1]

These figures give a skeleton picture of Fairfax County's most prominent
citizen in the period between the two World Wars; when the statistics
are translated in prose, his shadowy form gains weight. The farmer at
this time was a small landowner, possessing a farm only as large as his
own family and a few hired laborers could manage. Although his capital
holdings were not huge, they were well above the state average. He had
the prestige of being a homeowner, and the pride of working his own
soil, perhaps the same soil his grandparents had tilled. The rural
family raised livestock for their own use, but principally for the
market, and favored draft horses over tractors, mules or oxen to power
farm equipment. This farmer's time was spent on a myriad of duties and
details--his function was not yet totally specialized--ranging from
butchering hogs to building chicken coops to thinning corn. He worked
for himself, planning the day's activities, relying on his own judgment
and initiative to cope with the varying responsibilities he shouldered.
His numerical prominence gave him political and social leverage. It was
the rural way of life that shaped the county and his demands which
needed to be met.

At first glance this farmer's life seems tempered by nature and largely
self-contained. The daily routine was established by seasons and
sunlight; fortunes were made or lost at the mercy of the wind and rain.
A farm was not only the farmer's livelihood and workshop but his home.
Thus, unlike the city worker whose occupation was entirely separate from
home concerns, country life had a total integration.[2] Moreover, the
family farmer possessed a sense of continuity with the long tradition of
the small landowner in America. In many respects his life was little
changed from that of the thrifty, energetic and shrewd subsistence
farmer whom Thomas Jefferson had praised in the eighteenth century as
the ideal citizen of a democracy.[3]

In both startling and subtle ways, however, the traditional role of the
family farmer was changing in the 1920s and 1930s. In Ellen Glasgow's
novel _Barren Ground_, which examines the uncertainties of life on a
northern Virginia dairy farm, the