Waucoma Twilight

Waucoma (current population 277) rose amid the rolling hills of northeastern Iowa in the 1850s. Settled a “team-haul distance” from the next town, it built on the strength of area farms, luring the railroad in the 1880s and boasting in its prime an opera house, two schools, several churches, and active community organizations. Waucoma Twilight documents—through photographs of the town and the words of five farm families—the decline of a midwestern agricultural community, its vibrancy diminished by far-reaching changes in the economics and social structure of the American farm. The book’s 214 photographs illuminate contemporary and bygone days in the life of Waucoma—from historic photographs of the town center to images of recent farm auctions, parties at the American Legion Hall, and solitary combines working today’s expansive fields.

Dona Schwartz uses these photographs almost as a mirror, sharing them with Waucoma’s residents to draw out their memories and their reflections about their past, present, and future. The voices of the three generations interviewed reveal how much the image of the traditional family farm and its supporting town has yielded to the pressures of agribusiness. Increasingly large single farms now support only one nuclear family, and though small towns still exist on maps, essential commercial, educational, and recreational functions have shifted to shopping malls, consolidated schools, and country clubs dispersed in larger towns.

Middle-aged farming couples now eat microwaved meals; their children yearn for the land but also for the excitement of urban life; their parents retire from farm to town and meetings of the Old Timers’ Club and the Ladies’ Reading Circle. Though no longer thriving, Waucoma manages to survive through the efforts its people to keep the community alive.

“Dona Schwartz’s Waucoma Twilight succeeds admirably in evoking, in artful photographs and skillfully drawn collages of rural talk, the character and fate of small-town America. It is a triumph of visual ethnography.”

-Howard S. Becker, Professor of Sociology