Market forces regularly drew rural inhabitants into commercial associations, with antecedents at least as far back as the grange movement of the late 1860s. Contemporary endeavors such as oil cooperatives and rural electrification combined state and private initiatives to bring small-town and country inhabitants into modern transportation and commercial networks. The Rural Electrification Association (REA), which reached northern Lyon county in early 1938 and southern Lyon county in early 1939, demonstrated how state bureaucracies stimulated the formation of local associations. Under the aegis of the county agricultural agent, a group of 125 men from throughout the county met in the County Court House in Marshall to discuss establishing an REA association. The national REA sent a fieldman to lead the discussion, after which each township elected a director to represent their interests on a county board. From these fifteen township directors, a group of three were chosen to meet with nearby Lincoln county representatives "to make further plans for the joint project." (42) Although the cross country electricity lines were installed through the legal instrument of eminent domain, electrification within the county itself occurred through the voluntary agreement of farmers to provide land for distribution lines. One participant in the campaign for rural electrification near Cottonwood recalled that widespread doubts over the system's potential for success were often overcome by a concern for neighborliness, a sense that "maybe the fellow down the line really wanted it and maybe they should help their neighbor." (43) Sometimes these commercial associations took on a social hue, as for example when the members of the 26-F telephone line, beneficiaries of another government-funded network, held their yearly meeting in January 1939 at the home of one patron. (44)
Rural electrification highlighted the link between open country and town at the same time it revealed the limits of those relations, particularly within the context of mutual vulnerability to government and industrial bureaucracies further up the network chain. When Minneota, with Eidsvold and Nordland townships, applied to transfer their prior membership from the Minnesota Valley REA to the new Lyon-Lincoln REA, they cited the "advantage of getting in on an initial project" and the engineering benefits of their participation in a geographically proximate network. Membership in local REAs was, however, dependent on determining a rate structure acceptable to the national headquarters in Washington, D.C. The rate the Marshall municipal power plant offered was not acceptable to the national association; only once the national body had been satisfied could the project proceed and the northwestern townships act on their original intention to join with the rest of Lyon county in the new REA. (45) Ironically, several years later the political pressure exerted by a regional power supplier to route REA power supplies through their consolidated lines caused the Marshall power plant gradually to eliminate its original agreement to supply power to the Lyon-Lincoln REA.
The need for market connections drove many of the associations formed by town merchants in the first half of the twentieth century. Local suppliers would travel to regional centers such as Minneapolis or even Chicago to purchase their wares, and join associations such as the Retail Clothing Union or the Northwest Buyers and Jobbers to ease the buying process. Through such associations local merchants could secure their goods from larger in-city suppliers on a guaranteed basis. (46) At the same time, membership in these regional organizations enabled the merchants themselves to move along the networks created by the goods sold in their stores. Every week the newspapers of Lyon county's towns reported one or another person's travels to Rochester, St. Cloud, or the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Such commercial networks operated in both directions: representatives of the regional associations would also travel to small towns to assist members with marketing events that demanded specialized talents, such as bi-annual sales at the general store in Minneota. (47)
The state was an integral constituent of this network, particularly because of the network's overwhelming reliance on commercial agriculture. One of the earliest examples of state involvement in rural and small-town life had arisen through the land-grant universities established by federal law in the 1860s. Farm agents associated with the university model farms provided direct links between the state bureaucracy and local agricultural producers. The resulting networks included not only farmers but the merchants who sold to farmers as well. When the Lyon county seed dealers met in Marshall, the County Agent and "weed experts from the State Department of Agriculture, Dairy and Food and the Extension Service at University Farm" also attended. (48) It appears that most years, an extension agent from the University of Minnesota addressed the district conferences of the Federated Women's Clubs active in small-town Minnesota. (49) University Farm also drew Lyon county residents toward the Twin Cities (the farm was and continues to be located inside the city limits of St. Paul): the Minnesota Farm Bureau Federation held annual meetings there for members state-wide. Besides easing the management of programs such as 4-H and the Minnesota Crop Improvement Association, the annual program also made available classes in recent agricultural and home management trends to local members. Yet the Farm Bureaus supported through University Farm were not merely instruments of bureaucratic control or information dissemination: male convention delegates voted to support federal wage- and price-controls, while the women's delegation called for the expansion of rural health and library services, among other programs. (50)
Bureaucratically driven associations existed side-by-side with voluntary associations to promote various aspects of economic or cultural modernization. Where the REA demonstrated the ways in which bureaucratic and voluntary impulses could mesh to form a broad-based civic movement, other communications projects arose from primarily local community efforts. A tri-county amateur radio club was organized out of Tracy and Balaton to disseminate radio news to Lyon, Murray, and Redwood counties, to promote fellowship among radio amateurs, and to encourage interest in short-wave broadcasting. An article on the new club celebrated the service ham operators' provided to communities during such "wide-spread disasters [as] floods, cyclones, fires, and other emergencies when other means of communication were impossible." Yet even this effort by local radio operators was enmeshed in a network of government licensing and national associations. Amateur radio operators were required to obtain federal licenses before broadcasting messages, and the founder of the Tracy-Balaton club was a member of the South Minnesota Radio Amateurs (SMRA), itself a branch of the American Radio Relay League (ARRL) based in Hartford, Connecticut. (51)
Small towns bustled with social activities throughout the first half of the twentieth century, and neither depression nor war slowed the pace of social calls. One long-time resident of Lyon County recalled that, as a child in the 1920s and 1930s, her parents were never home on Sunday nights "unless someone happened to come to their house." (52) Tracy and its surrounding communities during one week in October 1939 witnessed the first PTA meeting of the new school year in the high school auditorium on Monday; eight different social gatherings on Tuesday, including the regular weekly meetings of the Spoodadzo Bible Study Club of the Presbyterian Church and the Order of the Eastern Star, the women's auxiliary of the Masonic Order; eleven social events on Wednesday, one of them a gathering of the Society of the Paraclete of Catholic Action at a home on Sixth Street in Tracy; and an additional seven social gatherings on Thursday. Planned for Friday evening were a reception by the Milroy township Community Club and its school board for the new school faculty and several meetings of churches' Ladies Auxiliaries. (53) Organizations such as the Farm Bureau, which could draw as many as 15 to 20 farmers each month to in-home meetings, while theoretically designed to provide technical support and mobilize political action, generally served as social get-togethers. (54) Often the preparation for these meetings led group members to travel out of the county: for the home demonstration project of their Farm Bureau meetings, Mrs. Claude Howe and Mrs. T. T. Erickson travelled to Vesta to pick up the lesson. (55)
The connection of towns and open country extended to the social sphere. Small towns planned public events to coincide with the market practices of farmers: Marshall blocked off Main Street on Saturday nights after the shops had closed and erected a bandstand in the middle of the road. One inhabitant remembered his aunts parking their cars early to guarantee a place to sit as townsfolk and farmers alike gossiped together. (56) Many formal social gatherings did segregate Lyon county along settlement lines: the yearly school picnics held by the community clubs of each township provide one example of how people defined 'the community' according to geographic proximity. The sense that townsfolk led a vanguard to the country, so obvious in the marketing strategies of small-town merchants, extended to the social sphere of their wives. (57) The Ladies Aid Societies were most likely to meet one week at a farm home, the next at a home in town, but the newspapers carefully distinguished which churches were large enough to have parlors, and these were usually in town. Russell, one of Lyon county's smaller towns, supported not only the Workman's Order but also the Woodmen and Masons, as well as their sister orders the Degree of Honor, Royal Neighbors, and Easter Star. (58) These all drew their membership from town and country alike.
Accurate estimations of association life in Lyon county's small towns are difficult to derive, because women's social events dominated the newspaper lists of social gatherings, thus obscuring the equally active men's association network. The regular meetings of local Kiwanis, Odd Fellows, and American Legion surfaced in the newspapers only when officers were elected at special annual meetings, or when clubs travelled to other towns to take part in translocal gatherings. The January newspapers were full of announcements, often on the front page, proclaiming club officer elections. The first club meetings of the new calendar year often sparked publicity campaigns calling on "business and professional men including regular and non-members" to attend meetings of, to cite one example, the Tracy Civic and Commerce Association (a predecessor to the modern Chamber of Commerce). As will be noted later, these men's associations often did the work of city government during civic celebrations, and their semi-official role could be noted by their location in official spaces such as the council rooms of the municipal building in Tracy. (59) By comparison, the induction ceremony of the 'worthy matron' of the Order of Eastern Star, which occurred in the Masonic Lodge, was marked by "an archway of American Beauty rose buds through which the Worthy Matron was conducted" after the officers of the Order had formed the letters W and M from those same roses. (60)
Regardless of the market-driven modernity evident in Lyon county's small towns, then, it could be argued that the region's cultural life observed the stereotypical patterns of cultural traditionalism. In fact, however, people in Lyon County organized their cultural life according to principles established by national organizations. This was most evident in the many business and social associations already described, for men and women both, which thrived during the late 1930s and early 1940s. Cottonwood, with its population of only 1000 people, sustained a women's Study Club, the 18 members of which met 14 times during the 1941-1942 season. Although three of these meetings included social activities--an opening tea, a Christmas party, and a spring picnic--all devoted time to programs on "Current Topics, Reviews of late books, Life sketches of famous men in the news, and travelogues." (61) The Federated Club movement made inroads into the Lyon County towns of Marshall, Minneota, Balaton, and Russell; once a year, the members gathered together in Tracy for the annual Lyon county meeting, with sessions held in the high school auditorium. (62) The women's clubs were instrumental, indeed the driving force, behind one of the county's largest civic projects during the war years, a campaign to promote a county-wide public library. Their members also travelled frequently on club business: at the 1942 annual meeting of Lyon county Federated Clubs, Mrs. Harold Baker, the district president, summarized events at the district meeting in Mankato, while Sally Woodward gave a report on in-home salvage from information she gathered on a fact-finding mission to Washington, D.C. Several years earlier, the district meeting in Montevideo, fifty miles north of Lyon county, had generated front-page interest in Lyon county newspapers. (63)
Many of the social organizations active in Lyon county met in private homes: newspaper announcements kept no standard practice for identifying the home by male head of household, female hostess, or (in the case of in-town gatherings), street address. County historians report that women's auxiliaries did not erect street signs or house numbers until the late 1940s, and the relative dearth of street identifiers presents a portrait of life in which places were identified by the people who owned or rented them. (64) This was true not only on farms, whose current owners or renters often had to explain that they had just taken possession of "the old Ueland farm," but also for home-owners in town and merchants on Main Street. When the Dahls purchased a home in East Cottonwood recently vacated by the Pilottes, the newspaper identified it as "the former (Chas) Catlin residence." (65) Several of Tracy's most prominent buildings, including the Sabin building which housed the police station as well as a ballroom, store, and bowling alley, were known by the people who owned them. Announcements that buildings and businesses had changed hands revealed not only the importance of commercial transactions to essentially market communities, but also the extent to which these business dealings had personal ramifications through space. Even those associations large enough to merit public meeting spaces--setting aside for now the many groups, large and small, who met in Lyon county's churches--took care to open their spaces to the widest community involvement possible. When the basement rooms of the Empire State Bank building in Cottonwood were renovated to make them more amenable to the American Legion and Auxiliary who met there, the Auxiliary posted a notice making the rooms available and emphasizing "an especially fine feature . . . the well equipped kitchenette." (66)
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