Richard Edwards

“The homesteading generation's belief in education created the same Hobson's choice that so many farm families had to face. Children educated to become nurses, teachers, lawyers, pharmacists, insurance agents, doctors or police officers do not in general return to carry the family farm into the future. To use their education, they have to leave home and farming. And to complete this bittersweet irony, their children's success in other occupations were exactly what the homesteader generation had hoped for them. In a phenomenon familiar in both white and Black communities, the farming generation's deep commitment to educating their children produces children who were not, for the most part, interested in farming.”
― Richard Edwards, Great Plains Homesteaders

“As dramatically as homesteading reshaped the land, it transformed the homesteaders even more. Not all families that successfully earned homestead patents remined in farming. Some claimants and their descendants continued in farming, while others took up other professions. Regardless, future generations were shaped by the experiences of their homesteading ancestors. The Homestead Act provided the first run on the ladder of upward mobility.”
― Richard Edwards, Great Plains Homesteaders