technology, educational opportunities and a
refurbished transportation network were naturally considered advances in
their time; they could be loosely headed under the term "progress." But
progress does not run along a perfectly straight path, rather it dips
and weaves ignoring some people and places in its circuitous route.
Consequently, many of the changes so eagerly embraced by the farmer of
modest means were the very factors which eventually crowded out the
family farm. The farmers of Fairfax County were for the most part
unaware of their impending doom, being instead optimistic and relatively
prosperous during the 1920s and 1930s. But the small, varied and
preindustrial farm could not compete for long against the lure of city
wages, highly mechanized and specialized farms, and the inroads of the
city into rural areas.

Mechanization most drastically altered life on the family farm. Work
rhythms and patterns, previously geared to hand labor, were disrupted,
and even the sounds on the farm changed. Older cows, for example,
disliked the noise of the electric milking machines, and Wilson McNair
wrote that

horses were generally scared of traction engines with their hissing
steam, etc. When the engine met a team it would stop and one man
would lead the horses by the bridle past the engine.... At the
railroad crossing in Herndon there was a bell that rung when a
train was coming. Our pony, if the bell was ringing when we crossed
the track coming home would break into a dead run. You couldn't
hold her.[191]

To the interim farmer, caught between completely automated equipment and
the tradition of hand labor, the change in work habits, knowledge and
goals could be more than vaguely disquieting.

As mechanization increased, many began to speak of agriculture in
industrial terms, believing that "factorizing" the farm would solve its
problems. This meant dispensing with any unnecessary tasks, such as
raising sheep or making soap, and as much as possible replacing manpower
with machinery. Technical terminology started to creep into farm talk.
C. T. Rice referred to his dairy as "a milk producing plant,"[192]
ancient terms such as "culling" became "selective breeding," and even
the animals were referred to as machines, which if "poorly constructed
must be ... discarded by the good breeder."[193] To independent-minded
farmers, who, as Sinclair Lewis had observed, jealously guarded the
abi