To lovers of the outdoors, the legacy of Gunlog Bjarni “G. B.” Gunlogson is evident. Just visit Icelandic State Park, in Pembina County, established in 1964 following Gunlogson’s gift of a 200-acre nature preserve along the Tongue River to the state of North Dakota. See the homestead buildings of his Icelandic immigrant parents, Eggert and Rannveig, along with an assemblage of other historic buildings representing rural life. Hike the nature trails. Homesteading + country life + nature + conservation: it’s a simple legacy. Only, maybe not so much.
There is an apparent contradiction, but really an evolution, in the life course of Gunlogson, who went off to North Dakota Agricultural College to get a degree in agricultural engineering. Subsequently going to work for J. I. Case Company, he was an inventive engineer, invaluable to the design of farm implements, but more so, because he was an articulate young man, to the promotion of the Case line. The company sent him into the field, often to his home country in North Dakota, to conduct schools for dealers and farmers on Case machinery and power farming in the age of steam.
Eventually Gunlogson departed the company on good terms, moved into the country near Racine, Wisconsin, and continued his work for Case as an independent contractor. He thought a lot about his roots in North Dakota, and no doubt hoped he was saving the country through advanced farming, but began to think it was not enough. Such that when he retired, he formed his own promotional entity, the Countryside Development Foundation, to investigate and improve the conditions of rural life.
This brought him back to his alma mater in Fargo, specifically to the Institute for Regional Studies, whichDean Hans Giesecke had established in 1950 to study and promote life on the northern plains. The institute in 1963 published a short book setting down Gunlogson’s observations of and recommendations for country life: What’s the Future for the CountryTown and the Countryside? I’m here to commend this work to community leaders still struggling today with the situations Gunlogson described in 1963, and to leaders of the Institute for Regional Studies at NDSU, to contemplate what they are about as they celebrate the 75th anniversary of the institute in the year 2025.
Gunlogson’s book sketches an American countryside in decline, losing out to rural-urban migration, but it is not a jeremiad. Rather it is full of what as a historian I call agency, that is, the sense that we, the people, might do something about this, that we are not just flotsam floating on a sea of larger developments.
Gunlogson, too, was a prophet, for in 1963 business was good, families were big, schools were full, most country towns thought the great public question of the day was whether the boys would make the State B this year. The Icelandic sage, however, saw ahead the depopulation of the countryside and the withering of the country towns.
This was bad for America, he said, for cities, where people lived divorced from the land, were dystopias in need of redemption. They needed the countryside, with natural enclaves intact and rural communities vital, as their place of redemption. The prairies were not to be, as the Department of Agriculture intended, a sacrificial production zone, but rather a beating heart for both countryside and country. We save and sustain our communities not just for our own maintenance and pleasure but for — America.
