There's a hall of fame for teachers. Another for science fiction writers. There are even halls for greyhound dogs and pirate radio broadcasters. And just as you'll find Elvis Presley enshrined at the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, and Pele at the National Soccer Hall of Fame in a little town in New York, you'll see exhibits honoring the giants of the Farm Belt at the National Agricultural Center and Hall of Fame in Bonner Springs, Kansas.
After you walk past a bronze relief, the only national memorial to America's food producers, a videotape salutes yeoman farmers, whom U.S. president Thomas Jefferson called "the chosen people of God, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue."
"The original rugged individual, the American farmer shaped our country's work ethic, our belief in self-reliance. To know the history of the American farmer is to know our roots as a nation to understand not just who we are, but why," states the hall of fame's informational video.
Thomas Jefferson himself is enshrined in the agricultural hall of fame, as is his fellow farming president, George Washington. President Abraham Lincoln's an honoree, too, and not for his legendary woodchopping skills. He signed laws opening the West to homesteading, created the national department of agriculture, and established colleges in rural areas.
Most U.S. visitors recognize some of the other figures, too:
- Eli Whitney, inventor of the cotton gin - Luther Burbank - a legendary plant geneticist - John Deere, whose steel plow vastly increased farm production - Cyrus McCormick, inventor of the reaper - And Squanto, the Native American who taught New England's Pilgrims how to plant corn, or maize.
But even rural schoolchildren need some help relating to some of the other hall of famers like Stephen Babcock, who made it possible to determine the butterfat content of milk; Frank Mullen, the first professional farm broadcaster; and Marion Dorset, a chemist who developed a serum to prevent hog cholera.
Tim Ninz is director of the agricultural center, which was chartered by Congress in 1960 but is privately funded. He shows visitors the center's vintage farm equipment, displays of rural artwork, and - outside, on the 100-hectare grounds - a model farm town, circa 1900, including blacksmith shop, poultry hatchery, train depot, and a one-room schoolhouse to which children from throughout the Midwest are brought for a day quite unlike the one most of them experience in their modern, air-conditioned classrooms.
"[It's] just as if it were 1904," he said. "It certainly gives them a different definition of what discipline was like in school. It gives them much more of a first-person feel for what grandma and grandpa went through when they were in school."
Mark Tallman, an Agricultural Hall of Fame board member, who grew up in western Kansas and now works as a lobbyist for school boards in the state capital of Topeka, calls the center "a passport to simpler times."
"You eat. You wear clothes," he said. "The products of agriculture are just there. So a lot of people don't think of it as an industry any more, or think about the kinds of things that had to happen to develop it as it is. As you think back, not so long ago, on just the absolute difference of lifestyle between what we take for granted now and what it required to settle this country. And of course it was people involved in agriculture that did settle every new part of the country."
But fewer and fewer people are involved in agricultural production in the United States, less than two percent of the population in the last census. As a result, say agricultural leaders like Jon Wefald, president of Kansas State University, Americans take farmers for granted.
"Very few Americans, especially on the east coast and the west coast, realize that without American agriculture, America is in a world of hurt [in big trouble]," he said. "They'd better appreciate and just pray to the Lord every night that our farmers and ranchers stay alive, that rural America stays vital, because our rural communities and our farmers and ranchers have been the bedrock of American democracy and free enterprise."
The National Agricultural Center and Hall of Fame in eastern Kansas serves as a sounding board for the critical issues facing the heartland. Mark Tallman says farmers are used to the boom-and-bust cycles wrought by nature. But he says family farmers are increasingly buffeted by meager profits, the threat of takeovers by agribusiness conglomerates, and the withering of the rural way of life.