The Last Guinnip on Guinnip Road

The sign at the front of the farm says 1837.

That was the year Joseph Guinnip left Steuben County, New York, crossed the Erie Canal to Sandusky, Ohio, floated down the Wabash River to Lafayette, Indiana, and finally settled forty acres of land in southeastern Illinois. He built a log cabin. He cleared timber. He raised a family.

Nearly two hundred years later, the land still belongs to a Guinnip. Don Guinnip, seventy-four years old, wakes early each morning to tend roughly one thousand acres of corn and soybeans and forty head of cattle. The road that runs past the farm is called Guinnip Road. The house where Don lives is the one his grandfather built more than a century ago.

He may be the last.

The Wall Street Journal told his story this week. Don Guinnip has survived prostate cancer. Both of his hips have been replaced with titanium. Four decades of grueling work have worn him down. He estimates he can keep up the current workload for a couple more years.

His son and daughter left for college. They work in corporate fields now. His four siblings made the same decision years earlier. There is no one to take over.

“It’s disappointing to me,” Guinnip said, holding back tears. “That’s the way the dice were rolled, and you have to accept what life gives you.”

He still drives a truck from the 1990s. The power steering recently failed. He uses aging equipment rather than buying new machinery. “Why would I buy new equipment,” he asks, “if I have no one to pass it along to?”

The family gathered recently to discuss what happens next. They debated options: dividing the land among grandchildren, reorganizing the farm into an LLC, leasing it to another farmer. After two hours, no decision was made.

“I’m healthy, I like doing what I’m doing,” he said. “But I’m not going to live forever.”

Willa Cather understood farmers like Don Guinnip. She grew up among them on the Nebraska prairie, and she spent her career writing about their lives—their struggles, their stubbornness, their love for land that did not always love them back.

In O Pioneers!, published in 1913, Cather gave voice to what every farmer knows, but few say aloud:

“The land belongs to the future, Carl; that’s the way it seems to me. How many of the names on the county clerk’s plat will be there in fifty years? I might as well try to will the sunset over there to my brother’s children. We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it—for a little while.”

For a little while.

The Guinnips have owned their land for a little while—longer than most. Joseph Guinnip’s son fought in the Civil War. Another ancestor survived a buzz-saw accident in 1910 that nearly took his arm. Don’s father, Robert, and mother, Rose, raised their children on the same ground. The land has passed through every generation since 1837.

But Cather knew that even the longest continuities end. The question is not whether they end, but whether anyone remembers them.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, there are now more farmers aged seventy-five and older than those under thirty-five. In 2025, 315 farms filed for bankruptcy—a 46 percent increase from the year before. Family agriculture, says the National Farmers Union, is in crisis.

Don Guinnip is one story. There are thousands like him across the country. Farmers whose children left for cities. Farmers whose land will be sold to corporations or divided among heirs who have never driven a tractor. Farmers who carry the memory of five generations and wonder who will carry it after them.

Someone should write these stories. Not the policy reports—those already exist. The human stories. The ones that begin with a sign that says 1837 and end with a man holding back tears in a farmhouse full of black-and-white photographs.

The Power of Authors calls writers to this work: Find the farmers who are running out of time. Sit with them. Ask what their grandfathers planted, what their children chose instead, what they hope someone will remember.

We come and go. The land is always here. But the stories disappear unless someone writes them down.

The sign says 1837. Someone should tell what it means before no one is left who knows.

The book is available on Amazon: http://bit.ly/3K6o8AM. If you’d like an autographed copy, you can order it here: http://bit.ly/4pgmzjM.

 

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