A Companion to American Agricultural History - Группа авторов

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in the region’s long and hot summer days and warm nights, with a growing season of approximately five frost-free months and annual rainfall of 40 inches or so. It also underwent multiple transformations in the midcontinent that reflected the blending of North and South. Beginning in the eighteenth century, according to botanists Edgar Anderson and William L. Brown, short-season flint corn of the Yankee met the long-season southern gourdseed corn, resulting in a hardy, 100-day corn that became widely grown and known as “corn belt yellow dent” by the 1870s. The combination of the softer gourdseed and the hard flints resulted in a corn that was soft enough for livestock to consume without grinding but hard enough to store and transport, if needed. While countless farmers engaged in this kind of corn crossing, open-pollinated corn (either deliberately or inadvertently), Robert Reid of Illinois most famously developed the variety known as “Reid’s Yellow Dent” in the 1840s. Reid planted a late-maturing yellow corn, and when some hills failed to germinate planted those with an early red variety. Reid saved seed from that crop and continued to propagate it for decades without introducing any new varieties. The resulting yellow dent matured between 90 and 110 days, had 16–22 rows of kernels per ear, and could yield up to 40 bushels per acre in optimal conditions. It was a Corn Belt triumph (Anderson and Brown 1952; Hudson 1994; Olmstead and Rhode 2008). The rise of the Corn Belt dent demonstrates not only the importance of environmental conditions, mechanization, transportation, demand, and market access in commodity production, but that the goals and cultural background of the settlers were also critical.

      One of the most extreme examples of culture shaping production was the settlement of southerners along the Missouri River counties in the central part of the state. There, they recreated the plantations of their home region, utilizing enslaved African Americans to raise the tobacco, hemp, and livestock culture of Kentucky, Virginia, and Tennessee. The rich bottom lands and rolling hills were later dubbed “Little” Dixie” in recognition of the persistence of southern culture (Hurt 1992).

      Studies of small communities provide a finer-grained examination of these dynamics of culture and agriculture. Sugar Creek, located in Sangamon County, Illinois, was largely settled by native-born southerners who forged a community in which collective action through kin and neighborhood mattered at least as much, if not more so, as that of the individual. Chain migration characterized much of the settlement, with kin following kin in to mobilize social capital. In Sugar Creek and thousands of other free-labor communities like it, men and women cooperated to raise crops, livestock, and children. They confronted a world of increasing market integration, fueled by the growth of railroads and Civil War. Market integration generally rewarded those who were able to invest in new tools and expansion, leaving the Sugar Creek of the 1870s far more divided by wealth than it had been in the 1820s (Faragher 1986).

      In contrast to Sugar Creek, Yankees dominated in Kalamazoo County, Michigan while Fountain Green township of Western Illinois was a mix of southerner, Yankee, and Scots-Irish from the Mid-Atlantic states. Even so, families who made farms in these areas faced similar conditions of farm making and market access that resembled those of Sugar Creek. Families met much of their own needs, but market production of wheat and livestock also played an important part in sustaining the farm. During and after the Civil War, these communities were transformed. The war was a catalyst for economic growth and economic stratification (Faragher 1986; Gray 1996; Rugh 2001).

      In Indiana’s hill country, consisting of the southernmost counties closest to the Ohio River, the unglaciated, forested landscape became home to a wave of southern settlers from the upland South and, to a lesser extent, the Mid-Atlantic states. Ultimately, German Catholics also made homes in the region, contributing to a conservative pattern of safety-first agriculture, marked by low rates of mechanization and modest market production. Only after the massive railroad expansion of the 1850s and the price boom of the Civil War years did hill country market production start to catch up to that of central Indiana with its better rail connections (Nation 2005; Salstrom 2007).

      After the initial years of settlement, successive waves of foreign-born settlers arrived in the region, building communities characterized by a strong ethnic identity. The lure of the rural Midwest was the availability of ample land to recreate communities from the homeland. Immigrants hoped to avoid the secularization of life in the mother country that threatened parental control and to enhance their economic position or, at the very least, stave off decline. In the Midwest, these two concerns could be addressed at the same time. The religious and social order that was threatened in Europe and Scandinavia could be replicated in the Midwest with minimal interference. In the midcontinent, immigrants could enjoy maximum living space thanks to an ample supply of comparatively inexpensive land, low taxes, and the lack of an established state church or compulsory military service. American freedom for these groups was the freedom to recreate the Old Country, favoring the Midwest over the slaveholding South, where opportunity through land ownership was limited by slave-owning elites.

      Once established, immigrant island communities grew apace due to chain migration, creating a mutually reinforcing cycle by which an individual or family follows another family member to the same location. By the mid-nineteenth century, it was Germans and Irish, soon followed by waves of Dutch, Scandinavian, and Finnish settlers. Immigration from Germany and the Austro-Hungarian empire, most notably Czechs, surged again in the late nineteenth century. The timing of each group’s arrival often coincided with various opportunities for low-skilled work. For the Irish of the 1840s and 1850s, it was canal and railroad construction. The Danes of the late 1860s also worked on the railroads, while the Finns and Scandinavians who arrived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries often found employment in logging in Minnesota, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

      The farm settlements and agricultural practices of the Old Country were not forgotten in America, but there was widespread adaptation to local market pressures and opportunities, just as there had been for native-born settlers. Many immigrants were astounded by the scale of American farms, the new crops, and the new and different landscape, not to mention the importance of hired labor and mechanization. The land that many of them left was characterized by small farms, with little reliance on hired labor and machines, and intensive farming practices prevailing over extensive ones. Still, immigrants rapidly took to cash crops such as wheat and feed crops such as corn, adopting what had been either marginal or non-existent crops in their homelands. In the first few years of settlement, many immigrants out-Yankeed their native-born counterparts by dedicating even more land to cash crops such as wheat due to the frequent high returns on the crop. Soon, though, they tended to diversify even more than native-born farmers, farming more as they had in the Old Country. Practices that had been abandoned in the farm-making years actually reappeared, representing a sort of cultural rebound in which these farmers brought crops such as rye and flax back into their operations (Baltensperger 1980; Gjerde 1985; Ostergren 1988).

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