River, Reaper, Rail

Timothy Thoresen

Description

River, Reaper, Rail: Agriculture and Identity in Ohio's Mad River Valley, 1795-1885 tells the story of farmers and technology in Ohio's Champaign County and its Mad River Valley from the beginnings of white settlement in 1795 through the decades after the Civil War. This is a story of land-hungry migrants who brought a market-oriented farm ethos across the Appalachians into the Ohio Valley. There, they adapted their traditional farm practices to opportunities and big changes brought by the railroad, the mechanization of the harvesting process, and the development of state-sponsored farmer organizations. For a few decades in the middle of the nineteenth century, this part of America's heartland was the center of the nation geographically, agriculturally, and industrially. With the coming of the Civil War and the nation's further industrialization and westward expansion, the representative centrality of west central Ohio diminished. But the shared conviction that "we are an agricultural people" did not. This book presents their embrace of that view as a process of innovation, adjustment, challenge, and conservative acceptance spanning two or three generations.

Sujets

• Histoire
• USA
• United States of America
• Local history
• Midwestern United States
• History of the Americas
• États-Unis

Informations

• Publié par: University of Akron Press
• Date de parution: 01 août 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781629220789
• Langue: English

Extrait

River, Reaper, Rail
SERIES ON OHIO HISTORY AND CULTURE
Series on Ohio History and Culture Kevin Kern, Editor
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Edward C. Arn, edited by Jerome Mushkat, Arn’s War: Memoirs of a World War II Infantryman, 1940–1946
Brian Bruce, Thomas Boyd: Lost Author of the “Lost Generation ”
Kathleen Endres, Akron’s “Better Half”: Women’s Clubs and the Humanization of a City, 1825–1925
Russ Musarra and Chuck Ayers, Walks Around Akron: Rediscovering a City in Transition
Heinz Poll, edited by Barbara Schubert, A Time to Dance: The Life of Heinz Poll
Mark D. Bowles, Chains of Opportunity: The University of Akron and the Emergence of the Polymer Age, 1909–2007
Russ Vernon, West Point Market Cookbook
Stan Purdum, Pedaling to Lunch: Bike Rides and Bites in Northeastern Ohio
Joyce Dyer, Goosetown: Reconstructing an Akron Neighborhood
Robert J. Roman, Ohio State Football: The Forgotten Dawn
Timothy H. H. Thoresen, River, Reaper, Rail: Agriculture and Identity in Ohio’s Mad River Valley, 1795–1885
Titles published since 2003. For a complete listing of titles published in the series, go to www.uakron.edu/uapress .
River, Reaper, Rail
AGRICULTURE AND IDENTITY IN OHIO’S MAD RIVER VALLEY, 1795–1885
Timothy H. H. Thoresen
Copyright © 2018 by Timothy H. H. Thoresen
All rights reserved • First Edition 2018 • Manufactured in the United States of America.
All inquiries and permission requests should be addressed to the Publisher,
The University of Akron Press, Akron, Ohio 44325-1703.
ISBN : 978-1-629220-76-5 (paper)
ISBN : 978-1-629220-77-2 (ePDF)
ISBN : 978-1-629220-78-9 (ePub)
A catalog record for this title is available from the Library of Congress.
∞The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).
Cover: (Top) “The Harvesters Discussing the Temperance Lecture,” reprinted from A Son of Temperance, Thrilling Scenes in Cottage Life (Hartford: Case, Tiffany, and Co., 1855), p 379; (middle) “Mad River, Near Springfield, O.,” reprinted from Rev. B. F. Tefft, ed., The Ladies ’ Repository (Cincinnati, 1851), facing p. 321; (bottom) 1851 advertising broadside for Hussey’s Reaping Machines, courtesy of the Ohio History Connection. Cover design by Amy Freels.
River, Reaper, Rail was designed and typeset in Adobe Caslon by Amy Freels and printed on sixty-pound natural and bound by Bookmasters of Ashland, Ohio.
For my daughters—SaraLynne, Ahna, Karis
Contents
Introduction
1. The Land
2. The People and Their Culture
3. Claiming the Land, and Settling In
4. Traditions and Revisions
5. The Transportation Problem
6. Making Do, With Roads and Without
7. New Connections, New Directions
8. Urbana
9. The Prospect of a Railroad
10. Changing Prospects
11. Reapers
12. Improving the Land
13. Organizing for Improvement: An Agricultural Society
14. Geography, Generation, Gender: Union Township, 1860
15. Adaptive Diversity
16. The Relevance of Horses
17. Making Sense of Civil War
18. Distant Fields
19. Common Ground
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Introduction
This study has its origin in an invitation to participate in the 2005 Champaign County Bi-Centennial lecture series sponsored jointly by the County’s Bi-Centennial Commission and Urbana University. While the original lecture gave focus to a personal interest in farm machines and agricultural technology, it was also the stimulus to look at a field of scholarship I had previously barely known. A decade-long project evolved. Loosely an exploration of systemic change in agriculture, the work was from its inception distracted by the personal elements—the lives and stories of the people who experienced the change. I found myself looking for the narratives, the representative and illustrative stories that made sense of the patterns I was seeing. My principal models come from ethnography, my language often draws on economics, and my perspective is always historical.
The initial sources for this project were the commonly available publications in the history of agriculture, selected manuscript schedules and summary statistics of the Census Bureau for the period under review, and the Annual Report of the Ohio State Board of Agriculture from its beginning in 1846. Champaign County residents of the 1800s may have kept account books, and a few kept diaries. None of those documents has survived unless they are still hidden away in attic boxes or bottom drawers. A few private letters survived in published form when they were included in pioneer reminiscences following the Civil War. Otherwise, my principal and quite rich primary source has been the weekly Urbana newspapers. The earliest, The Farmer’s Watch Tower , first appeared in 1812, and only a few issues survive. From 1821 and the appearance of Ways of the World , a weekly newspaper in Urbana was fitfully regular. Names changed, as did the “proprietors” (their word for the owner/publisher/editor). Long-term stability was achieved in 1849 with the Urbana Citizen and Gazette which ran continuously for forty years until displaced by the Urbana Daily Citizen . The Citizen was proudly Whig, then Republican, and was challenged for readership by much less successful Democratic papers. Offsetting its political bias was its self-conscious role as the principal newspaper in the county. Beyond matters of public notice and legal record, the Citizen generously provided space for reader comment, letters from the war front or from the “West,” and reminiscences of ye olde days. Mixed in on the same unnumbered folio pages were paid advertisements for professional services, retail dry goods, and agricultural implements, allowing the historian a complementary insight into local events and public transactions. Less consistently I also consulted the much more limited surviving files of the other newspapers attempted in the county’s several smaller towns. These source materials were encouragingly made available to me by the staffs of the Champaign County Public Library, the Champaign County Historical Society, the Urbana University Library, the Wright State University Library, and the archives of the Ohio History Connection.
The story of Champaign County and its Mad River Valley is a story of the Ohio country and, with reference to agriculture, it is a story of America and its rural heartland. It is the story of land-hungry migrants carrying a market-oriented farm ethos across the Appalachians into the Ohio Valley and displacing the native inhabitants. As the migrants adapted their traditional farming practices to the local conditions, practice was also affected by changes in farming technology, changes in modes of transport and communication, changes in market orientation, and perhaps most obviously into our own day, changes in a dynamic and global industrial economy. For a few brief decades in the middle of the nineteenth century, Champaign County was very near the center of the nation demographically, agriculturally, and industrially. Its people looked optimistically in all directions, stirred especially by big changes in the transportation infrastructure, the mechanization of the harvesting process, and the character of state-sponsored farmer organizations. Driven by dynamics from outside the county, the effect of those developments on life inside the county was intense because of the timing. And yet, through all those changes we should see that the individual farmer, like the evolutionary process itself, has been fundamentally conservative. Change is endured to preserve what otherwise would be at risk. Everything is interrelated. Better yields, higher prices, less work, lower costs are all values within a complex, a network, a system, a culture which understands that change in one place will certainly have unanticipated implications and change in other places. For the farmer, improvement is therefore tested against multiple annual cycles of planting and harvest before it is judged a success, and outsiders, experts, and city folk just don’t know. But change did happen, and therein is our story. It begins with the land itself.

Selected Ohio Waterforms. Courtesy Champaign County Engineer .
1.
The Land
Land was the reason. Land gave identity. Land also gave purpose, and for prospective white settlers, that meant working the land in accord with their cultural heritage. Anticipating removal of what those settlers called “the Indian menace,” therefore, and with the prospect of obtaining title to as much good land as any hard-working farmer could manage, independent farming was the attraction of the Old Northwest Territory. Officially opened for settlement by terms specified in the Land Ordinance of 1785 and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, the future Ohio beckoned. Along the Ohio River and gradually upstream its tributaries, forests gave way to farms. By the middle of the 1790s, the leading edge of settlement up the Great Miami River had reached about half the distance from the Ohio River to Lake Erie. From there a lesser edge was spreading eastward to encompass a land nearly perfect for farming.
Through this land runs a river with its sources on the eastern slopes of Campbell Hill, Ohio’s high point of elevation. Named Mad, the river flows southward and westward as though wrapping itself around the base of the ancient rock formation of which Campbell Hill is composed. Thousands of years earlier, massive ice flows similarly wrapped and bent around that obstruction of Devonian bedr