Agriculture in the Midwest, 1815–1900

From the end of the War of 1812 to the end of the nineteenth century, the American Midwest became the vital center of the nation's food production, processing, and distribution system. R. Douglas Hurt presents a detailed examination of the region's development from the arrival of the first white American land seekers to the appearance of the government policymakers, agricultural innovators, farm equipment inventors, railroad builders, and others who helped create the Midwestern breadbasket. As the author acknowledges, however, the people who worked the land—whether as members of American farm families, utopian societies, or immigrant enclaves—played the most essential role in Midwestern agriculture's success.Readers seeking a history of nineteenth-century agriculture in the entire twelve-state region of the Midwest will be disappointed. Hurt instead confines his study to the prairies and timberlands of the Old Northwest Territory, Iowa, and western Minnesota. By excluding the Great Plains Midwest and Missouri, the author provides a coherent history of seven states—Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota—that shared similar demography, crop and livestock specializations, precipitation averages, transportation developments, and government policy outcomes. Synthesizing a variety of secondary works and incorporating primary sources such as diaries, memoirs, census records, and agricultural press accounts, Hurt presents a thorough recounting of the agricultural history of this seven-state subregion of the Midwest.The book's standout chapters include those on farm implement modification, Ohio's utopian Zoar community, the establishment of Irish immigrant colonies in Minnesota, and the impact of the Civil War on Midwestern agriculture. In a chapter titled “Tinkerers,” Hurt details the trial-and-error methods that inventors such as John Deere employed to create equipment that would meet the needs of Midwestern farmers and their environment. In the process of satisfying their demanding Midwestern customers, manufacturers established the Midwest as the nation's farm implement hub. Hurt's case study of Zoar provides insight into the motivations and goals of those who inhabited the Ohio colony as well as their counterparts in other experimental farm communities. The German immigrants who lived and worked communally at Zoar, like other Midwestern utopians, viewed the region as a place of possibility where the fertile soil would allow them to thrive as they experimented with novel gender relationships, living arrangements, and farming methods. Zoar and the other Midwestern utopias would ultimately fail, however, as members’ zeal waned and their numbers diminished. Hurt explores a different type of immigration story in his examination of the attempt to establish Irish agricultural colonies in Minnesota. Well-meaning Irish Catholic leaders in the United States hoped that farm life would serve as a healthy alternative to the overcrowded and impoverished urban ghettos that typically housed newcomers from the Emerald Isle. They soon found, though, that most new Irish arrivals lacked the necessary skills and wherewithal to succeed on the Midwestern prairies. Irish immigrants who already had previous farming experience in the United States fared much better. In contrast to the Irish immigrant saga, Hurt's chapter on the Civil War depicts an unqualified Midwestern success story. Although the war created both a manpower and horsepower shortage on the region's farms, wartime demand for the products of Midwestern agriculture created economic boom times and cemented the Midwest's reputation as America's breadbasket.Hurt's focus on the seven states of the prairie and forest Midwest promotes a logical narrative that follows the development of an agricultural system based primarily on corn and hogs. This geographic emphasis, however, limits discussion of Midwestern racial diversity. Throughout his study, the author appropriately draws readers’ attention to the experiences of the men, women, and children who toiled on the region's rich farmland. By concentrating only on those Midwestern states north and east of the Missouri River, however, Hurt tells a story in which white Americans and European immigrants predominate. Black Americans who worked the land in Missouri, first as enslaved labor and later as sharecroppers, are absent. The Exodusters, formerly enslaved Southerners who homesteaded in Kansas, are likewise missing. Gone, too, are the Native Americans of the Dakotas and their experiences under the federal Dawes Act (1887) that attempted to turn them into farmers. In other words, by excluding the plains Midwest and Missouri, Hurt achieves narrative coherence but sacrifices a more racially inclusive portrait of the agricultural Midwest.Hurt's study provides a wealth of information for scholars and educators. Those teaching courses on agricultural history, Midwestern history, and US immigration history will find it particularly useful. Some readers, however, may find the book's many proofreading errors a bit distracting

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