The good prices did not hold. Food could be raised cheaply, but markets were costly to reach, even with the new wizardry of the steamboat, and something gigantic was called for in the way of internal improvements. The answer was at first canals, afterwards railroads. At the same time, something had to be done by the farmer himself if the entire structure of American agriculture, now becoming conscious of its own embarrassments, was not to go down. The answer to this was better farming. It was in 1819, the panic year, that John S. Skinner founded at Baltimore the American Farmer, first of the distinctively farm journals which almost immediately had a small group of successors. Among them were the New England Farmer, the Albany Cultivator, the Pennsylvania Farmer, the Rural New Yorker, the Vermont Farmer, the Ohio Farmer, etc.
Yankeedom was a good social soil for these journals. The all but universal literacy of the people, their curiosity, their love of argument and disputation, their habit of experimentation, all tended both to give currency to the new ideas presented and to sift the practical and valuable from the merely theoretic and futile. Thus was introduced, in a period of prevailing “hard times,” a meliorating influence destined to reach a very large proportion of the settlers in those sections, particularly Vermont, western New York, northern Pennsylvania and Ohio, from which the bulk of the Yankee pioneers of Wisconsin were drawn a quarter of a century later. The effect of county and state fairs was to deepen and fructify the influence of the new agricultural press.
It will be understood that the actual “shoring up” of agricultural practice came about with relative slowness. Yet, it soon began here and there, and by a kind of mild infection spread gradually over wide areas. Only in crisis periods, with the introduction of new methods to suit new market conditions, was progress ever very rapid. To illustrate, as early as 1820 Josiah Quincy was advocating and practising the summer soiling of cattle, especially milch cows, and demonstrating the profitableness of the system for the region near Boston. It was a long time before soiling became common even in that district, but this experiment engendered better care of livestock. The same careful, experimental farmer demonstrated the economy of using good-sized whole potatoes for seed, as against the practice of planting seed ends and small tubers; other farmers were slow to adopt the idea, which is not yet universally followed, yet some improvement doubtless came from the publication of Quincy’s findings.
What, then, were the general farming habits of the Yankees who form the background of Wisconsin’s pioneer age? First of all, they lived in decent houses which were usually of lumber. Dwight contended that not one New England village in a hundred was disfigured with the presence of even one log house. He also gives the result of a count made in 1810 of the log houses along the road from New Haven to Windsor in Vermont, thence across the Green Mountains to Middlebury, and back by a direct route to New Haven, a distance of over 460 miles, much of it through new settlements. It showed only fifteen to Middlebury and thirty-two on the return route. It seems to have been a matter of pride with the Yankee to desert his pioneer log house as quickly as possible. His personal skill with tools, and abundance of saw timber, made the construction of a frame house a family undertaking calling for labor indeed, but only a minimum of hired skill; and for little material involving the outlay of actual money. So the frame houses rose wherever the Yankees settled. Along the great road from Albany to Buffalo, in western New York, they began to spring up before the settlements were ten years old. When, about twenty-five years later, travelers passed that way they saw many houses of squared, framed timbers, covered over neatly with boards at the sides and ends, and roofed with shingles.[14] These common frame houses were sufficiently inartistic, no doubt. Perhaps, as one traveler remarks, they did look like “huge packing boxes.” Similar architectural designs can be seen scattered over the West—and the East, too—at this late date. Still, they were more commodious than the log houses, and improved the families’ living conditions. The next stage was likely to mark a very distinct advance. “In the more cleared and longer settled parts of the country,” says a none too sympathetic English traveler, “we saw many detached houses, which might almost be called villas, very neatly got up, with rows of wooden columns in front, aided by trees and tall shrubs running round and across the garden which was prettily fenced in, and embellished with a profusion of flowers.” Yankees had the habit of building by the roadside, whatever the economic disadvantages of such a situation, because it enabled them to keep in touch with the world—a reason which is by no means frivolous, and for them highly characteristic.
We have no such definite account of the Yankee farmers’ barns as of those of Pennsylvania Germans. It is true that Dwight, speaking for the older New England, suggests that the barn was apt to be a much better structure than the house. The custom, however, noted by travelers in New York and elsewhere, of letting cattle run at large all winter without shelter other than trees and brush, and perhaps the straw pile or rick of marsh hay, argues that stabling was furnished for only a minimum number of work oxen, horses—if such there were—and perhaps in some cases cows in milk. It undoubtedly was not the practice to house stock cattle, or even—except in isolated cases—to feed them in sheds. The advocates of careful sheltering who wrote for the agricultural journals recognized that the weight of opinion was against sheltering stock. They compromised with that opinion by recommending sheds for young stock and dry cows, and warm barns only for milking cows and work animals.[15] Yet, some of the leading cattle feeders of the Genesee valley, as late as the year 1842, were content to scatter loads of hay over meadows and through brush patches for the hundreds of beef cattle they were wintering.[16]
The livestock, except sheep and pigs, was still by 1840 prevailingly of no breed. Nevertheless, Durhams and Devons were coming into use. The Patroon stock of shorthorns, introduced in 1824 from England by Stephen Van Rensellaer, of Albany, gained its first customers apparently among the English farmers of western New York, but gradually made its way among the Yankees as well. Other importations were soon made, so that by 1840 there were several prominent herds of purebreds in that section of the state. In 1842 it was said of the Genesee County Fair that “with the exception of some working oxen and one cow not a single animal of native cattle was in the yard. All were either pure or grade Durhams or Devons.... Bulls were shown by some six or seven competitors. Among them were four thoroughbred ones and one of those imported.”[17] It is clear that by the time emigration to Wisconsin began to take place, actual progress had been made and the entire body of Yankee farmers had been indoctrinated with the idea of better livestock. Sheep and pigs were already largely improved, the former prevailingly through the cross with the merinos, the latter with Berkshires and other English breeds. The Morgan horse, a Vermont product, was gaining wide popularity.
From what has been said of the care of livestock, it follows that the possibilities of the farm for the manufacture of fertilizer were generally neglected. English travelers were apt to insist that this neglect was universal, but there were, of course, numerous exceptions. Farming was extensive, not intensive. Lands were cleared by chopping or “slashing” the timber, burning brush and logs, then harrowing among the stumps to cover the first-sown wheat seed. In a few years, with the rotting of the smaller stumps and the roots, the plow could be used, though always with embarrassment on account of the large stumps which thickly studded the fields. These disappeared gradually, being allowed to stand till so fully decayed that a few strokes with ax or mattock would dislodge them. As late as 1830 many fields in western New York were stump infested.
A FARM NEAR ROCHESTER, NEW YORK, IN 1827
From Captain Basil Hall’s Forty Etchings from Sketches Made with the Camera Lucida. London, 1829
Wheat was the great, almost the sole, market crop, and it was grown year after year till the soil ceased to respond. From bumper yields of twenty-five or thirty bushels per acre the returns fell off to twenty, fifteen, and then twelve, ten, or even eight. The process of decline was well under way when the immigration to Wisconsin set in, and already the turn had come toward a more definite livestock economy, which in large portions of New York soon gave rise to a system of factory cheese making. A main reason for the removal to the West, on the part of farmers whose holdings were too small to make successful stock farms, or who refused to abandon wheat raising as a business, was that lands in the West could be had already cleared by nature. Many half-cleared farms, with customary buildings and fences, could in the forties be purchased in western New York for from four to eight dollars per acre. Instead of buying these farms, the young men preferred going to Michigan, Illinois, Iowa, or Wisconsin, those having such farms for sale doing likewise after selling out to neighbors, usually the larger farmers, who elected to remain and change their system of farming. In Vermont we have a similar story, in Ohio the same. The Yankee farmers who came to Wisconsin were generally at home either small farmers or the sons of farmers large or small; while a certain proportion of the larger farmers, by reason of debt or desire to extend their business, also sold out and came west to buy cheap lands on the prairies or in the openings.