An agriculture which dates from before the time of Tacitus, and which acquired permanent characteristics from the influence of Roman merchants, monastics, and feudatories in Roman and medieval times, was bound to differ widely and even fundamentally from the agriculture of a far flung American frontier. The Germans who met the Yankee immigrants in primitive Wisconsin brought an inheritance of habit and training analogous to that of the English Puritan emigrants to New England, but with the difference that the Germans’ training had continued two hundred years longer, on similar lines. They were old-world cultivators, the Yankees new-world cultivators.
Tacitus says in one place: “The Germans live scattered and apart, as a spring, a hill, or a wood entices them.”[18] Nineteenth century German economists complained that German farmsteads were seated often most inconveniently with reference to the management of the farm lands pertaining to them. They had been established, in the days of long ago, by lakeside, brook, or river under conditions in which access to water was the most important single consideration. They had never been moved, although gradually the arable stretched far back from the dwelling, and the pasture perhaps was located in a wholly detached area.[19] This description applies to portions of northern Germany where farms were large and farming had the status of a regular and dignified business.
Many individuals and families came to Wisconsin from districts like Mecklenburg, Prussia, Pomerania, though in the emigrations of the 1840’s and fifties the great majority were from southern and central German states. It will be one of the interesting inquiries in connection with our study of local influences in Wisconsin towns (Domesday Book Studies), how far the special regional inheritances of foreign born settlers manifested themselves in Wisconsin communities. The presumption, about the north German, would be that his farming operations would tend to be on a large scale, under a business system which—in this new land—would slough off such anachronisms as the dislocated farmstead, and present the features of an ideal establishment. But it may be that the forest was such a powerful leveler as to obliterate most of the regional distinctions among immigrants. Our chief concern, at all events, is with that great body of German farmers, and intending farmers, who came from the southwestern states of the recent Empire, especially Alsace, Baden, Württemberg, Rhine Palatinate, Rhenish Prussia, Hesse, Nassau, Westphalia—to some extent Bavaria and Saxony.
The fundamental facts about the home conditions of these people, so far as they were farmers at home, were the smallness of their holdings, their intensive cultivation, and the almost universal village type of life. Travelers of about 1840 describe the typical middle Rhine country as a highly cultivated plain without division hedges or fences other than the tree-bordered roads, with no separate farm dwellings and with no livestock in sight. The crops of several kinds being arranged in various shaped fields, patches, and strips, the plain looked like the proverbial “crazy-quilt.” Villages were huddled at the edges of woods, and occasionally in the midst of the cultivated area. Their houses, which were not arranged on a regular plan, were usually large stone structures, the farm yard, with tools, implements, manure and compost heaps, occupying a kind of court at the rear.
As a rule, all animals were housed winter and summer. Here was an important difference to the farming of the north, where large herds of cattle could be seen pasturing ample meadows, or ruminating in the shade of buildings or of woods. The soiling system was universally practiced in summer. Grass land being scarce and precious, feed for the cows was laboriously gathered along the brookside, in the open spaces of the forest, along all the roads, in the cemeteries, and the greens before the houses. The weeds and thinnings from the growing crops went to the same object. Vegetable tops were a great resource in late summer and fall, and patches of clover, while insuring green feed, furnished hay as well. In places the growing of sugar beets for the market was a leading agricultural enterprise, and the tops of the beets were carefully cured for winter feed.
The cultivation was intensive both in that it aimed at the maximum produce from given areas, and in that the crops raised included some which called for very special care. Some sections grew tobacco, in connection with which much hand work was indispensable. This crop also called for care in seed selection, in germinating, and in preparing the ground for the reception of the young plants. Beet culture for sugar making involved perhaps not less care, and doubtless more hand labor. Of similar but less particularity was the growing of root crops for stock feed, the orcharding, which was general, and the vine dressing, incident to the business of special districts.
There were, of course, many farmers and farms in the region indicated and in other contributory regions, which were not so widely different from the average of those in America. Yet, on the whole, it can be said that the German husbandman, in training and habit, was analogous to our modern truck farmer or orchardist, rather than to our general farmer. He was a specialist in soils, in fertilizing and preparing them for different crops, in planting, stirring, weeding, irrigating; in defending plants against insect pests, seasonal irregularities, and soil peculiarities; he throve by hoeing, dragging, trimming, pruning, sprouting; by curing and conserving plants, roots, grasses, grains, and fruits. His livestock economy was incidental, yet very important. It supplied the necessary fertilizer to maintain soil productivity; it afforded milk, beef, pork, butter, cheese, wool. It gave him his draft animals, often cows instead of oxen, and economized every bit of grass and forage which his situation produced.
Improvement of livestock appears to have affected southwestern Germany prior to 1850 very little as compared with the pastoral countries of England, Holland, Friesland, and north Germany. The animals kept by the village farmers were therefore not remarkable for quality. But they were usually well housed, and the feed and care they received made up in considerable measure for the absence of superior blood.
The various states of Germany, by 1840, were maintaining schools of agriculture, a species of experiment stations for the dissemination of such scientific agricultural information as was then available. To some extent, therefore, farming was beginning to be scientific. But, prevailingly it was intensely practical, the appropriate art connected with the growing of every distinct crop being handed on from father to son, from farmer to laborer.