The agricultural traits and peculiarities of the nineteenth century Yankees were the resultant of partly contradictory forces, some of them evolutionary, others devolutionary. In England the period of the Puritan migration to America and the half-century antecedent thereto was a time of vigorous agricultural change marked by many improvements in cultivation and in land management. The agrarian revolution introduced by the transfer of church properties to laymen was accompanied by enclosures and a widespread tendency to shift from an uneconomical crop economy to an agriculture governed by business principles. In this new system the production of farm animals—especially sheep—the fertilization of the soil, rotation of crops, and livestock improvement were main factors. Forces and interests were set in motion at this time which, a century or so later, made farming the concern of many of England’s leading minds, whose wise and persistent experimentation benefited the whole civilized world.

The few thousand immigrants to the New England colonies, founders of America’s Yankeedom, were not all farmers. Some were fishermen, some were small tradesmen, others craftsmen; a few were professional men and soldiers. But a goodly proportion were land owners and peasants, and all had a more or less direct knowledge of the principles and processes which governed English agriculture. The influence of habit, always a determining factor in the transfer of civilization from an old land to a new, caused the occasional reproduction in New England of some features of English farming, especially under village conditions. The common field system in Old Salem reflected a disappearing element in English farm life, while the commons of hay, commons of pasture, commons of wood, and commons of mast, with their administrative “hay reeve,” “hog reeve,” “wood reeve,” herdsmen, and shepherds, mark a natural imitating of the ways of parish life at home.

But there were differences in the conditions “at home” and in America as wide as those symbolized by the terms “insular,” and “continental,” applied to the geography of the two countries. Chief among these differences were the generally forested character of the new-world land, the necessity of adapting tillage to an unfamiliar climate, in part to new food cereals, especially Indian corn, and the absolute dependence upon markets which could be created or opened by the colonists themselves. It was in fact the problem of a market which so long subordinated farming proper in New England to a species of country living in which small patches of arable supplied most of the family’s food, while forest and stream were the objects of exploitation for marketable furs, for medicinal plants, and for timber products. Yankee ingenuity, which justly became proverbial, had an assignable cause. It was not an inherited quality, or one which was imported and conserved; it was a distinctively American product, explained by the situation of the average New England farmer—who was, by force of circumstances, more of a mechanic and woods worker than a cultivator of the soil. His house, especially in winter, was a busy workshop where clapboards, staves, hoops, heading, ax handles, and a variety of other articles of utility and salability were always in course of manufacture. All the farm “tinkering” was additional thereto.

In his contest with the forest for a livelihood, the Yankee farmer was gradually changed from the eastern New England village type to that of the American “pioneer.” His axmanship was unrivaled, his skill in woodscraft, his resourcefulness in the face of untried situations were equal to the best. When the time came for taking agricultural possession of broad spaces in the northern and western interior, the Yankee was the instrument, shaped by four generations of American history, to achieve that object.[12]

This general “handiness” was gained not without a partial loss of such acquired knowledge and skill in agriculture proper as the first immigrants brought from England. Close, careful cultivation was impossible among the stumps and girdled trees of new clearings; the amplitude of natural meadows and the superabundance of “browse” relieved settlers from the sharp necessity of providing artificially for the winter feeding of cattle; the mast of oak trees and the wealth of nuts, supplementing summer “greens,” roots, grass, and wild apples, supplied most of the requisites for finishing off pork. Under these conditions farming even at best was an entirely different thing from what it had been at home. At its worst, it was a crude process, affording a vegetative kind of existence, but nothing more. In fact, farming in the New England states hardly attained the status of a business until the nineteenth century, though in some portions it gave the farmer and his family a generous living and afforded a few luxuries. It made thousands of persons independent proprietors who could not have reached that station at home; it gave the farmers as a class a commanding influence in politics and society; “embattled,” it enabled them to wrest their country’s independence from the awkward hands of a bungling monarchy. In short, it contributed incalculably to their importance as men in history. The indications are, however, that as farmers the fourth generation of Mayflower descendants were decidedly inferior to the original Pilgrims and Puritans.

The third generation were probably less skillful than the fourth. For, by the time of the Revolution there were farming areas in southern New England that were looking up. Timothy Dwight, near the end of the century, found and recorded some of the evidences of a movement to improve cultivation, to fertilize the soil, to better the character of farm livestock—a movement which had been going forward under impulses communicated from England, where the eighteenth century was peculiarly fruitful in agricultural development. Dwight was enough of an idealist to appreciate the limits of the improvement thus far reached. Yet he did insist, with evident justice, that the farming of the Connecticut valley and of eastern Massachusetts was at least respectable. Fields were well cleared and carefully cultivated, clover began to be used as a feeding and green manure crop, the beginnings had been made of a system of rotation of crops, livestock was of relatively good quality—especially in certain Connecticut towns which were already noted for the weight of the bullocks they furnished to the commissary department of Washington’s army. By that time, also, leading men in New England lent their influence toward the building up of the agricultural interest; agricultural societies were organized and essays on agriculture came to have considerable vogue. Some importations of purebred livestock from England took place. The first merino sheep were brought in from France, then larger numbers from Spain by Consul William Jarvis. In 1810 Elkanah Watson established his Berkshire County Agricultural Society, with the county fair which became the model for subsequent county and state fairs the country over.

When Tom Paine predicted in 1776 that an independent America would prosper “as long as eating continues to be the custom of Europe,”[13] he assumed one point about which some doubt might in future arise: Would Europe always have the wherewithal to purchase American foodstuffs at prices which would compensate our people for growing them and delivering them to the market? During the continuance of the long revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, Europe managed to make good Paine’s prophecy, and prices at the close of the wars ruled high. There followed the great expansion era which spread American farmers over the New West, both south and north, into which Yankees entered to a large extent.

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.

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.

One could almost predict how farmers thus trained would react to the new environment of the Wisconsin wilderness. Taking up a tract of forested land or buying a farm with a small clearing upon it, their impulse would be, with the least possible delay, to get a few acres thoroughly cleared, subdued to the plow, and in a high state of tilth. Exceptions there were, to be sure, but on the whole the German pioneers were not content to slash and burn their timber. After the timber was off, the stumps must come out, forthwith, to make the tract fit for decent cultivation. Was it the Germans who introduced in land clearing the custom of “grubbing” instead of “slashing”? This meant felling the tree by undermining it, chopping off roots underground at a safe depth, taking out grub and all, instead of cutting it off above ground. In timber of moderate growth this practice proved fairly expeditious and highly successful, for once a tract was grubbed, the breaking plow encountered no serious obstruction. A good “grubber” among later immigrants could always count on getting jobs from established German farmers.[20]

To the American, who was content to plow around his stumps every year for a decade, to cultivate around them, cradle or reap around them, it seemed that his German neighbor was using some kind of magic to exorcise his stumps. The magic was merely human muscle, motivated by a psychology which inhibited rest so long as a single stump remained in the field.

The German not only used the heaps of farm yard fertilizer which, on buying out the original entryman, he commonly found on the premises, but he conserved all that his livestock produced, and frequently, if not too distant from town or village, became a purchaser of the commodity of which liverymen, stock yard keepers, and private owners of cow or horse were anxious to be relieved. The manufacture of fertilizer was a prime reason for stabling his livestock. The other was his fixed habit of affording animals such care. Not all Germans built barns at once, but the majority always tried to provide warm sheds, at least, whereas Yankee and Southwesterner alike were very prone to allow their animals to huddle, humped and shivering, all winter on the leeward side of house or granary, or in clumps of sheltering brush or trees.[21] The German was willing to occupy his log house longer, if necessary, in order to gain the means for constructing adequate barns and sheds.

Germans were not one-crop farmers. The lands they occupied, usually forested, could not be cleared fast enough at best to enable them to raise wheat on a grand scale, as the Yankees did in the open lands of the southeast and west. Their arable was extended only a few acres per year, and while that was being done the German farmers grew a little of everything—wheat, rye, corn, oats, barley, potatoes, roots. Clover was to them a favorite forage, hay, and green manure crop. In growing it, they used gypsum freely. This policy of clover growing, adopted gradually by all farmers, was one of the means finally relied on by the wheat farmers to restore the productivity of their abused soils.

In ways such as the above, German farmers helped to save Wisconsin agriculture in the period of stress when wheat growing failed and before coÖperative dairying entered. They were not the chief influence in popularizing improved livestock. Credit for that innovation must be awarded to the Yankees. They had resumed in the eastern states the English tradition of breeding, and brought it into Wisconsin where, by means of state and county fairs and an active agricultural press, it was ultimately borne in upon the minds of all farmers, Germans among the rest.[22]

Neither did the Germans lead in developing the new agriculture, of which coÖperative dairying was the keystone. Yankee leadership therein, too, was the dominant influence. Yet, it was the Germans, Scandinavians, and other foreigners—and numerically Germans were in the majority—who, by virtue of their agricultural morale, their steadiness in carrying out plans, their patience and perseverance, have made the dairy business of Wisconsin the great industry it has become.

Above all, the Germans persisted as farmers. They prospered not dramatically, like some of the more successful of the Yankee farmers, but by little and little they saved money, bought more land, better stock, and built better homes. When Yankee farmers, discouraged or impoverished by the failure of wheat, offered their farms for sale preparatory to “going west,” Germans who had managed their smaller farms more carefully stood ready to buy; when Yankees who were tired of being “tied to a cow” wanted to go to Montana, Oregon, or Wyoming to raise steers by wholesale, on the ranching plan, they sold out to Germans who made the dairy farms pay larger dividends year by year. When Yankee farmers retired to the city, or went into business, which in recent decades they have done by thousands, Germans were among those who were the keenest bidders for their farm properties. In a word, the German has succeeded agriculturally through the more and more perfect functioning, in this new land, of qualities imparted by the training and inheritance which he brought with him from the old world. On the whole, Germans have kept clear of speculation, preferring to invest their savings in neighboring lands with which they were intimately familiar, or to lend to neighboring farmers on farm mortgage security. In the aggregate, German farmers in Wisconsin have long had vast sums at interest. The Institute for Research in Land Economics (University of Wisconsin) has completed investigations which show that the nation’s area of lowest farm mortgage interest rates (5.2 per cent or less) coincides very closely with the great maple forest of eastern Wisconsin, which has been held, from the first, predominantly by German farmers.

We have no desire to minimize the factor contributed to Wisconsin’s agriculture by the Yankees. They were the prophets and the organizers of the farmers’ movement. Their inherent optimism, their speculative bent, their genius for organization were indispensable to its success. “Anything is possible to the American people,” shouted the mid-century American orator from a thousand Fourth of July rostrums, therein merely reflecting what the mass of his hearers religiously believed. When agriculture had to be remade in Wisconsin, the Yankee’s intelligence told him in what ways it must be improved, and his tact, courage, and address enabled him to enlist and organize the means for remaking it. When the Yankee was convinced, by his farm paper or by the exhibitions, that a purebred animal was a good investment, his speculative spirit sent him to his banker to borrow a thousand dollars, and to a distant breeder to make what his more timid German neighbor would call a “mighty risky investment”—for the animal might die! Finally, when local organization was required to secure a cheese factory, a creamery, or a dairy board of trade, the Yankee by virtue of his community leadership was usually able to effect the desired result.

Wisconsin’s almost unique success in agriculture is due to no single or even dual factor. But among the human elements which have been most potent in producing the result, none is of more significance than the fortunate blend in her population of the Yankee and the Teuton.

THE YANKEE AND THE TEUTON IN WISCONSIN
Joseph Schafer