Livingston County, Illinois - Chapter 3: Agricultural Development, 1909

Chapter 3: Agricultural Development

EARLY FARMING - PIONEER METHODS - CHICAGO THE GRAIN MARKET - BENEFITS OF DRAINAGE - FERTILITY OF LIVINGSTON COUNTY LANDS - PRIMITIVE FARMING IMPLEMENTS - IMPROVEMENTS WROUGHT IN FIFTY YEARS - CUTTING AND THRESHING GRAIN - A PIONEER PLOW FACTORY - -FENCES.

Farming in the early days was vastly different from that of the present time. There were no reapers, mowers, cornplanters, sulky plows or harrows. The breaking plows of the pioneers were long and strong affairs, with a capacious mold-board, and required two to three yoke of oxen to draw them through the tough soil. As soon as the field had been turned in this way, "sod corn," as it was called, was planted. The ground was first "marked out" both ways, one way with a small eight-inch mold-board plow, and the other by a marker made of a four by four scantling - if they had one. The marker had attached to it a pair of shafts, and a bowed sapling for a handle. After marking, the children would drop the corn. The corn was taken from little tin pails or baskets held in the hand, or buttoned into the clothing in front, or fastened to a belt around the waist. The covering was done with a hoe, and was a tedious job compared to our present plan, and the harvesting and securing of the small grain was even more tedious.

Marketing Grain In Chicago

In the early times, the settlers hauled wheat to Chicago, often taking ten days to make the return trip, and they congratulated themselves if they were so fortunate as to receive 50 cents a bushel for it. That city had not yet risen from the bogs and marshes of Lake Michigan, and the great grain market was not what it is today. Some farmers would join in a company, and, with their wagons loaded with wheat. drive through to Chicago, camping out at nights, as their load of wheat would hardly have justified the paying of the tavern bill. There was at that time not eyen an Indian trail leading to Chicago, but those pioneers took their way over the unbroken prairie, guided by signs and indications which never led them astray. They rarely made more than two such trips a year.

Benefits Of Farm Drainage

The years 1876 and 1877 were wet ones in this county, and thousands of acres of the low lands were untillable in consequence. In many places, water stood in the ponds nearly the whole year, thus robbing the farmer of the use of many acres of the best producing land on his farm. About this time, farmers and land-owners were beginning to learn that, by systematic drainage, their lowest lands could be utilized as well as the highest, and as much, and perhaps more, grain could be raised on an acre of the "swamp" well drained, than on the best upland on the farm. The finest illustration seen at that time of the benefits of drainage was on the 900-acre farm, known as the Marsh farm, situated west of Fair. bury. The method adopted on this farm, as well as other farms in this vicinity, was as follows: There was a large ditch cut through the lowest part of this farm, into which smaller ditches led, that were piped with fencing boards nailed together and placed in the bottom in the shape of an inverted V. Upon these boards hay, straw or long grass was thrown, after which the earth was filled in. The water was carried off in the main ditch through the farm and finally found an outlet in the Vermilion river. There was of this system of drainage on this farm about 1,000 rods, which cost 35 cents per rod. The present mode of tiling in the county was not commenced until 1878, thirty years ago, but has been pushed forward rapidly until there are now in the county but few, if any, farms not thoroughly drained.

At the time Illinois was admitted into the Union, the lands of what now constitutes Livingston County were government lands, subject to entry by claimants or "squatters" when the government land office was established at Danville. The prairies of this county were known to be as fertile as any land in the state, and the soil as good and productive as that of McLean, Peoria or LaSalle Counties, but the conformation of the country is different. The land is not so "rolling" or so well drained naturally as the land in Mc- Lean, Peoria and LaSalle is. A large portion of Livingston County is so flat and level that it was classed as swamp or overflowed land, too wet for cultivation. For this reason, Livingston County was not settled up as early or as rapidly as adjoining counties that are better drained naturally, or had navigable streams that afforded cheap transportation for produce and merchandise. While there was a large area of fine, tillable land in the county open for settlement from 1835 to 1855, the larger portion was considered as being better adapted for grazing purposes than for cultivation as farms. . Since the general introduction of tile drainage by the farmers of this county, these flat, swampy lands have been thoroughly drained, and are now the richest and most productive corn lands in the State, and are selling at $150 to $200 per acre, As late as 1850

The wonderful fertility of the soil of Livingston County is not surpassed by the fuvored delta of the Nile. There are farms in this county that have been under constant cultivation for the past seventy years without any more fertilization than the scant supply of barnyard manure produced on the place, that last season (1908) produced 50 bushels of corn per acre. The Rollins' farm, for one, two miles east of Pontiac, has been under cultivation for fully seventy years, and seems to be about as productive as It was in 1838, when the wild prairie sod was first turned under, and it has had but little artificial fertillzation. The Daniel Rockwood farm, now the Bruer place, has been under cultivation threequarters of a century and produces as large crops as it ever did. There are many old farms up and down the Vermilion river and around Indian Grove, that have been under cultivation seventy to seventy-five years but show no loss of fertility.

Primitive Implements Of Agriculture

Some of the implements of agriculture used in the early times, were as primitive as the methods of education. At first, it was not supposed that the vast prairies would ever be utilized. The little bar-share plow, with the wooden moidboard, in common use in the Eastern States, was not to be thought of to turn over the prairie sod, matted thick with grass roots as hard almost as hickory withes. But soon the inventive genius of the Yankee supplied an article with which most of these plains have been brought under cultivation. The original "sod plow" is seen no more, as it has long since outlived its usefulness, It consisted of a large share, cutting a furrow of two feet in width, with iron bars for a moldboard. The beam of the machine was fifteen feet in length. No handles were needed, though sometimes they were attached, but were used only for the purpose of starting or throwing it out of the ground. To this immense plow was hitched five to eight yokes of oxen. The breaking was usually done late in the spring and, with the turning of the sod, was deposited seed, which produced an inferior crop of corn the first year, which grew and ripened without further attention. Hay was cut with cradles, These ancient land-marks have all passed away, and but few who wielded them still remain to tell us the story of these and the many other peculiar institutions of the olden time. Here and there is seen a whitened head, here and there we behold a tottering frame, and ere long they, too, will have passed from earth, and their places will be filled by the more modern style of humanity.

The past fifty years has witnessed some wonderful improvements in the construction and operation of farm machinery in this country, and the decided changes in the ideas that prevailed a half century ago respecting the management and control of the various operations connected with the planting, cultivating and harvesting of the great crops of the different kinds of grain, are no less noteworthy.

Perhaps the most noticeable improvement along these lines has been made in the matter of planting, harvesting and threshing implements. The improvements in cultivating implements, however, have also been decidedly manifest and worthy of due notice. The complicated and highly improved self-binders and threshers as they exist today, are vastly different from the first machines that were devised for that purpose. In fact, if a man who had been accustomed to using one of the latest of these machines, had never used or seen one of the first ones, he would hardly be able to tell for what use it was intended.

Cutting And Threshing The Grain

The grain was cut with the old straighthandled cradle, and raked into bundles with a hand rake. It was then loaded on wagons and taken to the barn. The most primitive means of threshing small grain was to pound it out with a flail. The flail was a very simple instrumest, consisting of two pieces of wood, one about eighteen inches in length the other about 4 feet long, each with a hole bored through one end, and the two lashed together by having a piece of rawhide leather pass through the holes in each piece and tied. The short piece was about two inches thick at the end opposite the one which had the hole bored through, rounded like a club and tapering slightly from the other end, the long piece being similar in shape to a modern pitchfork handle. The bundles of wheat or rye, etc., were laid down in a row upon the threshing floor or placed prepared for threshing out the grain, with the heads of the grain all in one direction. The threshers stood at one end of the room and swung the flail over so that the club or short piece of the flail came down upon the heads of the grain with great force. About a dozen or more bundles were placed upon the floor at a time, the number of bundles threshed at one time depending on the size of the threshing floor. This means of threshing grain was only used to very limited extent in this locality and in very early times and only by men who had a small quantity of grain to thresh. Those who raised larger crops of small grain made a larger threshing floor and tramped out their grain with horses.

With the crude implements used by the pioneer farmers of Livingston County, the cultivation of the rich black soil was an exhaustive and discouraging occupation. The polished steel moldboard plow had not yet been invented, and the disc, so generally used now, had not been dreamed of. The plows used prior to 1847 had steel or cast iron shares and wooden moldboards, and the man behind the plow had to carry a paddle and every few minutes was compelled to stop his team and dig the dirt from the share and moldboard before the plow would enter the soil. Every farmer knows what it means to undertake to plow a field with a plow that will not scour. In the spring of 1847 there was not a plow in Livingston County that would scour in the black prairie soil of this state; and at that time Henry Jones, a pioneer, a blacksmith and plow maker, living two miles east of Pontiac, in a conversation with Philip Rollins, a pioneer farmer, declared that he could make a plow that would scour in any field in the state. Rollins assured Jones that if he could do so it would double the value of every acre of land susceptible of cultivation in Livingston County. Jones went to Ottawa, procured the steel and made two plows. After cutting and shaping the shares and moldboards, and grinding them down on a grindstone as smooth as possible, the different parts were put together, and as a finishing touch the plows were run for a half day in a hard beaten strip of road northwest of the Rollins' homestead, two miles east of Pontiac. The hard clay soil put a fine polish on the steel share and moldboard, and when tried in the black soil of the field the plows scoured and proved a great success, ji pounds. After leaving the Rollins farm, the party took a northeasterly course across the prairie. The snow was six to eight inches deep, with just enough crust to keep it from drifting. For the greater part of the way there was not the sign of a road. They encountered no fences or settlements until they reached the Kankakee river, which was crossed on the ice. The next farms and fences to obstruct their way were encountered east of Joliet. From that on into Chicago the party had a well beaten road to follow. Arriving in Chicago the pork was soon disposed of and the proceeds invested principally in material for making steel moldboard plows, In February, 1848, Jones began the manufacture of plows warranted to scour in any soil in Livingston County, and continued making them until the spring of 1849, when he quit the business to pilot a party of gold-seekers to California.

Fences And Fencing

The early settlers of this county and state, as a matter of course, had to fence their fields against the depredations of their own as well as their neighbors' stock. First, the brush fence was quite common where the farms were made by clearing up the timber land, but later the stake-and-rider fence was generally used. These built in a zig-zag fashion, five and six rails high. At the angles, or where the rails lapped, stakes were placed in the ground on each side and two to three feet from the bottom rail, leaning against the top rail and forming a cross or crotch in which the last rail, or rider, was laid. The stakes braced the fence, and the rider held the stakes firmly in place. This made a very strong and durable fence, "hog-tight," and with strength to turn or hold the most breachy cattle and horses that ran at large. Walnut, oak,-hickory and ash made the best rails, while the honey locust was generally used for stakes. Black walnut was the favorite tree for rails, because it was durable and split easily. Millions of feet of the finest black walnut timber that ever grew, that would sell today for $40 per thousand for veneering purposes and for gunstock material for the armies of the world, were cut and split up into fence rails to fence Livingston County farms. After the prairie lands began to attract the attention of homeseekers, timber became too valuable to be cut up and split into rails for fencing, and farmers began to look for other and less expensive material for enclosing their fields and other improvements. For several years after 1853, there was a craze for osage orange hedge, and thousands of miles of this fence was set out on the farms. Hedge fence proved unsatisfactory for several reasons. It required much attention in resetting plants that died out, patching up with poles, old rails and boards where it burned out, trimming, etc. It would catch and hold all the weeds, leaves, and corn blades that the strong winds would bring in contact with it, and a spark of fire from burning corn stalks or a pipe or any other source would soon destroy rods of it; but the greatest objection to osage hedge as a farm fence was that it would sap the moisture or fertility for a rod or more in width from the soil along its entire length, and rendered that much otherwise valuable land entirely worthless, This made osage orange hedge fence intolerable to the enterprising farmer, and it has nearly all been grubbed out or pulled up by the mile with traction engines and burned. After the completion of the Chicago & Alton Railroad, pine boards, with cedar posts, were used extensively for fencing. This made a good though expensive fence, and when it began to be generally used all over the broad prairies of the west, the price of lumber began to advance, and the cost of pine boards and cedar posts became so high as to be almost prohibitive, and the fence question became a burden to the farmer. Barbed wire for fencing was then introduced, and to a great extent was used all over the country. This, also, made a good fence but, like pine boards, was expensive, and proved quite dangerous to stock where used for fencing pasture lands, and a wire fence without the dangerous barbs was substituted and is still used. When the county had become pretty well settled up, the greater portion of tillable land brought under cultivation and the "man with the hoe" largely in the majority, more attention was paid to the production of grain and less to raising stock. The farmers then came to the conclusion that it would be cheaper to fence their stock than to fence their fields of grain, and begun to discuss and agitate the question of a "no fence" law. In the winter of 1866-67 a "no fence" law was passed by the Legislature at Springfield, and has been in operation since that time. This law prevents stock running at large and effectually settled the fence question to the