Dane County, Wisconsin - Chapter 7: Density of Population, 1905

Chapter 7: Density of Population

The table below, showing density of population, has been carefully made out with the intention of giving changes in population actually on farms. This has not been altogether possible, but where villages are included the fact is mentioned.

The first thing of interest is the large population of i860, and the comparatively uniform distribution over the county, indicating that about all the available land was occupied. From i860 to 1870 ten different towns show a decrease; that was, at least in part, owing to the large numbers who entered the army and failed to return, or who returned, but with others had gone to the new lands of the West before 1870.

At least twenty-three towns show a decline in the decade following, this being the time of the greatest exodus of discouraged wheat growers in search of greener fields. At the same time there was a marked increase in some half-dozen towns, and with unimportant exceptions the increase was in Albion, Dunkirk, Christiana, and Pleasant Springs, that is to say, in the towns that were fast coming to the front in the new business of tobacco growing.®^ Farms were divided, either by sale or rent, and more help was needed to raise tobacco than had been required in general farming.

From 1880 to 1890 there was a decrease in some fourteen towns and an increase in about an equal number. Here we find the same influences at work. The increase is in the tobacco district, following the spread of the crop to new towns, noticeably Burke and Cottage Grove. The increase in tobacco culture and the in- crease in density of population, fail, about this time, to coincide as closely as during the earlier period because the application of machinery to tobacco raising made it possible to dispense with a part of the labor, and also because the tendency to subdivide farms has been less pronounced since about 1885.

In the last decade twenty-two towns show a gain, and eight a decline, the rest being the same as before or doubtful. Here the trend seems to vary from former periods in some particulars : the tobacco sections show an advance of four per cent ; while the advance of the whole county is eight per cent. Evidently those who desire small farms for tobacco growing are finding them outside of the distinctive tobacco district ; this might be hard to establish, but it is certain that tobacco culture has spread to nearly every town of the county, and that within the last ten years. In the general farming towns the better culture practised in all respects has resulted in the employment of more farm laborers, and the tendency toward smaller farms®* means an increase in density of population.

It remains to speak of population in the dairy section. In the towns of Perry, Montrose, Springdale, and Vermont, there has been an almost uniform decline for the three decades since dairying became important. Vermont, which has become more exclusively a dairy town than any other in the county, shows a decline in population of almost thirty-four per cent, during the thirty years. The remaining towns which show declines for the whole period are those where dairying is fast gaining on other kinds of farming, as in Middleton and Oregon.** Still, two more, Roxbury and Berry, show a marked decline in population and these towns are not easily classified ; they are settled very largely by Germans; are, for the most part, hilly and broken, and as wheat growing, which persisted longer with them than in other parts of the county, had finally to be given up, the hills were turned almost entirely into pastures. The conditions and the results are thus practically the same as in the dairy district, and no doubt these towns will before long be classed as dairy towns.

Hibbabd History Of Agrioxji-Tubb In Dane County

ber of acres by dairying than by any other system of farming in this section, and the decline in population in the dairy district means that an economic, adjustment is taking place and tells nothing as to prosperity or dissatisfaction of farmers in general.

Considering the county as a whole, the substantial gain in rural population during the past ten years would hardly seem to mark it out as a good subject for dissertations on "rural depopulation."

*Thi8 table is partly taken from a thesis on the **The Social and Economic DoTelopment of Dane County," by F. E. Harrigan, University of Wisconsin, 1901. The other parts were worked out from the Census Reports.

t For this and preceding years a villaffre was included. Black Earth and Madi son are omitted because it is impossible to separate the village and city populations from the rural.