Breaking the prairie: the first crops, 1830–1850

1830–1850 · HARRIS PRAIRIE AND THE CLAY STRIP

The farm history of this ground opens with a wheat field and a pair of hands to cut it. Chapman's Harris Township chapter, read first-hand for this build, records that Jacob Harris, who came in 1830 and settled on Harris Prairie, "raised the first wheat that was cut in the township, it being harvested in 1831," and that his neighbor Jacob Meyer, come the spring of 1831 and still living on section 15 in 1880, helped cut the crop. The Food leg of this build carries the 1831 wheat as the place's flour foundation, with the boundary fact that Harris never had a mill; this section carries what the wheat began: a prairie plowed from its east side, by the settlement party whose land entries of 19 April 1830 — the county's first — Before the City and the Land carry whole. Wheat was the cash crop a new prairie could sell, but the first farms were subsistence rounds before they were wheat farms: the pre-settlement seasonal economy the build's Before the City leg reconstructs gave way to corn, garden truck, and stock kept on the open prairie, and the county's first crop failure is also in Chapman — the frost of June 1835, which "totally destroyed" a wheat crop in full bloom, the one total wheat failure in the county's first fifty years by his account.

The two townships broke differently, and the difference governed everything after. Harris was the prairie township: "one of the finest upland prairies in the county" in Howard's phrase, carried in the Land leg, with a marsh through its middle and southeast that the next entries take up. Clay, carved off Harris's west side in 1840 (the carving is the Land's), was by Chapman's description "nearly all of the land is broken, or marsh, or timbered land" — a township of oak openings, river bottom, and the small stream country along the St. Joseph, whose first settlement gathered along the river's eastern bank (John Eyler, Lambert McCombs, John Weaver and a few other families, from Chapman's Clay chapter) and whose citizens by 1880 were "mostly Germans." The designated place takes only Clay's eastern sections, along the Harris line — the part of Clay that was prairie-edge farmland rather than river timber — and its first election, in 1840, was held in a barn on section 30, "Brooks' barn," a farm building doing civic duty in a township that had no other public room; the Food leg prints that fact for its own purpose and this section notes the barn was a working farm's. By 1836, as the Land leg records, about all the government land on this ground was taken up: the prairie had become a farm map before it became anything else, and it stayed one, essentially complete, for a century.

Sources:

1. Chapman (1880), Harris Township chapter: the first wheat of 1831 and Jacob Meyer's part in cutting it, in the words quoted; ch. XIII: the June 1835 frost and the wheat crop; Clay Township chapter: the township's broken, marsh, and timbered character, the river-bank first settlement, the mostly German citizenry of 1880, and the first election in "Brooks' barn" on section 30 — read first-hand as above.
2. Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907), Harris Township section: the prairie's character, as carried in this build's Land leg.
3. This build's Land and Before the City legs: the entries of 19 April 1830, the 1836/1840 township carving, and the close of the government-land era by 1836 (pointed to, not retold).
4. This build's Food leg: the 1831 wheat as flour foundation and the mill boundary (pointed to).