Horses to machines: the mechanization succession on this ground

1872–1954 · THE TWO TOWNSHIPS IN THE COUNTY'S SUCCESSION

The first machine in this ground's farm record is not a tractor but a mower, and it is at work in 1872. The Scholastic's visitor to St. Joseph's Farm that year watched "the rich meadows of tame hay being mowed down by four or five machines" — mechanical mowing on the drained marsh in the decade after the Civil War, on the farm big enough to buy machines first. The same record gives the farm's horse-power at the same date: "About 25 horses" stood on the place beside its 150–200 fat cattle and its thousands of sheep — the machine age and the horse age in one inventory, which is how the succession actually ran. Howard's 1907 biographies preserve the hand era's memory at the county's edge (an Olive Township farmer who "used the old cradle to cut the grain" and had seen his father cut with a sickle, in South Bend's build's quotation) — the cradle and sickle were this ground's tools within living memory of the men Chapman sketched. The succession's county numbers, from the 1954 census of agriculture as South Bend's leg reads them, mark its end: farms reporting horses or mules fell from 453 farms (927 head) in 1950 to 218 farms (434 head) in 1954 — the horse leaving the county's farms inside five years, in the same census tables that count the tractors and pick-up balers that replaced him. For the two townships themselves no tractor count, no binder or thresher record, and no implement dealer's book stands in any source — the ground's implement trade was done at the station for freight and in South Bend and Mishawaka for purchase, where the Businesses leg and the sister builds carry it — and the township-level want is registered in the gaps roll with the census manuscripts and the county extension reports as its settlers. What this entry can print at the record's strength is the shape: machines arrived first where the hay was (the institutional marsh farm, 1872), the horse held the family farms into the 1950s, and the county census caught the change at its steepest exactly as the subdivisions were beginning to take the ground the machines had just made efficient.

Sources:

1. The Scholastic, 1872, as compiled in Brother Aidan's Extracts 238 (University of Notre Dame Archives): the four or five mowing machines; the farm's ~25 horses; the stock inventory.
2. I, Part 4, County Table 7 — horses and/or mules, 453 farms and 927 head (1950), 218 farms and 434 head (1954); the cradle-and-sickle memory from Howard (1907) (pointed to).
3. Chapman (1880) and Howard (1907), township chapters, and the 1875 atlas: searched for township implement, binder, thresher, and tractor records — none at township strength; the want is GAP-FARMS-4 in the closing roll.