The produce-and-stock order: the farm economy describes itself, 1875

1875–1907 · THE TWO TOWNSHIPS

The single best description of this ground's mature farm economy is the one its farmers paid to print about themselves. The patrons' directory of the 1875 county atlas — the Higgins, Belden atlas the Land leg reads whole for the farm map — lists Harris Township's subscribing farmers with the occupation each man chose for himself, and the choices, read together, are a census of the economy's self-image: Jacob D. Byrer, "Farmer"; Dan N. Dressier, "Stock Farm," section 16; John W. Griffith, "Farmer, Produce and Stock Farm," section 10; Mathew Griffith, "Farmer, Grain and Produce"; George Hessig, "Produce Farmer," section 16; Jacob Hofterbert, "Produce Farmer," section 16; E. M. Irvin, "Stock Farmer," section 13; Warren Irvin, "General Produce Farm, Stock, etc.," section 24; Robert Kennedy, "Farmer," section 14; Susan Krupp, "Produce and Stock Farm," section 9 — a woman heading a farm entry in her own name, her husband Joseph L. Krupp's 440 acres standing in Chapman's sketches five years later; W. C. Kownover, "Farming"; James Lowry, "Farmer, Stock Raiser, etc.," section 11; Charles Lutlweg, "Produce Farmer, Stock, etc.," section 15. Produce and stock, stock and produce: not one of the township's directory voices calls himself a grain grower first. The economy those words describe is the corn-and-livestock system at household scale — corn and garden produce out, cattle and hogs fed at home, butter, eggs, and market truck to the city — and it is the order that governed the two townships from the wheat era's passing until the subdivisions.

Howard's 1907 biographical volume, read whole for this build's People leg, lets the same order be measured farm by farm a generation on, and the People leg carries the men; this section carries the pattern. The named farms of the mature economy: Jacob Meyer's 460 acres on section 15, worked into the second generation by his son Joseph as superintendent; Joseph L. Krupp's 440; Michael Smith's 380; the Slaughterbeck ground — Jacob, who "cleared the land himself," with 270 acres all but fifty in Harris, and his son Charley L.'s 320 acres in sections 28 to 30 by 1907 under a farm name, "the Idlewild Stock Farm," the township's one named stock farm in the record; John M. Shimp's "the Burr Oaks," sixty acres on section 11 that Chapman already prices at sixty-five dollars an acre in 1880 — the prairie's best land at its best price; John W. Griffith's "Sunny Banks Farm," 103 acres, eighty-three of them in Harris's section 10. At the small end stood the forty- and sixty- and eighty-acre places of the same sketches (John A. Zaehnle working his father's farm and forty acres of his own on section 22; John Koker's eighty acres on section 22, for which he "has been offered $5,200"). A farm landscape of family freeholds, that is, running from forty acres to four hundred and sixty, with the institutional farm's thirteen hundred across the middle of it — and not one tenant plantation, company farm, or bonanza operation in either township chapter of either county history. The farmers' own institutions that this order built — the mutual, the creamery directorship, the fair board seats — stand in their own entry below.

Sources:

1. Higgins, Belden & Co., An Illustrated Historical Atlas of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1875), Harris Township patrons' directory: the occupation lines in the words quoted — read first-hand from the published text (archive.org, illustratedhisto00higg), with the Land leg's whole reading of the directory (21 patrons, sections 7–24).
2. Chapman (1880), Harris Township chapter, biographical sketches: Krupp (440 acres, sec. 9), Meyer (460, sec. 15), Smith (380, sec. 17), Hassig (212, sec. 16), Schneck (93, sec. 9), Shimp (60 acres at $65 an acre, sec. 11), Koker (80 acres, sec. 22, the $5,200 offer), Zaehnle (sec. 22) — read first-hand as above.
3. Howard (1907), vol. 2, biographical sketches, as read whole in this build's People leg: the Slaughterbeck farms and the Idlewild Stock Farm, the Griffith Sunny Banks Farm, the Meyer succession (pointed to for the persons; the farm pattern is this entry's).