The wheat era and its passing

1831–1900 · THE TWO TOWNSHIPS IN THE COUNTY'S WHEAT CENTURY

Wheat made this county's first farm reputation, and wheat is what the nineteenth-century record counts loudest — but on this ground the wheat era was always a shared tenancy with stock. The county frame is Chapman's: a county that boasted, "and truthfully too," of being among the best agricultural counties in the Union, that had known no total crop failure in fifty years, and that threshed 811,037 bushels of wheat in 1879. South Bend's build carries the wheat arc whole — its rise on the broken prairies, its long nineteenth-century primacy, and its passing into the corn-and-livestock order and then the soybean rotation, at census strength. This section's share is what the wheat era looked like inside the two townships. At its largest, the era's wheat stood on the institutional farm: St. Joseph's Farm's production, as the University of Notre Dame Archives' extracts print it, ran to "10–15,000 bushels of wheat" in a year — the output of a small township by itself, from the drained marsh farm across Harris's middle, and its own entry below carries the farm whole. On the family farms the wheat years are visible only at the record's smaller size: the 1831 first cutting, the 1835 frost, and the pattern of the 1875 directory, in which Harris's patrons describe themselves not as wheat growers but as produce and stock men — the directory's own words are the next entry's subject.

The passing, on this ground, was therefore less a revolution than a re-weighting. The prairie sections had never been a wheat monoculture: the same Chapman sketches that name the township's substantial men call them "farmer and stock-raiser" (Joseph L. Krupp, 440 acres on section 9; George Hassig, 212 acres on section 16; Michael Smith, 380 acres on section 17, who "also raises stock"), and the marsh — unfit, in Chapman's words, "for agricultural purposes, except for grazing and haying" — had been a stock-and-hay ground from the beginning, waiting on drainage. What replaced wheat's primacy here was the order the directory already names in 1875: corn fed to cattle and hogs on the upland farms, hay and pasture on the low ground, milk for the university and later for the creamery, and produce for the South Bend market. The county's censuses count the succession at their own level — wheat shrinking to a rotation crop by 2022 (2,510 acres in South Bend's reading) — and the townships' part in it is the subject of the three entries that follow: the stock order, the marsh, and the great farm.

Sources:

1. Chapman (1880), ch. XIII: the county's wheat standing and the 1879 figures; Harris Township chapter: the stock-raiser sketches (Krupp, Hassig, Smith) and the marsh's grazing-and-haying verdict, in the words quoted — read first-hand as above.
2. University of Notre Dame Archives, Brother Aidan's Extracts 238, "Farms at Notre Dame" (archives.nd.edu): St. Joseph's Farm's production figures as compiled there from the farm's own record (carried whole in the farm's entry below).
3. South Bend build, Farms & Agriculture: the county wheat arc whole, and the 2022 wheat acreage (pointed to).