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Farms & Crops · The county that fed the city
South Bend was platted on a river bend in a county of prairie, oak opening, and marsh, and for its first century the city's life ran on what that county could grow. The prairies — Terre Coupee and Harris above all — were broken to corn and wheat within a decade of the county's organization in 1830; the marshes along the Kankakee, in the county's southwest, waited two generations for the steam dredge, then became the richest soil in the county and the seat of a mint industry that made this ground, for a time, one of the peppermint addresses of the world. The censuses of agriculture count the result at printed values: 2,408 farms on 221,456 acres in 1950, and 547 farms on 153,034 acres in 2022 — fewer farms, larger farms, and a sales value, $162,244,000 in 2022, that the wheat county of 1880 could not have imagined. What follows is that record: the crops in their order, the water let off the land, the institutions the farmers built, the market where the county still sells to the city face to face, and the acres that remain.
One frame governs everything in this section. The farm record is a county record: the censuses of agriculture count St. Joseph County whole, and no separate farm count for the city of South Bend exists or is implied anywhere below. Mishawaka's farm fringe is county ground and is counted in the county figures as the censuses count it; the institutions and the market sat in South Bend because the county seat and the buyers were there. Where the record gives a number, the number is printed with its census year; where it does not, the gap is named rather than filled.
The county in numbers: the census frame
1879 — 2022
The benchmarks, as each count states them: The county history of 1880 opens its agriculture chapter with the threshed product of 1879 — 811,037 bushels of wheat, 829,554 bushels of corn, 143,791 bushels of oats — but prints no…
The prairie farms and the first crops
1830s — 1880
Corn first, then wheat, on grass that had never felt a plow: The ground the settlers of 1830 took up was of three kinds, and the order in which they farmed it is the order of this whole section. Along the river and in the oak…
The wheat era and its passing
1879 — 2022
The first cash crop, outlasted by everything it paid for: In 1879 wheat stood where it had stood since the prairies were broken — level with corn at the head of the county's product, 811,037 bushels threshed against corn's…
The corn-and-livestock order
1949 — 2022
Corn fed to animals on the place, then corn and beans sold off it: The county the 1954 census counted in full was a corn-and-livestock county of the classic northern-Indiana kind. Corn for all purposes stood on 60,563 acres in…
Draining the wet prairies and the Kankakee edge
1858 — 1937
The county's second founding was done with dredges: West and south of South Bend the young Kankakee spread through a marsh that reached from just southwest of the city to the LaPorte County line, and the low prairies ponded water…
The muck farms and the mint
1889 — 2026
The drained marsh grew the county's most valuable crop by the pound: Muck — black, decomposed vegetable matter, six inches to three feet deep over sand or clay — lies in nearly every township of the county and thick along the…
Truck crops: onions, celery, cucumbers, and potatoes
1909 — 2022
The intensive ring that fed two growing cities: Between the grain townships and the city tables lay the truck farms, and Quinn's 1916 survey maps them by soil: "On the sandy soil, potatoes, melons and small fruits are the…
The dairy county
1909 — 2022
For two generations the county's second industry was milk: Quinn's survey states the standing without qualification: "This county ranks among the first in the State in the number of milch cows and the production of milk. In 1909…
Orchards and small fruit
1892 — 2022
An industry the county histories name, the censuses watched disappear: The apple entered the county's commercial record as a named man's work: Howard's 1907 biographies describe George W. Brunson as "one of the first men to…
Horses to tractors: the mechanization of the county
1907 — 1954
One lifetime holds the whole change: Howard's 1907 biographies preserve the change in a single family's memory: an Olive Township farmer who "used the old cradle to cut the grain," had seen his father cut grain with a sickle, and…
The county fair: societies, grounds, and the 4-H fair
1841 — 2026
Three fairs on four grounds, and the fourth still running: The fair begins with the county's first agricultural society, organized under the act of February 19, 1838: notice in the South Bend Free Press , an organizing meeting on…
The farmers' institutions: Grange, institutes, insurance, bureau, extension
1877 — present
The county organized itself as thoroughly as it farmed: Beside the fair's societies, the county's farmers built a full set of institutions of their own, and Howard's 1907 volume inventories them. The Farmers' Mutual Fire…
The South Bend Farmer's Market
1911 — present
The county still sells to the city face to face, in the market's second century: South Bend's farmer's market opened in 1911 beside the Colfax Street bridge, in the market histories' account — a year-round market, three days a…
The suburban conversion: farmland against the suburbs
1907 — 2022
The same county, read in acres instead of people: The Population section of this history tells the county's twentieth century as a movement of people — the city's share of the county falling from two-thirds in 1920 to under 38…
The nursery and greenhouse line
1949 — 2022
The one specialty that never left: Every other specialty in this record — wheat, cream, orchard fruit, even mint at its 1949 size — contracted. The county's trade in living plants did not. The 1954 census enumerated it as its own…
What farms remain, and what they grow
2022 — 2026
The count as it stands: The 2022 Census of Agriculture, the latest completed count, gives the county 547 farms on 153,034 acres, an average of 280 acres, with 141,832 acres of cropland, 1,262 of pastureland, 4,290 of woodland…