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 remembered the first binder brought into Olive Township. The 1954 census counts the completed revolution and the remnant it left. Tractors on farms: 2,279 in 1950 and 2,939 in 1954, reported by 1,634 and then 1,688 of the county's farms — of the 1954 machines, 2,374 were wheel tractors other than garden tractors, 456 were garden tractors, and the table counts crawler tractors besides, the drainage and muck country's heavy tool. Motortrucks numbered 1,182 on 968 farms; automobiles, 2,146 on 1,763 farms. The harvesting line had mechanized in the same five-year stride: grain combines from 497 to 717, corn pickers from 614 to 902, pick-up hay balers from 136 to 256, field forage harvesters from 100 to 136 — the baler and the forage harvester being the dairy and livestock county's own machines.

Against this stands the horse account, closing: horses and mules on farms, 927 head on 453 farms in 1950; 434 head on 218 farms in 1954. The farm home mechanized with the farm: electricity reached 1,928 of the county's farms by the 1954 count, telephones 1,608, piped running water 1,788, television sets 1,402, home freezers 1,197. And the count carries the change's other face — 1,045 operators reported working off their farms in 1954, 895 of them 100 days or more, and for 696 farm families the other income of the family exceeded the value of farm products sold: the part-time, factory-wage farm, of a county whose plants are told in the Businesses and Industrial sections, was already a normal form of St. Joseph County farming by 1954. The tractor counts by later census years, and the machines' makers — including this county's own plow works — are taken up in the Tractors leg of this history; here the census line stands: in four years the county added 660 tractors and buried half its horses.

Sources:

1. Timothy E. Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907), Ivins sketch — the sickle, the cradle, and the first binder in Olive Township in one family's memory.
2. U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1954 Census of Agriculture, Vol. I, Part 4 (Indiana), County Table 5 — specified facilities and equipment for 1954 and 1950 (tractors by kind, motortrucks, automobiles, grain combines, corn pickers, pick-up hay balers, field forage harvesters, milking machines, electricity, telephone, piped running water, television sets, home freezers) and off-farm work and other income; the facilities and equipment figures are the census's sample-based county estimates, as its table states.
3. U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1954 Census of Agriculture, Vol. I, Part 4 (Indiana), County Table 7, Part 1 — horses and/or mules: 453 farms and 927 head in 1950; 218 farms and 434 head in 1954.