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 Kankakee valley, the filled beds of the little glacial lakes. Undrained it was worth, in Quinn's words, "no value except for the little hay and pasturage they furnished, but now large yields of cabbage, onions, celery and peppermint are derived from them. The selling price of such lands is as high as $150 per acre" — the top of the county's land market in 1916. The federal Farmers' Bulletin on muck-land farms, studying 140 of them across northern Indiana and southern Michigan in 1914–15, sorted the whole district's muck farming into four types — celery, onion, peppermint, and grain-and-stock — and this county carried all four.

Peppermint was its glory. The federal bulletins trace the culture from Wayne County, New York, to a first plantation in St. Joseph County, Michigan, in 1835 — the Michigan county of the same name, not this one — and thence into northern Indiana; Howard's county history, telling it through a grower, says it was introduced into Michigan about 1845 by the Wolf Brothers and spread over northern Indiana — the two accounts are printed as they stand. What is documented here, on this ground, is dated 1889: Jerry R. Woodward, raised on a Michigan peppermint farm, came to St. Joseph County, Indiana, that year and put three hundred acres into peppermint with his brothers, then bought a second three-hundred-acre farm "principally devoted to the raising of peppermint," doing his own distilling and placing the oil on the market himself.

Quinn, writing in 1916, calls it plainly: "The mint industry has become one of great moment in this county within the last few years. On the muck soil it may be grown for six or seven years in succession without any rotation," the roots set in shallow furrows in ground plowed the fall before, the herb mowed with the scythe in August or September, dried, and "hauled to the distillery"; oil yielded 12 to 50 pounds to the acre, at prices that ran from 75 cents a pound in 1899 to $4.75 in the scarce year 1902, and the survey prints a photograph captioned simply "Mint Farm, St. Joseph County." The census puts the industry's size on paper: in 1949, 108 farms harvested mint for oil on 4,460 acres and made 109,844 pounds of oil; in 1954, 54 farms on 2,207 acres made 70,232 pounds.

The line runs to the present on the same ground: Douglas Matthys of western St. Joseph County is a fourth-generation mint grower whose great-grandfather began mint at the same location in the 1930s, on an operation grown to nearly 1,000 acres of mint; Purdue's horticulture specialists place Indiana's mint in six counties — Jasper, LaPorte, Porter, Pulaski, St. Joseph and Starke — "thanks to muck soil and black sand," with Indiana ranking second in the nation in spearmint and fourth in peppermint. The marsh the dredges emptied is still paying its dividend, in the most concentrated form Indiana agriculture knows: oil by the pound.

Sources:

1. E. J. Quinn, "Soil Survey of LaPorte, St. Joseph, and Bartholomew Counties" (1916), "Muck" and "Agricultural Conditions" — muck's distribution and depth, the crops derived from it, the $150-an-acre price, and the mint industry account with its planting, harvest, distillery, yields, and 1899 and 1902 oil prices.
2. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Farmers' Bulletin 761, H. R. Smalley, "Management of Muck-Land Farms in Northern Indiana and Southern Michigan" (1916) — the four muck farming types (celery, onion, peppermint, grain-and-stock) across the district, from a study of 140 muck farms.
3. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Farmers' Bulletins 694 (1915) and 1555 (1929) — commercial mint culture from Wayne County, New York, the 1835 plantation in St. Joseph County, Michigan, and its extension into northern Indiana.
4. Timothy E. Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907), sketch of Jerry R. Woodward — peppermint's introduction into Michigan about 1845 by the Wolf Brothers as the biography gives it; Woodward's 1889 arrival, his two 300-acre peppermint farms in this county, and his own distilling.
5. U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1954 Census of Agriculture, Vol. I, Part 4 (Indiana), County Table 9, Part 3 — mint harvested for oil: 108 farms, 4,460 acres, 109,844 pounds of oil in 1949; 54 farms, 2,207 acres, 70,232 pounds in 1954.
6. Farm World (farmworldonline.com), report on Indiana mint growing — Douglas Matthys, fourth-generation grower in western St. Joseph County, the family in mint at the same location since the 1930s, nearly 1,000 acres; Purdue specialist Petrus Langenhoven on the six-county concentration, the muck soil and black sand, and Indiana's national ranks in spearmint and peppermint.