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 openings stood the timbered land; west and south of the townsite lay the open prairies, Terre Coupee and Harris prairies chief among them — of their soil the state survey of 1916 wrote that no soil in either county it covered was more prized: easily tilled, stoneless, black with the humus of centuries of grass; and in the southwest, along the young Kankakee, lay marsh that no plow could touch until it was drained. Settlement ran along the Michigan Road, completed in 1832, but Quinn's survey records that "the productive soil of the prairie induced many to leave the much traveled thoroughfare and to settle there, where the soil was more easily cultivated and where luxuriant grass afforded excellent grazing to their horses and cattle." The first crops were the family's own demands, in Quinn's order: "Corn, wheat and potatoes were the leading crops.

Corn was grown usually two years in succession, then followed by wheat. Often corn was the principal crop and was grown continuously for years without any system of rotation." The county history of 1880, looking back over the county's first fifty years, boasts — and the boast is the earliest crop judgment the record holds — that there had "not been a total failure of crops, and but one total failure of the wheat crop. In 1835, in the early part of June, when wheat was in full bloom, there came a heavy frost which totally destroyed the crop." The prairies themselves were wetter than their later fame suggests: within living memory of the 1916 survey, Terre Coupee and Harris prairies "were covered in whole or in part with water for much of the year," and draining the low prairie was the work of the same generation that drained the marsh.

What the prairie produced once it was broken is stated in the frame entry above: by 1879 the county threshed over 800,000 bushels each of wheat and corn. The peoples who farmed this ground before 1830, and the clearings and portage that preceded the farm, are told in the Land and Tribes section of this history; the farm record begins with the furrow.

Sources:

1. E. J. Quinn, "Soil Survey of LaPorte, St. Joseph, and Bartholomew Counties" (1916) — the prairie settlement off the Michigan Road, the first crops and their order, corn grown continuously, the Carrington sandy loam of Terre Coupee and Harris prairies, and the prairies' former water cover.
2. Chas. C. Chapman & Co., History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1880), chapter XIII — the fifty-year record of crop failures and the June 1835 frost that destroyed the wheat in bloom.