From Pioneering to Persevering: Family Farming in Indiana to 1880 (review)

Paul Salstrom, a leading figure among Appalachian historians, turns his attention to Indiana agriculture in the nineteenth century, and his work offers a number of important insights and information. The question that drives From Pioneering to Persevering is "why family farming was so economically viable in early Indiana" (xii). Salstrom's answer is that Hoosier farmers captured a significant portion of the East Coast sale price of corn, the states' key commodity. Salstrom roots that success in the railroad's inability to establish monopolies in transportation, unlike further west. Salstrom further argues that it would not be until the invention of a mechanical harvester for corn that Hoosier family farms would be at risk and thus cease to persevere, dating that occurrence to the post-World War II period.

The relationship between the earlier reason for perseverance and the final cause of decline is not self-evident and is never explored, because the book itself ends in 1880, at the peak of what Salstrom calls family-farm perseverance in Indiana. To pin that decline on the mechanical harvester glosses over the key role of New Deal agricultural policy in paving the way for the adoption of harvesters, as well as the impact of hybrid corn and the chemical revolution in agriculture in increasing yields in the post-World War II era. It also ignores the rise of a culture of consumption in the twentieth century, with its desire for larger marketable surpluses that may have driven the adoption of mechanical reapers, chemicals, and hybrids. Moreover, in 1880 Indiana agriculture was in the midst of change. By 1890, the Farmer's Mutual Benefit Association and other pre-Populist organizations would gain a foothold in Indiana (although the lack of a railroad monopoly would be one reason Populism never really takes off), following in the tracks of an even more widespread, albeit short-lived, success of the Grange in the 1870s. These movements underscore the fact that some Hoosiers believed the family farm was at risk. By 1880, widespread drainage of Indiana's wet prairies was underway, requiring serious capital investment that would make the traditional family farm less viable. Finally, good census figures on farm tenantry become available for 1880, and strong regional variation within the state for tenantry makes a simple formulation of the family farm suspect, although one of the strengths of the book is its recognition of such regional differences.

Both of Salstrom's key arguments are based on the secondary literature and not on extensive research in the primary sources. Nearly a quarter of the book is devoted to Native American and French agriculture, which provides a useful contrast to the Anglo-American family farm, but it is not worthy of the extensive attention. Thus, the book reads more like a synthesis than a monograph, even as it seeks to answer questions better suited for a monograph. At 126 pages of text, excluding notes, the book just seems too short to accomplish much. It does not provide a solid account for academic readers because it is not rooted in primary sources and fails to give a full accounting of the eventual decline of the family farm. For me and for other experts in Indiana agriculture, the time spent reading it is valuable, but for historians working on other states' agricultural pasts, the model produced is not fleshed out convincingly enough to demand their attention. For the reading public, the book will provide a decent overview of Indiana agriculture to 1880, but, with its tantalizing arguments about the later period, it will leave them wishing for more.