The Filson’s Agriculture-Related Collections: The Filson Down on the Farm

FALL 2009 67 O ver its 125 years, The Filson has collected a vast number of books, manuscripts, photographs, and artifacts relating to Kentucky and Ohio Valley history. Various subjects are represented. Best known for its pioneer, antebellum, and Civil War collections, The Filson also has excellent material regarding agricultural history. Land provided the major incentive for settlers who pushed across the Appalachian Mountains into the Ohio Valley in the eighteenth century. As the population along the eastern seaboard rose, land became increasingly precious. Colonists desired land for various reasons, but most wanted it to farm. The pressures of population and the decreasing fertility of land east of the mountains created a demand for the millions of acres in the first American West. Migrants could turn the forests and prairies of the Ohio Valley into productive farms, raising crops and livestock for the family table and for sale. Both wealthy plantation owners and poor tenant farmers believed that Kentucky, and soon the rest of the Ohio Valley, was a land of milk and honey. The diaries, letters, and reports of the earliest pioneers regularly featured descriptions of the land and its potential. John Filson’s The Discovery, Settlement, and Present State of Kentucke (1784), essentially a promotional tract touting Kentucky as the Eden of the West, became an international bestseller. Once settlement started in the mid-1770s, a veritable land rush ensued, and tens of thousands of settlers—the vast majority of them farmers—swarmed into Kentucky and soon Tennessee, and later Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Native-born Americans toiled in the fields beside immigrants from Germany, Ireland, and other countries. Hundreds of thousands of enslaved African Americans worked the fields of their masters and sometimes a patch of land for themselves. Many slaves were talented stockmen who assisted with the breeding, raising, and showing of livestock. Both before and after the end of slavery, blacks were an integral part of Kentucky’s horse racing industry, especially as jockeys and grooms. Inthenineteenthcentury,asthelandbecamemoresettledandestablishedfarms dotted much of the state, interest in Kentucky agriculture did not wane. Planters The Filson’s AgricultureRelated Collections or The Filson Down on the Farm THE FILSON’S AGRICULTURE-RELATED COLLECTIONS 68 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY and farmers formed agricultural societies devoted to improving farming methods and products. Science and mechanization became important agricultural concerns. Farmers established cooperatives and entrepreneurs profited from farm-related businesses. Local, state, and eventually the federal government played a growing role in the agricultural life of the region, from inspection to price supports. To the present day, the region’s economy remains significantly agricultural. The centrality of farming in the Ohio Valley prompted many people and organizations to write, publish, and otherwise document the history of agriculture in the Ohio Valley. A review of The Filson’s agricultural collections identifies numerous manuscripts, books, pamphlets, prints, photographs, and ephemera documenting this history. The majority of collections relate to Kentucky but researchers can find information regarding the wider Ohio Valley region and the South. Whether through the Cumberland Gap or down the Ohio River, settlers flooded first into Kentucky and later into the rest of the region. It might have been Filson’s Kentucke that brought them or a letter circulated in the neighborhood. Thomas Perkins’s 1785 letter to a friend in Massachusetts touting this new-found Eden might have served as just such a catalyst. “I believe,” wrote Perkins, “it is universally agreed by every one who has seen this Country—and we have Inhabitants from almost every part of the world—that there is no place superior to it in the fertility of its Soil—It produces excellent Corn, Tobacco, wheat and other small grain—in short I know of nothing that has been attempted, what grows here very well.” One of the newcomers , Barthelemi Tardiveau, hailed from France. In 1788 and 1789, he wrote a series of letters to J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, author of the famed Letters of an American Farmer (1787), discussing a variety of topics, including agriculture.1 Many Kentucky farmers tracked and attempted to improve their crop yields. Joseph Hornsby, of Shelby County, Kentucky, kept detailed records in his daily diary for 1798 to...