River, Reaper, and Rail: Agriculture and Identity in Ohio's Mad River Valley, 1795–1885 by Timothy H. H. Thoresen (review)

During upheavals, many people yearn for constancy. Some point to the countryside, believing that tradition insulates it from change. Historians have debunked this illusion. The countryside, especially in modernity, has been no less dynamic than the city. For example, American farmers were among the first to adopt the automobile in the early twentieth century. That century witnessed a series of agricultural revolutions as the natural and social sciences and technology developed and farmers adopted new crop varieties, livestock breeds, fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, machines, and business models, thereby illustrating the countryside's affinity for modification and redefinition.

In River, Reaper, and Rail, Thoresen reinforces this understanding, focusing on Champaign County, Ohio, where changes rippled through systems of land tenure, human populations, technology, transportation, markets, economics, and farmers' perceptions of themselves and their role in Ohio and the United States between 1795 and 1885. The book begins by surveying Champaign County's geology. Little is mentioned about the first humans in the region because they are peripheral to this history, which establishes European settlements in the late eighteenth century. Without easy access to markets, these migrants practiced subsistence by planting Amerindian corn, squash, and potatoes. Supplying many calories and nutrients per acre, the Andean potato was essential to this strategy. Ohio's first Europeans, originating in northern Europe, where the potato was a staple, brought a subsistence mentality to this new land even as they hoped to profit from a cash crop. From this rudimentary start, Thoresen traces the development of roads, canals, and railroads that integrated Champaign County into American and global markets. Farmers took advantage of markets by transitioning from potatoes and other subsistence crops to wheat. They used old technologies like the wooden plow, sickle, and scythe and adopted new ones such as castiron and steel plows, the cradle, and the reaper to accommodate wheat. These changes occurred together, each reinforcing the others to create and refine Champaign County's agrarian economy.

This depiction, skillful in evoking agriculture's nineteenth-century dynamism, risks distorting the county's economy by inflating wheat's importance. Even in its heyday around the mid-nineteenth century, wheat was second to corn, which had since prehistory been Ohio's leading cultigen, making possible a livestock industry founded on hogs and, in the short term, beef cattle and a liquor industry immersed in whiskey. Corn was thus more important than wheat to the market, entering it as meat and whiskey. Pork, more than wheat or any small grain, defined Champaign County's agriculture during the nineteenth century. By century's end, wheat was in decline as Ohio could not compete with the West, and during the twentieth century a corn-soybean rotation came to monopolize the county's croplands. Today Champaign County produces almost no wheat. Thoresen does not ignore corn, though he might have emphasized that it, more than wheat, informed the changes that swept through the county's agriculture during the nineteenth century.

As a case study, River, Reaper, and Rail enriches an understanding of history, economics, and technological diffusion. As such, it is relevant to the literature that examines these developments. The book's interdisciplinary approach accentuates the trend toward scholarship that reaches multiple audiences by connecting rather than atomizing insights. By emphasizing connections, this study links events, people, and perspectives to historical developments. The focus on Champaign County may establish a foundation upon which others might build a larger structure, perhaps by treating the county as part of the corn-hog complex that situated it and the rest of western Ohio within the Midwest. Alternatively, historians may expand treatment beyond the nineteenth century to trace soybeans' ascent as a complement to corn in Champaign County and elsewhere...