The Emergence of Prosperous Farmers and Businessmen in Nineteenth-Century Kalamazoo County, Michigan

An early version of this paper was presented at the 2007 Annual Meeting of the Agricultural History Society, Iowa State University. We are indebted to the professional staffs of the Western Michigan University Archives and Regional History Collections and the Kalamazoo County Probate Court for their expertise and kindness, especially the late Dr. Andrew Carlson and Pam Jobin. We benefited greatly from the critiques by reviewers (known and unknown) of early drafts of this paper, and we thank Dr. Hans Stolle and Greg Andersen for their cartography. THE MICHIGAN HISTORICAL REVIEW 37:2 (Fall 2011): 53-78©2011 by Central Michigan University. ISSN 0890-1686 All Rights Reserved. The Emergence of Prosperous Farmers and Businessmen in Nineteenth-Century Kalamazoo County, Michigan by John T. Houdek and Charles F. Heller, Jr. Farming dominated economic activity in the southern part of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula during much of the nineteenth century. Most farms were operated by families and were modest in size, averaging eighty to one hundred acres. However, sprinkled among these farms in every county were big agricultural operations, commonly three-to-five times larger than the average farm. Other than their size, big farms usually resembled small ones: they were operated by families engaged in general agriculture. Historians know about the early existence of such large farms in southern Michigan in the nineteenth century. These farms were recorded in the manuscripts of each federal decennial census and in the accounts of some prosperous farmers preserved in the first county histories. To our knowledge, however, there are no systematic studies of such farms and their operators in southern Michigan, nor for that matter in any area known to us. In addition, we have searched in vain for studies of what prosperous farmers did with the profits gained from their agricultural efforts. Although this information can be found for a few wealthy farmers, individual cases do not sufficiently clarify the roles played by this distinctive group. Were they more than just large ordinary farmers? How were they connected to their surrounding rural and urban communities? Our approach to these questions was to study a group of objectively defined big farms drawn from one year, 1870, in one area of Michigan, Kalamazoo County. By 1830 the survey of land in southern Michigan was nearing completion and land offices began to open. The stage was set for the 54 The Michigan Historical Review land boom that would peak in 1835-1836. At that time, farming was still the main occupation in the northern states, even in New England and the mid-Atlantic states where commerce and manufacturing were growing rapidly. Agriculture was still embedded in the culture of many rural areas, but the commercial aspect of farming was moving to the forefront. Income was increasingly important to farmers, and they were becoming more aware of the value of their crops as both domestic and overseas markets for agricultural products steadily expanded. Most arable land in western New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio had already been settled, but the demand for farmland continued to grow.1 With land prices in settled regions rising, people who lived in rural areas—particularly residents of New York and New England—sought opportunities in places like southern Michigan. These were usually people from established farming communities, many of whom had been successful back home. Some of them gave a high priority to traditional agrarian values, and they were not overly concerned that marketing opportunities in southern Michigan and other western areas were likely to be marginal for some time. Another way of looking at people moving into newly settled areas, however, is to see them as willing to accept drawbacks such as limited markets for their crops, but only for a brief time. These settlers assumed they would be laying the groundwork for a successful market economy (as well as for a strong community), and so they reluctantly accepted the need to forgo immediate income while shouldering the costs of developing new farms in the hope of future opportunities and eventual prosperity. Many of those who went west hoped to be in on the ground floor as the area developed. There were many young people from farm families who had...