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Connecticut's reputation was
built on farming
We live in a state that was shaped from the very beginning by
agriculture, by the demands of farming and the need to survive
based on agricultural production. The first thing every settler
coming to this state had to do was provide for food for the
future. When people first came to a new town they didn’t build
houses, they dug caves and they put little roofs over them. And,
they lived sometimes three years in a hole in the ground because
they had to get fields planted. It was a question of survival
from the beginning.
Connecticut’s reputation was built on farming for the first two
centuries of its life. And in the 19th and 20th
centuries, farming and industry went hand in hand in a lot of
ways. They supported each other, and they learned from each
other.
We’re now a time when, both in the culture and in our own lives,
farming seems to be less important than it was. Agribusiness in
the Midwest has made farming a factory business. But the
essence of what we were and much of what we are, our cultural
memory, is tied up with farming. I think this is a pivotal time
for Connecticut agricultural and for our sense of the past. If
we want to keep that connection with our agricultural
traditions, we’ll be able to do it because we work at it, not
because it’s going to happen without a lot of support.
Melding native and English farming practices
In the early 17th century, you would have seen a farming
practice that was in many ways unusual even to the people who
were doing it. The English had come to America and they learned
from the Indians; they’d learned a lot. Maize, Indian corn, was
a new product for them. And, planting it was new. The story we
learn in elementary school about the friendly Indians teaching
the Pilgrims how to plant corn – there’s a lot of truth in it.
Well … the friendly part, maybe not s o true. But, the fact
that English people were dependent upon Indians to learn how to
survive in this new climate is very true.
On a 17th-century farm, or a farmstead, you would find a kitchen
garden, which was pretty similar to what they had grown in
England. But, for the major crops, there would be a big corn
field. And, that corn field would be rows of corn about six
feet apart, hilled up. As the corn came up, the English people
learned to do something they never did before in their orderly
society. They would plant squash and beans right around the
corn hills. It was a perfect combination in terms of nutrition,
and also in terms of production efficiency. The squash took
care of the weeds. The beans used the corn stalks as poles, and
they would get really remarkable production, especially out of
soil that hadn’t been worked and overworked for centuries.
By the second half of the 17th century, the English had taken
what they had learned from the Indians and reincorporated it
back into their traditional practices.
John Winthrop Jr., who was a Connecticut governor and one of the
founders of England’s Royal Philosophical Society, wrote a
treatise on corn that he sent back to England so natural
philosophers over there could see what they were doing in
America. He said that when the English people plant corn now,
they use a plow. They plow furrows six feet apart and then they
come back and plow crosswise, six feet apart. And, at every
intersection they make a hill. Later, they come in and plow
around the hills.
What he describes is a farming practice that now combines the
efficiency of the plow with the production capacity and
efficiency of native farming practices. And, this is, I think,
one of the really interesting things about 17th-century
agriculture. There was exchange and experiment and practicing
going on. And, people learned to make the most of the resources
they found here.
Optimism in the 19th century
We’re very fortunate because at the turn of the 19th century,
the newly formed Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences was an
organization that was ambitious to promote improvements in
agriculture, industry and life using science. The organization
sent out a questionnaire to every town in Connecticut that
contained an incredibly long list of questions about each town’s
agricultural practices, their industry, their population, just
about everything you’d want to know.
In the tradition of Connecticut bureaucracies, the returns
trickled in over the next 20 years. We have in these collected
reports of what was going on in many Connecticut towns an
extensive account spanning two of the most critical decades of
transition in the history of the state.
What’s contained in these reports challenges some of the
assumptions historians have long held about Connecticut
agriculture. For example, historians have said that there was a
scarcity of fertile land in Connecticut and in the year 1800.
That may have been true, but the reports sent from the towns
don’t reflect that. They reflect a real optimism about
agriculture and a kind of admiration for the production capacity
of the land.
Connecticut luminary Timothy Dwight traveled around the state.
The records he left described Connecticut land as always
beautiful, sometimes magnificent. And, I think that little
capsule reflects the feeling of people in the state that they
had a pretty good thing.
Another long-standing assumption the town reports contradict is
this idea that Connecticut farmers weren’t very good stewards of
the land: that they practiced extensive, rather than intensive,
farming; that they would lay waste to a field rather than be
conscious of continuing to nourish it and keep its productive
capacity alive. What the reports show is that farmers in
Connecticut in the early 19th century were very concerned about
making the most of the land, and keeping the land productive and
fertile.
One of the great discussions you find among farmers – maybe
always, but certainly in the 19th century – is about manure.
Manure is big stuff in farming in the 19th century because
manure is black gold. It was the best way to keep land fertile.
One of the issues that was a constant concern in the 17th and
18th centuries was how do you collect enough manure to get it
out in the fields to keep your land growing? In the 19th
century, what you find in agricultural manuals is instructions
on how to shape your cow pens so that they slope toward the
middle so that the manure doesn’t drain out, and you get the
most manure per cow that you can put back in your fields.
Timothy Dwight, who was a very astute observer of Connecticut,
wrote about the practice in Middlesex County of collecting the
white fish when they came in May – I assume that was the shad,
probably – and putting them into the fields by the thousands and
plowing them back into the soil for fertilizer. He remarked
that the practice produced some of the finest crops that
Connecticut had seen. He also remarked that it filled the air
with such a fetter that it disgusted every traveler. So,
imagine riding through Middlesex County on your horse and coming
to a field of freshly manured shad – pretty exciting!
One of the questions of the Academy of Arts and Sciences reports
was: Do you use horse of oxen to pull your plows? And, in
almost all of Connecticut, and certainly by a big majority, the
animal of choice was the ox. There were very practical reasons
why this was true. Ox was cheaper to care for and they tended
to be healthier than horses. They had a longer useful life. In
addition, when an ox had outlived his carrying capacity, or his
pulling capacity, he was a market on the hoof. There was just
everything about the ox could be made into a product, either for
use or for sale: tallow, hides, they said good beef was made
from ox, and even the horns were useful. When the horse gets
old, you have an old horse. Maybe a pot of glue.
One place that was the exception to this dependence on oxen was
Litchfield County. There you found that many farms used
horses. Connecticut commentators said that was obviously a
wasteful affectation that had been picked up from the Dutch in
New York. And, for whatever reason, horses were used quite a
bit in Litchfield County, and it was atypical of the rest of the
state.
Industrialization and agriculture
In Connecticut, at the turn of the 19th century,
industrialization is off to a good start. And it happened in
lock step with agricultural development. Now, in Litchfield
County, hilly country, the new towns are the youngest towns in
Connecticut. There is also very good iron ore there, and
northwest Connecticut is the home of a very important iron
industry, from the standpoint of industrialization.
Of course, the thing you need to make iron is wood. So there was
a significant concern among farmers that the wood was being
stripped from the hillsides. If you add to the demands of the
iron furnaces for charcoal, the desire of New Yorkers to be
warmed by Connecticut wood in the winter, you can imagine the
Litchfield hills being filled with the sound of axes almost all
the time.
Very early, Connecticut farmers reacted to the potential for a
wood shortage by becoming significant supporters of the wood
lots. They managed them the way they managed other crops. They
managed them to make sure there would be a continuous supply.
They also, later, managed them for the market.
Another example of farmers as good conservators it that they
raised cattle and pigs and sheep for wool for market and were
very conscious of what land was good for grazing and what land
was good for tillage. They were quite selective in how they
made use of the land. They also went to a “fallow field” system
in which they would let fields rest for a couple of years and
they rotate crop production.
There are some really interesting consequences of this
relationship between industrial growth and agricultural
development in the early 19th century. One of the kinds of
predictable ones, but things we don’t think about, is the
creation of the Yankee peddler. John Greenleaf Whittier has
written a wonderful poem about farm boys who work in the farms,
spring and summer and fall in the 19th century. After the
harvest, they go down to New Haven and they sign up with a
merchant, get a case of goods and ship out to Norfolk or
Charleston. They spend their winters going around being
representatives for these peddlers, who were selling
Yankee-produced goods in the south. For many years this was a
common practice, and it’s one of the ways that the Yankee
peddler got a reputation for being a Connecticut creation.
Moving on to Vermont and Ohio
For people who owned land, Connecticut was a great place to be a
farmer in the 1800s. The problem was that people in
Connecticut, like people elsewhere in New England, took the
biblical injunction to be fruitful and multiply seriously. So,
they had a lot of kids. They farmed by day and procreated by
night. And for many of these children, it was clear that there
was not going to be enough land in Connecticut for them. You can
only divide up a farmstead to a certain point, and then it can
no longer support the people who own it. So, what you had
happening, even before the 1800s, is people in Connecticut
moving out to find new land and to literally transplant
Connecticut elsewhere.
Many people don’t know that when Vermont established itself and
the Vermont legislature declared it to be an independent entity,
their founding document called the state “New Connecticut.” The
reason for that is that there was a great deal of out-migration
from Connecticut up to Vermont. People went up the Connecticut
River, a natural kind of travel route. Men had served in Vermont
during the French and Indian War and in the Revolution. They
thought the farm land was really beautiful and had great
potential.
People like the Allen Brothers, Ethan and Ira, and his three
other brothers became land speculators in Vermont. The result
was that for the period immediately after the revolution and
into the early 1800s, many people who left Connecticut left for
Vermont. They founded towns like Windsor and Vernon: The list of
Connecticut-named towns renamed in Vermont, is large. Counties
were named after Connecticut counties. And, of course, many of
the early Vermont governors were born and raised in Connecticut.
Until the power of the Vermont winters really hit home, Vermont
was the place to go. The tide shifted and people then moved west
to Ohio’s Western Reserve and the firelands, the northern half
of Ohio. In the settlement that Connecticut made with the
United States giving up its colonial claims to a strip of land
all the way from the East Coast to the Pacific Ocean, it
reserved two large chunks of land in what became Ohio. The
northeast part of Ohio was the Western Reserve. That was land
that was to be given to Revolutionary War soldiers as bounties
for their service. The firelands, which is the land west of
Cleveland over towards Toledo, were reserved for citizens of
Norwalk, New London and Groton who had their homes destroyed
when Benedict Arnold came in 1781 and burned their towns down.
So, there was an incentive for Connecticut people to move into
the Western Reserve and the firelands. Moses Cleveland, who was
from Canterbury, made the exploratory journey out. It was the
surveying journey that staked out the land claims for
Connecticut. He named Cleveland for himself, came home, and
never went back. And many other sons of Connecticut families
went west. Ohio still prides itself on calling itself the
Western Reserve. When you go to towns like Hudson and Chagrin
Falls, you will see that they have “out-New Englanded” New
England. It’s like someone picked up a Connecticut town and
moved it 300, 400 miles west. It’s really quite astonishing how
successfully these children of Connecticut were able to
replicate the material culture of their former homes and their
former lives.
It would be nice to think that the Revolutionary War soldiers
were rewarded and they went west and took their claims. However,
as often happens after wars, speculators ended up buying many of
the soldiers’ claims soldiers for the lands in the Western
Reserve. They bought them at deeply discounted prices during
the high inflation after the war, and then they sold them to
settlers moving west. The original soldier claim-holders often
had to sell off at a deeply discounted price, and if they wanted
to go later, buy a claim back at a somewhat inflated price --
because business is business.
A farmer-friendly legislature
As farmers and new industrialists are both benefiting and
growing in the new economy of the early 19th century, there’s an
active political change that, in the long run, gives farmers a
very disproportionate influence on the state legislature –
something that continued all the way to 1965.
The political change came about as a result of the Constitution
of 1818. That, in itself, is unique, because Connecticut, up
until the year 1818, still existed under the colonial charter it
had in 1662. While other states after the Revolution had
scurried around to make a constitution for a free nation,
Connecticut said, “We’ve been doing this for a hundred years
already; we’ll just keep what we got.” They changed “King” to
“United States” and kept going.
But, in 1818, for a number of reasons, they called a
constitutional convention. One of the consequences of the
constitution had significant future import for agricultural
interests in the state. This was a change made to the system of
representation in the Connecticut General Assembly. What the
constitution of 1818 said was: A town existing in 1818 can send
two representatives to the Assembly, but any new towns will only
be able to send one – unless the Assembly decides otherwise.
This didn’t have any immediately startling consequences. But,
if you flash forward 70 or 80 years, you have this situation
where rapidly urbanizing and industrializing cities have half
the representation of earlier and still small towns. This
created a legislature that was largely filled by prosperous
farmers and largely served the interests of rural land owners.
It was a political boon for Connecticut farmers that lasted well
into the 20th century.
While this may have worked to the benefit of agriculture during
this period, it certainly made adapting to a changing,
urbanizing society very difficult for the state. |
