When spring awakens the hibernating farms of Southern Illinois, look closely. A second force stirs amidst green pastures and black fields. Here live the imaginary figures of men in wide-brimmed hats and dungarees and women in flowing calico skirts and children in dusty coveralls who run barefoot over gardens.
They’re the hardy spirits of farm families who began to reap Williamson County’s harvests more than 150 years ago. Enduring pioneers, they hailed from Kentucky, Tennessee, the Carolinas, and as far away as Europe.
Arriving in wagons filled with cooking utensils and a few worldly possessions, they discovered a land of diversity. Swaying prairies adjoined virgin forests. Flowing creeks and fertile soil completed the landscape.
“When our fathers came here, they found grass higher than their heads, and for 20 years it was the best range that man ever saw, until the farmers stopped the hunters from burning the woods. When this was done, the leaves killed the grass, and up came the bushes,” wrote Milo Erwin in his 1876 edition of “Williamson County, Illinois,” the region’s first history book.
Abundant vegetation yielded thyme and savory for broth, medicinal herbs, wildflowers and golden apples. By 1810 the buffalo herds had disappeared. But other wild game prospered in the woods and on the grasslands.
“Two-thirds of the early settlers followed the occupation of hunting. They cultivated small patches of corn for bread. The other third followed farming. While eight acres was a large farm, they made good livings and had something to give their children,” Erwin wrote.
Trees were felled and log cabins constructed. Gradually pioneer families began to plant more than just the crops necessary to sustain livestock and family members.
Land, in 1836, could be purchased for $2.50 an acre from the U.S. government. “The price of government land was afterwards reduced to $1.25 an acre,” wrote David Ruffin Harrison prior to his death in 1911.
“The first settlers raised a great amount of cotton for clothing,” Erwin recorded. “It was the main crop until 1840, when our people commenced to raise tobacco as a money crop.
Tobacco was a profitable cash crop and Williamson County often led the state in production.
In those days, “Marion was often filled with tobacco teams and loaded wagons at harvest time. As many as 50 loaded tobacco wagons have been counted at one time on the public square waiting to be unloaded,” a Marion Weekly Leader newspaper reporter wrote. Census records report that 1,150,000 pounds of tobacco were produced in Williamson County in 1870.
Shortly after the turn of the century, tobacco died out as a cash crop in this area.
The bottom fell out of the area’s cotton market with the close of the Civil War. By then, the South could once again devote her human resources and land to the cultivation of the cotton crop best suited to her climate.
It was probably inevitable that cotton and tobacco crops would be replaced by others, since they sapped Williamson County’s soil of much-needed nutrients.
By the late 1800s, farmers turned their attention to the cultivation of grasses, clover, grains and livestock. And so it was when Williamson County farmer Tom Van Dyke began farming land near Stonefort.
“Tom farmed with horses, mules, and horse-drawn equipment. When you’re farming with horses alone, there isn’t much chance for farming large acreage. With a horse-drawn, one-bottom plow you’re lucky if you can plow two acres in a 10-hour day. And that’s a lot of labor in the field”’ explains the late Van Dyke’s grandson, Alan McCabe.
He is a retired agriculture teacher who owns the Van Dyke land and with wife Wanda raises a herd of registered Black Angus cattle there.
Like most general farmers of the day, Van Dyke aimed for maximum production on minimal land. He raised apples, peaches, cattle, dairy cows, hogs chickens, sheep and grain for livestock.
“The farm family, a nearly self-sufficient entity, paid little for food. To obtain the food or clothing that they could not produce on the farm, they sold or traded chickens, eggs, vegetables, butter, cream, or cowhides,” Donald F. Tingley wrote in his book “The Structuring of a State: The History of Illinois 1899-1928.”
Horses and mules powered farming equipment well into the 1940s. It was imperative the animals receive the best of care. Consequently, farmers spent much of their time growing grain to feed the animals. Surplus grain was ground into meal and flour and became the families’ breads, biscuits, and cakes.
As area coal mines opened, men were provided with an additional source of income. But the work proved unsteady. During the Depression many mines were forced to close.
Miners without work “got out and bought five, 10 and 20 acres when they could. The mines didn’t work much, just like today, and so those people could eat if they had some land,” explains Mike Plumer, University of Illinois Cooperative Extension Service Advisor.
Orchard production grew to become a bright spot in the county by the 1920s and 30s. A “tremendous” number of fruit trees were successfully harvested by Williamson County farmers, Plumer said.
At the same time, farmers concentrated on raising top-grade poultry, cattle, and hogs and began keeping records on livestock production.
Many Williamson County farmers bought their first tractor in the 1940s, a welcome tool that extended crop yields.
Recalling the ease of plowing with his first tractor, retired Marion farmer Ed Alsip said: “Lord ‘a Mercy. In an hour’s time you could plow more than you could in three days with a team pullin’ two 16- inch plows.”
When rationing began during World War II, Alsip says farmers found themselves appealing for increased fuel and tire allotments to keep their machinery in working order and in the fields.
Mechanization fostered another farming trend. Able to cover more ground, farmers turned to new cash crops: corn and soybeans.
Despite the introduction of mechanization, those returning to Williamson County’s farms after World War II found farming no longer fulfilling. While the war effort raised the nation from the depths of the Depression, life on the farm seemed backward to some. Only a few farm homes had electricity and indoor plumbing was still not common. Televisions and radios were luxuries when they became available.
Those who would have been the next generation of farm families ”didn’t want to share in the agrarian lifestyle,” Plumer explained. “It was too primitive and to upgrade to the level they were used to in the cities (they’d visited) you had to have money to spend. The agrarian lifestyle wasn’t geared that much to money.”
In what became a national post-war trend, the lure of urban life and steady industrial jobs called the children of area farmers.
Take Alan McCabe’s family. One of six sons born to a Williamson County farmer, McCabe was the only son immediately interested in working the family homestead. He purchased his grandfather Van Dyke’s farm and his father’s adjoining farm to create a 200-acre grassland farm.
Explaining a path chosen by several Williamson County farmers, McCabe says, “Williamson County is predominantly part-time farm-based agriculture.” Farmers here are likely to practice ministry, work as teachers, coal miners, auto mechanics, and carpenters, too. On a national level, less than two percent of the population farms full-time, McCabe says. Farmers in his grandfather’s era raised enough food to feed and average of eight people. Today’s farmer feeds 75, he says.
“Three farms adjoining me are all for sale because there is no family to continue (farming),” says McCabe, a successful but childless farmer facing the same dilemma.
There is no doubt that farming demands much from farm families. Many bank on profitable corn and soybean yields to survive. And to succeed at this, a full time farmer “in season works 130 hours a week from 5:00 a.m. to 11:00 P.M.,” Plumer explains.
Small wonder the sons and daughters of farmers are drawn to professions less tied to weather, changing markets and government regulation.
In what Plumer calls a growing movement, 5 to 20 acre plots of rural land are increasingly being purchased by people who have no intention of farming.
This segment of the population comprises 40 percent of Williamson County’s land owners. They view life on “farmettes” or “ranchettes,” as ag experts have dubbed these mini-farms, to be environmentally superior.
The presence of rural homeowners sometimes proves thorny for farmers working adjoining fields. Residential land, valued at $2,000 per acre, can drive up the cost of nearby farm land, which sells for $500 to $600 an acre, Plumer said. And farmers have to time their activities, such as plowing, cultivating, and spraying chemicals, so as not to offend nearby homeowners.
The farming buzzword for the 1990s is LISA. Translated, it means Low Input Sustainable Agriculture. In other words, organic farming or farming without pesticides, fertilizers and chemicals. Achievable only in theory, organic farming will have to be modified to feed our nation and the world, Plumer said.
(By Paula Davenport, printed in 1989 Sesquicentennial History, WCHS)