settlers into the Ohio Valley. At the northern end of Ohio, by contrast, Connecticut’s Western Reserve was an entry point for New England Yankees, a gateway that only widened with the completion of the Erie Canal. Southerner and Yankee would coexist and vie for ascendency in the midcontinent, finding expression in debates over slavery, internal improvements, and education (Power 1953; Gray 1996).
Despite the tension and conflict between northerner and southerner in the region, neither triumphed; the Midwest was something new. In the language of the mid-nineteenth century, inhabitants of the Old Northwest became westerners. They were the products of both North and South as well as the many cultures of Northern Europe, the British Isles, Scandinavia, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, forming a region dedicated to republican government and market production (Etcheson 1996).
Long before there was a United States, however, Europeans looked to the region as a granary. French settlers in Louisiana, dedicated to sugar cane production and processing, looked northward for food. They sent colonists north along the Mississippi and its tributaries, establishing an agricultural colony called the Illinois Country that provided food and fiber crops to the plantations in the sugar parishes and to the residents of New Orleans. Settlers at Kaskaskia, Ste. Genevieve, and other points lived in villages, practicing long-lot agriculture as they had in France (Ekberg 1998).
Cultural geographer John C. Hudson claimed that multiple cultural hearths contributed to the swath of the Midwest that earned the moniker “Corn Belt” due to the importance of raising corn primarily for livestock as well as for the market. The location of Hudson’s hearths include the Scioto and Miami River Valleys of central and Southwestern Ohio and north central Kentucky’s Bluegrass region, extending south to the Pennyroyal Plateau of south-central Kentucky and northern Tennessee, as well as Tennessee’s Central Basin. These areas, Hudson contended, were home to people who relied on corn and forage for fattening livestock and who brought their agricultural practices to the Old Northwest, marking the region as a leader in corn, cattle, and hog production (Hudson 1994).
One of the dominant economic activities in the region, regardless of cultural background, was a commitment to raising corn, the region’s most iconic crop. It thrived in the region’s long and hot summer days and warm nights, with a growing season of approximately five frost-free months and annual rainfall of 40 inches or so. It also underwent multiple transformations in the midcontinent that reflected the blending of North and South. Beginning in the eighteenth century, according to botanists Edgar Anderson and William L. Brown, short-season flint corn of the Yankee met the long-season southern gourdseed corn, resulting in a hardy, 100-day corn that became widely grown and known as “corn belt yellow dent” by the 1870s. The combination of the softer gourdseed and the hard flints resulted in a corn that was soft enough for livestock to consume without grinding but hard enough to store and transport, if needed. While countless farmers engaged in this kind of corn crossing, open-pollinated corn (either deliberately or inadvertently), Robert Reid of Illinois most famously developed the variety known as “Reid’s Yellow Dent” in the 1840s. Reid planted a late-maturing yellow corn, and when some hills failed to germinate planted those with an early red variety. Reid saved seed from that crop and continued to propagate it for decades without introducing any new varieties. The resulting yellow dent matured between 90 and 110 days, had 16–22 rows of kernels per ear, and could yield up to 40 bushels per acre in optimal conditions. It was a Corn Belt triumph (Anderson and Brown 1952; Hudson 1994; Olmstead and Rhode 2008). The rise of the Corn Belt dent demonstrates not only the importance of environmental conditions, mechanization, transportation, demand, and market access in commodity production, but that the goals and cultural background of the settlers were also critical.
One of the most extreme examples of culture shaping production was the settlement of southerners along the Missouri River counties in the central part of the state. There, they recreated the plantations of their home region, utilizing enslaved African Americans to raise the tobacco, hemp, and livestock culture of Kentucky, Virginia, and Tennessee. The rich bottom lands and rolling hills were later dubbed “Little” Dixie” in recognition of the persistence of southern culture (Hurt 1992).
Studies of small communities provide a finer-grained examination of these dynamics of culture and agriculture. Sugar Creek, located in Sangamon County, Illinois, was largely settled by native-born southerners who forged a community in which collective action through kin and neighborhood mattered at least as much, if not more so, as that of the individual. Chain migration characterized much of the settlement, with kin following kin in to mobilize social capital. In Sugar Creek and thousands of other free-labor communities like it, men and women cooperated to raise crops, livestock, and children. They confronted a world of increasing market integration, fueled by the growth of railroads and Civil War. Market integration generally rewarded those who were able to invest in new tools and expansion, leaving the Sugar Creek of the 1870s far more divided by wealth than it had been in the 1820s (Faragher 1986).
In contrast to Sugar Creek, Yankees dominated in Kalamazoo County, Michigan while Fountain Green township of Western Illinois was a mix of southerner, Yankee, and Scots-Irish from the Mid-Atlantic states. Even so, families who made farms in these areas faced similar conditions of farm making and market access that resembled those of Sugar Creek. Families met much of their own needs, but market production of wheat and livestock also played an important part in sustaining the farm. During and after the Civil War, these communities were transformed. The war was a catalyst for economic growth and economic stratification (Faragher 1986; Gray 1996; Rugh 2001).
In Indiana’s hill country, consisting of the southernmost counties closest to the Ohio River, the unglaciated, forested landscape became home to a wave of southern settlers from the upland South and, to a lesser extent, the Mid-Atlantic states. Ultimately, German Catholics also made homes in the region, contributing to a conservative pattern of safety-first agriculture, marked by low rates of mechanization and modest market production. Only after the massive railroad expansion of the 1850s and the price boom of the Civil War years did hill country market production start to catch up to that of central Indiana with its better rail connections (Nation 2005; Salstrom 2007).
The rural Midwest also became a home for African Americans who fled the South. In the aftermath of Gabriel’s, Vesey’s and Nat Turner’s rebellions, southern state legislatures made it increasingly difficult for free African Americans to stay in the South. Those who were manumitted or purchased their freedom confronted new laws that required leaving the state or forfeiting their freedom. Many of those who left made homes in the rural Midwest. In Indiana, the Roberts and Beech settlements proved to be havens from the 1830s through the 1850s. Residents experienced economic opportunity through the possibility of land ownership, commerce, and labor for neighboring white family farms. Farm production in these settlements reflected both the desire for meeting household needs and the market, with larger farmers more market oriented than those with small acreages. These settlers built their own churches, schools, and social organizations in the face of racial animus that intensified during and after the Civil War (Vincent 1999).
After the initial years of settlement, successive waves of foreign-born settlers arrived in the region, building communities characterized by a strong ethnic identity. The lure of the rural Midwest was the availability of ample land to recreate communities from the homeland. Immigrants hoped to avoid the secularization of life in the mother country that threatened parental control and to enhance their economic position or, at the very least, stave off decline. In the Midwest, these two concerns could be addressed at the same time. The religious and social order that was threatened in Europe and Scandinavia could be replicated in the Midwest with minimal interference. In the midcontinent, immigrants could enjoy maximum living space thanks to an ample supply of comparatively inexpensive land, low taxes, and the lack of an established state church or compulsory military service. American freedom for these groups was the freedom to recreate the Old Country, favoring the Midwest over the slaveholding South, where opportunity through land ownership was limited by slave-owning elites.
Once established, immigrant island communities grew apace due to chain migration, creating a mutually reinforcing
