Extended Families in Rural America

Historiography

The Agricultural Transition in New York State: Markets and Migration in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America

Donald H. Parkerson, 1995

“One of the defining characteristics of mid-nineteenth-century New York State,” Parkerson began, “was the extraordinary mobility of its rural people” Contrary to popular belief and a historiographical tradition that has mistakenly pictured a stable, tradition-bound rural world in contrast with a (more thoroughly studied) dynamic, industrializing urban world, Parkerson said that “ordinary farm families embraced social and economic change” largely through chain migrations that extended the households of farmers trying to enter market production. This key factor of the commercial agricultural transition has been missed for several reasons. Earlier studies of migration have tended to focus on household heads (because they were the ones named in the census, especially before 1860). And a persistent agrarian myth has prevented generations of historians from even looking at the issue. Finally, when “new social historians” like Thernstrom began studying persistence in the 1970s, they used a technique called nominal record linkage that failed to account for deaths, errors in census enumeration, and common name errors; or that attributed a much lower value to these potential errors than Parkerson did (I seem to recall a discussion of these in one of Thernstrom’s articles -- but he seemed to believe he had corrected for them). The bottom line, said Parkerson, was that the city populations were probably more dynamic than we’ve thought; but more importantly, “the countryside was in constant motion, with rural people moving in perhaps even greater numbers than their urban cousins”.

This mobility was not a Handlinesque tragedy, though. Rural families who moved were not the passive victims of social dislocation and the collapse of the producer republic. They were agents of change and frequently they were taking advantage of opportunity, rather than running from trouble. Parkerson noted that “the price of winter wheat on the New York market increased by about 50 percent between 1840 and 1860, and corn and hog prices skyrocketed nearly 70 percent”. Rural families saw opportunities to enter the early consumer market, if only to free up women’s time that had been spent producing homespun (recall Roberta Balstad-Miller’s Erie Canal story), as demand for farm products was boosted by the Irish Famine (potato blight), the Crimean War, Sutter’s Mill, and ultimately the Civil War. If there’s one flaw in this study, it’s that in his effort to highlight how “the investments and production strategies of surplus market farmers increased their yields and made them wealthier by 1865,” I think Parkerson consistently undervalued the effect of the Civil War on the New York farm economy. If not for the Civil War, far fewer farmers might have shifted to market production and the ones that made the change would not have become so rich. The transition might not have marched all the way to the threshold of agribusiness and a “more consolidated agricultural economy in which wealth increasingly was controlled by fewer and fewer farmers with larger, more productive farms.”

But that’s a quibble. This was an important study that showed how “Migrants and host families had specific needs that could be satisfied only through kin cooperation and co-residence. Migrants needed emotional support, a place to live, and knowledge of the emerging marketplace. Host families, especially in their early married years, needed willing workers who could improve their human capital and help them enter the market economy.” I’d add, both the migrants and the farmers needed the financial support that extended, multi-regional families could lend. And (crucially for the people I studied in Peppermint Kings) when doing business over long distances, they needed to deal with people they knew they could trust. Parkerson used New York Census data, which included information on the length of time people had been at their current address. He also usesd diaries and personal papers very effectively, giving the reader a solid sense of the people he’s talking about. By combining data and voices, Parkerson brought what would otherwise have been a useful but sterile economic history to life.  The Agricultural Transition in New York State may have been an unfortunate title, if it limited Parkerson’s readership to people interested in upstate New York farmers. This book was full of great detail (I particularly loved the description on page 71 of how to make charcoal), and it made a really important point about rural people and about families in the 19th century.