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Show 214 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT Acreage of Land in Farms 1860 1870 1880 1890 Illinois ... 20 P11 989 ra HH? R61 30 ,498, 277 30,498 ,?77 Iowa __ ______ 10 .069, 907 15 ,541, 793 24 .752. 700 30,491 ,541 Not all speculators merely held their land idle waiting for it to increase in value. Some of them, using hired labor, created bonanza farms like Isaac Funk's 26,000-acre property in McLean County, Illinois, or Michael Sullivant's 40,000-acre Burr Oaks farm in Ford County. Others permitted squatters to remain on the land, perhaps on the condition of paying the taxes. Mathew J. Scott who had 42,000 acres in central Illinois began by making improvements at his own expense and renting the improved land to tenants. Later he resorted to rental sales agreements whereby tenants agreed to make specified improvements on assigned tracts and to pay a rent of 16 bushels of corn per acre for 6 to 9 years, after ¦ which the farm was to be theirs. But these bonanza farms were not to survive for long. The Funk property was gradually divided among the children and grandchildren of old Isaac, the Sullivant farm was lost on foreclosure, and the Scott family holdings were greatly reduced by sales to men of means and conveyances to tenants. Thus the speculator-developer contributed to the increase in the number of farms, some of which were, at any rate, temporarily tenant operated. The results of the liquidation of the speculative holdings and the contraction of the bonanza farms may be seen in the continued increase in the number of new farms long after the public domain was virtually gone (in Illinois by 1855; in Iowa there remained 1,192,000 acres in 1870) and in the diminishing size of farms. Average Acreage of Farms 1850 1860 1870 1880 1890 Illinois Iowa 158 185 146 165 128 134 124 134 127 151 Factors other than the liquidation of speculators' holdings and the division of bonanza farms were also responsible for the large increase in the number of farms in a single decade. A good part of the graduation lands, especially those in Missouri, were sold. The advertising campaigns of the land grant railroads, especially the Illinois Central and the Hannibal and St. Joseph, were drawing settlers to their own land and to other lands in their vicinity. All four of the states were offering their swamplands at very low prices. True, much of the swampland passed first to large dealers but they were usually anxious to sell as early as possible. A thoughtful study of 61 prairie landlords in eight counties of east central Illinois offers an interesting insight into the beginnings of tenancy. It traces the establishment of their estates, shows the nature and cost of the early improvements, and the sale of portions of the land to finance more intensive improvements on the remainder.89 From the outset the tenant farmer on the American prairies was in a very different position from the Irish peasant whose woes Americans were hearing so much about at the time, or from the freedmen of the post-Civil War period- the sharecroppers on the cotton plantations of Mississippi and Alabama. Tenancy was not always a step up on the ladder toward ownership, though some did attain that goal. Autobiographical sketches contained in western county histories show that numerous self-made men of property in Iowa, Wisconsin, and Illinois started as hired hands or tenants and worked up to ownership. It should be 89 Bogue, Patterns From The Sod, passim; Allan G. Bogue, From Prairie to Corn Belt: Farming on the Illinois and Iowa Prairies in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago, 1963), pp. 47 ff. |