Arkansas History of Agriculture
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Module 1 Fact Sheet 4 – Page 1 Updated – September 2007 Arkansas Conservation District Directors Training Manual Arkansas History of Agriculture Agriculture has played a major role in waters formed backwater swamps, and the finer Arkansas’s culture from territorial times, when particles coalesced into clay. farmers made up more than ninety percent of the population, through the present (about forty- The rushing floodwaters also changed course five percent of the state’s residents were still frequently, carving new channels and leaving classified as rural in 2006). Beginning as a the old river behind as oxbow lakes and bayous. region populated by small, self-sufficient The almost constant flooding also challenged landowners, the state evolved through a plant life, and two types of vegetation came to plantation culture before the Civil War, to an era dominate. More than ninety percent of the when tenant farming and sharecropping region was covered with trees, eighty percent of dominated from the Civil War to World War II, which were bottomland hardwoods. The other before yielding to technology and commercial vegetation was a rhizome grass the local enterprise. For more than 150 years, agricultural population called cane. It grew in such dense practices had hardly changed. Hand tools and stands that early travelers from Memphis, draft animals limited an average farmer to Tennessee, to Little Rock (Pulaski County) often cultivating about four acres a day and made it hired guides to get through it. The flooding also difficult to accumulate wealth. But World War II helped shape two distinct Delta subregions. transformed agriculture, and in twenty-five One of these, the Grand Prairie, a vast treeless years, machines turned what had been a region between the Arkansas and White rivers, lifestyle into a capitalistic endeavor. occupies more than 500,000 acres of natural grassland in the south-central section. The Prehistory other, Crowley’s Ridge, was formed by Geography played a key role in shaping windblown dust deposited before the rivers Arkansas agriculture. Divided into six regions, flooded. It rises more than 200 feet above the each with unique soils, the state presented a floodplain and varies up to ten miles in width as variety of choices. One of the largest farming it stretches 150 miles from the Mississippi River regions, the Mississippi Alluvial Plain (formed by at Helena (Phillips County) to the Missouri the Arkansas, Mississippi, and Ohio rivers), border near Corning (Clay County). stretches about 250 miles from Missouri to Louisiana. Nearly 200 feet above sea level, the The state’s first agriculture began in the Grand elevation varies less than 150 feet. Over the Prairie–Crowley’s Ridge region. Almost 3,000 past two million years, rivers carried soil years ago, the Pre-Columbian Woodland people particles from the upper Midwest and cut began growing food to supplement their hunter’s through thick loess deposits in the lower diet. Living in small villages characterized by Mississippi River Valley. Flooding was frequent, earthen burial mounds, these native peoples and as the water rose out of the normal river planted vegetables and grains by tilling with channels, the principles of hydrology caused the hand-held wooden tools. The Mississippian heavier, coarser soil particles to fall to the culture that supplanted the Woodland people bottom. The lighter, finer soils were carried kept some of their vegetables but added corn farther from the main source. Over time the and became almost exclusively dependent upon coarser particles (sand) built a dike along the this new grain for food. Cotton, the crop most riverbank and frequently prevented water identified with the Delta, did not appear until carrying finer particles from returning to the after the United States acquired the region with main channel. Trapped in stagnant pools, these the Louisiana Purchase. The dead river Arkansas Natural Resources Commission w http://www.anrc.arkansas.gov w501-682-1611 Arkansas Association of Conservation Districts w http://aracd.org w501-682-2915 Filename: Mod1_FS4_Arkansas_history_of_agriculture Module 1 Fact Sheet 4 – Page 2 Updated – September 2007 channels were some of the first lands sought homestead, their farming operations were out by the white American cotton farmers usually far less. A typical hill country farm arriving from the East in the 1820s. through most of the nineteenth century had about thirty acres in cultivation—ten acres of In southwest Arkansas, the Red River formed corn, five acres of cotton, and the rest in cereal another alluvial plain and shared some of the grains, sometimes tobacco (particularly in the same qualities of the Mississippi River region. It Ozarks), potatoes, and vegetables. The had oxbow lakes, swamps, and dense remaining property was open range for undergrowth that presented a challenge to early livestock, was used for hunting or fishing, and farmers. But the Red River valley sat higher and was a source for firewood, wood for tool was not as subject to flooding, and the soil had handles, roofing shingles, and other needs. a sandy loam rather than clay base. Because it Such farmers usually made enough from cotton required less effort to cultivate, it became the to pay taxes and buy a few finished goods. first region to be dominated by the cotton monoculture. After 1850, commercial agricultural in the Delta eclipsed subsistence farming. Cotton became Between the Mississippi and Red River the dominant crop as white Americans floodplains lay the West Gulf Coastal Plain. discovered that the alluvial soil typically Formed by erosion from the upland regions, the produced about fifty percent more cotton than Coastal Plain was characterized by shallow the state’s average pounds per acre, and Delta soils that were excellent for growing loblolly pine raw cotton regularly sold above market price at trees but had limited use for traditional row the Memphis cotton exchange. In the decade crops. Cotton and corn farmers survived by before the Civil War, the region’s population planting in the Ouachita-Saline River watershed increased more than 100 percent, and the slave valleys. population grew more than 120 percent. But even then the plantation cotton-slave culture West and north of the Mississippi River flood exceeded the self-sufficient hill farmers’ only in plain lay the Ouachita Mountains and the Ozark the dollar value of their investments in chattel uplift. Farming in these regions was also a and land. challenge. Soils were shallow, the terrain usually sloped, and most of the nutrients In some ways, the Civil War had a major impact leached out through centuries of erosion. There on Arkansas agriculture, but in others, little was some fertile land along the many streams changed. The most obvious change came after that drained the upland watershed, but these 1863, when the Emancipation Proclamation valleys were typically narrow and subject to freed Arkansas’s 111,115 slaves. Related to flooding. A crop lost to floods often offset soil that were the thousands of acres of farmland fertility. that lay fallow, some for the duration of the war, depriving individuals and the state government The Arkansas River Valley bisects the Ozarks of income. Perhaps the most divisive impact of and the Ouachitas and offered the best the war was a policy that allowed those owning farmland in the upland region. Beginning on the twenty or more slaves to be exempt from state’s western border, it ranges from twenty- military service. Historian Carl Moneyhon five to thirty-five miles wide and extends almost established that many large landowners 150 miles into the state. Originally valued for its persisted through the war and continued to cotton land, by the time of the Civil War, the dominate Arkansas agriculture economically region had the state’s most diverse agriculture. after the war. Agriculture in the Nineteenth Century As the war ended, federal army officers Before 1840, the upland region dominated confiscated some of the abandoned land and production. Most farming was done on hillsides, used it to resettle former slaves. These “home and even though many of the early immigrants farms,” established outside Little Rock, Pine staked out more than 100 acres for a Bluff (Jefferson County), and Helena, provided a Arkansas Natural Resources Commission w http://www.anrc.arkansas.gov w501-682-1611 Arkansas Association of Conservation Districts w http://aracd.org w501-682-2915 Filename: Mod1_FS4_Arkansas_history_of_agriculture Module 1 Fact Sheet 4 – Page 3 Updated – September 2007 few African Americans with their first experience In 1867, only 167 freedmen made claims in in managing their affairs. For most, having spent Arkansas. The next year, 161 filed. The their lives close to the soil working crops and numbers picked up over the next eight years. livestock with a limited selection of tools, But even as late as 1876, when the original continuing in agriculture was expected. But legislation was amended to allow for gaining access to farmland was a major “unrestricted access,” there were only 26,395 challenge. In response to the former slaves’ “original entries.” These individuals claimed 2.3 need for land, Congress adopted two programs million of the nine million acres set aside in designed to make individual land ownership a 1866. But fewer than half (12,680) of the original priority. The first extended the responsibilities of claimants lived on their homesteads long the Freedmen’s Bureau to assist with farming. enough to make a final entry. The second came in 1866 with the Southern Homestead Act, which provided “free land” from Congress’s amending the Southern Homestead the public domain in the former Confederate Act led to a wave of speculation as states. Arkansas was second only to Florida in representatives of timber and railroad acres still in the public domain and offered an companies descended on the South to buy opportunity for thousands of Arkansans, black millions of acres from the public domain.