Doctoral Dissertations

Walter Martin

Date of Award

8-1984

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

Geography

Major Professor

Leonard Brinkman

Committee Members

John B. Rehder, Charles S. Aiken, Frank O. Leuthold

Abstract

After an early period of experimentation with various types of commercial crops, by the mid-nineteenth-century many Nashville Basin farms had become committed to specialized commercial agriculture. Although our understanding of both subsistence farms and their more specialized successors is reasonably good, much less is known about the transitional stage composed of farms with divergent levels of commercialism. The purpose of this study is to bridge the gap by identifying production and location characteristics which discriminate between farms with varying levels of commercial activity in the Nashville Basin in the 1850's.

A four-step procedure is used to describe and analyze the characteristics of surplus producing farms in the Nashville Basin. These steps are: describing briefly the settlement history leading toward establishment of the Nashville Basin as a culturally and economically distinct region; summarizing the farming activity on 92 case study farms in 1850 and 1860; classifying these farms by level of productivity; and finally, evaluating factors which discriminate between highly productive and marginally productive farms.

The sample farms ranged along a continuum from a few yeoman farms with neither cotton nor tobacco production and deficit food production to farms with surplus production of grain, meat, cotton, or tobacco. Agricultural specialization was not well developed and all of the sample farms practiced mixed farming.

In 1850 the leading characteristics that discriminate between levels of surplus farm production are, in rank order: the number of swine, farm value, the volume of sweet potato production, butter production, and the value of animals slaughtered. By 1860 swine remained the leading discriminator, followed by the number of slaves younger than 15 years of age, the volume of corn production, the value of cotton produced, the value of farm implements, and farm value.

This analysis suggests that an important trend within the Nashville Basin was the live sale of corn-fed swine. The Nashville Basin between 1850 and 1860 followed the Ohio Valley example by developing a system of corn belt agriculture.

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