here. - WordPress.com

NPS Form 10-900-b

United States Department of the Interior

National Park Service

OMB No. 1024-0018

National Register of Historic Places Multiple Property Documentation Form

This form is used for documenting property groups relating to one or several historic contexts. See instructions in National Register Bulletin How to

Complete the Multiple Property Documentation Form (formerly 16B). Complete each item by entering the requested information.

____X___ New Submission

A. Name of Multiple Property Listing

Alabama Agriculture

________ Amended Submission

B. Associated Historic Contexts

(Name each associated historic context, identifying theme, geographical area, and chronological period for each.)

I. Native American Patterns and Early Settlers, 1750-1800

II. Farmers and Herders on the Frontier, 1800-1820

III. The Rise of a Cotton Kingdom, 1820-1860

IV. Alabama Agriculture during the Civil War, 1861-1865

V. King Cotton and Agricultural Reform, 1865-1910

VI. Boll Weevil and New Directions in Alabama Agriculture, 1910-1933

VII. New Deal Agriculture in Alabama, 1933-1945

VIII. Agriculture in the Modern Era, 1946-1965

C. Form Prepared by: name/title Dr. Carroll Van West, Director; Katie Randall, Fieldwork Coordinator; Savannah Grandey, Graduate

Research Assistant organization Middle Tennessee State University Center for Historic Preservation street & number MTSU Box 80 city or town Murfreesboro state TN zip code 37132 e-mail Carroll.West@mtsu.edu; Katie.Randall@mtsu.edu telephone 615-898-2947 date August 2014

D. Certification

As the designated authority under the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, as amended, I hereby certify that this documentation form meets the National Register documentation standards and sets forth requirements for the listing of related properties consistent with the National Register criteria. This submission meets the procedural and professional requirements set forth in 36 CFR 60 and the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards and

Guidelines for Archeology and Historic Preservation.

_______________________________

Signature of certifying official

______________________ _________________________

Title Date

_____________________________________

State or Federal Agency or Tribal government

I hereby certify that this multiple property documentation form has been approved by the National Register as a basis for evaluating related properties for listing in the National Register.

________________________________

Signature of the Keeper

__________________________________

Date of Action

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture

Name of Multiple Property Listing

Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018

State

Table of Contents for Written Narrative

Create a Table of Contents and list the page numbers for each of these sections in the space below.

Provide narrative explanations for each of these sections on continuation sheets. In the header of each section, cite the letter, page number, and name of the multiple property listing. Refer to How to Complete the Multiple Property Documentation Form for additional guidance.

Page Numbers

E. Statement of Historic Contexts

(If more than one historic context is documented, present them in sequential order.)

3

Introduction 3

I. Native American Patterns and Early Settlers, 1750-1800

II. Farmers and Herders on the Frontier, 1800-1820

III. The Rise of a Cotton Kingdom, 1820-1860

IV. Alabama Agriculture during the Civil War, 1861-1865

V. King Cotton and Agricultural Reform, 1865-1910

VI. Boll Weevil and New Directions in Alabama Agriculture, 1910-1933

3

5

7

25

28

44

VII. New Deal Agriculture in Alabama, 1933-1945

VIII. Agriculture in the Modern Era, 1946-1965

F. Associated Property Types

(Provide description, significance, and registration requirements.)

G. Geographical Data

H. Summary of Identification and Evaluation Methods

(Discuss the methods used in developing the multiple property listing.)

I. Major Bibliographical References

(List major written works and primary location of additional documentation: State Historic Preservation

Office, other State agency, Federal agency, local government, university, or other, specifying repository.)

Paperwork Reduction Act Statement: This information is being collected for applications to the National Register of

Historic Places to nominate properties for listing or determine eligibility for listing, to list properties, and to amend existing listings. Response to this request is required to obtain a benefit in accordance with the National Historic Preservation Act, as amended (16 U.S.C.460 et seq.).

Estimated Burden Statement : Public reporting burden for this form is estimated to average 250 hours per response including time for reviewing instructions, gathering and maintaining data, and completing and reviewing the form. Direct comments regarding this burden estimate or any aspect of this form to the Chief, Administrative Services Division, National

Park Service, PO Box 37127, Washington, DC 20013-7127; and the Office of Management and Budget, Paperwork

Reductions Project (1024-0018), Washington, DC 20503.

90

90

52

58

69

90

2

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


E. Statement of Historic Contexts

Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018

Introduction

The Alabama Agriculture Multiple Property Nomination developed out of conversations between the Alabama Historical Commission and the MTSU Center for Historic

Preservation on the need for a general road-map for the assessment of the state’s many agricultural resources, with a new emphasis on 20 th

century resources. This study not only relies on a plethora of scholarship on Alabama i

and Southern agricultural history but also

State previous Multiple Property Nominations and individual National Register nominations across Alabama. This generation of prior fieldwork by Alabama Historical Commission staff and from various consultants and experts created a base level understanding of the resources. Reconnaissance survey from the MTSU Center for Historic Preservation in late

2013 and early 2014 served to update the earlier research and nominations while also providing a current overview of the types of agricultural properties extant in Alabama in

2014.

I. Native American Patterns and Early Settlers, 1750-1800

Patterns of agricultural development in Alabama are historically linked to soil types and geographic regions throughout the state. The Tennessee Valley and Uplands region is full of clay and limestone derived soils, good for growing crops but not the easiest soil to cultivate.

The Prairie region, or Black Belt region, as this part is more commonly known, has rich, fertile soil that is good for large scale farming and growing staple crops such as cotton. The

Coastal Plains region, though not as productive, has piney forests that were used for herding in the early settlement and antebellum periods and eventually also for cotton. Alabama agriculturalists focused on these three regions from the prehistoric era to the antebellum era of the 19 th

century.

Prehistoric Context

Agriculture began in what is now the state of Alabama as early as 200 BC. Archaeological evidence suggests that Woodland tribes were growing a variety of crops including corn and squash in the area at this time. Between 400 AD and 900 AD, archaeological evidence suggests that Mississippian tribes began relying heavily on crops of flint corn, beans, and squash planted in fertile soils found near rivers. They kept to rivers in part because they were using tools made of wood and stone and soil there was easier to turn than the clay and limestone derived soils found further north and further from the riverbanks.

ii

The Moundville site, south of Tuscaloosa, dates from A.D. 1000 to A.D. 1450. This very important Mississippian site probably had as many as 1,000 residents with as many as

10,000 living in the Black Warrior River Valley. The intensive cultivation of maize supported the village and the surrounding population, which also relied on trade and hunting i Of particular pertinent use, and a volume that should be part of the library of anyone interested in Alabama agriculture, is Eddie W.

Shell’s recently published Evolution of the Alabama Agroecosystem (Montgomery: New South Books, 2013). ii Charles Hudson, The Southeastern Indians (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1976).

3

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018 to feed itself.

Mississippian cultures practiced “slash-and-burn” agriculture, meaning they cut and burned forests to clear and cultivate the land.

iii

Because of the long growing season in the

Southeast, they often planted two crops a year and moved often to allow the land to lie fallow between harvests. They practiced multiple cropping, mounding corn and growing beans up corn stalks, and culturally, it was the women of the tribes who carried out agricultural work. Men were primarily responsible for hunting and defending the tribe while women and children planted and tended both small family plots as well as larger communal plots of land. Still, these native people were largely hunters and gatherers by tradition, and relied on farming for only part of their food.

iv

Agriculture in Creek Territory

As native peoples began Alabama’s tradition of one-crop focused agriculture in the

Mississippian era, they also established the state’s first stock growing operations after contact with Europeans. Native peoples raised and herded domesticated animals as early as the late sixteenth century when Spanish missionaries brought cattle into what was then known as Creek territory. By the turn of the seventeenth century, the Spanish reported seeing cowhides and cattle used for beef among the Creeks, and in 1701, the French brought herds of cattle into the lower third of the state, further populating the region with livestock.

v

By 1750, the Creeks, similar to arriving white settlers, were cultivating small subsistence gardens and large communal fields of corn and beans, some tobacco, and other crops, including orchards of peaches and figs. They also had horses and raised cattle, chickens, and hogs, though domesticated animals did not supplant wild game in their diets until much closer to the turn of the nineteenth century.

vi They had organized political systems, a rich culture, and an economy that combined a long tradition of hunting and gathering with farming. Like white settlers, they pursued market participation and a minority owned slaves.

According to historian Andrew K. Frank, the Creeks’ acceptance of African slavery and their participation in the deerskin market caused white settlers to consider them, along with the Cherokees, as one of the “more civilized” tribes.

vii

In 1766, Great Britain opened Alabama territory for settlement, and the number of white settlers in the Creek/Alabama/Georgia area grew from roughly 1,400 in 1745 to 18,000 by

1775.

viii

White settlers moved first into the area’s wooded river valleys, initially ignoring the wet flatlands and rich soils of the Black Belt region.

ix Some brought African slaves with

State iii Charles Mitchell, “Agriculture in Alabama,” Encyclopedia of Alabama , accessed October 5, 2013. iv Andrew K. Frank, Creeks and Southerners: Biculturalism on the Early American Frontier (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,

2005); Hudson, The Southeastern Indians ; R. Douglas Hurt, Indian Agriculture in America: Prehistory to the Present (Lawrence:

University Press of Kansas, 1987); and Malcolm J. Rohrbough, The Trans-Appalachian Frontier (New York: Oxford University

Press, 1978). v Brooks Blevins, Cattle in the Cotton Fields: A History of Cattle Raising in Alabama (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press,

1998), 2. vi Hurt, Indian Agriculture in America and Mitchell, “Agriculture in Alabama.” vii Frank, Creeks and Southerners.

viii M. Thomas Hatley, Gregory A. Waselkov, and Peter H. Wood, eds., Powhatan’s Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast

(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 38. ix Rohrbough, The Trans-Appalachian Frontier, 205.

4

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018 them, increasing the number of both slave and freed blacks in the area from 100 in 1745 to

15,000 in 1775.

x These settlers established farms near navigable rivers and in many cases where Native American villages had been. They built structures, often log buildings, as shelter for themselves and their livestock and cultivated land for farming. It was a decidedly vernacular landscape in this frontier setting, with log construction most common because of the need to clear land for tillable fields and to then use the timber for stockades, cribs, small barns, and dwellings. No agricultural buildings from this period of 1745 to 1775 are known to exist today in Alabama.

During this period, white settlers and Creeks followed similar patterns. Both mostly farmed for subsistence and hunted wild game for food. Corn was still the universal crop grown throughout the region, and lack of transportation made it difficult for them to export what little if any surplus they had. Both raised chickens, hogs, and cattle. A 1766 census of seventeen plantations east of Mobile Bay counted 2,280 heads of cattle and only 124 people.

xi

The period following the American Revolution resulted in major changes for the Creeks as the federal government sought land for white settlement and westward expansion. Historian

Christopher Haveman says, “Creek lands were taken through cessions in treaties and clandestine arrangements between Creek headmen and federal agents.” xii

With the arrival of more European settlers, the Creeks became increasingly dependent on cattle herding as wild game became less prevalent. Historian Brooks Blevins says, “Within two generations of the arrival of Anglo-American pioneers, Alabama’s native tribes had replaced the traditional hunting and gathering culture with a herding culture.” xiii

Around the same time that American inventor Eli Whitney patented the first mechanical cotton gin in 1794, the American Southeast was experiencing rapid and widespread expansion and a shift from subsistence farming to staple crop agriculture. First generation settlers struggled just to survive and establish their farms, but second and third generation settlers were looking for more stability and searching for a staple crop to export.

xiv

Cotton was already a large-scale commercial enterprise in some parts of the Southeast, and

Alabama farmers responded to market demand. Though not yet the “Cotton Kingdom” it would become, Alabama agriculture was on its way to a new era by the turn of the nineteenth century.

Resource Assessment: Extant resources under this context are expected to be archaeological resources, and would be potentially eligible as settlement and processing sites under

National Register Criterion D. No above ground structures are known to be extant.

II. Farmers and Herders on the Frontier, 1800-1820

State x Hatley, Waslkov, and Wood, Powhatan’s Mantle, 38. xi Blevins, Cattle in the Cotton Fields, 4. xii Christopher Haveman, “Creek Indian Removal,” Encyclopedia of Alabama , accessed January 11, 2014. xiii Ibid., 5; also see, Kathryn E. Holland Braund, Deerskins and Duffels: The Creek Indian Trade With Anglo-America, 1685–1815

( Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993). xiv Rohrbough, The Trans-Appalachian Frontier, 108.

5

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018

The period between 1800 and 1820 included many changes for farmers in Alabama. Market demand and cotton prices soared in the years following the War of 1812, and many large scale planters from Virginia, Georgia, and the Carolinas migrated deeper south and further west between 1815 and 1830. They established large cotton plantations, many in the

Canebrake region, a subregion of the Black Belt located in west-central Alabama, and brought with them thousands of slaves. There were also many smaller scale farmers migrating to the area. Many of them settled just north of the Canebrake and brought few or no slaves with them. They planted gardens and raised livestock for subsistence, but they too grew cotton as a cash crop.

xv

A good example of the transition from subsistence to staple crop farming is seen in a case study of pioneer John Hutchins from the future neighboring state of Mississippi. Historian and author of The Trans-Appalachian Frontier

Malcolm J. Rohrbough describes Hutchins’s experience:

The little settlement of fifteen families lived in fear of Indians, Spanish officials, and thieves. Each member of the Hutchins family worked at several chores, the women in spinning, weaving, and the “household business,” the men in the fields and in the woods. As the family gradually opened up the land, corn replaced meat as the staple of their diet. Then Hutchins began to grow cotton, but without much prospect of a market. Separating the seeds was an onerous task…The cotton gin transformed all this. The younger Hutchins left to start his own plantation…With the help of two slaves and an old English soldier, Hutchins planted fifteen acres of cotton…The cotton crop grew larger and larger… Prices were high and he prospered….By 1807, he had built his own mill and gin.

xvi

Many early white settlers in Alabama’s river valleys shared Hutchins’s experience. They established farms, clearing land, planting corn, and relying on hunting and stock growing in order to feed the family and their agricultural workers, including enslaved peoples. But as soon as they could, they planted cotton because it was a cash crop that flourished in

Alabama’s river bottoms.

Claims made to the federal government in the years following the War of 1812 reveal that cattle was counted as one third of total losses by residents in the lower Tombigbee and

Alabama River areas.

xvii

As cotton planters spread their enterprises southward, cattle herders were pushed further into the piney forests of South Alabama. Though cotton would eventually touch every part of the state, as Blevins says, “The most substantial number of antebellum herdsmen were to be found in this belt making up most of the southern one-third of Alabama.” xviii

In 1814, the Creeks’ defeat at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend resulted in the Treaty of Fort

Jackson in 1815 and a major loss of million of acres of land in their western territory. The

Creeks still however retained thousands of acres in eastern and southeastern Alabama,

State xv Rohrbough, The Trans-Appalachian Frontier.

xvi Ibid., 107. xvii Blevins, Cattle in the Cotton Fields, 12. xviii Ibid., 15.

6

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018 where they continued to farm until the Indian Removal Act of 1830 forced their eventual removal and relocation westward to Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma. Similarly, a smaller group of Cherokee retained land and farmed in northeastern Alabama until removal in 1838.

xix

In 1819 Alabama became the 22nd state admitted to the Union, and statehood would accelerate the new state’s entry into the Cotton Kingdom of the South. The Overton Farm

(NR 10/3/1973) in Franklin County may date to the years of transition from territory to statehood. Located in northwest Alabama, the farm dates c. 1817-1819. Abner Overton first visited Alabama in 1815 and two years later he acquired 160 acres along Bear Creek, registered the land in Mississippi Territory, and built a shed as an initial residence. In 1819 he built a one-room log cabin, which, according to local sources in the National Register nomination, became a core section for a later (c. 1838) five-room dwelling. Today the

Overton Farmhouse is a log dogtrot that is open to the public and used for education programs.

Also discuss Ellerslie (c. 1818)

Resource Assessment: Buildings and structures associated with the pre-statehood period in

Alabama history exist, although in low numbers. Historic farm dwellings and agricultural production buildings (smokehouses; barns) would be eligible under Criterion A, agriculture, and potentially eligible under Criterion C, Architecture. No known buildings associated with a significant individual who is significantly associated with the agricultural patterns discussed in this context have been identified.

III. The Rise of a Cotton Kingdom, 1820-1860

The era in plantation agriculture came early to Alabama, even before statehood. Federal survey of the region began after treaties and land purchases from the Chickasaws in 1805 and the Cherokees in 1806. U.S. Secretary of War Henry Dearborn then directed surveyors to plot the new lands and prepare them for government sale. Federal officials met with the federal Cherokee Indian Agent Return J. Meigs, General James Robertson of Nashville, and

Native American leaders to establish formal boundaries on September 11, 1807. They created the original boundaries for Madison County, some 345,000 acres south of the

Tennessee state line. At this point surveyors established what was named the Huntsville

Meridian as the base point for the northern Alabama survey. Federal land sales began in

Nashville in August 1809.

xx

As the surveyors carried out their assignments in 1809, they also counted the people of

Madison County, finding 353 heads of households and some 2,233 white residents and 522 slaves—already the percentage of slaves was nearing 25 percent. By 1815 there were five

State xix Ibid., 16. xx Frances C. Roberts, “Thomas Freeman—Surveyor of the Old Southwest,” Alabama Review 11(July 1987): 216-230; Daniel S.

Dupre, Transforming the Cotton Frontier: Madison County, Alabama, 1800-184 0 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,

1997), 18-20; Malcolm J. Rohrbough, The Land Office Business: the Settlement and Administration of American Public Lands, 1789-

1837 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968); John M. Allman III, “Yeoman Regions in the Antebellum Deep South: Settlement and Economy in Northern Alabama, 1815-1860,” Ph.D. diss., University of Maryland, 1979.

7

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018 cotton gins located in Huntsville, the largest town, the seat of Madison County, and soon the first state capitol.

xxi

That number would increase after the approval of statehood for Alabama in 1819 drove additional early agricultural development. The perfection of the cotton gin, first patented by

Eli Whitney in 1794, and its rapid diffusion through the South by 1820, led planters to want to purchase slaves to work their cotton fields. Whitney’s invention significantly increased the amount of cotton that a plantation’s slaves could process. Alabama’s climate and soil were only suited for the production of upland or short-staple cotton, where the seeds are difficult to remove by hand. A powered machine solved that problem. Thus it was not only the rich river bottomland that attracted Alabama planters but waterpower from the rivers allowed larger, more powerful gins to operate.

Quick Embrace of Cotton and International Markets

Cotton became the primary Alabama crop, be it in the Tennessee Valley, the Black Belt region, or other prominent river valleys such as the Alabama River, as the regions opened to agricultural development after statehood and the removal of Creek Indians after the Treaty of Fort Jackson in 1815. Take as an example the Dellet Plantation (NR 3/13/2009), also known as Dellet Park, along the Alabama River at Claiborne in Monroe County. U.S.

Congressman James Dellet established the place c. 1819-1820 after Gen. John Coffee of

Creek War fame surveyed the land in 1819. The river village of Claiborne was a Creek War offshoot itself, standing at the site of Fort Claiborne, named for Gen. Ferdinand L.

Claiborne who established a base here for his invasion of Creek territory. After the Treaty of Fort Jackson, Fort Claiborne just became Claiborne in 1816. The first steamer, the

Harriet , reached the village in 1821 and four years later the Marquis de Lafayette visited the settlement.

xxii Dellet built the extant two-story five-bay Federal-style manor house, with a two-part two-story Greek Revival portico between 1835-1840, during the era when the plantation owners turned to cotton as a major cash producer. The plantation and town remained an important river port to the Civil War era, but declined after a railroad bypassed

Claiborne in 1872.

Another example is the Hickman Cabin, a log dog-trot built in 1818, at Pond Spring (NR

4/13/1977), Lawrence County, in the Tennessee River Valley. John P. Hickman established a plantation here and owned 56 slaves in 1820. In less than 10 years, Hickman sold his

Pond Spring property to North Carolina planter Benjamin Sherrod, who expanded and remodeled the plantation’s initial log buildings into the Federal-styled Sherrod House (c.

1830), transforming the remaining Hickman dog-trot into a dwelling for some of his 300 slaves who worked the cotton fields.

The process of rapid growth of cotton plantations is an important agricultural pattern of antebellum Alabama. Where the soil was fertile, and not as acidic as the plateau regions or along the coast, cotton could flourish. Historians Kenneth E. Phillips and Janet Roberts do not overstate the fact when they conclude: “cotton, perhaps more than anything else, was the driving economic force in the creation of Alabama.” xxiii

They found that perhaps as

State xxi Dupre, 18-20. xxii Chippy Irvine and Dennis Krukowski, The Farmhouse (New York: Bantam Books, 1987), 125. xxiii Kenneth E. Phillips and Janet Roberts, “Cotton,” Encyclopedia of Alabama , accessed November 15, 2013.

8

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018 many as 9 out of 10 antebellum Alabama farmers grew cotton on their land. This strong market-orientation of Alabama agriculture leaned on river transportation at first but also encouraged investors as early as the 1830s to consider railroad development to spur even greater cotton production and sales to international markets.

The international focus of Alabama agriculture was not solely in cotton. In 1817, French

Bonapartists established The Vine and Olive Colony on Congressional-granted land near the confluence of the Tombigbee and Black Warrior Rivers. Marengo County would develop as a center of the community. The Bonapartists, unaccustomed to the country and what it took to transform it into profitable agriculture, soon dwindled in numbers, their initial concept for growing olives for international consumption unrealized. French settlers from the West Indies, however, knew what it took to make the New World profitable—slavery— and soon most of the original Congressional grant had been turned into cotton plantations, with hundreds of slaves at work.

xxiv

The Alfred Hatch Place (NR 1/6/1988), near Gallion, Hale County, is an example of that transformation. The property is also known as Arcola Plantation, for it is at the former village site of Arcola, one of the initial settlements of the Vine and Olive Colony. Frederic

Ravesies first settled this land along the Black Warrior River and then Lemuel D. Hatch acquired the property, selling it to his brother Alfred c. 1840. A major slaveowner, with 200 slaves working various properties totaling 3,000 acres in the region xxv

, Alfred Hatch directed the construction of the extant Greek Revival-styled manor house, complete with a commanding two-story Doric portico, in 1856; here was a major antebellum cotton plantation.

What happened at Arcola was repeated across the state. In 1820, Alabama farms yielded an estimated 25,390 bales of cotton (with a bale typically weighing about 225 pounds), then a mere 3.7 percent of the national total. That percentage would quickly rise over the next 30 years as Alabama cotton was marketed not just to northeastern industrial states but to international markets in England and on the continent. The Alabama Department of

Archives and History in its website, “Alabama Moments in American History,” notes that

Mobile “ranked as the nation’s second largest cotton exporter by 1860. Virtually all local commercial activities, from marketing cotton to obtaining goods for plantations in the interior served the cotton trade. . . By 1860 Mobile had surpassed all other southern ports except New Orleans as a cotton exporter. Cotton usually made up 99 percent of the total value of exports from antebellum Mobile.” xxvi

Alabama’s cotton economy was also subject to booms and busts in the antebellum era.

State xxiv Hamner Cobbs, "Geography of the Vine and Olive Colony," Alabama Review, 14(April 1961): 86; also see Jeff Mansell,

“Plantation Houses of the Alabama Canebrake and Their Associated Outbuildings,” National Register of Historic Places Multiple

Property Nomination, Alabama Historical Commission, 1993; Rafe Blaufarb, Bonapartists in the Borderlands: French Exiles and

Refugees on the Gulf Coast, 1815-1835 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006); Eric Saugera, Reborn in America: French

Exiles and Refugees in the United States and the Vine and Olive Adventure, 1815-1865 .,Trans. Madeleine Velguth (Tuscaloosa:

University of Alabama Press, 2011). xxv Glenn M. Linden and Virginia Linden, eds., Disunion, War, Defeat and Recovery in Alabama: The Journal of Augustus Benners,

1850-1885 (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2007), 16. xxvi Also see John Kvach, De Bow’s Review: The Antebellum Vision of a New South (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013) and Robert Gudmestad, Steamboats and the Rise of the Cotton Kingdom (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011).

9

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture Alabama


Historian Daniel Dupre noted about the Tennessee Valley region: “the subsistence economy that had characterized the [pre-1820] squatter society slipped away in most

OMB No. 1024-0018 regions of Madison County as the slaves owned by a growing number of substantial farmers

State and planters cultivated acre after acre of cotton. The bustling new community of Huntsville, with its courthouse and lawyers’ offices and the stores and imposing mansions of its leading merchants, symbolized the rapid development of a market economy.” xxvii

The Panic of

1819, however, “shattered the citizens’ dreams of wealth and prosperity and exposed the fragility of their self-sufficient independence.” xxviii

Prosperity returned in the late 1820s—at the same time that General Jackson became President Jackson—and a second boom fueled new growth and construction until “those ‘flush times’ ended in the Panic of 1837.” xxix

Recovery from the Panic of 1837 proved slow throughout the Tennessee Valley, but the rebound was underway by the mid-1840s.

Two Tennessee Valley plantations reflect the patterns that Dupre analyzes. The Goode-Hall

House, or Saunders Hall (NR 10/1/1974), in Lauderdale County is a three-part Palladian design (1830) with a dominant two-story four-columned Tuscan portico with a lunette set in the pediment, an architectural detail reminiscent of Jeffersonian design. Rev. Turner

Saunders from Brunswick County, Virginia, came to Alabama from Williamson County,

Tennessee. He directed its construction, later selling the property to Freeman Goode in

1844. Here was a huge cotton plantation. The long drive to the manor house is lined by surviving two-room sharecropper dwellings, from the early to mid-20 th

century.

Belle Mont (NR 2/23/1982) in Colbert County is a grand Jeffersonian style plantation house with its splendid three-part Palladian design with two-part classical portico. Set on top of a hill overlooking hundreds of acres, the c. 1828-1832 manor house is a major architectural statement, originally constructed for Dr. Alexander W. Mitchell, a Scottish trained physician, who came to Alabama from Louisa County, Virginia, c. 1820. Mitchell owned over 1700 acres and many slaves. His plantation produced not only cotton, but hay and corn and had an orchard. Mitchell sold the plantation to Isaac Winston, another Virginian, in

1833. In 1860, Winston owned 114 slaves.

xxx

The Historic American Building Survey in

1936 documented surviving log v-notched dog-trot dwellings, used then by African

American sharecroppers but probably dating to the era of slavery. These houses are not extant. In neighboring Lawrence County, however, a brick two-room slave dwelling exists from Boxwood Plantation (NR 7/10/2013). The plantation had 92 slaves in 1860.

Constructed c. 1854, the building is one of the state’s few extant slave dwellings. Its raised plate construction is an architectural vestige of Virginia’s Chesapeake region, another indication of how the earlier Virginia plantation built environment became reflected in

Alabama’s plantation landscape.

What is missing at both Saunders Hall and Belle Mont is a sense of how the plantation homes were the symbolic and administrative center of a much more populated built environment. In the National Register nomination for the Boxwood Plantation Slave xxvii Daniel S. Dupre, Transforming the Cotton Frontier: Madison County, Alabama, 1800-1840 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State

University Press, 1997), 13. xxviii Ibid., 6. xxix Ibid., 7. xxx Alabama Historical Commission, “Belle Mont Mansion,” Encyclopedia of Alabama , accessed May 27, 2014.

10

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture

OMB No. 1024-0018

Alabama


Quarter, Alabama Historical Commission staff observe: “A variety of dependent structures—servants’ quarters, kitchen, smokehouse, dairy, laundry house, barns, stables, sometimes a plantation ‘office,’ and so on—were a vital component of the typical southern

State plantation. In fact, early observers often commented on the brood of outbuildings that inevitably clustered around the plantation ‘big house.’” Consequently, these rare surviving outbuildings from the large plantations from the King Cotton era—even if the dwelling house is gone—are significant for their association with this era of Alabama agriculture.

By 1849 Alabama was the top producing cotton state in the nation, with 22.9 percent of the national total, some 564,429 bales according to the 1850 census. That number rose by more than a third in the next ten years, some 989,955 bales according to the 1860 census. By

1860 Alabama in a sense became the “king” of the cotton industry and the center for cotton production in the South.

xxxi

As the labor force for the cotton industry, slaves also rapidly increased in number. For example, in the Alabama Canebrake, slaves made up almost 69% of the population of

Marengo County, while Greene County had 68% of its population in slavery and slaves comprised over half (54%) of the population of Perry County. By 1860, that number rose even higher in some Black Belt counties (almost 8 out of 10 residents in Marengo County were in slavery) while over half of the population of the Tennessee Valley were slaves.

But these aggregate numbers can and have misled writers to assume that every Alabama antebellum agriculturalist was a planter—that plantations solely define the era. Take one district from one Tennessee Valley county in 1850 —Lawrence County—and a different reality emerges. Most Alabama farmers owned slaves—but the vast majority owned only one or two, typically less than a handful of African American slaves.

________________________________________

1850 Lawrence County, Alabama Slave Census

Slave Inhabitants in the 8 th District in the County of Lawrence, State of Alabama, enumerated by J. B. Speaks, Asst. Marshal

Names of Slave Number of Names of Slave

Owners Slaves Owners

Ephraim

Hampton

2 John Rutherford

Number of

Slaves

1

Names of Slave

Owners

Number of

Slaves

Benjamin Milam 8

John L. Hunter 1

James Echols 1

William Fears 1

David H. Walker 58

C. C. Gewin

William H.

13

5

Young

Susan Sanders 1 Moses Simpson 14 John Martin 11

Moses Loony 1 James Warren 6 John Moore xxxi Charles S. Davis, Cotton Kingdom in Alabama (Philadelphia: Porcupine Press, 1974).

23

11

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Marlin Loony 1

Thomas H.

Henderson

Moses Loony

(sig)

1

Adam Terrence 7

Thomas ?Spinor 19

John Bean 10

J. W. Cowan

John Sanders

2

7

7

William T. Stovall 11

William Bowlen 23

Elijah Stover 16 Samuel Habon 1

Charles Gibson 20

John Aldridge 3

James F.

Townsend

1

John R. Brustow 1

J. E. Martin 3

John Craig 1

Jacob Spangler 1

Preston Bolling 2

Thomas L.

Stockton

John M.

McGaughy

1

15

Robert M. Clark 13

Josiah Days 1

Hugh

Stephenson

5

Philip Threlkeld 10

Hildred Wilkinson 10

George Stevens

A. S. Stovall

B. B. Sevier

Wade Cooper

Robert R. Chiles 1

John W. Hansell 3

Sarah Wood

A. B. Bowlen

9

10

1

14

3

9

Nancy Parham 4

Robert Henderson 5

Bennett Driver 16

Alabama

E. D. Michause 8

James Rush 4

William Stovall 5

William Harris 5

Joseph Jameson 9

Robert C.

Milford

1

Hodge S.

Stephenson

C. S.

McGaughey

3

2

A. H. Clear 11

P. Z. McVay 4

W. S. S. Dearing 3

Thomas J.

Blalock

13

William M.

McGaughy

James P.

McGaughy

11

5

Eli McGaughy 7

James S.

Robertson

4

W. D. Harper 1

J. G. Evetts 11

W. S. Clear 1

OMB No. 1024-0018

State

12

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Stephen Bennet 1

Martin W.

Bowling

1

Alabama

Dillion Bean 2 James B. Reynolds 1

James M.

Reynolds

1 Jacob Garvin 2

OMB No. 1024-0018

State

Hamilton Snoffet 1

Mary West 2

P. W. Stephenson 2

(illegible)

McClusky

2

James W.

Steenson

John F.

Demasters

4

1

Thomas R.

Brooks

3

Jane Shelton 1

Robert Byers 1

Thomas D.

Simms

18

John H. Knott 1

Thomas

McDaniel

23

Samuel

Livingston

10

E. B. Gadby

David J. Ligon

Wileg Holt

G. W. Roddy

1

9

Robert Blasingame 2

8

Isaac Dubemaneca 8

John M. Wallace 3

4

Horatio Lynch 5

Robert H. Preuit 10

Thomas Pearson 15

Sylvanus Gilson 16

O. H. P. Tackett 1

Monticue Gray 4

John Dunsmore 8

S. S. Lindsey

Perry ?Fuys

F. M. Lindsay

John Jarvin

John Jarvin

O. N. Porter

Z. B. Jarvin

5

P. A. McDaniel 31

2

3

26

15

Darius Lynch 1

J. M. Meadows 1

1

20

D. L. McCord

Andrew Smith

Menon Priest

R. M. Nichols

Almon Milam

8

5

3

1

3

Irwin P. McCrary 2

William J. McCaul 5

Nathaniel C.

Almond

4

William Alexander 11

John McBride 1

David S.

Dunsmore

2

William Calahan 1

David J. Goodlet 1

William

McKelvy

13

Isaac Araneton 3

Sarah Ganett 1

B. F. Harris 1

Stephen Turner 5

Thomas McCord 7

James Steenson 3

13

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Jane Lindsay 1

Jacob Boren 1

Jas. Alexander 1

Morris Chenault 1

William Menut 2

William Reneau 13

Isham Milam 6

Joel W. Hicky 6

Asa Hodges 2

Fleming Hodges 6

Joseph Bishop 3 D. M. Hodges 18

Isaac Johnson 1

William Eubank 2

James Aldridge 1

James Aldridge 14

W. W. Bayer 1

R. R. Bencon 8

John N. Walker 10

Higdon

Robertson

1

Elijah F. Warren 2

John L. Walker 4

Allen Burton 2

William Grenalade 4

Joseph Curtis

J. N. Owen

3

13

L. C. Owen 1

Sherwood Pearson 2

A. O. Picket 4

Henry A. McGhee 3

Martha Preuit

Neomy Seitch

43

11

Thomas W.

Warren

William A.

Milam

17

5

Thomas Eubank 6

William Young 1

George Almond 6

Eden Brown 22

Mary Brown 6

Wiley Gallaway 5

William H.

Salmon

1

1 P. D. Roddy

Stephen C.

Chitwood

3

Crocket McDonald 1

H. D. Bosman 2

Michael Hirt 2

S. H. McCord 3

Martha Irwin 6

Rebecca Jackson 4

F. N. Jarrett 1

Alabama

Thomas Martin 2

A. D. McCord 1

H. B. Habon 1

Josiah Stovall 5

James Wallace 8

Joseph

Underwood

6

A. McKinney 5

Rebecca Ewing 10

G. N. Wear 1

Lewis H. Sadler 1

Daniel McBride 3

Thomas Sparks 1

Rachael Cose 15

Philip Tackett 3

Elizabeth Jones 2

T. H. Walker 9

William Boyd 8

John M. Jackson 10

John C. Reese 11

J. P. Reed 2

T. M. Peters 5

A. B. Burleson 2

Edward Bracken 3

John Murry 2

George Tackett 1

OMB No. 1024-0018

State

14

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018

William Warren 26

Robert Armor

John C. Habon

2

1

Robert Crayton 21

Elijah McDaniel 21

John Preuit 22

Thomas Pate 7

David Hubbard 34

Margaret A.

Barker

10

Levi F. Warren 50 William Landers 11

James A. Trice 8

Reason Young 4

John Vaughn 2

Thomas Green 1

Judith Dorothy 12

James Johnson 2

Marion Couch 1

James Jackson 11

John Trent 1

Archer Campbell 22

O. D. Gibson 21

David Alexander 1

Lucy Gillispi 2

Archabald

Stovall

12 P. A. McDaniel 2 John Futchens 6

Charles Willis 2 David McDavey 36 J. B. Speaks 2

Southern historian Frank L. Owsley described those who owned only a few slaves as the plain folk—or yeomen--of the Old South. His research, along with that of a generation of his students, emphasized that the antebellum South was “a society of great complexity.

Instead of the simple, two-fold division of the agricultural population into slaveholders and nonslaveholding poor whites, many economic groups appear.” xxxii

Owsley counted the slave-owning groups as:

Great planters, owning more than 1,000 acres and 100 slaves

Planters, owning less than 1,000 acres and 25-99 slaves

Small planters, owning 500 acres and 10-15 slaves

Large farmers, owning 300-400 acres and 5-10 slaves

Small farmers, owning less than 200 acres and 1-2 slaves

The landscape of plantation agriculture

Let’s first consider the built environment of properties associated with the first three of

Owsley’s groups: great planters, planters, and small planters. Alabama’s plantation landscape from 1820 to 1860 was concentrated in the Tennessee River Valley and Black

Belt regions. But even outside of those two dominant areas, major plantations invariably located themselves on rivers, and later in the 1850s on railroads. “Transporting huge cotton bales [weighing several hundred pounds each] on rivers was the most practical method [of transportation] as it was faster and less expensive to move heavy freight on boats than in wagons on rough roads,” notes historian Robert J. Vejnar, II.

xxxiii Small towns that served the cotton trade also sprouted along Alabama’s rivers, especially the Tennessee, Tombigbee and Alabama rivers.

State xxxii Frank L. Owsley, Plain Folk of the Old South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1949), 7. xxxiii Robert J. Vejnar, II, “Plantation Agriculture,” Encyclopedia of Alabama , online edition. Also see Gudmestad, Steamboats .

15

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018

The earlier study of “Plantation Houses of the Alabama Canebrake and Their Associated

Outbuildings,” a Multiple Property Nomination to the Alabama Historical Commission, surveyed extant plantation houses, and immediate surviving outbuildings along the

Canebrake, part of the western to central section of the Alabama Black Belt. Jeff Mansell found a plantation landscape with several common elements.

The main plantation, upon which the planter resided, would include the necessary dwellings, agricultural buildings, and those outbuildings essential for the production, storage, and preparation of foodstuffs for the planter, his family, and slaves. Too, if cotton was raised on the main plantation, it would contain the slave quarters, barns, sheds, gins, presses, and all buildings and structures relative to the production of the staple crop. The Vaughan plantation, Myrtle Grove, consisted of the main house, the slave "quarters," corn cribs, stables, overseer's house, chicken houses, kitchens, barns, carriage house, lye hoppers, hog pens, cow lots, a gin house, a mill, and cemented cisterns. The main house and the outbuildings were described as being

"constructed of hewn cedar logs as it was before the days of weatherboarding or plastering." The cisterns were a necessity on all plantations in the Canebrake due to the shortage of water in the summer and fall months.

xxxiv

In 1993, Mansell concluded, “the Canebrake contains numerous plantation structures from the antebellum period including dwellings and outbuildings. These range from vernacular log structures to high style dwellings. Over 20 plantation main houses have been identified with a number of significant outbuildings (barns, sheds, slave houses, dovecotes, smokehouses, coolers, kitchens, and other structures).” xxxv

Plantations outside the Canebrake demonstrated a similar landscape of work, with multiple outbuildings scattered among tilled fields in crop rotation so that the cotton land would have time to replenish nutrients and maintain high yields. Not all land at any time, in other words, would be in cotton; some acres were also kept fallow as a way of restoring their productivity. Plantations, in this way, took on the appearance of a small rural village; due to their relative isolation, and to meet the needs of slaves, the plantation often had many selfcontained services located in individual buildings or within clusters of related outbuildings.

As Vejnar points out, plantations “often had to produce for themselves much of what was needed for day-to-day operations.”

xxxvi

In his study of southern plantations folklorist John

Michael Vlach identified these common buildings or structures associated with southern plantations:

The Big House (Mansion, Manor House)

The Yard (the landscaped space defining the prominence of the Big House)

Kitchens

Smokehouses

Outbuldings (privies, carriage houses)

Barns (for agricultural products and livestock)

State xxxiv Mansell, 15-16. xxxv Ibid. xxxvi Vejnar, “Plantation Agriculture.”

16

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018

State

Granaries and cribs (for agricultural products)

Stables (for livestock)

Production machinery buildings (gins, mills)

Overseer or driver dwellings

Slave welfare buildings (commissary, medical, schools)

Slave houses, spaces for domestic slaves

Slaves houses, quarters for field slaves

Vlach emphasizes that the number and variation of outbuildings underscore the reality that

“an antebellum plantation was fundamentally a place of work. This is, however, not the usual images associated with plantation estates [today]. . .Generally overlooked is the fact that a planter’s house was only the centerpiece of a holding that necessarily included fields, pastures, and woodlots” along with “slave quarters and various work spaces.”

xxxvii

Many earlier National Register nominations in Alabama have included properties that would fall into Owsley’s three categories of plantations. Barton Hall, also known as

Cunningham Plantation (NHL 5/2/1973) in Colbert County, is a c. 1849 Tennessee Valley plantation of substantial architectural pretension, in its classical detailing, rooftop observatory, and monumental interior spaces (especially its double staircase), perfect for entertaining or just purely demonstrating the wealth and taste of the owner. Built by the slaves of Armstead Barton, the property retained a brick kitchen slave quarter located to the side and rear of the Big House when Historic American Building Survey staff documented the property in the 1930s. The Oaks Plantation in Colbert County is a five-bay Federalstyled I-house constructed almost a generation earlier, c. 1829. Abraham Ricks brought his family from North Carolina to the Tennessee Valley in 1822; they lived in log dwellings until the manor house was finished by some of the family’s 300 slaves. In the 1930s

Historic American Building Survey photographers documented a single-pen log cabin slave dwelling. It is not extant. The Belle Mina Plantation (NR 10/31/1972) of Gov. Thomas

Bibb was among the first classical portico manor houses of the new state. This Limestone

County plantation is an imposing example of a plantation landscape, and originally its brick kitchen, with two rooms for slaves, was located adjacent to its side entrance.

Black Belt plantations abound, as documented in the earlier cited Jeff Mansell study of

Canebrake plantations. Greene County’s Rosemount Plantation (NR 5/27/1971) is a grandiose c. 1850 plantation house, with a huge classical columned cupola and an impressive façade defined by six two-story Ionic columns, attributed to Eutaw’s David R.

Anthony. In 1934, the Historic American Building Survey documented the plantation, and took photographs of a two-story central chimney frame slave quarters, along with a water tower, well house, a one-room school house, and small gable-front log outbuildings. This mix of the architecturally refined manor house with the much more vernacular, functional outbuildings of the farm was typical for Black Belt plantations, not only in the antebellum era but well into the 20 th

century. Fortunately, today many of these plantation houses have been preserved but, unfortunately, many period outbuildings have disappeared. Near

Rosemount Plantation is Thornhill (NR 5/10/1984) at Forkland, Greene County. Developed in the early 1830s by James I. Thornton, a Virginia native who was the brother-in-law of the xxxvii John M. Vlach, Behind the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,

1993), 183

17

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture

OMB No. 1024-0018

Alabama

Name of Multiple Property Listing owner of Rosemount, Thornhill has a Federal style façade defined by six two-story Ionic columns added c. 1850 by David R. Anthony. Thornton is an excellent example of

Owsley’s great planters as he owned as many as 2,600 acres and had 156 slaves in 1860. In

State addition to the main house, the plantation schoolhouse and family cemetery are extant.

Another massive classical portico, designed by B. F. Parsons, dominates Pitts’ Folly (NR

1984) near Marion, Perry County. Philip Pitts had the house built between 1852-1853. In

1860, he was one of the region’s great planters, owning over 2,200 acres and some 75 slaves with his children owning another 68 enslaved blacks. When Historic American Building

Survey photographers documented the property in the 1930s, they photographed a tworoom, central chimney frame kitchen and laundry, a period spring house, and a single-pen log slave dwelling, with log catted chimney. The house, kitchen, and slave dwelling are extant, though the log catted chimney was replaced by brick. The location of the springhouse is not visible from public right of way.

Not all Perry County planters were classicists. Some even broke the classical mold as they erected Victorian manor homes at the end of the antebellum era. In 1858, Edward K.

Carlisle, who was statistically a small planter but also gained considerable wealth as a cotton factor in Marion, commissioned famous New York architect Richard Upjohn to build his family a new home, Kenworthy Hall. Upjohn designed an Italian Villa mansion (NHL

2004) and mason Philip Bond built the dwelling, finishing in 1859. The plantation still retains a brick kitchen, brick smokehouse, and brick/frame well house as they were documented in the 1930s. At roughly the same time as Bond was constructing Kenworthy

Hall, Virginia native Joseph Selden, who owned 80 slaves, had the Carpenter Gothic styled

Fairhope Plantation (NR 5/29/1992) constructed by T.G. Fowler near Uniontown. Fowler adapted the pattern book designs of Alexander Jackson Davis for the dwelling.

In Marengo County, William Poole became one of antebellum Alabama’s wealthiest planters, owning three plantations and 179 slaves in 1850. His two-story frame late Federalstyle house, with two-story two-column Greek Revival portico, (NR 6/7/1994) in Dayton is not as architecturally ornate as many of his peers, indicating that the I-house form most often associated with small planters or large farmers could be the dwelling of choice even for the super rich.

In fact, one-story central hall Federal style homes could also serve as the dwellings for

Black Belt plantations. Such is the case with the James Spullock Williamson House (NR

1/5/1989) built c. 1860 in Lowndes County. Williamson owned 98 slaves and over 2,500 acres in 1860. Atwood (1836) in Faunsdale, Marengo County, is a one-story brick central hall residence that AHC historian Robert Gamble has noted for its obvious Tidewater

Virginia design influence. Nearby in Faunsdale is Cedar Crest (1850), another one-story three-bay residence with a Greek Revival portico.

Cedar Crest has a single surviving log slave house; most have disappeared from the Black

Belt. Along the Alabama River at Gee’s Bend in Wilcox County, however, historic photographs from the 1930s help to document the missing plantation landscape of the Black

Belt. In 1816 Joseph Gee of Halifax County, NC, located his plantation along the Alabama

River and brought 18 slaves with him to develop the land into a cotton plantation. When he

18

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018 died c. 1840 the plantation had grown in size and labor, to 47 enslaved blacks. Gee left his plantation to nephews who in 1845 sold it to Mark H. Pettway, and the place became known as the Pettway Plantation. After emancipation, several of the family’s slaves stayed and became sharecroppers, still using many of the early buildings and dwellings in their everyday existence, a way of life that changed little, even after the Pettways sold the plantation to Sebastian Van de Graaff of Tuscaloosa in 1895. Van de Graaff, an attorney, hired overseers to supervise the work at Gee’s Bend, a situation that remained in place until the New Deal arrived in the Depression decade.

xxxviii

State

Pettway Plantation house and outbuildings, Gee’s Bend (Library of Congress)

Farm Security Administration photographers took an amazing set of images in 1937 that documented the single-pen log dwellings still used by many African American sharecroppers including those that had log catted chimneys. The number of individual log dwellings, along with scattered log outbuildings and a mix of mismatched board fence and split rail fence, suggest what a plantation of one hundred years earlier must have appeared like. These were busy places, with everything suggesting a work landscape that depended on manual labor. That manual labor depended on the institution of slavery until emancipation in the mid-1860s.

Large farmers—those who owned between 200 and 400 acres and 5 to 10 slaves—often mimicked the plantation landscape in their more austere but, compared to yeoman farmers, still grand domestic settings. Circa 1851, local carpenter Joseph Britton Robert G. Griffith,

Sr. built his home (NR 3/14/2000) in Blount County in the two-story five symmetrical bay

Federal style, embellishing its interior with faux painting of graining and marbleizing in the primary public rooms of the first floor. Behind this Alabama Appalachian version of the

Big House, Griffith had various outbuildings and a row of cabins for slaves (not extant). In

1850 Griffith owned 400 acres, with corn as the principal crop but other agricultural products included wheat, barley, oats, Irish potatoes, and sweet potatoes. Livestock was important: 75 head of hogs, six horses, one mule, 4 oxen, 4 milk cows, and 8 other head of cattle. Griffith acquired a portable cotton gin in the mid-1850s, indicating his transition into more large market products. At his death in 1856, he owned eight slaves.

Another National Register example from Alabama Appalachia comes from Jackson County, xxxviii Kyes Stevens, “Gee’s Bend,” Encyclopedia of Alabama , accessed February 2014.

19

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018 the Townsend Farmstead (NR 8/11/2005), which contains a c. 1860 log dwelling, the first home for Daniel Townsend and his family. Townsend owned over 600 acres and had eight slaves; after the Civil War, the family built a larger frame farmhouse which is also extant.

Role of Slavery in antebellum Alabama agriculture

The rise of Alabama’s cotton kingdom was impossible without the institution of slavery. In his study of American agriculture, historian Douglas Hurt explained why and how slavery was crucial to the southern cotton states:

The fertile lands of the South could not be exploited for the cotton culture without a large labor supply. Yet these cheap lands made labor expensive because most men and women preferred to own their farms rather than work for someone else. With a new crop that offered the potential of great profits, southern farmers and planters expanded the institution of slavery to meet their labor needs. . . short-staple cotton and the gin enabled the institution to spread quickly across the South. Cotton farming now became profitable where it could not have existed before.

xxxix

Alabama was no exception to this general pattern across the South. “Cotton is a very laborintensive crop and requires abundant labor,” observe Phillips and Roberts, “thus African slaves were indispensible to plantation agriculture.” xl

Slavery, in turn, depended on cotton being viewed and marketed as an international commodity. For Alabama’s Black Belt, notes historian John Kvach, “The preservation of plantation culture and slavery relied on the successful commercial integration of the Southwest’s [Black Belt] planters and business class with global markets.” xli

Chart I: Slaves as Percentage of Population, Alabama

Year Number of Slaves % of total population

1820

1830

1840

41,879

117,549

243,532

32.7

37.9

42.9

1850

1860

342,844

435,080

44.4

45.1

Although nearly a half million slaves toiled in Alabama at the beginning of the Civil War— representing 45 percent of the total population—a significant minority of these (30 percent) were owned by a relatively small group of people whereas most Alabama farmers owned far fewer. Even in the Tennessee River Valley and the Black Belt, historian Gary B. Mills explains: “the most common agricultural units were small to medium-sized farms. The average improved acres per farm in Montgomery County, in 1850, for example were 211, a figure that included pastures as well as tilled lands.” In Madison County, the number was even smaller, 153 improved acres. “Large plantations with stately mansions housing men of great wealth and influence were scarce. The 5 percent of slaveholders who held 50 or more and that 5 percent of planters who owned more than 500 acres, in 1860, must be considered

‘super planters.’ Their numbers represented only three-tenths of 1 percent of the state’s

State xxxix R. Douglas Hurt, American Agriculture: A Brief History, revd edition (Purdue, IN: Purdue University Press, 2002), 95. xl Phillips and Roberts, “Cotton.” xli Kvach, 103.

20

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture

OMB No. 1024-0018

Alabama

Name of Multiple Property Listing population, yet they owned 30 percent of its real estate [and] 30 percent of its slaves.” xlii

Today, the vast wealth of the “super plantations” (similar to Owsley’s “great plantations”)

State mentioned by Mills is over-represented in the built environment as it is exactly those grand estates with grand mansions that have been most commonly preserved. Alabama examples from the Tennessee River Valley would be Belle Mont in Colbert County, Belle Mina in

Limestone County, Saunders Hall in Lawrence County, and Oaklawn in Madison County.

In comparison with the South as a whole, however, in 1860 Alabama had the fourth largest number of “super planters,” with its 5 percent trailing only Louisiana (7.2%), South

Carolina (6.2%), and Mississippi (5.4%) and placing the state well ahead of the other states who would make up the Confederacy.

xliii

Slaves on Alabama’s plantations and large farms tended to work in gangs, which meant they answered to a white “driver” who then reported to the plantation’s overseer. Robert J.

Vejner, II, summarizes a typical work day in a slave gang: “Slaves generally worked from sunrise to sunset and received only short breaks from their work. Failure to work at a steady pace could lead to punishment.” xliv

Despite the back-breaking endless work, and the often present threat of white violence, slaves generated their own communities, and built institutions to express identity, self-worth, and family, as a generation of scholarship since the 1970s has emphasized. The plantation landscape of antebellum Alabama was very much a white-black landscape.

xlv

Linking the landscape of the planters and the yeoman farmers in Alabama was a third crucial institution: cotton gins. These discrete production centers, were typically located at more centralized places such as crossroad villages and county seats, although great plantations often operated their own gins. Whether in town or on the plantation, enslaved people dominated the work at cotton gins. The gin served as another landmark of how agriculture dominated the state’s antebellum landscape since what often passed for an urban place was actually just the business related to the ginning and shipping of cotton. Daniel

Pratt in Autauga County built cotton gins for export, and his gins proved so successful on international markets that Pratt and Prattville became a center for the cotton gin industry.

The centralized cotton gin was also a place shared by both planters and yeoman farmers: both depended on the technology to make the raw crops of cotton into an agricultural product of value in national and international markets.

The Yeoman Farmer Landscape of Antebellum Alabama

The yeoman farmer landscape differed from that of the plantation elite. Certainly the pretension to architectural style differed in the homes of the plain folk and the planters; the scale of the domestic complex, in the size and number of buildings, are other differences.

But the proximity of people--within the families and between the white owners and their one or two African American slaves—was quite different when the dwelling home had one xlii Gary B. Mills, “Slavery in Alabama,” Dictionary of Afro-American Slavery , eds. Randall M. Miller and John David Smith

(Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1997), 39-40. xliii Donald P. McNeilly, Old South Frontier (Fayetteville, University of Arkansas Press, 2000), 80. xliv Vejnar, “Plantation Agriculture.” xlv Mills, “Slavery in Alabama.”

21

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018 or two rooms, and the entire farm only had 200 acres rather than 2,000 acres. An account from Rev. George Brewer on the antebellum settlement of Coosa County provides insight into the typical built environment of the Alabama countryside.

At first there were no saw mills, and for sometime but few, so that sawed lumber could not be gotten at all, or only by long and expensive hauls. The consequence was that log houses were the rule. To 1850 frame houses were scarce. . . . Houses of course varied in size from the single room log hut, to the large two stored houses made of large hewn logs with verandas or awnings. The most common, however, for the average man who looked for comfort and not too much expense, was what was called the two room or double log houses, with a hall of ten of twelve feet between. . . . These houses usually had shed rooms, thus making four rooms to the house. . . There were generally built in the back yard, some distance from the main building, separate houses for cook and dining rooms, smoke or meat houses, store room, and dairy. Stables, cribs, and barns were made in like manner, nearby, but with less care to appearance.

xlvi

This was a work landscape, reflecting what Owsley has called a farm economy in comparison to the plantation economy. “Farm economy,” explained Owsley, “meant a diversified, self-sufficient type of agriculture, where the money crops were subordinated to food crops, and where the labor was performed by the family or the family aided by a few slaves.” xlvii The farm economy in Alabama relied on livestock grazing, corn, wheat and other grains, then vegetables and fruit in season.

An extant example of these patterns noted by Rev. Brewer can be found in Sumter County:

Colgin Hill (NR 10/3/1985), built in 1832. Its National Register description calls the dwelling “a dogtrot log structure to which shed rooms were added and covered entirely with wood clapboarding.”

While cotton dominated Alabama’s plantation agriculture, it was not the only agricultural crop, as noted previously. Alabama farmers and planters also produced livestock for local markets, especially cattle and to a lesser degree swine. In several areas of the state, livestock farms were also large-scale agricultural enterprises, especially in the southern piney woods region and in places like Covington and Washington counties.

xlviii

Even with the plethora of cotton farms and plantations, Alabama still yielded its own foodstuffs—corn was most important, but larger plantations strove for self-sufficiency in corn and grains for livestock, for their slaves, and for the owners’ own consumption.

Orchards and fruit production—especially easily grown melons—supplemented the basics of corn, beef, pork, chicken, and peas found on many farms.

More difficult to discern is the agricultural landscape associated with white tenant farmers

State xlvi Rev. George Brewer, “History of Coosa County, Alabama,” cited in Owsley, 105-106. xlvii Owsley, 135. xlviii Brooks Blevins, Cattle in the Cotton Fields: A History of Cattle Raising in Alabama (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press,

1998); Kenneth Edward Phillips, "Jubilee in the Fields: Alabama's Landless Farmers in a Cotton Dominated Society,” (Ph.D. diss.,

Auburn University, 1999).

22

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018 in the antebellum era. Tenants existed in this period as people who had money, livestock, sometimes even slaves, but they did not own their land. In Lauderdale County, for instance, there were 53 white tenant farmers in 1850—certainly a tiny number but still an indication that tenancy was emerging as a way of life in the state before the Civil War.

Railroads and Expansion in the 1840s and 1850s

The creation of Alabama’s initial railroad network changed the landscape and agricultural practices for planters and yeoman farmers alike in the late antebellum era. The dominance of river traffic in Alabama agriculture was declining by the start of the Civil War due to the influence of the state’s railroad network, especially in the northern counties along the

Memphis and Charleston railroad line and along the Mobile and Ohio railroad line. Both lines could move the heavy cotton bale quicker than any overland trail and proved more reliable than the rivers, which were dependent on the river flow at any given time.

xlix

Alabama’s first railroads were built to connect inland farmers with major river ports for transporting their goods to larger markets. The state’s first road, the Tuscumbia Railway completed on June 12, 1832, was reportedly the first rail line west of the Allegheny

Mountains and connected the town of Tuscumbia to Tuscumbia Landing on the Tennessee

River. Upon completion, the line was extended eastward to Decatur, AL and was renamed the Tuscumbia, Courtland, & Decatur Railroad (TC&D). The forty-five mile line opened on

December 15, 1834 with only one steam locomotive, the Fulton , to operate the entire route.

An additional locomotive, the Pennsylvania , was added to relieve the workload. David

Dreshler, an official for the TC&D, modified the Pennsylvania for more efficient operation.

He changed the wheel arrangement placing four pilot wheels at the front and four driver wheels in the middle to make a 4-4-0 type locomotive. This allowed the locomotive to take curves much more easily and at faster speeds. Dreshler also added a sand dome on top of the boiler for more traction on the steel rails when the wheels slipped. These alterations proved to be ground breaking and nearly every steam locomotive thereafter featured a sand dome.

The 4-4-0 became the most popular type of locomotive in the nineteenth century, becoming known as the “American” type. The TC&D operated until 1847 when it was sold to new investors and renamed the Tennessee Valley Railroad.

l

Other small lines followed as planters realized railroads were an effective complement to river transport and a more efficient means of moving goods over land. Rough roads through

Native American territory proved to be treacherous and expensive for merchants and farmers.

li

The earliest railroads were almost entirely financed by plantation owners and local entrepreneurs with little financial aid from the state. Alabamians were hesitant to get the state involved in promoting the construction of rail lines thinking the government would only add corruption and unnecessary oversight.

lii

The state of Alabama granted more than twenty-five charters for new railroad companies in the 1830s but due to the lack of capital backing, most of them never got out of the planning stages. Those that were able to begin operation fell victim to the economic panic of 1837 and were forced to consider new

State xlix Wayne Cline, Alabama Railroads (Tuscaloosa: University Press of Alabama, 1997). Page number? l Wayne Cline, Alabama Railroads , (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997), 9-13,15-6. li Ibid, 19. lii Ibid, 20-2; John F. Stover, The Railroads of the South, 1865-1900 , (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955), 33-4.

23

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture

Name of Multiple Property Listing financial sources.

liii

Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018

The first railroad company in Alabama to utilize public aid was the Montgomery and West

Point Railroad. After many years of financial struggles and a foreclosure, the railroad was

State able to receive a loan of $120,000 from the state legislature through federally sanctioned money in February 1843. An additional loan of $117,000 was granted two years later to complete the line from Montgomery to Columbus, GA. Charles T. Pollard, the driving force of the Montgomery & West Point, then set his attention to connecting Montgomery with

Pensacola, FL. The Alabama & Florida Railroad was completed in 1861 formally connecting the Atlantic Ocean with the Gulf Coast. To accomplish this feat, Pollard utilized

Federal land grants in the amount of 400,000 acres to reach the gulf.

liv

This acquisition of land stemmed from recent legislation granting more than 400,000 acres in Alabama alone to the Mobile & Ohio Railroad that connected with the Illinois Central at

Cairo, IL. Famed Illinois senator Stephen A. Douglas as well as Alabama representatives fought for this legislation that opened up the national countryside for rail development on a large scale. Other Alabama railroads followed the Montgomery & West Point and received federal land grants to establish their rail lines. lv

Steamboats in the 1850s still dominated transportation, but wherever railroads dominated, especially at Montgomery and Huntsville, the new transportation technology spurred urban growth and development. The impact of the Memphis and Charleston Railroad on

Huntsville, for example, was immediate. The first train arrived in October 1855, and soon company officials decided to make Huntsville a key division point. In 1857, the railroad added an engine house and machine shop, a shed for passengers and a ticket office came a year later, and the passenger and freight car shop was finished in 1860, along with a handsome three-story brick depot. It was also home to the railroad’s eastern headquarters.

lvi

By 1860, Alabama railroads had received more than 2.7 million acres of federal land grants, the most of any southern state and the third highest of any state east of the Mississippi

River.

Resource Assessment: As the narrative in this context demonstrates, many properties associated with the antebellum plantation have been identified and nominated to the

National Register. However, many nominations focus on Criterion C, Architecture, and ignore Criterion A, Agriculture. Assessing agricultural significance calls for more than the manor house to survive, and unfortunately in many properties the only surviving building is the antebellum dwelling. If associated outbuildings and field patterns are extant, the property should be assessed for its agricultural significance under the property types and registration requirements of this nomination. Due to the significance of slavery in this period, properties with surviving slave dwellings should be carefully assessed for this significance under Criterion A, Agriculture, and Criterion A, Ethnic Heritage, Black.

Properties associated with yeoman farm families also require careful consideration for liii Cline, 17. liv Ibid., 19-23; 27-30. lv Ibid, 38-9. lvi “Huntsville Depot,” National Register of Historic Places Nomination, Alabama Historical Commission, 1971. Also see W. Forests,

“The Huntsville Depot,” Historic Huntsville Review , 30 (summer-Fall 2005): 7-54.

24

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018

Criterion A, Agriculture, significance. Many of these properties lack architectural distinction, and thus are ignored, but the assessment of their eligibility could focus on agricultural patterns, as discussed in the property types and registration requirements of this nomination. Properties associated with the state’s early turnpike and then railroad development may also be eligible under Criterion A, Agriculture since the state’s development of new markets through improved transportation shaped antebellum agricultural patterns.

IV. Alabama Agriculture during the Civil War, 1861-1865

The Civil War, 1861-1865, led to a fundamental reordering of the labor of Alabama agriculture. The war years also impacted agricultural production, due to disruption in international trade and the loss of manpower from Alabama farms and due to destruction from both armies during years of occupation in northern and southern Alabama from 1862 to the war’s end.

Heavy Hand of War and Occupation

Controlling the rich Tennessee River Valley, due to its river and rail transportation corridors, was of strategic significance to both North and South. With the spring 1862 victories at Fort Henry and at Shiloh, the Union army grasped control of the Tennessee

River. Union troops soon took control of the Memphis and Charleston route from Memphis to Huntsville and the southern end of the Nashville and Decatur Railroad. Florence fell first in February and Union occupation took over Huntsville on April 11, 1862. From April 14 to late August 1862, Col. William H. Lytle of the 17 th

brigade, 3 rd

Division of the Army of the

Ohio made his headquarters in Huntsville.

Lytle had a fairly peaceful existence there, and felt comfortable due to the number of

Unionists in the city. In a series of letters, Lytle made several interesting observations on wartime Huntsville. He told his sisters Josephine L. Foster and Elizabeth L. Broadwell on

May 6: “Huntsville is one of the most beautiful towns in America. It reminds me somewhat of Jalapa. There is a great deal of wealth here. The private residences [are] very elegant & embowered in shrubbery & surrounded with fine gardens. The air is so laden with perfume they called it I am told the ‘Happy Valley.’ Alas! It is no Happy Valley now.

The desolating footstep of the war has gone over it.” lvii

Residents resented the army’s impact on the local economy, especially the railroad. Huntsville historian, and die-hard

Confederate, Edward Betts later recorded that the Union took “practically all the rolling stock of the Memphis and Charleston Railroad, which had been collected at Huntsville pending removal to a more secure place. . . The railroad shops located here were completely demolished.” lviii

In mid-July 1863, Gen. David S. Stanley arrived in Madison County on a supply raid and reported back to General William S. Rosecrans: “I brought away in all about 300

State lvii Ruth C. Carter, ed., For Honor, Glory & Union: the Mexican and Civil War Letters of Brig. General William Haines Lytle

(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 114 . lviii Betts, 96-97. Also see: N. Shapiro, “Invasion & Occupation of Huntsville by the Federals,” Historic Huntsville Review , 27(2000):

1-29; M. B. Gabel, “General O. M. Mitchel’s Occupation of Huntsville,” ibid., 1(July 1971): 12-28; and the special issue of the

Historic Huntsville Review , 16(#1 and #2 1989).

25

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018 contrabands, collected about 500 cattle, and the same number of horses and mules. The mules are good, the horses not so good. A force of 10,000 could be subsisted in the

Huntsville country-plenty of corn mutton and beef, and if we don't eat it the rebels will.” lix

The crops and livestock of northern Alabama became part of the spoils of war.

Mobile held out until August 1864 when Union Admiral David Farragut defeated its defense of a torpedo-laden bay—uttering the famous cry of “Damn the Torpedoes. Full speed ahead”—and took control of Mobile Bay once Union forces had subdued

Confederate-held Forts Gaines and Morgan. The city itself remained in Confederate control until the war was over.

Alabama never experienced a major battle but almost at the end of the war, from late March to mid-April 1865, Union Gen. James H. Wilson carried out a devastating destructive raid on farms and property, beginning in Lauderdale County and sweeping as far south as

Tuscaloosa and Selma to destroy industrial mills and armories. As the Confederates retreated from Selma, they burned cotton warehouses, a fire that soon spread to other sections of the town. Gen. Wilson next occupied Montgomery, where again the Union troops destroyed the capital city’s railroad buildings along with riverboats. The destruction in Selma and Montgomery stunted the possibility of a quick agricultural recovery in the

Black Belt once the fighting had ended. In addition, by 1865 the railroad infrastructure of

Alabama was in shambles.

lx

Emancipation and the end of slavery

President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation had more legal clout in Alabama than other southern states because most of Alabama was still in Confederate hands when

Lincoln signed the document. But whether through the Emancipation Proclamation or other ways, slaves by the thousands left Confederate farms and plantations to seek safety and freedom behind Union lines.

In Huntsville, for instance, the town’s contraband camp steadily grew in numbers from 1862 forward. Jesse Leeper of the 4 th

Indiana Volunteer Cavalry came to Huntsville in July 1863 and reported that “we found a beautiful town and more contrabands than I could tell any use for[.] this is surely the greatest place for negroes that I have ever saw in my life[.] at least 2 to one the streets was lined with them[.] the white people look grimm and ill but the[re] was a small on the face of evry darkey in the place.” lxi

Later in 1863 freedmen were formed into a regiment of the U.S. Colored Troops on the

Huntsville town square. Thus began a process in the northern counties that would lead to the eventual creation of six distinct African American regiments along with seven other regiments of “mixed race and origin,” totaling some 7,300 African American soldiers for the U.S. Army. “Most blacks recruited for these regiments were former slaves who came from northern Alabama, although some came from Tennessee.” lxii

State lix Stanley to Rosecrans, July 22, 1863, Official Records of the War of Rebellion , Series I, vol. 23, p. 825. lx Ibid, 50-3; 63-6 lxi Richard J. Reid, ed., “Jesse Leeper Diary,” 6. Available at www.nps.gov/stri/historyculture . Accessed March 21, 2012. lxii Mark N. Lardas, “African American Union Troops,” Encyclopedia of Alabama , accessed April 17, 2014.

26

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018

Federal policy changed in February 1864 when General U.S. Grant ordered General John

Logan, in command at Huntsville, to stop recruiters from impressing freedmen into federal service. Grant explained: “’We want to encourage the cultivation of the soil.’” lxiii

Emancipation did not immediately end the predominant white assumption that African

Americans were only suited for labor. As the war ended, many white farmers and planters used Freedman’s Bureau contracts that bound former slaves to the farm similar in a manner to slavery itself. Whites found it difficult to imagine African Americans anywhere but on the farm. Historian Michael Fitzgerald explains:

The war's destruction reached the central Alabama cotton belt only in its final weeks. The surrender of the Confederate armies in Alabama in May 1865 started a chaotic transition period for the enslaved population, which had mostly waited out the events that were transpiring up until that date. Freed people headed for the nearest town or Union Army camp, or sought freedom on other plantations. Vast numbers sought reunion with dispersed family members. For those who remained on plantations, the main focus was ending slavery's close supervision, whippings, and harsh working conditions.

lxiv

In July 1865 Gov. Lewis E. Parson proclaimed that all slaves in Alabama were freed. As slaves grasped their freedom, some made arrangements with their former owners or other property owners to acquire their own land and begin to farm as freed men and women. The earliest known African American-owned farms in Alabama date to the years of 1865-

1866.

lxv

Historian Jon Wiener explored this process in depth in his influential study, Social

Origins of the New South: Alabama, 1865-1885 (1978). Using census records from five

Black Belt counties, Wiener found how the planter elite rather quickly resumed control of the region’s agriculture and substituted sharecropping as a way to maintain a manual labor force on their plantation and farms.

In Alabama’s postbellum era, sharecropping and cash tenancy defined the relationship between most agricultural workers and landowners. Historian Kenneth E. Phillips explains:

“Sharecropping involves landowners renting land to someone else in exchange for a portion of the crop, usually one-third to one-half, depending on what the sharecropper brought to the arrangement. Cash renting, as the name implies, refers to a rental agreement between farms and landowners. Cash renters were generally of higher economic and social status than sharecroppers.” lxvi By the early 20 th century, over 60% of the farmers in Alabama were in tenancy (meaning both sharecropping and tenancy?) .

Resource Assessment: Agricultural-associated properties relating to either wartime destruction or process of Emancipation associated with the Civil War would be considered

State lxiii Michelle J. Howard, “Slaves, Contrabands, and Freedmen: Union Policy in the Civil War,” M.S. Thesis, U.S. War College, Fort

Leavenworth, KS, 1998, p. 124. lxiv Michael W. Fitzgerald, “Presidential Reconstruction in Alabama,” Encyclopedia of Alabama , accessed April 17, 2014. lxv See the dated but still useful Walter D. Fleming, Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama (New York: Columbia University Press,

1905) and Peter Kolchin, First Freedom: The Response of Alabama's Blacks to Emancipation and Reconstruction (Westport, Conn.:

Greenwood Press, 1972). lxvi Kenneth E. Phillips, “Sharecropping and Tenant Farming in Alabama,” Encyclopedia of Alabama , accessed May 29, 2014.

27

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018 under this context for eligibility under Criterion A, Agriculture. Union occupation that directly impacted the farm, or farms that experienced wartime depredations from either side, are the primary considerations of this context. Nominated properties would require documented associations with this process of transformation, with evidence from the

Official Records of the War of Rebellion , the Southern Claims Commission, records of the

Provost General office, and other directly related primary sources. Emancipation also impacted many Alabama plantations and farms, but documentation outside of oral traditions can be difficult to find. Southern Claims Commission reports and Provost Marshal records can be fruitful primary sources to explore a property’s association with Emancipation and contraband labor.

V. King Cotton and Agricultural Reform, 1865-1910

New South and a Cotton Economy

National cotton production increased by 170 percent between 1870 and 1890, and continued to expand until the impact of the boll weevil in the second decade of the twentieth century.

Much of the increase was due to lands in the Southwest being opened up or drained and planted in cotton. Southerners contributed to the increase by resuming cotton production, converting subsistence crops to cotton, and typically cultivating new land in cotton. The impact was enormous. In Alabama, cotton acreage increased from one million acres immediately after the Civil War to nearly four million acres in 1914. Never was the Cotton

Kingdom more dominant than in these years.

High cotton prices inflated by wartime shortages encouraged planters in the Black Belt and the Tennessee Valley to resume operations as quickly as possible, but Emancipation, neglect, and foraging by both sides during the war left much of the agricultural landscape in

Alabama desolate, in disrepair, and without livestock for draft work. Besides of the few who were fortunate enough to hide cotton for postwar sale in 1865, most lacked capital and needed cash for repairs, to resume operations, pay land taxes, and buy necessities.

The railroad system was also in need of new investment. Realizing the need to get the state’s railroads back in operation, the state government started to grant state aid to war-torn companies. On February 19, 1867, the state legislature passed the first postwar railroad rehabilitation act by granting first mortgage bonds to the extent of $12,000 per mile in twenty-mile sections. The legislature changed the aid program a year later to $16,000 per mile in five-mile sections upon the completion of the first twenty miles. The regulation of the program was almost non-existent as railroads took advantage of the state’s generosity by accepting money for incomplete routes. This and other financial mistakes resulted in a state debt of thirty million dollars impairing its credit and putting the entire Alabama economy at risk. Within four years, the state’s railroads lost half of their appraised value plunging from

$25 million in 1871 to $12 million in 1875.

lxvii

Once again, new financial solutions were needed to ensure the success of Alabama railroads.

The availability of capital for investment was a problem. Laws passed during the Civil War placed the majority of banks in the North, leaving stores and merchants in the rural South to

State lxvii Stover, 88-94.

28

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018 dispense credit to cash-strapped planters and farmers. Many borrowed on credit to obtain supplies and some planters leased land to northerners or others who were able to pay cash rent.

High prices, lack of capital, and losses during the war also forced many small farmers who were previously self-sufficient outside of the most intense cotton-growing areas of Alabama to enter the market system. Debtors placed liens on future crops to obtain goods, and creditors often required payment in the form of cotton because it was nonperishable and easily marketed through extant trade channels. Outside investors demanded that cotton be cultivated because they had confidence only in that crop to remain income-producing.

lxviii

This crop-lien system and the availability of goods from the West created more cotton farmers and simultaneously undermined their self-sufficiency. Faced with the dire, postwar conditions of their farmsteads, at a time when farmers could buy produce and meat from stores, it encouraged them to devote more land and effort to cotton, which brought cash and ensured credit. High interest rates and falling cotton prices prevented farmers from escaping the debt cycle and bound them to planting cotton year after year. Some even increased acreage in futile efforts get ahead or break even. Credit farming maintained and exacerbated the South’s monoculture following the war and set the tone for the South’s economic recovery.

lxix

In addition to wartime price inflation and the prevalence of crop-lien financing, other factors encouraged small farmers to enter cotton production. Growing cotton was not especially difficult, did not require expensive machinery, and even though prices continued to drop throughout the nineteenth century, it always brought cash or afforded credit for the next year. Some perceived the end of slavery as a chance to participate in the commercial market without having to compete with slave labor.

Railroad construction and expansion also encouraged small farmers by expanding market access to those for which water transportation was not an option and providing more reliable commodity transportation for all producers. Railroad tracks in the South more than doubled in two decades, with 10,738 miles in 1860 and 24,577 miles in 1880. In 1860, eleven companies had 743 miles of railroad in Alabama. After the war, companies reorganized, consolidated, and repaired the state’s tracks, but the panic of 1873 led northern investors to take over bankrupt southern lines and expand trackage. By 1877 Alabama had 1,802 miles of railroad.

lxx

State lxviii On this general theme, see John S. Otto, Southern Agriculture During the Civil War Era, 1860-1880 (Westport, CT: Greenwood

Press, 1994). lxix Margaret M. Storey, Loyalty and Loss: Alabama’s Unionists in the Civil War and Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana

University Press, 2004), 182-3; Otto, Southern Agriculture During the Civil War Era, 53-4, Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New

South: Life After Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 13; Encyclopedia of Alabama , “Agriculture in

Alabama,” accessed December 23, 2013; James L. Roark , Masters without Slaves: Southern Planters in the Civil War and

Reconstruction (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1977), 137; David B. Danbom, Born in the Country: A History of Rural

America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 125, 128; William Warren Rogers et al., Alabama: The History of a Deep

South State (Tuscaloosa, 1994), 270. lxx Cline, Alabama Railroads ; Chief of the Bureau of Statistics, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1878 : Finance, Coinage,

Commerce, Immigration, Shipping, The Postal Service, Population, Railroads, Agriculture, Coal, and Iron , (Washington, D.C., 1879),

152.

29

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018

The Louisville & Nashville Railroad (L&N) prevailed relatively unscathed from the Civil

War to become a powerhouse company in Tennessee and the Ohio Valley. It leased the

Nashville & Decatur Railroad in 1871 beginning its expansion into the Deep South. It then acquired the financially strapped South and North Railroad , completing the line from

Decatur to Montgomery, and formally linking northern farmers with those in the south.

Many companies were formed to traverse the southern edge of the Appalachians linking the

Northern and Southern divisions of the state, finally bringing trade to Mobile. The L&N agreed to the acquisition of the South & North because John Turner Milner, a railroad official, promised new revenue from the mineral rich landscape in central Alabama.

lxxi

The entrance of the L&N helped establish Birmingham as a New South city and completely revitalized the state’s economy jumping from an agrarian based system to one rich with steel and industry. The success of Birmingham and Alabama steel essentially funded the

L&N’s expansion to Mobile and New Orleans.

lxxii

In 1894, the rail lines that were owned by the Richmond Terminal Company--the East Tennessee, Virginia, and Georgia, the Alabama

Great Southern, and Memphis & Charleston--were amassed into New York financier J.P.

Morgan’s new Southern Railway System. The L&N and Southern now dominated Alabama railroads.

lxxiii

People worried that these companies did not have the best interest of Alabamians in mind and demanded new regulation over railroad rates and operation. Farmers especially demanded lower rates for shipping their products as local freight rather than through freight.

Other states had formed Railroad Commissions to oversee rail operations and intervene in any problems. The bill forming the Alabama Railroad Commission was passed on February

26, 1881.

lxxiv

The Farmer’s Alliance pushed for stricter control over the railroads, however railroad lobbyists reduced the role of the commission to more of an advisory board.

lxxv

Walter L. Bragg became the first president of the commission and despite trying, failed to bring any radical change to Alabama railroads.

The railroads facilitated farmer access to foreign guano and domestic superphosphates and most stores’ inventories included these commercial fertilizers by the 1870s. Farmers used fertilizers to expedite growth in unfavorable climates and cultivate marginal land, both of which contributed to the rise of cotton acreage. The rebound and expansion of King Cotton was also buttressed by the advent of sharecropping and tenant farming. These were the agricultural production systems that, in the South, were directly related to the spread of cotton cultivation, both of which became more widespread and deeply entrenched toward the turn of the century.

lxxvi

Alabama’s Century and Heritage Farms program is an effective way of identifying extant properties that measure the rapid establishment of new family farms in the post-

State lxxi Cline, 97-107. lxxii “Alabama Railroads,” Encyclopedia of Alabama Online, accessed April 24, 2014, http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org/face/Article.jsp?id=h-2390 lxxiii Stover, 258-60. lxxiv Cline, 199-201. lxxv James F. Doster, Railroads in Alabama Politics, 1875-1914 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1957), 42. lxxvi Danbom, Born in the Country , 126; Ayers, The Promise , 14-5; Otto, Southern Agriculture , 82; Rogers et al., Alabama , 253.

30

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018

Reconstruction era. A good example from the National Register is the Jesse Pickens Pugh

Farmstead (NR 7/28/1999) in Clarke County. The half-spraddle roof cottage dwelling dates to 1865, and there are contributing outbuildings to the rear of the dwelling, extant historic fields, and a family cemetery, a combination of resources that reflects well the appearance of a post-Civil War family farm in Alabama. Another example of a two-story central hall dwelling, c. 1885, is the Sarah Amanda Trott McKinney 10-acre farmstead (NR 5/29/1992) in Bibb County. Sarah McKinney taught at the nearby Six Mile Academy and the family produced a range of agricultural products. Outbuildings include structures for canning (c.

1940), a brick cellar (potatoes), a chicken house, and a livestock barn.

Sharecropping as a way of life

Emancipation along with post-war economic challenges necessitated a reorientation of the agricultural labor system in the South. Landowners possessed the space and equipment to cultivate crops, but land was of little value without labor to cultivate it. When rumors of land confiscation and redistribution to freedmen went mostly unrealized, few freed people had anything but their labor to sell. The Freedman’s Bureau initially intervened by facilitating contractual agreements between laborers and landowners based upon systems of wage labor, but these arrangements proved unsatisfactory for both freedmen and landowners and various forms of tenancy began to emerge in the 1870s. lxxvii

By this time, historian Kenneth Phillips concludes, “most planters, newly freed slaves, and poor whites had accepted the sharecrop rental system as the answer to Alabama’s farm labor problem. It was a compromise, but it offered poor whites a means of eking out a meager existence; it gave freed people the semblance of the independence they craved; and it offered planters the opportunity to return plantations to productivity under some degree of personal supervision.” lxxviii Tenancy also led all parties to emphasize monoculture— especially cotton—because that was a certain cash crop. Tenancy was highest in the former plantation areas—as Jon Wiener showed in his study of the Black Belt--where antebellum operations were relatively self-sufficient and raised food crops as well as cash crops. Tenant arrangements divided plantations; each family worked and lived on their allotted parcel and planted their own cotton crop.

lxxix

Many landlords also often served as sharecroppers’ and tenants’ furnishing merchants, holding liens and mortgages against crops, animals, and equipment, and soliciting credit that only cotton satisfied. The resulting monoculture exacerbated farmers’ dependence on landowner-merchants for survival, which was made even more tenuous by the slow rebound of livestock to antebellum numbers and the advent of fence laws that prohibited free roaming. Sharecropping and tenant farming arrangements normally excluded the landowners’ responsibilities of providing basic necessities to freedmen and their families that existed under wage labor contracts. This limited freedmen’s and landless whites’ access to sustenance, many of them resorting to theft to avoid starving, making them prime targets

State lxxvii Roark, Masters , 137-9; Danbom, Born in the Country , 121-2; Otto, Southern Agriculture , 59. lxxviii Phillips, “Sharecropping.” lxxix Danbom, Born in the Country , 104-5, 126; Lee J. Alston and Kyle D. Kauffman, “Up, down and off the Agricultural Ladder: New

Evidence and Implications of Agricultural Mobility for Blacks in the Postbellum South,” Agricultural History 72 (1998): 264-5;

Gilbert C. Fite, Cotton Fields No More (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1984), 4-5; Ayers, The Promise , 191-6; Wiener,

Social Origins of New South .

31

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018 for Ku Klux Klan violence, and providing local terrorists a conflated excuse to exercise violence in the name of social control and morality. The new scattered arrangement of

African American homes, a direct result of the rising tenant system, weakened immediate resistance to and protection from assaults.

lxxx

But as the decades passed, more white farmers became tenants and eventually outnumbered

African American tenants statewide. Some onetime landowners slipped into tenancy after losing property due to unpaid mortgages. By 1920, the landless ran 56 percent of the

South’s farms and 58 percent of Alabama’s. While farmers throughout other parts of the country harvested crops, including cotton, with machines, southerners relied on draft animals and human labor well into the twentieth century. Much like antebellum slavery, the inescapable debt cycle in which many small farmers and the landless found themselves provided the human capital that sustained the static nature of southern agriculture and gave planters little incentive to pursue progressive alternatives.

lxxxi

Thousands of tenant dwellings have disappeared from the state’s landscape in the last fifty years due not only to demographic change but also due to the flimsy construction of many of these homes. In his oral history with Theodore Rosengarten, Alabama sharecropper Nate

Shaw explained: “Whenever a white man built a house for a colored man he just run it right quick like a box. No seal in that house; just box it up with lumber, didn’t never box it up with a tin roof. They’d put doors to the house and sometimes they’d stick a glass window in it but mostly a wood window. Didn’t put you behind no painted wood and glass, just built a house for you to move in then go to work.” lxxxii

Nevertheless, many dwellings for sharecroppers and tenants remain, documented in existing

National Register properties. The Walker-Klinner Farm (NR 10/15/1987) in Chilton

County had four tenant houses extant from 1850-1910, along with a post-World War II tenant house (1951) at the time of its nomination. The Moore-Webb-Holmes Plantation

(NR 8/24/2011) in Perry County lacks the historic manor house but has multiple tenant dwellings along with the overseer’s house. Since this property has remained in the family since 1819 it is an excellent example of a Black Belt plantation that transitioned from the antebellum era through farm tenancy and into the modern era of mechanized Alabama agriculture.

A generation of historical studies have helped us understand what happened within the tenant house and the contributions of tenants to Alabama agriculture. It is not a pleasant story. Historian Kenneth Phillips concludes: “The way of life of most tenant farmers was

State lxxx Leon Litwack, Trouble in Mind (New York: Knopf, 1998); Charles S. Aiken, The Cotton Plantation South since the Civil War

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1998). lxxxi Fite, Cotton Fields , 4; Virginia Van der Veer Hamilton, Alabama: A Bicentennial History (New York: W.W. Norton & Company,

1977), 37; Ayers, The Promise , 188-9; Michael W. Fitzgerald, “The Ku Klux Klan: Property Crime and the Plantation System in

Reconstruction Alabama,” Agricultural History (Spring 1997): 188-91; Danbom, Born in the Country , 125-9, 153; Otto, Southern

Agriculture , 100, 106; B.I. Wiley, “Salient Changes in Southern Agriculture Since the Civil War,” Agricultural History 13

(1939):71,73; Encyclopedia of Alabama , “Cotton,” accessed December 27, 2013, http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org/face/Article.jsp?id=h-1491; Alston and Kauffman, “Up, down, and off,” 269; George B.

Ellenburg, Mule South to Tractor South: Mules, Machines, and the Transformation of the Cotton South (Tuscaloosa: University of

Alabama Press, 2007), 29-30, 120-1. lxxxii Theodore Rosengarten, All God’s Dangers: the Life of Nate Shaw (New York: Avon, 1974), 108.

32

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018 inferior to that of many people in medieval Europe. Housing consisted of primitive log cabins or clapboard shotgun houses. Few homes had glass windows or screens; most featured wooden shutters that could be closed at night and in inclement weather. Indoor plumbing was nonexistent; water was provided from open wells or nearby springs and creeks, and bathrooms were outdoor privies located a few yards behind the house.” lxxxiii

Tenants usually did not benefit from the railroads or the introduction of automobile highways in the 20 th

century; most lived along unimproved dirt roads until the 1950s. Their diet was poor, dependent on corn and pork and lacked vegetables and fruit.

Yet their value to King Cotton was unquestioned. “Whether white or black,” Phillips emphasizes, “sharecroppers produced more cotton per acre than any other category of farmer.” lxxxiv Tenant dwellings in other words are not inconsequential or secondary buildings on Alabama’s agricultural landscape; they are central, significant properties.

Edgar Thompson wrote in 1940: “`The plantation which the visitor in the South sees today, is generally an estate, a group of little farms, cultivated on shares. Dilapidated cabins are sprinkled over the estate, one to each tract or farm.” lxxxv

Tenants were not slaves: they would not stay in quarters but preferred a bit more independence by living on the land that they tilled. Tenant houses were a distinguishing part of Alabama farms during the reign of

King Cotton.

The rise of tenancy did not mean the end of the plantation, as geographer Charles S. Aiken emphasized in The Cotton Plantation South Since the Civil War (1998). Rather plantations reached “their numerical apex and greatest geographical extent” by the early 20 th

century, before the impact of the boll weevil.

lxxxvi

In 1910 the federal census conducted a special study of the plantation South, defining a plantation as having three critical features: large landholding, large labor force, and centralized management (most typically at the location but also including absentee planter owners/managers). According to that definition,

Alabama had 7,280 plantations: those with five or more tenants were concentrated in the

Black Belt, with secondary concentrations around the Black Warrior River, the Alabama

River, and the Tennessee River valleys. North central Alabama and the southern coastal region had no plantations with five or more tenants by 1910.

lxxxvii

The focus on the impact of tenancy often hides another reality—an increasing number of

African American farm owners. The Laura Watson House (NR 9/5/1985) in Sumter County is not extant, but when documented in the mid-1980s it was recognized as a typical turn-ofthe-century dwelling for an African American farmer. As stated in the nomination by AHC staff, its two-door façade with end chimneys and a full-length post supported porch was “a good example of a rapidly vanishing folk-type dwelling of the kind which might have been occupied by a small black freeholder at the turn of the century.”

Again, the Alabama Century and Heritage Farm program is an effective tool for identifying and creating a record of these early African American farms. One example is the Walker-

State lxxxiii Phillips, “Sharecropping.” lxxxiv Ibid. lxxxv Charles S. Aiken, The Cotton Plantation South Since the Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 17. lxxxvi Ibid., 7-8. lxxxvii Aiken, 35-37.

33

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018

Fluker Farm in Dallas County. In 1889 Eugene Walker established the farm with 20 acres.

About ten years later, c. 1900, Walker built a frame house with a side gable roof, which is extant. His land yielded cotton, corn, and vegetables, and the family raised cattle. In 1906

Tyler and Candis McClammy established the larger Thad McClammy Farm in Monroe

County on 350 acres. They built a frame house with hipped roof flanked by end chimneys, a smokehouse, barns, and chicken house, and these resources are extant. Sharpe’s Farm in

Montgomery County was founded in 1904 on 119 acres of land and was known for its peach orchards. The property retains a frame house with a front-facing gable roof from the 1920s.

Agrarian Resistance and Reform

During America’s Gilded Age, discontent among farmers throughout the country led many to organize in hopes of representing agrarian interests in this rapidly transformative time.

Falling farm commodity prices, high interest rates, and unregulated business worked against the nation’s producers and agrarian resistance was commonplace toward the end of the century. Alabama was no different, even as agrarian activism faced the region’s entrenched class structure and racism.

lxxxviii

Agrarian political resistance largely played itself out by the turn of the century as the initially successful Populist movement lost momentum and adherents but the process of agricultural reform, and new agricultural institutions that embodied that reform, became established parts of the lives of farmers and of towns and villages across the state.

The United States Department of Agriculture was instrumental in the establishment of the

Grange (Patrons of Husbandry). First conceived as a nationwide agricultural organization to mend relations between the North and South, the Grange soon became an institution through which farmers collectively addressed their economic woes. By the time the Alabama State

Grange formed in 1872, 320 subordinate granges already existed in fifty of the state’s sixtyfive counties. The passive policies of the national organization allowed local granges to organize with African Americans at their discretion, which often resulted in separate local organizations for blacks. Organizers based subordinate granges on fraternal lodge social structures. Many of them met in schoolhouses, other common centers, or built their own halls. Middling to large landowners often designed objectives and led activities of the granges.

Many, if not most progressive agriculturalists and organizers perceived “the tenant farmer problem” as “a thorn in agriculture’s side.” lxxxix In addressing the impoverished farmers’ financial woes, Grange leaders rejected inflationary policies and instead, encouraged smallholders, tenants, and sharecroppers to avoid credit, make the most of the resources at hand, generally “work harder,” and cultivate in their children “thrift and industry.” xc

According to Theodore Saloutos, “More unrealistic advice for the mass of sharecroppers and impoverished small landowners could hardly have been given.” xci

This was especially true in states like Alabama, where lien laws forced debtors into “iron-clad” mortgages that

State lxxxviii Theodore Saloutos, “The Grange in the South, 1870-1877,” The Journal of Southern History 19 (November 1953): 473. lxxxix Charles M. Gardner, The Grange: Friend of the Farmer (Washington, DC: The National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry,

1949), 153. xc Theodore Saloutos, Farmer Movements in the South, 1865-1933 (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), 36. xci Ibid.

34

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture

Name of Multiple Property Listing threatened nearly all possessions including livestock and future crops.

xcii

Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018

Despite the granges’ advice on finances, the organizations participated in other activities

State and ventures for the good of all farmers. They formed cooperatives for buying and selling farm goods, owned stores, gins, and warehouses, hosted social events, advised farmers against purchasing faulty goods, and promoted long-term goals for rural progress. Again, unrealistic advice to small farmers coincided, including agricultural diversification, general and agricultural education, and the avoidance of credit. In addition, many leading Grangers also identified with the Democratic Party, which increasingly relied on the fallacy of white solidarity in order to distract poor whites from their economic interests.

xciii

Participation in the Alabama Grange peaked in 1875 with approximately 18,000 members; membership declined for the rest of the decade, while tenancy increased for the rest of the century. The Grange funneled support into broader reform groups such as the Green Labor

Party, especially in northern Alabama. Greenbackers promoted departure from the gold backed monetary system to help workers and the poor. They believed the current system prevented laborers and farmers from transacting equally with bankers, merchants, and others to whom they were indebted. Southern farmers perceived inflationist policies as a more immediate and effective remedy to their problems. A reorientation of the nation’s monetary system would make cash more readily available and, theoretically, enable the poor and landless to decrease reliance on creditors and landowners. Less indebtedness and increased cash flow could also allow farmers to more easily accumulate capital to diversify, a tenet of progressive agriculture. Diversification could increase self-sufficiency, as well as provide alternate commercial products for sale, thus further increasing the flow of cash.

Despite modest third party influence in northern Alabama, they often pursued these objectives through the Democratic Party. Nevertheless, the inflationist campaigns began to verse farmers in the political vocabulary of the day and the Democrats’ failure to establish egalitarian policies only fed rural discontent.

xciv

More exclusive and radical organizations such as the Agricultural Wheel began to appear. A group of small farmers created the Wheel in 1882 in Arkansas and sought to build its membership with rural residents only, excluding merchants and bankers whom the Grange allowed. Wheel members sought to form cooperatives for buying necessities and implements, marketing and selling goods, and shared the Greenbackers’ opinions of the monetary system. The Wheel appeared in Alabama in 1886 and by 1889, 75,000

Alabamians were members. The Wheel was more active and radical in some areas of the state than others. In northern Alabama the Democratic party lacked the hold it enjoyed in the southern region. The area became a hotbed for political agitation , producing substantial opposition to the Democratic Party. Additionally, as more landowners in the area slipped into tenancy, cooperating across racial lines became more appealing and demonstrated the xcii Charles H. Okten, The Ills of the South (New York, 1894), 33-53, quoted in Saloutos, Farmer Movements, 36. xciii Saloutos, “The Grange,” 474, 478; Robert Partin, “Black’s Bend Grange,” Agricultural History 31 (July 1957): 49-50; Ayers, The

Promise , 214-5. xciv Partin, “Black’s,” 49; Ayers, The Promise , 45-6, 215; Theodore Saloutos, Farmer Movements in the South, 1865-1933 (Lincoln:

University of Nebraska Press, 1964), 42, 49;

35

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture

Name of Multiple Property Listing potential potency of class politics.

xcv

Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018

In the late 1880s, the Wheel merged with the Farmers’ Alliance. The Southern Farmers’

State

Alliance began in Texas in the 1870s. Like the organizations that preceded it, the Alliance borrowed much of its organizational and social structure from fraternal lodges, recruited members through lecture circuits, and cultivated the sentiment that soon drove Populism. In

1887, Alabama farmers formed the state’s first Alliance in Beech Grove, Madison County.

By 1889, 662,000 southerners were Alliance members with 120,000 in Alabama. The suballiances sponsored cooperative ventures, promoted social cohesion, and generally served as clearinghouses for rural progress. The Alabama State Exchange in Montgomery was one large example of a cooperative warehouse created to help members bargain in marketing, sales, and purchasing.

xcvi

The organization’s refusal to admit black members moved African American farmers and laborers to organize the Colored Farmers’ National Alliance in the late 1880s. African

Americans formed suballiances throughout the South and established their own cooperative exchanges, including one in Mobile. The Colored Farmers’ Alliance claimed 50,000 members in Alabama by 1889. Regionally and locally African American and white suballiances were separate, but shared many of the same economic goals. In Alabama, local orders of both races sometimes cooperated to boycott jute and pursue cooperative opportunities. Alabama’s African American Alliances faced many more additional challenges than did the white Alliances. Besides one exception, African American Alliances in Alabama lacked newspapers to disseminate information, promote unity, and maintain morale. They also endured rabid opposition from conservative Democrats, and substantial criticism from the far right of the Farmers’ Alliance.

xcvii

Alliance leaders promoted ideas such as economic boycotts and the sub-treasury plan which would allow farmers to store their crops, borrow against them, and sell them when prices were higher. Collective resistance and cooperation remained a central tenet of the Alliance, but leaders began to agitate for more political action. Many Democrats paid lip service to the Alliance during their campaigns in order to attract the support of some three million people who identified with the southern Alliance. In 1890, Alabama placed an Alliance man in the U.S. Senate and 75 representatives in the House. Many Democratic politicians that adopted the Alliance platform failed to pursue it once seated.

As Democrats alienated the most radical Alliance members and economic depression set in, disgruntled members formed the Populist Party in 1892.

xcviii

Of the southern states,

Alabama had one of the most active Populist parties. To the Democrats, one of the most threatening aspects of the Populist Party was its ability to unite poor whites and blacks by advocating their economic similarities above racial differences. White opposition to xcv Paul Horton, “Testing the Limits of Class Politics in Postbellum Alabama: Agrarian Radicalism in Lawrence County,” The Journal of Southern History 57 (Feb. 1991): 65-66; Saloutos, Farmers Movements , 62-4; Sheldon Hackney, Populism to Progressivism in

Alabama (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), 7-8; Samuel L. Webb, “From Independents to Populists to Progressive

Republicans: The Case of Chilton County, Alabama, 1880-1920,” The Journal of Southern History 59 (November 1993): 713. xcvi Hackney, Populism , 7-8; Danbom, Born in the Country , 156-8; Ayers, The Promise , 217-20. xcvii Ayers, The Promise , 235; Saloutos, Farmer Movements , 81; William W. Rogers, “The Negro Alliance in Alabama,” The Journal of Negro History 45, no.1 (January 1960): 41-2. xcviii Saloutos, Farmers Movements , 77, 119; Danbom, Born in the Country , 158.

36

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018

Populism was strongest in Black Belt counties where whites felt especially threatened by the black majority. Because of this, election fraud in the Black Belt was considerably higher than in other areas of the state. Populist support seemed more prevalent in northern

Alabama, but election fraud in the Black Belt obscures Populist support in that area and suggests the extent to which the Democrats felt threatened. Reuben Kolb, one of Alabama’s most famous progressive agriculturalists and Alliance Democrat turned Populist, attracted considerable support when he competed in the 1892 and 1894 gubernatorial elections, but still lost to the Democratic candidate. In 1896, the state’s Populist Party shared tickets with

Republicans and Democrats. In local and state elections, Populists mainly voted with the

Republicans and supported pro-silver Democrat William Jennings Bryan for president.

Bryan lost and the Populist Party soon became inconsequential as an independent political force. Despite the party’s demise, populism was not totally lost on farmers and laborers; the populist critique of the status quo lived on and found expression in later farmer organizations such as the Farmers’ Union of the early twentieth century.

xcix

Existing meeting halls for the Grange, Agricultural Wheel, Farmers Alliance, and the

Populist party would be significant properties under this multiple property study. Grange

Hall (1874, originally located in Pintlala) at Old Alabama Town in Montgomery documents how these buildings were unpretentious in size and architectural style. State meetings of both the Agricultural Wheel and the Farmers Alliance took place at Auburn University in the late 1880s and early 1890s. Tuskegee Institute hosted similar conventions for African

Americans in the 1880s and 1890s. Properties associated with the theme of agricultural political reform, such as county courthouses, from the late 19 th

century need additional study.

The Clayton Plantation (NHL 12/8/1976) in Barbour County represents well the impact of agrarian political activism on one Alabama family from the 1880s to the Progressive era.

This plantation was the birthplace and later central business of Henry D. Clayton (born

1857), who began his political career in the Democratic Party in the 1880s as a young man in his twenties. By 1890 he supported the Farmers Alliance and backed the gubernatorial candidacy of Alliance man Reuben F. Kolb. Kolb was unsuccessful but Clayton won a seat in the state legislature as an Alliance man. In 1896 he represented the state at the 1896

Democratic National Convention as a supporter of free silver and devoted backer of

William Jennings Bryan. Bryan won the nomination but not the presidency while Clayton won a seat in Congress, where he became a stalwart supporter of such former Populist planks as the direct election of senators. In 1913-14 he worked with the administration of

Democratic President Woodrow Wilson to draft and pass the Clayton Anti-Trust Act, one of the progressive attempts to reign in the monopolies of the Gilded Era. Clayton’s legislation excluded farm or labor organizations as illegal combinations that restrained trade, keeping the emerging movement for agricultural cooperatives moving forward at the federal level.

New Immigrants and Traditions

The dominant place of cotton and tenancy in post-Civil War Alabama can obscure other significant developments in the state’s agriculture. Devastation to the population,

State xcix Ayers, The Promise , 255, 276-77; Hackney, Populism , 100-4; Danbom, Born in the Country , 160.

37

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018 landscape, and economy during the Civil War and the outmigration that followed

Appomattox left Alabama in need of new people and new ideas. In-migration was partially dependent upon and encouraged by the completion and extension of the state’s railroads.

When the Louisville and Nashville Railroad (L&N) ate the debts of the South and North

Alabama Railroad (S&N), it acquired 2.7 million acres of land in Alabama. The L&N had land to dispose of and German John G. Cullmann began to act as the company’s real estate agent for the area that would become Cullman County. He quickly began seeking settlers from Europe and German communities in the North and by 1873, 123 families had settled in the area. The initial success of the settlement attracted praise from those who depicted it as a model to be emulated by other regions of the state and the area attracted additional

Germans, Swiss, Britons, Canadians, and Dutch, as well as white families from central

Georgia.

c

Cullman County is in the central part of northern Alabama, located in the Sand Mountain area on the Cumberland Plateau. Its soils are lime deficient and were considered poor compared to other areas of the state; it was not part of the state’s plantation landscape. John

G. Cullmann’s vision for the settlement consisted of commercial vineyards, wineries, and orchards, a marked departure from the agriculture prevalent in the rest of the state.

Cullmann’s plans achieved some realization. For example, in 1898, the Alabama Vineyard and Winery Company established the community of Vinemont and sold properties that each contained a house, orchards, and vineyards, alongside a price guarantee for produce. This and similar ventures aimed to encourage and support diversification existed, but the settlement is said to have survived by cotton, sweet potatoes, and strawberries. Families soon relegated orchards and vines to smaller plots and kept their produce. Despite the shortlived commercial wine industry and prevalence of cotton, agricultural diversification survived, largely as a result of German families’ adherence to self-sufficiency and tendency to avoid credit farming.

ci

When strawberries were brought to the settlement in 1880, Germans found an outlet for their familiarity with hard labor and discipline. Some historians credit the Germans with beginning commercial production of sweet potatoes. They also grew truck crops and raised livestock. The majority of these families only secondarily grew cotton and adopted best cultivation methods, such as using fertilizer and terracing, from their native neighbors and

Georgian settlers. Such exchange was mostly one-sided; the Georgian settlers tended to adhere to credit and cotton farming, and subsequently had a higher percentage of sharecroppers and tenant farmers in their ranks. As a result of early postbellum diversification trends, the county was considered agriculturally superior to others and ranked high in farm income and per capita value of farm products well into the twentieth century. The county’s prosperity in agriculture and economic diversity are traced by most back to the Germans’ seemingly inherent industry and the melding of American and

German culture.

cii

State c Robert S. Davis, “The Old World in the New South: Entrepreneurial Ventures and the Agricultural History of Cullman County, AL,”

Agricultural History 70 (August 2005): 439-44, 448; J. Allen Tower and Walter Wolf, “Ethnic Groups in Cullman County, Alabama,”

Geographical Review 33 (April 1943): 277. ci Tower and Wolf, “Ethnic,” 276, 285; Davis, “The Old World,” 445-6, 452-4. cii Davis, “The Old World,” 445-6, 454; Walter and Wolf, “Ethnic,” 277-9, 285.

38

NPS Form 10-900-b





Southern Alabama’s Baldwin County is another area where new immigrants made a significant impact. Baldwin County was one of those regions in Alabama still relatively

OMB No. 1024-0018

State sparsely populated at the time of the Civil War. From 1865 to 1910, this agricultural frontier experienced natural resource exploitation, land sales, and new settlement. Lumber companies cut timber, sold cut-over land, and the transportation network that grew to accommodate the industry facilitated in migration of newcomers, most of which were participants in postwar colonization projects. These programs sought to relocate immigrant families from urban centers to rural places of the lauded New South. Nearby Mobile and

Pensacola provided immigrant farmers urban consumers and encouraged diversified agriculture for both local and national markets.

In 1893, an Italian publisher from New York funded the settlement of twenty Italian families in Daphne, Baldwin County. Each family farmed fifty acres where they grew cotton, corn, vegetables, and, later, strawberries. In 1905, Germans settled cut-over land formerly owned by the Southern States Lumber Company in Elberta and 43 Polish families settled around Summerdale. In 1906, Jason Malbis established a Greek community in

Mobile known as Malbis Plantation (NR 5/10/2011). These immigrants raised livestock, fruit and crops for the local market. The community also contained a canning factory, a turpentine still, ice plant, and bakery. These ethnic groups were more inclined to adopt scientific agricultural methods and practice diversified agriculture than native Alabamians.

By the 1920s, Baldwin County exported Satsuma oranges, pecans, and sweet and Irish potatoes.

ciii

Agricultural education in the New South

While King Cotton remained dominant, agricultural reformers were concerned that planters and farmers were in danger in relying so heavily on a single cash crop. They warned of the debilitating nature of monoculture and urged diversification to southern farmers, the majority of whom were poorly educated, malnourished, and debt-ridden, barely surviving because of their adherence to cash crop production and participation in a parasitic market system. Outsiders perceived their cultivation habits and lifestyles as self-defeating and inefficient. Farmers did not fit within the image of the New South engineered by southern boosters to attract investment, encourage industrial development, and expedite the South to equal social and economic footing with the rest of the country. According to this rhetoric, in order to progress, farmers needed to adopt the efficiency that sustained industrial success in other parts of the country. Agricultural efficiency necessitated educated farmers adopting scientifically proven concepts. It was hoped that this would eventually result in diversified agriculture and higher standards of living. The post-war establishment of the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Alabama in Auburn and the emphasis on agricultural education at Tuskegee Institute helped to acquaint Alabama farmers with tenets and practices of what was often called “progressive agriculture.” civ ciii Dino Cinel, “Italians in the South,” Italian Americana 9, no. 1 (Fall/Winter 1990): 16; Larry Burnette, Historic Baldwin County: A

Bicentennial History (Historical Publishing Nework, 2007), 23. civ Linda O. McMurry, George Washington Carver, Scientist and Symbol (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 73; Norwood

Allen Kerr, A History of the Alabama Agricultural Experiment Station, 1883-1983 (Auburn: Alabama Agricultural Experiment

Station, 1985), 5; Danbom, Born in the Country , 128-31.

39

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018

In his study of Alabama agriculture, Eddie Wayne Shell emphasizes that agricultural reformers in the late nineteenth century looked to three principles that they believed would propel the state forward and provide “salvation” for the state’s farmers: “the application of science and education to farming . . . the organization of farmers . . [and] crop diversification.” All three were crucial but most reformers thought education was the most important principle.

cv

Talladega County, Alabama also produced an educator who not only impacted his native state but the entire South through the private education foundations, the George Peabody

Education Fund and the John F. Slater Fund. The J. J. Curry House (NHL 1965/ NR

4/29/1979) includes a family farm of over 700 acres. Curry became the general agent of the

Peabody Education Fund in 1881 and in 1890 assumed the administration of the Slater

Fund, which was dedicated to African American education. He helped to organize the

Conference for Education in the South in 1898, out of which in 1902 came the General

Education Board, funded by John D. Rockefeller, which influenced southern education and southern agricultural education for the next generation.

The Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical College, now Auburn University, began in 1872 when Alabama took advantage of the Morrill Act of 1862, which granted states 30,000 acres of land for each congressman. Alabama received 240,000 acres to sell, the money from which was put into interest bearing funds. The interest was to be used to establish and support an industrial and agricultural college. Supporters of these technical schools thought them practical alternatives to classical education for the working class. Theoretically, technical education would produce a workforce ready to contribute to the shift toward industrialization and scientific, diversified agriculture. In Alabama, the college at Auburn embodied the shift toward conceptualizing farming as a scientific endeavor. Agricultural research and experimentation began almost immediately with the establishment of what was to later become the Alabama Agricultural Experiment Station.

Early activity included demonstrations for students and nearby farmers that exhibited the efficient cultivation of vegetable crops, grains, grasses, and the effects of fertilizer on these, as well as cotton. The school’s experiment in cotton rotation, the “Old Rotation” parcel

(NR 2/14/1988), established in 1896, is a recognized landmark at Auburn today.

cvi

Old

Rotation is a one-acre parcel established by Professor J. F. Duggar to test the seasonal rotation of soybeans with cotton, to see if the legume helped to restore the nutrients taken away by cotton production. The experiment was successful, and has had a profound impact not only on the state’s agricultural landscape but that of the cotton-producing South where soybeans are still regularly rotated with cotton production. It is the third-oldest field crop experiment that is still in production in the United States. Cullars Rotation (NR 4/18/2003) dates to 1911 and reflects the university’s significant experiments with fertilizers. Several of the historic buildings in the Auburn University Historic District (NR 6/3/1976) are associated with turn of the century agricultural associations such as state conventions for the

Agricultural Wheel and Farmers Alliance.

State cv Shell, 441. cvi Charles C., Mitchell, Dennis P. Delaney, and Kipling S. Balkcom. "A Historical Summary of Alabama's Old Rotation (circa 1896):

The World's Oldest, Continuous Cotton Experiment." Agronomy Journal 100 (September-October 2008): 1493-98.

40

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018

The short-lived cooperative substation established in 1874 near Courtland in the Tennessee

Valley exhibited college officials’ acknowledgement of the need for branch stations in order to reach more farmers and address a wider range of the state’s agriculture. Before the 1887

Hatch Act, which provided federal funding for agricultural research, the initiative for experimentation lay largely with the states. In 1883 the Alabama legislature passed a bill that created the state’s Department of Agriculture as well as the Agricultural Experiment

Station, both of which were initially located at Auburn. The Station’s first director, James

Stanley Newman, renovated, enhanced, and enlarged the college’s farm, which undertook

480 experiments by 1885. The primary strategy of information dissemination was the publication of bulletins comprised of weather observations, information about insects, diseases, and fertilizers, the cultivation of vegetable and fruit crops, and the practical interpretation of the station’s sundry experiments. Farmers could obtain bulletins free of charge at request.

cvii

The spread of scientific knowledge based on bulletin publications relied first, on the literacy of farmers, and second, on their reception of “book knowledge” and their willingness to apply it. Broad demonstration was needed. Farmers’ Institutes began in 1889 and served as venues of farmer forums and real-time instruction. Beginning in 1889, the state began to place agricultural schools in each of its nine congressional districts. These were placed in

Athens, Abbeville, Albertville, Evergreen, Jackson, Wetumpka, Sylacauga, Blountsville, and Hamilton. These schools served as branch experiment and demonstration sites and prefaced many Alabama students’ instruction at the college in Auburn. Much of the federal money that funded the college and experiment station was restricted and audited for the use of basic research, leaving the state to fund extension. It was not until the South was threatened by the boll weevil that the Alabama legislature moved to appropriate money solely for the use of agricultural extension.

cviii

The Morrill Act of 1862 did not mandate provisions for the education of African Americans and when Democratic “redemption” swept the state in 1874, lack of voluntary state establishment of higher education for blacks was a foregone conclusion. Booker T.

Washington’s political bargaining and adherence to the doctrine of technical paths of education for African Americans secured support for Tuskegee Normal and Industrial

Institute, founded in 1881 in Macon County (NHL 10/15/1966). Technical training for

African Americans did not threaten the extant racial structure because it fit white supremacy’s tenet of African Americans’ fixed place in society as laborers. In 1896,

Washington obtained John F. Slater Fund money for the establishment of an agricultural department at Tuskegee, convinced George Washington Carver to leave Iowa to head it, and carefully cultivated political relationships to acquire state funds for the establishment of the nation’s first experiment station completely run by African Americans. Though the state only provided $1,500, it was both symbolic and imperative to the agricultural investigation and extension work at Tuskegee. Washington’s ability to secure financial support from various organizations and his success in securing Carver to head the institution’s agricultural wing made Tuskegee a clearinghouse for agricultural innovation and education

State cvii Rogers et al., Alabama , 331; Kerr, A History of the Alabama Agricultural , 3-6, 10; Danbom, Born in the Country, 113; P.O. Davis,

A Century of Science on Alabama Farms (Auburn, AL: Auburn University Press, 1952), 8-10; Fite, Cotton Fields , 77. cviii Fite, Cotton , 79; Davis, A Century , 19; Kerr, A History of the Alabama Agricultural , 35-6.

41

NPS Form 10-900-b




Name of Multiple Property Listing for Alabama’s African Americans.

cix

Carver’s training in scientific agriculture was central to Tuskegee’s agricultural investigations and the extension that grew from it. Tuskegee’s extension work began

OMB No. 1024-0018 informally with school officials traveling throughout rural Macon County, establishing relationships with black farmers, providing advice on various subjects, and helping to establish local schools. Washington took the institution’s agricultural extension a step further when he began hosting Farmers’ Conferences on Tuskegee’s campus. Faculty designed these events as forums through which farmers’ concerns could be heard and addressed by agricultural experts and other leaders of the local black community. Farmers

State were also taken on tours of the experiment station where they could see for themselves scientific agriculture in action. The success of these annual meetings encouraged Carver to begin holding monthly Farmers’ Institutes which provided more specific direction about soils, fertilizers, and diversifying crops. Women also frequented the meetings. Faculty instructed women in various aspects of farming and home economics and the Institutes became sources of practical advice to both men and women on farms. Out of these Institutes grew annual fairs where people exhibited their year’s work. The success of such fairs led to the combination of black and white fairs under the Macon County Fair Association. These fairs were sources of pride, encouragement, and demonstrations of rural peoples’ resourcefulness, productivity, and culture.

cx

By 1904, the Farmers’ Institutes begat Carver’s two-week “short courses” and encouraged the advent of movable schools to create a broader audience for scientific agriculture. The

Jesup Agricultural Wagon was the first movable school. In the summer of 1906, equipped with many of the latest agricultural implements and a faculty member from the experiment station, the wagon reached more than 2,000 people per month and also attracted the attention of the USDA agent Seaman Knapp. This led to interest in the potential of traveling demonstration and cooperative work and resulted in Thomas M. Campbell, a recent

Tuskegee graduate, being appointed as the USDA’s first black demonstration agent. The

Jesup Wagon, operated thereafter by Campbell, served as a metaphorical and literal vehicle for the expansion of Tuskegee’s extension work. The conferences, Farmers’ Institutes and courses, and the movable schools varied in form but were common in that they sought to better the plight of rural African Americans, the majority of which were sharecroppers and tenant farmers. By taking advantage of Tuskegee’s outreach, they learned how to improve their quality of life by using scarce resources efficiently, maximizing self-sufficiency, and executing fundamental farming and economic principles. These efforts also served as the foundations for subsequent agricultural extension work in the African American community.

cxi

A Landscape Transformed

Alabama became a state in 1819—for the next 46 years slavery dominated the shape of its cix Allen W. Jones, "The Role of Tuskegee Institute in the Education of Black Farmers." Journal of Negro History 60 (April 1975):

252-67; Davis, A Century , 8-9; Hamilton, Alabama: A Bicentennial , 79; McMurry, George , 45, 52, 75.

cx McMurry, 116-8. cxi McMurry,125-6; Allen W. Jones, “Thomas M. Campbell: Black Agricultural Leader of the New South,” in Southern Agriculture

Since the Civil War: A Symposium ed. George L. Robson, Jr. and Roy V. Scott (Washington, D.C.: Agricultural History Society,

1979), 44; Fite, Cotton, 79.

42

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018 agriculture and created an agricultural landscape dominated still by the cotton plantation. In the next 46-year period, which ends as the boll weevil infestation begins to wreck havoc on the cotton economy, the plantation reached its zenith. Two facts serve to illustrate. In 1870,

1.5 million acres in Alabama were devoted to cotton; by 1895 the number of acres in cotton reached 2.6 million.

cxii

Yet the agriculture landscape associated with the pre-boll weevil plantation was quite different from its antebellum beginnings. “The landscape was reordered,” according to Charles Aiken, “not only by the transition of the plantation system from a slave to a tenant labor force, but also by the emergence of a railroad network, a central place hierarchy, and a new, more complex agricultural infrastructure.” cxiii

In towns and prominent crossroads, there were the typically unadorned brick and frame stores run by furnish merchants, who provided loans and goods to tenant farmers, and more centralized cotton gin businesses, known as ginneries. On the farms and plantations, the labor force was not concentrated in quarters in closer relationship to the manor house, but scattered on both sides of dirt roads that passed through the cotton and other agricultural fields. Steam powered cotton gins, most of which incorporated the more technologically efficient Munger ginning system, improved the quality of ginned cotton while also increasing how much cotton could be processed in a day. In larger production centers, entrepreneurs established cotton warehouses and compresses where bales could be stored or

“compressed” into a smaller size for later shipment. Other related businesses would be fertilizer plants, such as the Blue Eye Oil and Fertilizer Company in Lincoln, or cotton seed processing plants, such as the Macon County Oil Company in Tuskegee. The most prominent company across the state was the Southern Cotton Oil Company, established in

1887 and eventually operating various facilities in all of the cotton-producing states.

cxiv

The new state-supported institutes, whether at Tuskegee, Auburn, or other state colleges encouraged further agricultural development. The era of King Cotton also witnessed the development of a new institutional foundation that would guide Alabama agriculture to the present.

Then there were agricultural products more important by the end of the century than they had been after the Civil War. Alabama hay production in 1895 stood at 86,000 tons; it had only been 10,000 tons in 1870. Sweet potato production jumped from 28,000 acres in 1870 to 61,000 acres in 1895. Dairy production reached 55.5 million gallons of milk by 1889.

cxv

Cotton was still King but Alabama agriculture at the turn of the century was more diverse than it had ever been.

Resource Assessment: More field investigation is needed for this period of Alabama

Agriculture, a requirement noted for all of the post-1865 historic contexts of this Multiple

Property Nomination. The pervasiveness of the post-Civil War agricultural economy in

Alabama is documented by many of the Alabama Century and Heritage Farms, a registry maintained by the state department of agriculture, since the majority of these properties date post-1865. But the field investigation also needs to consider the impact of agricultural

State cxii Shell, 423. cxiii Aiken, 39. cxiv Aiken, 39-48. cxv Shell, 427-431, 437.

43

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018 education institutions while existing nominations of several of these college campuses

(Auburn and Tuskegee in particular) need to consider Criterion A: Agriculture in the assessment of the property’s significance. Properties associated with 19 th

century agricultural reform/political organizations have not been studied. There are potentially additional community buildings (courthouses, fraternal halls) significantly associated with the 19 th

agricultural reform movement that have never been assessed for their potential significance under Criterion A: Agriculture.

VI. Boll Weevil and New Directions in Alabama Agriculture, 1910-1933

The arrival of the boll weevil accelerated the process of agricultural diversification. In 1903, the Alabama legislature passed a quarantine law in anticipation of the insect’s invasion. The law proved ineffective and in 1911 the boll weevil began its damage, forcing Alabama and the rest of the cotton South to realize the dangers of staple crop monoculture. It is difficult to overemphasize how the destruction of this pest contributed to the end of King Cotton and the introduction of a new era of much more diversified agriculture in Alabama, a pattern that has continued for over 100 years. The recent history of the pest and its impact, A

History of the Boll Weevil in Alabama, 1910-2007 , by the Alabama Agricultural Extension

Station, is the best place to start. The most public statement is the now-famous Boll Weevil

Monument (1919) in Enterprise, Alabama. The monument (NR 4/26/1973) celebrated the impact of the boll weevil, since it forced local farmers to diversify and improve local agriculture.

Other developments encouraged the cultivation of diverse crops for both sale and consumption. On one level it was political and institutional. Booker T. Washington had established Tuskegee’s department of agriculture in 1896 with a branch agricultural experiment station established, with George Washington Carver as director, in 1897. The

Alabama legislature created the State Board of Horticulture and the State Livestock Sanitary

Board, which in order to combat tick fever began the process of ending open range livestock grazing. In 1908 came state departments for Botany and Entomology. In 1911 came the creation of a Division of Food, Drugs, and Feed and the Board of Agriculture. The last proved most significant. “Created with the purpose to conduct farm demonstration work in cooperation with the USDA and the Extension Service” at Auburn, it was “the forerunner of the Alabama Cooperative Extension Service.” cxvi

The Division of Immigration and Markets came in 1915. The Experiment Station at Auburn added a department of Agronomy and

Soils in 1916 and Agricultural Engineering in 1917.

On another level it was technological. The advent of refrigerated shipping in the late nineteenth century expanded market potential for southern fruit and experiment substations facilitated diversification with research, demonstration, and extension work. Great strides were made by the experiment stations regarding truck crop production, including the control of insects and diseases that ruined vegetable and fruit crops, best cultivation practices, and marketing.

cxvii

State cxvi Shell, 413. cxvii Kerr, A History of the Alabama Agricultural , 35; Gilbert C. Fite, “Southern Agriculture Since the Civil War: An Overview,” in

Southern Agriculture Since the Civil War: A Symposium ed. George L. Robson, Jr. and Roy V. Scott (Washington, D.C.: Agricultural

44

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018

The state’s railroad system was also stabilized. By the 1920s, the railroad landscape in

Alabama was essentially complete. Five major railroads controlled the majority of the trackage in the state with some short line and logging railroads acting as feeders for the larger companies. Passenger trains, both local and de-luxe, crossed through the state en route to destinations across the South. This system remained functional until the 1960s when severe reductions in passenger and freight revenue caused railroads to start to consolidate once again. Today, only two major corporations operate in Alabama, Norfolk

Southern and CSX, and Amtrak operates the only remaining passenger route, a contemporary version of the famous Southern Railway Crescent Limited route to New

Orleans.

cxviii

The farmers and plantation owners who originally brought railroads to Alabama could never have envisioned the role they would play in the development of the state. It ended the reliance on river transport, transformed the Alabama economy to an industrial state, and broke ground in state and federal aid for infrastructure. Farmers rallied to tame the beast they helped create in the regulatory wars of the early twentieth century but failed to gain full control of the railroad companies. Without the work of Alabama farmers, the state’s railroad history may have been completely different.

Automobile transportation was also important in this period, especially in the 1920s, as federally funded highways began to crisscross the state. The new highways, and local roads feeding into the highways, provided farmers with improved access to regional markets. But the immediate impact was limited. In 1930, Alabama had 257,395 farms—only 4,516 had access to hard surfaced roads.

cxix

Where farmers had good transportation access, truck farming began to expand, and farm families took not only produce but local crafts to roadside stands and pull-offs where they would sell directly to the increasing numbers of automobile travelers.

cxx

Related to the impact of the automobile was the slowly developing trend for farmers to put aside mule teams in favor of tractors, especially once the Ford Motor Company’s Fordson tractors in the 1910s demonstrated that even middle-class farm families could take advantage of the new machine to ease the burden of farming by livestock and to also increase production due to the alleged superior efficiency of the tractor. The first available numbers, from 1920, count only 811 tractors for the state’s 256,000 farms. Many rural families in the next two decades invested in farm machinery such as tractors or trucks before they considered the investment in an automobile. After World War II, the growth of the modern farm machinery industry also added a new property type along the state’s roadsides—the automobile/tractor dealer and the emergence of such brand-specific

State

History Society, 1979), 9-10; Jane M. Porter, “Experiment Stations in the South, 1877-1940,” in Southern Agriculture Since the Civil

War: A Symposium ed. George L. Robson, Jr. and Roy V. Scott (Washington, D.C.: Agricultural History Society, 1979), 93; Danbom,

Born in the Country , 128; James L. McCorkle, Jr., “Agricultural Experiment Stations and Southern Truck Farming,” Agricultural

History 62(1988): 238. cxviii “Alabama Railroads.” cxix Phillips, “Sharecropping.” cxx Ronald R. Kline, Consumers in the Country: Technology and Social Change in Rural America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins

University Press, 2000) , 55-86.

45

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture

Name of Multiple Property Listing dealerships as John Deere, International Harvester, and Ford.

cxxi

Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018

Fruits and Nuts Industry

Alabama’s commercial fruit production began in the late nineteenth century, but remained tenuous because of plant diseases, insects, and state prohibition that closed local wineries in

1908. Peaches soon began to rebound in northeastern Alabama and the state produced over

2.6 million bushels in 1915. An era of growth in the state’s fruit industry was underway.

State

For instance, acres in strawberries more than doubled from 1919 to 1924 while watermelon acreage more than tripled, and production of oranges grew substantially as well. The Purnell

Act of 1925 used federal dollars to fund state experiment stations’ economic research, including the marketing of farm products. These endeavors led to advancements in the processing of produce, specifically freezing it prior to shipment to markets across the nation in order to preserve freshness. This practice simultaneously helped farmers reduce loss of fruits and vegetables and conditioned distant markets to expect year round accessibility to fresh produce.

cxxii

Pecans also became marketable during the early twentieth century, providing farmers another alternative to cotton. Pecan trees are native to some regions of the South, but once incidental growers realized market potential, orchards full of engineered varieties began to spring up. The alluvial soils of the coastal plains suited this trend and the trees’ presence expanded from their natural occurrence in a portion of the state’s Black Belt to planted orchards that encompassed much of the southern half of the state by 1916. New orchards took years to bear produce and many farmers interplanted cotton, hay, or food crops in young orchards to offset production costs until the trees reached bearing age. This lengthy transition phase, considerable overhead costs, risk, and tedious cultivation methods prevented many farmers from pursuing commercial production. But those who did ushered

Alabama into the pecan industry. The number of bearing trees in Alabama rose from just over 44,000 in 1909 to more than 300,000 by 1924 producing 1.6 million pounds of pecans.

cxxiii

The peanut industry began to boom during the boll weevil invasion, a fortuitous coincidence that provided many farmers an opportunity to continue market production and rely less on cotton. The rising popularity of peanut oil and shortages of vegetable oil and lard during

World War I expedited the demand for peanuts. This increase in demand and the development of other peanut products raised prices and experiment stations began devoting more resources to the investigation of cultivation and potential uses. The legume grew well in the warm climate and sandy soils of southern Alabama’s wiregrass region and was not only valuable as a market product, but also served multiple purposes on the farms on which it grew. Peanuts were relatively easy to cultivate, supplemented protein deficient diets, and supplied farmers with livestock fodder. Peanuts’ soil building properties also enabled cxxi Kline, 77-78. cxxii Encyclopedia of Alabama , “Alabama Peach Industry,” accessed January 3, 2014, http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org/face/Article.jsp?id=h-1108; Porter, “Experiment Stations,” 96; United States Census of

Agriculture, 1925, Part II: The Southern States , 779; cxxiii Isabel K. Billings, “Pecan Industry in the United States,” Economic Geography 22(1946): 220-1; United States Department of

Agriculture, Technical Bulletin no. 324, “An Economic Study of the Pecan Industry,” by S.A. Jones, et al. (Washington, D.C.: U.S.

Government Printing Office, 1932), 5, 25, 42-3; United States Census of Agriculture, 1925, Part II: The Southern States , 779;

46

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018

State farmers to replenish their land, much of it exhausted by cotton.

Farmers soon began to heed the advice of experiment station bulletins and their county agents. For example, in 1916, encouraged by their county agent, farmers in Coffee County began commercial peanut production and put 20,000 acres in peanuts. The next year the county claimed the highest county yield of peanuts in the nation, producing more than one million bushels. In 1919, the state produced over 6.2 million bushels of peanuts; by 1934 the number rose to over 8 million. The crop quickly became the area’s salvation from cotton. The wiregrass region attracted peanut processing plants and the area was unique in that it did not lose population during the weevil infestation. Boosterism for the economic miracles associated with peanuts appeared frequently in the local press: there was a demand for the crop, it took extensive labor to harvest it, and it created processing jobs for urban residents. Though cotton prices rose due to the boll weevil’s perpetual devastation, tempting farmers back into monoculture, peanuts prevailed and became the area’s major crop. By

1938 Dothan was announcing to anyone who would listen that it was the “Peanut Capital of the World.” cxxiv

Resource Assessment: Historic farms associated with the progressive era production of fruits, peanuts, and pecans need more investigation as that history was been eclipsed by the traditional interests in cotton. The success of these new cash crops—perfect for farm families to produce for a more urban South—was a significant contribution to the development of a more diversified agricultural economy in Alabama.

Crop rotation and new legumes

By the early twentieth century, progressive agriculturalists had long correlated the prevalence of inefficient agricultural practices and exhausted land. Since the establishment of the land-grant colleges and their respective agricultural experiment stations, bulletins and farmers’ institutes encouraged farmers to abandon staple crop monoculture, which tired both the land and its farmers. Reformers were wary about advocating a complete departure from cotton and corn and encouraged crop rotation as a central tenet of scientific agriculture. For cotton farmers, crop rotation with legumes put nitrogen back into the soil and would theoretically increase cotton prices because of reduced production. At Auburn’s experiment station, agriculturalists studied cowpeas and other legumes and their growth in Alabama soils. As early as 1902, George Washington Carver began touting the benefits of cow peas from the experiment station at Tuskegee. Cowpeas were suited for Alabama’s climate and were more resilient than velvet beans and soybeans. Rotation with cowpeas rested the land from bare ground crops, they could be plowed under as green manure to enrich the soil, and humans could consume the seeds. Cowpeas also helped advance diversification because it provided feed for livestock and could be grown with millet, Sudan, and Johnson grass for cxxiv Arthur G. Peterson, “Peanuts: Price, Production, and Foreign Trade Since the Civil War,” Economic Geography 7 (1931): 60;

Encyclopedia of Alabama , “Peanut Production in Alabama,” accessed January 3, 2014, http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org/face/Article.jsp?id=h-2016; United States Census of Agriculture, 1925, Part II: The Southern

States, 779; United States Census of Agriculture, 1935, Reports for States with Statistics for Counties and a Summary for the United

States: Farms, Farm Acreage and Value, and Selected Livestock and Crops, 663; Kathryn Holland Braund, “Hog Wild” and ‘Nuts:

Billy Boll Weevil Comes to the Alabama Wiregrass,” Agricultural History 63 (1989): 23, 33-7; Linda O. Hines, “George W. Carver and the Tuskegee Agricultural Experiment Station,” in Southern Agriculture Since the Civil War: A Symposium ed. George L. Robson,

Jr. and Roy V. Scott (Washington, D.C.: Agricultural History Society, 1979), 80-1.

47

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018 hay. By 1920, the USDA considered cowpeas the most important and widely grown legume in the southern states.

Clover also gained popularity as a cover crop that could hold and replenish the soil in the winter between summer plantings, provide pasturage, and be interplanted with cotton and corn during the summer. The establishment of Auburn’s branch substations for research, experimentation, and demonstration in five main regions of Alabama, the Tennessee Valley region, Sand Mountain, the Black Belt, Wiregrass, and the Gulf Coast, allowed scientists to address regional soil fertility and encourage all of Alabama’s farmers to plant legumes in their diverse agricultural endeavors.

cxxv

Agricultural extension in the fields and at home; impact of federal programs

Much of the federal money allotted to the land-grant colleges’ experiment stations was restricted to funding research only, leaving the states to fund most extension work.

Experiment stations received state appropriations from a fertilizer tax, but it took the boll weevil’s debut to convince the state legislature to commit to extension work. In 1911 they passed one act to support research across the state and one solely for farm demonstration and cooperation with the federal government for the same purpose. The legislature created the acts to prepare farmers for boll weevils. The acts doubled the number of county agents that traveled across the state, and in doing so, laid the groundwork that the Smith-Lever Act of 1914 would build upon. By 1914, 95 extension agents conducted cooperative demonstration on 10,597 farms in Alabama. Extension also came in the form of girls’ and boys’ agricultural clubs and outreach to women through instruction on home economic principles. Whatever the form, agricultural extension sought to acquaint farmers with science, diversify their crops, and improve their quality of life even before the Smith-Lever

Act of 1914.

cxxvi

The Smith-Lever Agricultural Extension Act of 1914 created consistent federal support for extension work. It funded the establishment of extension departments in agricultural schools and allowed the experiment stations to expand outreach. The Act did not appropriate money for African American schools specifically and Thomas Campbell and his agents at Tuskegee came under the control of Auburn. Under this arrangement, Tuskegee extension efforts received small funds which Campbell used to expand outreach. He appointed Juanita

Coleman, the first black home demonstration agent, to the movable school, eventually assigned a registered nurse to it as well, began another movable school in the Tennessee

Valley area, and funded six more black agents. Black extension work also provided the institutions through which African American farmers contributed to the war effort.

Campbell and other agents helped fundraise, promoted food production, assisted with recruiting, and helped locate animals for the military during World War I.

cxxvii

State cxxv Ayers, The Promise , 201; Danbom, Born in the Country , 131; Fite, Cotton , 25, 69-70; Kerr, A History of Alabama Agricultural

Experiment Station, 1883-1983 , 33-8; McMurry, George , 86; U.S. Department of Agriculture Farmers’ Bulletin no. 1148 , “Cowpeas:

Culture and Varieties,” by W.J. Morse. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1920, 26; U.S. Department of Agriculture,

Farmers’ Bulletin no. 693 , “Bur Clover,” by Chares V. Piper. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1915, 1-2, 10; cxxvi Kerr, A History of the Alabama Agricultural ???

, 35-40; Davis, A Century , 27; Hines, “George,” 82-3; cxxvii Fite, Cotton , 81-2; Davis, A Century , 16; Jones, “Thomas,” 47-8.

48

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018

Then in 1916-17 came new significant federal legislation. The Federal Farm Loan Act increased credit for rural families, leading to the creation of thousands of local farm loan associations across the nation. Farmers could borrow up to 50% of the value of their land and up to 20% of the value of their improvements. The Smith-Hughes Act of 1917 took the tenets and practices of progressive agriculture to the nation’s high schools, providing federal funding for agricultural education. Smith-Hughes proved to be one of the most important progressive laws assisting family farmers in this period, impacted the state’s high schools immediately, and soon began to shape vocational education for adults as well.

cxxviii

Alabama legislators reacted to the new federal programs in 1923 with a reorganization of the state’s agricultural bureaucracy. It reorganized the department into four divisions: (1)

Agricultural Chemistry; (2) Plant Industry; (3) Weights and Measures; and (4) Clerical and

Records Division.

The federal Purnell Act of 1925 increased federal funds for research in home and agricultural economics, as well as rural sociology. This expanded research in areas such as human and animal nutrition and diseases found in rural populations such as pellagra. The broader research base in areas of health and home economics produced extension work more widely applicable to the poor and landless than that based solely upon scientific agriculture. A state act in 1927 created the five experiment branch substations which furthered extension work because these permanent facilities were able to address and research regionally specific agriculture. For example, the Tennessee Valley substation initially focused on poultry, truck crops, and staple crops, and the Wiregrass station soon became the center for peanut cultivation. Ten new experiment fields also accompanied the substations and the former area extension service agents were usually incorporated into these new institutions’ personnel. These substations hosted field days, inviting area farmers to hear lectures, observe demonstrations, and discuss specific issues.

Even though Alabama’s agricultural education and extension made respectable strides from the end of the nineteenth century through the first two decades of the twentieth, much of the efforts focused on efficient production of staple crops. Agriculture in the South remained labor intensive, reliant on draft animals. Mechanization was not a major aim of the experiment stations. For instance, only 1 percent of Alabama farms had tractors in 1925. In addition, scientific agriculture still remained impractical to small farmers and tenants who could not obtain the capital, and in some cases landlords’ permission, to diversify in order to become more economically stable. Even for land-owning farmers, best practices and new technology were usually only feasible for large farming operations.

cxxix

Johnson grass and the rise of the cattle kingdom

As the boll weevil crept across the state, dooming once prosperous cotton fields, farmers searched for alternatives and laborers searched for new work. Nearly half a million African

Americans left the South during World War I, not including the droves of laborers who fled to southern cities. In the 1920s, an additional 800,000 left the region. During this period, more than 150,000 blacks left Alabama. Planters and farmers were so fearful of the insect’s

State cxxviii Rufus W. Stimson and Frank W. Lathrop, History of Agricultural Education of Less Than College Grade in the United States

(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1954 [1942]), 12-16. cxxix Kerr, A History of the Alabama Agricultural Experiment Station, 1883-1983 , 49, 52-8; Fite, Cotton , 98-101;

49

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018

State potential for damage, they turned to agricultural diversification even if the threat was greater than the reality.

cxxx

While cotton eventually made a comeback in some areas, like the Wiregrass, across much of

Alabama a new landscape emerged, grounded in the cattle industry. This transition from cotton to cattle began to transform the region’s landscape from tenant homes and rows of staple crops to pastures of grasses and legumes. The region’s production of grasses, legumes, and hay rose from 41,649 tons in 1900 to 230,985 in 1920.

cxxxi

The prevalence of Johnson grass and the pasture research of the Black Belt’s agricultural experiment stations assisted financially stable farmers in the transition from cotton to cattle.

Colonel William Johnson, a planter at Marion Junction, first used Johnson grass before the

Civil War. Despised by cotton farmers for decades, the grass held potential for farmers looking to diversify. It provided a hay crop, forage for cattle, and it grew well in the soil of the Black Belt. Experiment stations from 1910 to 1940 educated area farmers about pasture development and tested other forage crops in addition to Johnson grass, including different legumes, oats, and black medic. The rise of the cattle industry in Alabama was not limited to the Black Belt, but it caught on more quickly in areas with sizeable land tracts (former plantations) and farmers who could afford the transition (planters). Because of this the

Tennessee Valley also became a hotspot for the cattle industry. The work of the Tennessee

Valley Agricultural Experiment Station at Belle Mina reflected this shift, initially focusing on staple and truck crops, it later accommodated the aspirations of the area farmers by focusing on pasture development as local farmers shifted to livestock.

cxxxii

Progressive agriculturalists also promoted the maintenance of purebred herds as a cornerstone of the modern cattle industry. Representatives from pure bred associations across the country visited Alabama, recruited breeders, and hosted livestock shows. The increasing prevalence of purebred cattle, such as Angus, Hereford, Shorthorn, Jersey, and

Holstein, reestablished the livestock show and signaled a shift into more sophisticated cattle raising.

cxxxiii

The establishment of a terminal livestock market in Montgomery in 1918 further encouraged the growth of the cattle industry. Before investors established Union Stock

Yards, livestock had to be shipped to Louisville or New Orleans, an option only feasible for large scale cattlemen. Smaller cattlemen sold to local butchers or stores and relied on traveling commission merchants if they wanted to ship livestock to market. The Union

Stock Yards in Montgomery enabled farmers to rely less on middlemen and more easily obtain market prices for their livestock. On its opening day, the Union Stock Yards brought in $75,000 selling cattle, hogs, goats, and sheep. Not only did the Stock Yards provide a competitive market for extant cattle raisers, its existence encouraged diversification and its cxxx James C. Giesen, “The Herald of Prosperity: Tracing the Boll Weevil Myth in Alabama,” Agricultural History (Winter 2011): 42-

4 cxxxi Glenn N. Sisk, “Agricultural Diversification in the Alabama Black Belt,” Agricultural History 26 (1952):42-5; Brooks Blevins,

Cattle in the Cotton Fields: A History of Cattle Raising in Alabama (Tusclaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998), 84; Shell, 493. cxxxii Encyclopedia of Alabama , “Agriculture in Alabama,” accessed January 7, 2014, http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org/face/Article.jsp?id=h-1396; Blevins, Cattle, 70, 91; Kerr, A History of the Alabama

Agricultural Experiment Station, 1883-1983 , 56. cxxxiii Blevins, Cattle , 72-4.

50

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018 personnel worked with the extension service to promote purebred livestock throughout

Alabama.

New Deal programs and events surrounding World War II would expand the cattle industry into other parts of the state and revolutionize farm culture, building upon the gains made during the interwar years by cattlemen and agricultural organizations. New Deal agencies promoted the transformation of worn-out staple production fields into pasture land not only out of a concern for soil erosion and conservation but also for the new agricultural profits to be made from southern cattle.

cxxxiv

Creating the modern dairy industry

Commercial dairying accompanied the rise of the cattle industry. Pasture development and disease and tick eradication had been projects of southern agricultural experiment stations for some time. The success of these efforts encouraged the modern dairy industry in the early twentieth-century South. Before the United States’ entry into World War I, the Animal

Husbandry Department at Auburn established Alabama’s first creamery. Guided by experts and encouraged by wartime demand, farmers in the Black Belt alone tripled the amount of milk sold between 1910 and 1920, selling nearly 1.3 million gallons for the region and by

1921 seventeen creameries were located throughout the state. The creameries acquainted farmers with some of the infrastructure necessary for commercial dairying, while county agents, businessmen, and cattle associations began to import Jerseys and Holsteins to help establish and maintain pure dairy cattle bloodlines.

cxxxv They also encouraged farmers to build new dairy barns and silos to better take care of dairy herds and production. South of

Greensboro, the seat of Hale County, a concentration of extant silos from these decades continue to document how the dairy industry helped to transform the agricultural landscape of the Black Belt.

Early creameries and the importation of purebred dairy cattle created the foundations of

Alabama’s commercial dairy industry before and during World War I. After the war, the industry began to decline but interest was kept alive by extension agents who formed clubs specifically for purebred dairy cattle, experiment stations such as the one at Belle Mina that began to research dairying, and banks that provided loans specifically for dairy farm improvements. New Deal programs and World War II demand built upon these early shifts toward commercial production and encouraged further expansion of the state’s dairy industry.

cxxxvi

Resource Assessment: Many significant agricultural patterns shaped Alabama’s rural built environment in this context. When assessing the significance of a rural property dating to this period, key questions emerge out of the above narrative: 1) is the property significantly associated with the federal/state agricultural extension programs? Does it have extant buildings or structures (such as terracing or silos) that either used or adapted building plans provided by extension agents? 2) Is the property associated with emerging new agricultural products such as the fruits and nuts industry, the dairy industry, pure-bred livestock associations, or other specialized agricultural products targeted for urban/suburban

State cxxxiv Ibid., 80-1, 113. cxxxv Sisk, “Agricultural Diversification,” 45; Blevins, Cattle, 83; Porter, “Experiment Stations,” 93; cxxxvi Blevins, Cattle , 122-3.

51

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018 populations? 3) How did the property incorporate emerging new technology, such as tractors and other powered agricultural implements or electric power, into farm operations?

4) Is there extant evidence of the farm’s program of crop rotation or the introduction of other soil conservation approaches? For all of these issues, the core question supporting potential Criterion A: Agriculture significance is: are there buildings and structures associated with these questions and resources extant on the farm? Buildings, structures, and sites directly and significantly associated with these themes and topics must be extant for the property to possess Criterion A: Agriculture significance.

VII. New Deal agriculture in Alabama, 1933-1945

Although diversification was limited and cotton remained dominant in much of Alabama prior to 1930, the changes brought on by the Great Depression and New Deal built upon extant shifts in southern agriculture. Reformers still saw technology, education, and diversification as the industry’s salvation: the New Deal introduced a fourth pillar of perceived progress—an increased role for the federal government.

Certainly the 1930s seemed ripe for major change, but so much was limited by the size of one’s landholding. For tenants, the impact of the Depression was profound. White and

African American sharecroppers by 1931 gave up on solutions from the government and established the short-lived Share Croppers Union. The searing poverty, mob violence, and limited opportunities of the rural South pushed many off the land and into cities, where relative anonymity and an increased number of economic and educational opportunities promised better quality of life. This deprivation of labor revealed southern farm culture’s inefficiency. In Alabama, “By the close of the Great Depression,” concluded historian

Melissa Walker, “farming was no longer a viable option for most landless southerners.” cxxxvii

For those who owned their land, the larger the holding and the more cash income it produced largely defined the degree to which they could take advantage of New Deal agricultural programs. The creation of a federalized agricultural system brought benefits to many white farmers but it helped white planters the most.

cxxxviii

Agricultural Adjustment Acts of 1933, 1938, and Cotton Support

The sharp decline in cotton prices during the first years of the Depression did not deter farmers from growing it. They ignored calls for acreage reduction, as cotton provided many the only means to feed and clothe their families. As a result, southern cotton farmers produced record crops, such as that in 1931 of more than 17 million bales, flooding the market and further devastating prices. Roosevelt’s administration considered agricultural recovery imperative to the stabilization of the nation’s economy and Congress quickly passed the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) in 1933. The act paid farmers cash to reduce acreage of certain farm commodities in the hopes of cutting surplus and raising prices, thus stabilizing supply and demand. By the time the bill passed the year’s cotton crop was already in the ground; large portions of the growing cotton crop would have to be destroyed.

This drove extension services and government agencies and officials to begin a campaign cxxxvii Melissa Walker, Southern Farmers and their Stories (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006), 27. cxxxviii Fite, Cotton, 101, 119.

State

52

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018 encouraging farmers to plow under up to 50 percent of their crop in exchange for cash in the fall. Desperation drove over one million cotton farmers to enter reduction contracts with the government. In Alabama, cotton acreage decreased by nearly 1.5 million acres from 1930 to

1935, producing nearly 400,000 bales less in 1935 than in 1930. Despite its initial success in decreasing production and raising prices, the act worsened the disparities of the socioeconomic structure of the South and further entrenched the trend of favoring large commercial farmers over smallholders and the landless.

Acreage reduction led to the eviction of thousands of southern tenants at the landlord’s will, despite AAA contractual stipulations that called for the maintenance of croppers and tenants and division of government checks among them. The mistreatment of the some of the poorest people in the nation at the hands of a federal program led to the establishment of the

Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union (STFU). Alabama had its own agricultural labor union, the

Alabama Sharecroppers Union (ASU), an organization of African Americans that worked to assert the rights of tenants and sharecroppers and eventually filed suit against the AAA.

Damaging publicity about the devastations dealt to the rural poor and conservatives’ free market cries weakened public support and approval of the AAA. The Supreme Court soon ruled the law to be unconstitutional.

cxxxix

The revised Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938 retained some of the principles and much of the effect of the earlier act. It benefitted large-scale farmers and used acreage allotment to limit production. In Alabama, acreage devoted to cotton continued to drop, resulting in an additional decrease of 200,000 acres in 1939 than in 1934. Despite acreage decreases, production remained relatively high because farmers were retiring least productive land and applying fertilizer and best production techniques (researched by the scientific agriculture community) to their allotted acres. In addition to the holdovers from the first act, the 1938 act made federal crop loans and insurance available, established price supports, had soil conservation provisions as well as orders that mandated the fair treatment of sharecroppers and tenants.

The second AAA set the tone for the federal government’s agricultural policies for the next three decades. Southerners generally accepted the AAA because, like the first act, it left social and racial hierarchies intact. Like other New Deal agencies such as the Tennessee

Valley Authority, the AAA functioned through decentralization and co-opted existing local power structures that thwarted any potential of social reform in agriculture. The

Resettlement Administration and, later the Farm Security Administration’s efforts at social uplift and reformation paled in comparison to the powerful march of large scale, commercial agriculture encouraged by the two Agricultural Adjustment Acts.

cxl

State cxxxix Fite, Cotton , 123-8, 130-1; Fite, “Southern Agriculture,” 16-7; United States Census of Agriculture, 1935, Reports for States with

Statistics for Counties and a Summary for the United States: Farms, Farm Acreage and Value, and Selected Livestock and Crops ,

621; Joseph A. Cote, “Clarence Hamilton Poe: The Farmer’s Voice, 1899-1964,” in Southern Agriculture Since the Civil War: A

Symposium ed. George L. Robson, Jr. and Roy V. Scott (Washington, D.C.: Agricultural History Society, 1979), 39; Encyclopedia of

Alabama , “Alabama Sharecroppers Union,” accessed January 20, 2014; Danbom, Born in the Country , 210-5. cxl Danbom, Born in the Country , 216; Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940, Agriculture Volume I: First and Second Series

State Reports, Part 4: Statistics for Counties, 280; Edward L. Schapsmeier and Frederick H. Schapsmeier, “Farm Policy from FDR to

Eisenhower: Southern Democrats and the Politics of Agriculture,” in Southern Agriculture Since the Civil War: A Symposium ed.

George L. Robson, Jr. and Roy V. Scott (Washington, D.C.: Agricultural History Society, 1979), 359-60.

53

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018

Impact of Tennessee Valley Authority Programs

If any one New Deal agency embodied the progressive aspirations of bringing the South in line with the rest of the nation, it was the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). The new agency significantly impacted agricultural landscapes in northern Alabama as its lakes flooded and displaced hundreds of family farms. Its programs of agricultural modernization impacted farmers across the state. The TVA was an experiment in resource development, social planning, and government intervention that sought to reform the poorest area in the nation. Authority goals included rural electrification, soil conservation, flood control and river navigability, and general improvement in agricultural practices. These objectives also led to the relocation of families that farmed in the path of the Tennessee River’s development.

cxli

In Alabama, the TVA distributed electricity to the top third of the state, created jobs for the rural unemployed, supplied cheap fertilizers, and embarked on agricultural development.

The TVA’s early agricultural programs revolved around the promotion of phosphate fertilizer as the basis for soil recovery and diversification.

In 1933, the TVA established the National Fertilizer Development Center (NFDC) at the plants in Muscle Shoals. The NFDC became a clearing house for fertilizer research, development, and evaluation and maintained working relationships with the U.S.

Department of Agriculture to develop and distribute new processes. Attributing much of the valley’s agricultural problems to soil infertility and erosion, TVA director H. A. Morgan promoted phosphate fertilizer that would act with the region’s lime rich soil to create optimal conditions for the cultivation of soil building legumes. Farmers who cooperated with experiment stations and extension employees received fertilizers from the agency and were encouraged to plant lespedeza, clover, alfalfa, and other cover crops. TVA also worked with farm families to provide metal barns, as seen in the 1937 barn at The Cedars, a

Century and Heritage Farm in Limestone County.

TVA also allocated funds to the land-grant universities to enhance extension programs, and sponsored associations that promoted mechanization, cooperative ventures, and farm electrification to increase farm income and the standard of living. Part of this money helped facilitate a program of single farm and larger area demonstrations in which the agency supplied the fertilizer and machinery in order to demonstrate the value of such methods as terracing and contour farming in conjunction with fertilizer.

cxlii

TVA’s production of electricity also impacted Alabama farms. The Tennessee Valley

Authority, combined with the extension of electrical power into rural areas via the federal

Rural Electrification Administration, encouraged farmers to process their produce before it went to market in order to increase profit. Community refrigerators and storage units, quick-

State cxli Fite, Cotton, 148-9; Rogers et al., Alabama, 486; Sarah Phillips, This Land, This Nation: Conservation, Rural America, and the

New Deal (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 78-80. cxlii Rogers et al., Alabama, 486; Richard C. Sheridan, “Chemical Fertilizers in Southern Agriculture,” in Southern Agriculture Since the Civil War: A Symposium ed. George L. Robson, Jr. and Roy V. Scott (Washington, D.C.: Agricultural History Society, 1979), 315;

Phillips, This Land, 100-4; W.H. Droze, “TVA and the Ordinary Farmer,” ,” in Southern Agriculture Since the Civil War: A

Symposium ed. George L. Robson, Jr. and Roy V. Scott (Washington, D.C.: Agricultural History Society, 1979), 193-4.

54

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018

State freezing machinery, and grinding apparatuses not only created demand for TVA power, they provided farmers more ways in which to present their products to the commercial market. It was thought that this would provide increased income, enabling farmers to afford home and farm improvements. In 1934, 1 in 30 farms in Alabama had electricity and by 1939, 1 in 7 had electricity. Demand and consumption continued to increase when the agency purchased the Alabama Power Company’s utilities in 1940 and the activities of the Rural

Electrification Administration increased demand by enabling farmers to purchase electric appliances during the 1940s and into the 1950s.

cxliii

Despite the agency’s rhetoric of uplift through rural revitalization, it hardly dealt well with the poorest population of northern Alabama, including those evicted because of AAA policies, African Americans, small farmers, and families displaced by the TVA itself. As with other New Deal farm policies, TVA’s approach to agriculture favored large-scale landowners over smallholders and the landless and the TVA mainly cooperated in research endeavors with white land-grant colleges and experiment stations, and discriminated against blacks in agricultural extension services.

cxliv

Impact of the Soil Conservation Service: conservation districts, crops and techniques

In 1935 Congress renamed the Soil Erosion Service the Soil Conservation Service (SCS) and made it a permanent agency of the Department of Agriculture. Congress created the

SCS to provide technical assistance to farmers who wished to implement soil conservation methods on their land. Initially, the SCS functioned by entering into five-year contracts with individual landowners or farm operators within a chosen demonstration area. Demonstration included mechanical erosion control such as terracing, contour farming, strip cropping, and waterway construction and stabilization. Farmers also used specific crops and vegetation to check erosion, including kudzu, legumes, and different varieties of grasses and hay. cxlv

In order to reach more farmers and address the various natural resource issues across the country, the federal government encouraged the formation of local soil and water conservation districts in 1937. These units were formed by public referendum and provided farmers with an organization through which they could obtain free technical assistance from

SCS technicians and guidance from federally appointed district soil conservationists. By

1945, 1,346 districts operated in forty-six states. This trend signaled a shift in agriculture toward voluntary commitment to better land stewardship and best use of natural resources in agriculture. Participation was undoubtedly encouraged by the passage of the Soil

Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act of 1936. This law paid farmers to keep portions of their land out of production. These payments helped to subsidize the cost of implementing measures recommended by the SCS and promoted by the districts.

cxlvi cxliii Phillips, This Land , 104; Encyclopedia of Alabama , “Tennessee Valley Authority in Alabama,” accessed January 19, 2014;

Edward A. Ackerman, “TVA In Its Larger Setting,” in TVA, The First Twenty Years: A Staff Report ed. Roscoe C. Martin

(Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1956), 248. cxliv Melissa Walker, “African Americans and TVA Reservoir Property Removal,” Agricultural Histo ry 72 (1998): 418; Nancy L.

Grant, TVA and Black Americans: Planning for the Status Quo (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 97. cxlv Fite, Cotton, 134; D. Harper Simms, The Soil Conservation Service (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970), 16. cxlvi Simms, The Soil Conservation Service , 75, 81; R. Neil Sampson, With One Voice: The National Association of Conservation

Districts (Tuscon, AZ: Wheatmark, 2009), 4-5; Fite, Cotton , 143.

55

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018

Through these districts, individual farmers obtained farm plans specifically designed to meet the needs of their farms. Technicians took soil tests, productivity, and cultivation methods into account before presenting the farmer with recommendations. With the assistance of SCS technicians farmers built terraces, created waterways for field drainage, stabilized stream banks, and dug farm ponds. They farmed on the contour, strip cropped, and planted Johnson grass, alfalfa, clover, and sericea lespedeza in rotation with row crops or for pasture development. They retired and repaired marginal land with pine seedlings and kudzu. The SCS especially recommended kudzu to the states within the cotton belt in order to counter the effects of cotton and corn that gullied hillsides and stripped topsoil. The SCS also played an important role in the rise of the state’s commercial catfish industry by helping farmers determine the appropriate location, design, and maintenance of ponds.

cxlvii

Alabama resettlement communities

The Resettlement Administration, and later the Farm Security Administration, was created to help the poorest farmers, most of whom were sharecroppers and tenants evicted as an unintended side effect of acreage reduction policies. The goal of the organization was to help poor farmers become economically stable landowners. The agency set up model communities, provided houses and community buildings, encouraged cooperative organizations, and made government loans available to farmers who could not obtain credit elsewhere. Resettlement efforts in Alabama funded by the Subsistence Homestead Program of 1933 included those at Palmerdale, Gardendale, Cahaba Farms, Greenwood, and

Bankhead Farms. These particular settlements were designed for the residents to combine part-time wage work and subsistence farming. Other resettlement programs were more strictly agrarian. Three such communities in Alabama were Skyline Farms on Cumberland

Mountain, Gee’s Bend in Wilcox County, and Prairie Farms in Macon County.

cxlviii

Skyline Farms (NR 6/12/2013) began as a Reconstruction Finance Corporation project in the late Hoover administration. In mid-December 1934, Jackson County received the news that it would be the location of one of three resettlement communities in Alabama; the federal government allocated $350,000 for what was called the “colony” at Cumberland

Mountain Farms. Despite the later name change circa 1936 to Skyline Farms, and the seven decades since, residents still refer to the project as the “colony.” Construction began immediately. Two hundred farm families already on the relief rolls of the state’s Rural

Rehabilitation Program would be eligible for acceptance to the resettlement community.

The project would include 13,185 acres of land and would be for white families only.

The selection process for families to become part of the homestead project was demanding and included only families already on relief rolls, most of them already living in Jackson

County. Among the criteria used were men with farm experience and a willingness to live in a rural community. Men had to be in good physical health and between the ages of 30

State cxlvii W. L. Clement, interview by Evan Hatch, Murfreesboro, Tennessee, September 23, 2009, Farms of Cannon County, Tennessee,

Digital Collections of Walker Library at Middle Tennessee State University, accessed January 3, 2014, http://cdm15838.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/singleitem/collection/cannon/id/406/rec/4; Mart Allen Stewart, “Cultivating Kudzu: The

Soil Conservation Service and the Kudzu Demonstration Program,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 81 (1997): 157-9; Karni R. Perez,

Fishing for Gold: The Story of Alabama’s Catfish Industry (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006), 3-5. cxlviii Fite, Cotton, 145-7;

56

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018

State and 55. They had to be of good character, have no criminal record, and have evidence of a good credit rating before the Depression. The age requirement existed because men of that age group often found it most difficult to find employment, yet they were experienced and mature.

cxlix

These men also had families to support, therefore, aiding them with employment would aid their families as well.

cl

Officials divided the land into 181 homesteads of forty to sixty acre units (unit size varied based on the number of family members living on the land) connected by a web of local roads, reminiscent of country lanes of the nineteenth century as they wound in and around the farms creating scenic vistas along the way. Each family received materials to clear the land and construct a three to five room home on the property. In addition, each family received an apple tree, mule, barn, and smokehouse.

cli On February 7, 1935, the first home opened for inspection. This house is referred to by Skyline residents as “Colony House

Number 1” and is extant on Alabama Highway 79. All of the project homes were numbered as they were constructed. Harry N. Ross, the project director under FERA and the Jackson

County works supervisor, hosted the first colony house inspection. Judge Money,

Congressman Kirby, and FERA’s District Rehabilitation Director, T.P. Lee, made speeches.

Planning engineer, A.F. Hawkins; State Director of Rural Rehabilitation, R.K. Green; state works supervisor, F.R. Smith; and J.T. High of the Auburn Extension Service all attended.

Mr. and Mrs. Crawford Edwards and their family moved into the first colony house that day. Everyone praised not just the buildings but the furnishings, with the chairs and other furniture mostly made at the colony while women homesteaders wove most of the rugs and linens.

Down in the Black Belt, the quilters of Gee’s Bend have gained such fame that today almost no one remembers the community’s roots in New Deal agricultural reform. At Gee’s Bend,

African American families each farmed five acre garden plots in addition to 95 acre tracts close by, participated in cooperations to process and market their crops, and were aided by a government employee who provided guidance and technical assistance. The community included a store, grist mill, cotton gin, repair shop, a warehouse, medical clinic, and school.

While some of these farming communities never operated as intended, Gee’s Bend was relatively successful. Cotton yields were high, and in 1939 the community owned 600 head of beef cattle, and non-commercial canning factories ran seasonally. The demise of the

FSA, increased mobility afforded by automobiles, and the breakdown of cooperative efforts led to the demise of Gee’s Bend as a cooperative, relatively self-sufficient farming community and by 1950 the cooperative organizations were completely gone and each farmer had an individual mortgage.

clii

Prairie Farms was an African American resettlement community located in Macon County that began with the same ideology behind other Resettlement Administration projects. cxlix David Campbell and David Coombs, “Skyline Farms: A Case Study of Community Development and Rural Rehabilitation,”

Appalachian Journal 10(Spring 1983): 244-254. cl “Cumberland Mountain Farms Physical Set Up,” Skyline Farms Collection, Skyline Farms Heritage Association, The Commissary,

Skyline, Alabama. cli Campbell, “Skyline Farms: A Case Study of Community Development and Rural Rehabilitation,” 12. clii Rogers et al., Alabama , 487; M.G. Trend and W.L. Lett, “Government Capital and Minority Enterprise: An Evaluation of a

Depression-Era Social Program,” American Anthropologist 88 (1986): 595-8.

57

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture

OMB No. 1024-0018

Alabama


Similar to many former plantation areas across the South, Macon County’s African

American farmers owned a very small percentage of the land they farmed. This fact and the

State depressing economic situation faced by area African Americans moved Tuskegee officials such as Booker T. Washington and Thomas Campbell to support several resettlement projects that preceded Prairie Farms, such as a 1901 resettlement attempt by the Southern

Improvement Company (a joint venture by Hampton Institute and Tuskegee) and the later

Baldwin Farms project headed by the Tuskegee Farm and Improvement Company.

cliii

The Resettlement Administration created Prairie Farms out of two former plantations. The project was bordered on the east and west by Cubahatchee Creek and Line Creek, respectively, on the north by the Tallapoosa River and on the south by U.S. Highway 80.

Families began arriving at Prairie Farms in 1937. Thirty-seven farms were established on tracts of 40 to 100 acres. All farmsteads consisted of a house with plumbing, as well as electricity provided by the TVA, a privy, a barn and stable, vegetable house, poultry house, and well. In addition, the community had a cooperative, two community pastures, and a schoolhouse. The Tuskegee Institute Prairie Farms Laboratory School provided elementary and high school education for area children within and outside of the resettlement project.

The school was unique and fortunate in that its proximity and connection to Tuskegee enabled it to receive supplies and visits from Tuskegee officials and personnel, such as

George Washington Carver and extension agents. The center of the community, the school’s campus boasted a five-room schoolhouse, a barn, a farm shop, teacher’s cottage, two basketball courts, a volleyball court, a baseball field, and a track field. The school saw its highest enrollment with 213 students.

cliv

Despite interest in continuing Prairie Farms as a federally aided resettlement venture even after budget cuts crippled the FSA, the government began selling the farms to private owners in 1944, and by 1951 all of the farms were privately owned.

Resource Assessment: The key question for Criterion A: Agriculture significance under this context is whether the property has a direct significant association with a New Deal program/agency and whether a building, structure, or site associated with the various federal programs is extant on the property. Key New Deal agencies/programs to consider when assessing a potential agricultural property include: Agricultural Adjustment Act, Tennessee

Valley Authority (especially in northern Alabama), Resettlement Administration (Skyline

Farms, Gee’s Bend, Prairie Farms), and the Soil Conservation Service (terraced fields, conservation plantings, ponds). But assessments should also measure the impact of betterknown New Deal programs such as the Works Projects Administration (for its sanitary privy program if no other reason) and the Civilian Conservation Corps (who conducted plantings, terracing, and other conservation-related projects on private properties throughout

Alabama).

VIII. Agriculture in the modern era, 1946-1965 cliii Robert E. Zabawa and Sarah T. Warren, “From Company to Community: Agricultural Community Development in Macon County,

Alabama, 1881 to New Deal,” Agricultural History 72, no. 2, African Americans in Southern Agriculture, 1877-1945 (Spring 1998):

465-6. cliv Ibid., 476-80.

58

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018

Alabama counted about 1.34 million farmers in 1940; by 1950 that number had dipped to

960,000. World War II and the immediate years after were a time of dislocation and migration from the family farms of the state, and the number of farmers would continue to decline for the rest of the century.

clv

Yet the state’s agricultural bureaucracy, both in the public and private worlds, began to expand. New departments were established at the

Auburn experiment station. And new commodity-focused organizations joined the

Alabama Farm Bureau.

clvi

These included:

Alabama Seedsmen Association, 1941

Alabama Crop Improvement Association, 1942

Alabama Cattlemen Association, 1944

Alabama Farm and Power Equipment Dealers Association, 1944

Alabama Poultry Association, 1947

Alabama Forest Products Association, 1949

American Dairy Association of Alabama, 1950.

Mechanization and family farms: Tractors, mechanical cotton pickers and electrification

Despite the prevalence of automobiles in the South during the first few decades of the twentieth century, the majority of farmers still relied on draft animals, especially mules, for farm work. Part of the gospel of scientific agriculture was efficiency through technology, which meant, among other things, higher yields produced with less time and labor. Tractors would undoubtedly beat mules in maximizing efficiency every time. But as many other approaches taken by scientific agriculture were impractical to the majority of the farmers in

Alabama, who were sharecroppers and tenants, so was the tractor. They could not afford to buy tractors and landlords often saw no reason to ease this predicament. For those farmers who did have enough capital, the early tractors developed for the Midwestern market were too large and impractical and did not justify the investment. Historian George Ellenberg notes that in 1940 even “general purpose tractors were too large for single family cotton plots,” with families only cultivating about 25 acres each.

clvii

Here is where we see not only the manufacture of smaller tractors, but rural outmigration and subsequent land consolidation as a tenuous prerequisite of mechanization. In 1940, only 7,638 tractors existed in Alabama.

clviii

Payments from various New Deal programs enabled some farmers to mechanize their operations. In addition, the development of small tractors to better accommodate southern agriculture created a market among farmers who could afford the investment. International

Harvester’s Farmall and John Deere and Allis-Chalmers tractors were some of the first to impact the South. Extension agents worked with farmers to properly mechanize their operations as much as possible. Cooperatives and agricultural organizations, such as soil and water conservation districts sometimes pooled resources to purchase new machinery, while wartime prosperity enabled many to purchase tractors on their own. After World War

State clv Shell, 587. clvi Ibid., 623. clvii George B. Ellenberg, Mule South to Tractor South: Mules, Machines, and the Transformation of the Cotton South (Tuscaloosa:

The University of Alabama Press, 2007), 104. clviii George B. Ellenberg, Mule South to Tractor South: Mules, Machines, and the Transformation of the Cotton South (Tuscaloosa:

The University of Alabama Press, 2007), 100-6; Kerr, A History of the Alabama Agricultural Experiment Station, 1883-1983 , 76.

59

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018

II, veterans came home and preferred to farm with machines, manufacturers continued to improve upon tractor designs and accompanying implements, and the decline in horse and mule production helped expedite mechanization. By 1950, the number of tractors in

Alabama had increased by 171 percent and by 1962 the USDA stopped recording the number of mules on farms because of their miniscule role in agriculture.

clix

Initially, the different phases of cotton cultivation and the labor involved in each phase hindered the mechanization of farms. Cotton could be planted without human labor, but people were needed for weeding and picking, and investing in machinery for just the planting phase deterred some farmers from purchasing machines at all. Instead, they relied on wage labor and the mules they already owned. The development of a satisfactory cotton harvester took years. The idea was far from new and manufacturers struggled for decades to develop an implement that would render the same quality of cotton picked by hand. When

International Harvester began producing machines that simulated hand harvesting, full mechanization of cotton cultivation spread quickly. This development enabled farmers to overcome the labor shortage induced by continued outmigration of sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and wage laborers, and increase profits and efficiency. Once mechanization came to dominate southern farm operations, the shift to fewer farms of larger size gained momentum. By 1950 there were 20,000 fewer farms in Alabama than ten years earlier.

clx

From 1940 to 1950, the income of the average Alabama farmer tripled. This influx of cash ready for investment, combined with the expansion of rural electrification, led to the modernization of the farm home. The TVA supplied electricity to the top portion of the state, but the New Deal’s Rural Electrification Administration (REA) encouraged the formation of entities nationwide that would distribute electricity to rural areas. The REA provided low interest loans to organizations for generation and distribution, as well as loans to individuals who wished to buy appliances and wire their buildings for electricity.

Demand for electricity was also imperative to the establishment of cooperatives and distribution centers. In 1935, government officials counted 200 uses for electricity on the farm. By 1949, the number had risen to 400. Agricultural diversification helped create and expand the demand. Electric motors and pumps were needed for grinding feed, moving and storing hay, irrigation, temperature control for poultry production, and refrigeration for commercial milk production. Improvements in the home, such as electric ranges and lighting, and appliances such as washing machines, radios, and fans contributed to the demand and helped bring rural homes into the American mainstream.

clxi

The Cattle Kingdom replaces King Cotton

New Deal programs, mechanization, high prices, and experiment stations paved the way for southern agriculture’s transition to livestock after World War II. While outmigration of farm families and wartime personnel demand forced the rural population to decline, cash payments for acreage reduction subsidized the consolidation and mechanization of farms.

State clix Ellenburg, Mule , 77, 106-7, 126; Kerr, A History of the Alabama Agricultural Experiment Station, 1883-1983 , 76. clx Ellenberg, Mule , 120-4; Craig Heinicke and Wayne A. Grove, “Machinery Has Completely Taken Over’: The Diffusion of the

Mechanical Cotton Picker, 1949-1964,” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 39 (2008): 69; Rogers et al., Alabama , 519. clxi Kerr, A History of the Alabama Agricultural , 80; Danbom, Born , 221-2; H.S. Person, “The Rural Electrification Administration in

Perspective,” Agricultural History 24 (1950): 88;

60

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018

Landowners developed pastures where tenants once planted cotton crops and progressive agricultural organizations such as the Soil Conservation Service, extension services, and breed associations provided the guidance that enabled farmers to do so. Wartime food demand also helped rekindle commercial cattle raising. Extension agents encouraged production for the war effort and, in 1943 alone, helped over 7,000 Alabama farmers with cattle. The same year, over 1,300 students statewide participated in 4-H cattle clubs, preparing the next generation to carry on the expansion of the cattle kingdom. Postwar affluence and urban growth also helped increase demand for beef and dairy, encouraging more farmers to abandon cotton and semi-subsistence farming to pursue cattle raising, while cattlemen associations and the agricultural universities promoted efficiency and agribusiness methods.

clxii

Cotton hardly disappeared from the state’s agricultural landscape—but the number of acres cultivated in cotton did decline significantly. In 1940, 2 million acres were in cotton; by

1950 that number was only 1.3 million acres.

clxiii

Other agricultural products made up the difference. The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA),

Rural Electrification Administration (REA), and Auburn’s experiment station at Belle Mina helped the dairying industry thrive during the interwar years. The TVA and REA provided farmers with the electricity to run milking machines and coolers, while the experiment station’s research guided pasture development and disease eradication. Commercial dairy production increased during World War II with the number of dairy farmers more than doubling between 1940 and 1945. Despite this, farm families still consumed most of the milk produced in Alabama. After the war, demand grew and by 1950, 2,000 farmers produced Grade A milk and another 12,000 sold Grade B milk to manufacturers.

As one of the most compelling signs of the mid-20 th

century transformation of Alabama agriculture, the two regions most associated with the rise of the Cotton Kingdom one hundred years earlier--the Black Belt and the Tennessee Valley--saw most of the Grade A milk production, as well as the establishment of businesses that purchased both Grades A and B from farmers. These included Southern Dairies, Black Belt Creamery, Kraft Cheese,

Blue Bonnet, and several others. Tall concrete silos dotted the landscape, replacing to a degree the once dominant presence of the cotton gin. Farmers in the northern part of the state sold to markets in Tennessee, Mississippi and Georgia, manufacturers in Decatur and

Florence, and other smaller businesses. These area businesses, as well as those in other regions increased demand and encouraged more small farmers to begin commercial dairying. The dairy industry could flourish outside of the old plantation agriculture zones also. The Paint Rock Valley of Jackson County had several farms that turned to dairy production, selling their product to processing facilities in Scottsboro and Huntsville,

Alabama, as well as Fayetteville, Tennessee.

clxiv

Another shift was toward horticultural crops, which brought $861,000 in cash receipts in

1939 but yielded $5.2 million ten years later (numbers not adjusted for wartime

State clxii Blevins, 115-6. clxiii Shell, 596-597. clxiv Blevins, 123-4.

61

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture Alabama also show how Alabama farmers were now producing for a growing suburban market,

OMB No. 1024-0018

Name of Multiple Property Listing inflation).

clxv

Along with the growth in dairy, these numbers for greenhouses and nurseries

State which wanted such ornamental plants. The state added a department of forestry to the

Auburn experiment station, along with departments for Research Data Analysis and

Research Information. Farming was entering the informational revolution of the second half of the 20 th

century.

clxvi

By 1945, there were 30 percent more cattle in Alabama than in 1940 and half a million less acres in cotton. The Black Belt led the state in numbers, but most of the new growth occurred in Baldwin, Clarke, Mobile, and Washington counties, as well as in the wiregrass region where farmers allowed cattle to forage leftover peanut crops. The prevalence of cattle raising also increased in the Tennessee Valley and Piedmont area. Business interests, such as those represented by the Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Railroad Company, saw the potential to benefit from the expanding cattle industry and were instrumental in organizing the

Alabama Cattlemen’s Association (ACA). The ACA provided cattlemen with communication and business networks, access to politicians who usually served as officers in the organization, and working relationships with economic organizations such as the

Alabama State Chamber of Commerce.

clxvii

Despite having 46 meat packing plants in 1958, Alabama’s packing industry remained small and relied on the importation of mature cattle from the West. During the 1960s, only about one third of Alabama’s cattle were slaughtered and consumed in state. Farmers shipped the rest out of state for fattening, or “finishing,” making Alabama a cow-calf state. This means cattlemen kept a herd of cows, raised their calves to 400-600 pounds, and shipped them west or sold them at auction to buyers who prepared them for the feedlot, the last stop before slaughter.

Local businessmen and progressive agriculturalists across the state urged departure from reliance on the western breeders for the fattening phase and mature cattle. Using familiar rhetoric about the benefits of diversification, they sought to expand Alabama’s role in the national cattle industry. Despite a 16 percent increase in the state’s feed cattle between 1963 and 1966, the availability of grains in the Midwest and the increasing prevalence of parttime cattle raisers in Alabama maintained the state’s position as a cow-calf state.

clxviii

Rise of the modern timber industry

Longleaf, shortleaf, and loblolly pines and hardwoods are native to much of Alabama.

These natural resources have played a large role in the state’s economy since before the

Civil War, by which time Mobile functioned as a lumbering center. Railroad expansion also facilitated the growth of the naval stores industry and rapid industrialization and urbanization in the late nineteenth century encouraged additional logging.

clxix clxv Shell, 610. clxvi Ibid. 621. clxvii Ibid. clxviii Ibid., 144-7. clxix Lawrence S. Earley, Looking for Longleaf: The Fall and Rise of an American Forest (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina

Press, 2004), 109, 131; Donald E. Davis, “Metropolis: Paradise Lost,” in Southern United States: An Environmental History ed.

Donald E. Davis and Mark R. Stoll (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO), 160, 170; John H. White, Jr. “Tracks and Timber,” The Journal of the Society for Industrial Archaeology 2, no.1 (1976):35, 41;

62

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018

The depletion of forests in the North, the relatively quick regeneration of southern forests, and the abundance of transportation networks and cheap labor attracted the lumber and naval stores industries to the South. Rural whites and African Americans sawed logs and extracted pine gum for the production of turpentine and rosin well into the 1970s. These same factors, together with technological advancements encouraged the rise of the state’s pulp and paper industry from the 1920s onward.

The pulp and paper industry was different from the lumber industry in that it could use young trees and it also used a greater amount of trees. These reasons, in addition to the industry’s newcomer status in the region, resulted in the wood dealer system. In these systems, companies obtained timber from individual landowners through middlemen, or wood dealers. Dealers were often local businessmen employed by the companies who acted as liaisons to the landowners. Their familiarity with the region and people also enabled them to enlist rural residents to cut and load wood. Falling timber for pulpwood did not require much machinery compared to collecting timber for lumber. Pulpwood could be cut with saws by people with little training, enabling many farmers to supplement their income, while one-time tenant farmers became employed either by landowners or wood dealers.

This hierarchical socioeconomic structure consisting of pulpwood mill owner, wood dealer, landowner, and laborer mimicked sharecropping and tenantry. By the 1950s, the wood dealer system was a hallmark of the pulp and paper industry in the South and continued to play a large role in later decades.

clxx

Mechanization in the 1960s combined the lumber and pulpwood enterprises, streamlined processes, and changed the timber industry’s labor dynamic. Sophisticated machinery required trained and educated operators. In addition, new machinery and techniques enabled mills and wood dealers to get a greater amount of raw material from fewer producers. As in other agricultural endeavors, mechanization and subsequent consolidation forced many producers out of the market and made modern businesses of lumbering and pulp wooding.

clxxi

Mid-twentieth century agriculture and the Jim Crow landscape

The many new federal programs in agriculture rarely impacted African American farm families as much as they did their white counterparts, no matter where they lived in the Jim

Crow South. The number of families engaged in agriculture across the region and the state declined significantly in the mid-twentieth century, but the number of black farmers declined so quickly and precipitously—discrimination and dispossession occurred at a frightening speed even during the Civil Rights Movement--that by the end of the twentieth century, some commentators wondered if the African American-owned farm had any future.

clxxii

State clxx John C. Bliss and Warren A. Flick, “With a Saw and a Truck: Alabama Pulpwood Producers,” Forest and Conservation History

38, no. 2 (April 1994): 79-81; clxxi Ibid., 87-8. clxxii Pete Daniel, Dispossession: Discrimination Against African American Farmers in the Age of Civil Rights (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); also see Jane Adams, ed., Fighting for the Farm (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,

2003).

63

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018

State

One important program worthy of further study and fieldwork is the persistence beyond the

New Deal era of the Tuskegee Land Utilization Project, which ran from 1935 to 1956.

clxxiii

The project began under the Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act and yielded the Prairie

Farms resettlement community. It eventually involved over 10,000 acres of submarginal, highly eroded land. Reformers explored ways of restoring the land and approaches to turning this type of landscape into profitable agricultural uses by African Americans. This land conservation effort continues to exist today as the Tuskegee National Forest, designated in 1959.

Federal involvement in Alabama agriculture intensified from 1954 to 1965 through several different agricultural acts. The Agricultural Act of 1954 “created a flexible price support system for basic crops” while establishing the influential Commodity Credit Corporation.

When this bill was renewed two years later, it created the Soil Bank program, which would revolutionize soil conservation efforts. The Feed Grain Act of 1961 created price supports for that segment of the agricultural industry. Then the Food and Agricultural Act of 1965 began the process of long-term “farm bills,” which still shapes the relationship between farmers and the federal government.

clxxiv

Soil Bank Program (1956) and agricultural diversification and conservation

The consequences of increased efficiency and production afforded farmers by mechanization and advancements in scientific agriculture began to gain wider acceptance in the 1950s. Mechanization enabled farmers to work more, often submarginal, land, while fertilizers and improved cultivation practices maximized production. These higher yields resulted in surplus farm commodities, increased soil erosion, and falling farm income. In response, Congress passed the Agricultural Act of 1956, creating the Soil Bank Program intended to reduce commodities, protect farm income, and conserve and rehabilitate land.

As seen before and during the New Deal era, the more agricultural programs there were, the less farmers were able to survive. And, like most New Deal initiatives, the Soil Bank program benefited white farmers more so than African American farmers.

clxxv

Under the Soil Bank Program, the Acreage Reserve Program (ARP) sought to curb production of peanuts, corn, rice, tobacco, cotton, and wheat through acreage reduction contracts with farmers. The other part of the Soil Bank Program was the Conservation

Reserve Program (CRP). The CRP’s goals were more long term in that it intended to make pastures, forests, and wildlife habitats out of former cropland. The CRP presented farmers and landowners with the opportunities to enter 3-, 5-, or 10-year contracts prohibiting cultivation, as well as cost sharing for conservation. The Soil Bank Program allowed some farmers to remove all of their land from production, resulting in outmigration and further consolidation of farms. It also encouraged landowners to evict their tenants and adopt less labor intensive crops and cultivation methods.

clxxvi clxxiii Robert G. Pasquill, Jr., Planting Hope on Worn-out Land: The History of the Tuskegee Land Utilization Project, Macon County,

Alabama, 1935-1959 (Montgomery: New South Books, 2008). clxxiv Shell, 639. clxxv Craig E. Colton, “Paradise Lost?” in Southern United States: An Environmental History ed. Donald E. Davis and Mark R. Stoll

(Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO), 186; J. Douglas Helms, “Brief History of the USDA Soil Bank Program,” USDA Natural Resources

Conservation Service, Historical Insights 1 (January 1985): 1; Pete Daniel, “African American Farmers and Civil Rights,” Journal of

Southern History 73, no.1 (February 2007): 2. clxxvi Helms, “Brief History,” 1; Danbom, Born in the Country, 245.

64

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018

In 1960, new contracts stopped and by this time 28.7 million acres, or 6 percent of the country’s cropland, was under Soil Bank contracts. In Alabama, participating farmers placed a collective 410,000 acres under contract. Reforestation was a central part of the

CRP in the southern states. South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama planted over one million acres of trees under the program.

clxxvii

Due to international competition and the small cotton allotments (compared to those of the

West) that southern farmers obtained from the government, many cotton farmers began to lease others’ allotments, diversify, or abandon cotton altogether. Soybeans, grains, and grasses for livestock became an attractive alternative, payments from the federal agencies such as the Soil Bank program subsidized the transitions, and experiment stations, extension agents, and the Soil Conservation Service (SCS) provided technical guidance. In Alabama,

Mississippi, Georgia, and Florida, farmers seeded 732,000 acres of pasture and built 10,382 farm ponds with the help of the SCS in 1954 alone.

clxxviii

Civil Rights on the Farm

The advent of scientific agriculture and agribusiness meant disaster for small farmers.

Sharecroppers, tenants, and smallholders did not fit into the new agriculture of mechanization, efficiency, and investment capital and many were forced out.

The USDA’s co-opting of local social and power structures in the South made the federal agency more palatable to white southerners wary of government intervention. The decentralization of USDA programs, especially those of the New Deal such as the Farm

Home Administration (FHA), Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service (ASCS), and the Federal Extension Service (FES), enabled locals to control who received aid and who did not. The discrimination was not relegated to the local level, but was central to the operations of state offices, universities, and experiment stations, and agripolitics in

Washington, DC. Despite the USDA’s Citizen Advisory Committee on Civil Rights, discrimination still prevented African Americans from benefitting from, or even knowing about agricultural aid.

clxxix

In many cases, African American farmers were unaware of the opportunities provided by

USDA agencies. For example, in Alabama, only 35 percent knew they could sell or rent cotton allotments, 64 percent did not know they could obtain financial assistance from the

ASCS, and 75 percent did not know the government would subsidize fertilizer purchases.

Similar trends were also true regarding FHA loans. Even after such landmark events as

Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Act of 1957, white politicians and USDA employees drove black farmers off the land by denying loans, delaying payments, reducing acreage allotments, and refusing advice and information, especially targeting activist farmers. Extension services were segregated. African American extension agents did not receive the support or funding that white agents enjoyed and 4-H students did not have the

State clxxvii Helms, “Brief History,” 2; John Fraser Hart, “Loss and Abandonment of Cleared Farm Land in the Eastern United States,”

Annals of the Association of American Geographers 58, no. 3 (September 1968): 432. clxxviii Fite, Cotton, 194-5. clxxix Daniel, “African American Farmers,” 2-7; also see his wider study, previously cited, Dispossession (2013).

65

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture

Name of Multiple Property Listing same extracurricular opportunities as white students.

clxxx

Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018

In 1964 and 1965, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), understanding the local ASCS offices’ power to distribute money, loans, and information, turned its attention to local ASCS elections in Mississippi, Georgia, and Alabama. Members of SNCC created literature that explained the complicated programs and structures of

USDA. This helped African Americans participate in the ASCS’s electoral process, but

State fraud was rampant and whites used intimidation and eviction to control the turnout.

A nationwide report released in 1965 entitled Equal Opportunity in Farm Programs found that between 1939 and 1959 black farm owners decreased by 40 percent, the average size of their farms was nearly 200 acres less than whites, and they earned less than half the farm income of whites. The same report also revealed that of the 6,100 employees of the Soil

Conservation Service in the 16 southern states, only 40 of them were African American. By

1966, there were still no African American professionals in Alabama’s state ASCS office and only two African American clerical workers out of fifteen. Only 6 of 127 ASCS county office employees were African American and all of the field employees were white.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 emphasized equal employment in government agencies and the USDA was one of the most consistent offenders. The decentralization that allowed racism to thrive also made the USDA programs and offices resistant to quick change mandated by national laws. Change was slow and inconsistent and from 1959 to 1967, the number of African American farmers in Alabama decreased by 28 percent.

clxxxi

Despite exclusion from the federal agencies that helped prop up large commercial farmers in agribusiness, many African American farmers found success by other routes. SNCC workers helped farmers become aware of federal aid and understand the bureaucratic structures that USDA officials manipulated to exclude them. Throughout the South, African

American farmers formed cooperatives for selling crops and purchasing machinery, seed, and fertilizer. The black colleges and experiment stations, such as Tuskegee, trained black agriculturalists, promoted collective participation in agribusiness, and distributed information and advice that was more practical to their economic and social situations.

clxxxii

Modernizing the farm home

Farmhouses play a central role on any farm and so as agriculture became modernized so did farm homes. The increased profitability of agribusiness subsidized purchases and modernization. The newly electrified countryside also facilitated modernization because it created a market for appliances and attracted industries that provided some residents with consistent part- of full-time income. By 1960, 97 percent of farms nationwide had electricity. clxxx Daniel, “African American Farmers,” 11, 47; Valerie Grim, “Black Participation in the Farm Home Administration and

Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service, 1964-1990,” Agricultural History 70, no.2 Twentieth Century Farm Policies

(Spring 1996): 322. clxxxi Daniel, “African American Farmers,” 11, 23-6, 37; Douglas Helms, “Eroding the Color Line: The Soil Conservation Service and the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” Agricultural History 65, no.2 (Spring 1991): 48. clxxxii Valerie Grim, “The Politics of Inclusion: Black Farmers and the Quest for Agribusiness Participation, 1945-1990s” Agricultural

History 69, no.2 (Spring 1995):264, 269.

66

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018

In the mid-century, telephones, radios, and televisions became more prevalent in farm homes and to accommodate the new technology, owners remodeled their homes and added rooms and spaces. These new home-centered technologies became important to the functioning of the farm because it kept the farmer abreast of the weather forecasts, the most up-to-date market trends, and telephones facilitated business transactions. More consistent farm income also enabled farmers to build more stylish houses or adopt bits and pieces of certain styles and incorporate them into local trends.

clxxxiii

Electricity by the 1950s and 1960s impacted the persistence of four long-term agricultural outbuildings: springhouses and dairies; smokehouses; and wash houses. Springhouses, dairies, and smokehouses were developed for food preservation. Electrical freezers eliminated the need for smokehouses (except for those farm families who preferred to preserve meat through a smoke-curing process, and those numbers dwindled due to the time and effort needed to smoke meat properly). Electrical refrigerators eliminated the need for springhouses and dairies to preserve dairy products. Indoor plumbing and electric washers and dryers eliminated the need for separate wash-houses and clothes drying lines. All of these prevalent 19 th

and early to mid-20 th

century outbuildings may still be extant on a rural property, but many have been converted to new uses or left empty, outside of storage of whatever items the family wishes to store. The incorporation of all of these activities into the farmhouse is an important reason why rural families replaced earlier historic dwellings with Ranch houses and Colonial Revival houses from the 1950s to the 1970s.

The introduction of indoor plumbing and water systems also revolutionized many Alabama farmhouses during this era. Often the rooms of new technology (electricity and indoor water particularly) were grafted to the rear of the existing farmhouse, or carved into corners of once much larger rooms. The adoption of indoor plumbing also eliminated the need for sanitary privies. Once privies were a dominant part of the agricultural landscape; where there were once hundreds of thousands, only a few hundred privies exist.

In 1945, only 5 percent of Alabama farmers owned telephones. The Hill-Poage Act of 1949 helped change that. The Act’s goal included bringing telephones to at least two-thirds of farm families who still lacked them. Thanks to this Act and the reduction of construction and distribution costs, by 1964, 76 percent of farms had telephones.

clxxxiv

In his massive study of Alabama agriculture, Eddie W. Shell notes that “Alabama agriculture was and is part of a worldwide ecosystem, and changes would have to be studied and evaluated within that framework.” clxxxv

One of his many significant findings is the observation that by the last third of the 20 th century, a triangle of elected officials in government ( local?, state and federal) largely guided and determined the course of the state’s agriculture, reacting as in the past to regional, national, and international contexts.

The mid-1960s yet again ushered in a new era in the history of Alabama agriculture.

State clxxxiii Paul K. Conkin, A Revolution Down on the Farm: The Transformation of American Agriculture Since 1929 (Lexington:

University of Kentucky Press, 2008), 107. clxxxiv Don F. Hadwiger and Clay Cochran, “Rural Telephones in the United States,” Agricultural History 58, no.3 (July 1984):221. clxxxv Shell, xvii.

67

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018

Resource Assessment: More buildings, structures, and sites from the modern era of

Alabama agriculture exist on the state’s agricultural landscapes than any other period of time. Yet, traditionally the silos, pole barns, and ranch-style farmhouses of these properties receive scant attention compared to other contexts in this MPS nomination. For Criterion

A: Agriculture significance under this context, key considerations include: the inclusion of modern technology (telephone, electricity), which did not appear in many Alabama rural areas until the 1950s; the turn to modern dairy facilities; structures associated with livestock production, especially cattle and chickens; structures and buildings associated the horticulture industry and other specialized products for urban/suburban consumers; and the construction of buildings associated with agricultural reform/education groups such as the

4-H and FFA and FHA. Many dwellings on rural properties may have historic late 19 th

or early 20 th century cores, but are ignored for potential eligibility due to “modernization” in the 1950s and 1960s. But as this context documents, changes to a dwelling from this time period may reflect ideas, technology (electricity and indoor plumbing in particular) and patterns of agricultural production and improvement that are significant in their own right.

In fact, such technological modernizations of African American farmhouses may not occur until 1960-1970 since public utilities were often not extended into rural black communities until that decade. Such “modernized” farmhouses may be eligible under Criterion A:

Agriculture if not eligible for Criterion C: Architecture.

State

68

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018

Section F: Property Types

The historic built environment associated with Alabama agriculture is defined broadly by three categories: agricultural landscapes (farms, plantations); public agricultural institutions

(agricultural schools, experiment stations and demonstration areas); and private agricultural organizations (Grange lodges; agriculture organizations).

Agricultural Landscapes

The property type Agricultural Landscape includes three primary properties: historic family farms; historic plantations; and historic slave and/or tenant farmsteads. The difference between the first two relates to the size of the agricultural property and the number of laborers for the property.

Historic family farms in Alabama range from at least ten acres to five hundred acres in size, including yeoman and small slaveholding farmers. This range of farm acreage embraces farms of one hundred acres or less that families operated solely with their own labor, perhaps assisted seasonally by hired labor, and farms of less than five hundred acres where the family worked with twenty or fewer slaves in the antebellum period or with a similar number of tenants in the postbellum era. Historic family farms may contain related dwellings and other outbuildings eligible as a historic district under Criterion C:

Architecture. More typically, they are eligible under Criterion A for Agriculture in how they are significantly associated with the themes and processes of this Multiple Property

Submission.

Historic plantations in Alabama are defined as properties of five hundred to thousands of acres where the family owned twenty or more slaves or employed a like number of tenants, or agricultural laborers, after the Civil War. This test of twenty or more slaves, with more than five hundred acres of land, to define an Alabama plantation reflects the agricultural and economic context of antebellum Alabama. In total, though, slaves represented 45% of the state’s population by the time of the Civil War, roughly 30% were owned by a relatively small group of people whereas most Alabama farmers owned far fewer. Only 5% of slaveholders held 50 or more slaves and more than 500 acres of land, representing less than

1% of the state’s total population.

clxxxvi

Using the number of tenants as 20 or more in the post-Civil War period reflects the persistence of manual labor for agricultural production on

Alabama’s plantations until the wide-spread incorporation of mechanization in the mid-20 th century. Historic plantations may contain dwellings and other outbuildings eligible under

State clxxxvi

Gary B. Mills, “Slavery in Alabama,” Dictionary of Afro-American Slavery , eds. Randall M. Miller and John David Smith

(Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1997), 39-40.

69

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018

Criterion C or they may be owned by individuals who are significant to Alabama history, thus eligible under Criterion B. More typically they are eligible under Criterion A for the theme of Agriculture.

Historic slave and/or tenant/laborer farmsteads are on small plots of land, typically five acres or less, that contain a dwelling, associated outbuildings, and perhaps small agricultural open space for livestock (chickens, swine, cattle). These farmsteads exist within farms and plantations and in most cases no buildings remain. But when and if their location can be determined, they are valuable under Criterion A and D for potential information about the nature of slave and/or tenant agriculture and farm life.

Historic farms and plantations most often share four broad categories of buildings and/or structures: 1) dwellings 2) outbuildings 3) field patterns, defined by historic fences and/or landscape features (creeks, tree lines, etc.) and 4) cemeteries. For the descriptive section of this discussion, we will consider each of these categories in order and list the primary types of buildings and/or structures found in each category. However, for general assessment purposes, the following should be kept in mind. We argue that for a property to meet the description of a "historic family farm" or “historic plantation” it should exhibit, at least, extant historic dwellings, outbuildings, and field patterns. That is, the nominated farm complex usually should contain a historic dwelling; outbuildings that are associated with the dwelling and/or associated with a significant agricultural period in the history of the farm; and historic fields that are associated with a significant period of agricultural production in the history of the farm. Family cemeteries may or may not be on the property. This resource is an important feature, if present, but its presence is not necessary to define a

"family farm" or “plantation.” Nor is it necessary for the same family to have owned and operated the farm over a long period of time; depending on the individual situation, changing ownership may add to, or detract from, the architectural or historical significance of the property. It is highly doubtful that a historic "family farm" or “plantation” is present, if the dwelling was built after 1965 and/or there are no extant historic outbuildings or historic fields.

There is, however, one exception to the aforementioned assessment guideline. Some members of the planter class owned houses in town and maintained corresponding plantations outside city limits. In this case, where the planter’s house and farm complex were historically separate, the house may be eligible on its own, aside from whatever historical or architectural significance it may carry, for significance in contributions to agriculture.

The chronological period for the extant resources in the three categories of dwellings, outbuildings, and fields may be mixed; that is, the house may be more recent than the field patterns or the outbuildings may be more recent than both the dwelling and fields. This pattern also holds true for historic slave and/or tenant/laborer farmsteads, where extant outbuildings may be older than the dwelling, which is commonly from the 20 th

century.

The nominated property's period of significance, especially for the agriculture theme of

Criterion A, will define the chronological range represented by the individual resources of a historic family farm. A farm might have a founding date of 1860, for example, and the

State

70

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018 fields and some outbuildings may well date to the mid-nineteenth century. The house, on the other hand, might be a 1920s bungalow. This chronological range is not unusual; farm families updated outbuildings and dwellings as circumstances on the farm changed, particularly in the early twentieth century in response to the progressive farming movement.

The crucial determination for a historic family farm is to determine the period of significance for agriculture. If the property does not have significance in agriculture, however, it should be carefully assessed for architectural significance under Criterion C as a historic district. This architectural grouping may be associated, as well, with significant developments or periods in agricultural history and may be eligible under Criterion A for the theme of agriculture.

1) Dwellings: places of human occupation in the present or in the past that remain on the farmstead, with the exception of planter’s housing “in town,” which may or may not retain any acreage associated with its agricultural history.

Types of Dwellings:

Single-pen log cabin (1785-1900). A one-room log house, with a single gable end chimney, which may be further described according to its notching type. Often used as a dwelling of initial occupation, but may have been built later in the nineteenth century for use as slave quarters and/or tenant housing.

Double-pen log cabin (1785-1900). A two-room log house, with gable end chimneys on either one or two ends, which may be further described according to its notching type.

Often used as a dwelling of initial occupation, but may have been built later in the nineteenth century for use as slave quarters and/or tenant housing.

Saddlebag house (1785-1930). The original type of saddlebag house was a two-room log cabin with each room flanking a shared central chimney and each room having its separate front door entrance. Often used as a dwelling of initial occupation, but may have been built later in the nineteenth century for use as slave quarters and/or tenant housing. Indeed, the basic form of two rooms, central chimney, and two front doors survived as a popular housing type for both whites and blacks well into the twentieth century, usually built as a frame house.

Dogtrot house (1800-1860). This two-pen log house features an open breezeway with gable end chimneys. Often used as a dwelling of initial occupation, but may have been used later as a central hall house once the logs were covered with weatherboard and the breezeway covered to create a central hall. A good example of this type is the dogtrot log house at

Pond Spring in Hillsboro, Lawrence County, AL. It was built in 1818 and occupied by John

P. Hickman and was later occupied by slaves after a Federal style frame house was constructed for the family in the 1830s.

These first folk forms of dwellings were often incorporated into or encapsulated by larger homes as the family expanded the house in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Central hall house (1800-1900). The basic form of this one-story frame or brick dwelling is

State

71

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018 a central hall flanked by roughly equal sized rooms. By the middle decades of the nineteenth century, an ell-wing had usually been added to the dwelling for the purposes of creating a separate dining room, additional bedrooms, and connecting the kitchen to the main house.

I-house (1800-1900). A common house type in sections of Alabama that were settled by

Anglo-American settlers (we are currently in the process of identifying & nominating Ihouses in northern Alabama; that’s why I changed this.)

, this type was first identified and defined by geographer Fred Kniffen in the 1930s. This is a frame or brick (and in rare instances log) two-story dwelling that is one room deep with end chimneys. This house type can have one front door leading to a central hall flanked by two rooms or it can have two front doors leading into two separate rooms. By the middle decades of the nineteenth century, a one-story (sometimes two-story) ell-wing or lean-to extension was added to the dwelling for the purposes of creating porches, a separate dining room, additional bedrooms, or connecting the kitchen to the main house. Borden Oaks in Greensboro, Hale County,

Alabama, is a good example of a variation on this style. It was built in 1835 and has a

Federal style portico across the facade. Other good examples are the Robert G. Griffith Sr. house (1851) in Summit, Blount County; the Sadler House (c. 1830) in McCalla, Jefferson

County, and the Hezekiah Ford House (c. 1830) in Huntsville, Madison County.

Tidewater Cottage (1800-1840). This dwelling type, appearing in the Tennessee Valley and central Alabama regions in the early nineteenth century, is often described as a raised cottage of Virginia. As architectural historian Robert Gamble assesses, “Alabama versions feature a shallower roof-pitch than do their colonial predecessors.” clxxxvii

End chimneys also feature less prominently on Alabama examples, but the strict symmetry and rational geometry seen in colonial examples is carried throughout this regional subtype. This type is typically a center-hall plan though may feature a hall-and-parlor plan and may be one- or two-rooms deep. Good examples of this style include Bride’s Hill and Albemarle near

Courtland, Lawrence County. There are some loose interpretations of this style found in the

Black Belt region as well. One example is Altwood (1836) in Faunsdale, Marengo County.

Shotgun (1870-1940). Vlach has identified the cultural origins of this dwelling as African-

American, especially in the urban crucible of New Orleans during the antebellum era. The house, in its basic form, is a one-story frame dwelling and contains at least three interconnected rooms, with no hallway, with the entrance being on the gable end. In the

Reconstruction era, African-Americans constructed the house type both in urban and small town areas from where it diffused into the countryside and became a basic house form for tenant farmers and sharecroppers.

Up-right and Wing (1870-1910). A two-story version of the gable-front-and-wing dwelling.

Bungalow (1905-1940). A one to one and a half story brick, stuccoed, or frame dwelling with a low pitched overhanging roof and wrap-around porch that, in its pure state, eschews historical ornament for more naturalistic decorative details. This house style became very popular with "progressive farmers" in the early twentieth century, but many examples in

Alabama would embrace the "classical bungalow" form, that is, the dwelling would be a

State clxxxvii

Gamble, The Alabama Catalog , 33.

72

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018 bungalow but its porch and windows would reflect the influence of classical revival design by using classical columns, capitals, and Palladian-like windows. There are examples of this style found on several Alabama Century and Heritage Farms.

Ranch (1950-1965) This style became a popular choice for middle class farmers in the midtwentieth century and most often features one-story, brick or frame, asymetrical facades with a low-pitched roof. Roofs can be hipped, side-gabled or cross-gabled, and there is usually a wide to moderate overhanging eave. Large picture windows often dominate the façade. There are examples of this style found on several Alabama Century and Heritage

Farms.

Architectural Styles

Need to also include Federal style

Greek Revival (1830-1870). Architectural style popular with the planter class. Columns may have Cornithian, Ionic, or Doric capitals. Several examples of this style can be found throughout Alabama. Some include: Pitts Folly (1853) in Uniontown, Perry County; Cedar

Crest (1850) in Faunsdale, Marengo County; Thornhill (1833) in Forkland, Greene County; and the Driskell-Martin House (1850) in Plantersville, Dallas County.

Discuss bracketed Greek Revival from RG’s book.

Italianate (1850-1880). Architectural style popular with the planter class, strongly associated with the general boom in the southern agricultural economy during the 1850s.

Two important characteristics are wide brackets under the eaves or cornices and round which appear on windows and doors, and, quite often, are repeated in the porch design. This style may feature a symmetrical or asymmetrical façade. An asymmetrical facade, with a square tower, would be found in more formal statements of the style influenced by the

Italian country villa design. An example of this style can be seen near Marion, Perry

County, at Kenworthy Hall ??? [Not sure what this means.] . It was built between 1858 and

1861 by architect Richard Upjohn. A good example of a symmetrical facade is the Drish

House in Tuscaloosa, Tuscaloosa County. It was first completed in 1837 in a Greek Revival style but renovated in the Italianate style, including a prominent three-story brick tower, prior to the Civil War

Gothic Revival (1850-1880). Almost always a frame house style with a steeply pitched roof and cross gables that can be centered, asymmetrical, paired, or come in threes across the façade. Gables often have decorative vergeboard. This house style typically has a one-story porch with a hipped or shed roof and wooden posts. A vernacular variation of this style is seen in the board-and-batten slave quarters at Faunsdale Plantation in Faunsdale, Marengo

County. There are also examples of this style found on some Alabama Century and Heritage

Farms.

Second Empire (1865-1885). Popular among advocates of the "New South" and economic change in the years after the Civil War. Mansard roof, multi-colored tin plate roofs, and

State

73

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018 decorative iron cresting are basic architectural elements. The Second Empire often includes dormer windows, decorative brackets in the eaves, and heavy moldings around doors and windows. The façade may be asymmetrical and may or may not feature a tower with either a flat or mansard roof.

Folk Victorian (1870-1910). This often vernacular house type was a dominant rural dwelling of Alabama during the late nineteenth century. It includes the asymmetrical gablefront-and-wing type as well as the symmetrical hipped, pyramidal, side-gabled, and frontgabled roof types. All types feature a porch on the façade that can be recessed or not with a shed or hipped roof and turned posts. Details often include those of Italianate or Queen

Anne inspiration. There are examples of this style found on several Alabama Century and

Heritage Farms.

Queen Anne (1880-1900). This decorative style features a steeply pitched roof, usually with a dominant front-facing gable, patterned wooden shingles, and an asymmetrical façade.

Porches are either full or partial and may be recessed. Architectural historians Virginia and

Lee McAlester add “A tower, when present, is most commonly placed at one corner of the façade.” clxxxviii

The Queen Anne influence on various folk forms of farm housing is common, usually exhibited as fish scale shingles, millwork, and wrap-around porches. A variation of this style is seen at the Walker-Klinner Farm in Maplesville, Chilton County.

The 1890 house features Eastlake ornamentation on a symmetrical façade with a full front porch in what may be described as a Folk Victorian style.

Foursquare (1905-1930). A two-story brick or frame house, with Craftsman-influenced brackets under the eaves and typically a shed dormer on the low pitch roof. It was popular among "progressive farmers" during the early twentieth century. It would sometimes take on the appearance of the Classical Revival house by the addition of a two-story classical portico but more common was the addition of a largely unadorned one-story portico which gave the dwelling a more Colonial Revival appearance.

Colonial Revival (1920-1950). A popular style among middle class farmers, especially between World War I and World War II. "Georgian Revival" would typically be a twostory brick house with a steep gable roof, symmetrical facade, and dormer windows. The

"Georgian cottage" would be a one-story version of this same style, built in either frame or brick.

Minimal Traditional (1935-1955). Identified and defined by the McAlesters, this one-story frame or brick dwelling is a small (three to five rooms) one-story house that features a symmetrical facade and has little ornamentation. Popular among farmers of smaller amounts of acreage and can be found on larger estates as tenant housing. Sometimes this house form is referred to as a "tract house," signifying its popularity in the immediate post-

World War II housing boom. Many tenant houses extant from 1940 to 1965 will convey elements of this architectural approach, resembling little suburban homes on the landscape.

Colonial Revival Ranch (1955-1970). This style grafts Colonial Revival details, such as

State clxxxviii

Virginia and Lee McAlester, A Field Guide to American Houses (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1984), 263.

74

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture

OMB No. 1024-0018

Alabama

Name of Multiple Property Listing classical portico with pediment, a symmetrical façade, and dormer windows, on what is otherwise the Ranch-style form. This adaptation of Ranch style gained popularity in the

State

1960s and continued as a building type to the end of the century.

2) Outbuildings: places of human work and where animals, agricultural products, and equipment may be stored. In general, the outbuildings for farmsteads are arranged in a domestic complex, usually defined by a fence or tree/shrubbery line, that surrounds or lies in close proximity to the dwelling, and in the agricultural complex, or work complex, that would lie farther away from the dwelling and to the rear or the side of the domestic complex.

The following outbuildings would most typically be located within the domestic complex:

Carriage house (1800-1900). A rectangular one-story gable roof frame or brick building used for the storage of carriages and/or horses for carriages.

Cellars (1800-1965). A few nineteenth century cellars may still be located (the structures were known then as root cellars) and they were used for the underground storage of potatoes, turnips, and other root vegetables. In the middle decades of the twentieth century, many progressive farmers constructed cellars out of concrete so canned goods could be stored there throughout the year.

Concrete construction for outbuildings in general can be traced to the influence of the building trades and architecture programs at Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University) during the 1940s. Due to building material shortages during World War II, Tuskegee professors and agricultural extension worked together to develop and then advocate for the use of concrete for both farm outbuildings and any rural building. The program soon spread across the state and there is a concentration of concrete buildings, especially in African

American rural communities, that date c. 1940 to c. 1970.

Chicken coop (1900-1950). Progressives urged farm women to raise poultry products to help supplement farm income and enable families to purchase new technology for the home.

These are typically rectangular one-story board-and-batten buildings with a metal shed roof.

Some are built to standardized plans provided by USDA or the extension agent.

Cistern (1775-1945). A reservoir used to catch and store rainwater. Cisterns use a system of gutters and downspouts to collect rainwater from the surface of a roof. They are most commonly found underground and made of brick or stone and are sometimes accompanied by a brick or frame structure built to cover the opening.

Dairy (1840-1900). A small frame building, with ventilation grills in the top half, which is taller than it is wide (but not as tall as a smokehouse) and used for milk storage.

Garage (1900 to 1945). A rectangular one-story gable roof frame or brick building used for the storage of automobiles.

Ice house (1800-1940). Found more typically on large plantations, this rectangular, frame

75

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018 building was used for the storage of ice and other perishable commodities. Most were abandoned or turned to new uses after the introduction of electricity in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Kitchen (1785-1900). A rectangular one-story gable roof frame or brick building used for the preparation of meals. Typically by 1900, the separate kitchen had been incorporated into the dwelling by means of a L-wing.

Office (1780-1940). A rectangular one-story gable roof frame or brick building used for administering and managing farm work and sales. Often part of the domestic complex, it may also be located as a "buffer" between the domestic complex and the agricultural complex.

Privy (1785-1965). Tall, squarish frame or board and batten structures, with usually side ventilators and metal shed roofs, for human waste disposal are rarely found on extant farms and if they do remain, most date from the twentieth century. Some follow plans distributed by the USDA or extension offices. Many were constructed by the Works Projects

Administration during the 1930s. For example, see Townsend Farmhouse (NR 8/11/2005) in Jackson County.

Schoolhouse (1800-1860). Typically found on large plantations, one-room schoolhouses were sometimes built for planters’ children within the farm complex. They were usually square or rectangular frame buildings with a gable roof. A good example of an extant plantation schoolhouse is at Thornhill (NR 5/10/1984) in Forkland, Greene County. It was built c. 1845. Planters sometimes constructed much less elaborate schools for the children of their tenants, but none of these buildings have yet been identified.

Smokehouse (1785-1965). A tall but relatively narrow log, brick, or frame structure used for the smoking and preservation of meats, usually pork. Most log smokehouses date prior to 1860; frame smokehouses are mostly of the twentieth century.

Spring house (1785-1940). A small usually gable roofed building of brick, stone, log or frame used to protect the family water supply and to provide a cool spot for the temporary preservation of perishable dairy items.

Store (1800-1950). Found typically on large plantations, these buildings are sometimes called “commissary” buildings and are either rectangular or square log or frame buildings.

They often have a gabled roof, and a full front porch over the entry with a hipped or shed roof and wooden posts.

Washhouse (1800-1950). Typically a frame one-story gable roof rectangular building that housed the machinery, pans, and pots for washing clothes. Still stands on some farms and used for storage today.

Warehouse (1900-1965). A large rectangular frame or metal building with a gable roof used to store crops such as cotton.

State

76

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018

Water tower (1920-1965). A wooden or metal tank elevated on an open wooden or metal base used to hold large amounts of water needed for household, livestock, and irrigation use.

Well (1785-1965). Wells refer to the structures built over a dug-out or drilled well to underground water. It is uncommon to find a frame or log well head today; beginning in the twentieth century, farmers built either a frame well house to cover the well opening and pump or located the machinery within a concrete well head.

Windmill (1920-1965). “The standard farm windmill consisted of a light, but strong, steel frame of four sloping legs, braced at intervals,” describes Allen G. Noble.

clxxxix

The blades are curved and placed in a “rosette pattern.”

Wood shed (1800-1965). A small rectangular typically frame building with an overhanging gable roof used to protect the wood supply from rain. Still used on properties that rely on fireplaces and/or wood stoves for winter heating.

The agricultural complex typically contains the larger outbuildings of a historic family farm or historic plantation. The centerpieces are the various barns, around which are loosely arranged cribs, granaries, equipment sheds, and other buildings devoted to agricultural production and storage. On larger farms, especially tobacco farms, barns may be located throughout the farm, closer to the productive fields with which they are associated.

Barn types would include:

Single crib barn (1785-1960). According to Noble, single crib barns "are merely a crib, or pen, constructed of rough-hewn logs and covered by a simple gable roof." cxc

Commonly, the barns are between eight and twelve feet in length and have a door on the gable end. Used for corn and grain storage, this type of barn was constructed of frame in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Often, the original log crib remains intact, but flanking frame (or even metal) sheds have been added to increase the barn's storage capacity.

Double crib barn (1785-1960). "In these barns," Noble states, "a second crib, sometimes identical to the earlier crib and sometimes of rather different dimensions, was erected so that it could share with the first crib a common roof, which extended across a central aisle or breezeway.” cxci

Four crib barn (1820-1920). "Four separate cribs are erected, one at each corner of the barn, and a single gable roof is put over the entire structure. The two aisles thus formed cross in the middle of the building." cxcii

State clxxxix

Allen G. Noble, Wood, Brick, and Stone: The North American Settlement Landscape, Vol. 2: Barns and Farm Structures

(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984), 83. cxc

Ibid., 3. cxci

Ibid. cxcii

Ibid., 10.

77

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018

Transverse frame barn (1820-1965). The four-crib barn design was basically filled in as the side aisle openings were eliminated, leaving only a center aisle open at the gable ends.

Another pen replaced the side aisle opening, giving farmers six storage pens rather than the four of the double crib barn. Over time, the center aisle has been elongated, with some transverse crib barns having five or six pens on either side of the center aisle. The USDA developed standardized plans for transverse crib barns, used for curing either burley or darkfired tobacco, in the mid-twentieth century. This barn type has also been transformed into a stock barn, particularly on the increasing number of farms that no longer produce tobacco.

Pole barn (1945-1965). A popular post-World War II barn type, this low-pitch roofed, onestory frame or metal barn is placed on a concrete slab and upright poles provide the framing of the barn walls and steel-girder trusses provide support for the roof.

Flue cured tobacco barn (1810-1965). A few examples of this barn type exist in Alabama; more are found in Tennessee and North Carolina. The basic form is a tall rectangle or square around the lower half of which has been constructed a shed supported by wooden poles that surrounds the building. This barn type has also been transformed into a stock barn, particularly on the increasing number of farms that no longer produce tobacco.

Burley tobacco barn (1880-1990). Burley tobacco is air-cured and does not require a special type of barn configuration. Most burley tobacco barns in northern Alabama, where the concentration is greatest along the Tennessee River valley, are tall, elongated gable roofed barns, with entrances on the gable end. The barns have ventilators along the roof ridge to enhance air circulation and they often have movable panels on both the sides and gable ends to increase circulation.

Crib types would include:

Corncrib (1785-1965). Different types of cribs are located throughout the United States, but in this region, most cribs are elongated but narrow buildings constructed off the ground on wooden supports that have slatted walls to provide proper ventilation for the corn.

Drive-in crib (1800-1940). Similar to a double crib barn, but different in that there is no loft, the two cribs are elongated, and the aisle is quite wide.

Front drive crib (1800-1920). A single crib barn built of logs or frame with a projecting front roof which is then braced and supported by corner poles.

Side drive crib (1800-1920). This type "has an aisle and a crib of about equal dimensions, and each is covered by approximately one-half the roof, the slope of which is unbroken." cxciii

Other agricultural production/storage buildings would include:

Chicken coop (1900-1965). The production of poultry became a major agricultural

State cxciii

Ibid., 25.

78

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018 commodity during the progressive agriculture era. Extension service agents provided farmers with standardized plans for small, medium, and large chicken houses and many of these buildings are still extant on farms, although few are in use today. Farms that produced small amounts of chicken utilized a coop that featured two to three windows on one side with a shed roof. Larger chicken coops have a low-pitched roof over an elongated building with six to ten window openings on each side.

Cotton Gin (1800-1965). Typically only historic plantations will have extant cotton gin facilities. These are typically large rectangular shaped gable-roof buildings with openings on both the side and gable ends. Most are of frame construction from the antebellum period to 1900. Gins of the twentieth century may be built of metal or concrete block.

Granary (1785-1965). First constructed of logs, and later frame, and most recently of metal, these typically gable-roofed structures provided storage for wheat, oats, and other small grains. Cylinder shaped metal granaries became more common in the second half of the twentieth century.

Hog houses (1800-1965). Also known as pigpens or even hog parlors, the hog house was located as far away from the dwelling as possible. In the nineteenth century, a simple single-story frame building with gable roof was typical since the basic function of the structure was to protect the pigs in inclement weather. In the early twentieth century, however, standardized plans from extension agents provided a more integrated design so that the corn or other foodstuffs could be stored next to the feeding pens. These buildings are often referred to as hog parlors. Modern hog houses built since the 1970s on large swine-producing farms are elongated one-story metal buildings with a gable roof, which are almost completely enclosed except for a single entrance at the gable end.

Milkhouse (1900-1965). Associated with the boom in the dairy industry during the twentieth century. Most extant milkhouses are built of concrete blocks and are one-story in height, unadorned, and have a gable roof. Inside the building is where the modern dairy equipment is located.

Silo (1880-1965). A tall usually circular storage system for ensilage. Since their introduction to the United States, silos have evolved from rectangular wooden structures

(1880 to 1900) to circular wooden-stave structures (1900 to 1920) to huge concrete silos

(1920 to 1980) and to the modern Harvestore systems of today (1945 to 1965).

Stable or mule barn (1785-1965): a type of barn used to house livestock, typically horses or mules. These are rectangular one-story log or frame structures.

Storage sheds would include:

Equipment shed (1920-1965). Associated with the gas-powered engine mechanization boom in agriculture during the twentieth century. These one-story frame structures, often with a shed roof, are garages for farm equipment, with typically multiple bays to shelter tractors, combines, seeders, wagons, etc. Extension agents also provided farmers with standardized plans for these buildings.

State

79

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018

Hay shed (1940-1965). Since the mid-twentieth century, farmers for reasons of cost have turned increasingly to building one and even two-story hay sheds to protect their hay crop.

These are rectangular gable roof buildings, with the roof supported by wooden or metal poles, which are open on the sides.

Fruit shed (1930-1965). These one-story frame or metal rectangular buildings typically with metal roofs and concrete foundations and floors are used to process fruit for the marketplace.

Pecan, Peanut drying shed (1900-1965). Developed in reaction to the growing popularity of pecans and peanuts as a cash crop, the drying shed would be used for prepping nuts of all types for the market. Typically built as a one-story frame or metal building with a concrete foundation and metal or asphalt gable roof.

Other features:

Pond (1900-1965). Associated with the progressive farming period and the twentieth century switch to livestock production. Certainly ponds were constructed on farms before

1900, but those identified in the Center's fieldwork have dated to the mid-twentieth century

(or later) and are typically aligned with efforts of the Soil Conservation Service in a given county.

III. Fences and Fields

When assessing the fences and fields that comprise an individual farmstead, it is crucial to remember that family farms and plantations are individual units of production. Comparing a family farm or plantation to a historic factory building is a valuable analogy. Like a historic factory building, the outside (that is, the farm boundaries) are constants (although additions may be made through the years). How space is divided on the inside (or within the fields), however, may change through the years, according to the commodities being produced at a given period.

Due to changes in farm technology and mechanization, as well as the decline of farm tenancy, fields from the mid-twentieth century are often larger in acreage than those that could be managed efficiently by earlier available technology and labor systems. This change in field size, in most cases, is significant to the agricultural history of the property in that the changes reflect the general trends of labor, farm management, and crop production of twentieth century agriculture. The fields, in other words, become valuable documents of how agricultural production evolved from the nineteenth to the twentieth century.

When assessing fields, consider whether boundary lines between fields have been defined by past historical markers or by past historical behavior. Sometimes, historic fence lines are in place; sometimes, historic documents (soil conservation surveys from the 1930s; deed records; aerial photography from the 1930s-50s) will document the definition of the fields.

Most often, however, "natural" fence lines, such as trees, bushes, and terraces, are still

State

80

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018 apparent around the boundaries of fields. If these types of historic boundaries exist around the fields, defining their historic boundaries as individual production areas within a larger unit of production, a significant agricultural sense of time and place is conveyed.

Terraces (1935-1965)

According to Arthur Hall, terraces in the United States have been used mainly to prevent soil erosion and create level surfaces for cultivation on naturally sloping land.

cxciv

Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century, many farmers in the South terraced their fields to meet both objectives with “stair steps” on more severely sloping land and broad-based terraces on gently sloping land and even flat land. As a soil conservation method, terracing was especially useful to southern farmers because the principle crops, such as cotton and corn, were row crops whose planting loosened much of the topsoil, making it vulnerable to washing. Terracing became more prevalent and standardized with the creation of the Soil Conservation Service in 1935 and the formation of local soil and water conservation districts beginning in 1937. Terracing fields was usually only one, albeit very substantial, of many soil conservation measures recommended in the farm plans created by SCS personnel for individual farmers. Agricultural engineers helped lay out plans and farmers built them with animal labor or, preferably, machinery. Farmers in

Alabama often formed cooperatives or “terracing clubs” to purchase equipment. The switch from row crops to livestock and the advent of no-till planting technology in the 1970s made terraces unnecessary. Many farmers leveled terraces on land still in row crops to eliminate obstacles for large, no-till equipment. Some intact terraces can still be seen in pastures where they do not affect livestock operations.

Stone fence (1840-1950). In this region, the earliest stone fences probably date to the late antebellum period, most likely built by slaves. Some are made of flat limestone, though this type of fence is more prevalent in Tennessee and Kentucky. In the central and northern parts of the state, sandstone and fieldstone fences are more commonly found.

Rail fence (1800-1900). Also known as the worm, snake, or zig-zag fence. These types, according to Noble, "refer to the crooked pattern that the fence makes, the result of a necessity to alternate directions in order to maintain stability." (13)

Board fence (1850-1965). Square lumber posts connected by three to five wooden boards

(typically four were used). Used primarily to enclose livestock lots.

Barbed wire fence (1900-1965). Although introduced in the Midwest during the 1870s, and gaining immense popularity in the Western states in the late 1800s, the barbed wire fence in

Alabama is usually twentieth century in origin and is associated with the shift to cattle production in this century.

Net wire fence (1900-1965). Like the barbed wire fence, woven wire fences were first available in the 1880s, but in Alabama most extant fences are twentieth century in origin.

This type of fence is very common.

State cxciv Arthur Hall, “Terracing the Southern Piedmont,” Agricultural History 23, no. 2 (April 1949): 96-109.

81

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018

Electric fence (1935-1965). Once the Rural Electrification Administration began to provide cheap electricity to rural areas, farmers began to use single or double strands of electric wire to fence livestock.

IV. Cemeteries

Several historic farmsteads retain family cemeteries, which may be significant contributing elements of the farmstead if the majority of graves date prior to 1965, if the grave markers are significant artifacts of folk culture, and if the cemetery itself represents a significant example of a designed landscape. Some will have "slave cemeteries" as well. It is important to document if the cemeteries are actually from the era of slavery or is the cemetery more for the graves of black tenants and sharecroppers who worked in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Either type of cemetery, however, if they meet the general requirements noted above, would be significant contributing elements to the farmstead and, in fact, could be individually eligible for their significant association with the ethnic heritage theme of Criterion A.

Public Agricultural Institutions

Experiment Stations

In the late 19 th

century, public agricultural experiment stations in Alabama were established as departments of what are now Auburn and Tuskegee Universities in an effort to further institutionalize scientific agriculture. At these stations, scientists and progressive agriculturalists planted and developed different varieties of crops, raised livestock, tested fertilizers and cultivation methods, and devised practical applications for area farmers from research findings. The stations were clearinghouses for information regarding the latest developments in agriculture. In the 1920s, when agricultural extension became more formalized, the relationships between the land-grant college researchers and extension agents were strengthened and stations became a more consistent source of information for county agents. Experiment station faculty also disseminated information through bulletins, facility tours, and demonstrations, and together with extension agents exposed farm families to the latest developments in scientific agriculture and encouraged change on their farms.

In addition to the experiment stations at Tuskegee and Auburn Universities (George

Washington Carver Agricultural Experiment Station and the Alabama Agricultural

Experiment Station, respectively), the Alabama legislature established branch stations to be operated by Auburn faculty. The establishment of experiment stations throughout the state helped progressive agriculturalists reach more farm families and address different regions of the state and their respective soils, climates, and agricultural trends. These satellite establishments can be broken into three categories: (1) The original “substations” created in

1929 and 1930 that now serve as research and extension centers (with Chilton Station as the exception), (2) the research centers and units established during and after World War II that currently serve as research centers, and (3) the research centers and units that began as experiment fields established by the Department of Agronomy and Soils between 1928 and

1930, but in the 1960s began to be administered by Auburn as additional research centers.

State

82

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018

Each experiment station and research center is unique in that each focused and continues to focus on the specific agricultural issues of its region, making research and advice more applicable to area farmers. Not only did the experiment stations and research centers play a large role in affecting change on individual farms, the stations’ emphases reflected shifts in regional farm culture. For example, the Wiregrass station began in 1929 focusing on cotton and corn, but as area farmers began to cultivate peanuts, the station shifted much of its focus onto the legume.

Many of the structures described in the “Property Types of Historic Family Farms and

Plantations” above, including dwellings, outbuildings, fences and fields, may be found at the experiment stations and research centers. The structures typically found on these properties will be generally unadorned and functional dwellings, outbuildings, and fences.

Similar to family farms and plantations, the significance of these establishments’ structures under the agricultural theme of Criterion A lay in their relationship to one another and each should be considered components of a property that may be nominated. Also similar to historic family farms and plantations, the chronological period for the extant resources in the three categories of dwellings, outbuildings, and fields and fences may be mixed; that is, the dwellings may be more recent than the field patterns or the outbuildings may be more recent than both the dwellings and fields.

According to the 1930 and 1931 annual reports of the Alabama Agricultural Experiment

Station, the substations established in 1929 and 1930 began with residences for the superintendents, lesser residences for the assistants, several “labor cottages,” barns, tool sheds, office buildings, garages, poultry houses (where applicable), and well houses. In some instances, land acquired for the stations already had structures on it. This was the case at the property bought for the Sand Mountain substation on which stood three farm residences and a barn. These were repaired, painted, and used by station personnel. Since the stations’ establishment, structures have undoubtedly been razed, adapted, updated, and additional structures built in response to technological advancements and agricultural trends. Some of the stations’ structures were built with state-of-the-art construction methods and used innovative floor plans to demonstrate various structural and functional benefits to area farmers. For example, the practicality of a house built in the mid-1950s at the North

Alabama Horticulture Research Center was noted in a publication that included the construction methods and floor plans. A particular property’s nomination must determine the chronological range of the structures similar to those pertaining to family farms and plantation complexes.

Public agricultural institutions considered to date include:

Original Branch Stations

Tennessee Valley Research and Extension Center: 755 acres. Four miles north on County

Road 71 from I-565 exit 2, Belle Mina, Limestone County. This station began with 240 acres as one of the first branch stations established by the Alabama legislature in 1929.

Early research focuses included cotton, corn, truck crops, poultry, and pasture development.

The station conducted dairy demonstrations in the 1940s and participated in cotton

State

83

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018 mechanization in the 1950s and 60s.

Sand Mountain Research and Extension Center: 536 acres. 13112 Highway 68, Crossville,

DeKalb County. This station was created in 1929 on 240 acres as one of the first branch stations established by the Alabama legislature. Began as a 96-acre unit focusing on fruit and vegetable crops and later included hog production and maintenance and cotton and dairy work. The station saw demonstration work in the 1940s and cotton mechanization in the 1950s and 60s.

Wiregrass Research and Extension Center: 600 acres. 167 East Alabama Highway 134,

Headland, Henry County. This station began on 220 acres in 1929 as one of the first branch stations established by the Alabama legislature. Initial research focused on cotton and corn, but began to turn to peanut cultivation research after World War II in response to the increasing prevalence of area production and peanuts’ value as a cash crop.

Gulf Coast Research and Extension Center: 800 acres. 8300 State Highway 104, Fairhope,

Baldwin County. This station began in 1930 with 720 acres of land as one of the first branch stations established by the Alabama legislature. Research initially focused on Midwestern seed potatoes and later included soil enrichment, food and vegetable crops, forage crops, and dairy and beef cattle.

Black Belt Research and Extension Center: 1,116 acres. 60 County Road 944, Marion

Junction, Dallas County. Began in 1930 as one of the first branch stations established by the

Alabama Legislature with initial focus on soil enrichment and pasture development in order to facilitate the growth of the livestock industry. The station was also a site for dairy demonstration in the 1940s.

Post-World War II Branch Stations

Chilton Research and Extension Center: 161 acres. 120 County Road 756, Clanton, Chilton

County. This station was established in 1948 to help peach producers and to promote the fruit as a cash crop. Other horticulture crops, such as watermelon, peas, and tomatoes, also received attention to a lesser degree.

Upper Coastal Plain Agricultural Research Center: 735 acres. 171 Experimental Loop,

Winfield, Marion County. Established in 1944, early activities included dairy research, swine, and fruit and vegetable crop studies. Later research included forage crops and beef cattle.

Piedmont Research Unit : 1,409 acres. Piedmont Drive, Camp Hill, Tallapoosa County. This station was established in 1945. Early research focused on pasture development and forage crops. The station served as a dairy demonstration site in the 1940s. Early research also included beef cattle and fruit and vegetable crops.

North Alabama Horticulture Research Center: 159 acres. 765 County Road 1466, Cullman,

Cullman County. The station was established in 1948. It’s early research focused on encouraging the local truck farming industry. It also served as a pimento pepper production

State

84

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018

State center and especially contributed to sweet potato and apple research.

Auburn University Natural Resources Education Center: 1790 acres. Camden, Wilcox

County. Established in 1949, early research focused on poultry and livestock. The station also studied irrigation’s value to beef production and bamboo as a pulp crop. Originally the

Lower Coastal Plain Substation, the station was renamed in 2008 to match its new mission: to provide the space and facilities to educate private landowners and conservation professionals about wise use of natural resources. As of May 2014 the site is inactive.

Properties established as experiment fields by the Department of Agronomy and Soils in

Auburn:

Prattville Agricultural Research Unit: 80 acres. 713 County Road 4 East, Autauga County.

This project began in 1930 as one of ten experiment fields established by the Department of

Agronomy and Soils who administered the sites until the 1960s. The site’s main historical focus was soil fertility and cropping methods.

Monroeville Agricultural Research Unit: 79 acres. Monroeville, Monroe County. This project began in 1930 as one of ten experiment fields established by the Department of

Agronomy and Soils who administered the sites until the 1960s. The site’s activities historically focused on row crop production.

Brewton Agricultural Research Unit: 80 acres. 2067 Kirkland Road, Brewton, Escambia

County. This project began in 1930 as one of ten experiment fields established by the

Department of Agronomy and Soils who administered the sites until the 1960s. Early focuses included soil fertility and row crop studies.

cxcv

Private Agricultural Organizations

Aside from family farms and plantations, there are several private property types that played and continue to play a large role in Alabama’s agriculture. The private agricultural institutions that progressive agriculturalists formed in the early 20 th century, such as the

American Farm Bureau Federation represented agricultural interests in political circles. The

AFBF promoted measures such as long-term credit, protective tariffs, and protection for farmer cooperatives from antitrust laws. The influence of the AFBF on the national level cannot be overstated, but according to Nancy Berlage, communities formed local farm bureaus for reasons that were not always political. They joined for the “scientific, economical, and social projects.” cxcvi

Farmers formed these local institutions to address their more immediate concerns and obtain practical advice, making them integral to transitions in local farm culture.

Although the local bureaus’ programs and concerns were undoubtedly localized, they built support for the national organization by creating a framework and “power base in rural cxcv

The information about the stations’ historical emphases were derived from N.A. Kerr, A History of the Alabama Agricultural

Experiment Station: 1883-1983 (Auburn, Alabama: Alabama Agricultural Experiment Station), 1985. cxcvi

Nancy K. Berlage, “Organizing the Farm Bureau: Family, Community, and Professionals, 1914-1928” Agricultural History 75, no. 4 (Autumn 2001), 407.

85

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture

OMB No. 1024-0018

Alabama

Name of Multiple Property Listing communities.” cxcvii

The local bureaus, often organized by county, are consolidated under state bureaus. The Alabama Farmers’ Federation (ALFA) formed in 1921 and operates through 67 independent county federations. Thus, these local organizations were part of an

State extensive rural framework that supported the state office and national AFBF, making the office buildings that housed these institutions integral agricultural property types.

Farm Bureau Office Buildings (1920-1965) in the historic period discussed in this Multiple

Property Submission served a similar role for farm families, offering advice, information, and providing meeting space for agricultural groups. By the late 1960s the Farm Bureau offices had evolved into more of an insurance sales operation. The office buildings vary in size and materials but in general, they are one-story commercial office buildings with gable roofs, brick or weatherboard cladding, and concrete foundations.

Farm Co-operative Office Buildings (1920-1965) provide work space for agricultural cooperatives to serve farmers. There is not a standardized building type. The office buildings vary in size and materials but in general, they are one-story commercial office buildings with gable roofs, brick or weatherboard cladding, and concrete foundations.

REGISTRATION REQUIREMENTS

Assessing the significance of the individual historic farm, plantation, or historic slave and/or tenant/laborer farmstead and its associated dwellings, outbuildings, fences and fields, and cemeteries, requires analyzing how it reflects or is significantly associated with the patterns of the state’s agricultural history discussed in this Multiple Property Submission. Many historic farms and plantations will have resources associated with different agricultural eras, from the antebellum period to the reign of King Cotton to the diversified agricultural history of the mid-twentieth century. Some may only have significance in agriculture to a particular period.

Historic family farms and historic plantations are most often significant for their association with the history of agriculture and the history of settlement in that area (Criterion A). They may well be the homes of individuals significant in the history of agriculture (Criterion B) or in other areas where the property would have its own context for potential Criterion B eligibility. Many contain examples of architecture and craftsmanship that would be significant under Criterion C of the National Register. Some farms may best represent farm complexes eligible under Criterion C as a collection of buildings with integrity that are good examples of a type, period, or method of construction. If the district is associated with significant developments and periods in agriculture, it may be eligible under Criterion A for the theme of agriculture

Agriculture, settlement, and architecture, then, are the primary historical themes of significance for historic family farms and plantations. But properties may have secondary areas of significance due to extant historic properties such as offices (medicine), schools

(education), churches (community), road systems and/or transportation-related buildings, cxcvii

Ibid.

86

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018 and slave and/or tenant housing (ethnic heritage and labor) or due to a significant association with an individual of significance (politics, science, medicine, law, education, ethnic heritage, etc.)

The range of outbuildings associated with a historic slave and/or tenant/laborer farmstead is more limited. Typically, if extant resources remain, it will consist of the dwelling, a privy, and one or two small multi-purpose outbuildings. Historic slave and/or tenant/laborer farmsteads are most typically eligible under Criterion A: Agriculture for the significant contribution that manual labor made to the development and success of Alabama agriculture. Cases may exist where the craftsmanship embodied in the farmstead may meet

Criterion C: Architecture eligibility but these examples will be limited. Typically, any left extant would be such a rare property type for Alabama that the property could be eligible as as a rare building typology. Farmsteads may be associated with an individual of significance, but in most cases that individual’s significance will be most closely related to another property that is most significantly associated with the person’s more productive years (education, politics, commerce, popular culture, etc.) The Lewis Farmstead outside of

Troy, for instance, is significant as an extant early twentieth century African American farmstead but not for John Lewis, who was born and grew up there. Properties associated with Lewis’s involvement in the Civil Rights Movement and political careers in Selma,

Alabama, Atlanta, Georgia, and Nashville, Tennessee, are what represent his contributions to American history.

Several historic farms, plantations, and slave and/or tenant/laborer farmsteads have extant archaeological resources; some even have extant prehistoric archaeological resources.

These resources must be carefully evaluated for their eligibility, both individually and as contributing elements, under Criterion D.

Historic public agricultural institutions may be eligible under Criterion A for agriculture and education for their significant associations from hosting or sponsoring agricultural events or as properties where significant agricultural education or administration took place. They also may be eligible under Criterion B for having a direct, significant association with an individual of significance in the history of agricultural education or agricultural sciences in

Alabama. For example, the agricultural labs and offices associated with George

Washington Carver at Tuskegee University would potentially possess both Criterion A:

Agriculture significance and Criterion B significance for the role and leadership of Carver.

Some institutions are lodged in buildings with potential architectural distinction, such as those at the Auburn University historic district and the Tuskegee Institute historic district.

Such buildings of architectural distinction would be eligible under Criterion C.

Private agricultural institutions may be eligible under Criterion A for their significant associations with important patterns in Alabama’s agricultural history in the post-Civil War decades to 1965. These institutions may be significantly associated with a person whose career is significantly associated with the state’s agricultural history, thus eligible under

Criterion B. Some institutions may be lodged in buildings of architectural distinction. The buildings may be eligible under Criterion C for their individual architectural significance.

State

87

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018

Assessments of Integrity

Properties may meet registration requirements if they possess sufficient character and integrity to retain their sense of time and place from their period of significance. In the case of agriculture-associated properties in Alabama, traditional tests of architectural integrity may prove insufficient since historic farms, plantations, and slave and/or tenant/laborer farmsteads have often been in the same place for generations, and generations of farmers and planters have changed their properties to meet family needs and agricultural trends. However, if the property lacks the significant distinguishing features from a specific period of significance, no matter how just and well intentioned those renovations may be, the property no longer possesses integrity for that period of significance.

Particularly valuable questions to consider about the integrity of property types in this nomination are:

Location. Is the property situated on its historic acreage and/or lot from its period of significance? Farms and plantations will increase and decrease in size over time: is the nominated property still part of the historic landscape of its significant period?

Association. Is the property located at the place of its initial construction? Rural outbuildings and tenant dwellings were often moved within a farm or plantation to meet changing agricultural needs. Did the movement of the building occur since 1965? As mechanization eliminated the need for so much manual labor, tenant houses on a farm would often be moved to a more central location or to be used for other purposes. If the building remains within the historic farm or plantation boundaries, it would retain its association with the property under Criterion A: Agriculture.

Setting. Is the historic setting of the property intact? Do substantial modern intrusions, such as highways, commercial development, and modern outbuildings, sites, and structures exist? Are these intrusions located on the property or on immediate adjacent property? Are the modern intrusions so distracting that they lessen, or eliminate, the sense of time and place conveyed by the historic property?

For agricultural districts, additional important questions are: “how have intrusions and noncontributing structures and buildings affected the district’s ability to convey a sense of significance” and do the “physical features and characteristics that distinguish” the district still exist? Slave and tenant-laborer farmsteads are scarce elements on the 21 st

century agricultural landscape. Even when they are surrounded by modern development, if the dwelling and historic lot remain, the property retains setting under Criterion A. The

Boxwood Slave Quarter discussed earlier in this nomination is a representative example.

Feeling. Does the property retain an ability to convey a sense of time and place from its period of significance? Has this feeling been compromised by new and/or incompatible adjacent property use or construction?

Certainly historic farms and plantations will have new buildings, outside of the period of significance, adjacent or nearby to historic buildings and structures. Also many times the

State

88

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018 acreage of the property will be far less than it possessed during its period of significance.

Consideration should be given to the impact of intrusions and non-contributing structures and buildings. Can a sense of historic feeling still be conveyed by the farm, plantation, or farmstead as a whole? Has the loss of acreage meant that the property no longer conveys the range of resources and space associated with an agricultural landscape? The U.S.

Department of Agriculture defines a farm as having at least 10 acres. Historic family farms and plantations should have at least that much historic acreage.

Design. Are the design qualities—as represented by its distinguishing significant architectural elements and features--from the property’s period of significance still extant and apparent? Farms, plantations, and farmsteads will change. Integrity will be retained if these adaptations belong to the property’s period of significance and do not overwhelm the initial construction, design, and style to the degree that the property loses its integrity of feeling, design, materials, and workmanship of its period of significance, and thus no longer conveys the sense of being a farm, plantation, or farmstead.

Materials. As much as possible, historic properties should retain their original building materials to their period of significance. Does the property as a whole display its original construction materials? How much original material has been lost? How much has been retained? When and why did these alterations take place? Were the changes within the period of significance and associated with the property’s thematic significance?

Changes in materials in the mid-20 th

century may be associated with the incorporation of new technology within the farm, plantation, or farmstead and should be assessed within the context for that period of Alabama’s agricultural history. Additions to dwellings made in the 1946-1965 time period in order to house new household technology may be of different materials than used in the original construction of the dwelling.

Workmanship. As much as possible, historic properties should retain their construction techniques and overall form and plan for their period of significance. How much of the original workmanship embodied within the historic farm, plantation, or agricultural institutional property survive? When and why did these alterations take place? Were the changes within the period of significance and associated with the building’s thematic significance?

G. Geographical Data

The boundaries for this MPS are the boundaries for the State of Alabama.

H. Summary of Identification and Evaluation Methods

After a literature review of existing histories on Alabama agriculture, consideration of existing National Register of Historic Places nominations and consideration of information provided by the Alabama Century and Heritage Farms program, staff from the MTSU

Center for Historic Preservation conducted reconnaissance survey of representative areas of

State

89

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018 the entire state, but giving particular attention to Black Belt and Tennessee River valley counties. This field investigation aimed in determining extant property types found on identified historic farms and plantations as well as key agricultural institutions throughout the state. Archival research took place at Auburn University, University of Alabama, and

Tuskegee University.

I: Major Bibliographic References

Abernethy, Thomas Perkins. The Formative Period in Alabama, 1815-1828 . 1965. Reprint,

Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990. 

Aiken, Charles S. The Cotton Plantation South Since the Civil War . Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins University Press, 1998.

__________________. “The Fragmented Neoplantation: A New Type of Farm Operation in the Southeast.”

Southeastern Geographer (November 1970).

“Alabama Agricultural Experiment Station.” History of the Boll Weevil in Alabama, 1910-

2007 . Auburn: Auburn University, December 2007.

Alston, Lee J. and Kyle D. Kauffman. “Up, Down, and Off the Agricultural Ladder: New

Evidence and Implications of Agricultural Mobility for Blacks in the Postbellum

South.”

Agricultural History (Spring 1998): 263-80.

Armes, Ethel. The Story of Coal and Iron in Alabama.

Birmingham: Book-Keepers Press,

1972.

Austin, Deborah W. "Thomas Monroe Campbell and the Development of Negro Agriculture

Extension Work, 1883-1956." Master's thesis, Auburn University, 1975.

Ayers, Edward L. Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction. New York: Oxford

University Press, 2007.

Billings, Isabel K. “The Pecan Industry in the United States.”

Economic Geography 22

(1946): 220-7.

Blaufarb, Rafe. Bonapartists in the Borderlands: French Exiles and Refugees on the Gulf

Coast, 1815-1835 . Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006.

Blevins, Brooks. Cattle in the Cotton Fields: A History of Cattle Raising in Alabama .

Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998.

Bliss, John C., and Warren A. Flick, “With a Saw and a Truck: Alabama Pulpwood

Producers,”

Forest and Conservation History 38, no. 2 (April 1994): 79-81.

Braund, Kathryn E. Holland. Deerskins and Duffels: The Creek Indian Trade With Anglo-

State

90

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018

America, 1685–1815.

Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993.

-----------------------------------. “’Hog Wild’ and ‘Nuts:’ Billy Boll Weevil Comes to the

Alabama Wiregrass.”

Agricultural History (Summer 1989): 15-39.

Byrd, William N. Jr. “Wiregrass: The Transformation of Southeast Alabama, 1880-1930.”

PhD diss., Auburn University, 2009.

Cacho, Oscar, Henry W. Kinnucan and Scott Sindelar. Catfish Farming Risks in Alabama .

Alabama Agricultural Experiment Station, Circular 287. December 1986.

Campbell, Thomas M. The Movable School Goes to the Negro Farmer . Tuskegee, Ala.:

Tuskegee Institute Press, 1936.

Carnes, T. J. Out of the Sand: A History of the State Agricultural School at Albertville,

Alabama 1894-1936 . Albertville AL: T. J. Carnes, 1991.

Cinel, Dino. “Italians in the South.”

Italian Americana 9 (Fall/Winter 1990): 7-24.

Conkin, Paul K. A Revolution Down on the Farm: The Transformation of American

Agriculture Since 1929. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2008.

Danbom, David B. Born in the Country: A History of Rural America. Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins University Press, 1995.

Daniel, Pete. “African American Farmers and Civil Rights,” Journal of Southern History

73, no.1 (February 2007): 2-13.

Davis, C. S. The Cotton Kingdom in Alabama.

Montgomery: Alabama State Department

Archives and history, 1939.

Davis, P. O. A Century of Science on Alabama Farms . Auburn AL: Auburn University

Press, 1952.

Davis, Robert S. “The Old World in the New South: Entrepreneurial Ventures and the

Agricultural History of Cullman County, AL.” Agricultural History 70 (August

2005): 439-60.

Dolan, Susan A. Fruitful Legacy: A Historic Context of Orchards in the United States, with

Technical Information for Registering Orchards in the National Register of Historic

Places . Washington D.C.: National Park Service, 2009.

Droze, W. H. “TVA and the Ordinary Farmer.”

Agricultural History (January 1979): 188-

202.

Dupre, Daniel. “Ambivalent Capitalists on the Cotton Frontier: Settlement and

Development in the Tennessee Valley of Alabama.” Journal of Southern History

State

91

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018

(May 1990): 215-240.

-----------------. Transforming the Cotton Frontier: Madison County, Alabama, 1800-1840 .

Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997.

Duggar, J. F. Southern Field Crops.

Rev. ed. New York: Macmillan Co., 1925.

Early, L. S. Looking for Longleaf: The Fall and Rise of an American Forest . Chapel Hill:

University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

Ellenburg, George B. Mule South to Tractor South: Mules, Machines, and the

Transformation of the Cotton South. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press,

2007.

Essler, Elisabeth McTyeire. “The Agricultural Reform Movement in Alabama, 1850-1860.”

Master’s Thesis, Alabama Polytechnic Institute, 1948.

Everest, John W., et al. "Kudzu in Alabama: History, Uses, and Control." Alabama

Cooperative Extension System Monograph ANR-65, August 1999.

Farris, Jonathan A. and Trina Binkley. “Dry Forks Plantation, Wilcox County, Alabama.”

National Register of Historic Places Nomination, listed 1999.

State

Ferguson, Karen. “Caught in ‘No Man’s Land’: The Negro Cooperative Demonstration

Service and the Ideology of Booker T. Washington, 1900-1918.” Agricultural

History (Winter 1998): 33-46.

Ferleger, Louis. “Sharecropping Contacts in the late-Nineteenth Century South.”

Agricultural History (Summer 1993): 31-47.

Fite, Gilbert C . Cotton Fields No More: Southern Agriculture 1865-1980 . Lexington KY:

University of Kentucky Press, 1987.

Fitzgerald, Michael W. “’To Give Our Votes to the Party:’ Black Political Agitation and

Agricultural Change in Alabama, 1865-1870.” Journal of American History

(September 1989): 489-505.

---------------------------. “The Ku Klux Klan: Property Crime and the Plantation System in

Reconstruction Alabama.” Agricultural History (Spring 1997): 186.

Flynt, Wayne. Alabama in the Twentieth Century . Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press,

2004.

Flynt, J. Wayne. Poor But Proud: Alabama's Poor Whites . Tuscaloosa, Ala.: University of

Alabama Press, 1989.

Ford, Gene A. and Trina Binkley. “Courtland Historic District, 1 st

Expansion, Courtland,

92

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture

OMB No. 1024-0018


Alabama.” National Register of Historic Places Nomination, 1998.

Alabama

Ford, Gene A., et al. “Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical University Historic District,

State

Madison County, Alabama.” National Register of Historic Places Nomination, listed 2001.

Fornari, Harry D. “The Big Change: Cotton to Soybeans.”

Agricultural History (January

1979): 245-253.

Frank, Andrew K. Creeks and Southerners: Biculturalism on the Early American Frontier .

Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005.

Gamble, Robert. The Alabama Catalog: Historic American Buildings Survey. A Guide to the Early Architecture of the State, 1810-1930.

Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama

Press, 1987.

Grant, Nancy. TVA and Black Americans: Planning for the Status Quo. Philadelphia:

Temple University Press, 1990.

Grim, Valerie. “Black Participation in the Farm Home Administration and Agricultural

Stabilization and Conservation Service, 1964-1990,” Agricultural History 70, no.2

Twentieth Century Farm Policies (Spring 1996): 214-23.

______.“The Politics of Inclusion: Black Farmers and the Quest for Agribusiness

Participation, 1945-1990s.” Agricultural History 69, no.2 (Spring 1995):258-274.

Hackney, Sheldon. Populism to Progressivism in Alabama. Princeton, NJ: Princeton


Hamilton, Virginia Van der Veer. Alabama: A Bicentennial History. New York: W.W.

Norton and Company, 1977.

Haney, Phillip B., ed. Boll Weevil Eradication In The United States Through 1999 . The

Cotton Foundation Reference Book Series, No. 6. Memphis, Tenn.: Cotton

Foundation, 2001.

Hardeman, Nicholas. Shucks, Shocks, and Hominy Blocks: Corn as a Way of Life in Pioneer

America . Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981.

Hatley, M. Thomas, Gregory A. Waselkov, and Peter H. Wood. Eds.

Powhatan’s Mantle:

Indians in the Colonial Southeast . Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989.

Haveman, Christopher. “Creek Indian Removal.”

Encyclopedia of Alabama . Online Edition.

2009.

Heinicke, Craig, and Wayne A. Grove. “ ‘Machinery Has Completely Taken Over’: The

Diffusion of the Mechanical Cotton Picker, 1949-1964.” The Journal of

93

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018

Interdisciplinary History 39 (2008): 65-96.

Helms, Douglas. “Eroding the Color Line: The Soil Conservation Service and the Civil

Rights Act of 1964.”

Agricultural History 65, no.2 (Spring 1991): 43-54.

Hines, Linda O. "George W. Carver and the Tuskegee Agricultural Experiment Station."

Agricultural History 53 (January 1979): 71-83.

Horton, Paul. “Testing the Limits of Class Politics in Postbellum Alabama: Agrarian

Radicalism in Lawrence County.”

The Journal of Southern History 57 (February

1991): 63-85.

Hudson, Angela Pulley. “Reading Between the Lines: Creeks, Slaves, and Settlers on the

Borders of the United States South, 1790s-1820s.” PhD diss., Yale University, 2007.

Hudson, Charles. The Southeastern Indians . Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press,

1976.

Hurst, J. R, M. W. Runge, H. B. Strawn, and W. D. Gunther. The Alabama Poultry

Industry: An Economic Impact Study . Special publication of the Alabama

Agricultural Experiment Station, Auburn University and the Center for Business and

Economic Research, University of Alabama, 1995.

Hurt, R. Douglas. Indian Agriculture in America: Prehistory to the Present.

Lawrence:

University Press of Kansas, 1987.

Jackson, Harvey H. III. “Barn Again: Alabama’s Barns.”

Alabama Heritage (Spring

1997): 38-44.

Jones, Allen W. "Thomas M. Campbell: Black Agricultural Leader of the New South."

Agricultural History 53 (January 1979): 42-59. 

 ———. "The South's First Black Farm Agents."

Agricultural History 50 (October 1976):

636-44.

  ———. "The Role of Tuskegee Institute in the Education of Black Farmers." Journal of Negro History 60 (April 1975): 252-67.

Jordan, Terry G. North American Cattle-Ranching Frontiers: Origins, Diffusion, and

Differentiation . Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993.

Kelley, Robin D. G. Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great

Depression . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990.

Kerr, Norwood Allen. A History of the Alabama Agricultural Experiment Station, 1883-

1983.

Auburn: Alabama Agricultural Experiment Station, 1985.

State

94

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018

Kolchin, Peter. First Freedom: The Response of Alabama's Blacks to Emancipation and

Reconstruction . Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972.

Lang, Christopher. "Dennis Water Cress in Huntsville." Alabama Heritage 66 (Fall 2002):

44-48.

Lanham, Ben T., Jr., J. H. Yeager, and Ben F. Alford. Alabama Agriculture, Its

Characteristics and Farming Area . Auburn, Ala.: Agricultural Experiment Station of the Alabama Polytechnic Institute, 1953.

Mansell, Jeff and Melanie Betz. “Plantation Houses of the Alabama Canebrake, Alabama.”

National Register of Historic Places Multiple Property Nomination, 1993.

Martin, Roscoe C., ed. TVA, The First Twenty Years: A Staff Report.

Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1956.

Mayberry, B. D. The Role of Tuskegee University in the Origin, Growth and Development of the Negro Cooperative Extension System 1881–1890 . Tuskegee, Ala.: Tuskegee

University Cooperative Extension Program, 1989.

McCorkle, James L. “Agricultural Experiment Stations and Southern Truck Farming.”

Agricultural History 62 (1988): 234-43.

McMurry, Linda O. George Washington Carver, Scientist and Symbol.

New York: Oxford


Menarchek, Matthew Joseph. “Toward a New South: Huntsville, Alabama, 1804-1890.”

PhD diss., University of Alabama, 2012.

Mitchell, Charles. “Agriculture in Alabama” in

Encyclopedia of Alabama . Online edition.

2007.

Mitchell, Charles C., Dennis P. Delaney, and Kipling S. Balkcom. "A Historical Summary of Alabama's Old Rotation (circa 1896): The World's Oldest, Continuous Cotton

Experiment." Agronomy Journal 100 (September-October 2008): 1493-98.

Moore, John R., ed. The Economic Impact of TVA . Knoxville: University of Tennessee

Press, 1967.

Moss, Pete. “Dairy Industry in Alabama.”

Encyclopedia of Alabama . Online edition, 2007.

Oliver, Thomas W . A Narrative History of Cotton in Alabama and a Tour of the Old

Alabama Town Cotton Gin.

Montgomery AL: Landmarks Foundation, 1992.

-----------------------. “King Cotton in Alabama, A Brief History.” Alabama Heritage

(Winter 1995): 16-26.

State

95

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture

OMB No. 1024-0018

Alabama


Olliff, Martin T. “Life and Work in a Progressive Cotton Community: Prattville, Alabama,

1846-1860.” Agricultural History (Spring 1994): 51-62.

State

Otto, John Solomon. Southern Agriculture During the Civil War Era, 1860-1880. Westport,

CT: Greenwood Press, 1994.

Partin, Robert. “Black’s Bend Grange.”

Agricultural History 31 (July 1957): 49-59.

Pasquill, Robert G., Jr. Planting Hope on Worn-Out Land: History of the Tuskegee Land

Utilization Project, Macon County, Alabama, 1935-1959 . Montgomery, Ala.:

NewSouth Books, 2008.

Perez, Karni. Fishing For Gold: The Story of Alabama's Catfish Industry . Tuscaloosa: Fire

Ant Books, 2006.

Person, H.S. “The Rural Electrification Administration in Perspective.” Agricultural History

24 (1950): 88-105.

Peterson, Arthur G. “Peanuts: Price, Production, and Foreign Trade since the Civil War.”

Economic Geography 7 (1931): 59-68.

Phillips, Kenneth Edward. "Jubilee in the Fields: Alabama's Landless Farmers in a Cotton

Dominated Society." Ph.D. diss., Auburn University, 1999.

Phillips, Sarah T. This Land, This Nation: Conservation, Rural America, and the New Deal.

New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Rea, Robert R. Major Robert Farmar of Mobile. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press,

1990.

Roark, James L. Masters without Slaves: Southern Planters in the Civil War and

Reconstruction. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1977.

Rodabaugh, Karl. The Farmers' Revolt in Alabama, 1890-1896 . Greenville, N.C.: East

Carolina University, 1977.

Rogers, William Warren. The One Gallused Rebellion: Agrarianism in Alabama, 1865-

1896 . Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1970.

———. "Reuben Kolb: Agricultural Leader of the New South."

Agricultural History 32

(April 1958): 109-19.

________. “The Negro Alliance in Alabama.”

The Journal of Negro History 45 (January

1960):41-2.

Rogers, William Warren, Robert David Ward, Leah Rawls Atkins, and Wayne Flynt.

Alabama: The History of a Deep South State . Tuscaloosa, University of Alabama

96

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018

Press, 1994.

Rohrbough, Malcolm J. The Trans-Appalachian Frontier: People, Societies, and

Institutions, 1775-1850.

New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.

Saloutos, Theodore. Farmer Movements in the South, 1865-1933. Lincoln: University of

Nebraska Press, 1964.

_________. “The Grange in the South, 1870-1877.” The Journal of Southern History 19

(November 1953): 473-87.

Sampson, Neil. With One Voice: The National Association of Conservation Districts.

Tucson, AZ: Wheatmark, 2009.

Saugera, Eric. Reborn in America: French Exiles and Refugees in the United States and the

Vine and Olive Adventure, 1815-1865 . Trans. Madeleine Velguth. Tuscaloosa:

University of Alabama Press, 2011.

Saunt, Claudio. A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the

Creek Indians, 1733-1816.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Shell, Eddie W. Evolution of the Alabama Agroecosytem: Always Keeping Up, But Never

Catching Up (Montgomery: New South Books, 2013).

Simms, D. Harper. The Soil Conservation Service. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970.

Sisk, Glenn N. “Agricultural Diversification in the Alabama Black Belt.”

Agricultural

History 26 (1952): 42-5.

Smith, Ronald H. History of the Boll Weevil in Alabama.

Bulletin 670. Auburn, Ala.:

Alabama Agricultural Experiment Station, 2007.

Stewart, Mart Allen. “Cultivating Kudzu: The Soil Conservation Service and the Kudzu

Demonstration Program.”

Georgia Historical Quarterly 81 (1997): 151-67.

Stoery, Margaret M. Loyalty and Loss: Alabama’s Unionists in the Civil War and

Reconstruction. Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 2004.

Strickland, Arvarah E. “The Strange Affair of the Boll Weevil: The Pest as Liberator.”

Agricultural History (Spring 1994): 157-169.

Swasby, Dr. M. A. “Profits of Fruit Culture in the South.”

American Cotton Planter

(August 1853): 248-250.

Tower, J. Allen and Walter Wolf. “Ethnic Groups in Cullman County, Alabama.”

Geographical Review 33 (April 1943): 276-85.

State

97

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


Alabama

OMB No. 1024-0018

Vlach, John. Back of the Big House: The Cultural Landscape of the Plantation House .

Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993.

Walker, Melissa. “African Americans and TVA reservoir Property Removal.”

Agricultural

History 72 (1998): 417-29.

Walker, Melissa. Southern Farmers and their Stories . Lexington: University Press of

Kentucky, 2006.

Walthall, John A. Prehistoric Indians of the Southeast: Archaeology in Alabama and the

Middle South . Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1980.

Waselkov, Gregory A., et al. Plantation Archaeology at Riviere aux Chiens, ca. 1725-1848.

Mobile: University of South Alabama Center for Archaeological Studies, 2000.

Webb, Samuel L. “From Independents to Populists to Progressive Republicans: The Case of

Chilton County, Alabama, 1880-1920.” The Journal of Southern History 59

(November 1993): 707-37.

Whayne, Jeannie M. “Black Farmers and the Agricultural Cooperative Extension Service:

The Alabama Experience, 1945-1965.” Agricultural History (Summer 1998): 523-

552.

White, John H. Jr. “Tracks and Timber,”

The Journal of the Society for Industrial

Archaeology 2, no.1 (1976): 32-41.

Wiener, Jonathan M. Social Origins of the New South: Alabama, 1860-1885 . Baton Rouge

LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1978.

Woodman, Harold G. King Cotton and His Retainers: Financing and Marketing the Cotton

Crop of the South, 1800-1925 . Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1968.

Yeager, Joe, and Gene Stevenson. Inside Ag Hill: The People and Events that Shaped

Auburn's Agricultural History from 1872 through 1999 . Auburn, Ala.: Alabama

Agricultural Experiment Station, 2000.

Zabawa, Robert E. and Sarah T. Warren. "From Company to Community: Agricultural

Community Development in Macon County, Alabama, 1881 to the New Deal."

Agricultural History 72 (Spring 1998): 459-486.

State

98

NPS Form 10-900-b



Alabama Agriculture


OMB No. 1024-0018

Alabama

State

99

here. - WordPress.com

National Register of Historic Places Multiple Property Documentation Form

Related documents

Add this document to collection(s)

Add this document to saved

Suggest us how to improve StudyLib