Ohio History Journal

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Ohio Agriculture in History

Ohio Agriculture in History

 

By ROBERT LESLIE JONES*

 

 

 

The history of agriculture in Ohio is on the surface a subject

prosaic enough. Indeed, only once, and that long ago, did it ever

possess anything of the implausibly romantic. Timothy Flint tells

us that the New England settlers who came in the beginning to the

lands of the Ohio Company were attracted not only by "the un-

paralleled fertility of the soil" but (according to the wags of the

day) by "springs of brandy, [and] flax that wore little pieces of

cloth on the stems."1 Fortunately for the historian there were more

substantial reasons for the growth and maintenance of interest in

farming in Ohio. Ohio was the first northern state west of the

mountains; it was a confluence for settlers from New England and

New York, Pennsylvania, and the old upper South, with their

variant social and economic inheritances; it became a bridge be-

tween the East and Indiana, Illinois, and the newer states farther

west, because it bordered the Ohio River and Lake Erie, and was

crossed by the National Road and the first railroads; its south-

western portion lay in the Corn Belt, and with the exception of

the Kentucky Bluegrass, was the only part thereof not too distant

from eastern livestock markets to take full advantage of them; it

evolved, and did so in the very morning of its development, distinc-

tive agricultural specializations; and perhaps not least, it had in

Allen Trimble, Anson Bartlett, Jared Kirtland, John Klippart, Wil-

liam Renick, and others, men who were not only champions of im-

 

* This article and the one immediately following, "Ohio Agriculture Today," were

read at a session on "Agriculture in Ohio" during the seventy-first annual meeting of

the Ohio Historical Society on April 28, 1956.

Robert Leslie Jones is head of the department of history and political science at

Marietta College. He is a frequent contributor to the Quarterly and other periodicals

on agricultural subjects.

1 Condensed History and Geography of the Western States, or the Mississippi Valley

(Cincinnati, 1828), II, 363.