Overview

We tend to think of Ohio as an industrial state and community, but since the territory became a state in 1803, the mainstay of Ohio’s production has been agricultural. The state thrived because people farmed the land.

Through the nineteenth century, and even today, most Ohio farms produced wheat, corn, barley, oats, rye, and, later, soybeans. Corn remained the most abundant crop, but some farmers in the southern part of the state grew tobacco as well. Nearly all farmers planted fruit trees—usually apple, peaches, and pear trees. Most farmers also kept some chickens, sheep, pigs, milk cows, and cattle.

In the decade before the Civil War, farmers in Ohio, as in the rest of the United States, utilized two changes in production that enabled them to increase their yield per acre. They began using the steel plows and reapers, the far more important of the two. Farming was and is limited by how much a farmer can reap, not by what they can sow. Thus, reapers and mowers allowed farmers to reap more acres and increase production. Cyrus McCormick invented the reaper that still bears his name and Obed Hussey invented the mower. Both men lived in Cincinnati. Similarly, farmers began using steel plows, which dug deeper into the soil and rarely broke. Taken together, agricultural yield increased significantly over the course of the nineteenth century. When reapers became mechanized with, first, steam and then petroleum, farmers expanded their endeavors even further.

Ohio’s farmers increased their production in part to take advantage of the burgeoning markets along the waterways that cut through the state. Cleveland and Cincinnati both sit on water pathways that connect them to bigger markets, and people in cities such as Dayton and Cincinnati built businesses to handle that increased production. Farmers around Dayton, for example, produced more tobacco the city housed a tobacco processing plant. Cincinnati became known as “Porkopolis” because so many farmers in the region sent their pigs to the city for slaughter and shipping. Mills cropped up throughout the state to turn wool into thread and cloth, silos sprang into the sky to house the grain farmers carted to central locations for nation-wide distribution on the Ohio River and on the Ohio Canal.

Readings

1. Robert Leslie Jones, “Ohio Agriculture in History”