The agricultural traits and peculiarities of the nineteenth century
Yankees were the resultant of partly contradictory forces, some of
them evolutionary, others devolutionary. In England the period of
the Puritan migration to America and the half-century antecedent
thereto was a time of vigorous agricultural change marked by many
improvements in cultivation and in land management. The agrarian
revolution introduced by the transfer of church properties to
laymen was accompanied by enclosures and a widespread tendency to
shift from an uneconomical crop economy to an agriculture governed
by business principles. In this new system the production of farm
animals--especially sheep--the fertilization of the soil, rotation
of crops, and livestock improvement were main factors. Forces and
interests were set in motion at this time which, a century or so later,
made farming the concern of many of England’s leading minds, whose wise
and persistent experimentation benefited the whole civilized world.
The few thousand immigrants to the New England colonies, founders of
America’s Yankeedom, were not all farmers. Some were fishermen, some
were small tradesmen, others craftsmen; a few were professional men
and soldiers. But a goodly proportion were land owners and peasants,
and all had a more or less direct knowledge of the principles and
processes which governed English agriculture. The influence of habit,
always a determining factor in the transfer of civilization from an old
land to a new, caused the occasional reproduction in New England of
some features of English farming, especially under village conditions.
The common field system in Old Salem reflected a disappearing element
in English farm life, while the commons of hay, commons of pasture,
commons of wood, and commons of mast, with their administrative “hay
reeve,” “hog reeve,” “wood reeve,” herdsmen, and shepherds, mark a
natural imitating of the ways of parish life at home.
But there were differences in the conditions “at home” and in America
as wide as those symbolized by the terms “insular,” and “continental,”
applied to the geography of the two countries. Chief among these
differences were the generally forested character of the new-world
land, the necessity of adapting tillage to an unfamiliar climate, in
part to new food cereals, especially Indian corn, and the absolute
dependence upon markets which could be created or opened by the
colonists themselves. It was in fact the problem of a market which so
long subordinated farming proper in New England to a species of country
living in which small patches of arable supplied most of the family’s
food, while forest and stream were the objects of exploitation for
marketable furs, for medicinal plants, and for timber products. Yankee
ingenuity, which justly became proverbial, had an assignable cause. It
was not an inherited quality, or one which was imported and conserved;
it was a distinctively American product, explained by the situation of
the average New England farmer--who was, by force of circumstances,
more of a mechanic and woods worker than a cultivator of the soil. His
house, especially in winter, was a busy workshop where clapboards,
staves, hoops, heading, ax handles, and a variety of other articles of
utility and salability were always in course of manufacture. All the
farm “tinkering” was additional thereto.
In his contest with the forest for a livelihood, the Yankee farmer was
gradually changed from the eastern New England village type to that
of the American “pioneer.” His axmanship was unrivaled, his skill in
woodscraft, his resourcefulness in the face of untried situations
were equal to the best. When the time came for taking agricultural
possession of broad spaces in the northern and western interior, the
Yankee was the instrument, shaped by four generations of American
history, to achieve that object.[12]
This general “handiness” was gained not without a partial loss of
such acquired knowledge and skill in agriculture proper as the
first immigrants brought from England. Close, careful cultivation
was impossible among the stumps and girdled trees of new clearings;
the amplitude of natural meadows and the superabundance of “browse”
relieved settlers from the sharp necessity of providing artificially
for the winter feeding of cattle; the mast of oak trees and the
wealth of nuts, supplementing summer “greens,” roots, grass, and wild
apples, supplied most of the requisites for finishing off pork. Under
these conditions farming even at best was an entirely different thing
from what it had been at home. At its worst, it was a crude process,
affording a vegetative kind of existence, but nothing more. In fact,
farming in the New England states hardly attained the status of a
business until the nineteenth century, though in some portions it
gave the farmer and his family a generous living and afforded a few
luxuries. It made thousands of persons independent proprietors who
could not have reached that station at home; it gave the farmers as a
class a commanding influence in politics and society; “embattled,” it
enabled them to wrest their country’s independence from the awkward
hands of a bungling monarchy. In short, it contributed incalculably
to their importance as men in history. The indications are, however,
that as farmers the fourth generation of _Mayflower_ descendants were
decidedly inferior to the original Pilgrims and Puritans.
The third generation were probably less skillful than the fourth. For,
by the time of the Revolution there were farming areas in southern
New England that were looking up. Timothy Dwight, near the end of the
century, found and recorded some of the evidences of a movement to
improve cultivation, to fertilize the soil, to better the character of
farm livestock--a movement which had been going forward under impulses
communicated from England, where the eighteenth century was peculiarly
fruitful in agricultural development. Dwight was enough of an idealist
to appreciate the limits of the improvement thus far reached. Yet he
did insist, with evident justice, that the farming of the Connecticut
valley and of eastern Massachusetts was at least respectable. Fields
were well cleared and carefully cultivated, clover began to be used
as a feeding and green manure crop, the beginnings had been made
of a system of rotation of crops, livestock was of relatively good
quality--especially in certain Connecticut towns which were already
noted for the weight of the bullocks they furnished to the commissary
department of Washington’s army. By that time, also, leading men
in New England lent their influence toward the building up of the
agricultural interest; agricultural societies were organized and essays
on agriculture came to have considerable vogue. Some importations of
purebred livestock from England took place. The first merino sheep
were brought in from France, then larger numbers from Spain by Consul
William Jarvis. In 1810 Elkanah Watson established his Berkshire County
Agricultural Society, with the county fair which became the model for
subsequent county and state fairs the country over.
When Tom Paine predicted in 1776 that an independent America would
prosper “as long as eating continues to be the custom of Europe,”[13]
he assumed one point about which some doubt might in future arise:
Would Europe always have the wherewithal to purchase American
foodstuffs at prices which would compensate our people for growing
them and delivering them to the market? During the continuance of the
long revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, Europe managed to make good
Paine’s prophecy, and prices at the close of the wars ruled high. There
followed the great expansion era which spread American farmers over the
New West, both south and north, into which Yankees entered to a large
extent.
The good prices did not hold. Food could be raised cheaply, but markets
were costly to reach, even with the new wizardry of the steamboat, and
something gigantic was called for in the way of internal improvements.
The answer was at first canals, afterwards railroads. At the same
time, something had to be done by the farmer himself if the entire
structure of American agriculture, now becoming conscious of its own
embarrassments, was not to go down. The answer to this was _better
farming_. It was in 1819, the panic year, that John S. Skinner founded
at Baltimore the _American Farmer_, first of the distinctively farm
journals which almost immediately had a small group of successors.
Among them were the _New England Farmer_, the _Albany Cultivator_, the
_Pennsylvania Farmer_, the _Rural New Yorker_, the _Vermont Farmer_,
the _Ohio Farmer_, etc.
Yankeedom was a good social soil for these journals. The all but
universal literacy of the people, their curiosity, their love of
argument and disputation, their habit of experimentation, all tended
both to give currency to the new ideas presented and to sift the
practical and valuable from the merely theoretic and futile. Thus was
introduced, in a period of prevailing “hard times,” a meliorating
influence destined to reach a very large proportion of the settlers
in those sections, particularly Vermont, western New York, northern
Pennsylvania and Ohio, from which the bulk of the Yankee pioneers of
Wisconsin were drawn a quarter of a century later. The effect of county
and state fairs was to deepen and fructify the influence of the new
agricultural press.
It will be understood that the actual “shoring up” of agricultural
practice came about with relative slowness. Yet, it soon began here
and there, and by a kind of mild infection spread gradually over
wide areas. Only in crisis periods, with the introduction of new
methods to suit new market conditions, was progress ever very rapid.
To illustrate, as early as 1820 Josiah Quincy was advocating and
practising the summer soiling of cattle, especially milch cows, and
demonstrating the profitableness of the system for the region near
Boston. It was a long time before soiling became common even in that
district, but this experiment engendered better care of livestock. The
same careful, experimental farmer demonstrated the economy of using
good-sized whole potatoes for seed, as against the practice of planting
seed ends and small tubers; other farmers were slow to adopt the idea,
which is not yet universally followed, yet some improvement doubtless
came from the publication of Quincy’s findings.
What, then, were the general farming habits of the Yankees who form
the background of Wisconsin’s pioneer age? First of all, they lived in
decent houses which were usually of lumber. Dwight contended that not
one New England village in a hundred was disfigured with the presence
of even one log house. He also gives the result of a count made in 1810
of the log houses along the road from New Haven to Windsor in Vermont,
thence across the Green Mountains to Middlebury, and back by a direct
route to New Haven, a distance of over 460 miles, much of it through
new settlements. It showed only fifteen to Middlebury and thirty-two
on the return route. It seems to have been a matter of pride with
the Yankee to desert his pioneer log house as quickly as possible.
His personal skill with tools, and abundance of saw timber, made the
construction of a frame house a family undertaking calling for labor
indeed, but only a minimum of hired skill; and for little material
involving the outlay of actual money. So the frame houses rose wherever
the Yankees settled. Along the great road from Albany to Buffalo,
in western New York, they began to spring up before the settlements
were ten years old. When, about twenty-five years later, travelers
passed that way they saw many houses of squared, framed timbers,
covered over neatly with boards at the sides and ends, and roofed with
shingles.[14] These common frame houses were sufficiently inartistic,
no doubt. Perhaps, as one traveler remarks, they did look like “huge
packing boxes.” Similar architectural designs can be seen scattered
over the West--and the East, too--at this late date. Still, they were
more commodious than the log houses, and improved the families’ living
conditions. The next stage was likely to mark a very distinct advance.
“In the more cleared and longer settled parts of the country,” says a
none too sympathetic English traveler, “we saw many detached houses,
which might almost be called villas, very neatly got up, with rows of
wooden columns in front, aided by trees and tall shrubs running round
and across the garden which was prettily fenced in, and embellished
with a profusion of flowers.” Yankees had the habit of building by the
roadside, whatever the economic disadvantages of such a situation,
because it enabled them to keep in touch with the world--a reason which
is by no means frivolous, and for them highly characteristic.
We have no such definite account of the Yankee farmers’ barns as of
those of Pennsylvania Germans. It is true that Dwight, speaking for the
older New England, suggests that the barn was apt to be a much better
structure than the house. The custom, however, noted by travelers in
New York and elsewhere, of letting cattle run at large all winter
without shelter other than trees and brush, and perhaps the straw pile
or rick of marsh hay, argues that stabling was furnished for only a
minimum number of work oxen, horses--if such there were--and perhaps in
some cases cows in milk. It undoubtedly was not the practice to house
stock cattle, or even--except in isolated cases--to feed them in sheds.
The advocates of careful sheltering who wrote for the agricultural
journals recognized that the weight of opinion was against sheltering
stock. They compromised with that opinion by recommending sheds for
young stock and dry cows, and warm barns only for milking cows and work
animals.[15] Yet, some of the leading cattle feeders of the Genesee
valley, as late as the year 1842, were content to scatter loads of hay
over meadows and through brush patches for the hundreds of beef cattle
they were wintering.[16]
The livestock, except sheep and pigs, was still by 1840 prevailingly of
no breed. Nevertheless, Durhams and Devons were coming into use. The
Patroon stock of shorthorns, introduced in 1824 from England by Stephen
Van Rensellaer, of Albany, gained its first customers apparently among
the English farmers of western New York, but gradually made its way
among the Yankees as well. Other importations were soon made, so that
by 1840 there were several prominent herds of purebreds in that section
of the state. In 1842 it was said of the Genesee County Fair that “with
the exception of some working oxen and one cow not a single animal of
native cattle was in the yard. All were either pure or grade Durhams or
Devons.... Bulls were shown by some six or seven competitors. Among
them were four thoroughbred ones and one of those imported.”[17] It is
clear that by the time emigration to Wisconsin began to take place,
actual progress had been made and the entire body of Yankee farmers
had been indoctrinated with the idea of better livestock. Sheep and
pigs were already largely improved, the former prevailingly through
the cross with the merinos, the latter with Berkshires and other
English breeds. The Morgan horse, a Vermont product, was gaining wide
popularity.
From what has been said of the care of livestock, it follows that
the possibilities of the farm for the manufacture of fertilizer were
generally neglected. English travelers were apt to insist that this
neglect was universal, but there were, of course, numerous exceptions.
Farming was extensive, not intensive. Lands were cleared by chopping
or “slashing” the timber, burning brush and logs, then harrowing among
the stumps to cover the first-sown wheat seed. In a few years, with the
rotting of the smaller stumps and the roots, the plow could be used,
though always with embarrassment on account of the large stumps which
thickly studded the fields. These disappeared gradually, being allowed
to stand till so fully decayed that a few strokes with ax or mattock
would dislodge them. As late as 1830 many fields in western New York
were stump infested.
[Illustration: A FARM NEAR ROCHESTER, NEW YORK, IN 1827
From Captain Basil Hall’s _Forty Etchings from Sketches Made with the
Camera Lucida_. London, 1829]
Wheat was the great, almost the sole, market crop, and it was grown
year after year till the soil ceased to respond. From bumper yields
of twenty-five or thirty bushels per acre the returns fell off to
twenty, fifteen, and then twelve, ten, or even eight. The process of
decline was well under way when the immigration to Wisconsin set in,
and already the turn had come toward a more definite livestock economy,
which in large portions of New York soon gave rise to a system of
factory cheese making. A main reason for the removal to the West, on
the part of farmers whose holdings were too small to make successful
stock farms, or who refused to abandon wheat raising as a business, was
that lands in the West could be had already cleared by nature. Many
half-cleared farms, with customary buildings and fences, could in the
forties be purchased in western New York for from four to eight dollars
per acre. Instead of buying these farms, the young men preferred going
to Michigan, Illinois, Iowa, or Wisconsin, those having such farms for
sale doing likewise after selling out to neighbors, usually the larger
farmers, who elected to remain and change their system of farming. In
Vermont we have a similar story, in Ohio the same. The Yankee farmers
who came to Wisconsin were generally at home either small farmers or
the sons of farmers large or small; while a certain proportion of the
larger farmers, by reason of debt or desire to extend their business,
also sold out and came west to buy cheap lands on the prairies or in
the openings.
* * * * *
An agriculture which dates from before the time of Tacitus, and
which acquired permanent characteristics from the influence of Roman
merchants, monastics, and feudatories in Roman and medieval times, was
bound to differ widely and even fundamentally from the agriculture of a
far flung American frontier. The Germans who met the Yankee immigrants
in primitive Wisconsin brought an inheritance of habit and training
analogous to that of the English Puritan emigrants to New England,
but with the difference that the Germans’ training had continued
two hundred years longer, on similar lines. They were old-world
cultivators, the Yankees new-world cultivators.
Tacitus says in one place: “The Germans live scattered and apart, as
a spring, a hill, or a wood entices them.”[18] Nineteenth century
German economists complained that German farmsteads were seated often
most inconveniently with reference to the management of the farm lands
pertaining to them. They had been established, in the days of long ago,
by lakeside, brook, or river under conditions in which access to water
was the most important single consideration. They had never been moved,
although gradually the arable stretched far back from the dwelling, and
the pasture perhaps was located in a wholly detached area.[19] This
description applies to portions of northern Germany where farms were
large and farming had the status of a regular and dignified business.
Many individuals and families came to Wisconsin from districts
like Mecklenburg, Prussia, Pomerania, though in the emigrations of
the 1840’s and fifties the great majority were from southern and
central German states. It will be one of the interesting inquiries
in connection with our study of local influences in Wisconsin towns
(_Domesday Book Studies_), how far the special regional inheritances of
foreign born settlers manifested themselves in Wisconsin communities.
The presumption, about the north German, would be that his farming
operations would tend to be on a large scale, under a business
system which--in this new land--would slough off such anachronisms
as the dislocated farmstead, and present the features of an ideal
establishment. But it may be that the forest was such a powerful
leveler as to obliterate most of the regional distinctions among
immigrants. Our chief concern, at all events, is with that great
body of German farmers, and intending farmers, who came from the
southwestern states of the recent Empire, especially Alsace, Baden,
Württemberg, Rhine Palatinate, Rhenish Prussia, Hesse, Nassau,
Westphalia--to some extent Bavaria and Saxony.
The fundamental facts about the home conditions of these people, so
far as they were farmers at home, were the smallness of their holdings,
their intensive cultivation, and the almost universal village type of
life. Travelers of about 1840 describe the typical middle Rhine country
as a highly cultivated plain without division hedges or fences other
than the tree-bordered roads, with no separate farm dwellings and with
no livestock in sight. The crops of several kinds being arranged in
various shaped fields, patches, and strips, the plain looked like the
proverbial “crazy-quilt.” Villages were huddled at the edges of woods,
and occasionally in the midst of the cultivated area. Their houses,
which were not arranged on a regular plan, were usually large stone
structures, the farm yard, with tools, implements, manure and compost
heaps, occupying a kind of court at the rear.
As a rule, all animals were housed winter and summer. Here was an
important difference to the farming of the north, where large herds
of cattle could be seen pasturing ample meadows, or ruminating in the
shade of buildings or of woods. The soiling system was universally
practiced in summer. Grass land being scarce and precious, feed for the
cows was laboriously gathered along the brookside, in the open spaces
of the forest, along all the roads, in the cemeteries, and the greens
before the houses. The weeds and thinnings from the growing crops went
to the same object. Vegetable tops were a great resource in late summer
and fall, and patches of clover, while insuring green feed, furnished
hay as well. In places the growing of sugar beets for the market was
a leading agricultural enterprise, and the tops of the beets were
carefully cured for winter feed.
The cultivation was intensive both in that it aimed at the maximum
produce from given areas, and in that the crops raised included some
which called for very special care. Some sections grew tobacco, in
connection with which much hand work was indispensable. This crop also
called for care in seed selection, in germinating, and in preparing the
ground for the reception of the young plants. Beet culture for sugar
making involved perhaps not less care, and doubtless more hand labor.
Of similar but less particularity was the growing of root crops for
stock feed, the orcharding, which was general, and the vine dressing,
incident to the business of special districts.
There were, of course, many farmers and farms in the region indicated
and in other contributory regions, which were not so widely different
from the average of those in America. Yet, on the whole, it can be
said that the German husbandman, in training and habit, was analogous
to our modern truck farmer or orchardist, rather than to our general
farmer. He was a specialist in soils, in fertilizing and preparing
them for different crops, in planting, stirring, weeding, irrigating;
in defending plants against insect pests, seasonal irregularities, and
soil peculiarities; he throve by hoeing, dragging, trimming, pruning,
sprouting; by curing and conserving plants, roots, grasses, grains,
and fruits. His livestock economy was incidental, yet very important.
It supplied the necessary fertilizer to maintain soil productivity; it
afforded milk, beef, pork, butter, cheese, wool. It gave him his draft
animals, often cows instead of oxen, and economized every bit of grass
and forage which his situation produced.
Improvement of livestock appears to have affected southwestern Germany
prior to 1850 very little as compared with the pastoral countries of
England, Holland, Friesland, and north Germany. The animals kept by the
village farmers were therefore not remarkable for quality. But they
were usually well housed, and the feed and care they received made up
in considerable measure for the absence of superior blood.
The various states of Germany, by 1840, were maintaining schools of
agriculture, a species of experiment stations for the dissemination
of such scientific agricultural information as was then available. To
some extent, therefore, farming was beginning to be scientific. But,
prevailingly it was intensely practical, the appropriate art connected
with the growing of every distinct crop being handed on from father to
son, from farmer to laborer.
One could almost predict how farmers thus trained would react to the
new environment of the Wisconsin wilderness. Taking up a tract of
forested land or buying a farm with a small clearing upon it, their
impulse would be, with the least possible delay, to get a few acres
thoroughly cleared, subdued to the plow, and in a high state of tilth.
Exceptions there were, to be sure, but on the whole the German pioneers
were not content to slash and burn their timber. After the timber was
off, the stumps must come out, forthwith, to make the tract fit for
decent cultivation. Was it the Germans who introduced in land clearing
the custom of “grubbing” instead of “slashing”? This meant felling
the tree by undermining it, chopping off roots underground at a safe
depth, taking out grub and all, instead of cutting it off above ground.
In timber of moderate growth this practice proved fairly expeditious
and highly successful, for once a tract was grubbed, the breaking
plow encountered no serious obstruction. A good “grubber” among later
immigrants could always count on getting jobs from established German
farmers.[20]
To the American, who was content to plow around his stumps every year
for a decade, to cultivate around them, cradle or reap around them,
it seemed that his German neighbor was using some kind of magic to
exorcise his stumps. The magic was merely human muscle, motivated by a
psychology which inhibited rest so long as a single stump remained in
the field.
The German not only used the heaps of farm yard fertilizer which, on
buying out the original entryman, he commonly found on the premises,
but he conserved all that his livestock produced, and frequently,
if not too distant from town or village, became a purchaser of the
commodity of which liverymen, stock yard keepers, and private owners of
cow or horse were anxious to be relieved. The manufacture of fertilizer
was a prime reason for stabling his livestock. The other was his fixed
habit of affording animals such care. Not all Germans built barns at
once, but the majority always tried to provide warm sheds, at least,
whereas Yankee and Southwesterner alike were very prone to allow their
animals to huddle, humped and shivering, all winter on the leeward side
of house or granary, or in clumps of sheltering brush or trees.[21] The
German was willing to occupy his log house longer, if necessary, in
order to gain the means for constructing adequate barns and sheds.
Germans were not one-crop farmers. The lands they occupied, usually
forested, could not be cleared fast enough at best to enable them to
raise wheat on a grand scale, as the Yankees did in the open lands of
the southeast and west. Their arable was extended only a few acres per
year, and while that was being done the German farmers grew a little
of everything--wheat, rye, corn, oats, barley, potatoes, roots. Clover
was to them a favorite forage, hay, and green manure crop. In growing
it, they used gypsum freely. This policy of clover growing, adopted
gradually by all farmers, was one of the means finally relied on by
the wheat farmers to restore the productivity of their abused soils.
In ways such as the above, German farmers helped to save Wisconsin
agriculture in the period of stress when wheat growing failed and
before coöperative dairying entered. They were not the chief influence
in popularizing improved livestock. Credit for that innovation must
be awarded to the Yankees. They had resumed in the eastern states the
English tradition of breeding, and brought it into Wisconsin where, by
means of state and county fairs and an active agricultural press, it
was ultimately borne in upon the minds of all farmers, Germans among
the rest.[22]
Neither did the Germans lead in developing the new agriculture,
of which coöperative dairying was the keystone. Yankee leadership
therein, too, was the dominant influence. Yet, it was the Germans,
Scandinavians, and other foreigners--and numerically Germans were
in the majority--who, by virtue of their agricultural morale, their
steadiness in carrying out plans, their patience and perseverance, have
made the dairy business of Wisconsin the great industry it has become.
Above all, the Germans persisted as farmers. They prospered not
dramatically, like some of the more successful of the Yankee farmers,
but by little and little they saved money, bought more land, better
stock, and built better homes. When Yankee farmers, discouraged or
impoverished by the failure of wheat, offered their farms for sale
preparatory to “going west,” Germans who had managed their smaller
farms more carefully stood ready to buy; when Yankees who were tired
of being “tied to a cow” wanted to go to Montana, Oregon, or Wyoming
to raise steers by wholesale, on the ranching plan, they sold out to
Germans who made the dairy farms pay larger dividends year by year.
When Yankee farmers retired to the city, or went into business, which
in recent decades they have done by thousands, Germans were among
those who were the keenest bidders for their farm properties. In a
word, the German has succeeded agriculturally through the more and
more perfect functioning, in this new land, of qualities imparted by
the training and inheritance which he brought with him from the old
world. On the whole, Germans have kept clear of speculation, preferring
to invest their savings in neighboring lands with which they were
intimately familiar, or to lend to neighboring farmers on farm mortgage
security. In the aggregate, German farmers in Wisconsin have long had
vast sums at interest. The Institute for Research in Land Economics
(University of Wisconsin) has completed investigations which show that
the nation’s area of lowest farm mortgage interest rates (5.2 per cent
or less) coincides very closely with the great maple forest of eastern
Wisconsin, which has been held, from the first, predominantly by German
farmers.
We have no desire to minimize the factor contributed to Wisconsin’s
agriculture by the Yankees. They were the prophets and the organizers
of the farmers’ movement. Their inherent optimism, their speculative
bent, their genius for organization were indispensable to its success.
“Anything is possible to the American people,” shouted the mid-century
American orator from a thousand Fourth of July rostrums, therein merely
reflecting what the mass of his hearers religiously believed. When
agriculture had to be remade in Wisconsin, the Yankee’s intelligence
told him in what ways it must be improved, and his tact, courage, and
address enabled him to enlist and organize the means for remaking it.
When the Yankee was convinced, by his farm paper or by the exhibitions,
that a purebred animal was a good investment, his speculative spirit
sent him to his banker to borrow a thousand dollars, and to a distant
breeder to make what his more timid German neighbor would call a
“mighty risky investment”--for the animal might die! Finally, when
local organization was required to secure a cheese factory, a creamery,
or a dairy board of trade, the Yankee by virtue of his community
leadership was usually able to effect the desired result.
Wisconsin’s almost unique success in agriculture is due to no single
or even dual factor. But among the human elements which have been most
potent in producing the result, none is of more significance than the
fortunate blend in her population of the Yankee and the Teuton.