Pioneer technology had to adapt on the Illinois prairie

We can only imagine the reaction when the earliest 19th century settlers pushed west out of the Eastern forests and came upon the tall-grass prairies that covered most of Illinois.

After all, they’d been used to settlement in the dense forests that stretched from the Atlantic seaboard all the way west to Indiana, including from Virginia across the Appalachians and into Kentucky and Tennessee.

Pioneering techniques in those regions was pretty well settled. Even though the term hadn’t come into popular usage yet, there was a definite pioneer technology that had been well understood for some 200 years: Land was claimed, forest trees were girdled – bark stripped in a band around the trunks – to kill the trees, which were then cut down the next year and used for split rail fencing and log building construction. Crops were planted among the stumps and meager harvests were expected until more labor was expended removing those stumps and clearing the ground of rocks and underbrush. Even then, the thin forest soils weren’t very productive.

So when pioneer wagon trains reached the verge of the forests and the only view ahead was rolling prairie thick with wild grasses and broad-leaved plants as far as the eye could see, the unease must have been palpable. How were fields to be fenced with no thick timber to produce rails? Where would the logs for cabins and outbuildings come from?

And not only that, but if this ground couldn’t grow trees, could it grow crops? How were the farm implements available to them – mainly walking plows with wooden or cast iron moldboards that were fine in the East’s thin soil – supposed to deal with this entirely new kind of ground?

Fortunately, as it turned out, there was at least some timber in isolated groves and along watercourses that could be tapped for building and fencing materials. And as might be expected, the earliest settlers quickly claimed those wooded areas. The earliest survey maps of the region show the first farms were located along the edges of those small patches of forest, whenever possible on the east side of them for shelter from the prevailing west winds.

The near constant wind, which could quickly turn into destructive gales at all seasons of the year, also was something new for families used to living in the middle of stands of dense timber.

Those timber stands out here on the prairie were subdivided by their owners and the parcels sold to later arrivals who needed the logs for their own fencing and buildings. James Sheldon Barber, who came west to Oswego from New York state with a wagon train in 1843, wrote back to his parents in 1844, noting that “ten acres [of timber] is sufficient for a farm of 80 acres.”

But as the country started filling up, the amount of timber available quickly proved insufficient. Sawn lumber began to be shipped into Chicago in the 1840s from the huge timber stands in Wisconsin and Michigan and that led to a technological change in building construction from those traditional log buildings.

Builders in Chicago developed and perfected “balloon construction.” Instead of material and labor-intensive log construction, balloon construction used sawn lumber nailed together to create building frames much like modern construction. It used less wood and was stronger and more durable. And it allowed areas with little or no timber – like Will County’s Wheatland Township, for instance – to at last be settled.

And that, in turn, led to a change from timber-based settlement practices to instead prairie and grove –based settlement practices. With logs no longer needed for buildings, but only for firewood and for rail fences, farms could be successful with fewer acres of woodland. From the early 1830s through the mid-1840s, as we’ve seen, at least 10 acres of timber were required to make a success of farming. But, first adoption of balloon framing and the arrival of dimension lumber from northern sawmills eliminated the need for log construction and then the invention and perfection of barbed wire for fencing by prairie geniuses like DeKalb’s Joseph Glidden, continually reduced the need for large tracts of timber by prairie farmers.

Finally, there were the necessary changes in farm equipment technology. Those wooden plows, essentially unchanged for centuries, simply weren’t up to turning over the thick, rich prairie sod. For the initial plowing, someone with a special plow had to “break,” or turn over, the tough prairie sod for the first time. That often cost as much as the land itself had. But even after that first plowing, prairie soil was nothing like that thin Eastern stuff. Wooden plowshares were unsatisfactory, even when faced with iron, because they were so fragile. Cast iron plowshares were tried, but proved heavy and basically unsatisfactory as well because thick prairie loam stuck to them and had to be continually cleaned off.

But then some inventive farmers and blacksmiths began experimenting with steel plowshares, like the one developed by John Deere over in Grand Detour, Illinois. Steel plowshares were much lighter in weight and stronger than cast iron. And as those inventive farmers found out, when plows with steel shares were pulled through the soil, they self-polished (or scoured). In fact, the more they plowed, the shinier they got, making it far easier for teams of horses or oxen to pull them.

The true pioneer era here in the Fox River Valley only lasted about two decades, from the late 1820s through the early 1840s, although it lingered on in areas with fewer timber resources until the early 1850s when building and fencing technology had advanced far enough to sharply reduce the timber resources required. In fact, by the time James Sheldon Barber got to Oswego in 1843, there was little unclaimed government land left in Kendall County although there was still plenty available in neighboring largely timber-free areas like DeKalb County and Will County’s Wheatland Township.

And as the frontier moved ever farther west, the new techniques developed by those early prairie farmers went with them onto the largely treeless prairies and plains west of the Mississippi River.

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