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Farm Construction as a Use of Farm Labor in the United States, 1850–1910

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2011

Martin L. Primack
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Extract

The construction and improvement of farm buildings in the United States during the latter half of the nineteenth century was a task of farmcapital formation exceeded only by the effort to clear the land itself. As uses of the farmer's time and capital, the erection of the first crude shelters and the steady additions to the dwelling and to other farm buildings are of major interest and importance in the analysis of American agricultural development. The statistics available to measure this work are adequate to command attention; like all statistics of this period, they must, of course, be employed with caution.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 25 , Issue 1 , March 1965 , pp. 114 - 125
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1965

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References

1 Tostlebe, Alvin S., Capital in Agriculture, Its Formation and Financing since 1870 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957) pp. 54–57, 66–69Google Scholar.

2 A further discussion of Tostlebe's estimates is contained in the Appendix.

3 Towne and Rasmussen in their study of farm production and investment (see fn. 4) also offer estimates for improvements to land and buildings from 1800 to 1900. They estimate the value of improvements on new farms for the century at $300 per farm at 1840 prices. This was an estimate by Solon Robinson of the cost of a frame farmhouse in Illinois in the 1840's. The improvement on established farms over the period was estimated at $26 per farm at 1910–1914 prices, based on the current agriculture expenditure series for 1910–1914. The criticism of using a single expenditure estimate for improvement on new and on old farms is too obvious to dwell on. The estimate of improvement of new farms is further weakened by the lack of estimates of the cost of outbuildings. More important, the assumption of constancy in improvement in new farms and in old for 1800 to 1900 is subject to the same criticisms as those of Tostlebe's series discussed in the Appendix below.

4 William N. Parker, “Productivity Change in Wheat and Oats,” a paper presented at the Income and Wealth Conference of the National Bureau of Economic Research at Chapel Hill, N.C., Sept. 1963; Marvin W. Towne and Wayne D. Rasmussen, “Farm Gross Product and Gross Investment,” pp. 268–70, and Robert E. Gallman, “The United States Commodity Output, 1839–1899,” pp. 36–37, 49, both in Trends in the American Economy in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, N. J.: published by Princeton University Press for NBER, 1960)Google Scholar.

5 Towne and Rasmussen, pp. 275–79; Robert E. Gallman, “Gross National Product in the United States, 1834–1909,” a paper presented at the Conference in Income and Wealth, Chapel Hill, 1963. Gallman's farm-capital formation estimate refers only to improvements to land made with agricultural materials.

6 Primack, Martin, “Land Clearing Under Nineteenth-Century Techniques. Some Preliminary Calculations,” Journal Of Economic History, XXII, No. 4 (Dec. 1962), 484–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Gallman, “United States Commodity Output,” pp. 60–65. “This assumption is supported by the returns of the construction hand trades in the censuses of 1869, 1879, 1889, and 1899, which show ratios of value of output to value of materials of 2.06, 1.93, 2.13, 2.28. Seaman (page 456) estimates that the value of houses built in 1839 was 2.2 times the value of materials consumed.” Changes in composition of construction do make for changes in the ratio. The construction hand trades data, forming the basis for the ratios, refer principally to building. Building construction is what this paper is concerned with.

8 The Cultivator, I (1840), p. 76. Oliver, William, Eight Months in Illinois, with Information to Immigrants (New Castle upon Tyne, 1843Google Scholar; Chicago: Walter M. Hill, 1924), p. 243; Ohio State Board of Agriculture, Annual Report, 1850, pp. 752–754.

9 It is probable that a significant part of this off-farm labor for construction comprised only part-time construction workers who were enumerated as farm labor.

10 This assumption causes an overstatement of the value of new construction, since it has been pointed out that at least in the early and middle stages of settlement of an area the new farms have less-developed farmsteads. It is doubtful if this overstatement is as serious as one might think. In the early period of settlement, when the differences between new farmsteads and old would be most marked, the number of farms increases at such a rapid rate that the average value is more representative of the new farms than of the old, because the old farms are a small part of the total. By the time the established farms are a significant part of the total, this discrepancy between established farmsteads and new ones is not as marked.

11 This interjects an obvious understatement, in that additional construction would be obscured in comparing the average value figures by the introduction of new farms with lower average value.

12 To apply a wage rate for a single year to capital formation proceeding throughout the decade raises serious questions. In many states, wage rate changes between decades are significant, especially between 1899 and 1909. But the use of some average wage rate for a decade raises more serious statistical problems than it solves. Also, it is still an open question as to how the buildings were valued for the census taker. Even if they were valued at replacement or original cost, the question of the rate at which the fanner charged labor still remains. Much of this construction was done during slack times, and it would be unreasonable to use a wage rate by day for the harvest season. Since we are concerned with deriving labor in man-days, it would be cumbersome to use monthly wage rates. Also, the cost of board should be considered. Therefore, the wage rate used was the daily wage in off-season work without board.

Wage rates for 1869, 1879, 1889, and 1909 are from Holmes, George K., “Wages of Farm Labor,” U. S. Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Statistics, Bulletin No. 99 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1912), pp. 40–43Google Scholar.

Wage rates for 1859 are from “Wages of Farm Labor in the United States,” U. S. Department of Agriculture, Division of Statistics, Misc. Series, Report No. 4 (Washington, 1892), pp. 54–69. These series were used instead of more recent studies of farm wage rates because these were the only ones to contain all the years and present data by state.

13 Primack, Journal Of Economic History, XXII, No. 4, Table 3, p. 492.

14 Tostlebe, pp. 54–57, 66–69.

15 Ibid., pp. 177–80.

16 Through an oversight, the derivation of the current value of farm buildings was excluded from Alvin Tostlebe's book. However, he has very kindly explained his method by mail. In a letter dated Dec. 19, 1961, Tostlebe gave as references for the data to derive his indices of farm-buildings costs the following: (1) Warren, George F. and Pearson, Frank A., Prices (New York: Wiley, 1935), p. 26, Table 3, for building-material pricesGoogle Scholar; (2) U. S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the U. S., 1789–1945 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1949), p. 66Google Scholar, table series D107–110, for wages per day in the building industry; (3) Ibid., p. 66, table series Dlll–118, for hourly earnings in the building trade; (4) Ibid., p. 70, table series D172–176, for composite farm-wage rate index.

17 Shannon, Fred A., The Farmers' Last Frontier, 1860–1897 (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1945), pp. 254–59Google Scholar.

18 Gallman, “United States Commodity Output,” pp. 60–65.