Tennessee Farming, Tennessee Farmers

• Author(s): Winters, Donald L.
• Series:
• Imprint: Univ Tennessee Press
• Publication Date: 1995-03-10
• Status: Active
• Available in Hardcover - Cloth: Price $35.00 | Buy Now

“This is an important contribution to the history of the Upper South during the antebellum years. It will be essential for any study of the history of the South, Tennessee, and American agriculture.”—R. Douglas Hurt, Iowa State University

The first book to chronicle the agricultural history of Tennessee during the antebellum period, Tennessee Farming, Tennessee Farmers explores the ways in which farmers transformed the state from an undeveloped wilderness into a cluster of mature agricultural regions producing a wide variety of commodities.

As Donald Winters shows, Tennessee farmers before the Civil War created a complex agricultural system that provided goods for household consumption and for sale in markets off the farm. As a result, the state came to occupy an important transitional position between the cotton and tobacco agriculture of the South and the grain and livestock agriculture of the North. Adopting new technology and better farming methods enabled Tennessee farmers to improve their efficiency and the quality of their products. Producing for outside markets, meanwhile, required them to participate in an extensive commercial network through which their goods were sold, transported, and processed; this system also provided the financial services essential to their operations.

Although Tennessee farmers poured much of their energy into business matters, they also sought in various ways to enhance the quality of rural life for themselves and their families. As they pursued their objectives, farmers set priorities and selected from competing options. Their decisions, the context in which they made them, and the ways they carried them out form the content of this book.

The Author: Donald L. Winters is professor of history at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of Henry Cantwell Wallace as Secretary of Agriculture, 1921–1924 and Farmers without Farms: Agricultural Tenancy in Nineteenth-Century Iowa.