Farming and Rural Life

Although Native Americans have farmed in Wisconsin since the Woodland Period (about 3,000 years ago), the European settlers who arrived in the 19th century were not at first drawn to farming. Instead the lure of underground mineral wealth attracted the first few thousand settlers to the lead region of southwest Wisconsin in the 1820s.

Everything began to change in the 1830s when government surveyors began laying out townships and making detailed examinations of the Wisconsin landscape. Armed with copies of the surveyors' notes, land seekers and speculators began to purchase land from government land offices, paving the way for Wisconsin's... more...

Original Documents and Other Primary Sources

	An Immigrant Who Became a Northwoods Missionary
	An overview of Wisconsin agriculture in 1909
	Juliet Severance argues for farm women's education, 1886
	Farming developments in Sauk County (1917)
	A Made-to-Order Farm to lure settlers northward, 1921
	A Sauk Co. farmer recalls turning from wheat to dairy in the 1850s.
	The early days of commercial cranberry growing in Wisconsin.
	A man recalls his years on a hop farm in Sauk County
	A gas powered tractor for small-scale farmers
	Folklore and folktales collected by Charles E. Brown
	A post-season report on farm laborers, 1960
	Three new flour mills open in Superior in 1893
	A pamphlet on farming in Northern Wisconsin, 1904
	An 1888 milling catalogue from the Allis Company
	Advertisements for farm equipment
	Photographs of cranberry harvesting, 1895-1977.
	"Aunt Nellie" offers advice to farm women, 1912-1918
	Tobacco farming takes off in southern Wisconsin
	Stonefield, home of Gov. Nelson Dewey and the State Agricultural Museum

Primary Sources Available Elsewhere

	The tendency of youth to leave farm life, 1898
	Wisconsin Blue Books
	A look at Wisconsin's farm cooperatives
	A survey of Wisconsin's agricultural history, 1922
	Explore farming and rural life in Wisconsin
	Giant crops from Wisconsin's fertile soil, 1911-1917

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