From Cradle to Reaper: A Prairie Farm Exhibit

Prairie Farm Gallery: From Cradle to Reaper

Welcome. Between about 1830 and 1870, settlers turned much of the Illinois prairie into farms. At first many families grew most of their own food and made much of what they used. Over these decades, factories and railroads drew them into a national market: they grew more wheat and corn to sell, and they bought goods made far away.

Artifact 1: Grain cradle, 1830s. A long blade with wooden fingers that caught the cut wheat. Historians estimate a skilled worker could cut about 2 or 3 acres a day with one. Ripe wheat had to be cut within about two weeks or it spoiled, so farmers hired extra hands and traded work with neighbors at harvest.

Artifact 2: Model of a horse-drawn reaper, 1840s. Cyrus McCormick first showed his reaper in Virginia in 1831. In 1847 he opened a factory in Chicago. A reaper pulled by horses could cut about 10 to 12 acres a day. Many farmers bought one on credit, paying in parts after each harvest.

Artifact 3: Railroad shipping receipt, 1856. A receipt for 400 bushels of wheat shipped by rail from a prairie town to Chicago. The first railroad reached Chicago in 1848. By the late 1850s, lines from many directions met there, and steam-powered grain elevators lifted wheat from rail cars into huge bins to be sold and shipped east.

Artifact 4: Cast-iron cookstove, 1850s. Made in a foundry and shipped west by rail. By the 1850s, many farm families had replaced cooking over an open fireplace with a stove like this one, which used less wood and kept heat steadier, but had to be bought with cash or credit.

Artifact 5: Sewing machine, 1860s. Elias Howe patented a sewing machine in 1846, and by the 1860s companies sold machines to families on payment plans. One test reported in the 1860s found that a man's shirt took more than 14 hours to sew by hand and a little over an hour by machine.

Artifact 6: Kerosene lamp, 1860s. After oil was struck at Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859, kerosene made from it gave a brighter and cheaper light than most candles. Families could read, sew and do accounts after dark.

Closing panel. Not everyone gained. Farmers who sold wheat now depended on prices set in faraway markets. When prices fell in the Panic of 1857, some families who had bought land and machines on credit could not pay their debts and lost their farms. The prairie farms also stood on lands that the Sauk, Meskwaki, Potawatomi and Ho-Chunk nations had given up through treaties, war and forced removal in the 1830s. These nations govern their own lands today in states such as Iowa, Kansas, Oklahoma and Wisconsin.