| jd8850 - 3/24/2024 00:26 Your grandfather's grandfather. Wd that go back to 1850 or so? It would here. My grandpa honesteaded in 1909 so his grandpa wd be another 50 years back. He would have been in Germany then. Spose Iowa had some of the first farming?
Realistically, in most of North America going beyond subsistence farming to feed a family means the timeline follows logistics. Till 1850, give or take, having a market for perishable commodities meant you had to be close enough to a population center to get there with animal power, and/or close enough to reliable river shipping to use that. All the rest of westward expansion of farming and ranching in a big way had to follow the railroads. Some added impetus in there with manpower shortages during the Civil War, and then veterans returning who wanted to find more room. And of course, in tandem with reliable railroads came development of things like grain binders, steam-powered threshing machines, and much improved tillage/seeding implements (even if most of them were still horse or oxen powered). |
Has the game changed cont........
