Why did Iowa's growth stalled?

[Torie]

Aside from remaining dependent on agriculture and agriculturally related manufacturing, and outside of Cedar Rapids, on a much smaller scale, lacked promoters that made Dallas what it was when it was no reason to be there based on topography and rivers and harbors and so forth, one factor was that farms got bigger and bigger due to economies of scale. Another factor was that farming was most profitable around 1900 per acre. My great grandfather bought 10 arable acres in the 1870's, for $500 an acre, today in inflation adjusted dollars maybe 12K per acre. Today it is worth but maybe 6K per acre, propped up by subsidies. The dirt back then was as if it were gold. Today, it is on "welfare."

Ultimately with his profits and his Civil War pension coming in, the farm grew to 200 acres or arable land, plus 200 acres of upland  forest and pasture land just south of Winterset. That was enough of a profit generator to be able to give his six children who survived to adulthood (4 children did not survive to adulthood),   either a farm or a college education, their choice. My grandmother was one of the two of six who chose a college education, where she met my grandfather. The other of the six who chose  college became a lawyer. About 10 years ago I sold off the arable land (my grandmother bought her siblings out on her mother's death). The clan, the five of us,  still holds the balance. I hope next summer if still alive to wander the upland hills and forest and fields one more time. It has personal echoes of history, up close and personal, some of the stories such as George Washington Carver one that I have shared here, revived once more in my mind. Someday, it will be subdivided, but not while I remain on this mortal coil.

The point is this was all possible with one man, a plow and a horse. Overhead was low, the profits large.

Today, Madison County Iowa was where my great grandparents farmed, today has but about 400 operating farms. The rest (total population 15,000) service those farmers or commute to Des Moines. And finally an astronomically higher percentage of the nation's population make their living off something that is not related to agriculture.

In the 1930's, they used to have Iowa picnics in Long Beach, CA that would attract 30,000 people to chat about their Iowa experiences, and catch up. The emigration out of Iowa has been going on for a long time, with not much immigration. It has no glamour, and the money is elsewhere. But it has value to me in those special fields, and memories.

[Torie]

In college I took a course on urban theory or something like that. A couple of things I remember were central place theory, that used SW Iowa as a paradigmatic example. The place was mostly an arable flat plain. So where did town end up being placed and how big did they get? There were market town nodes, mostly county seats, with the county sizes actually designed so that one could get to the county seat with no longer than a three hour carriage ride of something like that. Then there was a larger urban node with more services, that was located where one could get to in a day by horse, and stay overnight. That larger node was the city of Atlantic.

Of more relevance here, a theory was advanced that when a city got up to about 400K population, that its growth that had a forward inertia to it, so that it would continue to grow, without much likelihood  of population decline. It had enough services and infrastructure to be a lower cost place for more industry and services to come in. At that time, around 1972 or so, the Des Moines urban area was about right on the cusp at 400K, and the Quad Cities a bit short at 350K. I thought to myself, well I will get to see how well that theory works out.  I now know Des Moines kept growing at a steady rate, with spurts, while the Quad Cities seem pretty stagnant at about 380,000 or so. Will the Quad Cities if and when it struggles over the 400,000 finish line start to grow more reliably. Stay tuned. I may not be around to find out perhaps, but hopefully most of you will.

I did not know the Des Moines MSA has had such robust growth lately, When we sold the ancestral farmhouse just south of Winterset about 18 months ago, I was surprised by how much it had appreciated in recent years, by about 60% or so. Now I know why, as Winterset to a substantial extent is now an exurban node to the robustly growing Des Moines area, and NE Madison County is now beginning to get suburban spillover, with a new bridge over the Raccoon River, and a Microsoft data plant being built right on the county line.

I guess you can tell I found the class interesting, no?

Below is an image of info to bring up a paper on the issue.

[Torie]

[Torie]

Thanks to Dingo Joe, I just bought a used copy of Hallowing Out. So far as I know, not one of the still living descendants of my grandparents and their siblings (9 of those, so God knows how many descendants), now live in Iowa. Yes, you guessed it - most of them ended up in California.

Interestingly, I am not very well liked in some quarters in Winterset. The word is that there is this rich Hollywood gay asshole lawyer who won't sell the land. It did not help that I sold the river bottom cropland to a guy also not well liked, because he "overpays" for land, and has to boot about 20 Hispanics (oh the horror, the horror of it all) on his payroll who process the seeds in his factory from his natural plant crops that are used for plantings on land that is the land conservation program that is otherwise subject to erosion. We buy some of his seeds for those of the  upland fields that are part of that program. The hood seems a bit hostile to both brains and diversity. Sad!

[Torie]

My great grandparents arrived in Madison County around 1870 or so. I notice it had about 14K then, about the same population it had in 2000. It's peak population was about 18,000 in 1900, and its low was about 11,500 in 1970. In the 2020 census it will be around 16,500, still under its peak population. Winterset, the county seat, is another story. It's population in 1870 was around 1,500, or about 11% of the county's population. In 2020, it will be around 5,500 (an historic high), or about a third of the county's population.

Other than that the county is beginning to grow again a bit, unlike most smaller rural counties in Iowa, due to its proximity to Des Moines, I assume that the increase in the percentage of a county's population that is in the county seat is typical in Iowa. Heck, on the now much bigger farms than back when in Madison County, it is not all that common to see even a farm house on it. Much of the outside the county seat population is in relatively fancy homes with acreage that is for its scenic beauty and not crops. Some I know are owned by upper middle class retirees, who made their money elsewhere, and returned home, or like the ambiance of the place, which is very indeed very scenic with considerably topography (rather than a flat featureless plain), with a cute county seat. Some of these gentry, and some of the resident professionals, meet every Friday morning in the local diner on the town square to shoot the breeze. About half are liberals, and half conservatives, although this was in the pre Trump era. The educational divide and partisan preferences is I think the dominant factor these days in that hood.

My reputation in town among those who live off farming is that "gay rich Hollywood lawyer" who will never sell the land. I don't think they mean that  as a compliment.  Just a surmise on my part. Adding to my "charisma" is that I got busted for possession for pot there (that is a whole other story). A few months later, the police chief wanted to buy this little house on a bluff over the Middle River (awesome place where I would have lived myself after very substantial renovations), if I wanted to spend much time there, but alas I do not). I told him that if I sold to him, one condition would be that he was never, ever again to mess with my stash. He laughed.

Oh, one other thing. Most of the lawyers in town don't like me much either, and the feeling is mutual. I find most of them terminally obtuse and incompetent. Sad!

Even with my bum heart, I love every day of my life. There is always another adventure out there in store for me, and more stories for me to file away, and bore people with later. 

[Torie]

Yes, the rather sharp population decline in percentage terms in the 1880's is puzzling. I don't know what happened and googling around has not revealed the answer. It may be that in the 1880's the farm development had been maxed out, but cheaper rail rates and high corn prices caused a temporary bubble during the 1890's that caused the temporary spike up in the census of 1900.

I know that the farm price parity point for ag subsidies was around 1900, and that by inference my great grandparents must have made good money off their farm in the 1890's, because they retired to town in 1906, having bought more upland acreage that included the historic home to which they retired, and hired others to work the land from there on out. So it must have been a very prosperous time for farming.

[Torie]

I just found this a fascinating story (for me) of the county of my material grandfather's birth, Montgomery County, Iowa. It is a detailed study of ethnicity, class, geographic divide (including neighborhood divides in the city of Red Oak itself, based on not only money but social standing), and social mobility, or, much more often, the lack thereof. The ethnic groups did not intermarry. The elite were the New England Yankees. Next down the food chain were the Yankees from Ohio and PA from selected counties.  Then a more mixed bunch of American born immigrants, called "native Americans." The non "natives" including the Swedes, who lived mostly apart in seperate townships, and tended to hang around more and expand, and had some financial success, but did not mix much with the Yankees, particularly the Yankee elite.

And finally, the NW corner township of Lincoln was Welsh (with a hamlet named Wales). The first wave of Welsh were minors from the Scranton-Wilkes Barre area. They worked hard, farming, and when the crops were harvested, went back to the PA mines to work until it was time to return the following spring to plant another crop. Their issue would leave to go West for better land on the plains, or so they thought, searching for that perfect quarter section, to be replaced by new Welsh immigrants (sort of like the Bangladesh in Hudson NY, who kids leave, to be replaced by new immigrants from the home country). They kept to themselves and their Welsh Presbyterian church, never merging with the Yankee dominated Presbyterian Church.

My great grandfather was an immigrant from one of the named Ohio Counties, Clark, in looking that up. He moved to Montgomery County at about age 20, and married the daughter of one of the very first settlers, whose family owned quite a bit of land one sees on plat maps from a bit later. I was told by my grandmother, that my grandfather's mother was a school teacher in Red Oak. I now know why for the first time. Her husband died in 1891, at age 42, and his wife had to go to work to feed the six kids. And that was how she got the job as a school teacher. Married women were not allowed to work because it was viewed that they would be taking a job away from someone who needed it to survive or care for the family. (My grandmother had the same problem, but that is another story. She managed in a couple of cases to get a job anyway, because she was fluent in Latin.)  How my great grandmother was able to send my grandfather to college I don't know. Maybe he got the then equivalent of a football scholarship, at which he was talented. When I lived with my grandparents in Davenport for six months at age 4, I remember he had high hopes that I would be a football player too, since I was a big kid. He died the next year, so he never found out that I was not a jock type.

Anyway it is a tale of class barriers, and social barriers, and ethnic barriers, that were quite impermeable, at least according to this highly detailed paper.

Montgomery County too had a dip in population in 1890, although very slight, before it also rebounded in the 1900 census, to then as was the pattern gradually decline.

The story begins on page 46, after some boring academic chatter, and soon gets into the internecine fight for where the railroad line and depot would go - a fight  as it turned out to the death between the two hamlet - literally. Red Oak won, and then a few years later grabbed the county seat label as well, from the loser, Frankfort, which then crumbled to the ground  and into dust without much further ado.

https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/studentwork/524/