If you grew up in the United States, you probably took a course in middle school or junior high about your state’s history. I don’t remember a thing about my class except a frantic late-night scramble to finish my “Missouri Scrapbook,” full of notes, photographs, postcards, mementos, etc.
My guess is that you didn’t learn a lot from state history classes, either. Am I wrong?
But state history has much to be said for it. Americans who move from state to state can find vivid confirmations of the themes of American history. I’m thinking of the frontier, our wars of independence—the American Revolution and the Civil War—, the destruction of American Indian tribes, the struggles to build infrastructure, etc.
Local sites may not rise to the fame of, say, the Trail of Tears, Nat Turner’s Rebellion, or the Boston Tea Party, but they help build the story of our past.
Each state’s history offers surprises. Here are a few examples from places I’ve lived in. I welcome you to send me others (for publication).
North Carolina: An Independent Bunch
The state has been described as a valley of humility between two mountains of conceit (i.e., Virginia and South Carolina). A joke, yes, but for a long time much of North Carolina’s population was composed of poor or near-poor farmers in the central and western parts of the state. Although North Carolina had its wealthy planter class and their enslaved populations, the majority of residents were farmers. The state had so few ports that most settlers came by wagon from Pennsylvania or Virginia.
The early backcountry colonists were a rowdy and independent bunch, often unhappy with appointed colonial officials—for good reason, since many of the officials were corrupt.
So, nearly three months before the Declaration of Independence was announced in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776, North Carolina’s provincial assembly was the first to call on all colonies to separate from Britain. (The statement became known as the Halifax Resolves.)
But a decade later, North Carolinians’ continuing rebellious nature led many to oppose the U.S. Constitution They thought it gave too much power to the national government. North Carolina was the second-to-the last state to approve the constitution (before Rhode Island), and it did so only after Congress passed the Bill of Rights.
A desire for freedom can have multiple impacts.
Massachusetts: The Not-So-Famous Ride of William Dawes
When I was a young journalist covering news in Jamaica Plain, a section of Boston, I attended the April 18 celebration of William Dawes Day.
Who was William Dawes? You know that in 1775 Paul Revere galloped toward Lexington and Concord announcing that the British were coming. But so did William Dawes! He set out from Boston at the same time by a different route. (The colonists believed in redundancy.) And his horse wasn’t quite as fast.
Nevertheless, both men reached Lexington and warned Sam Adams and John Hancock that the British were coming after them.
But neither Revere nor Dawes got as far as Concord (where the British were coming for an arsenal of arms). On their way, they met a group of redcoats, who captured Paul Revere. As Dawes tried to shake off the British, his own horse bucked him off and he had to walk, painfully, back to Lexington. A third courier, Dr. Samuel Prescott, reached Concord.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow took a lot of poetic license in his poem about Paul Revere.1
Montana: The Tragedy
Ah, romantic Montana. You know a lot about it from Yellowstone. But at the heart of Montana’s modern history is a grim series of events.
I’ve written before about the sad results of American homesteading. As settlers moved west, land was “given” to them by the national government. But “actual homesteading was generally confined to the less desirable lands distant from railroad lines,” writes one historian2; and it was virtually impossible to make a living by farming 160 or 320 acres on the arid Great Plains. By 1890, nearly two-thirds of all homesteaders had not “proved up” their claims.3
Montana’s homesteading experience was especially bad. Eastern Montana (where plenty of land was available) was extremely dry and one of the last areas to be homesteaded—mostly between 1909 and 1917.
Agricultural experts were convinced (or had convinced themselves) that “dryfarming” techniques could enable settlers to raise sufficient crops, even on small plots with little rain. This in spite of the fact that John Wesley Powell said that 2,560 acres were needed for farming success beyond the 100th meridian of longitude, and eastern Montana is well west of that.4
“According to the theory, deep plowing in fall and spring captured precipitation and sent it far into the soil where it was saved for plants,” explains Gary E. Libecap, “rather than allowing the moisture to be lost as runoff as it would be with shallower tillage.”5 This view was widely accepted by scientists.
It was affirmed by the Bozeman Agricultural Extension Service, a newly formed government outreach agency, and the railroads that wanted to bring immigrants to the West, such as the Northern Pacific and the Great Northern railroads.
The basic problem? The dryfarming techniques were based on an unusual run of wet years in Montana. When the bulk of homesteaders arrived, a deep drought was starting. All in all, this is a painful story that starts with confident experts, compliant government authorities, and eager railroad officials, and ends with failure.
Missouri: St. Louis in Decline
Now back to my home state and the city I lived near, St. Louis. Why did it lag behind other cities (especially Chicago) after the Civil War? Here’s a hypothesis from historian Jeffrey Adler.6 (I’ve mentioned this previously as one view of St. Louis’s decline.)
St. Louis was founded in 1764 by Frenchmen who bought furs from Native Americans for sale in the East. It was distinctly cosmopolitan from the beginning. As farmers migrated to Missouri from nearby states, they began to control the state legislature, and St. Louis became increasingly out of place—a traditional city surrounded by populists. St. Louis merchants needed banks in order to facilitate their growing trade. But the state legislature hated banks and made it almost impossible to have one.
So, during the 1830s and 1840s, St. Louis relied on New Englanders and New Yorkers. With eastern investment opportunities lagging, New England and New York merchants invested in St. Louis. But they never founded banking or financial institutions. In many cases, their St. Louis offices were managed by their sons, training for eastern jobs.
When the conflict over slavery intensified in the 1850s, New Englanders found Missouri increasingly distasteful because it was a slave state. As Adler tells it, they walked away or stopped investing in St. Louis. This was just the time when a safely northern city, Chicago, was flexing its muscles and eager for their money. Thus, St. Louis’s decline.
Notes
- A more correct history can be found in Christopher Klein, “A Midnight Ride of William Dawes,” History.com, updated Sept. 30, 2021, https://www.history.com/news/the-midnight-ride-of-william-dawes. ↩︎
- Paul Wallace Gates, “The Homestead Act in an Incongruous Land System,” American Historical Review 42 (July 1936), 652–681, at 655. ↩︎
- Richard L. Stroup, “Buying Misery with Federal Land,“ Public Choice 67, no. 1 (April 1988), citing F. A. Shannon, “The Homestead Act and the Labor Surplus,” American Historical Review 41 (July 1936): 637–665, at 645. ↩︎
- Gary B. Libecap, “Learning about the Weather: Dryfarming Technique and Homestead Failure in Eastern Montana, 1900–1925,” Montana the Magazine of Western History (Spring 2007), 24–33. ↩︎
- Libecap, 26. ↩︎
- Jeffrey S. Adler, Yankee Merchants and the Making of the Urban West: The Rise and Fall of Antebellum St. Louis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). ↩︎
This article was republished from Jane Takes on History with permission from the author
