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Farming the Land

When the Mormons evacuated Nauvoo in 1846, crossing the Mississippi on ice and on ferries, they departed in three thousand wagons, pulled probably by no fewer than ten thousand horses and oxen. Driven along with them were thirty thousand head of cattle, "a great number" of horses and mules, and "an immense number" of sheep. In the wagons were several hundred thousand pounds of flour, grain and dried fruits, vegetables, beef and bacon, and seed for their new farms in the west. This was not a typical city on the move. It was an agricultural community. In fact, farming was the occupation listed by most residents of Nauvoo, even those working at other professions.

Typical of such Illinois Mormons was Warren Foote, a farmer from upstate New York, who continued to farm just south of Nauvoo, but not exclusively, as his diary indicates. On 28 September 1844 he wrote: "The season has been so wet that we did not raise any corn, and the oats were very light. I did not make any thing much in farming. We are going to work at chairs again." In addition to farming and manufacturing chairs, Brother Foote taught school and drove a stage.

As a farming community, Nauvoo was unique in America. The city was planned as an agricultural community and in actual practice developed as such, despite its size and commercialization. Farms clustered about the city and on the opposite Iowa shore. Many of the owners lived in the city and went out to work their farms each morning. Thus the farmers could enjoy the social, cultural, and educational benefits of dwelling in the city.

Such an arrangement depended on some freedom from the dawn to dark labor that farming had traditionally required. This was to some extent possible because farming at this time was just beginning to leave the subsistence stage. Even though a farm still produced eighty to ninety percent of a family's needs, by the 1840s farms were producing larger and larger cash crops through the use of labor-saving machinery and better stock and seed.

Despite the extensive preliminary work required to establish new farms on the Illinois prairie, by 1844 Joseph Smith recorded in his journal: "Quite extensive preparations are being made by the farmers in this vicinity for the cultivation of land; and should the season prove favorable, we doubt not that nearly, if not a sufficient amount of produce will be raised to supply the wants of the city and adjacent country."

One reason the Mormon farmers were able to supply the needs of a city the size of Nauvoo was the land itself. Settlers from the east had cherished the erroneous conviction that timbered land was more fertile than prairie land. Thus earlier settlers spent backbreaking years clearing forests when prairie land lay invitingly unplowed and unclaimed. By the 1840s, this myth was destroyed as the Latter-day Saints broke thousands of acres of ground at Nauvoo. Nevertheless, the taming of the prairie was not an easy task. Sometimes it could be done only in stages, getting it ready one year and planting the next, as one letter by a Mormon farmer to friends back east suggests: "We did not farm much this summer. We have about fifty acres of ground ready to farm next summer."