Answer: Tenancy increased as poorer families who could no longer be squatters farmed someone else’s land. In turn tenants gave a percentage of their crops to the landowner. Wage work also increased dramatically. Poorer men performed agricultural work for wages instead of developing their own farms. Similarly, wealthier cultivators gained a larger proportion of the region’s acreage. In the Sugar Creek area, for example, the richest 10 percent of the population possessed 25 percent of the land in 1838; the top tenth held 35 percent two decades later. Likewise, in 1838 the poorest 20 percent of the population controlled only 10 percent of the land, but in 1858 this same share of the population owned a mere 5 percent. The rich not only obtained more property; they also employed many of the new tools and farming techniques that made their land even more productive, creating an even greater surplus of crops. In less than a generation central Illinois went from subsistence agriculture to market-oriented farming.
This economic transformation also altered the landscape. Early settlers tended to set up their farms in wooded areas along waterways. Although they might purchase the surrounding acreage, they laid out their homesteads more according to the natural formation of the land than the square lines drawn by federal surveyors. Moreover, many early pioneers used the adjacent grasslands as a common (shared) pasture where cattle and hogs grazed freely. As farmers became more intertwined in the market system, they changed their ways of using land; they fenced in pasturage to keep out the livestock of competitors. Property boundaries and roads eventually followed section lines, thereby imposing a grid on the land even though this new system of demarcating property ignored the natural topography. By 1860 the Midwestern landscape began to take its modern form: square fields, gridlike roads, and productive farms could be found across the prairie.
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