Land Clearing Under Nineteenth-Century Techniques: Some Preliminary Calculations

Before 1850, American farms were cut from the forest, and the work of forming a farm took time. The clearing of a few acres for first crops was followed by the endless labors of improvement—fencing, building, ditching, and the ambitions of a farmer for land could load him down for life with acres to clear and keep up. Five acres of forest clearing in a year in addition to current crops was about the limit for a farm family. Improved land could be a cash crop like any other, its yield no more risky than wheat or cotton, and only a little more remote. But even farmers who specialized in clearing land for sale might count on two hundred acres or so of forest clearing as the labor of a lifetime. The work of clearing forest was extremely hard, but it could be done in off-season, and deprived a settler not of cash income but only of hours of idleness. Nearly all the tasks could be done by the little labor force under a farmer's control—by sons, or on southern plantations by slaves; and the work converted otherwise half-idle labor into an important form of farm capital.