"Fields, Farms,& Forests" byCarl Krog
Stages of development and patterns of settlement in the United States vary from region to region. In the states of the Lower Midwest and in the South, agricultural settlement paralleled the development of transportation networks and the founding of retailing and service centers. In the Rocky Mountain West and in the Northern Great Lakes the agricultural frontier followed the lumbering and mining of the industrial frontier.
The year 1890 marked the official end of the frontier in the United States, but in Marinette County, the agricultural frontier was just beginning to move north. During the 1890s, lumber production dropped while the number of farmers increased in the county. Residents hoped that the plow would follow the ax, field would follow forest, a former sawmill town would become the marketing center of the region, and the new measure of wealth would not be in lumber and shingles, but in grain and in diary products. The number of farms in Marinette County doubled each decade after 1880 and then doubled again during the first 20 years after 1900.
| (in acres) | 1880 | 1890 | 1900 | 1910 | 1920 | 1925 | 1930 |
| Farms | 293 | 614 | 1300 | 1919 | 2531 | 2893 | 2307 |
| Cropland | 10220 | 22591 | 47126 | 79474 | 107444 | 102514 | 92122 |
Price per acre was high in many of the farming areas of the lower Midwest. The price of the former pine- lands, called “the cutover” was low which drew farmers from the corn-belt states of Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana as well as industrial workers from the industrial cities to the south. The dream of Thomas Jefferson that America would remain a nation of independent self-reliant farmers was realized a century after the Louisiana Purchase in the agricultural frontier of the north where most settlers owned their farms.
| 1900 | 1910 | 1920 | 1925 | |
| Owner | 94.6% | 90.4% | 87.2% | 89.1% |
| Tenant | 3.5% | 4.5% | 6.0% | 5.8% |
Like the growing season of northern Wisconsin, the World War I (1917-1918) prosperity was short. Wisconsin farm income dropped from $332,551,000 in 1919 to $188,396,000 in 1920. With less demand for bread and potatoes, thirteen million acres of farmland were abandoned in the United States during the 1920s. The postwar agricultural depression had an immediate and devastating impact on farmers who recently had settled the northern part of Marinette County, an area handicapped by poor soils, poor roads, and a greater distance to both schools and markets. There were 531 abandoned farms in the northern two-thirds of the county by 1928. Farmers in Wisconsin’s northern seventeen counties faced similar problems: 82% of these counties’ 11,000,000 acres remained in stumps and brush and in 1927 nearly one quarter of this area had been sold for non-payment of taxes.
Both the federal and state governments passed laws, which created a framework for county government to begin reforestation following the failure of agricultural settlement. Wisconsin laws included: the Forest Crop Law which allowed owners to defer full payment of taxes until the timber was cut, a rural zoning law, and a law authorizing county forests. Faced with nonpayment of taxes, which had reached $335,115.15 by 1929, the Marinette County government took over its tax delinquent land and created the county forest whose 204,984 acres would eventually include two-ninths of the county.
In turning to a program of reforestation, the government was actually returning to an earlier pattern of land use. During the lumbering era, many men worked as lumberjacks during the winter, and then returned to their families and farms during the warm months to expand their fields, and to plant and harvest their crops. During the 1930s, the sequence was reversed, the government hired unemployed men to plant trees to bring back the forests. Farmers and woodsmen, living in this ill-defined transitional zone between field and forest, while working in both environments, have survived by drawing income from both. Southern Marinette County along Highway B is a land of fields and nearby woods. County Highway X running through the woods in the center of the county connects one park on the Menominee River with another on the Peshtigo River. Here, farming failed, the forest has returned, and the beauty of the region remains.