The Transformation of Farm & Rural Life in McDonough County, IL (1945-2000)
McDonough County, Illinois has carved out its own history for the past 200 years, most commonly in agriculture, where nearly 300,000 acres of farmland still exist today. Ever since the county’s founding, its land was greatly transformed primarily for agricultural purposes.
As Macomb and other small towns expanded overtime, its values in the rural community changed a lot, with the last 70 years of the 20th century alone making up majority of these changes. Since 1945, the changes in McDonough County’s rural community have contributed to a shift in population, great advancements in agricultural technology, established enclosed confinements, and the great depletion of small farms. Ultimately, this significantly changed the values of the county’s economic, social and environmental circumstances.
Before World War II, McDonough County resembled many Midwestern rural communities severely struggling economically throughout the 1930s. Farm numbers slightly declined in the 1920s, but the Great Depression intensified this trend to the point where more than 100 farms disappeared between 1925 and 1935. Mounting farm debt and less food demand forced many families to sell their land and quit. Yet rural life remained rooted in diversified production— corn, soybeans, cattle, and hogs—all while shifting its technology from horse-powered labor to gas/diesel engine machinery. Recorded family farms in the county, including the Torrance’s of Good Hope and the Davis’s, whom migrated from Schuyler County, of Macomb, illustrate how some farms survived the Depression with limited resources while representing the last generation of popular small, diversified farms before post-war modernization took place. During WWII, the financial recovery of this rural community from expanding wartime farm production sparked off the popularity for farmland consolidation and capitalist agriculture, changing McDonough County’s identity for decades to come.
The post-war boom from 1945 to about 1970 marked the most dramatic shift in the county’s agricultural history.
