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.
Rising food demand and rapid population growth encouraged farmers to produce more with fewer workers. As farms expanded, many younger people left these communities to bigger cities for more job opportunites, contributing to a long-term decline of small farms. Farmers also faced environmental consequences, accompanied by this expanding trend through increased fertilizer use, that lead to more fertilizer runoff into waterways, thus, harming the Mississippi River basin for generations. Most pasturelands county-wide, used for grazing cattle, were plowed into more cropland to expand crop production. Eventually, this gave way to larger enclosed barns to house hogs and cattle.
A hog buying station that was built within the county in 1968 by the McDonough County farm bureau symbolized this popular shift toward industrialized livestock operations at the time. Meanwhile, soybeans became the dominant crop statewide, and the county’s contribution helped Illinois become the world’s leading soybean producer to the international commercial market by the mid-1960s. At the same time, the Torrance and Davis families, mentioned earlier, were lucky enough to expand their acrage during this period through inheritance and gradual land purchases, hence, reflecting broader consolidation trends.
The 1970s brought new federal aid for agriculture through expanded subsidies and credit access, but it also marked the beginning of economic instability. By the early 1980s, high interest rates, falling crop prices, and declining export markets triggered the worst agricultural crisis since the Great Depression. Many farmers faced foreclosure, including Randall Carson’s dairy farm in Tennessee, Illinois, whose “penny sale” protest in 1982 highlighted the era’s financial desperation for farm survival. By 1987, the county had little over 1,000 farms—less than half the number recorded in 1945. As the 1990s rolled around, industrial livestock facilities, ran by corporate partnerships, had become the standard across the county. These changes occasionally sparked local resistance, such as a turn-down vote in 1994 for zoning a proposed hog operation in the Lamoine township. Overall, McDonough County’s trajectory at this point mirrored national patterns of consolidation, technological acceleration, and social stress.
Today, McDonough County’s post 1945 rural history offers valuable lenses into understanding how local communities respond differently to national agricultural shifts.
Fortunately, the descendants of the Davis and Torrance families still independently own and operate their lands in Good Hope and Macomb, reflecting both family farm continuation and change. By recognizing the successes and challenges from the past, local residents can shed hope in the future for this rural community.
