Digging Into Dubois County's Farming History
Dubois County in southwestern Indiana sits on some of the best farmland in the state. The soil is deep, the drainage is decent, and the climate has always supported traditional Midwestern crops. But if you look past the modern soybean and corn operations, there is a lot of agricultural history here that most people never notice. I spent a few years walking old farmsteads and county records trying to piece together what used to exist before consolidation took over. What follows is a practical guide to the parts of that history that are still findable today. The first thing you need to understand is that Dubois County's agricultural identity was never just one thing. It shifted repeatedly over about 150 years. The earliest settlers, arriving from Kentucky and Ohio in the 1810s and 1820s, established mixed farms. They grew wheat, raised hogs, kept dairy cows, and tended orchards. Wheat was the big cash crop through the 1840s. Then the railroads arrived in the 1870s and changed everything. Suddenly you could ship milk to Evansville and Indianapolis without spoiling it. Dairy took off. Dairy became the backbone of Dubois County agriculture for roughly a century. By the 1950s, almost every family farm in the county had at least a few cows. The ice cream plants and creameries that operated out of towns like Princeton and New Harmony depended on local milk supply. I remember driving through the county in the late 1990s and seeing entire sections of land that looked abandoned because the family farm had been folded into a larger operation elsewhere. The stone walls, the overgrown foundation outlines, the old barn sites marked only by a cluster of oaks that served as shade trees for the cattle yard — these are the things you look for.
Here is something most people miss. Tobacco was huge in Dubois County at various points. Not the big-cigar-leaf type, but flue-cured tobacco. There were several curing barns built across the county in the early twentieth century. The brick chimneys are still standing on a handful of properties. If you walk old country roads north of Washington Township and between Princeton and Spalding, you will spot them. They are rectangular structures, usually two stories, with a distinctive chimney at one end and ventilation slats along the upper walls. Most have been converted to storage or sitting empty. The land they sat on was often strip-mined later, which is another layer of history buried under the farmland. Orchards are another thing worth tracking down. Dubois County had a notable apple and pear industry in the late 1800s. The family farms near the Wabash River floodplain had especially good soil for fruit. I found references to a pear shipment operation near English that supplied stores in Evansville and even Louisville. The heirloom apple varieties that grew there — things like Wealthy, Spy, and Hawkeye — are mostly gone from commercial cultivation but a few trees still survive on old properties. If you want to find them, look for neglected fence rows and properties that have stayed in the same family for generations. The older homeowners often know where the old orchard plots were.
How to Research This Yourself
The practical way to approach this is to start with the Dubois County Historical Society in Princeville. They have farm ledgers, county agricultural society records, and photographs going back to the 1880s. The Indiana State Board of Agriculture reports from the late nineteenth century also contain county-level data on livestock numbers, crop acreage, and farm product values. Those reports are available through the Indiana State Library digital collection and cost nothing to access. For the physical landscape, my approach has been to use a combination of historical Sanborn fire insurance maps and current aerial photography. The Sanborn maps, updated periodically from the 1880s through the 1950s, show barns, outbuildings, and farm structures that are no longer there. I printed out a sheet of the 1930 Sanborn map for the Princeton area, walked it against the ground with a GPS app, and found three farmsteads that had been completely erased from the landscape but whose drain tiles and cellar holes were still visible in the field. That process — matching old maps to current satellite imagery — takes about thirty minutes per square mile and reveals more than a day of random driving. One edge case I ran into that might save you time: the county land records after 1940 are indexed by grantor and grantee, not by parcel number in the online system. If you are trying to trace a specific farm through ownership changes, you will hit a wall quickly. The workaround is to go to the Dubois County auditor's office in person and ask for the parcel map cross-reference. They have a card file that matches old farm names and owner names to current parcel IDs. It took me about ten minutes once I knew where to ask.
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Things That Will Disappoint You
Most of the physical remnants are on private property. You cannot just walk onto abandoned farmsteads and dig around. The old barns that are still standing are either being used for storage by current owners or are structurally unsound enough that trespassing would be dangerous. The cemetery route is safer — old family cemeteries associated with displaced farm families are scattered throughout the county and are publicly accessible. Headstones on those plots often list the person's occupation as "farmer" or "stock raiser," which gives you a breadcrumb trail. Another limitation: oral history is almost entirely gone. The last generation of people who grew up on Dubois County family farms is aging out. I tried to track down a former dairy farmer near Spalding whose family had operated a herd of about forty cows in the 1940s. His grandson had the deed to the land but not the stories. The grandson had moved away and the knowledge had not been passed down. This is the real bottleneck. Everything written down is public record. The lived experience — how the farming actually worked, what the rhythms were, what failed and why — is disappearing faster than anyone is documenting it. If you are looking for a single downloadable archive or a neat online map of all these sites, it does not exist. The closest thing is the Indiana Memory website, which has some scanned photographs and a few farm-related collections, but it is incomplete and not searchable by location in any useful way. The Purdue Extension archive has county-level crop and livestock data tables, which are useful for understanding the scale of production shifts over time, but they will not help you find a specific farmstead.
What to Look For When You Are Out There
The most reliable physical markers of old agricultural activity are: stone foundation walls that run through fields and terminate abruptly, old drain tile lines that still carry water during heavy rain, clusters of non-native trees planted as windbreaks (usually hawthorn or Russian olive), and the occasional abandoned cattle tank or stock pond lined with limestone. These features persist for decades after the farm disappears. A field that looks uniform to a driver on the highway often has half a dozen of these markers if you walk it slowly. Soil color and texture changes can also indicate old farmstead sites. Kitchen middens, manure accumulation, and repeated tillage of the same spot create a distinct soil profile. In Dubois County, the glacial till overburden is generally consistent, so a patch of darker, richer soil in an otherwise uniform field is worth a closer look. A simple soil probe test will show you the difference in organic matter content immediately. The agricultural past of Dubois County is not dramatic. It is not filled with famous figures or spectacular events. It is the story of families who worked this land, tried different crops, adapted to market changes, and eventually sold out or consolidated. The evidence is still there in the landscape and in the records, but you have to know where to look and you have to be willing to spend time in county offices and on back roads. The information exists. It is just not organized for anyone who is not already invested in the work.
