As the great Civil War raged in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, on May 20, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the national Homestead Act into law. Settlement of the United States steadily marched westward since the founding of the country, pausing only for a moment as war split the nation into north and south.

The idea of free land for the development of the western territories began to grow with the 1848 organization of the Free Soil Party which combined an anti-slavery stance with a proposed “free land” endowment to industrious settlers willing to clear and improve that gift of property. Their slogan, “Free soil, free speech, free labor and free men,” brought the idea of organized settlement to national attention.

By 1860 an early version of the homestead bill was vetoed by President Buchanan before ultimately succeeding under the Lincoln Administration in 1862.

The Homestead Act allowed landless people to gain precious land, an ideal that had previously seemed out of reach. Before them lay the chance to enjoy a life of self-preservation under the assumption of personal independence. However, for most homesteaders, independence was merely an illusion as they fell into debt by merely trying to keep a responsible hearth and home for family. Many homesteaders were unprepared for harsh pioneering conditions. Almost from the beginning, 160-acre homesteads were abandoned or sold at ruinous prices.

The strong or downright lucky endured. Railroads spread as web-like systems across the country, bringing economic opportunity which, of course, necessitated additional debt. Towns sprung up every half-dozen to 15 to 20 miles. By 1890, four out of every five (80 percent) Americans lived in rural areas. Rural America seemed to be thriving, but the debt cycle subtly continued. By the turn of the century, industrial innovation produced a population transition from farms to American’s urban centers.

While rural populations diminished, the growing urban American population provided a considerable resource to sustain those who remained on the farm. The industrial revolution offered innovations in farm machinery and practices. Agriculture shifted from the previous emphasis on self-sustaining subsistence production to “export” distribution of excess production to burgeoning cities. The surge of the industrial revolution inversely served to veil the underlying weaknesses built into an erratic agricultural economy.

The dawn of the 20th Century brought the concept of “parity pricing” as a tool to stabilize prices for farm-raised commodities.

Under parity pricing, the financial exchange of agricultural production could equalize rapidly changing commodity values with the economic reality of the rest of the American economy.

To achieve equality for rural families, an adjustment up or down was proposed, considering the costs of production. The intended result would be a working income equal to other sectors of the economy. Sounds fair. Farmers and ranchers were only feeding everyone else with that production.

Just as the idea was taking hold, farm prices stabilized and for the time being, the idea of agricultural parity languished.

During the years of 1909-1914 the rural economy operated on a par with urban income. Even so, the previous 10 years of poor prices had extracted its toll. Americans living in rural areas fell from the 1890 figure of 80 percent to 65 percent by 1915. At the same time, European powers stumbled into the conflict that ultimately drew the United States into “the war to end all wars. ”

Prices skyrocketed throughout World War I, but just as the war failed to end all wars, agricultural prices failed in the years following the war. Corn, for example, tumbled from $1.30 per bushel in 1919 to 63 cents per bushel in 1920.

The war years allowed the old cycle of debit vs. staying in business to become entrenched into America’s heartland. Farmers, who were encouraged to invest in new equipment and to produce more and more during the war, found themselves deeply in debt, producing surpluses that were no longer needed. The Roaring 20s passed them by with disintegrating prices and exorbitant debt barred them from the prosperity that their city cousins experienced.

Cattle producers fared a little better after the postwar collapse began to rebound in the late 20s. Meanwhile, the 1920s ground into the Great Depression of the 1930s with very little letup as the farm sector was swept away. Farm prices dropped a staggering 67 percent from 1919-1933.

As early as 1929 the government had finally come to the realization that stable food production was a matter of national security. The Hoover Administration introduced the Agricultural Marketing Act, an attempt to buttress the failing farm economy, but the effort didn’t go far enough and the farm economy continued to decline.

By 1933 economists revisited the concept of parity pricing for agricultural commodities. The golden years of 1910-1914 were identified as the target of profitable years for America’s farmers.

The Franklin D. Roosevelt Administration passed the Agricultural Adjustment Act that year. A “floor” price was included to support certain commodity prices, giving at least some farmers purchasing power equal to that of the urban workforce. Even so, the act didn’t go far enough to significantly enhance the rural economy. It would take another war to bring prosperity back to rural America in the continuing saga of agricultural transformation and survival on The Way West.