Talk:Lower Missouri Valley
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Discussion
Why the area is on the map
- Dewey (1913) gives the start of hemp growing in Missouri (about 1835), the output of 1840 and 1844, and its abandonment about 1890.
- Eaton (1938), a master's thesis built on the census returns and the county newspapers, names the principal producing counties throughout (Buchanan, Clay, Howard, Lafayette, Platte, Saline), the counties added by the mid-1840s (Andrew, Carroll, Chariton, Jackson, Ray) and the river counties of 1850 (Boone, Callaway, Chariton, Clay, Cooper, Howard, Lafayette, Saline), with county figures for 1850, 1860 and 1870 to 1890.
The name
No source read gives the tract a name of its own. Eaton speaks of "the Missouri River Valley" and "the river counties". Lower Missouri Valley narrows the first to the Missouri stretch of the river. Little Dixie and Boonslick, two historical names for parts of central Missouri, were not used: no source read ties either name to the hemp counties.
Growing status
The status is No longer grown. Dewey writes that the industry was finally abandoned about 1890, and Eaton found no hemp in the census returns after 1890 and none grown for commercial purposes in 1938. The first year (1835) is Dewey's "about 1835"; the last (1890) is the last census that records hemp in the area. The reason given is the one both sources state: other crops paid better.
- The status is about the crop. Dewey also wrote in 1913 that hemp was abundant as a wild plant in western Missouri; that wild growth belongs to the Midwestern United States region, and no source read places feral hemp inside these fourteen counties after 2000. The feral populations sampled in Missouri in 2022 lie upriver, in Atchison and Holt counties, outside the area.
How the border is drawn
- The border is a proxy built from fourteen whole counties, with OpenStreetMap relation numbers: Andrew (1180529), Boone (1180507), Buchanan (1180464), Callaway (1180450), Carroll (1180461), Chariton (1180545), Clay (1180508), Cooper (1180490), Howard (1180475), Jackson (1180462), Lafayette (1180551), Platte (1180451), Ray (1180498) and Saline (1180457).
- Every one of them is named by Eaton as a hemp county of the river valley. Marion and Pike, on the Mississippi, are left out, as are the counties away from the river that grew small amounts after 1850. Gentry and Macon, which reported several hundred tons each in 1860, and Atchison and Holt, upriver, are also left out: the area follows the river counties Eaton names.
- The area is about 21,500 km², the figure in the infobox. The infobox point (39.23, −93.44) is the centre of the shape, in Saline County.
- The border is not drawn from accession or news points.
Where the sources disagree
- The causes of the decline: Dewey names the hand brakes and the cost of carrying the fibre east; Eaton names the Civil War, the end of slavery, the lack of machinery, iron cotton ties and more profitable crops. The page gives both.
- The output of 1840: Dewey gives 1,600 tons; Eaton notes that the census of 1840 combined hemp and flax and gives estimates of 1,400 to 1,600 tons.
Sources
- Dewey, Hemp, in the Yearbook of the Department of Agriculture for 1913 (read in a scan of the printed volume).
- Miles W. Eaton, A history of the hemp industry in Missouri, MA thesis, University of Missouri, 1938, read in the university repository's scan. The repository's catalogue spells the author's name Easton; the title page reads Eaton.