Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
The original caption on the photo above reads: “J. R. Reynolds hauling fertilizer to his two-horse Farm in Hart County, GA, March 28, 1939.”
But…but… he’s driving two MULES, not two HORSES, you say.
Before modern mechanization, the size of farms in Hart County, and across Appalachia’s southern states, was generally measured in horses. A small farm would be one-horse. A two-horse farm was average size, and anything above that was considered large.
“So, a young man starting to raise a family and make his living farming, looked for a one-horse farm,” says agricultural historian Everett GrinerSoutheast AgNET, 31 Aug. 2017, southeastagnet.com/2017/09/01/agri-view-one-horse-farm-era/.">1. “Now, that was about 60 acres. All one man could manage.”
And those mules J.R. Reynolds was driving?
“More frequently than not, that one horse was a mule,” observes Griner. “That was just about the land that one animal could handle too.”
The Marion Times-Standard of Marion, ALNewspapers.com, www.newspapers.com/image/319154977/?terms=%22two-horse+farm%22&match=1.">2 in 1906 felt that a 60 acre parcel defined a two-horse, not a one-horse, farm. And The Scottsboro (AL) Citizen16 Nov 1882, 1 – The Scottsboro Citizen at Newspapers.com. [online] Newspapers.com. Available at: <https://www.newspapers.com/image/320795638/?terms=%22two-horse%20farm%22&match=1> [Accessed 29 March 2021].">3 describes a farmer who in 1882 “had 65 acres, worth $5 per acre, a pair of mules $300, and perhaps $300 for implements.”
“The two-horse farm is an indefinite unit when measured by acreage,” pointed out the Western North Carolina TimesSize of Farm for Best Result. Newspapers.Com. https://www.newspapers.com/image/64831234/?terms=%22two-horse%20farm%22&match=1">4 of Hendersonville in 1919. “Some have less than forty acres for crops, while others have sixty or more.” And unlike Everett Griner, Times author J. M. Johnson felt “the two-horse farm is the smallest unit with which a farmer and the average farm family should attempt to operate.”
W.M. Ivey (b. 1899) grew up on a 60 acre, two-horse farm in Georgia’s Rockdale County, east of Atlanta. He moved to Hiawassee, GA as a grown man, where he also lived on a two-horse farm. “But,” he explains in a 1971 interview with the Atlanta ConstitutionHe Patrols 3 Events Each Year. Atlanta Constitution. https://www.newspapers.com/image/398263174/?terms=%22two-horse%20farm%22&match=1">5, “it was a smaller parcel of land. Up here in Towns County one horse could only handle from 8 to 10 acres. I surely had a lot to learn when I came to these mountains.”
How common was the two-horse farm throughout Appalachia during the late 19th to mid-20th century? Not very. Take a look at the graphic below produced from a search on Newspapers.com for the term “Two-horse farm.”
The search yielded 3,712 results in 54 Appalachian counties. The Appalachian Regional Commission defines the region as 420 counties, so that’s only 13% of Appalachia’s overall area. If a two-horse farm is 50-65 acres of tillable space, that eliminates a large percentage of Appalachia’s most mountainous areas, where family farms simply did not have that amount of flat acreage available.
Cotton farming, common in southernmost Appalachian states but not in more mountainous areas (where corn is the main cash crop), requires far more land than corn to minimally sustain a family, and this search’s skew toward the Carolinas and Alabama reflects that.
The time period during which this term appears in newspapers is telling. It appears actively from about 1875, when farm equipment development finally allowed one family to till a 60 acre plot with two horses/mules, up to about 1950, when modern tractors supplanted animals for farm labors.
Indeed, by 1939 the writing was already on the wall. An Asheville Citizen TimesGreat Change Made in Mountain Life by Coming of Auto. Asheville Citizen-Times. https://www.newspapers.com/image/195403417/?terms=%22two-horse%20farm%20wagon%22&match=1">6 article from that year says “Somewhere during the Taft administration, one of the younger men in The Flats, with some money he had saved and some that he borrowed, bought the chassis of a Ford truck and built the cab and the body, and with the printed directions taught himself to drive. That was 20 or more years ago.
“There are men and women in The Flats, children at that time, who still recall the service of a Sunday afternoon in the Methodist church, when suddenly there came the honk-honk of an approaching auto. Incontinently we all left the church—and stood upon the low bluff over the road in time to see two cars pass swiftly before us, around a curve in the road and out of sight.
“The first cars that had ventured to climb the mountain from Dillard to and through The Flats and on to Highlands! That simple experience of a Sunday afternoon was prophetic of a new chapter in the story of The Flats. The truck was suggested by these two cards, and was the first truck in the region.
“Within three years every owner of a farm and some of the renters owned a truck or a car. The theater of activity was tremendously widened.
“The two-horse farm wagon practically disappeared; the horses were used to raise the crop; the car or the truck to market the products.”
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