The Ellis County Rural Heritage Farm Tells the Undertold Story of Early 20th Century Small Family Farms in the Blackland Prairie of Texas
During the early 1900s, Ellis County was one of the leading cotton growing areas in the United States and was once referred to as “the greatest cotton county in the world”. Cotton was a major crop and driver for the economy throughout the Texas Blackland Prairie because of its rich, fertile soil being well adapted to growing this commercially lucrative crop.
A massive agricultural boom, primarily based on cotton, after the Civil War was not based on large plantations, but on the tens of thousands of small family farms spread across the Blackland Prairie and the labor of farm families, tenant farmers, and sharecropper. They lacked electricity and what we would term many of the “modern conveniences”.
The Ellis County Rural Heritage Farm itself has no claim to being a legendary place where “history happened”. It could have been one of tens of thousands of farms located anywhere from the Red River to San Antonio that have been lost to the passage of time.
The notable historical relevance of the Ellis County Rural Heritage Farm is to illustrate and tell an undertold story of the life on the thousands of small family farms in the Texas Blackland Prairie that provided the economic foundation for the ascendance of the cotton industry and ultimately the rapid growth of the Central and North Central Texas economy and communities.