Farm Acreage

The 1860 census enumerated 2.0 million farms of three acres or more, although the average farm had about 200 acres. Farm acreage included both improved and unimproved land. Improved land included all cleared land used for grazing, grass, or tillage and land lying fallow. Unimproved land had not been cleared and would include a wood lot, for example, although it omitted land that was not improvable, such as a marsh that could not be drained, and large ponds and lakes over ten acres in surface area. These figures do not give an indication of the number of acres under cultivation or the intensity of the cultivation in terms of intended cash yield per acre.

The average size of the individual farms within each state reveals a distinct regional pattern. The average farm in most of the southern slave states was substantially in excess of 200 acres (the national average) while the average farm in most of the northern states was 175 acres or fewer. In Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri – slaves states that had lower proportions of slaves than the states of the lower south – the average farm size tended toward the national average. Slavery contributed to the larger average farm size in the states of the lower south. Large plantations employed slaves as gang labor to produce cash crops – cotton, sugar, and rice – on a vast scale. Of the 20,289 farms that were between 500 and 1,000 acres, 83.4 percent were in southern states. Of the 5,348 farms that were 1,000 acres and larger, 85.5 percent were in the southern states. The average farm size in the Pacific coast states was also significantly higher than the other northern states. In Oregon 6.7 percent of the farms were 500 acres or larger, and in California 4.3 percent of the farms were of that size. In the other northern states, less than 1.0 percent of the farms were 500 acres or larger.