Thoroughly Modern Farming
We lit every light in the house and barn the first night to see if the wires would
really handle it. It did. —Verna Krogman, Coral
When they turned on the lights, all of us kids jumped up and down and my mother
cried. —Charles Curtiss, Lapeer
 Mechanization
transformed the life and work of Michigan farmers in the early 1900s. Tractors, steam
engines, gasoline engines and electricity began to reduce the number of workers needed on
the farm. The telephone and radio broke the isolation of rural communities, linking them
with urban populations.
Nineteenth-century Michigan farms grew a wide variety of crops and raised many
different animals; 20th-century Michigan farms specialized. By 1930, almost half of
Michigan's 169,372 farms were general or specialty crop farms. Twenty-five percent
of Michigan farmers were dairy farmers. Others had orchards, vegetable,
poultry or livestock (e.g., swine, beef cattle) farms.
Tractors
I retired the horses . . . when I began farming. The horses were too slow: an
all-day job with the horses took me three hours by tractor. —Lina G. Coleman, Jr.,
Coleman Centennial Farm, Midland County
Early tractors—usually powered by steam—were too expensive and too large for the
average farmer. They worked best on large open flat tracts of land such as Great Plains
wheat farms. Smaller tractors useful to Michigan farmers were developed when gasoline
engines became powerful enough to pull heavy farm equipment.
 Henry Ford experimented with tractor technology for ten years before
creating Fordson tractors like this one in the exhibit. He created the Henry Ford and Son
Corporation in 1917 to manufacture and sell this tractor at $750. Mass production dropped
the price to $395 in 1922. The model in the gallery was started with gasoline, but it
ran on kerosene.
Electrification
Although used mostly for street lighting and public buildings, electricity for lighting
city homes in Michigan became widespread during the 1890s. But it was expensive to provide
electrical service to widely scattered farms. With electricity unavailable or cost
prohibitive, many farms modernized with gasoline-powered generators. Often the tractor
itself was used as a stationery engine to power silo fillers, log splitters and other farm
equipment. Smaller stationery engines drove machines that separated cream from milk,
shelled corn or washed clothes.
Consumers Power, now Consumers Energy, experimented with electrifying rural areas in
1926-27, building a line between Mason and Dansville, connecting 33 farms over a
seven-mile area. The company, at its own expense, gave farmers in this area an opportunity
to try out new electrical appliances. The farm wife got her first electrical washing
machine, and her husband ran a string of lights in the barn.
In 1935, the federal government created the Rural Electrification Administration (REA).
The REA granted long-term loans to local governments and farmers' cooperatives to enable
farmers to bring electricity to their individual farms. By 1940, more than 60% of Michigan farms
were using electricity.
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