Tenant Farming in Oklahoma
Activities
Using Data Spatially: Mapping Farm Ownership in Oklahoma, 1910
Use this table or the Excel file to learn about the prevalence of tenant farming in Oklahoma during early statehood. Use the table to determine whether the number of owned farms is greater or lesser than the number of farms operated by tenants. Assign a color for the counties with more owned farms than tenant farms and a different color for the counties with fewer owned farms than tenant farms. Use that data to create a map.
Don’t forget to include a title and a map key!
Nagle, P. S. The Tenant Farmer, September 1912.(Note: Pittsburg County is in error.)
Using Data Spatially: Mapping Farm Ownership in Oklahoma, 1910
Use this table or the Excel file below to learn about the prevalence of tenant farming in Oklahoma during early statehood. Use the table to determine whether the number of owned farms is greater or lesser than the number of farms operated by tenants. Assign a color for the counties with more owned farms than tenant farms and a different color for the counties with fewer owned farms than tenant farms. Use that data to create a map.
Don’t forget to include a title and a map key!
Do you notice any patterns as you look at this information spatially that were not obvious on the table? Can you draw any conclusions about farming in Oklahoma based on this data? What questions do you have about farming in Oklahoma after creating this map?
Did you know that Oklahoma still has tenant farmers?
Check out this report from the Oklahoma State University County Extension: extension.okstate.edu/fact-sheets/oklahoma-cropland-rental-rates-2020-21.html.
Summarizing Cotton
Summarization is an important communication skill. Summarizing means providing a shortened version of a longer piece. When you summarize, you are trying to give the reader or listener a basic statement about the main ideas, or the most important information from a longer work. It is important that your summary is accurate and that you do not add information. You also need to put it in your own words. A good way to practice is to read an article or watch a video and write down the main ideas. Once you have the key information, you can put it in your own words. Try to practice your summarization skills as you learn about cotton:
The importance of cotton as a crop to the United States can not be overstated. Cotton production caused many Southerners to enslave a large number of people and forced them to work on cotton plantations. The desire for land to expand cotton production was a major reason for the removal of American Indian nations in the southeastern portion of the United States. The wealth generated from cotton as a cash crop resulted in the capital, or money that can be invested, to start the industrialization of the country.
Watch the videos linked below and read the newspaper article. Then, take your notes and create a summary of these videos. You can write your own summary or present your summary in a video.
- The History of Cotton: youtube.com/watch?v=lsz1PA-JYKU
- Growing and Harvesting Cotton: youtube.com/watch?v=lCidlr_pbI4
Cotton headed to the gin in Muskogee, Oklahoma, c. 1899 (14542.0, Heye Foundation Collection, OHS)
Transcript of “An Eventful Day in the Life of the Tenant Farmer”
(By P. S. Nagle)The momentous day in the life of the tenant farmer is not the day of his marriage or of his birth or the birth of his children. It is not Christmas or the Fourth of July. It is a day fixed by the statute. It is “Movin’ Day.” On this day, if so ordered by his landlord, he must put all his earthly effects in a wagon with his wife and children—take to the highway and hunt for another “home”—a wagon tramp.
He cannot leave the county with his earthly effects without written consent of the bank that holds the mortgage. If he should, he goes to jail.
And the new “home” that he goes to is a one-room shack with a lean-to decorated with woodpecker holes in the roof and rat holes in the parlor floor.And in his new “home” he works from can to can’t–from the time he can see until time he can’t see. He is an eight hour man. He works eight hours in the morning and eight in the afternoon.
And his wife works four hours at “shack work” and ten hours in “choppin” and “pickin.”
And every child over six years of age takes a vacation from September 1st to January 1st, and from April 1st to September 1st.
And their play-ground during the first vacation is the dreary cotton field. And these children pick cotton for a brutal and ruthless landlord class until the blood drips from the ends of their fingers. And in the cotton field they take their second vacation, “choppin” and “hoein.” And if caught in a high wind the rags they wear would whip them to death.
Nagle, P.S. “An Eventful Day in the Life of the Tenant Farmer”, The Tenant Farmer, October 1, 1914. View this article on The Gateway to Oklahoma History or read the above transcript.
