Thomas D. Campbell was a farmer and mechanical engineer. In 1918, when he was 36 years old and World War I was spurring demand for wheat, he started a 95,000-acre wheat farm in southeastern Montana. It was the largest farm in the United States and possibly the world. Located primarily on land leased from the Crow Indian reservation, the farm obtained a $2 million investment from New York financier J. P. Morgan.
As time went on, Soviet agricultural experts visited Campbell’s farm to learn how to use so many machines efficiently, and Campbell went to the Soviet Union as a technical adviser, where he met Josef Stalin. Campbell was famous, influential, and popular. His farm continued well beyond his death in 1966.
I doubt you have ever heard of him, however. I lived in Montana for 22 years and never heard of him. I have friends who lived there much longer who drew a blank when I brought up his name.
Yet in 1919, a story in Everybody’s Magazine, “200,000 Acres and Not a Single Horse,” was adulatory (Campbell had 200,000 acres at his disposal but cultivated about half of them).[1] In 1928, he was on the cover of Time Magazine. In 1935, a Fortune writer featured Campbell in a long story on breaking the sod, saying, “without Tom Campbell the tractor would have been a different and an inferior thing.”[2] That is because Campbell was the first to buy a lot of heavy farming equipment and he used his engineering acumen and powerful personality to insist on quality and durability. In 1949, he was the “wheat king of the world,” according to Harper’s Magazine.[3]
Some of the adulation continued after his death. “It is my opinion that Campbell deserves the title of the monarch of mechanized, industrialized, large-scale agriculture,” wrote Hiram Drache in Agricultural History in 1977, and he anointed him the “plower of the plains.“[4]
In 2003, Deborah Fitzgerald devoted a chapter of her book Every Farm a Factory to Campbell’s farming operation. To Fitzgerald, he epitomized the early twentieth-century movement toward industrial agriculture, the subject of her book. “He represented a hybrid of two traditions, engineering and farming, and he showed that the two had much in common,” she wrote. “His long-term success is compelling evidence for the soundness of his views.”[5]
Yet today, the headquarters of one of his big farm units, Camp No. 4, is just part of a museum in the small town of Hardin, Montana. Why do so few people know about him?
If you will bear with me, here’s a suggestion.
One of the lessons I learned when I was a journalist was that it’s great to get a story first—the “scoop”—but if other journalists don’t follow you, it’s not a scoop and you have a credibility problem. Similarly, it’s a coup to have the biggest wheat farm in the United States, but if it’s not something other farmers want (or dare) to try, you may be “on the wrong side of history,” rather than the herald of change. According to the Wall Street Journal, Frahm Farmlands, one of the largest farms in the United States today, has 30,600 acres in Kansas. That is less than a third of Campbell’s acreage.
Economist Peter J. Hill points out that while modern farms are mechanized, they are still, for the most part, family farms. (Indeed, Frahm Farmlands’ website describes itself as a “6th generation family farm.”) Not only did Campbell’s farm find few duplicates, but the “bonanza farms” of the previous era, which started the industrialization of farming, have largely disappeared, too. [6]
In addition, Campbell’s farm may not have been the success that it appeared to be. As Terry Anderson pointed out (in the same journal as Drache), after four years of no profits, J. P. Morgan let Campbell buy the ranch for “seventeen cents on the dollar.”[8] Thus, much of Campbell’s initial capital was essentially free; by leasing Indian land he avoided taxes (and possibly paid low rents); and he benefited from payments from Soviet visitors. Although the company operated until the 1980s (and the company bought land in New Mexico in the 1930s), the historians I’ve read have not revealed how many years the farm made money. While wheat can be grown with an average rainfall of 14 inches or less, years of drought can be devastating, and Montana had them .
Even so, Campbell was an engaging and brilliant entrepreneur, and he had a long run. There’s no doubt that he was efficient, he knew machines, and he managed his labor well. Why he is ignored still puzzles me. I invite your thoughts.
(My second article on Thomas Campbell, “Was Thomas Campbell Duped?” can be found here.)
Notes
[1] Robert H. Moulton, “200,000 Acres and Not a Single Horse.” Everybody’s Magazine 41, no. 1 (July) 1919, 47. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Everybody_s_Magazine/6ZnPAAAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1
[2] “Grasslands:The Broken Sod,” Fortune, April 1935, 65-66, 185-90, at 185. Drache (below) identifies the Fortune writer as Archibald MacLeish.
[3] “Joseph Kinsley Howard, “Tom Campbell: Farmer of Two Continents,” Harper’s Magazine, March 1949, 55-63, at 56.
[4] Hiram Drache, “Thomas D. Campbell: The Plower of the Plains,” Agricultural History 51, no. 1 (1977): 78-91, at 70n, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3741634.
[5] Deborah Fitzgerald, Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture (New Haven: Yale, 2003).
[6] Douglas W. Allen and Dean Lueck, The Nature of the Farm: Contracts, Risk, and Organization in Agriculture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).
[7] Terry L. Anderson, “Bonanza Farmers and Subsistence: A Response.” Agricultural History 51, no. 1 (1977): 104-08, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3741636.
Image: Thomas D. Campbell (right) with the vice minister of agriculture of the Kazakhstan Soviet Republic. Photo courtesy of the Bighorn County Historical Museum, Hardin, Montana.
Thomas D. Campbell. I didn’t know much about him till I Googled his name.
He actually is an older relative of my Campbell family.
I have a handwritten letter that he sent to my Great Aunt Queenie. He calls her “cousin” in his letter.
He seems (from what I have read) to have been an interesting person.
Thanks for commenting. I’m so pleased that this spurred you to find out more. It’s odd how some people who are so famous go “off the radar” in the years after they die. I guess that’s what historians do—bring them back to public view.
Before wheat could become king of Montana, it is worth noting that wheat had to be brought to America from Europe. When the Spanish arrived in America, they discovered lots of corn, but no wheat to make their kind of bread. They brought wheat, cattle , pork, and other crops and animals to ‘America and took corn, chocolate, and other products back to Europe as part of the famous Columbian Exchange.
Reference:
Grennes, Thomas, Paul Johnson, and Marie Thursby. The Economics of World Grain Trade. New York: Praeger, 1978.
And later Rose Wilder Lane, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s journalist daughter, described her father’s failure to farm in S. Dakota and their move to the rumored great soils of Kansas. They were almost starving as they crossed into Kansas and were invited to a feast some immigrants were having. The immigrants, she writes, were Russians and they had brought with them the grain that would make the Midwest the “Bread Basket” of America–winter wheat.
Thank you, Tom. I didn’t realize that wheat was a transported grain.
I begin wondering why so few successful farmers are well known, though we have heard much about the failures. Almanzo Wilder’s failures became the Little House on the Prairie books and TV series. Then we have the Dust Bowl stories. And more recently “Farm Aid” started in 1985 by Willie Nelson and others to help failing farmers.
Small note:
“In addition to all that, he was a veteran of two world wars.” He was 36 in 1918 so I assume he served in WWI though he was back in Montana growing wheat in 1918 (the armistice being Nov 11 that year). By 1940 he would be about 58.
According to Harper’s (1949) Cambpell was a brigadier general in the United States Army Reserve, “attached to the General Staff: during World War II he served in every theater and participated in several combat engagements.” However, it appears he did not serve in World War I, but started the farm instead. I’m going to remove that statement and replace it with another I didn’t have room for.