Distilling Grain, Feeding Livestock

2020 ◽  
pp. 56-73
Author(s):  
Karl Raitz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Great Plains ◽  
Industrial Scale ◽  
Human Consumption ◽  
Farm Families ◽  
Canadian Prairie ◽  
Corn Production ◽  
Spent Grains ◽  
Indian Corn ◽  
Bluegrass Region

Kentucky’s nineteenth-century distillers used Indian corn as their primary grain, but they also distilled wheat, rye, and barley. Thus, they needed reliable sources of quality grain. Corn became a staple grain, consumed in quantity by farm families and town residents alike. Corn was widely grown in the nineteenth century, but before 1860, only farmers in the Bluegrass region were producing sufficient grain to feed their own livestock, sell to millers for human consumption, and meet distillers’ demands. After the Civil War, corn production increased, and the grain became more widely available for industrial-scale distilling. Wheat and rye were not extensively grown in Kentucky; they were more valuable than corn for foodstuffs and were not favored by distillers. Although Kentucky farmers produced barley, supplies were often deficient in quantity and quality for malting and use by distillers, necessitating its importation by rail from producers on the Great Plains and in the Canadian Prairie Provinces. Distillers fed hogs and cattle on spent grains, or slop, throughout the distilling season, and by season’s end in late spring, the animals had achieved market weight. This was a form of agriculture-distilling complementarity.

A “Hired Girl” Testifies Against the “Son of a Prominent Family”: Bastardy and Rape on the Nineteenth-Century Nebraska Plains

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donna Rae Devlin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Great Plains ◽  
Life Experience ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Primary Component ◽  
Space And Place ◽  
Successful Outcome ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Civil Suit ◽  
Sexual Power

Abstract In Red Cloud, Nebraska, in 1887, Anna “Annie” Sadilek (later Pavelka) pressed bastardy charges against the “son of a prominent family,” even though she could have, according to her pre-trial testimony, pressed charges for rape. To the literary world, Sadilek is better known as Ántonia Shimerda, the powerful protagonist in Willa Cather’s 1918 novel, My Ántonia. However, it is Sadilek’s real-life experience that allows us to better understand life on the Nebraska Plains, specifically through an examination of the state’s rape laws and the ways these laws were subsequently interpreted by the courts. The Nebraska Supreme Court, between 1877 and 1886, established the need for the state to prove force as a primary component of the definition for rape, drew boundaries around acceptable reporting times, and solidified their stance on the requirement of corroborating testimony. These factors led Sadilek to charge Charley Kaley not with rape but with bastardy, a civil suit, which almost guaranteed a successful outcome for Sadilek and her child because it would not burden the county or state with their financial welfare. In analyzing Sadilek’s choices before the law, this article demonstrates the complexities of the gendered legal systems facing women like Sadilek who sought justice for crimes of a sexual nature. Additionally significant, this article draws attention to a space and place that lacks significant study in regard to the sexual power dynamics of the nineteenth-century Great Plains West, a multicultural contact zone highly susceptible to the influences of hypermasculine control.

Agronomy of Dryland Corn Production at the Northern Fringe of the Great Plains

jpa ◽  
1991 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 606-613 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. J. Major ◽  
R. J. Morrison ◽  
R. E. Blackshaw ◽  
B. T. Roth
Keyword(s):  
Great Plains ◽  
Corn Production ◽  
Northern Fringe

A Comment on John Rowzée Peyton and the Mound Builders: The Elevation of a Nineteenth-Century Fraud to a Twentieth-Century Myth

1989 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 161-165 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey K. Yelton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Great Plains ◽  
Critical Examination

Blakeslee (1987) has suggested that the Mound Builder myth in part can be traced to John Rowzée Peyton, who reportedly crossed the Great Plains in 1774 and probed a mound, attributing it to a past, non-Indian civilization. However, critical examination of the account, first published in 1867, indicates that John Rowzée Peyton’s adventure actually was invented by his grandson, John Lewis Peyton.

Wired into Nature

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Schwoch
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
North America ◽  
Communication Networks ◽  
Great Plains ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Electronic Communication ◽  
Spanish American War ◽  
White House ◽  
Atlantic Seaboard

This book is a study of the telegraph in western North America, concentrating on the latter half of the nineteenth century. A number of distinguished books and articles have been written about the telegraph and the nineteenth-century American experience. For the most part, however, this scholarly work is geographically partial. The standard histories of the American telegraph are stories of the East Coast and the Atlantic Seaboard, the growing Midwest, and service to urban areas. This book looks toward the West. The narrative includes landscapes and ecosystems, meteorology, surveillance, and containment and conflict with Native Americans. Major themes include the high ground, the signal flow, the state secret, and the secure command. Opening with discussion of the first attempts to bring the telegraph to the Trans-Mississippi West, the book concludes with the consolidation of the secure command of electronic communication networks in the White House during the Spanish-American War, detailing the transformation of electronic communication networks from continentalism to globalism. The terrain of the narrative incudes the Great Plains, the Southwest, the Pacific Coast, the Rocky Mountains, the border with Mexico, and the subarctic and arctic areas of North America. This book presents an interpretive approach that centers on environmental, climatological, military, and surveillance issues as key factors in the history of electronic communication networks.

Making Bourbon

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karl Raitz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
International Markets ◽  
Temperance Movement ◽  
General Process ◽  
Spent Grains ◽  
Product Identity ◽  
Production Techniques ◽  
Scott County ◽  
Livestock Diseases

Kentucky distillers have produced bourbon and rye whiskeys for more than two centuries. Part I of this book examines the complexities associated with nineteenth-century distilling’s evolution from an artisanal craft practiced by farmers and millers to a large-scale mechanized industry that adopted increasingly refined production techniques. The change from waterpower to steam engines permitted the relocation of distilleries away from traditional sites along creeks or at large springs. Commercial-scale distilling was accompanied by increasing government taxes and oversight controls. Mechanized distilleries readily expanded production and increased their demand for labor, grains, cooperage, copper stills, and other metal fixtures. Improved transportation—turnpikes, steamboats, trains, and dams and locks—allowed distillers to extend their reach for grains and equipment while distributing their product to national and international markets. Industrial production produced large amounts of spent grains, or slop, which had to be disposed of by feeding it to livestock or dumping it in sinkholes and creeks. Industrialization also increased the risk of fire, explosions, personal injury, and livestock diseases. Overproduction during the last third of the nineteenth century, among other problems, forced many distilleries to stop production or close. The temperance movement eventually led to Prohibition, which was in effect nationwide from 1920 to 1933. A small number of distillers survived that period by making medicinal whiskey. Part II consists of two case studies that provide detailed information on the general process of mechanization and industrialization: the Henry McKenna Distillery in Nelson County, and James Stone’s Elkhorn Distillery in Scott County. Part III examines the process of claiming product identity through naming, copyright law, and the acknowledgment that tradition and heritage can be employed by contemporary distillers to market their whiskey. Distillers venerate the “old,” and reconstructing the past as a marketing strategy has demonstrated that the industry’s heritage resides on the landscape—much of it established in the nineteenth century in the form of historic buildings, traditional routes, distillery towns, and other features that can be conserved through historic preservation and utilized by contemporary whiskey makers.

The modern abattoir as a machine for killing: the municipal abattoir of the Shanghai International Settlement, 1933

2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 131-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yi-Wen Wang ◽  
John Pendlebury
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Production Line ◽  
Spatial Layout ◽  
Human Consumption ◽  
Meat Processing ◽  
Art Deco ◽  
The Public ◽  
Archival Material ◽  
Special Places ◽  
And Control

The public abattoir emerged as an institution across the industrialized world in the mid-nineteenth century to centralize and control animal killing and meat processing, activities that had traditionally taken place in private slaughterhouses. The modern idea of the abattoir, however, is more than a place where animals are killed for human consumption. Designed to optimize a disassembling process that efficiently took apart the livestock into small pieces, the modern abattoir is one of the earliest building types where the production line was incorporated into the spatial layout. Modern abattoirs also separated livestock from people, and production from consumption, into special places removed from public view.This paper is concerned with the production of a public abattoir in 1930s colonial Shanghai. The Shanghai Municipal Abattoir, completed in 1933, was deliberately designed as a ‘machine for killing’, which applied production-line principles to the efficient slaughter of animals. The result of this functionalism was an extraordinary series of multi-storey concrete structures, dictated by the bloody business of slaughtering animals and processing their carcasses, set behind an art deco façade. In this paper we seek to tell the story of the production of a building that has previously been little researched, with most of the archival material in Shanghai Municipal Archives (SMA) and the limited published material available only in Mandarin.

Cotton, Corn and Risk in the Nineteenth Century

1975 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 526-551 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gavin Wright ◽  
Howard Kunreuther
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Economic Development ◽  
Civil War ◽  
World Cotton ◽  
The South ◽  
Satisfactory Explanation ◽  
Corn Production ◽  
Historical Literature ◽  
Self Sufficiency ◽  
Per Capita

Why Did “Uncle Remus” exhort the post-bellum South to reduce its cotton-growing in favor of corn? His complaint was prompted in the immediate sense by the low cotton prices of the early 1890's, but such comments reflected a continuing discontent over the region's abandonment of self-sufficiency in foods after the Civil War. The ratio of cotton output to com was probably at an antebellum peak in 1860, but this ratio had been easily exceeded by 1880, as Table 1 indicates. In the leading cotton states, per capita corn production and the per capita stock of hogs were only about half of what they had been twenty years earlier. Coinciding as it did with a major era of stagnation in world cotton demand, this shift into cotton is of great importance for the subsequent economic development of the South. Despite its size and significance, the shift lacks a satisfactory explanation in the historical literature.

Status of a broadly distributed endangered species: results and implications of the second International Piping Plover Census

2000 ◽  
Vol 78 (1) ◽  
pp. 128-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan H Plissner ◽  
Susan M Haig
Keyword(s):  
Endangered Species ◽  
Great Plains ◽  
Atlantic Coast ◽  
The United States ◽  
Greater Antilles ◽  
Piping Plover ◽  
Canadian Prairie ◽  
Wintering Birds ◽  
The U.S ◽  
Second International

Methods for monitoring progress toward recovery goals are highly variable and may be problematic for endangered species that are mobile and widely distributed. Recovery objectives for Piping Plovers (Charadrius melodus) include attainment of minimum population sizes within specified recovery units, as determined by two U.S. and two Canadian recovery teams. To assess progress toward these goals, complete surveys of the species' winter and breeding ranges in Canada, the United States, Mexico, the Bahamas, and the Greater Antilles are conducted every 5 years. In 1996, 1200 biologists and volunteers participated in the second International Piping Plover Census, tallying 2515 wintering birds and 5913 adults (2668 breeding pairs) during the breeding census. Winter numbers were 27% lower than those of the first international census conducted in 1991, with substantially fewer wintering birds along the Gulf of Mexico and an overall increase in numbers along the Atlantic Coast. Large numbers of wintering plovers remain undetected. In 1996, the total number of breeding adults was 7.7% higher than in 1991. Regionally, breeding numbers were 31% higher along the Atlantic Coast and 20% higher in the small Great Lakes population, but declined by 5% in the U.S. Great Plains and the Canadian Prairie. Target recovery numbers were met only for Saskatchewan but were approached in Alberta and New England. The results suggest that Piping Plover distribution and habitat use in the U.S. Great Plains/Canadian Prairie region may shift dramatically with water conditions.

Microbial dynamics during production of lesser mealworms (Alphitobius diaperinus) for human consumption at industrial scale

2018 ◽  
Vol 70 ◽  
pp. 181-191 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. Wynants ◽  
S. Crauwels ◽  
C. Verreth ◽  
N. Gianotten ◽  
B. Lievens ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Industrial Scale ◽  
Human Consumption ◽  
Microbial Dynamics ◽  
Alphitobius Diaperinus
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