How wheat growing, milling, and baking shaped the people and culture of North Texas. In the national imaginary, America's amber fields of grain lie in the country's center, but for more than a century, they also grew across one pocket of the South: North Texas. From the 1840s to the 1970s, the state's agriculture, dominated in lore by cotton in the east and livestock in the open range, was heavily invested in the cultivation, processing, sale, and consumption of wheat. Recalling a forgotten history, Rebecca Sharpless shows how the rhythms of the wheat harvest-and the evolution of the milling, distribution, and baking industries-governed daily life in what is now known as the Dallas-Forth Worth Metroplex. In the 1840s, Anglo settlers discovered that grain flourished in North Texas and quickly built an economy that included wheat in fields, mills, and kitchens. After the Civil War, hand labor gave way to mechanization, greatly increasing production. Commercial bakeries churned out novel confections, and big cities were built on the bounty of the countryside. In the second half of the twentieth century, as production moved northward, industrial milling and baking declined, but home baking boomed, flour advertising supported regional music, and wheat fortunes financed the region's cultural life. Sharpless covers 150 years of wheat's very human history and shows how the labor that cultivated it, the sustenance it provided, and the prosperity it generated left an indelible mark on the people and institutions of Texas.
Rebecca Sharpless is a professor of history at Texas Christian University. She is the author of Fertile Ground, Narrow Choices: Women on Texas Cotton Farms, Cooking in Other Women's Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South; and Grain and Fire: A History of Baking in the American South.
List of Illustrations Prologue: "Definitive Excellence" Introduction: Soil and People 1. "Our Prairie Flour": Colonization, 1840-1861 2. "The Granary of the Confederate States": Civil War, 1861-1865 3. From Prairie to Production: Growing Wheat, 1865-1900 4. Oxen to Electricity: Milling, 1865-1900 5. From Biscuits to Angel Food Cake: Baking, 1865-1900 6. Wheat in the Spring and Cotton in the Fall: Growing, 1900-1940 7. Mechanization, Marketing, and Music: Milling, 1900-1940 8. Homemade Sweets and Standardized Bread: Baking, 1900-1940 9. Fading Glory, Waning Memory: 1940-1972 Epilogue Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index
People of the Wheat is the rare agricultural history that is hard to put down. We meet farmers, mill workers, bakers, and entrepreneurs whose lives were bound up in Texas wheat from the mid-nineteenth century through the twentieth, and through them come to understand how the rise and fall of one crop shaped a region. This engaging, well-written book is for Texans curious about the silos in their backyard, students of agricultural and food history, and anyone who loves rich stories of people, soil, industry, and white bread.--James C. Giesen, Mississippi State University, author of Boll Weevil Blues: Cotton, Myth, and Power in the American South Rebecca Sharpless has provided us with a fascinating book about a Texas most people did not know existed. People of the Wheat is economic history, but it is also technological, social, and gender history. She tells us about the sowing, harvesting, grinding, and baking, but also the culture that grew and prospered because of North Texas's investment in wheat. Sharpless has beautifully captured the stories of the many peoples that created and developed the wheat culture of north Texas.--Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, Iowa State University, When a Dream Dies: Agriculture, Iowa, and the Farm Crisis of the 1980s
