Farm Mortgages in the Middle West

Abstract

Agrarians and traditional historians viewed the farm mortgage as one of the major grievances of western farmers in the late nineteenth century. It is said that eastern moneylenders charging usurious interest rates were robbing the debt-ridden farmers of the Middle West. Recent historians, however, tend to emphasis the brighter side of farm mortgages. The revisionists hold that (1) the proportion of mortgaged farms was not high enough to arouse farmers; (2) farmers borrowed money for productive purposes; (3) the interest rates were declining throughout the decades; (4) the average life span of a farm mortgage was very short; and (5) the source of mortgage credit was the Middle West. The purpose of this paper is to reexamine the arguments upheld by revisionist historians, especially those based on quantitative methods.