Library
Elkinsville, Indiana: The Town That Was · 12 of 13
Elkinsville, Indiana: The Town That Was
ARG Design HIGH

The Subsistence-Plus Economy

Elkinsville, Indiana: The Town That Was Elkinsville Editorial Committee
subsistence-economy barter cash-earning poverty mutual-aid self-provisioning

Key Principle

No Elkinsville family farmed at commercial scale. Chester Followell was explicit: "Everyone did a little farming in the Elkinsville area to help make their living. There were no farmers who farmed on a large scale." (Chapter: Family Stories — Followell) Every household combined self-provisioning — gardens of half an acre to five acres, livestock, canning hundreds of quarts annually, hunting for the table, foraging — with multiple small cash sources: crossties hand-hewn at $0.30 each (dropping to $0.10 during the Depression), sassafras bark and hides shipped by mail to New York drug companies and tanneries, eggs and cream sold to peddler wagons or Freetown groceries, ginseng gathered and sold, wage labor at stone quarries, and factory commutes to Bloomington or Columbus.

The peddler wagon (Jimmy Hamblen's "Family Store at your door" from Story; Helms' wagon Mondays; McDonald's wagon Thursdays) circulated through the community accepting chickens and eggs as currency. Bob Cross: "my mother would round up four or five chickens and I would deliver them to Emory and Ada. Sometimes the money from the chickens would be used to pay on our bill." Revival preachers were paid in "pound parties" of potatoes, canned food, kerosene, and smoked meat — "There wasn't enough money in those days for an offering." (Chapter: Family Stories — Lucas)

Poverty was portable: it traveled with displaced families. The same economic marginality that characterized Elkinsville life reproduced itself after displacement, because the subsistence-plus structure required the specific land, cooperative labor web, and institutional network of a known community.

Why This Matters

The subsistence-plus economy is why displacement was economically catastrophic beyond the land value. Factory jobs continued to exist after displacement — Abe Bowman went to Cummins Engine; Mabel Followell went to Sarkes Tarzian; the younger Elza Lucas went to Cummins as Senior Tool Engineer for 34 years. But these wages alone had never been sufficient. The subsistence half of the economic system — garden, game, canned goods, cooperative butchering, shared equipment, mutual credit — required the specific land and the cooperative web between households. Displacement didn't just move people; it amputated half their economy.

The 1848 Johnson Township tax data confirms structural poverty from the community's founding: 1,210 acres at roughly $2.14/acre, 43% tax delinquency rate, improvements worth more than the land itself. What later appeared to outside observers as Depression-era deprivation was, to Elkinsville residents, normalcy: "Times were as hard for my mom and dad as it was for the rest of the families in the Elkinsville area, but we didn't realize it as we were growing up." (Chapter: Family Stories — Bowman)

Good Examples

The hides-and-sassafras postal economy: William Followell trapped 30–40 muskrats per season plus minks, weasels, possums, and raccoons. Sassafras bark was dug, dried, bundled, and mailed from the Elkinsville Post Office to New York buyers; payment checks returned within ten to fifteen days. On some days, mail carrier Clarence Aynes's buggy was so full of dried sassafras roots that "there was no place for him to sit." This trade required the post office as a direct link: its closure in 1941 severed the channel between subsistence producers and distant markets. (Chapter: Post Office; Family Stories — Followell)

Noah Lucas's juvenile subsistence enterprise: Around age twelve, Noah Lucas partnered with mail carrier Clarence Aynes to gather walnuts, persimmons, and bittersweet for sale. He scouted locations by horseback in summer, harvested after school in fall, transported goods in a Radio Flyer wagon with custom sideboards, and let passing cars hull the walnuts by spreading them on the road. This was not supplemental income — it was the cash-earning layer of the subsistence-plus model, pursued by a twelve-year-old as a serious economic activity. (Chapter: Family Stories — Lucas)

Bramble Stogdill's itinerant decades: Bramble Stogdill (1896–1992) left the Elkinsville area and spent decades in serial migratory labor — timekeeper in Siscoe, Texas; railroad car rebuilding in Illinois; cotton picking in Arkansas; following a pea route in California for three years; farming in Oklahoma. "I got a job picking peas and followed a pea route for about three years." Each job was temporary; departure from Elkinsville did not yield upward mobility but permanent precarity. The subsistence economy's poverty was not place-bound — it reproduced itself wherever he went, now without the cooperative web that had made it survivable. (Chapter: Family Stories — Bramble Stogdill)

Counterpoints

Raymond Lucas replicated the mutual-aid structure in Columbus, partly successfully: After displacement, Raymond Lucas's home in Columbus became "The Hotel." He systematically invited strangers to holiday meals (planned for 40–50 guests), took out bank loans on others' behalf, and rather than accepting repayment, directed recipients to work for other community members in need — digging wells, hauling firewood for "widder ladies." "He put more people back to work than the Employment Security Division." The subsistence-plus ethic was portable in its values even when the land and community were gone. But the scale and self-sufficiency of the original system could not be reproduced. (Chapter: Family Stories — Lucas)

The extractive price structure made cash earning structurally inadequate: Barrel staves brought $1.50 per wagon load at Columbus minus a $0.25 toll, netting $1.25 — set by distant markets. Crossties paid $0.30 each in good years, $0.10 in the Depression; an exceptional worker hewing 25 ties in a twelve-hour day earned $2.50. The community's remoteness meant it exported only raw materials at prices determined by buyers it never met. The poverty of the subsistence-plus economy was not a failure of effort but a structural consequence of geographic isolation locking the community into the lowest tier of exchange.

Not all poverty was portable in the same way: For tenant families without property ownership, displacement sequences were different from those of landowners. Mary Agnes Bridgewater's family rented on the John Lutes place 1929–1940; when her mother died in 1940 and father in 1944, the children scattered to Illinois — not because of the Corps but because tenancy offered no stability. Displacement for tenant families cascaded through family death, not government acquisition. (Chapter: Family Stories — Mobley)

Key Quotes

"On the farm we had milk cows, horses, pigs, chickens, and no money." — Elkinsville Editorial Committee, Chapter: Family Stories — Bowman

"There were no farmers who farmed on a large scale." — Elkinsville Editorial Committee, Chapter: Family Stories — Followell (Chester)

"There wasn't enough money in those days for an offering, so they would have a 'pound party' before Grandpa left to go home." — Elkinsville Editorial Committee, Chapter: Family Stories — Lucas

"There were days when he would have to walk alongside his mail buggy because it was full of dried roots on their way to the market and there was no place for him to sit." — Elkinsville Editorial Committee, Chapter: Post Office (Clarence Aynes)

Rules of Thumb

  • When assessing displacement harm, add the subsistence half of the economic system to the wage-labor half; displacement's economic impact is not the lost land value but the lost combined system.
  • Cash-earning activities in subsistence-plus economies are diversified by necessity, not by choice — each stream (crossties, hides, eggs, ginseng) is individually inadequate; only the aggregate is viable.
  • Poverty that predates displacement does not simplify the harm; structural poverty made the community's cooperative labor web more essential, not less.
  • The portability of cultural values (Raymond Lucas's mutual aid in Columbus) should not be confused with the portability of the economic system those values sustained.

Related References