Culture and Agricultural Land Tenure1

The traces left by land transactions in legal records, maps, and family-farm size corroborate oral accounts and observations gathered during field studies among seven Illinois farming communities dominated by German and Yankee ethnic groups. Cultural factors are demonstrated to shape intergenerational land transmission practices, leading to ethnically distinctive patterns of land tenure, visible in the size of farms, persistence in farming, fragmentation of holdings, and amount of acreage owned or rented. Three family-land issues, synthesized from the field studies, are posited as pivotal to how local land tenure systems develop: who owns “family”-owned land, whether the group or individual welfare is of highest priority, and the value placed on connections between the household and community. As families enact land transmission, those who control it aim to reproduce customary asymmetric relations of gender, generation, and status that maintain the cultural system in its special configuration.