Back in Time Column: Century Farms and You

If you’re anything like me, you’ve rambled around Cape Girardeau County’s hundreds of miles of meandering back roads and maybe seen one of the stately white signs announcing the land’s status of Century Farm. Many farms in the county qualify as a Century Farm, and at the Cape Girardeau County Archive Center, we can help fill in some of the necessary information.

The Missouri Century Farm program is offered by the University of Missouri Extension, which is a fantastic resource. They offer everything from soil testing to cooking classes, and their website is well worth a quick visit. The Century Farm program recognizes farms that have been farmed by the same family for at least 100 years with a minimum of 40 acres contributing to the family’s current gross income.

Our staff has helped with a few successful Century Farm applications, and we are delighted to do so. Genealogy is a big part of the research we help facilitate and has many applications beyond a family tree. In the case of a Century Farm application, genealogy is vital to establishing family links between those who have owned and farmed a given tract of land in the county. At the Archive, we can show researchers how to find information, give a chart to fill out to keep the information organized, and even potentially find ancestors on maps or in probate records.

Cape Girardeau County was founded in 1812, prior to Missouri’s 1821 statehood, but settlers were arriving for decades prior to that. Records at the Archive Center date back as early as the 1790s, when present-day Missouri was part of the Louisiana Territory, controlled by the French, then the Spanish, then the French again, until the United States bought the Louisiana Territory in 1803, mere weeks after the French had taken it over again. That 1803 date is pivotal, as many families had already settled in the territory, including in present-day Cape Girardeau County. If a stakeholder could prove they’d been living on the property and had improved it (again, pivotal), the claim was considered valid.

So those are the original land grants, some given as payment for military service, some by the government to help hold the land. I should mention the earliest settlers took the land by force, and while there were few if any Native American settlements in this county, the land was occupied. The displacement was horrific and inexcusable. It was also government policy, and immigrants, mainly from Europe, rushed to the area on the promise of free land. Some families and unmarried people set out in groups, while others arrived singly. Over time, the formerly whistlingly empty territory began to fill up.

Many of these earliest settlers had descendants who stayed in the area. Information on their family lines often exists in probate records, also called estate papers. These files were created when a deceased person, or decedent, had property that needed to be divided, so the decedent’s heirs would go to court over it. Sometimes those heirs were named in the documents, sometimes not. Deed records, housed at the Recorder of Deeds’ office, also sometimes show a familial relationship. Tax records can show who was paying for a particular parcel in a given year.

Anyone who has applied for membership in the Daughters or Sons of the American Revolution (DAR or SAR, respectively) knows documentation from that time period was not always complete then and has not always survived intact. Courthouse fires happened. If a county did not have a centralized office for archives (and most didn’t and don’t — Cape Girardeau County has had an Archive Center only since the year 2000, for example), records were stored as they could be, not always in ideal conditions. I harp on this, but it’s absolutely true that Cape Girardeau County residents and those with ties to the region have a tremendous asset in this place.

The Century Farm program application period is from Feb. 1 to May 1 each year. For anyone interested in learning more about the Century Farm program, I suggest a first step of checking out the program’s website at extension.missouri.edu/programs/century-farms and figuring out whether the property in question is eligible. If a landowner has a title abstract, most of the heavy lifting is already done. If not, the Archive Center is here to help. I also suggest checking the Bureau of Land Management Government Land Office website at glorecords.blm.gov/ to see if the original land grant can be tracked down. Again, the Archive Center can help navigate the websites. We are here to help.

Marybeth Niederkorn is the director of the Cape Girardeau County Archive Center in Jackson and holds various leadership positions dedicated to preserving and furthering the county’s rich history.