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Title: "How Ya Gonna Keep 'Em Down on the Farm [When They've Seen Schenectady]?: Rural-to-Urban Migration 19th Century America, 1850-70"

Citation Type: Miscellaneous

Publication Year: 1999

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Abstract: In 1920, the U.S. Census reported that, for the first time, a larger share of the nation’s population was living in urban places (with more than 2,500 inhabitants) than was living in rural places. Though it can be said that we had become an urbanized economy by this date, the process of urbanization both began considerably earlier, in the first half of the nineteenth century, and continued down through the end of the twentieth century. Though we know the general outlines of the nation’s urbanization, we know very little about the forces at work at the individual or household level that resulted in these broad patterns. This essay offers some evidence of how those forces operated. It employs data on several thousand native-born males linked across the 1850-60 and 1860-70 decades and provides the first micro-level analysis of the causes and consequences of migration to America’s small town and cities for the nineteenth century

Url: http://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/~fe2r/papers/urban.pdf

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Authors: Ferrie, Joseph P

Publisher: NBER Department of Economics and Institute for Policy Research, Northwestern University

Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Migration and Immigration

Countries: United States