GEOGRAPHICAL CONCENTRATION. 5 



Indian corn, or maize, is cultivated in this country from the 

 most easterly county in Maine to the most westerly in the 

 state of Washington and from the valley of the Red River of 

 the North to the confines of the Everglades of Florida. Its 

 area of production is, in fact, more generally distributed than 

 that of any other product except grass, and yet at no agricul- 

 tural census ever taken has there been less than 38.57 per 

 cent of the total crop of the country produced in what have 

 been for the time being the four leading corn-producing states, 

 while the percentage has been as high as 52.36 and was 

 50. 80 as recently as 1889. The states that stood first, second, 

 and third in the scale of prodtiction in 1839 stood tenth, eighth, 

 and seventeenth in rank, respectively, in 1889, notwithstand- 

 ing that their own aggregate production had increased 41.72 

 per cent. On so vast a scale is corn now cultivated in a group 

 of states in the Mississippi and Missouri valleys that the com- 

 bined production of Iowa, Illinois, and Kansas in 1889 ex- 

 ceeded by over 100,000,000 bushels the total corn crop of the 

 country but twenty years before. It was the year 1879, how- 

 ever, that witnessed, so far as can be determined from official 

 statistics, the high-water mark of the tendency to concentra- 

 tion in the cultivation of this favorite product, the produc- 

 tion of the states of Illinois and Iowa in that year aggregat- 

 ing the enormous total of 600,816,728 bushels, or 34.23 per 

 cent of the entire crop of the country. During the following 

 decade there was some tendency toward decentralization, but 

 yet the census of 1890 found over one-half of the total corn 

 crop of the previous year to have been produced in four states 

 containing less than one-tenth of the entire area of the country, 

 notwithstanding that a production of at least one-tenth of a 

 bushel to every acre of land surface and of at least five bushels 

 per capita of population extended all the way from the St. 

 Lawrence River to the Gulf of Mexico and westward to 



