Paul--

As Carole Nash pointed out, secondary sources  may be of some help in this matter. For instance:

Clark, Victor S.
1929    History of Manufactures in the United States, Volume 1, 1607-1860. 1949 ed. Pub. by Peter Smith, New York.

U.S. Bureau of the Census
1965 ed.        The Statistical History of the United States from Colonial Times to the Present. Fairfield Publishers, Inc.,
Washington, D.C.

Gray, Lewis C.
1933    History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860. Peter Smith,  Reprints, New York.


South Carolina publishes a yearly statistical abstract, which may be mirrored in other states.

Check their bibliographies for obscure leads!

Good luck, Carl Steen


2/9/2001 9:11:11 PM, "Carole L. Nash" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>Paul and Ron et al -- I first ran into the agricultural and manufacturing
>schedules while researching general trends in farm size in some of the
>upper Shenandoah Valley counties.  The 1885 Historical Atlas of Augusta
>County includes a selection entitled, "The Physiography of Augusta County,
>Virginia," by Jed Hotchkiss (well known in these parts as surveyor and
>cartographer).  The sub-section "Animal and Vegetable Productions" is based
>on a comparison of 1850-1880 census data and includes tables that track
>changes in types of livestock, cleared and wooded acreage, old fields, cost
>of building and repairing fences, bushels of clover seed, pounds of honey,
>etc. -- an incredible resource.  I didn't use the primary records (didn't
>need to for this very general level of research) and didn't try to find
>them, but I was again reminded of the potential goldmine when I came across
>similar syntheses for the 1900-1920 period in several publications by the
>University of Virginia's School of Rural Social Economics.
>
>I was bowled over when I finally saw an example of the agricultural and
>manufacturing census on-line at Edward Ayers' *Valley of the Shadow* web
>page.  A study of two counties (Augusta County, Virginia and Franklin
>County, Pennsylvania) on the eve of the Civil War, the project is "a
>hypermedia archive of thousands of sources", including 1860 census records.
>For those of you who have never seen the agricultural and manufacturing
>census, I highly recommend a stop at
>http://jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU/vshadow2/govdoc/census.html
>Included in this section are guides that explain the history of the A and M
>census, the enumeration process, the evolution of categories, an
>explanation of fields, etc.
>
>Of course, this is well before the time period in which you're interested,
>but you might contact Dr. Ayers and ask about availability of these
>records.
>
>Carole Nash, Dept. Soc/Anth, James Madison University, Harrisonburg, VA 22807
>