Cultivated Plants
ISM Herbarium Sheet
This section will cover the changing array of plants that Illinois farmers have grown from 5,000 years ago to today.
Native Americans were the first people to cultivate plants in Illinois. They gradually changed their customs from a pure hunting and gathering society to one that included semi-permanent settlements and agriculture.
In the late seventeenth to late nineteenth centuries, Euro-Americans and Americans from the eastern and southern states immigrated to the new Illinois Country of the Indiana Territory and set up homesteads with farming.
As mechanization replaced horsepower and saved labor, some crops, such as oats, were grown less, soy beans were introduced, and larger amounts of corn replaced many acres of subsistence crops.
