Our Platte County’s early farmers and pioneer historian, W.M. Paxton, would likely be able to offer some valuable agrarian and business advice regarding a current news issue, one appearing almost weekly these days.
Quoting a private letter of Dec. 22, 1846, Mr. Paxton related in his Annals of Platte County:
“The farmers of Platte County put in less hemp than usual last spring (1846), but the fiber is better and heavier and will equal last year’s (1845). Lafayette County produces the most hemp perhaps 1,500 tons. Platte and Jackson come next, producing, each, 1,000 tons; and Clay 900 tons. ...The farmers of Missouri seldom stack hemp. They suffer it to receive enough rain, and after cutting to color it. It was then taken up and shucked, without binding. About the middle of October it is spread out to rot. Our winters are so dry that the hemp must receive several rains before it is rotted. I have frequently seen hemp taken up in spring not half rotted.”
Bill Graham
Hemp is in the news because the federal Agriculture Act of 2018 legalized hemp and hemp products, such as CBD oil. Farmers and advocates pushed for this with support from key Republicans and Democrats. Also, Missouri voters have legalized medical marijuana. Parkville aldermen are now working on ordinances that would govern medical marijuana operations in the city. Medical marijuana testing lab sites have been approved by state officials at sites in Platte City and near KCI in Kansas City. Licenses to produce medical marijuana have been state approved for businesses in the Weston and Dearborn communities. Retail stores selling CBD products for health use are popping up throughout the county and they’re a rage throughout the nation.
This is highly unusual to those who lived through the 1960s and 1970s and the War on Drugs in the decades after. I do not condemn. But I do marvel at how time changes things.
Hemp and marijuana are closely related in the plant family Cannabaceae, genus Cannabis. There are three species and various strains within this plant classification. The difference according to current law is that hemp plant leaves, stems, and flowers contain less than 0.3 percent THC, the chemical that produces a temporary high in pot smokers. Marijuana contains far higher levels of THC and is illegal under current federal and Missouri law. But growing in the field, they look the same. Smoking hemp will give you a cough and a headache, while smoking marijuana will give you a high before the cough arrives.
Once again, the legal economics of cannabis plants are in play in the nation and our county.
In the 1840s, settlers from Kentucky who had grown hemp for use in ropes and other commercial items soon found that the plant grew well in Platte County. They harvested fibers from plant’s tough stems. Shipping on the Missouri River made markets reachable. Slave labor did much of the farming, cutting, and processing that led to a baled product. Hemp and slave labor created wealth that paid for many of the fine old antebellum homes that still stand in our county. Even people like Mr. Paxton, believed by some to have been anti-slavery, played a role.
The Mexican-American War greatly boosted Platte County’s economy and hemp profits, Mr. Paxton noted at the end of 1846.
“For years Mexican silver and American half dollars were the chief circulation,” Paxton wrote. “From 1845 to 1849 I was buying hemp for the Louisville Manufacturing Company and dealt chiefly in silver half dollars. In 1847 German gold was abundant. For several years I purchased one third of the crop, and I paid for it chiefly in subsidiary silver. Bank notes were at a discount. Merchants often sent silver to St. Louis by steamboats. There were no banks then, and there were no robbers. I made hundreds of horseback trips, from Parkville, Platte City, and Weston, with saddle bags weighted with silver.”
The Civil War changed things. With no slave labor, hemp was not as easily produced. That and competition from similar products caused hemp to fade in Platte County. Paxton gives 1877 as his last reference of hemp sales in the county.
But hemp plants produce prolific seeds. Hemp continued to grow wild throughout the county in fences, roadsides, untended meadows. Nobody thought much of it until marijuana sellers in the 1970s harvested it illegally to water down real pot and improve profits. In the early 1980s, wild hemp was common in the county. A law enforcement officer once told me that oldtimers valued a mature hemp stalk for use in setting pole lines for catfish in the Platte River, as they had good flex. Today, drug enforcement efforts, along with regular farming practices seems to have eradicated most.
But perhaps hemp will return in some form. New machinery and technology will replace manual labor in harvest and manufacturing. The University of Missouri Extension Service offers new guides for perspective hemp farmers. Likely such crops will be in patches, like tobacco, perhaps planted in the river bottoms. But, the farmers of the 1840s did not foresee the crop’s demise, so how can we know how far it will rise again, or not?