Le Grand Champ: The French Common Fields of the Middle Mississippi Valley

In the 18th century, the French villages of the middle Mississippi River Valley developed a pattern of land use, settlement and farming unique in North America. Cahokia, Kaskaskia, Fort de Chartres, Ste. Genevieve, St. Louis, Carondelet and Florissant all used it. Part of Ste. Geneviève's great common field, le Grand Champ, is still farmed today.

Part of what was le Grand Champ, still farmland today. NPS / David Newmann

Village, commons and common fields

Beyond the village streets lay two kinds of shared land:

• The commons, where residents grazed livestock and cut wood.
• The common fields, where residents farmed long, narrow strips.

This was very different from the seigneuries along the St. Lawrence River in Canada or on the lower Mississippi, where farmers lived on their own fields. In the middle Mississippi valley, the strips usually did not reach the river, and residents owned the land outright, owing no rent to wealthy landlords.

The system resembled the communal agriculture of northern France in the high Middle Ages. An intriguing alternative explanation is that the French adopted the American Indian arrangement of villages and farm fields.

Why the strips were long

The strips were long and narrow because of the wheeled plow the French used, which was hard to turn at the end of a row. That plow, sometimes called a row plow or hoe plow, is still used in vineyards today.

In the St. Louis common fields, a typical strip was 1 arpent wide and 40 arpents long. An arpent was a French measure of 192 feet 6 inches, and 40 of them stretched about 1½ miles.

A right to farm

Residents worked the common fields under a right of tillage: they could use their strip for as long as they wished. If they gave it up, or died without heirs, the right returned to the community, which could assign the land to someone else.

Sources

• National Park Service, "Le Grand Champ" (Ste. Geneviève National Historical Park): https://www.nps.gov/articles/le-grand-champ.htm
• The source spells the plural of the unit both "arpens" and "arpents"; this page uses arpents.