'Enough Beans to Physic the Earth': Agricultural Diversification, Public Health, and the Rise of the American Castor Oil Industry

• In Event: Viscous Visions: Non-petroleum Oils and the Making of 19th-Century North America

Abstract

This paper examines the American castor oil industry in the 19th century. Extracted from the seeds of the castorbean (Ricinus communis), castor oil served as a lubricant, emollient, and surfactant. The vast majority of castor oil, however, became medicine, working by loosening the bowels of humans and livestock alike. I ask: did the public health movement motivate farmers to plant acres of castorbean, or did the trend toward agricultural diversification oblige American oilseed crushers to manufacture demand for an increasingly abundant stock of castor oil?

I use commodity chain analysis to answer my question. I begin in the fields of Illinois, Missouri, and Kansas, where farmers planted castorbean on the instruction of agricultural periodicals. I follow the crop through its late-summer harvest, when children gathered the beans, spread them to dry in south-sloping fields, and trucked them to rural markets. Bought in bulk by merchants, the beans then moved by riverboat or railcar to St. Louis, Kansas City, or New York. There, manufactories pressed them into varying grades of oil, and sold those oils to druggists, grocers, machine shops, leather dressers, and chemical companies across the country.

Reconstructing the castor oil commodity chain accomplishes two things. First, it situates castor oil within wider agricultural and industrial infrastructures. The 19th-century castor oil industry required little in the way of specialized technique or dedicated machinery. Farmers who grew corn or cotton easily swapped them for castorbean; factories that crushed popular oilseeds like flax and cotton readily manufactured castor oil. This suggests that the story of castor oil has been missed, in part, because its production and processing was remarkable only to the localized communities participating in it. Second, it offers an answer to the supply/demand conundrum around which the paper is framed: both and neither...

Author

• Brandon Luedtke, University of Kansas