Before and after the Civil War, the Shenandoah Valley was the "breadbasket of the Confederacy". The soils here rival those of Lancaster PA for productive quality.
And while slavery was evident here in the valley, the majority of farms were and are smaller, owner run properties that should have recovered fairly quickly after the war. I still can't see what they did for the intervening 40 years.
Crops in the valley were varied: wheat, corn, beef, and sheep for cash. Lots of othere stuff for local consumption.
Bob -- The complete and pervasive economic upheaval in the south coupled with the loss of a significant percentage of 18-30 year old males could have been enough to keep conditions fairly poor for a generation. Meaning no farm expansion. It's one thing to be back to operating at capacity in a few years and another thing to be doing so well you can build new infrastructure.
Alternatively, it could be that the original barns which may have all been built in a 20-30 year window were all just plain used up by that time and no longer worth repairing/adding on to/converting for different agricultural techniques and technologies (hay tracks, etc). So people built new ones.
