Agricultural and demographic records of 21,118 rural households selected from the 1860 manuscript censuses

Demographic, occupational and economic information for over 21,000 rural households in the northern United States in 1860 is provided in this dataset. The data were obtained from the manuscript agricultural and population schedules of the 1860 United States Census. Variables include farm values, livestock inventories, and crop production figures for the households that owned or operated farms (over half the households in the study), as well as values of real and personal estate, color, sex, age, literacy, school attendance, occupation, place of birth, and parents' nationality of all individuals residing in the sampled households.