It is in the panorama of the second half of the 19th century, with São Paulo as the largest coffee producer in the country with the largest world production in the product, which began to appear the large coffee farms in the interior of the state, the mainstay of Brazil's economy in the 1870s to 1930.
THE Santa Gertrudes Farm, with more than a century of existence (1854 – 1998), unlike many coffee farms that had a short period of life (about 50 years, due to various factors, including the exhaustion of the land), it has overcome all crises and social changes and economic benefits arising during this entire period, a fact that can be related to the good administration employed by their owners over time.
Santa Gertrudes Farm originated from a sesmaria, that of the Blue Hill, it was similar to other important sugarcane and coffee farms, such as the Ibicaba Farm, owned by senator José Vergueiro, who was the first São Paulo farmer to try to implement the salaried work of immigrants in São Paulo in the 1860s. THE
Santa Gertrudes Farm, like other farms in the region, had its origins as a sugar mill, being gradually replaced by the planting of coffee until the 1860s, when its production surpassed that of sugarcane.From 1854 to 1873 the owner of the farm was Mr. Amador de Lacerda Rodrigues Jordão, the Baron of São João de Rio Claro, a man of wealth and capital, and a traditional agricultural family in the interior of São Paulo. Paul. With the Baron's death in 1873, the farm is inherited from his wife who marries in 1876 the Marquis of Três Rios, who starts to manage the farm until the year 1893.
The Marquis, a very influential and wealthy person at his time, managed to bring together efforts and capital to influence the passage of the tracks of the Companhia Paulista de Estradas de Iron in the surroundings of the farm, when the railway arrived in the city of Rio Claro in 1876 – very common in the construction of the railways that served the zones coffee trees. Before the railroad, all coffee production was made on mule loins (donkeys, donkeys and mules) up to the port of Santos (about 180 km away). Each animal carried 120 to 150 kilos of coffee and it was only possible to make 6 trips per harvest (annual harvest) with each animal to the port. Transport was difficult, on bad roads where wheeled vehicles were not circulated. According to the calculations of some historians, in 1860, when the city of Rio Claro produced 2,600 tons of coffee, there were about 6,000 mules in the city for transport to the port of Santos, in a journey that lasted from 7 to 10 days.
In this sense, one can imagine the proportion of the improvement that the arrival of the railroad would mean on the farms in the interior of São Paulo, since the economy of exports from Rio Claro and region, after more than 50 years of primitive means of transport, jumped almost directly into the railroad era, where transport time was reduced from 7 to 10 days on mule loins to just 1 day on train cars, meaning time and cash.
With the arrival of the railroad, cities and farms gained in development, and Santa Gertrudes Farm in 1893 it already had an area of 700 alqueires (or 17,150,000 square meters), producing 450 tons of coffee, increasing by 5 times its production, which in 1861, before the railroad (which arrived in 1876), was only 90 tons, making it the largest farm in Rio Of course.
With the death of the Marquis of Três Rios in 1893, the farm was inherited by Eduardo Prates, a great capitalist and a businessman, owning banking houses, real estate, he was a shareholder and director of Companhia Paulista, etc. Being then a great administrator, Eduardo Prates transformed the Santa Gertrudes Farm in a model rural property, expanding its area even further (which reached 1 million coffee trees, with 866 acres (or 2,095 hectares = 20,957,750 square meters) in 1885 introduced improvements, such as electric light, in the 1900s; and innovations and benefits that the most modern technique of the time offered, the property still had 85 houses for the colonists (immigrants).
This farm had the highest concentration of foreign workers and their descendants (which can be seen by the number of houses built for the colonists) among the farms in the region. Calculations performed show that in the Santa Gertrudes Farm an average of 35 new families should be hired every year, with each family having an average of 6 to 7 members. These families came directly from the Hospedaria dos Imigrantes in São Paulo, or were enlisted in the surrounding farms, or in the municipalities of the region.
During this period, the farm was included in the calendar of visits of the most important personalities of the time, both national and from foreigners, thus, coming to São Paulo and not visiting a coffee farm was the same as going to Rome and not seeing the pope, according to visitors of the time.
The importance of Fazenda Santa Gertrudes does not lie only in the fact that it was a model property in the coffee industry in São Paulo, worthy of being seen by distinguished personalities. Fazenda Santa Gertrudes was the most important coffee property in the municipality of Rio Claro (when coffee was the largest product of the Brazilian economy and Brazil the largest world coffee producer, with São Paulo being the state with the largest production in the country, and Rio Claro was the fourth largest producer in São Paulo in 1897), in the so-called West Paulista. The model property was an example of the complex capitalist coffee company.
Per Amilson Barbosa Henriques
Columnist Brazil School
Brazil School - history of Brazil
Source: Brazil School - https://brasilescola.uol.com.br/historiab/a-fazenda-santa-gertrudes-rio-claro.htm