September 6 has echoed across centuries of American agriculture, marking moments that shaped how and where food is grown, who grows it, and how rural communities weather disaster. From the Mayflower’s departure and the collision of European settlers with Indigenous food systems, to a catastrophic wildfire in Michigan’s Thumb, a presidential tragedy that helped unleash Western irrigation, and a Category 5 hurricane striking U.S. territories, this date threads together stories of innovation, upheaval, and resilience.

1620: The Mayflower departs, and two agricultural worlds converge

On September 6, 1620 (Old Style), the Mayflower sailed from England toward a continent already home to sophisticated Indigenous agriculture. In the region the colonists would soon occupy, Wampanoag farmers and other Native peoples tended polycultural fields of corn, beans, and squash, managed wild foods and fisheries, practiced seasonal burning, and sustained soils through careful stewardship. The ship’s arrival weeks later set the stage for an ongoing and often unequal exchange: European tools, livestock, and crop preferences met Indigenous knowledge of local soils, seeds, and seasons.

The most durable agricultural legacy of that contact was not a single crop but a set of practices—intercropping, seed selection, soil amendments, and ecological management—that colonists learned in part from Indigenous neighbors and later adapted (and sometimes exploited) as settlement spread. Today’s interest in regenerative systems, diversified rotations, and landscape-scale stewardship draws lines—imperfect and incomplete—back to these early encounters and to practices long rooted in Native foodways.

1881: Michigan’s Thumb Fire scorches over a million acres of farms and forest

In the late summer of 1881, drought, land clearing, and logging slash set the stage for a fast-moving inferno across Michigan’s Thumb. Between September 5 and 6, wind-driven fires swept through Huron, Sanilac, and Tuscola counties and beyond, killing hundreds, leaving thousands homeless, and consuming more than a million acres of crops, barns, fences, haystacks, and woodlots. Farmers lost grain stores, draft animals, and the fencing and timber that made their holdings viable.

The blaze catalyzed a new kind of rural disaster response. The American Red Cross—then newly formed—mounted its first major domestic relief operation, organizing donations of seed, tools, clothing, and lumber so farm families could replant, rebuild, and overwinter. Longer term, the catastrophe accelerated conversations about firebreaks, drainage, and more careful management of cutover lands. In today’s era of longer fire seasons and drought-stressed landscapes, the Thumb Fire reads as an early chapter in a story that is still unfolding across farm-forest frontiers.

1901: A president is shot, and Western irrigation enters a new era

President William McKinley was shot on September 6, 1901, at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. He died days later, elevating Theodore Roosevelt to the presidency. The succession mattered profoundly for agriculture in the American West. Roosevelt’s conservation agenda soon produced the Newlands Reclamation Act of 1902, creating a federal reclamation service and a financing mechanism to build dams, canals, and laterals that turned arid valleys into some of the most productive farmland in the world.

Projects launched under that framework—spanning the Snake, Salt, Colorado, and other river basins—expanded irrigated acreage and shifted the national balance of specialty crops, forage, cotton, and tree fruit. The policy also locked in enduring debates over water rights, environmental flows, and farm size limits on federal projects. On a date remembered for a national tragedy, the downstream effects included a structural transformation of U.S. agriculture that still defines cropping patterns, rural economies, and water politics across the West.

2017: Hurricane Irma lashes U.S. Caribbean agriculture

On September 6, 2017, Hurricane Irma—at Category 5 strength—raked the U.S. Virgin Islands and passed just north of Puerto Rico. Even before Hurricane Maria struck two weeks later, Irma’s winds defoliated and snapped plantain and banana stands, toppled shade trees critical to coffee systems, damaged fruit orchards, and shredded protective infrastructure across farms and nurseries. Power outages disrupted cold chains and dairy processing, while debris-choked roads cut off markets.

Irma and the season that followed spotlighted the vulnerability—and adaptability—of tropical agriculture under intensifying storms. In the years since, producers in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands have advanced windbreak plantings, diversified perennial portfolios, reinforced tunnels and trellises, and refined emergency planning. Insurance tools and disaster assistance have also evolved, but the September 6 landfall remains a marker of how quickly climate risk can cascade through regional food economies.

Why these moments still matter

• Knowledge inheritance: The Mayflower’s departure stands not simply for colonial agriculture’s beginnings, but for a long, often-overlooked lineage of Indigenous agronomy that informs soil health and diversification strategies today.
• Disaster readiness: The Thumb Fire’s devastation helped normalize organized relief for farm communities and underscored the importance of fuel management, firewise planning, and recovery financing—lessons central to modern wildfire and drought response.
• Water as destiny: The 1901 transition of presidential power opened the door to a century of reclamation works that continue to shape where high-value crops are grown, how farms scale, and how water scarcity is negotiated.
• Climate resilience: Irma’s strike on U.S. Caribbean farms previewed a future in which wind, surge, and grid fragility test everything from field layout to perishables logistics.

By the numbers

• More than 1,000,000 acres: Farmland and forest burned in Michigan’s Thumb during the 1881 fires.
• Hundreds: Lives lost across the Thumb Fire’s footprint, alongside untallied counts of livestock and stored feed.
• Millions: Acres ultimately brought under Western irrigation in the decades after the 1902 reclamation law set federal projects in motion.
• Category 5: Irma’s strength on September 6, 2017, as it damaged crops and infrastructure in the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico.

Echoes on today’s farms

Early September remains a pivot point across U.S. agriculture. In the Corn Belt, growers gauge late-season heat and moisture as harvest nears; in fruit country, apples and pears move swiftly from orchard to pack-house; in the Delta and Southeast, cotton bolls open into a race against weather; in the West, water allocations and wildfire smoke complicate fieldwork and logistics. The strands that run through September 6—stewardship, preparedness, infrastructure, and community—still knit together the nation’s farm landscape, reminding us that history’s lessons are most valuable when they’re put to work.