was a psychological luxury in which he did not feel he could afford to indulge. The farmers of Litchfield and Berkshire and of the Connecticut Valley had no more knowledge of the scientific principles involved in the action of gypsum as a fertilizer than had their contemporaries in the hills of Worcester or Tolland, but they had learned somehow that gypsum produced bigger crops. They wanted bigger crops because they had a market. Hence they were willing to invest their money and labor and make the experiment. Hence their progress in the science of agriculture. The Farm Equipment Buildings, Tools and Implements. It was this lack of a market which explains to a large extent the small investment of capital in agriculture at this time, either in permanent improvements, such as drains and buildings, or in tools and implements. A house and barn were necessary and these were in general conveniently and substantially built. The latter had a threshing floor in the middle and stables for horses and cows on either side. Some of the hay was mowed away above the stables and the remainder was stacked near the barn in sheds, open at the sides and covered with a thatched or shingled roof. A corn-crib was always in evidence, set up on stilts as now, as a protection against mice and dampness. Of the tools and implements used on the farm we shall have occasion to speak in another connection.1 They were few and ill-contrived. One writer says that the farmer of this period could have carried them all, except the cart and harrow, upon his back. They included a plough, a hoe, a pitchfork, a manure-fork and a shovel, all of which were clumsily constructed of wood, often by the farmer himself, and plated with strips of sheet iron, perhaps by the local blacksmith; a flail for threshing grain and a a fan and riddle-sieve for winnowing. The practice of treading out the grain from the straw by driving cattle over it, which had persisted since the days of the ancient Israelites, was still to be found in some of the Middle states, but seems to have been superseded in New England. The sickle, the most ancient of harvesting im 'See infra, pp. 364-365. 2 Flint, Charles Louis. Progress in Agriculture. In Eighty Years' Progress of the United States. Hartford. 1867. p. 24. 3 See American Museum, V. 379; and Deane, New England Farmer, p. 283. A day's work with the flail yielded from four to six bushels of wheat and from six to twelve bushels of barley, according to the size of the grains. Ibid. Indian corn was sometimes threshed with a flail but a more efficient method was to scrape the grains from the cob by rubbing the ear across the edge of a spade. Mass. Agric. Soc. Papers, II. 1807, 25-26. plements, was still used to some extent in reaping wheat; for cutting other grains and grass, the scythe and cradle were used.1 For the all-important business of ploughing the farmer was but poorly equipped. Flint has given us a description of two of the types of ploughs most frequently used at this time. He says: "The Carey plough had a clumsy wrought-iron share, a land-side and standard made of wood, a wooden mould-board, often plated over in a rough manner with pieces of old saw-plates, tin or sheet-iron. The handles were upright, and were held by two pins; a powerful man was required to hold it, and double the strength of team now commonly used in doing the same kind of work. The 'bar-side plough' or the 'bull plough' was also used to some extent. A flat bar formed the land-side, and a big clump of iron, shaped a little like the half of a lance head, served as a point, into the upper part of which a kind of coulter was fastened. The mould-board was wooden and fitted to the irons in the most bungling manner. The action might be illustrated by holding a sharp-pointed shovel back up, and thrusting it through the ground." With such unwieldly instruments, two men or a man and a boy, using three horses or two or three yoke of oxen, could turn over in a superficial manner the soil of one or two acres in a day.3 Some attempts had been made to improve this implement; a cast-iron plough had been invented in 1797 in which the mold-board and land-side were cast in one piece, but the mass of the farmers were ignorant of these improvements. The iron plough was even opposed because of the fear that it would poison the earth. These had at Harrows were used to further pulverize the soil. times iron, but probably more usually wooden teeth. Deane says: 66 they are of so little advantage to the land, unless it be merely for covering seeds, that they may be considered as unfit to be used at all. The treading of the cattle that draw them, will harden the soil more, perhaps, than these harrows will soften it." All the transportation of crops, manure, timber and 1 The inefficiency of these tools appears in the following figures: Using a sickle, a man could cut one acre of wheat in a day; with a cradle he could cut four acres of oats or barley, and with a scythe, one acre of green grass. Deane, New England Farmer, p. 380. 2 Eighty Years' Progress, pp. 27-28. See also American Husbandry, I. 81-82. 3 American Museum, V. 379–380. 4 By Charles Newbold, of New Jersey. See Carver, T. N., Historical Sketch of American Agriculture in Bailey's Cyclopedia of American Agriculture. IV. 56. 5 New England Farmer. (2 ed.) p. 142. stone was done, except when there was snow on the ground, by means of ox-carts, ponderous two-wheeled vehicles, constructed almost entirely of wood. The carriage of goods for any distance was, if possible, postponed until winter when sledges or sleighs could be used. The Yield per Acre of Various Crops. The best method of determining just how inefficient was the practice of husbandry outlined in the foregoing paragraphs, would seem to be an examination of the yield of the various crops cultivated. There are, of course, no government reports going back to those early days1 nor are there any other official publications covering this period. There exists, however, a considerable mass of information on this point scattered through the various gazetteers and statistical accounts of towns and in the writings of travelers. This material refers to conditions in various parts of southern New England, in general between the years 1790-1810. The following figures have been compiled from a digest of such scattered information, making allowance for exceptional conditions in certain localities which would cause variations from the normal figures. Indian corn produced on an average 25 to 30 bushels per acre. Occasionally crops of as high as 40 or 50 bushels were recorded, in the Con necticut Valley, and, on the other hand, on sandy soil such as that of Cape Cod and of Nantucket the yield fell to 12 bushels per acre or less. Rye was considerably less prolific, averaging about 15 bushels per acre. This crop was curiously uniform over the entire area, hardly any cases being found where crops larger than this were harvested, and only occasionally did the yield fall to 12 or 10 bushels. Potatoes are credited with 100 to 150 bushels per acre, a figure which compares very favorably with those of the latest censuses, but this is probably due to inaccuracy at the earlier date in estimating the crop, since, as we have seen, potatoes were rarely grown by themselves in fields of any considerable size. Barley produced about 20 bushels to the acre, and buckwheat from 15 to 20 bushels. The yield of wheat, in the limited areas in which it was cultivated, was miserably low, hardly ever rising above 15 bushels to the acre, and averaging between 10 and 15.3 2 'The census of 1840 was the first in which agricultural statistics were collected. 2 In 1909 the yield for New England averaged 176.9 bushels per acre; in 1899 it was 130.3. U. S. Bureau of the Census. Thirteenth Census. 1910. Abstract. p. 399. For the best collation of figures for crop yields in any single work see Mass. Agric. Soc. Papers, II. 1807, 14–19. The Apple Orchard. Apples were the standard fruit of New England. As we have seen, every farm had an orchard of several acres, containing a hundred or more trees.1 The abundant yield of these trees seems to have been used principally for making cider, the favorite beverage of all classes and persons. Some was exported to the Southern states, either in its natural form or after being distilled into cider brandy, but the bulk of the product was stored away in the farmers' cellars for their own consumption. Apples were also preserved by slicing and drying for winter use in the household. In especially fruitful years there was still a surplus, which was fed to the cattle and swine. Other orchard fruits of less importance were pears, peaches, plums, cherries and quinces. The orchards suffered much from the lack of care. After the original planting, practically nothing was done to preserve the trees or increase their yield except to allow cattle to pasture among them and, very rarely, to plough between the trees. The result of this neglect was becoming apparent at the beginning of the century. The first growth of orchards in many towns was dying out and often the trees were so infested with worms that the value of their fruit was largely destroyed.3 The Management of Woodland. Every farm had also its woodland, occupying perhaps one-third of its total area, and every farmer was to some extent a lumberman and forester. The importance of wood in the farm economy we have already noted. Houses and barns, tools and vehicles, furniture and utensils, were constructed of this material to a much greater In the advertisements of farms for sale in the newspapers of the day great stress was laid on the capacity of the orchards as cider producers. For instance, a farm of 270 acres in Coventry, Connecticut, had an orchard capable of producing 60-100 barrels of cider annually. Windham Herald, January 11, 1811. 2 As an instance of the popularity of this beverage Miss Earle relates that cider, diluted with water, was drunk by children when milk was scarce. It was also supplied in large amounts to college students. Home Life in Colonial Days. New York. 1898. pp. 148–149, 161–162. Charles Francis Adams writes: "Later, (i.e., after the early years of colonial life) cider seems to have supplanted beer as the every-day and all-day beverage, and the quantity of it drunk by all classes down to a late period in this century was almost incredible. In the cellars of the more well-to-do houses a barrel of cider was always on tap, and pitchers of it were brought up at every meal, and in the morning and evening." Episodes. II. 686. Travelers commented on the poor condition of the orchards throughout southern New England. See Harriott, Struggles through Life, II. 34–35; Kendall, Travels, III. 35; Brissot de Warville, New Travels, p. 132. 1 extent than now. Besides this, the consumption of wood for fuel was enormous. The open fire-places demanded constant replenishing during the winter months and consequently the wood-pile formed an imposing eminence behind every farmhouse. In their wholesale and seemingly reckless destruction of timber in clearing the land, the settlers seem not to have anticipated the subsequent importance of this material to them. As a result of their improvidence there seems to have been in 1810 little first-growth timber standing, except in the more lately settled counties of western Massachusetts and Connecticut.2 And even in the management of such woodland as they had, the farmers of this period followed a bad system. The policy was to cut off close a certain tract every year, depending on the natural growth to replace it after a term of years. The better method, that of selecting certain trees over the whole extent of the woodland to be cut every year, was discarded because of the larger amount of labor which would have been necessary in gathering the wood. Ignorance of the better policy may also have been responsible.3 The scarcity of wood, which was inevitable, had begun to be felt, especially in the matter of fuel. In regions of naturally sparse forestation, as on Cape Cod, fire-wood was imported and experiments were being made with the use of peat as fuel.5 'The author of American Husbandry severely condemned this waste and seems to have anticipated to some extent the modern conservation movement in advocating legislative restraint. Op. cit., I. 84. See also Whitney, History of the County of Worcester, p. 249; and Belknap, History of New Hampshire, III. 26. 2 Dickinson, Geographical and Statistical View, p. 9, describes the forests still existing in Massachusetts, ca. 1810. 3 There seems to have been little agreement as to the time required for reforestation. See Dwight, Travels, I. 80; and Mass. Agric. Soc. Papers, II. 1807, 47. In a number of works this is given as the reason for the substitution of stone walls for rail fences. See Statistical Account of Litchfield, p. 92; Goodrich, Statistical Account of Ridgefield, p. 8. 5 Joseph Felt wrote in 1834: "The first settlers thought no more of burning twenty or thirty cords of wood annually than we do of burning five. Peat began to be used in some families about fifty years since It was made into coal sixty years past and used on the forges of blacksmiths." History of Ipswich, Essex and Hamilton. pp. 25-26. In his Observations on the Agriculture of the United States, William Strickland wrote that timber and wood had doubled in price in every part of New England within ten years. Strickland was an Englishman who spent a few months in this country as an agent of the British Board of Agriculture. He seems to have been diligent in his collection of facts, although his generalizations are colored by prejudice to some extent. The result of his work, a seventy-four page pamphlet, was published in London in 1801. |