STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 47 



While a portion of our country is shaken with the conflict of contending 

 armies, the farmers of the West are ploughing up their boundless prai- 

 ries, and each year preparing for a harvest that is to feed millions of 

 their countrymen, and other millions of other lands. They send their 

 products to the nearest cities, that grow rich and magnificent by the 

 transit of this illimitable wealth. Railroads are built, towns and cities 

 spring into life, the mechanic arts are employed in full force, and com- 

 merce, year by year, feels the inspiring etfect. In fact, the growth of 

 cities, fostered by the agricultural wealth that surrounds them, is a 

 remarkable feature in the civilization of the nineteenth century. 



The rise and progress of the City of San Francisco, built up as she has 

 been by the power of gold, and presided over by the genius of commerce, 

 has wrung from the civilized world its wonder and amazement. But 

 enormous as her prosperity has been, and astonishing as her enterprise 

 has become, she has more than a parallel in Chicago, a sister city of a 

 farming State, whose growth has been nurtured by the genius of agri- 

 culture, and whose towering warehouses are monuments dedicated to 

 Ceres, goddess of harvest. In eighteen hundred and thirty-three, the 

 Town of Chicago was organized and an election held, when twenty-eight 

 votes were all that could be found within the limits of the place. In 

 eighteen hundred and sixty, twenty-seven years later, she could boast a 

 population of one hundred and nine thousand two hundred and sixty. 

 In eighteen hundred and fiftj^-seven, when but twenty-four years of age, 

 she was acknowledged as the largest grain depot in the world, having 

 received into her warehouses that year something like twenty-two mil- 

 lions of bushels of grain, being twice as much as was received during 

 the same period at St. Petersburg, the leading grain depot of the Russian 

 Empire. In that season, there was packed in Chicago forty-two thou- 

 sand barrels of beef, and shipped from her wharves twenty-five thousand 

 head of cattle, and more than two hundred thousand head of hogs. 

 There are now completed some four thousand miles of railroads that 

 centre there, upon which more than one hundred trains of passenger and 

 freight cars arrive and depart daily. Her grain warehouses, by their 

 wondrous capacity, and by the powerful machinery used to facilitate 

 their operations, are visited as objects of curiosity by travellers from 

 every part of the world. Such are the triumphs produced — such is the 

 power wielded by a thorough, systematic, and aggregated pursuit of this 

 one branch of industry. 



The Census report of eighteen hundred and sixty pi*esents an unusual 

 amount of valuable information relative to the condition of agriculture 

 in California. According to the statistics presented there, the increase 

 in the value of live stock in our State, from eighteen hundred and fifty 

 to eighteen hundred and sixty, was over thirty-three millions of dollars; 

 the increase in the value of farms, about forty-three millions; in the 

 value of farming implements, more than two millions; and in farm pro- 

 ductions other than live stock, something like fifteen millions. These 

 figures exhibit a glowing, gratifying condition of the agricultural inter- 

 est of California. If such results have been obtained during a period of 

 ten years in our State, what may we not expect during the lifetime of 

 many a farmer now cultivating our soil ? 



With a territory extending north and south a distance equal to the 

 distance from the southern boundary of New York to nearly the north- 

 ern boundary of Florida, California has within her limits a variety of 

 soil and a variety of climate which will yield all the productions that 

 are grown in the Atlantic States. Already the first State in the Union 



