400 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



three thousand copies, and very likely not that. There was then 

 but one agricultural society in Maine, and but three or four in the 

 United States. The names of those who were early connected 

 with the agricultural press of the country may sound like the 

 names of strangers to many of you — but let me call them, for I 

 love to honor their memories: Fessenden, Skinner, Buel, Bement, 

 Cole, Hill, Colman, Holmes — the last for thirty years in the 

 chaffing, editorial harness, a pioneer in the diffusion of knowl- 

 edge, ever watchful of the interests of Maine men and constant 

 in his useful suggestiveness, to which many of you are indebted for 

 your present high position as intelligent, influential farmers. 

 Although these names may be forgotten, they have perpetual 

 monuments in the fine farms, good buildings and improved 

 husbandry of our country, which they did so much in establish- 

 ing ; and in passing, I cannot neglect to mention them, for their 

 names should appear in any paper treating of our early agricul- 

 tural history. To these men are we indebted for the correct 

 shapings of our agricultural literature, and for the early direction 

 of the thought of farmers in the channels of intelligence and 

 enlightened practices. 



Just forty years since this little paper was .first printed in a 

 small Kennebec village — the cradle of improved farming in Maine 

 — with its edition of three hundred copies going out on missionary 

 duty among a small number of thinking farmers, groping after a 

 higher intelligence in their business — and what is now the result ? 

 New England alone has eight agricultural papers with a circula- 

 tion each week of fifty-nine thousand copies ; while the circula- 

 tion of such journals within our own State, at the lowest possible 

 estimate, reaches the number of twenty-six thousand five hundred 

 copies weekly — a united circulation of more than four million 

 four hundred thousand copies per annum, one million three hun- 

 dred and seventy-eight thousand copies of which are confined to 

 our own State alone. Taking the entire country with its ninety- 

 eight agricultural newspapers, and we have a grand circulation of 

 more than nine hundred and eighty thousand copies each week, at 

 the very moderate estimate of ten thousand copies to each paper, 

 a total yearly circulation of fifty millions nine hundred and sixty 

 thousand copies. And what significance there is in these figures! 

 They are full of life and intelligence, and represent a greater mind 

 power than one would at first think. They mean that the agri- 

 cultural newspaper finds its way into almost every farm house in 



