98 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



Statement of Otis G. Cheever, in answer to inquiries of the 



Supervisory Committee. 



The farm which 1 enter for the society's premium, came 

 into the possession of my father in 1795, and consequently, has 

 been held by the family sixty-four years. 



The original purchase consisted of thirty-one acres, and an 

 old house twenty-two by twenty-five feet, without a barn, or a 

 rod of lawful fence on the premises. My father being a car- 

 penter, and doing most of the work in that line for the whole 

 neighborhood, was obliged to make farming a secondary busi- 

 ness. And being without a team or farming tools, he was glad 

 to receive a large part of the pay for his own work, in labor on 

 his farm. 



From time to time, as he succeeded in saving the means, he 

 added to his lands, so that, at the present time, the farm con- 

 tains, by estimate, ninety acres, including sixteen of woodland 

 bought since it came into my possession. 



It is divided as follows : Mowing and tillage, twenty-five 

 acres ; tillable pasture, seven acres ; not tillable pasture, nine- 

 teen acres ; (not tillable now, because I consider it worth more 

 devoted to the growth of wood, than to cultivation ;) woodland, 

 thirty-four acres ; waste land and swales, five acres. These 

 nineteen acres of what I now consider not tillable pasture, 

 have been, however, ploughed and sowed with winter rye once 

 or twice, and stones enough dug from them to divide the 

 whole into lots, varying from two to three acres each, well 

 fenced with heavy walls, and yet so many stones remain I do 

 not consider the land worth reclaiming, especially since, if let 

 alone, wood grows readily upon it. I think if owners of large 

 farms in this part of the county would encourage the growth 

 of wood on much of their exhausted pasture, instead of mowing 

 the bushes year after year, and then cultivate well a few 

 acres of their best pasture land, it would much more benefit 

 themselves and the public. There are thousands of acres of 

 wet, sour, rocky pasture land in the county that have been 

 burned over, or from which the brush, young pines and other 

 wood have been mowed for fifty years past, which, if left 

 untouched, would now be valuable woodlands. 



