OUR SOIL, OUR CLIMATE, OUR CROPS. 37 



OUR SOIL, OUR CLIMATE, OUR CROPS. 



From an Address before the Franklin Agricultural Society. 



BY LEVI STOCKBRIDGE. 



Our people, as a rule, have become so accustomed to speak 

 disparagingly of Massachusetts as an agricultural State, that 

 he who attempts to show that it has any special advantages of 

 this kind, runs the risk of being called either disloyal or a fool. 

 We are told that its soil is thin, hard, and stony, and has been 

 robbed by an exhaustive system of cultivation of all the ele- 

 ments of fertility (if any) that it originally possessed ; that its 

 climate is fickle, cold and repulsive ; that five months of the 

 year is dreary winter, during which its valleys and hills are 

 buried in snow, and for bare sustenance we are obliged to con- 

 sume all the products the exhausting labors of the summer 

 can produce ; that wealth, or even competence, cannot be at- 

 tained in the pursuit of agriculture here, without labor so con- 

 stant and severe as to break down the toughest physical system, 

 and an economy so rigid as to deprive one of all the luxuries 

 and most of the comforts of life, and make him miserable and 

 mean. We have become familiar with the oft-repeated remark, 

 that the place for successful agriculture, where competence, 

 independence and wealth may be obtained in agricultural pur- 

 suits, without the constant labor required by our hard soil, is 

 at the West, or in the sunny South. All this (and the story 

 is not half told), we almost daily hear of the pursuit of agri- 

 culture in Massachusetts. All this, and yet it is a fact, indispu- 

 table and clear as sunlight (and for which there must be some 

 good reasons), that nowhere else in this broad, fair land, in a 

 strictly farming community, are there such evidences of thrift, 

 prosperity and competence as in the farming communities of 

 Massachusetts. Nowhere else do we see such good houses and 



