52 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS. 



in which he says : " I hope, as the season is approaching fast when the 

 ground should be prepared for it, that you have informed Mr. James 

 Anderson (my manager) in a letter directed to the care of the post- 

 master in Alexandria, at what time he may send for the peas you 

 were so obliging as to promise me ;" and the following from a letter 

 of James Anderson to Landon Carter, which accompanied the above 

 letter of Washington. " I have only to add to that wrote by the 

 President — that the sooner you have 40 bushels of the White Indian 

 j>ease, with black eyes — ready, you will the more oblige the Presi- 

 dent, I do not wish any of the small kind either the round kind called 

 the Gentlemen pease, nor of the other small kind which resemble the 



large."' 



Jefferson, 1801 (Notes on the State of Virginia), makes no mention 



of peas or beans, although he enumerates the cultivated plants (p. 58) , 

 saying — 



Our farms produce wheat, rye. barley, oats, buckwheat, broom corn, and 

 Indian corn. The climate suits rice well enough, where the lands do. Tobacco, 

 hemp, flax, and cotton, are staple commodities. Indigo yields two cuttings. 

 The silk-worm is a native, and the mulberiy, proper for its food, gi'ows kindly. 



We cultivate also potatoes, both the long and the round, turnips, carrots, 

 parsnips, pumpkins, and ground nuts (Arachis). Our grasses are lucerne, St. 

 foin, burnet, timothy, ray and orchard grass ; red, white, and yellow clover ; 

 greenswerd, blue grass, and crab grass. 



The gardens yield musk-melons, water-melons, tomatos, okra, pomegranates, 

 figs, and the esculent plants of Europe. 



Beans and peas are not mentioned, and it may therefore be inferred 

 that neither was at that time of sufficient importance in northern 

 Virginia to be listed among the farm crops. A legume, probably 

 Vigjia unguiculata, was, however, cultivated in the cornfields to some 

 extent in southern Virginia some years earlier than the publication of 

 Jefferson's Notes. 



Dr. James Greenway, of Dinwiddle County, Va., in an article on 

 Cassia chamaecrista as a soil renovator (Transactions of the American 

 Philosophical Society, 3:22G, 1793), says the " common cornfield-pea 

 is far preferable to everything that I have seen tried for this purpose. 

 Every farmer who leaves his pea vines on the ground, and does not 

 in the accustomed manner, pull them up for fodder, must often have 

 observed that they quickly moulder and fall to pieces ; furnishing a 

 covering to the ground, which readily unites and blends with it, in 

 the manner mentioned of the bean " [i. e.. Cassia cliamaecrista'\. 



A catalogue of the plants found growing near Lancaster, Pa., 

 by Muhlenberg, 1793 (Transactions of the American Philosophical 

 Society, 3 : 157), in which cultivated and introduced plants are given, 

 as well as wild plants, does not mention any Dolichos or Vigna. The 

 cowjDea evidently had not then reached that locality. 



102— VI 



