STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 193 



own use, and if one fell short he would call upon his neighbor to 

 help him through, as no one thought of selling any, in fact, there 

 was no market for them. 



About the year 1837, a prominent agriculturist came through 

 the country with a wagon load of Rohan potatoes, offering to sell 

 them at the till then unheard of price of two shillings a tuber, as 

 no one had ever been able to get that much a bushel. (I would 

 be glad to get one now, eyen at four times that price.) He gave 

 such fabulous accounts of its productiveness — we had only to cut 

 it to single eyes and grow two to five bushels; and as to quality, 

 we never had anything like it — that my father was induced to 

 buy one. We cut it up as directed and raised from it about one 

 bushel and a half of large rough potatoes. We tried them for the 

 table and sure enough, we had never had an3'^thing like them. We 

 offered them to the pigs; it was evident they had never had any- 

 thing like them, for they came and smelt of them, but refused to 

 eat them. Father said if the hogs would not eat them, he did not 

 want any more of them. It was the first and probably the greatest 

 humbug we ever had in the way of potatoes. But no doubt some 

 good grew out of it, for it set people to thinking and talking about 

 the introduction of other new varieties, and soon the old red pota- 

 toes and Merino came in and took its place; and well do I remem- 

 ber when a lad, of sorting out the long Merino potatoes and making 

 rail fences and log houses of them and carrying them in my arms 

 like wood. I have grown them in the past fifteen years, but have 

 never been able to grow any half as long as those seemed to be in 

 my boyhood. Other varieties, such as Neshannock, Blue Pink Eye, 

 Long Pink Eye, Mercer and Mexican, followed in quick succession, 

 a class of potatoes that has never been excelled for table use. 



Previous to 1844, the potato had been vigorous, yielding abun- 

 dantly with little attention, but in that year there were manifest 

 signs of loss of vitality, and the disease known as the rot appeared, 

 nearly destroying the entire crop, and in 1846 and 1847, in con- 

 sequence of the failure of potatoes, there resulted a terrible famine 

 in Ireland and elsewhere. People became alarmed, fearing a total 

 loss of the crop, and immediately adopted various methods for its 

 preservation. Knowing it to be a law of nature, that any one 

 species of plants cultivated a long period of years on the same 

 ground, however successful at first, will exhaust itself in time, the 

 people of Ireland as also other countries obtained the opinion, that 

 the chief cause of the failure of the potato was the weakening of 

 the plant, resulting from too constant cultivation on the same 

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