460 INDIANA HISTORICAL COLLECTIONS 



corn meal, besides vegetables and fruit, melons, &c. Like 

 Mr. Leigh, he gets his flour from Virginia, and asserts 

 that no other will keep well through the summer. 



I saw in his garden some very fine fig trees, which as 

 far north as this produce remarkably well. Peaches are 

 unfailing, but with grapes he has not been successful. 

 Apples are not a southern fruit, yet many are attempt- 

 ing their cultivation. And now a word of Captain Eg- 

 gleston's system of cultivation. His place is all hilly, 

 thin, oak land, very light soil, that melts away in water 

 not quite so easy as salt or sugar ; and yet he has scarcely 

 a gully upon the whole farm; but he has more than 20 

 miles of side hill ditches, which are so constructed that 

 they take up all the surface water before it passes far 

 enough over the ground to form gullies. 



While riding over the plantation, I found one of the 

 overseers engaged, with a large force of hands, laying 

 off and making ditches upon some new ground, it being 

 a rule never to put in a second crop until the land is 

 ditched. 



I will attempt a description of the very simple instru- 

 ment used as a level. It consists first of an upright 

 standard about five feet high, the lower end sharpened 

 to stick in the ground, and about a foot above is a 

 shoulder, upon which rests a frame made of thin cross 

 bars, tennoned at each end into uprights, about four feet 

 long, one bar at top and one at bottom, and one in centre, 

 with holes through which the upright passes, and upon 

 which it plays freely. This standard being set in the 

 ground and a plum line brought to rest upon a scale pre- 

 viously graded to the required fall of the ditch, the oper- 

 ator sights along the middle bar until it strikes the 

 ground at the point where he would commence the ditch, 

 and then moves it round the face of the hill he wishes 

 to circle, having the various points marked as far as he 

 could extend the view from that point. And here I can- 

 not refrain from mentioning a very remarkable fact 

 which I saw, and which Captain E. assured me that he 



