168 INDIANA HISTORICAL COLLECTIONS 



ever saw. About eight or ten feet from the ground, the 

 limbs begin to spread out and extend 40 or 50 feet from 

 the body, forming a very thick, handsome, round top. 



At this place, I first learned the value of bagasse as 

 fuel. Here is a very well-arranged plan of saving and 

 burning it, a full and minute description of which I will 

 give in my articles upon sugar culture. This year, 350 

 hhds. were made with this, alone, for fuel under the 

 kettles. 



This land, which has been so long in cultivation, and 

 still brings good crops, offers strong evidence of the last- 

 ing fertility of the Mississippi soil, when treated only in 

 a decent manner. Of course, it is impossible to manure 

 a sugar plantation in the way that some small tracts of 

 grass and grain land at the north are; and it is not re- 

 quired, if the same system was universal that prevails 

 here, of deep plowing and turning under trash and pea 

 vines, and the use of the subsoil plow and thorough ditch- 

 ing, with judicious changes from corn to cane, and good 

 use of all the manure that can be made. Sugar may be 

 continued to be made from the same land, "even unto the 

 third and fourth generation." 



I intended to call upon Judge Rost,^ whose place is next 

 below Messrs. McCatchons', but he was absent. He is 

 one of the few planters who study science to apply it to 

 practical operations of planting sugar cane. He has a 

 draining machine upon his place, driven by steam. I was 



* Pierre Adolphe Rost, soldier and jurist, born in France, 1797; 

 died September 6, 1868. Immigrated to United States in 1816, first 

 settling at Natchez, where he taught school and studied law. Later 

 moved to Louisiana. Sei*ved in the state legislature of Louisiana 

 and as one of the judges of the supreme court. Gave important 

 addresses on the culture and manufacture of sugar before the 

 Louisiana Agricultural and Mechanics' Association, and contrib- 

 uted articles to the Monthly Journal of Agriculture and The 

 Plough, the Loom, and the Anvil. In 1862 was sent to Spain as 

 commissioner for the Confederacy. National Cyclopaedia of Ameri- 

 can Biography, 11:468. Besides the sugar plantation in St. Charles 

 Parish, Judge Rost owned a cotton plantation on the Red River. 

 See De Bow's Review, 6:296-99 (October and November, 1848). 



