SOLON ROBINSON, 1849 225 



what beyond midnight, conversing exclusively upon the 

 subject of improving and rendering fertile the worn-out 

 lands of North Carolina and Virginia. Upon this subject 

 Mr. B. is an enthusiast. He has been an extensive travel- 

 ler, and has visited some of the best cultivated farms of 

 the northern states ; and when he came into possession of 

 his property here in 1840, instead of leaving it to be 

 utterly worn out by overseers, who never learned any 

 other art of tillage than cutting down and burning up 

 timber, planting cotton, and wearing out land, — which is 

 then "turned out" to grow up again while they cut down 

 more, — he determined to apply the knowledge he had 

 gained from reading and travelling, and devote all the 

 energies of his strong mind to an effort to change that 

 old, ruinous system, which has nearly destroyed and de- 

 populated some sections of the south. To carry out his 

 plans, he found it absolutely necessary to change his over- 

 seer for a young man who had no plans of his own, but 

 was willing to obey orders. 



In speaking of the operations of this gentleman it may 

 be understood that I also include the plantations of his 

 father and brother, as all three are conducted upon the 

 same general system. In the first place, cotton is utterly 

 discarded from the premises, and clover, yes, rich, luxu- 

 riant red clover, by the hundred and thousand acres, has 

 been made to grow where nothing but brown sedge and 

 oldfield pines grew before. Illustrative of this fact Mr. B. 

 related to me an anecdote. There was one tract known 

 as the "old field," containing about an hundred acres, 

 upland, clayey, loamy soil, nearly level, "lying out," that 

 is, abandoned as no longer fit for cultivation, covered 

 with brown sedge, and growing up to oldfield pines. 



Calling the attention of his overseer one day, who had 

 already set him down as utterly crazy, and determined to 

 ruin his land if not himself by his "new-fangled plows," 

 and insisting upon having every furrow at least ten 

 inches deep, he fairly drove the man to a standing point 

 by ordering him to prepare that "old field" for the plow, 



