SOLON ROBINSON, 1850 443 



New- York Markets. — No. 1. 



[New York A7nerica7i Agriculturist, 10:77-78; Mar., 1851] 



[November ?, 1850] 



Thousands of our readers have never visited this 

 metropolis — perhaps have never seen a great city market 

 place, where the daily food of many thousand human 

 beings is exposed for sale. It used to be, in our youthful 

 days, a great mystery to us, how so many persons as we 

 were told, dwelt in places where the roads were all paved 

 with stones, and the houses touched each other, could 

 live without a pork barrel, potato cellar, pig pen, or hen 

 roost, and where they not only bought their milk, but 

 water, too. 



The mystery is not yet quite cleared up in our minds, 

 though we have no doubt now about the abundant supply 

 of provisions ; but how all, who eat, obtain their food, is 

 another question. If we could draw truthful pictures of 

 city life for farmers' sons and daughters to look at, it 

 would teach them to love their own homes — they would 

 contrast their plain, but wholesome, sweet and clean food, 

 with some of the miserable stuff sold in our markets, and 

 exclaim, "God made the country — man made the town" — 

 let us be contented with His work. 



With a viev/ to add to that contentment, we propose to 

 devote a few pages of the present volume, in giving some 

 slight sketches of our market places — those great marts 

 of things, clean and unclean, upon which human life is 

 here sustained. It may be instructive and amusing to 



father land, while describing a foreign one. Surely he has not for- 

 gotten the peculiarities of the old Boston dray, or 'truck,' with 

 shafts large and long enough for the sills of a respectable-sized 

 house; nor the enormous load often seen upon one, of five or six 

 hogsheads of sugar, drawn by as many horses. A long train of 

 these great, uncouth-looking vehicles, winding through some of the 

 narrow, crooked lanes, peculiar to Boston, is very suggestive of 

 something somewhat sea-serpentish — the hogsheads answering for 

 the 'humps.' Perhaps a better dray for all purposes cannot be 

 found, than those in use in New York. They would be very con- 

 venient farming implements." 



