THE LAND 11 



will bear nothing more, and then, not having manure to re' 

 plenish it, nothing remains but to take up new land in the same 

 manner." 9 



In the middle colonies the pattern for land use was a little 

 different. If we had taken Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, 

 instead of Petersham, Massachusetts, as our example of land 

 use in America, we should have reached a very different con' 

 elusion. Here was a belt of rich, deep limestone soil, plenty of 

 moisture, and wide, flat fields. The colonists who settled there 

 had come from similar soils in Germany. They knew how to 

 treat such soil. Furthermore, their close knit religious and 

 social life fostered a stable and efficient kind of land use. 



Above all, they knew that the use of land was a never-ending 

 partnership, a partnership between man and nature. The soil is 

 not a mine to be exhausted and then abandoned. To the Ger 

 mans of the Lancaster Valley, the land was a loan from nature 

 to be used, improved, and then passed on to their children, 

 and their children's children forever. 



This is why the history of Lancaster County is vastly dif- 

 ferent from that of Petersham. Here there were no successive 

 waves of prosperity and backwashes of poverty. Once a field 

 was cleared, it rarely returned to brush. And if the son of one 

 of these square, black-bearded farmers had moved to Peoria, 

 Illinois, like Lewis Bigelow, the whole community would still 

 be talking about it. The duty of a son in chis region was and is 

 to take over the land when his father retires to the "old folk's 

 side of the house" to smoke his pipe in peace and give advice. 



The land is a part of these farmers and their families. They 

 know what they want, and they have a good idea of how to get 

 it. That goal is stability. This is the reason that Lancaster 

 County fields still produce as much wheat and tobacco and hay 

 as they yielded two hundred and fifty years ago. 



American Husbandry, Vol I, p. 144. Quoted in Harold Underwood Faulkner, 

 American Economic History, Harper 6? Brothers, New York, 1935, p. 73. 



