America Climbs the Cornstalk 95 



It may have been from the Swedes that the Lenni Lenape got 

 their peach trees which amazed William Penn. A letter sent 

 to Sweden requesting a minister for the colony described the 

 Delaware colony: 



Almost all of us are husbandmen. . . . This country is very rich 

 and fruitful. It produces, God be praised, all sorts of grain; all that 

 we plant and so gives us plentiful returns so that we are richly 

 supplied with meat and drink, and we send out yearly to our 

 neighbors on this continent and neighboring islands bread, grain, 

 flour. . . . 



In the early days the flour was chiefly of buckwheat, though 

 Pennsylvania was to become a wheat-growing state and the city 

 of Baltimore the chief flour port in the East. But to the Eng- 

 lish who were moving into New Jersey from Long Island and 

 Connecticut the Swedes taught the uses of buckwheat flour, 

 and how to combine this with corn meal. What the johnny- 

 cake was to Rhode Island and the pone to the South, the 

 griddle cake, started with Indian meal, was to pioneer New 

 Jersey. A stack of these, very hot and smoking; dark and 

 slightly sour from the buckwheat, slightly gritty from the yel- 

 low meal with which the batter is properly started; so thin as 

 to be lacy on the edges; well buttered, and top-dressed with 

 strong, dark buckwheat honey is a meal to stay a man through 

 a long day felling timber in the pine barrens. 



With an anxious eye on the Swedes and the Dutch already 

 in possession of two great rivers leading into the fur country 

 and close to the French on the St. Lawrence, King Charles 

 persuaded the first Lord Baltimore to abandon his plan for a 

 colony south of the Virginia Plantation in favor of one on the 

 Chesapeake. The Ark and the Dove, with the first contingent 

 of Catholic settlers, sailed up the Potomac into the wide bay 

 of St. Mary's River and dropped anchor at the base of a bluff 

 where stood an Indian village. Leonard Calvert bought the 

 land for some steel hatchets, hoes and pieces of colored cloth. 

 By his treaty with the Susquehannocks they were to hold half 



